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The Awl, ThinkProgress, Film School Rejects, and several other publishers have moved back to WordPress after short experiments on Medium. In early 2016, Medium convinced a collection of small, independent publications to move to its platform but shortly thereafter discontinued its unsuccessful ad-driven publishing model without notifying publishers.

In March 2017, Medium CEO Ev Williams announced that his solution to fix the broken, ad-driven media industry was to fire up a new $5 subscription program that would put articles behind a paywall inside of the Medium network.

Today The Awl, The Hairpin, and The Billfold announced the publications have moved back to WordPress after switching to Medium in April 2016.

“The move to Medium was a cool experiment, in my opinion, but the year is up and personally I missed the ads,” The Awl Editor Silvia Killingsworth said. The Billfold’s announcement cited Mediums’ recent changes as the reason for the move back to WordPress:

Our move to Medium was an experiment to explore a different kind of business model, and that experiment is over now that the platform has moved in a different direction (you can read more in-depth about those changes here).

Adapting to change is all part of the many joys of being a small, independent publisher.

Film School Rejects Returns to WordPress After 1-Year Experiment with Medium

Film School Rejects (FSR) also returned to WordPress in May after a year-long, rocky experiment with Medium. The publication was one of Medium’s first 12 premium publishers.

“To be honest, I can’t afford, nor would my heart hold up for, a move back to a private server and WordPress,” FSR founder Neil Miller told Poynter in January after Medium announced it was pivoting away from ad-driven media. “So, barring a miracle, my site will live and die on Medium. I’m optimistic that I’ll find some sort of solution and be able to remain on Medium.”

Ultimately, Medium’s goals as a publisher of subscription content were at odds with FSR’s ability to sustain the publication. Miller said they had ported 10 years of content over to the platform after being promised a beautiful user experience and a way forward that would allow FSR to grown the business, continue to pay its writers, and keep the publication on the cutting edge.

“What we were sold when we joined their platform is very different from what they’re offering as a way forward,” Miller told Poynter. “It’s almost as if Ev Williams wasn’t concerned that he was pulling out the rug from underneath publishers who had placed their trust in his vision for the future of journalism.”

After moving FSR back to WordPress, Miller said the partnership with Medium was great until the company changed course to become a different type of platform.

“As time went on, it became clear that Medium’s priorities had shifted from being a platform for independent publishers to being itself a publisher of premium, subscription-based content,” he said. “As we learned more about their future plans for the now-existent Medium ‘Members Only’ program, it became clear that our site wouldn’t be able to continue to operate the way we always had.”

Miller said the process of trying a new platform and returning to WordPress made him realize that he “missed some of the customizable features of WordPress,” which led his team to work on some new features they will be launching in the future. The site has reinstated its banner advertising on pages.

“We’d love to be able to do this all without any ads, but there’s no money in that,” Miller said. “And guess who doesn’t get paid if the site can’t make any money? The people who write articles, edit the site, make video essays, curate One Perfect Shot, and host podcasts.”

ThinkProgress Exits Medium, Founder Says Platform is No Longer Developed with Publishers in Mind

ThinkProgress was one of the largest publications to make the move to Medium last August. After less than a year, the site has moved back to WordPress, its previous publishing platform. ThinkProgress founder Judd Legum told Poynter that the lack of advertising capabilities was not the reason his publication left the platform but rather because Medium no longer serves the best interests of publishers.

“I’m certainly not eager to have a bunch of ads on the site — and we’re not going to,” Legum said. “I’d love to have none. And if it were possible, I’d be interested in figuring out a model where we don’t have to have any. But if it’s connected to a platform that’s not going to be developed with publishers in mind, it doesn’t really make sense to think through that as a platform. That sealed it for me.”

ThinkProgress is taking its 8 to 10 million unique pageviews per month back into the independent publishing space. It is the latest of several other publishers leaving Medium after having been persuaded in 2016 to jump into Ev Williams’ experiment with initial promises of free hosting, more traffic, and advertising money. Not all of the sites are moving back to WordPress, but most are looking to free themselves from Medium’s experiment on publishers and regain the ability to sell advertising and/or subscriptions.

The Ringer moved to Vox Media at the end of May after Medium discontinued its advertising model. The Pacific Standard left Medium to focus on building custom features to drive subscription growth.

Backchannel also moved its site off of the platform and is now publishing on Wired.com. “In the time since Backchannel launched, Medium has shifted its business strategy, and it’s no longer as focused on helping publications like ours profit,” BackChannel Editor Jessi Hempel said.

Medium’s new subscription revenue model and partner program are still in beta but the returns have not been enough to convince publishers to stay, even with costly migrations back to tried and proven platforms like WordPress. Ad-driven publishing may not be the most ideal way to keep a publication afloat, but publishers moving away from Medium are not willing to stay on for the the startup’s experiment at the expense of their writers and staff.

WordPress 4.8.1 is available for download or as an update from the WordPress Dashboard. This release contains 29 bug fixes and improvements. The most notable addition is a dedicated Custom HTML widget.

Custom HTML Widget in WordPress 4.8.1

The Custom HTML widget works similar to the Text widget in WordPress 4.7 and below. To see a full list of changes in WordPress 4.8.1, check out the release notes. If you think you’ve discovered a bug, please report it in as much detail as possible on the WordPress support forums. Twenty-two people contributed to this release.

The illustrious Chance the Rapper was looking for a new intern.

I'm looking for an intern, someone with experience in putting together decks and writing proposals

— Lil Chano From 79th (@chancetherapper) March 27, 2017

Some people responded with regular resumes, replying as images, but Negele “Hopsey” Hospedales decided to make a website on WordPress.com:

maybe I'm extra, but I think resumes are old fashion. I built a website instead. #ChanceHireHospeyhttps://t.co/DmYvxAQu61

— madebyhosp. (@Hospey) March 28, 2017

The happy ending is written up in Billboard: he got the gig and went on tour with Chance. Hospey wrote a great article on it himself: How To Work For Your Favourite Rapper.

Version 3.3.4 of the Akismet plugin for WordPress is now available.

3.3.4 has a few fixes and enhancements that should make everyone’s lives better:

• URL previews in the WordPress admin will now begin preloading when the cursor moves near the link so they appear faster once you move your mouse over the link.
• When a comment is caught by both the Comment Blacklist and Akismet, Akismet will now leave it in Trash instead of moving it out of Trash and into Spam.
• A bug has been fixed that was preventing a notice from being shown when a site’s firewall was preventing it from connecting to Akismet’s servers.
• Akismet will no longer log all of its debug information unless a new constant (AKISMET_DEBUG) is also enabled, even if WP_DEBUG and WP_DEBUG_LOG are both enabled.

To upgrade, visit the Updates page of your WordPress dashboard and follow the instructions. If you need to download the plugin zip file directly, links to all versions are available in the WordPress plugins directory.

In this episode, John James Jacoby and I start off the show with an adaptation of ‘A Visit from St. Nicholas‘ created by Clement Clarke Moore. Since we didn’t have a guest, Jacoby and I opened up about our personal lives which turned into a conversation about remote working from home. We also discussed the news of the week, including SiteLock’s acquisition of Patchman, WordPress 4.8.1, and Adobe discontinuing Flash.

Stories Discussed:

A Fix for WordPress Weekly Subscribers Using Pocket Casts
WordPress 4.8.1 Adds a Dedicated Custom HTML Widget
SiteLock Acquires Patchman’s Malware and Vulnerability Detection Technology, Expands WordPress Customer Base to 4 Million
Adobe to Discontinue Flash Support and Updates in 2020
.blog Passes 100,000 Registrations, 66.5% of Purchased Domains are in Use
BuddyPress 2.9 Adds Ability to Safely Edit A Group’s Permalink
New Dobby Plugin Captures and Hides Unwanted WordPress Admin Notices

Picks of the Week:

An entertaining one-star review of Gutenberg based on ‘A Visit from St. Nicholas’ poem by Clement Clarke Moore.

WPWeekly Meta:

Next Episode: Wednesday, August 9th 3:00 P.M. Eastern

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Listen To Episode #283:

The 3rd Global WordPress Translation Day has been set for September 30, 2017. The success of previous events has generated momentum to continue the 24-hour global translation sprints and has also increased the visibility of the Polyglots team’s contributions. These sprints have provided a catalyst for the team’s growth from 5,000 contributors in April 2015 to 17,000 in November 2016. The greater WordPress community has also grown in tandem, as reliable translations are the lifeblood of international WordPress usage.

