Topher DeRosia Launches GoFundMe Campaign to Attend WordCamp Pune, India

Topher DeRosia, founder of HeroPress, is asking for $2,150 to attend WordCamp Pune, India. DeRosia was asked to speak about HeroPress by Saurabh Shukla, who is a HeroPress contributor and also the lead organizer of WordCamp Pune, India.

In an effort to be transparent, DeRosia published how he will spend the money.

• $1400 for the plane ticket
• $300 for hotel
• $200 for food, cabs, Uber, etc
• $100 for emergencies
• $150 for GoFundMe’s fees

If DeRosia has money left over from his trip, he plans to sponsor a WordCamp that’s having difficulty finding sponsors or donate it to the WordPress Foundation.

Since launching the campaign a few days ago, he’s raised $1,000. Unlike most other campaigns, donors can choose the amount they want to give. Among the donors listed is Matt Mullenweg, who contributed $250. If you enjoy the time, work, and effort put into HeroPress, consider donating a few dollars.

BuddySlack Plugin Sends BuddyPress Activities to a Slack Channel

Not long after the WordPress project adopted Slack as its primary form of communication, David Bisset started using it to help organize WordCamp Miami 2015. The application added real time communication for organizers, speakers, volunteers, sponsors, and the public. He found it to be a helpful addition to the WordCamp’s conference communication tools.

As a new fan of the platform, Bisset decided to build an extension for those who want to use Slack with BuddyPress. BuddySlack is his first plugin released on WordPress.org. The bare bones plugin will send a notice to Slack whenever an activity stream item is generated by any of the following core components:

• Members
• Profiles
• Activity
• Groups

The plugin allows you send your selected stream of activity posts to a particular channel, private group, or as a direct message to a user on your Slack team. It also includes an optional Slack settings panel within BuddyPress user profiles, allowing them to opt out of having their activities sent to Slack.

In order to use the BuddySlack plugin, you’ll need to set up an incoming webhook via Slack, which can then be entered into the plugin’s settings panel.

Bisset doesn’t plan on officially supporting the plugin but will add more features as time permits. He recognizes that it is currently somewhat limited, as it only supports sending activities for four default BuddyPress components. In the future, Bisset plans to expand it to support custom BP components as well as allow the user to customize the message sent to Slack.

Ideally, the plugin would allow you to set certain trigger words so that you wouldn’t have to send the entire stream of activities from a selected component. Right now the best use for BuddySlack might be on a smaller social network that doesn’t have a constant stream of activities. For example, if the Groups component is used sparingly, sending group activity stream posts to a specific Slack channel could be useful. Being able to narrow it down to a specific group would be even better.

The Slack plugin for WordPress allows you to set up multiple integrations for sending notices to different channels. It also allows for sending test notifications and temporarily disabling notices. These might be a few handy features that could benefit BuddySlack. Bisset is accepting pull requests if anyone wishes to contribute to the plugin on GitHub.

Slack integration via a plugin is also available for bbPress, WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, Contact Form 7, and Gravity Forms.

Highlights of Matt Mullenweg’s Q&A Session at WordCamp Europe 2015

Kari Leigh | Found Art Photography

The video of Matt Mullenweg’s Q&A session at WordCamp Europe is now published on WordPress.tv. For those who were unable to attend, this session provides a glimpse into what WordPress’ co-founder sees for the future of the software and the community.

One of the most exciting parts of the video is where Mullenweg talks about the potential of WordPress.org to serve other languages and eventually expand avenues of core contribution to non-English speaking audiences.

When asked what kind of contribution can be made to improve WordPress.org for Rosetta sites, themes, and plugins, Mullenweg replied:

Themes and plugins are undoubtedly the most important. To me, the next most important things are the Rosetta sites and having theme and plugin directories available on the Rosetta sites. There is actually a great example at ro.wordpress.org, which is the Romanian Rosetta site that shows both the potential and the problem:

Now there are themes and plugins menu items there, which none of the Rosetta sites have had prior to this. But when you click on it you see mostly English in the plugin descriptions, even things like screenshots and tutorials.

He described these updates to WordPress.org as just a “hint of what could be amazing” one day. Mullenweg noted that despite Europe having 23+ recognized languages, attendees at the WordCamp were all speaking English. However, not all areas of the world are populated by people with bilingual capabilities.

