WordCamp Asia 2024 is happening in Taipei, Taiwan, next year from March 7-9, at the Taipei International Convention Center (TICC). With the dates locked in and venue secured, organizers have now opened the call for speakers. The event will feature three days of talks, workshops, and networking events, and organizers expect more than 2,000 attendees.
Talks will be given in English and there will be four different formats for sessions:
Long Talks: 40 minutes total (30 minutes for talk + 10 minutes for Q&A)
Lightning Talks: 10 minutes total (10 minutes for talk only. No Q&A)
Panel Discussions: Approximately 60 minutes with Q&A
Workshops: 90 minutes up to half a day
WordCamp Asia’s organizers suggested nearly two dozen acceptable topics across a wide range of disciplines, including accessibility, SEO, marketing, Web3, AI, security, case studies, and more. They are especially “interested in hearing about diverse topics and inspirational stories. Topics such as trends, new approaches, and upcoming changes in related software and WordPress itself will be encouraged.”
The call for speakers includes those who are hoping to host or join a panel discussion or host a workshop. Speakers do not have to be experienced at public speaking to be selected for WordCamp Asia. Those who do not have videos of previous talks can record a 5-10 minute video talking about their topic and link to it in the speaker form.
WordCamp Asia has launched an Underrepresented Speaker Support Initiative alongside this call for speakers with the goal of removing financial barriers for speakers. The program calls on companies to invest in creating a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive tech community by sponsoring underrepresented speakers, helping them practice their talks, and promoting the cause.
The event’s organizers are also calling for sponsors, media partners, and volunteers. Prospective speakers are limited to two presentation submissions and can also indicate if they would be willing to be selected as a backup speaker. Applications will close on September 30, 2023. Speakers will be notified about the outcome of the selection process in November, followed by speaker announcements in December.
WordPress is honoring contributors the community has lost over the years through a new memorial page called WordPress Remembers:
WordPress dedicates this page to the memory of those we’ve lost. They’ve shaped our project and enriched our community. As we remember their passion and commitment to WordPress and open source software, we celebrate their spirit.
Forever in our hearts, their legacy endures through every line of code and every user they’ve impacted.
The page lists code and community contributors who left a lasting impact on the WordPress project, and links to their profiles and external blogs and memorial pages.
“As WordPress continues through the decades, we have to deal with all parts of life, including death,” WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg said, introducing the page on Twitter. “As a community, we now have a memorial place we can remember and honor those who contributed to WordPress but are no longer part of this world.” In a followup tweet he added, “I will be on this page someday.”
For a software project that is 20+ years old, with an aging contributor base, departures from this world will soon become more common. Visiting this memorial page is a heart gripping experience if you had the privilege of knowing any of these beloved contributors. It’s sobering to consider the impact and legacy of one’s investments in WordPress, but this elegantly designed memorial calls those questions to mind.
If you know of someone who is missing from this page, you can contact memorials@wordpress.org and volunteers will add them.
BuddyPress 12.0 is set to introduce a new Community Visibility feature that gives site administrators the option to restrict access to the community sections of the site. Sites set to “members only” will show an access error message and a login form when a non-logged-in user tries to view a page generated by BuddyPress.
The Community Visibility setting makes it possible to create a private community site without adding any plugins to BuddyPress, a feature that has frequently been requested by BuddyPress site admins. It is being introduced as a basic toggle but BuddyPress contributor David Cavins, who worked on the feature, said it lays the groundwork for future, more granular privacy controls.
The BuddyPress core development team has also published the BP Classic plugin ahead of the 12.0 release. The plugin provides backwards compatibility for sites using plugins or themes that are not ready for the BP Rewrite API that will be introduced in 12.0. It includes features and templates that are fully deprecated:
The BP Legacy widgets (these were migrated as Blocks in BuddyPress 9.0.0).
The BP Default theme.
The BP Legacy navigation globals (buddypress()->bp_nav & buddypress()->bp_options_nav).
An advisory about BP Classic was posted to the official BuddyPress blog to help site owners figure out if they will need this plugin. Those who require it before upgrading can install it ahead of time and it will be dormant until it is needed.
The new Community Visibility feature was committed to trunk five days ago and is on track to be included in the next major release. BuddyPress 12.0 is anticipated to be released on October 30, 2023, and Beta 1 is overdue and expected any day.