One way of measuring the growth of the global community is the checking the status of local meetups. After the addition of the dashboard events widget in WordPress 4.8, the community has seen a sharp rise in meetup group growth, according to recent stats from the community team. The widget displays local WordPress events for logged-in users.

“It’s safe to say that the widget has achieved its goals admirably — since WordPress 4.8 was released a little over a month ago, 31 new meetup groups have been formed with 15,647 new members across the whole program,” Hugh Lashbrooke said. “This is compared to 19 new groups and only 7,071 new members in the same time period last year.”

Much of that growth can be attributed to the growth of the international WordPress community, which has continued to advance the concept of regional WordCamps for countries and continents. These include events such as WordCamp Netherlands, WordCamp Europe, and the planned WordCamp Asia, that bring larger groups of WordPress enthusiasts together around a common region.

In 2014, the WordPress community hosted 80 WordCamps in 29 countries. At the conclusion of 2016, there were 115 total WordCamps hosted in 41 different countries.

WordPress’ usage continues to grow every year, and the percentage of non-English-speaking users is also expanding. In 2014, non-English WordPress downloads surpassed English downloads for the first time.

Last July, 53.9% of WordPress sites used the English (US) locale. That number has dropped to 50% as of today, as international usage continues to rise.

Stats from WordPress.org July 2017

Rahul Bansal’s lightning talk at WordCamp Europe identified one example of how the translation sprints are bringing in new contributors in India. In the past, meetup groups have had a problem with retaining new users, who often come to their first meetup lacking both a sense of belonging and confidence in contributing. Bansal and other Polyglots members had an idea to remove this block to contributing by getting new users involved in translating WordPress.

During the last global translation day event, Bansal helped organize a local group to translate WordPress core into Hindi, Marathi, and Gujarati. They also translated the subtitles for the WordPress 4.6 release video. The key was that the leaders did not participate in translating strings but rather focused on guiding new translators – 90% ended up being first-time contributors.

WordPress 4.6 shipped with support for 50 languages and the complete Gujarati translation was added to core just a few days before the release. Its inclusion in the release made WordPress more accessible to approximately 65.5 million Gujarati speakers worldwide.

The 3rd Global WordPress Translation Day falls on the same day that the United Nations has designated as International Translation Day, a new initiative to recognize “the role of professional translation in connection with nations and fostering peace, understanding, and development.”

WordPress has only just begun to explore its potential to democratize publishing and hasn’t even cracked the ice in terms of usage across the world’s most popular languages. Sites using the various Chinese and Arabic locales make up less than 2% of international usage, despite these languages having more than a billion native speakers combined. If WordPress adoption takes off in these parts of the world, it will create a whole new wave of contribution and vastly expand the world market for commercial plugins and themes. The Polyglots team are on the forefront of making this possible.

The first two WPTranslationDay events were held in April and November of 2016. The second event had a 74% increase in participation over the first with a total of 780 translators participating. This year organizers are aiming to host more local translation sprints to surpass the 67 held in November. If you want to join the Polyglots team to help serve WordPress’ growing international community, you can attend or organize one of the local events, watch sessions live on CrowdCast, organize a remote event, become a speaker, or start translating at translate.wordpress.org.

After over 13 million downloads of WordPress 4.8, we are pleased to announce the immediate availability of WordPress 4.8.1, a maintenance release.

This release contains 29 maintenance fixes and enhancements, chief among them are fixes to the rich Text widget and the introduction of the Custom HTML widget. For a full list of changes, consult the release notes, the tickets closed, and the list of changes.

Download WordPress 4.8.1 or visit Dashboard → Updates and simply click “Update Now.” Sites that support automatic background updates are already beginning to update to WordPress 4.8.1.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to 4.8.1:
Adam Silverstein, Andrea Fercia, Andrew Ozz, Atanas Angelov, bonger, Boone Gorges, Boro Sitnikovski, David Herrera, James Nylen, Jeffrey Paul, Jennifer M. Dodd, K. Adam White, Konstantin Obenland, Mel Choyce, r-a-y, Reuben Gunday, Rinku Y, Said El Bakkali, Sergey Biryukov, Siddharth Thevaril, Timmy Crawford, and Weston Ruter.

I don’t usually talk or even think about gender in relation to my career. I’m a female developer but I’ve never really felt like that is anything too special and more importantly I have rarely felt like my gender mattered.

As a kid I thought I would become an artist or a dancer. It wasn’t until I had to choose the university to apply to that I decided to go with something more practical so I went with Computer Science. I hadn’t really done much with code before that, except for having a Lord of the Rings discussion board with my friends and making doing some HTML & CSS related to that. After the first year of school I was already making my first WordPress sites to paying customers.

After graduating I have been a full-time employee in a developer position as well as a freelancer. I’ve worked both in Finland and in the USA. During my career I have actually been surprised how easy it has been for me, a woman in the male-dominated industry, to find work, to get promoted and to get recognition. I have not faced much discrimination or prejudice related to my gender, and the great professionals I have got to work with have always been interested in my skills beyond anything else.

So how come there is such a huge gender gap in the industry? I’ve witnessed it myself many times – being the only woman in a WordPress meetup of thirty people, or not having to queue at all to women’s bathroom in a tech conference with over 1000 attendees. There is no doubt that women are as capable as men, so whatever the reason is I really hope the future women would see the fun, problem-solving profession of a programmer as a great career option.

A few tips for an aspiring developer

I want to encourage everyone considering a developer career to take action and go for it. The tech industry is full of very clever and inspiring people and I promise you will not be bored. More importantly it is a safe career choice: the job market is great and the companies and the different tech communities are generally very open and welcoming. If you want to be a woman person in tech, remember:

1. Do not accept gender any discrimination
   One great thing about being a developer is the current status of the job market. There is a lot more demand than there is supply, so you can choose who you work with. Do not put up with discrimination, talk about it openly and stand against it. I’ve been lucky enough not to face much judgement based on my gender. I’ve worked both in Finland and in the US and the biggest challenges I’ve faced have been clients that have been surprised that a woman is the tech lead in their project. Usually after a few hours of working together the prejudice disappears – it has always been enough to just be professional and stay true to myself.
2. Be active and give back
   It is important to be active in your community and help other people out in their careers. Everyone benefits from a striving local community and also it is a great opportunity to make new connections and open new doors in your career.Being an organiser of WordCamp Finland & WordPress Helsinki meetup group for the last few years has really given me more than it has taken. I’ve learnt a lot and met many inspiring people, and it has opened up new career options for me too. The best thing tho has been just seeing the Finnish community grow so much and get more active by the day.
3. It’s skills that matter
   This is really what it comes down to. Are you developing your skills constantly? Are you willing to keep up with the industry? You do not have to be the best developer, but you should be confident in your skills and be willing to always learn new ones. I believe that this is the only thing that matters in the end – not your gender.

The post Your Skills Speak Louder Than Your Gender appeared first on HeroPress.

After a particularly busy month in June, things settled down a bit in the WordPress world — WordPress 4.8’s release went very smoothly, allowing the Core team to build up some of the community infrastructure around development. Read on for more interesting news from around the WordPress world in July.

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Weekly meeting for new core contributors

Onboarding new contributors is a persistent issue for most WordPress contribution teams. While every team welcomes any new contributors, the path to getting deeply involved can be tricky to find at times.

This month, the Core team implemented a fantastic new initiative: weekly meetings for new core contributors as a way to encourage involvement and foster fresh contributions. The meetings not only focus on bugs suited to first-time contributors, they also make space for experienced contributors to help out individuals who may be new to developing WordPress core.

The meetings are held every Wednesday at 19:00 UTC in the #core channel in the Making WordPress Slack group.

Increased focus on PHP practices in WordPress core

In bringing people together to improve WordPress core, a new channel in the Making WordPress Slack group named #core-php is designed to focus on PHP development in the project.

Along with this increased concentration on PHP, a new weekly meeting is now taking place every Monday at 18:00 UTC in #core-php to improve WordPress core’s PHP practices.

Sharp rise in meetup group growth

The dashboard events widget in WordPress 4.8 displays local, upcoming WordPress events for the logged in user. The events listed in this widget are pulled from the meetup chapter program, as well as the WordCamp schedule.

