Adam Schweigert, an independent media and technology consultant, has released a plugin called Newspack Plugin Update Checker that enables self-hosted Newspack users to keep their plugins up-to-date. The Newspack project was launched in 2019 by WordPress.com, with support from the Google News Initiative, the Knight Foundation, and The Lenfest Institute. It provides local news organizations […]
The Ollie block theme, created by Mike McAlister and Patrick Posner, now has a companion plugin available called Ollie Dash. The theme made headlines earlier this month after a contentious WordPress.org review process led its authors to remove the innovative onboarding features. Ollie was approved for WordPress.org but without the time-saving onboarding features its authors […]
WordPress.com plugin pages have been updated to include a download link for WordPress.org plugins listed in the .com directory. These are the listings that are scraped from WordPress.org. The plugins are available for free on WordPress.org for self-hosted sites but can only be used on WordPress.com with a paid subscription. Logged out view of WordPress.com […]
Citations is a new plugin created by WP Munich and the team at Luehrsen // Heinrich, a German WordPress agency. It makes it easy to create in-text citations and assign them a specific source. Most of the existing plugins that do this are for older versions of WordPress. This one is created specifically for those using the […]
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 […]
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 […]
WordPress’ Plugin Review team is wading through a backlog that was over 900 plugins awaiting approval earlier this week. The current count has 870 plugins sitting in the review queue, with an average wait time of 61 days before initial review. WordPress developer Marcus Burnette drew attention to the matter on Twitter after submitting a […]
ConvertKit has updated its official WordPress plugin and WooCommerce add-on to support a range of new features. More than 40,000 sites use ConvertKit’s plugin to integrate their newsletters, email campaigns, and digital products with WordPress. The service is free for the user’s first 1,000 subscribers but offers more automated features and third party integration on […]
All-In-One Security (AIOS), a plugin active on more than a million WordPress sites, was found to be logging plaintext passwords from login attempts in the database and has patched the security issue in version 5.2.0. In a post titled “Cleartext passwords written to aiowps_audit_log” published to the plugin’s support forum two weeks and five days […]
During the 2022 State of the Word, Matt Mullenweg announced a plan to add new “Community” and “Commercial” taxonomies for the theme and plugin directories that would help users more quickly ascertain the purpose of the extensions they are considering. Shortly after the announcement, instructions were published for theme and plugin authors to opt into […]