[ad_1] I don’t have a lot of things to share this week – just some articles and utilities – but if I had to narrow it down to what I’d recommend reading, it’d be the articles on Things 3.14, and the article on incentivizing quality code. That’s all my comments; on to the list. Week of 8 August 2021 Resources Articles Utilities and Resources More next week (assuming I keep up with all my feeds) 👋🏻. [ad_2] Source link
Continue readingMonthly Archives: August 2021
WooCommerce 5.6 Release Candidate 2
[ad_1] Hey, WordPress fans. We are checking in with your latest dose of weekly WordPress news. This week, WooCommerce 5.6 release candidate 2 is out and available for testing. The update is on track for the planned August 17th release date. Beyond that, Gutenberg 11.2.0 is released with some new features, and we have some great tutorials and resources for you as always. Let’s get to all of this week’s WordPress news… WORDPRESS NEWS AND ARTICLES TUTORIALS AND HOW-TOS RESOURCES [ad_2] Source link
Continue readingWordfence and WPScan Publish Mid-Year WordPress Security Report – WP Tavern
[ad_1] WPScan is on track to post a record-breaking year for WordPress plugin vulnerabilities submitted to its database, according to a collaborative mid-year security report the company published with Wordfence. In the first half of 2021, WPScan has recorded 602 new vulnerabilities, quickly surpassing the 514 reported during all of 2020. The report is based on attack data from Wordfence’s platform and data from WPScan’s vulnerability database, providing a more comprehensive picture of the current state of WordPress security than either company could present alone. One of the trends highlighted in the report is the increase in password attacks. Wordfence blocked more than 86 billion password attack attempts in the first half of 2021. Attackers use a variety of methods to gain access to WordPress sites, including testing sites against lists of compromised passwords, dictionary attacks, and more resource intensive brute force attacks. Wordfence found the standard login to be the primary password attack target for 40.4% of attempts, followed by XML-RPC (37.7%). Since these attacks seem to be increasing, the report recommends that site owners use 2-factor authentication on all available accounts, use strong secure passwords unique to each account, disable XML-RPC when not in use, and put brute force protection in place. Data from Wordfence’s Web Application Firewall shows more than 4 billion blocked requests due to vulnerability exploits and blocked IP addresses. The report includes a breakdown of the percentage of requests blocked by firewall per firewall rule. Directory Traversal accounts for 27.1% of requests. This is when an attacker attempts to access files without being authorized and perform an action such as reading or deleting a site’s /wp-config.php file, for example. This breakdown also highlights the fact that certain older vulnerabilities are still frequently targeted by attackers. The vast majority of the vulnerabilities you hear about in the WordPress ecosystem come from plugins, with themes making up a much smaller portion. The report notes that only three of the 602 vulnerabilities catalogued by WPScan in the first half of this year were found within WordPress core. In analyzing vulnerabilities by type, WPScan found that Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities accounted for more than half of all them (52%), followed by Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) at 16%, SQL Injection (13%), Access Control issues (12%), and File Upload issues (7%). Using scores from the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS), WPScan found that 17% of reported vulnerabilities were critical, 31% high, and 50% medium in severity. Both Wordfence and WPScan claim that the greater number of vulnerabilities reported this year is indicative of the growth of the WordPress ecosystem and a maturing, healthy interest in security. Themes and plugins aren’t getting more insecure over time but rather there are more people interested in discovering and reporting vulnerabilities. “First and foremost, we aren’t seeing a lot of newly introduced vulnerabilities in plugins and themes but rather we are seeing a lot of older vulnerabilities in older plugins and themes being reported/fixed that just weren’t detected until now,” Wordfence Threat Analyst Chloe Chamberland said. “Vulnerabilities aren’t being introduced as frequently and more vulnerabilities are being detected simply due to the higher activity of researchers which is in turn positively impacting the security of the WordPress ecosystem. Considering it isn’t newly introduced vulnerabilities that are being frequently discovered, I feel confident in saying that the increase in discoveries doesn’t indicate that the ecosystem is getting less secure at all but rather getting more secure.” Chamberland also said she believes there is a domino effect when vulnerabilities are disclosed to vendors and they learn from their accidents, causing them to develop more secure products in the future. “Speaking from experience as I spend a lot of my time looking for vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins, things have definitely been getting more secure from my perspective,” she said. “Today, I frequently find capability checks and nonce checks in all the right places along with proper file upload validation measures in place, and all the good stuff. It’s become harder to find easily exploitable vulnerabilities in plugins and themes that are being actively maintained which is a great thing!” The mid-year report is available as a PDF to download for free from the WPScan website. WPScan founder and CEO Ryan Dewhurst said he expects there will be an end of the year report for 2021. He has not yet discussed it with Wordfence but the companies are brainstorming about other ways they can collaborate. Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link