This widget provides greater visibility of official WordPress events, and encourages community involvement in these events. It’s safe to say that the widget has achieved its goals admirably — since WordPress 4.8 was released a little over a month ago, 31 new meetup groups have been formed with 15,647 new members across the whole program. This is compared to 19 new groups and only 7,071 new members in the same time period last year.

You can find a local meetup group to join on meetup.com, and if you would like to get involved in organizing events for your community, you can find out more about the inner workings of the program on the Community Team site or by joining the #community-events channel in the Making WordPress Slack group.

WordPress 4.8.1 due for imminent release

WordPress 4.8 cycle’s first maintenance release will be published in the coming week, more than a month after 4.8 was released. This release fix some important issues in WordPress core and the majority of users will find that their sites will update to this new version automatically.

If you would like to help out by testing this release before it goes live, you can follow the beta testing guide for WordPress core. To get further involved in building WordPress core, jump into the #core channel in the Making WordPress Slack group, and follow the Core team blog.

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Further reading:

• The WordPress mobile apps have been updated with a brand new text editor.
• In a recent push to encourage WordPress users to upgrade their PHP versions, two features have been proposed – one to provide a notice to users and another to allow PHP version requirements to be specified by plugins and themes.
• John Maeda wrote a great post celebrating the freedom that WordPress offers.
• Gutenberg, the new text editor for WordPress, is in continual development — everyone is invited to test it out.
• The WordPress Meta team is starting a new initiative to bring the community together to focus on fixing bugs across the WordCamp.org network.
• Volunteer applications for WordCamp US are now open.

If you have a story we should consider including in the next “Month in WordPress” post, please submit it here.

Jetpack’s Contact Form module hasn’t seen too many changes since its first release (version 1.3) in 2012. It is easily one of the most compelling features included in the plugin and has long been overdue for a refresh.

Today’s 5.2 release brings major improvements to the Contact Form module. Previously, Jetpack launched the form builder as a small popup in the post editor. The refreshed design brings form editing and previewing into the main content area where users can customize fields and labels and re-order them using drag-and-drop. At the bottom of the form users can click a button to add new fields. These interface updates bring the module more in line with other leading contact form plugins.

Jetpack 5.2 also improves the recommended features list for new users with better explanations of the features and benefits of each. The release also reduces the plugin’s zip file by 500kb and reduces the code required to run the Comment Likes module.

Comment Likes were introduced in version 5.1, offering users a new way of interacting within the comments. Hovering over the number of likes will display the Gravatars of the users who liked the comment. The feature does not require Jetpack Comments to be enabled. The two work independently of each other.

In attempting to add Comment Likes to the Tavern, we found the module has a conflict with the Epoch commenting plugin plugin. We have temporarily disabled the plugin until compatibility for Comment Likes is added. We are testing the module to see how it affects interaction in the comments of our posts.

BuddyPress 2.9 ‘La Lombarda’ named after a restaurant established in 1922 in the UK, is available for download. This release contains a handful of small improvements.

BuddyPress legacy templates now have Aria labels that improves accessibility to layouts. Group invites are no longer sent to users that have already received one. Uploading profile images on mobile devices is easier and has better support for files with non ASCII characters.

Earlier this year, I highlighted how BuddyPress didn’t create a redirect when a Group’s slug was changed. According to John James Jacoby, BuddyPress lead developer, groups did not have a canonical redirection, or keep track of their slug history.

Perhaps the most noteworthy improvement in this release is the ability to safely edit a Group’s Slug from the Dashboard and have it automatically redirect.

This improvement was eight years in the making and allows users to change a Group’s slug without breaking existing links.

Other changes in 2.9 include:

• Email links to private message threads now re-direct logged out users to the login screen, logged in users are directed to the message thread.
• A new template tag named bp_group_link()
• An order_by parameter for activity queries.

For a full list of changes in this release, check out BuddyPress 2.9’s Codex page. If you encounter any issues, you’re encouraged to report them in the BuddyPress support forum. Forty-five people contributed to BuddyPress 2.9.

Last week, you may have noticed that the Tavern was intermittently offline and generating errors. We’ve been experiencing technical issues for the past several months but they peaked last week. After working with Bluehost, they migrated the site from a VPS, to a Dedicated Server that has more powerful hardware.

Since the migration, we’ve noticed the site is more responsive, loads quicker, and doesn’t generate any errors. If you see an error or experience problems accessing the site, please report them to us on Twitter.

Last month, a number of WordPress Weekly listeners reported that they were unable to access recent episodes through Apple’s Podcasting app, Stitcher, and other applications. After reconverting the MP3s and getting them to work on Apple’s Podcasting app, I continued to receive reports from Pocket Casts subscribers that the files were not available.

After confirming the issue, I reconverted the MP3s three times with different conversion software. I also used tools to diagnose and confirm that the files were not corrupted. Despite my efforts, Pocket Casts continued to encounter problems accessing the files.

I was running out of options until Josh Eby reported that, deleting the app from his device, reinstalling it, and re-syncing his library fixed the problem.

So I decided to delete all of my app data for pocket casts and re-sync my library. I downloaded them again and it worked for 280…

— Josh Eby (@josheby) July 31, 2017

I followed his advice and indeed, recent episodes of WordPress Weekly are available again in Pocket Casts. If you’re subscribed to the show using Pocket Casts and can not access episodes 280-282, please consider going through the steps listed above.

With the right combination of plugins and events, the WordPress admin area can quickly become a confusing mess of notices. WordPress’ notification system is often abused and overused by plugin authors who want to inject upsells and announcements into the admin. These can stack up like a pile of junk mail vying for users’ attention when they are trying to manage their sites. Ultimately, notice overload decreases users’ enjoyment of the software and may contribute to making it a chore to log into WordPress.

The new Dobby plugin from Thorsten Frommen attempts to solve this problem by capturing and hiding unwanted admin notices. Frommen, a WordPress engineer at Inpsyde, was inspired to create the plugin after he saw a recent tweet from Torsten Landsiedel showing “Everyday life in the WordPress dashboard.”

Alltag im WordPress Dashboard. pic.twitter.com/lofO7544uL

— Torsten Landsiedel (@zodiac1978) July 16, 2017

Dobby rolls up WordPress admin notices and keeps them hidden behind a “Reveal” button that toggles a color-coded list of notices into view. It captures all the notices that are printed via the admin notice hooks, such as network_admin_notices, user_admin_notices, admin_notices and all_admin_notices. Dobby will post an admin notice if any notices have been captured.

Frommen said the target audience for his plugin is “all the people sick and tired of too many admin notifications, which are oftentimes of no real value at all.” Dobby has a filter available for users to define what “too many” means for themselves. The plugin’s GitHub repository has examples of how to use the Dobby filter threshold, which lets users customize the minimum number of admin notices required to trigger Dobby to start hiding them.

“It certainly is possible that people may miss (critical) messages with Dobby being active,” Frommen said. “However, Dobby is smart enough to style his admin notice according to the most critical one captured. This means that Dobby’s notice will have error styling if there was an error notice captured. If the most critical one was a warning, that’s what Dobby’s notice will be as well. Otherwise, it’s an info notice.”

Within the first 10 minutes of requesting translations after announcing that Dobby was on WordPress.org, Frommen received German and Dutch translations for the plugin. The plugin UI has only two strings, which makes it a simple, 5-minute translation job.

Frommen is considering adding a filter for people to define what kind of notices they would like Dobby to capture. He welcomes suggestions, contributions on GitHub, and more translations from the WordPress community.

photo credit: A Tiny Break From The Rain Adventures In Wonderland & Through The Looking Glass – (license)

Gutenberg 0.6.0 was released over the weekend with significant changes to the way paragraphs are created within text blocks. In previous versions of the plugin, pressing enter would create a line break inside a paragraph. This release modifies the behavior of the text/paragraph block to split the block when a user presses enter. (Line breaks can still be created by pressing SHIFT+ENTER.)

This update is a small improvement in that it hides the text formatting bar when you continue on with a new paragraph, but the slightest scroll or move of the mouse brings it back into view. Contributors are considering adding a buffer at some point that would only trigger the UI after the mouse moves a certain number of pixels.

