Open Channels FM: Open Web vs Walled Gardens, Simplifying the Difference
A straightforward look at what the open web is, how it started, and why it matters for digital communities.
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Matt: Pushing Standards
We get a lot of flak at WordPress.org for supporting older PHP versions, but an area we’ve always pushed the frontier is in Web Standards, getting websites and browsers evolving together to make the web richer. Ever since I caught the religion from Zeldman, promoting more functionality in the browser has been a life mission….
WordCamp Central: WordCamp Jinja 2026 Recap: Three Tracks, Two Days and Creative Currents on the Nile
On 19th and 20th September 2026, the WordPress community gathered at Civil Service College Uganda, a venue close to River Nile, for the fifth edition of WordCamp Jinja. The event brought together more than 300 diverse participants across 2 days and 3 parallel tracks of sessions full of learning, collaboration and connection. In a city…
bbPress: bbPress 2.6.20 is out!
bbPress 2.6.20 is a security and maintenance release. Everyone running bbPress should update. This release strengthens topic and reply password validation and keeps bbPress post shortcodes literal in ordinary WordPress content loops. It also adds a site-wide Forum Status setting with Open, Closed, and Frozen modes. Existing sites remain Open unless that setting is changed….
Open Channels FM: The Hidden Dependency Problem in Open Source Infrastructure
When we think about what keeps the Internet humming, most of us imagine massive data centers and super-fast connections. Fewer people realize that our everyday digital experiences often depend on the efforts of a very small group of individuals. Recent analysis revealed that in many essential open source projects, just one or two people are…
Open Channels FM: Rethinking Access and Dependence in Tech From AI Outages to Open Source Lifelines
Who maintains education AI, the backbone of software infrastructure, and a new open source document tool.
#237 – Robert Abela on WordPress Security and the Battle Against AI Threats
Transcript [00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley. Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, the state of WordPress security in 2026, and the battle against AI threats….
Matt: RIP Eric Binnion
For the next 30 days, a few billion of you will get an extra header in honor of Eric Binnion. The code in Nginx to do this is poetic: add_header X-Remembering "Eric Binnion <https://friendsofericbinnion.wordpress.com/>" always; Our design team will make that less AI and more humane in the coming days. Automattic.com will have a mourning…
OpenStation Blog: I Deleted 168,000 Lines of Comments. My AI Agent Didn’t Notice
Almost a third of our source code was comments. I deleted all of them and asked an AI agent to build the same features on both versions of the codebase, three times each. The code it wrote was just as good with or without comments. If you use agents on a real codebase and wonder…
Matt: Neal Stephenson Live!
Speaking of sci-fi authors, Automattic is hosting Neal Stephenson for a livestream about his new book soon, please tune in! Neal was a big influence on WordPress! I got hip to him from Tantek. In the source code of billions of pages you’ll see this: <link rel="profile" href="https://gmpg.org/xfn/11"> GMPG is the Global Media Protocols Group,…