WP-CLI contributors have been working towards a more sustainable future for the project throughout 2016. Daniel Bachhuber, the project’s official maintainer, has launched an experiment to fund ongoing maintenance and new development, asking potential patrons, “How much is WP-CLI worth to you?” Options for contributions range from $100/yr – $7500/yr. This particular funding experiment is not asking for one-time contributions …
Matt Mullenweg Proposes WordPress Growth Council
During the last WordSesh event held in August 2016, Matt Mullenweg joined the community for a session where he spoke about the growth of WordPress and his thoughts on confronting the project’s external threats. Mullenweg floated the idea of a WordPress Growth Council – a collection of individuals and organizations interested in contributing to WordPress’ growth. “We have very direct …
Harare, Zimbabwe Hosts Its First WordCamp
photo credit: Limbikani Soul Makani Kabweza WordCamp Harare, the first ever WordCamp in Zimbabwe, was held over the weekend at the Harare City Library. Harare was selected out of 182 applicants as one of the three locations for the WordCamp Incubator Program. The experimental program launched in February 2016 with the goal of bringing WordCamps to new locations around the …
WPWeekly Episode 255 – All About the Customizer
In this episode of WordPress Weekly, Marcus Couch and I are joined by Weston Ruter and Nick Halsey, lead developers of the Customize component in WordPress. I invited Ruter and Halsey on the show to give us some insight into its origin and why it was created. We also discuss its evolution since WordPress 3.6 and why it’s an important …
The Value of Sponsoring a WordCamp from a Business’ Perspective
Tony Perez, CEO of Sucuri This is a guest post written by Tony Perez, co-founder and CEO of Sucuri. Sucuri is a website security platform that helps clean and protect websites. I would consider us a small mid-sized company. Our annual sponsorship budget is in the range of $300 – $400k per calendar year (CY). One of the industry events …
Pantheon’s $100K WordCamp US Sponsorship Revoked the Night Before the Event
Nearly 2,000 people descended on Philadelphia, PA to attend WordCamp US last week. On the night before WordCamp US took place, Pantheon’s sponsorship was revoked and advertising materials, including the company’s booth, were hidden in a storage room inside the venue. The move generated a lot of controversy on social media and at the event. It cost Pantheon $100K to …
State of the Word 2016: Mullenweg Pushes Calypso as Future of WordPress’ Interface, Proposes Major Changes to Release Cycle
photo credit: WordCamp US organizing team Philadelphia welcomed 1,923 attendees to WordCamp US this weekend with an additional 2,028 enthusiasts watching via live stream. Matt Mullenweg delivered his 11th annual State of the Word address to a rapt audience ready to celebrate WordPress’ progress over the past year and hear the project leader’s vision for 2017. He began by thanking …
DigitalCube Launches Shifter, Serverless Hosting for WordPress
DigitalCube launched Shifter at WordCamp US today, the first serverless hosting product for WordPress. The Japanese development company specializes in WordPress and AWS integrations. Shifter was built by the same team behind the company’s Amimoto cloud hosting platform. Shifter converts WordPress sites into a series of static HTML files and serves them up via a global CDN (AWS) for high …
WordPress Will Only Recommend Hosting Companies Offering SSL by Default in 2017
In October, Let’s Encrypt was managing more than 10 million active SSL certificates. That number doubled to 20 million in November as large providers continue to partner with the organization to manage their customers’ certificates. In 2014, Google announced that HTTPS is a ranking factor. Earlier this year, the Google Chrome security team announced that Chrome 56 will mark HTTP sites that transmit passwords or …
Elizabeth Shilling Awarded the Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship
The WordPress Foundation has announced that Elizabeth Shilling, one of three co-founders of the Women Who WP meetup group, is the second recipient of the Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship. The scholarship was created in 2015 to remember Kim Parsell and provide an opportunity for a woman who may not have the financial means to attend the largest WordCamp in the US. …