I think it would be amazing to open up WordPress to have a first priority experience of the thousands of plugins and themes that are available for people who do not speak a word of English. Right now WordPress is just not accessible to that group. Luckily, over half the people in Europe are bilingual… In places where that’s a possibility, WordPress can still do well even though we don’t have a native experience in someone’s mother tongue.

But English is only the third most popular language in the world and it’s not the fastest growing. There are huge audiences that I think would be an important part of the community. Someday I want it to be where, instead of things being translated from English to a different language, we’re getting core contributions translated from, say, Chinese or Hindi or Spanish, into English to be reviewed. We’re not looking to just how to translate plugins from English into other languages but vice versa. I think that will be when we’re successful.

In the same way that better language support opens up WordPress to a wider audience, Mullenweg believes that the customizer will open up the software for more non-technical users. During the Q&A he shared his thoughts on the future of the customizer:

As we currently are working, the customizer is the way forward…It essentially removes the fear and disconnect between wp-admin and the front end of a site. It’s a bridge that gives people the confidence to make changes while seeing those changes in real time. The real time feedback and safety net of seeing that, and being able to undo and redo things, is incredibly empowering, particularly for non-technical users who don’t know how to dive into CSS or the code. I personally believe that the work on the customizer is some of the most important going on in the WordPress project right now.

In addition to building the feature in a way that is responsive to mobile devices, Mullenweg noted that the customizer currently falls short on desktop:

The customizer is, for lack of a better word, a narrow interface, because it needs to show your site in addition to the admin. I think we need to do a better job of making sure that interface scales up as well as down, meaning that if you do have the space or would like to make it fullscreen, that it is responsive, so that it enlarges into an interface that probably looks and works much like the current wp-admin interface for being a fullscreen experience for editing and modifying menus, widgets, colors, fonts, header images, site title, all the things that are key to the presentation of your site.

It is curious that the customizer is being pushed through to WordPress 4.3 without the ability to scale up gracefully. If the situation were reversed, where the feature was unfriendly to mobile users, it seems less likely that it would have been deemed ready for core. This illustrates the WordPress project’s strong emphasis on being positioned to attract mobile users.

Mullenweg encouraged attendees to keep an eye on the customizer, because he believes it will do a much better job than Wix and Squarespace when it comes to providing a user-friendly way to customizer websites.

The entirety of the 66-minute long Q&A session is included in the video below. In addition to languages and the customizer, Mullenweg also answers questions about security, WordPress’ minimum PHP version, the possibility of multilingual features in core, and the importance of building for mobile.

Stack Exchange Blog Ditches WordPress for Jekyll

Last week Stack Exchange announced its new blog, revamped to publish company news and engineering posts. The first post on the blog, written by Jon Chan, Stack Overflow’s developer evangelist, made no small amount of fanfare over migrating from WordPress to Jekyll.

Chan’s explanation of the team’s process cites a few curious reasons for their dissatisfaction with WordPress:

During the original proposal stage for the engineering blog, we also had a conversation about what engine we would use. At the time, all of our blogs were running WordPress…which we weren’t so happy about. It was very buggy, difficult to log in to, not very performant, and has caused our SRE team more than a few headaches. If we were really going to revamp the new company blog, it seemed like a lot of work to try and wrestle with our WordPress installation.

With a little bit of WordPress skill, these seem like easy complaints to resolve, especially given that Chan said the team was inspired by blogs like Code as Craft and OkTrends, both powered by WordPress. However, anti-WordPress sentiments continue to run high within the Stack Overflow community, which recently ranked the software as the third most dreaded technology.

photo credit: StackExchange Blog

After a great deal of consideration, the Stack Exchange team opted to use a static engine, eventually landing on Jekyll. Chan outlined the advantages they perceived in the move:

• Posts are in Markdown, something most of our company was familiar with
• Jekyll is just static site generation, so it’s much more performant
• Complete flexibility for front end work, no need to wrestle with templates
• Open source with a strong community, which we love
• Not WordPress or PHP

Chan described the migration process, an endeavor that was fraught with obstacles. There is a Jekyll Exporter plugin available to those who want to migrate their blogs over, but Stack Exchange opted to use the exitwp tool to get them most of the way there.