Continue readingYoast Joins Newfold Digital, Team To Stay in Place – WP Tavern
[ad_1] Earlier today, Yoast CEO Marieke van de Rakt announced the company had been acquired by NewFold Digital. Yoast and its SEO-related business are expected to continue operating as usual with its current team and maintaining its product line. Newfold Digital is a global web solutions provider that serves small-to-medium businesses. The company has many brands under its umbrella, such as Network Solutions, Bluehost, and more. “Yoast never had any funding before, it grew organically into a company with 140 employees maintaining a plugin with over 12 million active installs,” wrote van de Rakt in the announcement. “We don’t want to stop there! We’re planning to grow and improve even further! Joining Newfold Digital provides us with the freedom to build and iterate on ideas to further our mission.” There are no plans to change the team or the culture around Yoast. One of the goals during the acquisition was to keep everyone in place, continuing work on their product line. “Of course, some things change,” said Yoast founder and CPO Joost de Valk. “We’ll integrate into their systems (HR and finance). We’ll work on special offers for customers from Newfold. Our company changed so much over the five years, so it will change no matter what. I do feel that this opens up more security for growth and for developing new ideas.” While Yoast does not plan to change its 140-person team, it is still bringing in fresh talent. The company has been hiring a lot lately and expects that trend to continue with 19 current job openings. As host Nathan Wrigley and guest Cory Miller discussed on the latest episode of the Jukebox, acquisitions can be a welcome change for all parties. It can provide more financial stability and backing for the acquired company. It may allow the team to explore new features or new products that were not possible before. This can also work in the user’s favor in the long term. “Marieke and I felt ever since this Covid pandemic hit that we needed a partner or some more financial backing,” said Joost de Valk. “Being totally bootstrapped was getting to us. We worried about the exchange rate of the dollar, for instance. We got risk-averse, and all around us other companies got financial injections.” The husband-and-wife duo thought about selling part of their stock for additional funding but was worried about potential consequences. One such downside may have been the need to grow fast to keep investors happy. “We wanted to find a place to keep Yoast SEO growing and to keep working on WordPress,” said de Valk. “We had help from RBC, a company that helps with these types of acquisitions. They introduced us to Newfold, and we had a really good connection right from the start.” He remained tight-lipped about any new products or features in the pipeline, only saying that a lot is coming and things will speed up. Newfold is the owner of several high-profile hosting brands, including Bluehost and HostGator — both offer a managed WordPress service. It would not be unheard of to see a company mix and match its various products to draw in more customers. Nor would it be surprising to eventually see Yoast SEO or even some of the commercial Yoast offerings as part of packaged hosting deals. WP Engine fully integrates StudioPress products, for example, into its packages. However, de Valk said they have yet to discuss anything on that front. “You’re absolutely right that the things you’re proposing here make perfect sense,” he said. “So, I think we’ll work on those deals and, at the same time, team Yoast will work independently on their products.” Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link
Continue readingWordPress vs Blogger: Which One Is Better? 2021 Comparison
[ad_1] Trying to decide between WordPress vs Blogger to make a blog in 2021 or beyond? That’s the question we’re going to answer in depth in this post. But first, a spoiler alert – in 2021, WordPress is almost always a better choice to start a blog or website. But to understand why we say that and how each platform works, you should still read our full WordPress vs Blogger comparison. Keep reading for all the gory details when it comes to Blogger vs WordPress… 👋 WordPress vs Blogger: Introductions To start our comparison, let’s quickly introduce these two tools and clear up some potentially confusing details about WordPress. WordPress WordPress is open-source software that helps you create a blog or website. It’s by far the most popular way to create any type of website – the WordPress software powers over 41% of all the websites on the Internet. Yes – that number is as crazy as it sounds! Part of the reason why WordPress is so popular is that it’s incredibly flexible. It makes a great option for a blog, but you can also extend its