Last week, WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy opened a discussion on how many releases the project will aim for in 2022.

“Given that we have a release in January already, I wonder if we might be able to use 2022 to attempt four releases,” Haden Chomphosy said. She proposed three different release schedules:

• Quarterly releases: January, April, July, October
• Trimester-ly releases: January, May, September
• Known release and then evenly spaced targets?: January, May, August, November

When she brought it up in the #core Slack channel, a few contributors said…

Security Risk: High

Exploitation Level: Easy

CVSS Score: 9.9 / 7.7

Vulnerability: Privilege Escalation, SQL Injection

Patched Version: 4.1.5.3

Last week, security researcher at Automattic Marc Montpas recently discovered two severe security vulnerabilities within one of the most popular SEO plugins used by WordPress website owners: All in One SEO. The plugin is used by more than three million websites and if left unpatched could cause some serious headaches for WordPress users.

The Details

Both vulnerabilities require that the attacker have an account on the website, but the account…

Looking to build a new website, update an old one, or try out some new plugins? The best practice is to get started by using a staging website. This provides a safe environment for testing and experiments, and if anything goes wrong, you don’t have to worry about your live website crashing or being out of service for a while.

The precise steps to take in creating a staging website may differ depending on the type of website. In this post, you will learn how to easily copy your WordPress site to a subdomain for safe staging. Here are the steps to follow:

Step 1: Create a…

Have you heard of headless WordPress? Wondering how you might be able to incorporate its principles into your own site?

While the idea can appear somewhat complicated at face value, it’s pretty simple to grasp once it’s laid out for you. In this article, we’ll walk you through what headless WordPress is, discuss some of its advantages and disadvantages, and provide an alternative.

Let’s get started.

What’s a Headless CMS?

All WordPress websites have a front-end, which is what users see and interact with, and a back end, which is where administrators manage the content,…

More than half of all WordPress sites (50.5%) are using translations for non-English speaking locales. It’s only natural that these users would want the ability to register, log in, and reset their passwords in their own languages. A new language switcher on the login screen has finally made its way into core, four years after the ticket was opened.

WordPress 5.9 will introduce a new dropdown on the login screen that will display all the languages that are currently installed. (New languages can be added under the Settings > General screen in the admin.)

In a dev note for the…

In last week’s annual State of the Word address, WordPress project lead Matt Mullenweg announced the WordPress.org photo directory. Officially, it has not yet “fully launched.” However, it is live on the site, and anyone with an account can submit their photos.

Thus far, the directory has 103 submissions and are under the CC0 license. Unfortunately, there is only a single photo of a house cat. Perhaps I will need to contribute to the commons that this project has made possible.

This is a separate project from Openverse, a search engine for finding open-source media,…

Kellie Peterson of Automattic discusses domains at WordPress, her .xyz sales, and what distributed workforces are like.

This week we talk with Kellie Peterson, head of domains at Automattic, which is the company behind WordPress and offers domains through WordPress.com. Kellie was last on the podcast in January 2018, and a lot has happened since then at WordPress.com. On today’s show, Kellie explains how WordPress.com approaches domains, what top level domains do well, and how the company experiments with domain search. Before that, Kellie talks about some of her five-figure .xyz…

Readers were drawn to timely analysis on rooftop solar, the Texas power crisis and building electrification.

Over one million California households and businesses have put solar panels on their roofs. A dozen other states such as Arizona, Texas and Florida are following a similar trajectory. Government policies have helped fuel this boom, but multiple studies have pointed out that these policies are raising the bills of lower income households. Stakeholders are debating a new proposal from the California Public Utilities Commission that would make major changes. Energy Institute blog…

WordPress is one of the most popular platforms, with 50% of all the websites built on it. Like every other digital platform, websites also need maintenance to ensure higher performance and uptime. Web developers work hard to ensure that websites do not face downtimes due to maintenance issues. However, there are maintenance costs even for a WordPress website that you need to keep in mind.

There are several costs associated with website maintenance, like framework updates, the cost of app monitoring, testing, and more. Knowing these WordPress maintenance costs can help you save on expenses…