WordPress.com is making a strong bid for Google Domains customers after the the product was sold to Squarespace in a deal reportedly worthy $180 million. Shortly after the sale was announced, WordPress.com pitched Google Domains customers, reminding the public that the company is also a domain registrar, but the call to action didn’t include much incentive to switch.
This week WordPress.com is putting the heat on with a new offer to pay transfer fees and an additional year of registration for the first million domains moved from Google Domains. WordPress.com is also guaranteeing Google Domains customers the same pricing or lower for 400+ top-level domains.
“This will also apply to existing WordPress.com customers across most domains, meaning that in many cases we’re lowering your prices.” Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg said in the announcement this week.
“This isn’t a temporary thing. We’re committed to keeping domain prices low, and will only raise them if our wholesale costs go up (we’ll run our domains business like Costco).”
Squarespace has committed to honor the renewal prices previously set by Google Domains existing customers for 12 months but will set its own prices after this time.
In an interview with The Verge, Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena said his company is already using a lot of the same infrastructure Google is using in their Cloud DNS product, having resold Google Workspace for almost a decade. Squarespace currently employs 1,750 people with revenue under a billion dollars this year. Acquiring Google Domains gives the company the opportunity to cross-sell website packages to its incoming domain customers. There are approximately 10 million domains up for grabs in the transfer of customers.
Casalena said that being a reseller of Google Workspace was a major factor in Google’s decision to offer the domains to Squarespace, in addition to having the infrastructure to manage the business. This partially explains what was an otherwise bewildering deal that came as a surprise to the industry:
First off — once in a lifetime opportunity for us. Incredibly grateful that we were selected as the stewards of that business. We weren’t asking them, like, ‘Hey, planning on shutting down domains or anything?’ It wasn’t exactly outbound. I think they made the decision that it’s not a business that they were going to be in. And they contacted a couple of legitimate parties who could potentially even take on a business of that size because, again, it’s not the code or the employees are moving — it’s basically the domains themselves and the hosting services and the registrations, that sort of thing. So that really narrows it down to the number of companies that could even support that.
Then the other thing that was a big factor is we’ve been a huge fan and big reseller of Google Workspace for nearly a decade now, which was very important to them, and we’re incredibly sophisticated in selling Domains, selling Google Workspace, servicing it, and managing that for millions of people. So we were able to find a transaction that worked for us.Â
Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg reacted to the deal on Twitter this week, saying that he was disappointed Google didn’t make it a more competitive process.
“This might cost a ton of money but I was bummed we didn’t even get a crack at this, my guess is Cloudflare, Godaddy, and Bluehost didn’t either—why Google didn’t make this a competitive process?” Mulleweng said. “Concerning to have so many domains going to a proprietary CMS.”
WordPress.com has been slowly inching towards becoming a one-stop shop for users’ website needs. The company recently made its monetization features available for free, making the platform more attractive to creators who are just starting out online. Based on the reaction to Mullenweg’s tweet, it seems many people are still not aware that they can buy their domains from a registrar and host their websites elsewhere. If you are just hearing about WordPress.com’s domains, it’s natural to think they are only for WordPress sites, so the company has some work to do in making prospective customers aware.
Users can be hesitant to move to a new registrar when they don’t fully understand the process and don’t want to negatively impact their online presence. In the case of Google Domains customers, they are moving to a new registrar after the sale closes later this year, whether they like it or not. WordPress.com’s deal is a compelling offer if they can better position their domains as an independent service.
Jetpack 12.4 was released today, launching the plugin’s Newsletter product. It allows users to send blog posts as newsletters, without the hassle of having to copy and paste from the WordPress editor into another newsletter service’s campaign editor and reformat it for email. This launch comes seven months after WordPress.com launched its newsletter offering, which uses the same underlying infrastructure to deliver emails.
Jetpack Newsletter is launching as a free product, with a percentage of fees collected from creators who choose to offer paid subscriptions:
Fees are only collected when you accept payments. Fees are based on the Jetpack plan you have and are calculated as a percentage of your revenue from 10% on the Free plan to 2% on the Complete plan (plus Stripe fees).Â
Jetpack users are probably familiar with the plugin’s ability to send posts to subscribers via email. The newsletter feature uses this same infrastructure that site owners have relied on for years to allow subscribers to get updates in their inboxes when new posts are available.