functionality to create portfolios, eCommerce stores, online courses, directories, and lots more. WordPress can be a little tricky, though, because there are actually two “versions” of WordPress: WordPress.org/self-hosted WordPress – this is the home of the free open-source WordPress software. You can install WordPress on your own web hosting for free. However, while WordPress itself is free, your web hosting will usually cost around $5 per month. WordPress.com – this is one specific implementation of the WordPress software. WordPress.com lets you make a blog for free just by signing up for an account. However, the free version has some limitations. When most people say “WordPress”, they mean the open-source WordPress software. If they mean WordPress.com, they’ll specifically say “WordPress.com”. If you want to learn more about the differences, you can read our full WordPress.com vs WordPress.org comparison. But for this post, here’s all you really need to know: WordPress.com – lets you create a blog for free but doesn’t let you use AdSense or install WordPress plugins to add more features (unless you pay for the expensive plans). WordPress.org/self-hosted WordPress – requires a little money to set up, but is incredibly flexible. You can install WordPress themes and plugins and monetize your site however you want. For this comparison, we’ll focus mostly on how WordPress.org/self-hosted WordPress compares to Blogger, but we will bring up WordPress.com a few times. Blogger Blogger is a free blogging service owned by Google. It lets you easily create a blog using your existing Google account. It’s not software – it’s just a service that lets you create a blog by registering for an account. Whereas WordPress powers over 41% of all websites, Blogger powers a little under 1% of websites. So WordPress is definitely the more popular option in this comparison. The main reason Blogger isn’t more popular is because Blogger is quite limited in comparison. It’s really just for simple blogs – it doesn’t allow for any of the flexibility that WordPress offers. But if all you need is a simple blog, Blogger can definitely get the job done! 👐 WordPress vs Blogger Ease of Use In terms of ease of use, both Blogger and WordPress are quite beginner-friendly. Even if you’ve never made any type of website before, you should be able to easily set up both platforms. This applies to both self-hosted WordPress and WordPress.com. WordPress To create a self-hosted WordPress website, you’ll need to do two things: Purchase WordPress hosting to power the WordPress software. Again, this costs around $5 per month for a simple site. Install the WordPress software. Installing software might sound a little complicated, but it really isn’t. Because WordPress is so popular, most web hosts offer user-friendly setup tools that let you install WordPress with just a few clicks. For example, at Bluehost (one beginner-friendly host that we’ve reviewed), installing WordPress is as simple as filling out this form: Once you install WordPress, you can manage your site from a simple dashboard like this: To create content, you can use the WordPress block editor, which makes it easy to include both text and media (like embedded videos). The block editor also gives you more flexibility, letting you easily create multi-column layouts: To control the design of your site, you can install WordPress themes. There are thousands of free themes available, many of which are free. If you want even more control, you can use a visual, drag-and-drop page builder plugin to design every single aspect of your site. For example, the Divi theme gives you full code-free control over your site. At WordPress.com, it’s even simpler – you can just register for an account to create your site. Blogger Blogger is also super simple. To create a blog, you can use your existing Google account and follow a simple prompt to create your blog. To create content, you can use Blogger’s simple text editor, which works a lot like Google Docs. You can easily format text and insert images/videos, but you don’t get as nearly many options as WordPress. For example, there’s no easy way to create multi-column designs: To control the layout of your blog, you can use the drag-and-drop layout builder: You also get a separate theme builder that lets you control basic colors and fonts. In general, though, WordPress gives you a lot more options for controlling the design of your blog. ⚙️ WordPress vs Blogger Flexibility In terms of flexibility, there’s no contest between WordPress and Blogger – WordPress is 100X more flexible than Blogger*. Blogger is just for blogging. WordPress is great at blogging, but you can also use it for lots of other stuff, too. In addition to your blog, you can use WordPress to create the following: Portfolio eCommerce store Online course Membership site Forum Knowledge base Directory …lots more – this is just a partial list You can also mix and
Continue readingGoogle Site Kit Plugin Ships Hot Fix for Critical Error That Caused Broken Websites – WP Tavern
