WordPress.org

Our first global contributor drive is coming up next weekend, January 30-31, 2016, and we want you to be involved!

Many of our current contributors first got involved at a Contributor Day at a WordCamp or WordPress Meetup event near them, but not everyone has had that opportunity, so we’re trying to create an online experience that will give new contributors the same kind of live support and group dynamic. We’ll be doing these as weekend challenges rather than one-day events so that WordPress users all over the world can participate without worrying about pesky time zones, but each challenge will be designed to be completed within a few hours, comparable to an in-person Contributor Day.

Our inaugural Contributor Weekend is focused on the Support Team — the folks who volunteer their time to help people with WordPress questions in the support forums and IRC. Over the two day span, forum moderators will be available online to help new contributors and answer questions as needed. The challenge this month is called 20 Questions; your mission (should you choose to accept it) is to help WordPress users by answering 20 forum support requests over the course of the weekend.

You can participate on your own, or you can get together with other people from your local meetup group and work on it together. Working together in person is really fun, so we highly recommend trying to get some folks together if you’re able, but if that’s not possible you can still connect to other participants online. Either way, this is a great way to give back to the WordPress project and have some fun helping people at the same time.

Interested? Get the details on how to participate.

Hope to see you next weekend!

WordPress 4.4.1 is now available. This is a security release for all previous versions and we strongly encourage you to update your sites immediately.

WordPress versions 4.4 and earlier are affected by a cross-site scripting vulnerability that could allow a site to be compromised. This was reported by Crtc4L.

There were also several non-security bug fixes:

• Emoji support has been updated to include all of the latest emoji characters, including the new diverse emoji! 👍🏿👌🏽👏🏼
• Some sites with older versions of OpenSSL installed were unable to communicate with other services provided through some plugins.
• If a post URL was ever re-used, the site could redirect to the wrong post.

WordPress 4.4.1 fixes 52 bugs from 4.4. For more information, see the release notes or consult the list of changes.

Download WordPress 4.4.1 or venture over to Dashboard → Updates and simply click “Update Now.” Sites that support automatic background updates are already beginning to update to WordPress 4.4.1.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to 4.4.1:

Aaron D. Campbell, Aaron Jorbin, Andrea Fercia, Andrew Nacin, Andrew Ozz, Boone Gorges, Compute, Daniel Jalkut (Red Sweater), Danny van Kooten, Dion Hulse, Dominik Schilling (ocean90), Dossy Shiobara, Evan Herman, Gary Pendergast, gblsm, Hinaloe, Ignacio Cruz Moreno, jadpm, Jeff Pye Brook, Joe McGill, John Blackbourn, jpr, Konstantin Obenland, KrissieV, Marin Atanasov, Matthew Ell, Meitar, Pascal Birchler, Peter Wilson, Roger Chen, Ryan McCue, Sal Ferrarello, Scott Taylor, scottbrownconsulting, Sergey Biryukov, Shinichi Nishikawa, smerriman, Stephen Edgar, Stephen Harris, tharsheblows, voldemortensen, and webaware.