In this morning’s dev notes, we have a patched potential security vulnerability and some CSS tweaks to do with sign up. First, the scary-sounding one. I patched a possible security hole. Some core site functionality was being provided by a deprecated and retired plugin. A patched version exists, but it …

The Linux Foundation has announced the FAIR package manager for WordPress. This will be an independent and neutral plugin and theme package manager. One of the features of FAIR is the ability to deactivate Gravatar avatars, which means a slightly reduced privacy leak (depending on how much you trust Gravatar). …

The news is that WordPress released a performance plugin that could offer “Near-Instant Load Times”. Danny pointed this one out to me. It looks good. WordPress released an official plugin that adds support for a cutting edge technology called speculative loading that can help boost site performance and improve the …

I have been tuning up various parts of the site. Here is a list of the changes so far: If anything breaks that you notice please let me know.

We’ve been getting a lot of spam lately. This is partly because Google needs to lock down their Gmail service from being used to generate email addresses automatically. It may also be because we are starting to show up in more search results. Whatever the reason, spam is no fun …

I have discovered that my ire at a certain plugin author was not wholly justified. It turns out that the three plugins I have began removing were retired because the “pro” all in one plugin is now free. That said, having removed those and other plugins that we were not …

I have added a new plugin for beta testing – things itemised. Things itemised is used for making lists. Each list is created so that all members of the blog can add items to it but the display code is set up so that each user’s list is a separate …

I thought I would post an overview of the updates I’ve been running. Themes and plugins It is not terribly exciting. A month’s worth of bug fixes and security updates but no new features to speak of. The only really important news is that we have been silently keeping on …

GDPR is something that we bloggers need to take seriously. At Author Buzz, we’ve been looking at options to help our members comply with the new rules. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will be enforced from May next year, requiring all organisations that handle EU residents’ data to abide …

I guess I spoke too soon. The update seems to have had a very strange side effect – BBPress’ WYSIWYG editor has stopped working. I noticed a bug report from one of our members this evening. They were reporting that the forums were being squiffy. I was going to reply …