[ad_1] Google published an update to its Site Kit plugin for WordPress this afternoon with a hot fix for a critical issue affecting an unknown number of users. Reports of broken websites were popping up on Twitter and in the plugin’s support forum on WordPress.org. Users affected by the issue reported having a critical error on all sites using Site Kit, which forced deactivation of the plugin in recovery mode. In some cases it prevented them from accessing their dashboards. “On Wednesday, August 11, we identified a fatal error in the Site Kit plugin that could be triggered by other plugins or themes using an unprefixed version of Composer,” Google Site Kit Support Lead Bethany Chobanian Lang said in a pinned post on the support forum. Version 1.38.1 contains a hot fix for this issue, since it was critical enough to take down users’ websites. The plugin’s maintainers began investigating the issue less than 24 hours ago but are still not sure which plugins trigger the error due to their usage of Composer. “The reports do not include which specific plugins or themes were causing this, but the error message clearly highlighted the code in Site Kit that was the problem,” Google Developer Relations Engineer Felix Arntz said. “Technically, that problematic code had been in Site Kit since several versions ago (months back), so maybe another plugin/theme recently got updated with new code that exposed the problem.” After looking at popular plugins, Arntz said he hasn’t been able to find one so far that would have triggered the problem. Given Site Kit’s broad usage, other affected sites are bound to turn up once users realize there is a problem. Google launched the plugin in 2019 and has since amassed more than a million active installations. The majority of the plugin’s user base is running older versions, which may or may not be affected by the current issue. WordPress.org shows 35.6% of the plugin’s users are on version 1.38.x. The hot fix is not backported for older releases, but users running Site Kit version 1.38 with background updates enabled should automatically receive the fix. Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link
Continue readingBuilding a Higher Ed Header – WP Tavern
[ad_1] It feels like it has been ages since the WordPress community has had a call for testing Full Site Editing (FSE) features. The FSE Outreach Program was on a small hiatus. However, the WordPress 5.8 launch was also underway last month. The program is an open call for testing various components of FSE. Thus far, volunteers have successfully provided feedback on features that have already landed in core WordPress, such as block-based widgets and template editing. Testers have delved into others that have yet to be released. Each testing round is open to anyone who can spare a little of their free time and share their findings. The goal is to break things and point out problematic areas of the user experience. FSE Outreach #9 is a community-driven suggestion that calls for building a Higher Ed site’s header. Volunteers are asked to follow a 26-step process using the site editor beta feature in the latest version of the Gutenberg plugin and the TT1 Blocks theme. I am a fan of this take on testing, and program lead Anne McCarthy seems to favor doing more of it in the future. “If you’d like to suggest an idea for a call for testing, know it’s very welcomed and all ideas will be weighed against current project priorities to figure out what makes the most sense to pursue,” she wrote in the announcement. Since the project was all about Higher Ed, I decided to pay homage to my alma mater and use the colors that I wore proudly around campus for five years — and still do to this day. The following screenshot is the end result: Before going forward, I must admit that I cheated to get that final look. The call for testing asked that we build from the TT1 Blocks theme. I was able to get close to that result, but I had to switch to a custom theme I have been working on to get past a few hurdles. I went through each stage of testing with TT1 Blocks and will cover the issues I encountered. Building a Higher Ed Header Just getting off the ground, I ran into my first issue, which turned out to be a non-issue. The internet gods decided to play a trick on me, disallowing me from editing both the Site Title and Site Description blocks. I really wanted my fictional university to be “Gutenberg University,” but I could not do so without saving my progress and refreshing the browser tab. I was unable to replicate the issue, so I am hoping it was simply a fluke. Using the Navigation block still seems the most troublesome area of site editing. I know how much work the development team has put behind the user experience for this feature but cannot help but wonder if there is a point where users can opt into managing its content (the links) via the traditional Nav Menus screen in WordPress. The site editor works fine for the design aspect, but I have yet to feel comfortable using it to manage links. This stage of testing calls for adding multiple page links as both top-level and sub-menu items. When clicking the + button to add a link, my first instinct is to search for the page itself. However, the available field is a block search rather than a page search. Accidentally searching for link in block search field. To add an actual link, users must first add the Page Link block. Then, they can search for a specific page. This two-step process gets me every time. I ran into the issue for nav menus mentioned in the call for testing where there is no space between items when used inside a Columns block. It pains the purist in me to admit it, but I had to use the Spacer block between each item to fix this. I did not need to do this with my custom