Unfortunately, the “New Paragraph” placeholder text is intrusive and distracting. It is a constant, unwanted reminder of the structure of your document, which is not helpful if you are trying to stay in the flow of writing.

Gutenberg may improve the experience of vertically stacking differently formatted content, but the writing experience still needs a great deal of work before it can be comparable to what WordPress currently provides. The new editor still gets in the way of writing, instead of silently enabling it.

I love Gutenberg so far, but this is too many dongles to display at the moment of focusing on writing. pic.twitter.com/Xpb19KgG01

— Daniel Bachhuber (@danielbachhuber) July 25, 2017

After browsing the Gutenberg repository’s 400+ issues queue, it’s clear that contributors are aware of the jarring experience for writers and are working to improve it in every release. However, the beta software is not anywhere near ready for long-form writing, as the intrusive UI places too many cognitive demands on the writer.

New Blocks in 0.6.0: “Cover Text” and “Read More”

This release introduces a new “Cover Text” block that includes background, text color, and full-width options. Color swatches are available in the sidebar block options and contributors are planning to add filters to allow plugin and theme authors to supply a custom palette.

Version 0.6.0 also includes a new “Read More” block that inserts a read more link with instant visual feedback within the content.

This release also brings several improvements to existing blocks, autosaving for drafts, and initial support for undo/redo keyboard functions.

Gutenberg’s Negative Reviews are Piling Up on WordPress.org

Gutenberg contributors are regularly shipping weekly releases, with many features added as bare bones placeholders that will be iterated on in future releases. New blocks are being developed simultaneously with core editing features. Some testers have bemoaned the proliferation of blocks that may seldom be used while the basic writing experience continues to lag behind.

Gutenberg plugin reviews are currently averaging 2.3 out of 5 stars on WordPress.org, with 46 1-star reviews, 21 5-star reviews, and a handful in between. While the reviews are not a full representation of all who are testing Gutenberg, they provide a small window into users’ current expectations, delights, and frustrations with the editor. Gutenberg contributors are monitoring these forums and using the feedback to create bug reports.

Many reviewers have left 1-star ratings, begging WordPress to keep it as a plugin instead of adding it to core. One reviewer even took to verse to further elaborate on his one-star review titled “A Visit from St. Gutenberg” with an adaptation of the classic poem “The Night Before Christmas:”

A bundle of blocks he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a coder just opening his pack.

His eyes—how they twinkled! his dimples, how merry!
“Who needs MCE, when we have blocks and so many?”

Many reviewers find Gutenberg to be “unnecessarily complex” for actions that were previously easy to perform in the editor.

“I have several websites – two are for business and include blogs (technical posts, how-tos, etc),” @quantaweb said. “I’m also the editor of a literary magazine. This doesn’t work for any of these sites. It’s not easier to write blogs with it, and it does nothing to ease the work of importing critical essays and poetry into the literary magazine — and formatting them — either…Gutenberg is unnecessarily complex.”

Some of the 1-star reviews come laced with threats to move to another CMS and splinter the WordPress community if Gutenberg is included in core.

“By removing all the traditional editor buttons and trying to make a minimalist design the usefulness and ease of use has been drastically reduced,” @ovann86 said. “I found myself either not being able to do very basic content management or having to click, hover and look for the buttons – instead of them being visible and available immediately…If this was made core I would likely be forced to move to another CMS.”

Early testing of beta software is not for everyone, as many are unable to look past the initial bugs and clunky implementations to see the potential of the editor to improve WordPress’ severely fragmented content creation experience. Matt Mullenweg jumped onto the forums as recently as two weeks ago to respond to testers’ feedback.

“We definitely agree it’s not ready for prime time yet, that’s why we’re doing extensive public testing and iteration while it’s in the plugin phase,” Mullenweg said. “Thank you for your feedback and I hope you try it again in a few months with an open mind.”

BuddyPress is happy to announce the immediate availability of it’s latest release 2.9 ‘La Lombarda’ available for download or updatable from your WordPress install plugin directory.

This release features a range of improvements and updates for both core functionality and templates.

Amongst a range of improvements and enhancements:

• BP legacy templates are updated for aria labels to bring a vastly improved level of accessibility to layouts.
• In line with current practises anchor title attributes are replaced with an enhanced version usable for all devices, BP Tooltips now provides pop up title requirements on mouse hover or keyboard focus.
• Provide the capability to edit the Group slug: now site admins may edit the group name and the permalink in the dashboard.
• Prevent group invites being sent to users that have already received one.
• Uploading of profile images in mobile devices improved as well as better handling of files with non ASCII characters.
• Email links to private message threads now re-direct logged out users to the login screen, logged in users are directed to message thread.
• New template tag bp_group_link()
• Add an order_by parameter for activity queries.

You can see the full set of changes on our codex page Version 2.9.0

Comments & feedback
Please report any issues to the Buddypress Support Forum or open a ticket on our Trac development home.

Contributors
Buddypress is a volunteer project and the core team acknowledges the contributions from everyone listed below that helped to bring 2.9 to the community.

• 55don,
• AaronOfTomorrow,
• allianse,
• Antonio Mangiacapra (antonioeatgoat),
• Benj (benjlipchak),
• Boone B Gorges (boonebgorges),
• Bunty (bhargavbhandari90),
• Brajesh Singh (sbrajesh),
• Christian Wach (needle),
• brandonliles,
• danbp,
• David Cavins (dcavins),
• dkelm,
• dsar,
• dsided,
• Henry Wright (henry.wright),
• Hugo (hnla),
• Ido Friedlander (idofri),
• Jay (uscore713),
• John Blackbourn (johnbillion),
• John James Jacoby (johnjamesjacoby),
• Juanho,
• lakrisgubben,
• Laurens Offereins (Offereins),
• lne1030,
• lenasterg,
• Maniou,
• Mathieu Viet (imath),
• mercime,
• Michael Beckwith (tw2113),
• Mike Gillihan (MikeGillihan),
• Milind More (milindmore22),
• modemlooper,
• mrjarbenne,
• Nicolas Kulka (NicolasKulka),
• Oelita,
• Paul Gibbs (DJPaul),
• paresh.radadiya (pareshradadiya),
• r-a-y,
• Renato Alves (espellcaste),
• Rian Rietveld (rianrietvelde),
• Samuel Elh (elhardoum),
• seventhqueen,
• Slava Abakumov (slaffik),
• Stephen Edgar (netweb),
• Vishal Kakadiya (vishalkakadiya),

La Lombada
This release is named after what is thought to the oldest and thus first Italian restaurant in the UK established circa 1922 in Aberdeen.

While at WordCamp Europe I had the opportunity to meet Russian designer and developer Dmitry Mayorov, whose themes I had noticed earlier in the year in the WordPress Theme Directory. Mayorov’s design style is reminiscent of other niche theme developers like Anders Norén and Mike McAlister. He launched his own commercial themes business on ThemePatio.com two years ago and his free Counter and Maker themes collectively have more than 3,000 active installs on WordPress.org.

 

Mayorov started taking part in meetups in Russia in 2013. Following WordCamp Moscow 2015, Konstantin Kovshenin asked him if he would take on the role of lead organizer. Mayorov is organizing WordCamp Moscow 2017, which is scheduled for August 12. In our interview below, he describes a few of the challenges organizers face in uniting the Russian WordPress community that is spread out over such a large land mass.

Mayorov also discusses how he began creating WordPress themes and how clients’ needs influenced his theme development philosophy. He aspires to create themes that are fast, content-focused, and minimalistic, without the bloat of hundreds of font options and pre-built site layouts. Mayorov also gave us his predictions for the future of the theme industry.

“I think it’s going to go two directions at the same time,” Mayorov said. “I think that page builders and multi-purpose themes wont go anywhere but I also think that niche themes are here to stay as well. Not everybody is looking for a page builder.

“I see the tendency that at first when people get introduced to WordPress they discover theme marketplaces. They think, ‘Ok this is the top seller, I’m going to go with this theme.’ For some people it works, and there’s nothing wrong with that, because sometimes you have challenges where you need to create a website like yesterday…Once they see that there is another way, they start to research other theme developers and shops, realizing that there are simple themes that work faster and are easier to use, and that you don’t need to spend two hours trying to create the homepage. They will use those themes as well. These are the themes I’m trying to build.”

photo credit: Freestocks.org

Contributors to the Customize Snapshots feature plugin are steadily building a UI for managing Customizer changesets using the changesets infrastructure added in WordPress 4.7. Version 0.6.0 of the plugin was released this month with an expanded interface for managing the complexities of multi-user editing in the Customizer.