Newsletters can be turned on under the Discussion tab in the Jetpack settings. Many Jetpack users likely already have this turned on.
The Subscribe block can be placed anywhere on the site and new subscribers will be sent a confirmation email to confirm their subscription. They have the option to choose between instant, daily, or a weekly digest, as well as control the time and day they receive their digests. Subscribers can also pause or unsubscribe from the site.
Subscriber import and other features, such as newsletter stats for opens and clicks, is available via the Jetpack admin pages on WordPress.com.
At this time, newsletter creators can only import up to 100 subscribers via CSV file. This is severely limiting for all but the smallest of newsletters, but the Jetpack team has confirmed that it is high on their list of priorities to change as it creates too much of a barrier. The limit was set for spam prevention, but it makes it nearly impossible to migrate to Jetpack Newsletter if you have a popular newsletter. Those who are on paid plans can upload unlimited subscribers.
Newsletter creators can change the site name and logo for their emails and paid users will have more customization options in the future.
One thing that sets Jetpack Newsletter apart from the vast majority of other traditional email service providers is that it allows unlimited email sends and unlimited subscriber lists for both free and paid users.
Most popular services like Mailchimp, Brevo, and SendGrid, allow only a few hundred emails to be sent per day or up to 1,000 per month for free users. Paid plans get expensive quickly as a newsletter’s subscriber base grows. Emails and subscriber numbers usually determine the pricing for these services, which makes Jetpack’s product stand out from the crowd, especially for those who intend to independently monetize their newsletter through ads and paid sponsorships.
Jetpack Marketing Lead Rob Pugh said that although popular newsletter services are more limited in emails and subscriber numbers, they also offer a completely different feature set. The Jetpack Newsletter product is aimed at competitors like Substack.com, Beehiiv.com, and Ghost.org, which also all offer unlimited email sends. On paid plans, Jetpack Newsletter’s offer beats Substack, as it collects 2% (plus Stripe fees) as compared to Substack’s take of 10% plus credit card fees.
Newsletter creators should be aware that Jetpack Newsletter’s unlimited emails and subscribers may not last forever, as the FAQ section of the product states that it is an introductory offer:
As an introductory offer, we do not limit you or charge you based on your email list size. This may change in the future. Fair usage policy applies.
Jetpack representatives were not able to confirm the limits of fair usage or how long the introductory period will last.
“Launching without a limit on emails isn’t the most financially responsible thing, but we’re most excited to get this feature into the hands of people to get feedback,” Pugh said. “We’re focused on the immediate roadmap to make the product better, although there will likely be a limit at some point in the future if we see extreme use from people on free plans.”
He said the Jetpack team goes out of its way to make pricing changes as fairly as possible “and we don’t want to pull the rug out from anyone, so we’ll certainly consider how people are impacted before making changes.”Â
Until the limited subscriber import issue has been solved, any pricing changes down the road are only likely to affect newsletters that are just starting out getting people signed up. Apart from this limitation, Jetpack Newsletter is making a competitive debut in the market. For those who are already using Jetpack and have an existing subscriber base, it makes it nearly effortless to add paid subscriptions. Using the block editor is far easier than most newsletter campaign editors out there, and Jetpack streamlines the sending process so creators don’t have to copy and paste between email services.
Earlier this year, WordPress contributors announced that they are working on a new Interactivity API that will allow developers to build interactive blocks. This API will support the kinds of frontend experiences that let visitors interact with content and get feedback without having to refresh the page.
Automattic-sponsored contributor Luis Herranz, who has been working on the API, is now encouraging developers to test it with their own blocks. Gutenberg 16.2 included the Interactivity API under the Experiments flag and this version or later is required for testing it.
Developers can follow the API’s “Getting Started” guide on GitHub to scaffold an interactive block with `@wordpress/create-block`. Take a look at the roadmap, which has an extensive list of tasks the team has in mind for the initiative and will include tracking issues for features as they progress.
Those who are testing the Interactivity API can follow and participate in the discussions happening in the new Interactivity API category on GitHub. This early testing invitation is for those who are eager to help shape the API and offer feedback.