theme because, I am guessing, I addressed this somewhere along the way. The “space between items” option also failed to work with the Navigation block, ruining one of the early design ideas I had. I decided to go in a different direction. Using right-alignment with the Search block did not work. Therefore, I used the 100% width option to align it with my right-aligned nav menu. Time and time again, I needed to rely on the Spacer block to make adjustments. Part of this was because default margins and paddings are inconsistent among different blocks. The still-missing margin controls on nearly every block also played a hand in this. This is not particularly noteworthy. The development team is aware of and working on extending spacing controls — they just can’t get here fast enough for some of us. A spacing issue is what led me to ditch TT1 Blocks and switch to a custom theme. The following screenshot is my final work with the former. You may notice the gaping green background between the nav menu group and the header image below it. TT1 Blocks theme version with gap in header. No amount of tricks or rearrangement of blocks seemed to remove that space, and I simply could not live with that. I had already solved about 90% of Gutenberg’s spacing issues with my own theme and did not feel like writing any new CSS to address this. Making the switch also meant that I could get rid of several Spacer blocks I had in place. Aside from dropping in a header image, one other modification I made was skipping the addition of a Button block for the latest “Covid update.” I could not bear looking at TT1 Blocks’ overuse of padding. Instead, I nested a paragraph with a link within a column alongside a Navigation block. As always, I enjoyed the process. This post is meant to be critical of specific areas in the hopes that it helps build a better WordPress. For all its faults, many other parts offer a
Continue readingHonest Review of WPX Hosting (2021)
[ad_1] A fast website is vital to your online success. No matter what the purpose of your website, from blogging for fun to selling products online, your site will benefit from quick loading times. Improving website speed can help you get more visitors thanks to an increased visibility in the search engines. Faster websites also have higher conversion rates, resulting in more of those visitors joining your email list, clicking on links, purchasing products, or taking some other important action. Delivering fast loading websites is exactly what WPX Hosting was created to do. In this WPX Hosting review, we’ll be looking at what this WordPress web host has to offer. If you’re starting a new WordPress website or thinking of upgrading the hosting arrangements for an existing site, be sure to read this WPX Hosting review to find out if this service is the best option. Why You Need a Fast Website Before we get to the WPX Hosting review proper, let’s take a quick look at why you might want to upgrade to a faster web host and improve the speed of your website with the help from some data. According to some studies, if your site takes longer than 3 seconds to load 57% of all visitors will bounce and go elsewhere. 80% of those visitors will never come back and half of them will tell their network about their negative experience. If you’re selling products or offering downloads from your website, you’ll be interested to learn that Walmart found that when load times jumped from 1 second to 4 seconds, conversions declined rapidly . However, for every 1 second of improvement, they experienced up to a 2% conversion rate increase. Firefox reduced the load time of their site by 2.2 seconds and increased downloads by an impressive 15.4%. There are plenty of data and studies showing the negative impact of slow loading times as well as the positive benefits of increasing site speed. Even if you’re not running a multimillion dollar operation, I’m sure your site can benefit from improved loading times. WPX Hosting Review So now that we’ve covered why you need a fast website, how do you go about improving your loading times? Well, one of the quickest and easiest ways to speed up your WordPress website is to choose a high-performance web host. Therefore, if you want to enjoy the benefits of a fast loading website, this WPX Hosting review will be of great interest. We’ll start this WPX Hosting review by exploring the best features and some of the benefits you can enjoy by signing up with this web host. Then we’ll look at the user experience offered by WPX Hosting and the pricing options available. WPX Hosting Features If you’re interested in managed WordPress hosting services, your focus is probably on site speed and loading times. A good managed WordPress host has lots to offer. However, performance is usually the main reason website owners are prepared to pay a premium to sign up with these companies. Before we look at the features and user experience of this website, let’s see how fast WPX Hosting really is. WPX Hosting Speed Test To test the performance of WPX Hosting, we set up our own test sites using the best-selling multi-purpose Avada WordPress theme. Specifically, we installed Avada and one of its demos on a fresh installation of WordPress hosted on an entry level shared HostGator web hosting account. We then compared this website to an identical configuration hosted by WPX Hosting. Here are the results of our WPX Hosting speed