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WordPress 3.0 Thelonious passed 3 million downloads yesterday, and today the plugin directory followed suit with a milestone of its own: 100 million downloads. The WordPress community’s growth over the years has been tremendous, and we want to reinvest in it. So we’re taking the next two months to concentrate on improving WordPress.org. A major part of that will be improving the infrastructure of the plugins directory. More than 10,000 plugins are in the directory, every one of them GPL compatible and free as in both beer and speech. Here’s what we have in mind: We want to provide developers the tools they need to build the best possible plugins. We’re going to provide better integration with the forums so you can support your users. We’ll make more statistics available to you so you can analyze your user base, and over time we hope to make it easier for you to manage, build, and release localized plugins. We want to improve how the core software works with your plugin and … [Read more...] about 100 Million Plugin Downloads and Counting

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The release candidate for WordPress 4.5 is now available. We’ve made 49 changes since releasing Beta 4 a week ago. RC means we think we’re done, but with millions of users and thousands of plugins and themes, it’s possible we’ve missed something. We hope to ship WordPress 4.5 on Tuesday, April 12 , but we need your help to get there. If you haven’t tested 4.5 yet, now is the time! Think you’ve found a bug? Please post to the Alpha/Beta support forum . If any known issues come up, you’ll be able to find them here . To test WordPress 4.5, you can use the WordPress Beta Tester plugin or you can download the release candidate here (zip). For more information about what’s new in version 4.5, check out the Beta 1 , Beta 2 , Beta 3 , and Beta 4 blog posts. Developers , please test your plugins and themes against WordPress 4.5 and update your plugin’s Tested up to version in the readme to 4.5 before next week. If you find compatibility problems, we never … [Read more...] about WordPress 4.5 Release Candidate

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It’s only Monday and we already have several new switch stories for you. Thanks to everyone who mailed in! x.blog My first impression on WP is very positive. By now, I’m convinced that my MT set up going crazy was a blessing in disguise. I was used to the (awkward) MT templates and stuff and it took me about 3 days straight to get the hang of WP and customize everything. By now, I’m convinced WP is a superior product than MT. The way the index file uses regular PHP makes customization painless and the admin interface is crystal clear. Chris’ Corner So about a month or two ago I started to look around for new blogging software. Somehow (for some reason I can’t remember how at the moment), I stumbled upon WordPress, a PHP-based blog that has gotten great reviews by bloggers for its speed, flexibility, power, and ease-of-use. What a nice combo, cannot be true I thought. I was wrong. It was all true. I literally had a test installation of WordPress up, running, and my … [Read more...] about When it Rains it Pours

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You are an agent of change. Has anyone ever told you that? Well, I just did, and I meant it. Normally we stay away from from politics here at the official WordPress project — having users from all over the globe that span the political spectrum is evidence that we are doing our job and democratizing publishing, and we don’t want to alienate any of our users no matter how much some of us may disagree with some of them personally. Today, I’m breaking our no-politics rule, because there’s something going on in U.S. politics right now that we need to make sure you know about and understand, because it affects us all. Using WordPress to blog, to publish, to communicate things online that once upon a time would have been relegated to an unread private journal (or simply remained unspoken, uncreated, unshared) makes you a part of one of the biggest changes in modern history: the democratization of publishing and the independent web. Every time you click Publish, you are a part of that … [Read more...] about Help Stop SOPA/PIPA

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A stitch in time saves nine. I couldn’t sew my way out of a bag, but it’s true advice for bloggers as well — a little bit of work on an upgrade now saves a lot of work fixing something later. Right now there is a worm making its way around old, unpatched versions of WordPress. This particular worm, like many before it, is clever: it registers a user, uses a security bug (fixed earlier in the year) to allow evaluated code to be executed through the permalink structure, makes itself an admin, then uses JavaScript to hide itself when you look at users page, attempts to clean up after itself, then goes quiet so you never notice while it inserts hidden spam and malware into your old posts. The tactics are new, but the strategy is not. Where this particular worm messes up is in the “clean up” phase: it doesn’t hide itself well and the blogger notices that all his links are broken, which causes him to dig deeper and notice the extent of the damage. Where worms of old would do childish … [Read more...] about How to Keep WordPress Secure

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