The previous version of Customize Snapshots already supported scheduling but this release introduces a new multi-select save button that allows users to publish, save draft, save as pending, or schedule changes.

Version 0.6.0 adds the ability to name changesets, which is especially helpful for site owners who are sorting and previewing changes submitted by multiple editors. The list of changesets has links for previewing on the frontend, editing in the Customizer, or inspecting the changeset’s content on the edit post screen.

This release introduces the ability to merge multiple changesets into a single changeset, which users can then preview and publish all at once.

Contributors have not yet worked out how this feature will handle conflicting changes submitted by multiple users. It currently accepts whatever change was made more recently, but this isn’t ideal in certain situations. Conflict resolution is on the team’s radar to address in future iterations of the plugin and they are discussing several different approaches.

“Merging changesets would definitely lie in the realm of a power user feature,” Customize component co-maintainer Weston Ruter said. “It would probably not be proposed for core. Nevertheless, the existence of the feature is a demonstration of the kinds of things that can be possible when working with changesets.”

In addition to co-leading WordPress’ Customizer team, Ruter is also the CTO at XWP, where several of the agency’s clients are actively using the Customize Snapshots plugin. News Corp Australia and Beachbody are two companies that have invested in the plugin’s development and are successfully using it at scale on their network of sites.

“When paired with the Customize Posts plugin, it gets really powerful because you can edit multiple posts and pages, along with any of their postmeta, while also editing widgets, nav menus, and any other settings, and all of these changes are all bundled together in a single changeset,” Ruter said. “This changeset can then be previewed on the frontend, including by sharing the URL with an unauthenticated user (like a 3rd party who can’t even access the Customizer), and they can click around the site with all of the customizations applied as if they had been published.”

Ruter said the Customizer team isn’t currently targeting a WordPress release for getting these new UI additions added to core but rather view the progress as “prototypes for what could be merged into core, bit by bit.” He identified several tickets that the plugin provides prototype interfaces for:

• #28721: Scheduled changes for the customizer
• #31089: Add revisions and statuses for changesets
• #21666: Customizer reset/undo/revert
• #39896: Customizer: Allow users to Draft changes before Publishing

“Core development is still very much focused on the editor — Gutenberg — so the far-reaching Customizer changes are not being emphasized yet,” Ruter said. Meanwhile progress continues on the Customize Snapshots plugin, which was completely rewritten for the 0.6.0 release after most of its infrastructure was merged into WordPress 4.7. Ruter’s team is not sure which features will eventually land in core, but the various Customizer feature plugins give users an idea of the power of the changesets infrastructure that is already included in WordPress.

The .blog domain extension, managed by Automattic subsidiary Knock Knock WHOIS There (KKWT), opened registration to the public in November 2016 and has just passed the 100,000 registration milestone. The extension is averaging 300 new .blog domains registered per day and is quickly gaining popularity among new generic TLDs. According to the most recent stats available at nTLDStats, .blog registrations have climbed steadily and predictably every month since its public launch.

.blog registrations according to ntldstats.com

Automattic, which operates independently from KKWT as a registrar, currently has the largest market share of .blog domain registrars at 62.8%. Other smaller pieces of the pie continue to see increasing numbers of registrations.

“When a .blog domain is sold through any .blog registrar, it operates like all other top-level domains (TLDs),” .blog representative Erica Varlese said. “This means that the registry, in this case Knock Knock WHOIS There, receives the wholesale cost, ICANN receives their fees, and the registrar retains the rest.”

The .blog team has started experimenting with different marketing programs to promote the extension among registrars and launched its first campaigns last month.

“These programs are available to any .blog accredited registrar and, through participation, allows them to provide .blog domains to their customers at a discounted rate,” Varlese said. “It is designed to test price elasticity and various end-user marketing techniques that best fit each registrars’ unique customer-base.”

Registration for .blog domains is fully integrated into WordPress.com’s domain offerings, but Varlese said that Knock Knock WHOIS There, as a separate company, is not informed of the specific details of their domain roadmap. The subsidiary also does not track how many of the .blog domains are running WordPress, as the extension is platform agnostic and in use across many different blogging services.

So far .blog domain customers include both individuals and businesses, including some e-commerce and community sites. Varlese said the main benefit to acquiring a .blog domain is that customers are more likely to get and use a name they always wanted (example.blog), versus settling for a more complicated variation, such as blog.example.com.

“Using a blog domain is also a great way to embrace engagement with your community,” Varlese said. “In addition to individual and personal bloggers, we also see larger brands using blogs to engage with their customers. Visiting stackoverflow.blog, for example, is intuitive. The domain lets me know right away what type of content and interaction to expect versus what my expectations would be when prompted to visit stackoverflow.com. Both are equally important and both add value to the customer’s online experience.”

Many people purchase a domain just to sit on it for the right time to use it or sell. Greater usage of .blog domains promotes visibility on the web, which is why registrars place value on how many have launched websites using the extension.

“Our goal is steady, long-term growth while continuing to increase our usage rates,” Varlese said. “We want every .blog domain to resolve to a unique content site or blog. Usage is an important metric for us. It positively contributes to help the new TLD marketplace thrive and grow organically. It is at the forefront of every decision we make, including marketing and rebate programs for our registrars, as well as our dotblogger program, which gives online influencers easy access to all .blog domains, including premium and reserved domains.”

The .blog team’s 100,000 registrations milestone post cites usage stats from Pandalytics, a domains data service, that are not publicly available.

“66.5% of .blog domains have a unique website associated with them, compared to an average of 39.3% for both new and legacy TLDs, according to recent research by Daniel Ruzzini-Mejia (co-founder and CSO of DomainsBot Srl, the company behind big-data analysis platform Pandalytics),” Varlese said. “Ruzzini-Mejia also found more than 250 .blog domains that use an eCommerce platform.”

This is an interesting find in an era where many have claimed that blogs are dead. If the indie web proponents have their way, blogs may have another renaissance yet, and could become the anchors of commerce and identity online. The healthy usage numbers the .blog extension has posted in its first year are a strong indicator that the concept of blogging still holds an important place on the web.

Adobe announced today that it will discontinue Flash support and updates at the end of 2020. Flash played an important part in the history of the web, inspiring many of the open standards and formats that the web has moved on to embrace.

Given this progress, and in collaboration with several of our technology partners – including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla – Adobe is planning to end-of-life Flash. Specifically, we will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020 and encourage content creators to migrate any existing Flash content to these new open formats.

Last year most major browsers moved to block Flash, requiring users to enable it manually for sites where they wish to view Flash content. Microsoft, Google, and Mozilla were on deck today with announcements of their own regarding future Flash support. Firefox is the most aggressive with its plan to disable Flash for most users in 2019. Only those running an Extended Support Release will be able to continue using it through the end of 2020 and no version of Firefox will load the plugin after Adobe discontinues security patches.

Chrome is also phasing out support for Flash and plans to remove it completely from the browser toward the end of 2020.

“Three years ago, 80 percent of desktop Chrome users visited a site with Flash each day,” Google Chrome Product Manager Anthony Laforge said. “Today usage is only 17 percent and continues to decline.

“This trend reveals that sites are migrating to open web technologies, which are faster and more power-efficient than Flash. They’re also more secure, so you can be safer while shopping, banking, or reading sensitive documents.”

The Microsoft Edge team also announced its plans to phase out Flash from both Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer with complete removal from all supported versions of Microsoft Windows by the end of 2020.

Although HTML5 adoption is growing among game developers, Adobe’s announcement means major changes for segments of the the gaming, education, and video industries that have not yet migrated to newer, open formats. This news will also make obsolete dozens of WordPress plugins that were created to upload and display Flash content.

Adobe’s announcement was met with thanks and “good riddance,” with many calling for an even speedier timeline. Many are also concerned about all the orphaned content and .swf games on the web that Flash’s disappearance will create. Adobe has received many requests on Twitter for the company to consider open sourcing the old Flash Player codebase for the sake of compatibility and archiving content. Adobe has not officially replied to any of these requests.