tests using Pingdom: Budget shared host load time: 3.60 seconds WPX Hosting load time: 1.97 seconds (45% faster) We also saw improvements when testing the page speed and loading times using GTmetrix and Google Page Speed Insights. As you can see upgrading from entry level shared web host to a faster service like WPX Hosting can have a dramatic impact on your site’s loading times. When you consider the improvements in conversion rates and user experience that can be gained from increasing site speed, choosing a faster web host looks very appealing. It’s good to see the improved loading time was below the 3 second cut off mentioned earlier. Site speed isn’t everything, though, so let’s take a look at what else WPX Hosting has to offer. Daily WordPress Website Backups As part of their service, WPX hosting will back up your website on a daily basis. For increased protection, WPX Hosting stores the backup files on a separate server and keeps them for 28 days, which is longer than a lot of other hosts. You can easily restore any backup with just a few clicks. You can also take a manual backup as needed, which is useful to create a backup right before you make a big change: Of course, you can also use your own backup solution including plugins like BackupBuddy or BackWPup and store the files yourself. Free WordPress Website Migration Service If you already have a WordPress website, you might be wondering if moving to a faster web host is worth the effort. There are plugins and tools available that can help you migrate a WordPress website. However, the process isn’t always straightforward. Thankfully, WPX Hosting offers a free site migration service. The migration service is reportedly completed in 24 hours. The team will move your entire WordPress website from your current web host to your new WPX Hosting account. The migration of email associated with that website is included in the service too. Email Service All WPX Hosting plans include email. This allows you to send and receive emails using the address associated with your website’s domain name. When setting up email, you can choose to have email forwarded to another address, such as your Gmail account. Alternatively, you can access the emails through webmail, a client like Outlook, or on a smartphone. Google Apps is also supported. Straightforward Management Dashboard We’ll look at the process of installing
Continue reading#6 – Cory Miller on the WordPress Mergers and Acquisitions Landscape – WP Tavern
[ad_1] So in 2016 or so I started to think, what does the future look like? It feels like one day somebody at all the hosting companies goes, I wonder how much this thing called WordPress, what kind of footprint is it in our customer base, in our stack and somebody came back and probably said 40%, 50% or something like that, I’m sure way back in the day. And it seemingly overnight a bunch of money and attention from particularly the hosting space turned to WordPress and rightfully so, I mean WordPress is a huge CMS and its footprint on the web is enormous. So around that time, I’m seeing all these players kind of come in and, big money, start to come in, and we’re talking about billion dollar companies or billion dollar valuation companies or companies with private equity in the billions coming into the space and really turning their attention, and I thought, my job as the leader is to fast forward the movie and see where we’re going and make sure, you mentioned in our pre-talk about Monopoly, the game Monopoly, and I thought, wow, we are definitely the David versus Goliath now. We’ve been bootstrapped from the beginning from 2008 on, and what does the future look like, and our toolset, the software we’re offering at the time, it was very utility, backup security, and maintenance. GoDaddy had bought Sucuri, ManageWP. Automattic was already kind of our competition from the beginning anyway, with Jetpack and at one point their backup service VaultPress. And so Jetpack is another behemoth out there. And, I just go, I think it’s time for us to figure this out, what’s the next step in a big way, and really that ultimately came down to being acquired. We had a partner in Liquid Web. So they were obviously the first people that had been partnered with him for like a year and really appreciated their leadership team. Eventually my friend, Chris Lema joined them and then my friend AJ Morris was the one that put us on the map for Liquid Web. And they were doing some, wanting to really do some big things and WordPress and long story short that just all worked out. But for us, it was like, at what point do you just need to pull up your stakes and tents and move on and see what you can get? And two reasons, one is financial, of course, but the other is my team. You know, we had about 25 people at that time and I want to make sure our team has a place to land and a great career, and that up until that point, it was either Matt Danner and I, and we had to leave for anybody to have upward mobility really well. When we joined a Liquid Web, at the time, they were like 600 people. So there was a lot of opportunity, career opportunity to move within the company. And they were also doing some great stuff. Now, maybe early in my worries, you know, Mark from Wordfence a great founder, co-founder over there told me, he said, great book called only the paranoid survive. I spent about 10 years in paranoia, like insecurity. But it was time it’s turned out to be everything Joe Oesterling and the C Suites team over at Liquid Web, everything they said to me, they have been to the letter of their word. I have really great respect for them. And so iThemes is under the leadership now of Matt Danner is killing it. There have been on the acquisition tear in the last year. [ad_2] Source link