Since Jekyll doesn’t offer native support for comments, one of the biggest challenges in the migration was preserving that content and porting it into a new system. The Stack Exchange team decided to use Disqus for comments but were unable to properly migrate their existing comments and had to craft an alternative solution.

“The worst part of this is how unsupported we were by the Disqus team,” Chan said. “We waited on the order of weeks for support responses and for over a month they went unresolved. Sending in official support tickets, emails, and posts on their Discuss forum went unnoticed.”

Despite their unsatisfactory experience with Disqus and the fact that they have to sacrifice Stack Exchange login capabilities in order to use it, Chan said they will continue with it going forward.

If you’re running a large, high profile blog on WordPress, it requires a certain level of expertise to customize themes and plugins and to ensure a high level of performance. It’s unclear whether or not the Stack Exchange team was lacking in expertise (based on some of the complaints cited) or simply unwilling to continue with WordPress after unsatisfactory experiences. No massive migration from one platform to another is ever going to be easy and bug-free, but Chan’s account offers some valuable insight on how difficult it currently is to move from WordPress to Jekyll while preserving all of your content.

BuiltWith Reports a 7% Increase in WordPress’ Usage from January – July 2015

photo credit: Luis Llerena

BuiltWith, the popular service dedicated to monitoring internet technology trends and providing platform usage analytics, released its bi-annual internet coverage report for CMS usage from January – July 2015. The report shows that WordPress, which accounts for 48% of total CMS’s tracked, added 1.1 million domains since January.

WordPress has been found on an additional 1.1 million domains since January but only accounts for a 7% increase in customer base. Whereas Ghost was added to 2,184 domain home pages and accounts for a 17% increase in their customer base.

The title of the summary is “CMS Market Share Increases by Install Base,” but WordPress is the only CMS shown in the chart with an actual market share value assigned based on its place among tracked competitors.

BuiltWith indexed 328,852,063 domains during this quarter. Instead of simply showing the increase by usage numbers, the summary focuses on the percentage increase in customer base for a more interesting comparison. When commenters noted that this is not, in fact, market share data, Ghost co-founder John O’Nolan replied, “Relative growth compared to existing size is pretty much the only sane measure.”

@JohnONolan Strange perspective. Ghost added 17% or 2,184 domains. WordPress added 7% or 1,149,956. That's only 535 times more sites ;)

— Aigars Silkalns (@AigarsSilkalns) July 7, 2015

Oddly, the report did not share any figures for Drupal or Joomla, which W3techs estimates as WordPress’ closest CMS competitors in terms of market share. BuiltWith’s summary appears to be limited to the fastest growing platforms based on percentage increase in customer base.

The CMS report also included some interesting stats on the WordPress versions it detected on sites indexed. These numbers roughly correspond to the project’s version usage stats, although WordPress doesn’t publish numbers for versions older than 3.0. BuiltWith found that 1748 websites are still running on WordPress 2.1, released eight years ago. This number is down 259 sites since the beginning of the year.

photo credit: BuiltWith

According to Gary Brewer, founder of BuiltWith, “Wix and Squarespace’s main acquisition for existing websites that are using a CMS are from WordPress sites.” He also notes that WordPress continues to dominate without the help of celebrity advertisements. Wix’s ad with Heidi Klum and Squarespace’s Jeff Bridges commercial, which aired during the Super Bowl, are evidence of both companies’ massive marketing budgets. WordPress.com, the world’s leading provider of free WordPress sites, has yet to explore that route.

WordPress 4.3 Improves User Search and Turns Comments Off on Pages by Default

WordPress 4.3 beta 1 was put into the hands of testers last week. Those who have been following 4.3 developments are already familiar with the major features headlining this release, ie. the new site icons, menu management in the customizer, and more secure passwords. However, there are also a couple lesser-known improvements that will have a positive impact on millions of WordPress users.

Improved User Search

Searching for users in the admin is about to get much easier, thanks to work on a ticket opened by John Blackbourn 16 months ago. He notes that “only the user_login (username) and user_nicename (sanitized username) fields are searched,” excluding the following more likely fields:

• First name
• Last name
• Nickname
• Display name

This issue was especially problematic in large, multi-thousand member multisite installations where finding a user in the admin often meant knowing exactly what to query and then paging through results. WordPress 4.3 contributions from Pippin Williamson and Scott Taylor make it possible to search by the user’s email, URL, and display name.

