There’s a fascinating story around the work of Flatwater Free Press (FFP), a WordPress publisher in Nebraska. Yanqi Xu is a reporter for FFP. She won a national award for “Our Dirty Water”, a series about Nebraska’s high nitrate levels and their connection clusters amongst local residents. Farmers in Nebraska are using fertilizers full of…
Update: PublishPress Statuses is now available on WordPress.org. PublishPress Statuses is a new plugin that we’ve been working on for almost a year. Previously, we’ve had some support for custom statuses in other plugins including PublishPress Planner and PublishPress Permissions. However, custom statuses are a really important feature for WordPress publishers. We’ve had numerous requests…
WordPress is a platform that focuses on publishers. The project’s mission is to “Democratize Publishing“. However, WordPress does lack some key features that most publishers need. One of these missing features is custom statuses. The current choice for WordPress users is between “Draft” and “Pending Review”. Here’s a typical request from one of our PublishPress…
Last month, I wrote about the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress sites. ActivityPub could form the basis for a new social network with your WordPress site as your profile. The time is right to explore alternatives because social media is abandoning publishers. As you’ve probably heard, the Twitter is now called X, and it’s not very…
There are several ways to remove users from your WordPress site, or prevent them from accessing the admin area. For example, you can choose to change the user’s account to “No role for this site“. If you change this setting, the user will be able to log in to your site. And they will be…
Over 10 years ago, I wrote a post with this title: “There is an Open Source Rival to Facebook: WordPress“. In that post I pointed out that WordPress had almost all the features needed to build a social platform and asked, “What might happen if all those WordPress sites were linked together into a network?”
The latest version of PublishPress Blocks has a submenu for “Synced Patterns”. This feature was previously called “Reusable Blocks”. This submenu allows you to reach the “Synced Patterns” / “Reusable blocks” page screen that is normally difficult to find in WordPress. These patterns are an incredibly useful feature in the Gutenberg block editor. They allow…
Thursday, September 7 was a very interesting day for WordPress publishing. We saw a significant investment in the space, with the promise of more to come.
Today we are pleased to announce much improved Composer support for PublishPress plugins. Composer is a tool that developers can use to manage plugins or entire WordPress sites. Previously, it was possible to install the free version of our plugins with Composer. But it was more difficult to install the Pro versions of the plugins….
There are a ton of collaborations happening between smaller publishers at the moment. Two or three journalists don’t have the resources to tackle big topics, but they can when they work on stories together. I find out about many of these stories from the “Center for Cooperative Media” based at Montclair State University in New…