There goes my hero
Watch him as he goes
There goes my hero
He’s ordinary

I have no idea what I’m going to write about. How about people? Ordinary people are heroes to me. People who are willing to help one another. People just like you and me.

Well, at least like you – if you’re for some reason reading my diary.

Who’s teaching who

I still remember when I build my first website with table layouts while studying math in the University of Jyväskylä. Those were the days! But it doesn’t feel like yesterday anymore. More like day before.

Nevertheless being a math teacher has been the perfect choice for me. It’s been fun, challenging, and rewarding. I’ve probably learnt lot more from students than they have from me.

Heck, they even got me into WordPress when I was taking my ex-students short film course. Was it 2008? Something like that. We needed a website for our short film and had only 1-2 days. Students gave me link to WordPress.com and I was sold. Getting site up and running was easy and fast.

“Well come here and do it yourself!!” – drama class student shouted.

That’s another good lesson I’ve learnt.

It’s so easy to give negative feedback (don’t do it like that) without doing anything yourself or giving constructive feedback.

Oh boy I still feel ashamed when I judged a book by it’s cover. This time the book cover was a blonde girl asking weird questions with high voice. I was a prison of my prejudice and instantly assumed she must be bad at math. How wrong was I. She was brilliant.

At least the prison gate is now open if I just understand to walk out.

Who am I

Sometimes I wonder what other people think of me? Do they think I’m open minded teacher, or front-developer who cares about accessibility. But does any of that matter? Job title really doesn’t tell anything who I am. Or anybody else.

But who am I? I’m not sure how to define me. I’m no dad or husband. I do have several good traits but there are also demons inside me. Lack of empathy is one of them. And that comes down to this:

In the end I’m a selfish asshole.

It’s okay to be selfish from time to time but it’s not okay to let people down big time when they need me most. Being an ordinary human being is not one of my strengths but I’ll promise to work on it.

Friends will be friends

I consider myself lucky. I have lovely parents and two crazy big brothers. And over the years I have made friendships that last forever.

I hope everybody have a friend who is like a bridge between other friends. Someone who is always organizing something fun: bowling, music gigs, dinners, sports. Someone who is always nice to others and would never hurt a fly.

I had a friend like that.

But as a return I couldn’t help him enough. Shadows of life had taken over him. He could not see the light anymore. He died by suicide before christmas 2015.

Now he can’t fall anymore. He will always be our beloved one and we’ll miss him more than words can express. So many songs reflects to memories we have. For example this Finnish song that I heard exactly one year after his death. (Lyrics in english).

Why is it so much easier to talk about other problems but not your own. Why is it so hard to ask help when you really need it.

Life goes on

Do I need to say anything. No I don’t.

Summer 2017. Peaceful state of mind after a sauna.

 

My dear friends rock!

 

Friends will be friends forever.

WordPress is not important

WordPress is not important. People behind it are, they have feelings. I wish more people would remember that when commenting on blog posts, Slack, or other online tools with shitty attitudes.

Being nice and constructive goes a long way.

At the same time it’s amazing to notice how WordPress combines people together from all over the world. In WordCamps and meetups I have found new friends that really matter. That feels good.

Maybe WordPress is important after all.

The post Random Diary Chapters appeared first on HeroPress.

SiteLock, a website security company, has acquired Patchman, a Dutch security startup that offers automated vulnerability patching and malware removal for hosting providers. Prior to the acquisition SiteLock protected 6 million sites, with 2.2 million of them running on WordPress. The addition of Patchman extends SiteLock’s customer base to 12 million sites and more than 4 million of those are powered by WordPress.

Patchman detects vulnerabilities in a wide range of popular applications and quarantines and patches threats automatically. The quarantine feature neutralizes malicious files by removing them from public access. Patchman supports detection and patching for WordPress 3.x and later.

Historically, the service has not included patches for plugins but it has applied them on a case-by-case basis for high impact vulnerabilities, including a few found in WP Super Cache, MailPoet, and the open source Genericons font project. The Patchman dashboard allows users to easily track files where vulnerabilities have been detected, view status, and revert patches if necessary.

Patchman’s single focus on hosting providers gives SiteLock the opportunity to offer more options to its hosting partners. With the acquisition, the company is now partering with more than 500 hosting providers, including BlueHost, 1&1, Web.com, InMotion, Melbourne IT, GMO (NTT), and many others.

“During our early talks, Patchman was not looking to be acquired and SiteLock wasn’t looking to acquire,” SiteLock President Neill Feather said. After meeting at the WorldHostingDays show in Rust, Germany in late March this year and at another show in Los Angeles, the companies found they shared similar goals and would be in a better position working together.

“It truly was a matter of 1+1=3,” Feather said. “Traditionally, SiteLock is very strong in detecting and removing malware for end users. Patchman offers a service tailored specifically to hosting providers and aimed at fixing the security vulnerabilities that hackers exploit to infect websites with malware. By working together we are able to address a wider market and offer a broader solution to the problems that we solve for our customers. We can now attack the problem from multiple angles.”

Patchman’s technology will compliment SiteLock’s existing security features but the company has not yet decided how it will be incorporated into its security plans for customers. Feather said the team is still jointly building out its future roadmap to give hosts and end customers access to a wider range of products. They are also considering making Patchman’s detection technology compatible with more products in the WordPress ecosystem.

Feather could not disclose any specifics on revenue generated by SiteLock’s WordPress security products but approximately 30% of its newly expanded customer base is running on WordPress.

“What we can say is that we’re heavily invested in the WordPress community and plan on continuing to do so,” Feather said.

“I’m excited that the increased number of sites we now protect across multiple platforms means we’ll be able to identify malware and malicious trends more efficiently than we’ve been able to already, and that’s good for every end user,” SiteLock’s WordPress Evangelist Adam Warner said. “Secondly, although we already have solutions for our partners, Patchman allows web hosts to offer increased security options for advanced users of their platforms. Being a WordPress guy, I’m excited about the possibility we now have to extend the capabilities of Patchman to plugins and other WordPress-specific software.”

The very first WordCamp Varna will be held September 2-3 at the University of Economics. Varna is a beautiful city in Bulgaria on the Black Sea and a popular spot for summer holidays. It is the first Bulgarian WordCamp to be held outside of Sofia.

Tickets are on sale for EUR 10 (BGN 20) and include all the sessions, lunch, a #WCVAR 2017 T-shirt, and a few drinks at the after party. There are 102 remaining for the conference and 14 remaining tickets for the kids’ workshop (ages 7-14).

The location naturally inspired a maritime sticker pack collection for attendees, featuring four new wapuu designs. The collection was designed by the vector graphic illustrators at GraphicMama, a design partner for the WordCamp. Ever wonder how much effort goes into designing all the individualized creations in the world of wapuus? Check out the video below to see how WordCamp Varna’s wapuu designs were brought to life.

WordPress’ iOS and Android apps will soon be getting a new editor. The appearance of the new editor, codenamed “Aztec,” is very similar to the old one but is light years ahead of its predecessor in both speed and reliability. Aaron Douglas, iOS engineer at Automattic, announced the open beta for Aztec today with a side-by-side comparison video of the old and new editors. A copy and paste test with 500 paragraphs on iPhone 6s demonstrates Aztec’s instantaneous response while the old editor takes two-minutes to render the text.

In addition to better speed and performance, Aztec’s use of OS-provided text controls makes it possible to offer full support for accessibility technologies like iOS’ VoiceOver and Android’s TalkBack. It also adds the ability to draft using dictation.

Aztec introduces a new undo/redo tool at the top of the screen as a quick option for fixing mistakes. It also provides a simpler, more reliable experience using spell check.

The Aztec beta is available to all users in the latest updates of the app (8.0 for iOS, 7.8 for Android). After opening the app you will see a popup for enabling the new editor. It can also be toggled on/off by going to Me > App Settings and selecting “Set the Editor Type.”

The mobile team has made it easy to test and give feedback without leaving the app. Tapping the “beta” button at the top of the editor will open a “What’s New in the Beta” page with a bug button at the top that you can use to report bugs and send feedback. At the moment, the beta does not support shortcodes or video and WordPress gallery features. Keep in mind that it’s not 100% ready for use and heavy users of the mobile apps are likely to discover glitches.