Comments Turned Off on Pages by Default

WordPress 4.3 will also bring a welcome change to turn off comments on pages by default. In the future when you create pages, you won’t have to remember to go into the discussion settings to disable comments. One might think this would be a simple little thing to change, but quite a bit of discussion has gone into crafting the best solution to the ticket opened five months ago.

This change also applies to all custom post types. Mel Choyce outlined the new behavior in a post on the make.wordpress.org/core blog:

Post registrations that don’t explicitly add support for comments will now default to comments being off on new posts of that type (before, they defaulted to on). Up until now, post type support for comments has only affected admin UI; a developer could omit comment support on registration but still allow comments to be posted. This is a change in behavior, and we will be closely monitoring its effects during beta. Moving to explicit support will allow core behavior to be more predictable and robust in the future, but we will always consider real-world usage.

The change also comes with a new function and a filter that you can use to restore the current behavior of comments to your post type, if necessary. More details and an example on how to use the filter are available on the make.wordpress.org/core announcement post.

What’s Coming in WordPress 4.3 (Features and Screenshots)

After the release of WordPress 4.2 in April, development of the next major release WordPress 4.3 started in full swing. We have been following the development closely and are excited to report that WordPress 4.3 is expected to be released next month. In this article, we will show you what’s coming in WordPress 4.3 with features and screenshots.

Note: You can try out the beta version on your computer or on a staging environment by using the WordPress Beta Tester plugin.

Editing Menus in Customizer

With a heavy push for the theme customizer adoption, WordPress core team is slowly moving all theme options one by one to the customizer screen.

Widgets management was added to the customizer in WordPress 3.9, and theme switching was added in WordPress 4.2.

WordPress 4.3 will allow you to manage your navigation menus from the theme customizer.

While you can still manage and edit your menus using the old interface, the goal of this new addition is to allow users to customize all their theme settings from one settings page with a live preview.

This change was met with heavy resistance by some very notable members of the community. It would be interesting to see how the customizer evolves in the next versions.

Adding Site Icon or Favicon

Favicon or site icon is the tiny icon that you see next to a site’s name in your web browser. In the past, WordPress users had to use a plugin to add a favicon or add it manually by editing their theme files.

WordPress 4.3 will allow you to upload your site’s favicon or site icon from the WordPress admin area. Simply visit Settings » General and upload an image for your site icon.

WordPress will allow you to crop the image and will also show you a live preview of how it will look in browsers and as a mobile icon.

Better Passwords

WordPress 4.3 will introduce a new user interface for the password reset screen. It will automatically fill in the new password field with a strong password.

When you add a new user, WordPress will now send them a password reset link instead of a pre-selected password in plain text. During the process you also have the option to click on the show password button and add a password for the new user. WordPress will show a strong password auto-filled when you click on the show password button. You can change that to your own password if you want.

The goal here is to make sure that users understand the importance of using strong passwords. You may also want to take a look at our tutorial on what’s the best way to manage passwords for WordPress.

Editor Improvements

Many WordPress site owners spend most of their time writing posts. If you use the visual editor, then you will notice that moving your mouse to click on formatting buttons slows down your writing pace.

With 4.3, WordPress is introducing inline text shortcuts. These shortcuts are similar to Markdown which allows you to format text and add element using simple markup in the text. However, unlike Markdown these text patterns will immediately transforms patterns into HTML.

Using * or – will start an unordered list.
Using 1. will start an ordered list.
Using # will transform into h1. ## for h2, ### for h3 and so on.
Using > will transform into blockquote.

This is surely going to speed up writing for power users.

Visual/Text Editors in Press This

In WordPress 4.3, the Press This tool will get a full featured visual and text post editor. This will make it easier to create posts quickly with proper formatting tools.

Under The Hood Developments

In WordPress 4.3 shared terms on multiple taxonomies will now split up. This is part of the ongoing taxonomy improvement roadmap. (#30261)

In WordPress template hierarchy, singular.php file will now act as the default fallback template for single.php and page.php. (#22314)

WordPress 4.3 will allow developers to select a primary column when using list tables like on the Posts, Pages, or Media Library screens. (#25408)

We hope this article gave you a glimpse into what’s coming in WordPress 4.3. Let us know which features you are excited about and what you would like to see in future releases of WordPress.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

To leave a comment please visit What’s Coming in WordPress 4.3 (Features and Screenshots) on WPBeginner.

