If you develop plugins for WordPress, you’ll be aware of the controversy caused by the removal of plugins from the repository for breaches of its guidelines. Many such incidents are caused by developers stepping over the line with “growth-hacking” or data collection, a prime example being incentivized reviews. Some developers offer free or discount premium […]

PHP 7 is a clear win compared to earlier versions of PHP, yet, unlike Nexcess, many WordPress hosts haven’t upgraded. It’s difficult to get a clear view of the exact adoption rates of PHP 7, but according to figures from Jordi Boggiano, developer of Composer, PHP 7 adoption rates are hovering around 20 percent, with […]

Towards the end of last year, Magento announced that it had acquired the technology behind the Bluefoot CMS and page builder. The acquisition is intended to enhance Magento’s existing page-creation features and make it easier for eCommerce merchants to build and deploy bespoke product and landing pages on their stores. Bluefoot, a young project which […]

I’m a heavy user of RSS. Every day, I peruse dozens of websites in my feed reader, searching for content by writers and publishers that have, over many years, created content that appeals to me both professionally and personally. I know this is an unusual habit these days. RSS use has declined, and many sites […]

Allowing guest posts on your business blog is effective for building relationships, increasing the amount of content you publish, and attracting incoming links and increased social sharing. But, as any editor will tell you, accepting content submissions can be a lot of work, especially in light of the embrace of “guest posting” by spammers and […]

This August, the company behind the WordPress security plugin WordFence published a blog post revealing that the popular 404 to 301 plugin injected advertising into pages of the WordPress sites on which it was installed. The advertising was for low-grade and potentially scammy services like payday loan companies and escort agencies. But if you — […]

If you have a WordPress website, you need web hosting built to support the WordPress application. A web host provides the server a WordPress application runs on and the network that connects it to the internet. It’s not difficult to install WordPress onto a server. It’s not something that should be attempted by someone with […]

Links are an important part of the web, but they’re fragile. Every link is a pointer to a fixed location, and the web is constantly evolving, which means links break all the time — a process called link rot. When a user clicks on a broken link they see an error instead of the content […]

WordPress.org has warned plugin developers against paying or otherwise giving incentives to users for reviews, whether those reviews are positive or not. Until recently, there was no clear guideline about what was acceptable where review incentives were concerned, but a recently published blog post makes it clear that the WordPress.org team are strongly opposed to […]

WordPress 4.7 introduced many new features and enhancements. Users are most likely to be interested in the Customizer enhancements or the ability to quickly activate starter content for new themes. But it’s the inclusion of new content API endpoints that has developers talking. While the new endpoints don’t directly change the experience of WordPress users, […]