GoDaddy Retires Media Temple Brand

Media Temple (MT) is closing its doors after 24 years in the hosting industry, with the brand now retired and customers fully migrated to GoDaddy. In 2013, GoDaddy acquired MT “to win the hearts and minds of developers,” as then-CEO Blake Irving told VentureBeat at the time. When it was purchased, the highly regarded brand was focusing on advanced technical …

Patchstack Reports 404 Vulnerabilities Affecting 1.6M+ Websites to WordPress.org Plugins Team

After an accumulation of undisclosed and unpatched vulnerabilities in plugins hosted on WordPress.org, Patchstack has reported 404 plugins to WordPress’ Plugin Review Team. “This situation creates a significant risk for the WordPress community, and we decided to take action,” Patchstack researcher Darius Sveikauskas said. “Since these developers have been unreachable, we sent the full list of those 404 vulnerabilities to …

Performant Translations Plugin Now Available on WordPress.org

After an in-depth performance analysis earlier this year revealed that translations can impact server response times, WordPress contributors proposed half a dozen technical solutions for consideration to improve performance for the ~56% of sites that use translations. Performant Translations, a feature project by the core Performance Team, is now available as a plugin on WordPress.org. It incorporates some of the proposed …

WordPress.com Launches 100-Year Domain and Hosting Plan for $38K

WordPress.com is now selling a 100-year plan, one of the longest available in the industry, for a one-time payment of $38,000. It includes managed WordPress hosting (whatever that looks like in 100 years), multiple backups across geographically distributed data centers, submission to the Internet Archive if the site is public, 24/7 dedicated support, and a domain that doesn’t need to …

Gutenberg 16.5 Adds New Commands to the Command Palette

Gutenberg 16.5 was released this week with the biggest changes landing in the Command Palette. Users now have access to more block-related commands for block transforms and block actions, including the following: all transforms to the block has defined (e.g. to cover, to gallery, to columns, to file, to group, to media and text, for an image block) these block actions: paste …

Organic Themes Launches Apparel Store to Raise Money for the Maui Strong Fund

Organic Themes, one of the oldest WordPress theme shops, was founded in 2009 in the town of Lahaina on the island of Maui, which was ground zero for the recent devastating wildfires. Until recently, Lahaina was home to Organic Themes co-founder David Morgan, who hosted the Maui WordPress meetups for years, and co-organized WordCamp Maui in 2015. Morgan and his co-founder Jeff Milone …

WordPress 6.4 Roadmap Includes Typography Management Features, New Blocks, and Twenty Twenty-Four Default Theme

Work on WordPress 6.4 is kicking off with a post from Editor Triage Co-Lead Anne McCarthy that highlights everything the team has planned for the release. This will be the third major release of 2023, and is unique in that it’s being led by an underrepresented gender release squad. Although WordPress is moving into Phase 3 of the Gutenberg project, which …

New Chrome Browser Extension Enables One-Click Plugin and Theme Testing with WordPress Playground

WordPress Playground, an experimental project that uses WebAssembly (WASM) to run WordPress in the browser, makes it possible for users to quickly test plugins and themes without having to set up a local development environment. Ordinarily, testing a plugin or theme with Playground requires visiting playground.wordpress.net, which will instantly create a real WordPress instance with admin access without having to install PHP, MySQL, or …

Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker Plugin Adds New Frontend Highlighting Feature Funded by NASA

Equalize Digital, a WordPress accessibility products and services company, has added a new frontend highlighting feature to its free accessibility checker plugin, which is used to perform audits on self-hosted sites. The feature was funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), through Equalize Digital’s consulting work on the new NASA websites. NASA recently launched the beta version of …