Automattic Overhauls VideoPress and Open Sources Technologies Used to Build It

VideoPress, Automattic’s video hosting service, has undergone a complete overhaul. The video player is now responsive and adjusts well to mobile devices. Videos can be embedded anywhere and are easier to share, thanks to permalinks.

There’s also a couple of neat options for sharing videos. Similar to YouTube, you can select a time stamp where the video will start playing. You can also loop and autoplay videos.

VideoPress Sharing Options

One thing I noticed is that pasting a VideoPress permalink into the self hosted WordPress visual editor does not load the video. This is because WordPress does not have oEmbed support for VideoPress.

To embed videos into posts, you need to copy the HTML embed code from the video and past it into the WordPress text editor. Pasting the code into the visual editor doesn’t work. Guillermo Rauch, who works on the VideoPress team at Automattic says they are working on adding oEmbed support.

The new video player takes up little space and is unbranded. According to Rauch, the player’s skin and behavior is controlled by JavaScript, HTML and CSS. This opens the door for customizations by theme developers in the future. Thanks to major performance enhancements, pages with videos on them will load faster, even for those on slow internet connections. Here’s an example of a video using the new player.

A feature that I think a lot of people will enjoy is real-time seek which lets you skim through videos and helps you start playing at a desired point. Last but not least, the libraries used to build the new video player have been open sourced, including jpeg-stream, pixel-stack, and video-thumb-grid.

If you’re interested in using VideoPress, you need a Premium or Business plan on WordPress.com. The premium plan is $99 per year and includes 13GB of space. Videos take up a lot of space and one has to wonder if it’s worth the cost or if YouTube is a better option. If you use VideoPress, let us know what you think of these improvements.

How to Use LinkedIn Showcase Pages for Business

Are you looking for more ways to use LinkedIn for your business? Have you considered showcase pages? LinkedIn showcase pages enable you to promote certain products or services to specific customer segments. In this article you’ll discover how to use LinkedIn showcase pages for your business. What Are Showcase Pages? Showcase pages are an extension […]

This post How to Use LinkedIn Showcase Pages for Business first appeared on Social Media Examiner.
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WordPress 4.3 Beta 1 Now Available for Testing

WordPress 4.3 is right around the corner with beta 1 released and ready for testing. According to the 4.3 project schedule, there will be no more commits for new enhancements or feature requests from this point on. Contributors are now focusing on bug fixes and documentation ahead of August 18th, the target release date.

With all the controversy surrounding WordPress 4.3’s inclusion of menus in the customizer, you may have missed a few other lesser known features that are on track to be included and need to be put through the paces. The new site icons feature was added to trunk this week, along with a text editor for the Press This posting interface.

WordPress lead developer Mark Jaquith has been working on making passwords more secure. As of 4.3, WordPress will no longer send passwords via email. The password strength meter is now more tightly integrated. It will warn users upon selection of a weak password and can also suggest a secure password.

One interesting new improvement added to the post editor is recognition of some basic markdown-esque patterns inside TinyMCE:

Certain text patterns are automatically transformed as you type, including * and – transforming into unordered lists, 1. and 1) for ordered lists, > for blockquotes and one to six number signs (#) for headings

For those who are used to formatting text this way, the post editor in WordPress 4.3. will be a more friendly place for speedy composition.

Admin post and page list tables will take a huge leap forward to become more responsive in this release, improving the experience of using WordPress on smaller screens. Previously, the columns that could not fit were truncated, but WordPress 4.3 will allow columns to be toggled into view.

Check out release lead Konstantin Obenland’s beta announcement post to download a zip of the beta. If you want to help test, the easiest way is to get hooked up via the WordPress Beta Tester plugin. Bug reports are welcome on the Alpha/Beta support forums and can also be filed on WordPress trac.

Which One of These Six Cities Should Host WordCamp US?

When Matt Mullenweg put out the call to cities interested in hosting WordCamp US, we learned the criteria they would have to meet in order to qualify. Venues would need to seat approximately 1,000-2,00 people, have hotels within 3 miles of the venue, hotel costs for a range of budgets, and average flight costs from the West Coast, East Coast, Midwest, Mexico, and Canada.