Continue readingElastic Hits Back at OpenSearch, Making Client Libraries Incompatible with Amazon-led Open Source Fork – WP Tavern
[ad_1] After Elastic, makers of the search and analytic engine Elasticsearch, re-licensed its core product so that it was no longer open source, Amazon led a community effort to fork it. In July 2021, contributors to the project announced the first general availability (GA) release of OpenSearch 1.0, an Apache 2.0-licensed fork of Elasticsearch 7.10.2 and Kibana 7.10.2. In what appears to be a slap back at the open source fork, Elastic has begun making its client libraries incompatible with OpenSearch. The Python client was updated to perform an API request that will verify connection to Elasticsearch and raise an error if it doesn’t receive the proper response. The PR received 40 “thumbs-down” reactions from the community and a brief round of criticism before the discussion was shut down. “It’s disappointing to see this,” Invenio product manager Lars Holm Nielsen said. “You’re forcing us as bystanders in a battle to choose sides. We develop an Open Source product that could likely easily work with both Elasticsearch or OpenSearch and then the users can choose for themselves if they want Elasticsearch or OpenSearch. “Now, instead, we likely have to make choice for all our users if we want OpenSearch or Elasticsearch. This and other behaviors from Elastic really does not give me any confidence in Elastic and what you might do in the future. And don’t blame it all on Amazon – you’ve already changed the server license, you didn’t have to make this move.” Elastic Senior Engineering Manager Philip Krauss responded before turning off comments on the discussion. “Amazon OpenSearch is a different product,” Krauss said. “And while there is some shared history, there are already many differences that cause real confusion and issues.” Elastic has also modified its .NET Connector for Elasticsearch to include “a pre-flight check on first use,” which users do not consider to be an enhancement. Elastic Senior Engineer Steve Gordon said the change is not breaking in supported configurations and that the intent was “to make this incompatibility explicit by failing fast to avoid consumers incorrectly assuming they are running in a supported configuration which is not tested and may not function as expected.” Last week, OpenSearch responded to Elastic’s recent changes that render many clients incompatible, by committing to create a set of new client libraries that make it easy to connect applications to any OpenSearch or Elasticsearch cluster: Many developers who use Elasticsearch and OpenSearch in their applications also make use of the open source client libraries maintained by Elastic, which provide convenient high-level interfaces for several popular programming languages. Over the past few weeks, Elastic added new logic to several of these clients that rejects connections to OpenSearch clusters or to clusters running open source distributions of Elasticsearch 7, even those provided by Elastic themselves. While the client libraries remain open source, they now only let applications connect to Elastic’s commercial offerings. OpenSearch published a list of a dozen clients for which contributors plan to create forks that will maintain compatibility with all Elasticsearch distributions, even those produced by Elastic. “We do not recommend updating to the latest version of any Elastic-maintained clients, as this may cause applications to break,” OpenSearch maintainers urged users in the latest project update. Elastic’s decision to prevent official clients from working with open source forks has further undermined any remaining goodwill the company had after re-licensing Elasticsearch. “Looks like Elastic has sucked all the benefit they could from open source and is now spitting out the bones,” OSI Director of Standards and Policy Simon Phipps said. 10up, makers of the ElasticPress.io service, one of the most prominent Elasticsearch-powered products in the WordPress ecosystem, is still considering its next move after Elasticsearch abandoned its open source licensing. The company is not in any hurry to choose sides. Vasken Hauri, 10up’s VP of Platforms and Systems, said the dispute “isn’t something that we’re concerned about in the near term (the next 2-3 years).” Upgrading past Elasticsearch 7.11+ would require making a choice between continuing on with Elastic’s proprietary offering or switching to the open source fork. Hauri said that the company is “barely taking advantage of most of the features Elasticsearch offers now” and projects that the current roadmap “could probably run another couple of years without any need to get new features from Elasticsearch.” For the time being, the 6,000+ users of the ElasticPress WordPress plugin and customers of the ElasticPress.io service have nothing to worry about as a result of Elastic’s renewed war with Amazon. Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link
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