Aztec is open source (GPL 2.0) and packaged as a rich-text editor component in its own GitHub repository (iOS | Android) so that developers can use it in their own applications and contribute code back to the project.

“Quite literally, there is nothing like this out there – every editor we could find uses a web view or has very limited support for any HTML,” Douglas said. “Our hope is the Aztec editor is seen as a component that can be used by many iOS and Android apps to provide a rich HTML editing experience. We feel that we could garner a bigger contributor base to the mobile apps simply because this component exists, is free and open, and is super awesome.”

The project is a few months behind the schedule published in April, which had open beta targeted for May and the full release for the end of this month. Depending on how well the beta testing period goes, users could see the new Aztec editor included in the mobile apps within the next few months.

Hamilton is a new portfolio theme released by Swedish designer and developer Anders Norén during his summer vacation. It was created for photographers, illustrators, designers, and image-heavy blogs. The theme displays portfolio items in a minimal, masonry-style grid with an optional tagline on the front page.

“Hamilton has a pretty simple design at its core, so when it was more or less finished, I decided to add a couple of fun theme options to make it more customizable,” Norén said. “The main one is the Dark Mode. With a click of the mouse in the WordPress Customizer, you can change Hamilton from dark text on a white background to white text on a dark background.”

The Customizer also includes a few other helpful options for portfolio sites:

• Set a custom background image or color
• Replace the navigation toggle in the header with the Primary Menu on desktop
• Change two-column default post grid display to three columns on desktop
• Display titles in the post previews
• Add a title to front page when it’s set to display latest posts

The theme is beautifully responsive to various devices and screen sizes. Norén’s typography choices are clean and readable on mobile.

Hamilton includes styles for the default WordPress image gallery with more interesting options available to create complex galleries stacked with different numbers of columns. It also supports Jetpack’s Infinite Scroll module and has styles for blockquotes, pullquotes, and left/right/center aligned media.

One of the most unique features of the theme is the Resume template. It gives users the option to add a simple resume to their portfolios, without having to add a plugin. The template uses basic HTML for formatting with h1 header tags, horizontal rules, and unordered lists. The template could use a bit more documentation, since not all users are familiar with HTML, but it’s a useful addition for simple portfolio sites.

Check out a live demo along with the style guide to see the theme in action.

Hamilton is Anders Norén’s 15th theme approved for the WordPress Theme Directory. When he submitted it to the Theme Review Team, he anticipated that it would take a month or two for it to get through the review process. His previously submitted theme, Davis, took approximately nine months to make it through the queue. He was surprised to find that Hamilton went through the process in under a month. After less than a week on WordPress.org, the theme has already been downloaded more than 200 times.

Eight years ago, Justin Tadlock moved back home to Alabama and was living in the spare bedroom of his grandparents’ house with nothing more than a laptop and a suitcase. Over the course of a few months he started going deeper into learning about writing WordPress plugins and produced Members, a role management plugin for WordPress. The first major overhaul of the plugin came in 2015 with version 1.0’s expansion of features and a new UI for editing roles.

Members has built up a user base of more than 100,000 active installs since it first launched in 2009. Tadlock estimates that over the last couple years, 40% of Theme Hybrid customers are primarily there for support and small tweaks to the Members plugin. He decided it was time to begin investing more in the plugin and its community.

Tadlock released Members 2.0 this week. The plugin manages core WordPress capabilities but 2.0 adds the ability for plugins to register custom capabilities. The labels for the capabilities can be internationalized so users can manage the plugin in their own languages in human-readable form.

This release also adds the ability to use the WordPress editor for writing custom post error messages, making it easy to direct visitors to registration or other important information regarding access to the content.

Members 2.0 lets users add multiple roles when creating a new user from the Add User screen. It also introduces the ability to bulk add or remove roles from users, even when multiple roles have been enabled.

This version of the plugin serves some of its data using the WP REST API and a new setting was added to authenticate users who are accessing the REST API endpoints. This protects content from being exposed on sites that have the “private site” setting enabled. Tadlock plans to write a tutorial about what he has learned in integrating the REST API with the plugin.

Tadlock Aims to Monetize Members with Add-Ons, Renews Efforts to Develop a Community of Add-On Developers

Members 2.0 introduces a new Settings screen that ties in with Tadlock’s future plans to monetize the plugin. The new screen includes a view for add-ons. Tadlock has two add-ons available currently and has written an API for third-party developers to register their own add-ons to be visible on this screen.

“The plan is to create some small add-on plugins,” Tadlock said. “There’s already two: Members – Role Levels, which is paid, and Members – Role Hierarchy, which I was hired to build and was allowed to release to the community for free. I’ve got a few small plugins like those in mind that’ll be in a lower price range.”

Tadlock also plans to release a more robust version of the “Content Permissions” feature as another add-on. He has received numerous feature requests from users over the years about what they would like to see in this plugin. The add-on will offer a variety of different ways to show/hide content.

I asked Tadlock if he has considered building payment gateway add-ons so users can charge for memberships. He said the idea is on the table.

“I’m not sure if I’m going to build those or someone else,” Tadlock said. “I’ve mentioned it to some other developers. It would be a good place to start building add-ons.” His current setup uses Easy Digital Downloads with a couple of plugins to bridge it with Members and ThemeHybrid.com.

A plugin like Members has the potential to have a large, third-party ecosystem of plugins for payments and additional features, but Tadlock was focused on other projects during the first few years after it launched.

“I haven’t actively pursued the add-on angle,” Tadlock said. “Instead, I focused more on themes during most of that time. Now, I’m focusing more on plugin development. It’s my fault for not nurturing a community of add-on developers, which is something I’m trying to do more of now.”

Tadlock said many of the developers he knows are working with Members because they like that it gives them a solid foundation to build on for client work. He hopes to persuade some of them to release some of that code back as commercial add-ons or free plugins in the WordPress plugin directory.

Since launching the plugin eight years ago, Tadlock has aimed to make it behave as if it were a natural part of WordPress. At its core, Members is a role and capability management plugin and not a one-size-fits all membership plugin.

“It’s more or less a UI over what you could do with code already,” Tadlock said. “Most of all, it tries not to get in your way. Every membership site has its own unique needs. It’s tough building something that suits everyone. That’s why I’d rather have that foundation of Members just exposing the roles/caps system with third-party add-ons that suit various users’ needs.

“Other membership plugins often try to please everyone or pigeon-hole everything into their custom system. I like more to have a bit more flexibility without the bloat.”

When WordPress 4.8 was released last month, it introduced TinyMCE functionality to the Text widget. Unfortunately, this caused issues for those who use Custom HTML as the Visual editor often strips out portions of the code.

WordPress 4.8.1 Beta 1 is available for testing and addresses this problem by including a dedicated Custom HTML widget.

“For advanced users or any user who needs to paste in HTML snippets, there is now a dedicated ‘Custom HTML’ widget that is specifically for adding arbitrary HTML to your sidebar,” Weston Ruter, said.

“This widget will retain the application of the widget_text filters, in addition to having a new dedicated widget_custom_html_content filter.

“For use cases that involve adding content to your sidebar, the Text widget will continue to feature the same Visual editing interface that the post editor has (TinyMCE).”

Users who access Text widgets that have Custom HTML in WordPress 4.8.1, will see a note at the top of the widget that suggests using the Custom HTML widget.

If a user pastes or types HTML into a text widget with the Visual editor active, WordPress displays an Admin Pointer suggesting that they use the Text tab instead or use the Custom HTML widget.

Text Widget Admin Pointer

The Custom HTML widget works similar to the Text widget in WordPress 4.7 and below.

Custom HTML Widget

Sites that have existing Text widgets containing custom HTML that may be modified by the Visual editor, are opened in a legacy mode.

Legacy mode retains the old Text widget interface, including the checkbox on whether or not to automatically add paragraphs. This change prevents the Visual editor from altering code.

Ruter says the ideal way to test these improvements is to install it on a staging site that has Text widgets containing HTML and are known to be problematic in WordPress 4.8. After upgrading, check to see if the widgets open in legacy mode.

WordPress 4.8.1 is scheduled to be released on August 1st. Please report any bugs or errors you encounter in as much detail as possible to the WordPress Alpha/Beta section of the support forums.

photo credit: manu schwendener

React users are petitioning Facebook to re-license React.js after the Apache Software Foundation announced its decision to ban Apache PMC members from using any technology licensed with Facebook’s BSD+Patents License. So far the GitHub issue has received 627 “thumbs up” emoji and 66 comments from concerned React users who are hoping for a change in licensing.