Applications to host WordCamp US 2015 officially closed today. Six cities submitted applications to host the event, they include:

• Chattanooga
• Chicago
• Detroit
• Orlando
• Philadelphia
• Phoenix

On the Make WordPress Community site, Cami Kaos says applications are being carefully reviewed and organizers of the host city will be contacted as soon as possible. Dates for the event won’t be given until a host city and venue is chosen.

Out of all the cities selected, I want WordCamp US to be in Chicago. I love Chicago and it’s a quick flight from Cleveland. The city also has awesome pizza. Take the poll below and vote for which city you think should host WordCamp US. This poll is only for fun and will not affect the outcome of the host city.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

How to Craft Instagram Posts That Drive Sales

Do you use Instagram to promote your products and services? Interested in ways to drive sales with your posts? A good Instagram post is not as simple as just snapping a photo, applying a filter and posting it to your news feed. To have a real impact, your posts need to be carefully crafted and […]

This post How to Craft Instagram Posts That Drive Sales first appeared on Social Media Examiner.
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WordPress 4.3 Adds New Site Icons Feature and a Text Editor to Press This

WordPress 4.3 is on track to include a new site icons feature, which will allow administrators to easily upload an image to be used as the favicon and app icons for a site. Favicons have traditionally been handled by WordPress themes or plugins, but the new core support means that users no longer have to hunt down an extension to handle this basic site feature.

This addition landed in 4.3 in response to a four-year old trac ticket requesting an easier way for non-technical users to upload and crop an image to use as a favicon. Konstantin Obenland, release lead for 4.3, committed the feature to WordPress trunk this week, along with the following summary of its current capabilities:

This v1 marries Jetpack’s Site Icon module with the Media Modal, reusing code from the Custom Header admin. For now, the core-provided icons will be limited to a favicon, an iOS app icon, and a Windows tile icon, leaving .ico support and additional icons to plugins to add.

After testing WordPress 4.3-alpha, I found that the experience of adding a favicon in the settings panel is smoother and more intuitive than any plugin I’ve ever tried. The screen offers users a nice preview of the image as a favicon and mobile icon. It also doesn’t burden you with any notices about sizes and image quality, unless you attempt to upload an image that is less than 512px in width.

If you want to test the feature, you can provide feedback on the ticket or via the announcement post.

Another major enhancement added to 4.3 this week is a text editor for Press This. Many WordPress users appreciate the streamlined simplicity of the Press This post editor but were held back from using it to compose posts due to the lack of HTML editing support. The addition of a text editor offers the same capabilities as the standard editor in post-new.php.

Press This will also receive a few polishes in addition to the text editor, including auto-scrolling when the caret moves out of the viewport while the user is typing (similar to editor-expand) and auto-resizing for the textarea. WordPress 4.3’s improvements to Press This are not exactly a replacement for the dearly-departed distraction-free writing mode, but the post editor at wp-admin/press-this.php is quickly becoming one of the more zen-like interfaces in the admin.

WordPress for iOS 5.3 Released With Refreshed Stats and a New Layout for Posts and Pages

WordPress for iOS 5.3 is available on iTunes and has a few new features. Post listings display more content making them easier to browse. A search feature has been added to the post listing screen that displays results as you type.

Search bar in WordPress for iOS 5.3

I tested the search feature on two different sites. The first site is on WordPress.com and doesn’t use featured images. Search results displayed quickly with little lag.

The second is a self hosted WordPress site that uses featured images. I noticed lag as the app tried to display real-time results as I typed which also lagged the app. I couldn’t do anything else within the app until the search query finished.

I don’t use the search feature often and this experience has me concerned. Instead of being fast and fluid, it’s chunky and slow. I also don’t see the need to display featured images in search results. I think this would make the search query and the app faster.

WordPress.com and self hosted WordPress sites are now combined under My Sites. Instead of seeing a spinning circle when checking stats, there’s a progress bar at the top. This gives the appearance that the stats page loads faster. The stats page also has a subtle color scheme change that makes things more pronounced.

WordPress for iOS 5.3 Stats Page

Last but not least, 5.3 includes several bug fixes. Overall, 5.3 is a decent update. Remember to use caution when searching a site with a lot of posts that use featured images. WordPress for iOS 5.3 is available for free on iTunes. If you encounter any issues in 5.3, please report them in the support forum.