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WordCamp Incubator 2.0

Posted February 21, 2018 by Hugh Lashbrooke. Filed under Community, Events, WordCamp.

WordCamps are informal, community-organized events that are put together by a team of local WordPress users who have a passion for growing their communities. They are born out of active WordPress meetup groups that meet regularly and are able to host an annual WordCamp event. This has worked very well in many communities, with over 120 WordCamps being hosted around the world in 2017.

Sometimes though, passionate and enthusiastic community members can’t pull together enough people in their community to make a WordCamp happen. To address this, we introduced the WordCamp Incubator program in 2016.

The goal of the incubator program is to help spread WordPress to underserved areas by providing more significant organizing support for their first WordCamp event. In 2016, members of the global community team worked with volunteers in three cities — Denpasar, Harare and Medellín — giving direct, hands-on assistance in making local WordCamps possible. All three of these WordCamp incubators were a great success, so we're bringing the incubator program back for 2018.

Where should the next WordCamp incubators be? If you have always wanted a WordCamp in your city but haven’t been able to get a community started, this is a great opportunity. We will be taking applications for the next few weeks, then will get in touch with everyone who applied to discuss the possibilities. We will announce the chosen cities by the end of March.

To apply, fill in the application by March 15, 2018. You don’t need to have any specific information handy, it’s just a form to let us know you’re interested. You can apply to nominate your city even if you don’t want to be the main organizer, but for this to work well we will need local liaisons and volunteers, so please only nominate cities where you live or work so that we have at least one local connection to begin.

We're looking forward to hearing from you!

WordPress 4.9.4 Maintenance Release

Posted February 6, 2018 by Dion Hulse. Filed under Releases.

WordPress 4.9.4 is now available.

This maintenance release fixes a severe bug in 4.9.3, which will cause sites that support automatic background updates to fail to update automatically, and will require action from you (or your host) for it to be updated to 4.9.4.

Four years ago with WordPress 3.7 “Basie”, we added the ability for WordPress to self-update, keeping your website secure and bug-free, even when you weren’t available to do it yourself. For four years it’s helped keep millions of installs updated with very few issues over that time. Unfortunately yesterdays 4.9.3 release contained a severe bug which was only discovered after release. The bug will cause WordPress to encounter an error when it attempts to update itself to WordPress 4.9.4, and will require an update to be performed through the WordPress dashboard or hosts update tools.

WordPress managed hosting companies who install updates automatically for their customers can install the update as normal, and we’ll be working with other hosts to ensure that as many customers of theirs who can be automatically updated to WordPress 4.9.4 can be.

For more technical details of the issue, we’ve posted on our Core Development blog. For a full list of changes, consult the list of tickets.

Download WordPress 4.9.4 or visit Dashboard → Updates and click “Update Now.”

WordPress 4.9.3 Maintenance Release

Posted February 5, 2018 by Sergey Biryukov. Filed under Releases.

WordPress 4.9.3 is now available.

This maintenance release fixes 34 bugs in 4.9, including fixes for Customizer changesets, widgets, visual editor, and PHP 7.2 compatibility. For a full list of changes, consult the list of tickets and the changelog.

Download WordPress 4.9.3 or visit Dashboard → Updates and click “Update Now.” Sites that support automatic background updates are already beginning to update automatically.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to WordPress 4.9.3:

Aaron Jorbin, abdullahramzan, Adam Silverstein, Andrea Fercia, andreiglingeanu, Andrew Ozz, Brandon Payton, Chetan Prajapati, coleh, Darko A7, David Cramer, David Herrera, Dion Hulse, Felix Arntz, Frank Klein, Gary Pendergast, Jb Audras, Jeffrey Paul, lizkarkoski, Marius L. J., mattyrob, Monika Rao, munyagu, ndavison, Nick Momrik, Peter Wilson, Rachel Baker, rishishah, Ryan Paul, Sami Ahmed Siddiqui, Sayed Taqui, Sean Hayes, Sergey Biryukov, Shawn Hooper, Stephen Edgar, Sultan Nasir Uddin, tigertech, and Weston Ruter.

The Month in WordPress: January 2018

Posted February 2, 2018 by Hugh Lashbrooke. Filed under Month in WordPress.

Things got off to a gradual start in 2018 with momentum starting to pick up over the course of the month. There were some notable developments in January, including a new point release and work being done on other important areas of the WordPress project.


WordPress 4.9.2 Security and Maintenance Release

On January 16, WordPress 4.9.2 was released to fix an important security issue with the media player, as well as a number of other smaller bugs. This release goes a long way to smoothing out the 4.9 release cycle with the next point release, v4.9.3, due in early February.

To get involved in building WordPress Core, jump into the #core channel in the Making WordPress Slack group, and follow the Core team blog.

Updated Plugin Directory Guidelines

At the end of 2017, the guidelines for the Plugin Directory received a significant update to make them clearer and expanded to address certain situations. This does not necessarily make these guidelines complete, but rather more user-friendly and practical; they govern how developers build plugins for the Plugin Directory, so they need to evolve with the global community that the Directory serves.

If you would like to contribute to these guidelines, you can make a pull request to the GitHub repository or email [email protected]. You can also jump into the #pluginreview channel in the Making WordPress Slack group.


Further Reading:

If you have a story we should consider including in the next “Month in WordPress” post, please submit it here.

See Also:

Want to follow the code? There’s a development P2 blog and you can track active development in the Trac timeline that often has 20–30 updates per day.

Want to find an event near you? Check out the WordCamp schedule and find your local Meetup group!

For more WordPress news, check out the WordPress Planet or subscribe to the WP Briefing podcast.

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