“If you want to use the Interactivity API in your projects, please subscribe to this discussion where we will provide updates with instructions for migrating your code each time there is a breaking change,” Herranz said.
There is no official documentation yet, but a the team is working towards creating a bare-bones version first which will be used as the base for the official docs further down the road. The documentation efforts are being led by Automattic-sponsored contributor JuanMa Garrido and anyone willing to collaborate is invited to join the conversation on GitHub.
After a recent in-depth performance analysis earlier this year showed that translations can have an impact on server response times, WordPress contributors are proposing half a dozen technical solutions for consideration to improve performance for the ~56% of WordPress sites that use translations.
“Initial benchmarks showed that the median loading time for a localized site can be up to 50% slower than for non-localized sites, depending on which themes and plugins are being used,” Google-sponsored WordPress core committer Pascal Birchler said.
Based on recent discussions on GitHub, the Performance team has whittled it down to an updated list of six possible top contenders for speeding up sites with translations, including the advantages and disadvantages of each:
Solution A: Use different file format
Solution B: Native gettext extension
Solution C: Cache translations
Solution D: Lazily evaluated translation calls
Solution E: Optimize/Rewrite existing MO parser
Solution F: Splitting up translation files
Localized WordPress sites currently download .po and .mo files that contain the translations, but the first suggested solution proposes storing translations in .php files and using the .mo file as a fallback, as Birchler proposes that PHP loading and executing another PHP file would be a faster approach. He has a proof of concept on GitHub at at swissspidy/wp-php-translation-files and swissspidy/ginger-mo.
“When looking at all these factors, it appears that a revamped translations parser (solution E) could bring the most significant improvements to all localized WordPress sites,” Birchler said. “Especially when combined with a new PHP translation file format (solution A), which Ginger MO supports, the i18n overhead becomes negligible. Of course the same risks associated with introducing a new format apply.
“On top of that, a revamped i18n library like Ginger MO could also be combined with other solutions such as caching or dynamic MO loading to potentially gain further improvements. However, those routes have yet to be explored.”
The Performance team plans to test these ideas further on a wider scale through its Performance Lab feature project after gathering feedback from the broader community. August 6, 2023, is the deadline for leaving feedback on the proposal, which includes benchmarks and more details from the analysis.
a broken access control on form submissions export feature that allows Subscriber and Contributor role users to export all of the Ninja Forms submissions on a WordPress site (7.6 CVSS 3.1 score)
Patchstack researchers discovered the vulnerabilities on June 22, 2023, and Ninja Forms patched them on July 4, 2023. The security advisory was publicly released on July 27, 2023.
The plugin’s changelog for version 3.6.26 transparently identifies the security fixes included in the release:
Security Enhancements: * Prevent unauthorized download of submission * Prevent scripts in dashboard field labels; responsibly reported by Sayandeep Dutta * Prevent front-facing label scripts; responsibly reported by Jonathon Zamora & WordPress.org * Prevent excess extra data through automated form submission * Prevent override access where not permitted
Ninja Forms is used on more than 800,000 WordPress sites. The majority of the plugin’s users are on version 3.6.x (73.6%) but WordPress.org doesn’t offer a more detailed breakdown of minor versions, so it’s not clear how many are still vulnerable. Ninja Forms users are recommended to patch their sites immediately. At this time, the vulnerabilities are not known to have been exploited.
WordPress meta contributors have just logged an important milestone in their efforts to explore replacing Slack communication with Matrix, an open source federated chat system. The team hosted a meeting on the Meta Slack channel and the corresponding #meta:community.wordpress.org Matrix room simultaneously, enabled by the project’s new Slack/Matrix bridge.
The bridge allows users to follow the chat and participate from either Matrix or Slack, with messages showing up in real-time. It’s a tool that will make the transition easier as the WordPress project moves towards replacing Slack. The team is still in the process of importing the history for channels but the bridges are already in place for all public Slack channels/Matrix rooms.
DM’s do not work over the bridge, although they work between Matrix users. The bridge doesn’t have access to anything that is private, and the historic data import into Matrix will only apply to public Slack channels. DMs and private channel history will not be ported over.
