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10up Uncovers Security Vulnerability in FileBird WordPress Plugin, Update Now Available

FileBird WordPress Plugin

As a leading contributor to WordPress, 10up is committed to the cultivation of a vibrant, collaborative, and healthy open-source ecosystem. We strive to strengthen open platforms and tools through responsible stewardship, and embrace the concept that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”

Last week, that work included helping a popular WordPress plugin with 90,000+ installs fix a critical security vulnerability.

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10up Project Scaffolds Released

Project Scaffolds Screen With Code

At 10up, we make remarkable tools for building and telling stories—and make those tools available to everyone. With a goal of maintaining the highest standards for design and engineering, we created a scaffold to help ensure the 10up standards are applied to all projects in the most efficient way possible.

Today, we are excited to open-source and release our project scaffolding application suite.

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10up Engineering Practices now mandate baseline accessibility standards

W3C WCAG 2.0One year ago, the popular government policy magazine Open Access Government stated, “Accessibility for all is not an option – it’s a fundamental right.” Creating equal access to digital content, regardless of age, size, ability, or disability, has always been a priority for 10up; it is inseparable from our mission to make a better internet for everyone. Creating accessible interfaces for our projects is consistent with our commitment to the principles of Universal Design. Because of this, we have updated the accessibility standards contained in our Engineering Best Practices to require all projects to have a baseline accessibility compliance goal of WCAG 2.0 Level A.

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Keeping your WordPress options table in check

When troubleshooting a slow WordPress site, an often overlooked culprit is the wp_options database table. This table houses a variety of crucial site data, including:

  • permalinks
  • site settings
  • scheduled posts
  • widget data

In fact, nearly every WordPress page—from the front end to the admin screens—executes the query SELECT option_name, option_value FROM wp_options WHERE autoload = 'yes'. If this query does not run efficiently, the results can be devastating to a site’s speed.
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10up client FiveThirtyEight publishes top story of 2016

10up client FiveThirtyEight’s political coverage earned the stats-minded publisher four spots in ChartBeat’s top 25 most engaging stories of 2016, including #1 for their 2016 election forecast. This interactive feature provided predictions in the US presidential race, as well as 34 Senate contests nationwide, leading up to the November elections.

We love seeing clients like FiveThirtyEight topping the charts alongside long-established publishers like BBC, the New York Times, and NPR.

Reintroducing Windows Azure Storage for WordPress

When collaborating with Microsoft, we are often responsible for making WordPress work seamlessly with Microsoft’s own offerings, including their Azure cloud service platform. An ideal Azure hosting configuration leverages Azure Blob Storage to store and deliver uploaded media assets and attachments. Microsoft’s existing, open source solution, Windows Azure Storage for WordPress, had been neglected for years; we stepped up to overhaul the plugin.

The 4.0 release addresses legacy SDK dependencies and features a refactored code base, bringing it in line with our WordPress Best Practices.

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10up and ESPN launch The Undefeated

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On May 17, 10up launched The Undefeated, the latest project in our longstanding partnership with ESPN. Like Grantland and FiveThirtyEight before it, The Undefeated examines our world through a unique lens, exploring the intersections of race, sports, and culture through “innovative storytelling, original reporting, and provocative commentary.” We’re thrilled to celebrate the release of The Undefeated, which is receiving accolades and high engagement with its community feature, You Got 99 Words.

10up and FiveThirtyEight

We’re thrilled to unveil our second collaboration with ESPN, the new FiveThirtyEight! The site relaunched today with a fresh new Responsive design and content strategy on WordPress.com VIP. Over the course of roughly three months, 10up worked closely with ESPN to implement their new design vision, ensuring a fluid reader experience across devices using creative provided by their team. The WordPress theme powering the site features custom curation interfaces, advanced post editor controls (like footnotes), and sophisticated ad and analytics integrations.

The new FiveThirtyEight will continue to embody data journalism at its core, with Nate Silver at the helm now leading dozens of journalists reporting across verticals like Sports, Politics, and Science. In addition to traditional reporting, the site will also employ data visualization techniques to enable readers to better digest, interact with, and apply data trends to their everyday thinking. FiveThirtyEight will be housed in ESPN’s new Exit 31 content group, ” a creative enterprise that will combine the resources of three existing units – ESPN Films, Grantland and FiveThirtyEight – under one umbrella.”

We’ll have more to say about FiveThirtyEight in the future – for now, check out the new site!

What happens when 10up is in Las Vegas…gets shared with the community!

Nearly all thirty-nine 10uppers are descending on Las Vegas tomorrow, from as close as Los Angeles and as far as Germany, for our company Annual Meeting, running through Saturday morning. In addition to many first time face to face meetings, we’ll be reflecting on the last year, talking strategy for next year and beyond, relaxing around the sky-high pool, sharing contributions and best practices, and even venturing out on a city-wide scavenger hunt. Rumor has it there are even a few team building exercises, including a symbolic game of team bumper cars.

We’ll be taking photographs aplenty for a post-meeting round-up, as we did for our Developer Summit back in April. In the mean time, follow all the action via the team10up Twitter list, and if you want to be a part of future 10up meet ups, be in touch!

WordPress.com VIP, Global News talk redesign and 10up

Less than one month ago, Global News released a brand new website, engineered by 10up and hosted on WordPress.com VIP. With features like content tailored automatically to the visitor’s geolocation, highly curated home pages, and beautiful responsive design, we couldn’t be more proud to have been part of the Global News redesign team.  You can read more about our involvement by checking out our extended case study.

On Thursday, the WordPress.com VIP publisher blog posted a Q&A with Keith Robinson, Manager of Digital Products at Global News, where he took some time to highlight some of our contributions:

“10up helped us come up with a curation system that powers a lot of the site: the navigation, carousel, featured story, top story. It’s all one system that gives different choices.”

“We engaged with 10up in the fall to do the WordPress integration…we were very fortunate to hire some really top talent to work with us, and we’ve been working with really good partners.”

“10up brought a lot in terms of being able to listen to our needs and turn it into a functional site. They were great for us because we were at a stage where we needed things done very quickly and needed to discuss exactly what we were looking to do and how we were looking to do it–they helped us go from the discovery process to the implementation…we really benefited from the partnership and they were good to work with.”

You can read the full Q&A here.