Hi, there! I hope everything is wonderful with you and you have a fantastic Friday! I end the week with a new roundup of news from the WordPress community. Today I want to talk a little about the phrase you’ve probably heard before – Giving Back to the WordPress Community.
We are millions using WordPress as CMS and publishing platform for both personal and commercial use for FREE. WordPress is an Open Source project which means you are free to use it for anything without paying anyone a license fee. The only costs you have is when you use the self-hosted WordPress.org is the purchase of a domain and hosting. WordPress itself is free.
A lot of people and companies have taken advantage and benefit of this and created well-known brands, by designing WordPress themes and plugins. Others have created successful maintenance services for WordPress websites, security services, back-ups and much more.
WordPress is truly a big business around the world and because WP is increasing its market shares the business around WordPress will certainly also increase significantly in the future.
One way for all WordPress users to show some kind of appreciation could be to give something back. You can contribute in many various ways. Whether you’re developer, designer, translator or just like helping out there are always opportunities to contribute in WordPress projects. You can read more on how to contributing to WordPress here.
Other possibilities are to create and release themes and plugins for free or participate and share your knowledge on WordCamps around the world. Here are some quotes from well known WordPress profiles about giving back to the WordPress community:
”What makes WordCamps so incredible is how much giving back happens.”
Chris Lema
”Contributing to WordPress doesn’t have to be a huge part of what you do to make a difference.”
Josh Pollock
”There are hundreds of ways to give back to your community. As a bonus, I’ve found that the more you give back, the more you wind up getting out of it. It’s amazing the way that works out!”
Chris Ford
My own experience from the WordPress community is that it’s a great place to get help, advice, and tips, discuss and meet like-minded people. So get into this world and I promise you are going out with lots of new friends from around the world.
Here are WP Daily Themes Weekly WordPress Roundup #37 and let’s take look at some news from the WordPress community.
WordPress 4.4.2 Security and Maintenance Release
WordPress 4.4.2 is a security and maintenance release that was released a few days ago. WordPress versions 4.4.1 and earlier are affected by two security issues: a possible SSRF for certain local URIs and an open redirection attack was reported by Ronni Skansing and Shailesh Suthar.
As usual, when these security updates are released it’s recommended you update your sites immediately to not risk becoming vulnerable to attacks.
In addition to the security issues above, WordPress 4.4.2 fixes 17 bugs from 4.4 and 4.4.1. For more information, check out the release notes or consult the list of changes. Otherwise, log in to your Dashboard → Updates and simply click “Update Now.” Have you updated to WordPress 4.4.2 yet?
A Day of REST
Brian Krogsgaard who runs the well-known and reputable WordPress blog Post Status attended to – A Day of REST, the world’s first conference in London devoted to the WordPress REST API. He explains in his article – A Day of REST, that this conference could pose risks like not enough people would sign up, the content would be too dense, or not dense enough for the audience that showed, maybe the API wouldn’t be in core yet etc. None of these things happened, the conference was a success.
He also explains that the WordPress REST API drastically changes the landscape for WordPress development. Now, WordPress can be the data store, the front-end and the back-end components of a website can utilize completely custom web stacks while the data is stored in WordPress. The API can be used for modules within existing sites built traditionally with WordPress, or as the engine for entire external web apps.
This is a great article that I recommend you reading if you are interested in WordPress REST API. The WordPress REST API will in a soon future drastically change WordPress development for sure.
Giving Back to the WordPress Community
I earlier talked about giving back to the WordPress community and that is exactly what Mohammed Kaludi & Ahmed Kaludi has done. The two brothers who usually runs Magazine3, a premium WordPress themes shop has worked hard on an exciting project that recently was released. The results became Skin which is a brilliant WordPress theme dedicated to the community. Skin is an open source theme, built with bootstrap and of course, it’s free.
Ahmed talks about why they decided to create a now successful and time-consuming project like this:
”I have been a WordPress professional since last 8 years and it has always been ‘Take Take Take’ and no ‘Give’ on my part. So we finally decided to give back to WordPress community. Mohammed and I sat down for hours and listed all the things that we could do to give back and Skin was one of those items that got us really excited.”
Skin is an incredibly flexible and fast loading WordPress theme with tons of features and options making this a theme that really stands out from the crowd. This is a exquisite “giving back” projects that a lot of WordPress users will benefit from of. It’s not every day you can get access to an outstanding theme like this for free. Why not giving the Skin theme a try.
Useful Tutorials:
- How to Embed a Youtube Video in WordPress
- Building A Social WebSite With BuddyPress
- The Ultimate Guide to Embedding Content in WordPress with oEmbed
- A Step-by-Step Guide to WordPress Galleries
- How to Create a WordPress Child Theme
- Adding Google Maps to WordPress – How to Integrate Google Maps with Your Site
- How to Fix Image Color and Saturation Loss in WordPress
WordPress Resources:
- Improving Your WordPress Website’s Readability
- New Premium WordPress Themes January 2016 Edition
- How to Make Your Site 22% Faster to Navigate
- Changing Themes? Transfer SEO Settings with SEO Data Transporter
- 20 Of The Most Successful WordPress Businesses
- A Searchable, Filterable WordPress Hosting Comparison Matrix
- 11 Essential WordPress Themes & Plugins You Should Be Using
Product Reviews:
- Skin: The Best Free WordPress Theme Under 250ms
- Pootle page builder – a first look at a promising plugin
- Image And PDF Optimizer Plugin – ImageRecycle Review
- Detailed Review of WP Performance Score Booster
WordPress Giveaways:
- Questions you must ask before selecting a WordPress theme & a giveaway
- Win One of Three Licenses for a Huge Professional Icon Set
Podcasts:
- WordPress is 25% of Websites, Yet Squarespace? w/ Tamara Lackey
- Photographer to Full Time Blogger & Consultant w/ Christime Tremoulet
- WPblab – Answering your #WordPress questions
Ending Notes:
That’s all folks. Another awesome week in the WordPress community. I hope you will benefit greatly and make use of the tips in the article. Please continue to send in all WordPress tips to us so we can add them to our next roundup. See you soon.