Meta contributor meeting inside Chatrix instance with room switcher disabled
The Matrix team has created a Gutenberg block that embeds a Matrix client called Chatrix, which can be added to any WordPress page/post or P2 blog, as shown in the screenshot above. This example can be accessed at https://make.wordpress.org/meta/chat/. WordPress.org users can sign in with SSO inside the block and authorize their accounts to connect:
Now that the Matrix server is live at community.wordpress.org, WordPress users who want to attend team meetings or join rooms via Matrix can now do so using their choice of Matrix clients that support SSO. Logging in uses the same credentials as the WordPress.org account.
“Compared to Slack this means a vastly simplified onboarding process,” Automattic-sponsored contributor Alex Kirk said. “Instead of waiting for an e-mail arriving at a special e-mail address, you set the server in your Matrix client to community.wordpress.org and click ‘Login with WordPress.org’ (the name of that button might vary by client).”
As the channels’ history gets migrated over, Kirk said WordPress users will be automatically invited to rooms on Matrix that they have already joined from the Slack side. The team is planning to make more wide-scale public announcements after the Slack/Matrix bridge has demonstrated that it is running stable.
ClassicPress, the fork that has been keeping WordPress 4.9 on life support for those who don’t want to use the block editor, will soon be moving into version 2.0 after the community voted to re-fork a newer version of WordPress (6.x) to keep moving forward. Version 1.6.0 was released a few weeks ago as the last minor release before version 2.0.
ClassicPress contributors are discussing the future of Classic Commerce, which is a fork of WooCommerce 3.5.3 created to provide a reliable e-commerce solution for ClassicPress users. The community is now bracing for the inevitable compatibility issues introduced by version 2.0 that will require a massive undertaking to resolve.
In a forum thread seeking community input, @shimmy, an IT solutions business owner with an interest in supporting a long term e-commerce solution, proposed the following options for Classic Commerce’s future:
Re-Fork Woo-Current
Re-Fork Woo-Previous
Fork a different eCommerce solution
Migrate CCv1 to current
Complete Rewrite
“We can talk about re-forking, using something that works or asking ourselves: are we ready to really fork and support it on our own developing it in a way it works in ClassicPress or do we fork it and continue to patch it every time it doesn’t work because blocks or just keep it frozen?” Elisabetta Carrara said.
After some discussion multiple participants in the conversation were in agreement that forking the latest version of WooCommerce to make it work with ClassicPress is not a viable option.
ClassicPress director Viktor Nagornyy suggested exploring a refork similar to the method used for ClassicPress 2.0.
“With CP v2.0, we didn’t take WP v6.2 and rip out blocks, FSE, and React,” he said. “@MattyRob merged develop branch with CP v1, and worked his way through all the files to resolve merge conflicts. That was a lot of work, and he did a great job. WooCommerce and Classic Commerce are plugins, so I assume they have fewer files than WP/CP core.
“This type of ‘merge-fork’ could be a viable option for CC to save time and effort.”
@shimmy, who would be leading this effort, said he is leaning toward this approach.
“I think this provides a more natural upgrade path and to some degree backwards compatibility,” he said. “At some point in the course of merge-fork WC plugins will no longer be compatible with CC; which is fine because I think that CC should have it’s own plugin ‘bazaar.’ This ensures compatibility with CC; if you need a feature then it should be a filtered result with what you already have in place.”
Nagornyy also encouraged a nascent plugin ecosystem to grow up around these forks to provide additional features. Although the WooCommerce plugin ecosystem has thousands of options for extending stores, they are not guaranteed to be compatible with forks built on older versions of WordPress and WooCommerce.
“While the core CC is free, I encourage plugin developers to consider developing paid plugins for CC to ensure they get paid for their time and effort,” Nagornyy said. “It only strengthens CP and CC knowing premium, supported plugins are available. For e-commerce, the two profitable (and critically important) categories of plugins are payment gateways and shipping integrations.”
With the major changes coming to the WordPress admin in Phase 3 of the Gutenberg project, maintaining these forks will continue to be an uphill slog, as fewer plugins from the wider ecosystem will remain compatible with ClassicPress.
Maintaining payment gateways and shipping integrations for compatibility with these forks is also going to be challenging, as this discussion indicates that the community doesn’t have many experienced e-commerce developers who are eager to step up and donate their time to this project. If Classic Commerce cannot deliver on the ambitious ‘merge-fork’ option, users may need to look towards integrating external e-commerce solutions.