Many respondents on the thread said that ASF’s decision affects their organizations’ ability to continue using React in projects.

“Apache CouchDB and others will switch away from React if we have to,” CouchDB committer Robert Newson said. “We’d rather not, it’s a lot of work for no real gain, but we don’t have a choice. Changing license can be simple (RocksDB completed that change in a day).”

“My team, at LinkedIn, is also having legal troubles using React for our internal projects,” LinkedIn software Denis Ivanov said. “We would love to see a change on this front.”

Software developer Clark Evans commented on how React’s current licensing might affect medical research institutes, and suggested that Facebook consider an Apache 2.0 license because it includes equitable patent grants.

Since U.S. based universities rely upon patent licensing as part of their legislatively mandated technology transfer initiatives, they are growing far more cautious in their due diligence. For this reason, at some universities, software written with React may be shunned. Existing projects using React software may be asked to remove the React software software dependency. Please strongly consider this proposal, since our RexDB work is used at major universities, we do not wish to rework to use a React alternative.

Several participants in the discussion commented that they would like to use React but the licensing makes it impossible for their companies.

“Other large companies such as mine (Adobe) can’t use React, Pop, etc. for the very same reason,” Corey Lucier said. “We’d love to participate in the project, contribute to each, etc. but Facebook’s heavy-handed PATENTS clause is a showstopper.”

“Even mid-size companies like mine (ViaSat) are starting to disallow the use of Facebook’s ‘open-source’ projects for this reason,” software developer Aaron Yoshitake said. “We’d like to build React web and native apps, but it seems that any sensible legal department will recommend against agreeing to Facebook’s asymmetric patent grant.”

Internal Discussions Continue at Facebook, Re-Licensing Issue has been Escalated to Engineering Directors

Dan Abramov, co-author of Redux, Create React App, and React Hot Loader, shared with participants that Facebook is having internal discussions about the re-licensing issue but cautioned them to temper their optimism. He returned to throw some ice on the conversation, which has grown more heated over the past few days, when he said it could only remain an open discussion if everyone involved remains civil. Many participants are concerned about the future of the React-based software that they have already invested thousands of hours of work into.

“I understand that everyone is frustrated about this issue,” Abramov said. “Personally I am just as frustrated to spend time, energy, and emotional wellbeing on legal mumbo jumbo that is preventing people from using React. I would much prefer to spend this time on working together to make it better.

“But the reality of this situation is that the maintainers of React (people like me that you’re interacting on the issue tracker) are not the ones making these decisions. Each of us is doing what we can to show different perspectives on this issue to the people who can make those decisions, and we appreciate your feedback too. But we can only keep discussion open if everyone stays civil and respectful.”

Abramov also pointed out in a follow-up update that a bug tracker isn’t the best avenue for a legal discussion, especially since most participants are software developers and not lawyers. Many have mistaken the thread as a way to communicate with Facebook but there are just a handful of software developers who are representing the React community’s concerns.

“We have heard you very well, and we have passed on your concerns,” Abramov said. “But repeating the same points over and over in different threads does not help move this forward, and creates a lot of noise and stress for the maintainers who are already empathetic to your cause.”

Several participants expressed frustration that the React community cannot participate in the discussions more directly. However, as React is both an open source project and a product of Facebook, the company’s leadership has the last word on licensing issues.

“I understand that software developers like us are not the best people to discuss legal details,” software consultant Erik Doernenburg said. “However, wouldn’t the logical consequence be that the Facebook Legal team, who make such decisions, become active in this forum? Shouldn’t it be possible that all relevant details pertaining to a piece of open source software are discussed in the open? It is incredibly frustrating to have such an important aspect of open software discussed behind closed doors.”

It’s not known whether Facebook is considering another change to its Patents grant or a complete re-licensing. Participants in the discussion are also concerned about other Facebook open source projects like GraphQL, Relay, React Native, and Flow, which share the same BSD+Patents License and are widely used by the open source community.

Dan Abramov left an update today to let the community know that no resolution is available this week. However, the update seemed more positive than the first one, which discouraged participants from being optimistic about a change.

“I want to point out that there is a real momentum behind this discussion internally,” Abramov said. “There are going to be more meetings next week escalating this up to the engineering directors. As you imagine they are quite busy, so this is taking more time than we thought.

“Again, I can’t promise you any specific conclusion, and there is no clarity on where this will land. But please know there are people working on getting your voice heard.”

In this episode, John James Jacoby and I are joined by Cody Landefeld, Senior web strategist and founder of Mode Effect. Landefeld describes some of the challenges that shop owners face and provides insight into a couple of WooCommerce projects Mode Effect has recently built.

We discussed the future of WooCommerce and the odds of it turning into a SaaS product. Landefeld shares his thoughts on WooCommerce dropping its 50% renewal discount on subscriptions. Even though the discount is gone, he believes it’s still an affordable option for most users. To close out the show, Jacoby and I discuss the news of the week.

Stories Discussed:

AJ Morris Acquires iThemes Exchange
Jetpack Professional Plan Introduces Unlimited Access to 200+ Commercial Themes
bbPress 2.5.13 Readds Sanitization to Anonymous User Data
WP Rollback Adds Multisite Compatibility and Changelog Preview
Gutenberg 0.5.0 Adds New Verse Block for Poetry and a New Display for Recent Blocks

Picks of the Week:

Gutenberg Boilerplate For Third-Party Custom Blocks by Ahmad Awais. The boilerplate is a great way to learn the basics on creating custom blocks for Gutenberg. It comes with four example blocks.

• A block with custom CSS for editor and front end
• A block with ES6 or ESNext and a Webpack build process
• A block with editable content
• A block to click Tweet the contents of that block

Awais also shared his thoughts on the Gutenberg project.

Add Admin CSS – Using this plugin you’ll easily be able to define additional CSS (inline and/or files by URL) to be added to all administration pages. You can define CSS to appear inline in the admin head (within style tags), or reference CSS files to be linked.

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Listen To Episode #282:

The State of JavaScript 2017 Survey is now open to web professionals of all backgrounds. The intent of the survey is to provide an overview of the rapidly changing landscape of JavaScript frameworks and tools by gauging which technologies are growing in popularity and which ones people are liking and using less.

The survey, created by Sacha Greif and Michael Rambeau, should take approximately 10 minutes to complete. Topics include JavaScript frontend and backend tools and frameworks, state management solutions, testing tools, CSS, build tools, mobile and desktop technologies, package managers, text editors, salaries, and more.

Last year’s 89-question survey received more than 9,300 responses. Results showed that React ranked higher than other front-end frameworks in terms of developer satisfaction at 92%, followed closely by Vue.js at 89%.

It will be interesting to see if and how these results change with many open source project and companies growing wary of using React after the Apache Software Foundation’s recent decision to ban Apache PMC members from using any technology licensed with Facebook’s BSD+Patents License. A licensing issue that jeopardizes more companies’ ability to use Facebook’s popular open source technologies could precipitate a decline in React’s preeminence among frontend frameworks.

Sacha Greif reports that the survey has received more than 3,500 responses in less than 24 hours, a remarkable number compared to 9,300 over the course of three weeks last year. This response affirms the value that last year’s results provided to web professionals who are attempting to navigate the ever-expanding JavaScript ecosystem.

The bbPress development team has released bbPress 2.5.13. This release fixes a few bugs, most notably, it readds sanitization to anonymous user data that was accidentally removed in previous versions.

Those who allow anonymous users to create topics and replies on their forums are encouraged to update immediately.

“This feature is not widely used on public forums because spammers aggressively target these kinds of sites, but for communities that rely on this feature, please know you can safely upgrade to 2.5.13 without any issues,” John James Jacoby, lead developer of bbPress and BuddyPress, said.

As a reminder, beginning with bbPress 2.5.12, the minimum version of WordPress supported is 4.7. If you’re using an older version of WordPress, Jacoby recommends using or staying with bbPress 2.5.11.

bbPress 2.6 is still in the release candidate phase as developers iron out a few issues discovered on WordPress.org.

Users can download the latest version of bbPress from WordPress.org or browse to Dashboard > Updates, and upgrade from within WordPress.