Showing posts with label TOP-STORIES. Show all posts
Showing posts with label TOP-STORIES. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 17, 2016

WordPress 4.6 arrives with streamlined updates, native fonts, and editor improvements

WordPress.org launched WordPress 4.6, which adds a slew of new features to the blog management tool to help you “focus on the important things while feeling more at home.” You can download the new release, available in 52 languages, now from WordPress.org/Download (8.2MB).

WordPress is a content management system (CMS) that powers 25 percent of the web. The latest version is dubbed “Pepper,” in honor of jazz baritone saxophonist Park Frederick “Pepper” Adams.

WordPress 4.6 brings streamlined updates. When you update, install, and delete your plugins and themes, you won’t be forced to navigate away from the page.

Next up, the WordPress dashboard can now finally take advantage of the fonts you already have. This should result in faster loading, as well as a more native feel on whatever device you’re using.

There are also two improvements to the editor. The Inline Link Checker automatically checks to make sure your links are correct, and Content Recovery saves your content to the browser as you type.

I’m particularly excited about the latter as many of our team members prefer to write in the browser. Yes, I did write this article about WordPress in Microsoft Word.

Last, but not least, there are a number of under-the-hood improvements:

* Resource Hints: Resource hints help browsers decide which resources to fetch and preprocess.      
  WordPress 4.6 adds them automatically for your styles and scripts making your site even faster.
* Robust Requests: The HTTP API now leverages the Requests library, improving HTTP standard
   support and adding case-insensitive headers, parallel HTTP requests, and support for
   Internationalized Domain Names.
* WP_Term_Query and WP_Post_Type: A new WP_Term_Query class adds flexibility to query term    information while a new WP_Post_Type object makes interacting with post types more predictable.
* Meta Registration API: The Meta Registration API has been expanded to support types,    
   descriptions, and REST API visibility.
* Translations On Demand: WordPress will install and use the newest language packs for your
   plugins and themes as soon as they’re available from WordPress.org’s community of translators.
* JavaScript Library Updates: Masonry 3.3.2, imagesLoaded 3.2.0, MediaElement.js 2.22.0,
   TinyMCE 4.4.1, and Backbone.js 1.3.3 are bundled.
* Customizer APIs for Setting Validation and Notifications: Settings now have an API for enforcing
   validation constraints. Likewise, customizer controls now support notifications, which are used to
   display validation errors instead of failing silently.
* Multisite, now faster than ever: Cached and comprehensive site queries improve your network
   admin experience. The addition of WP_Site_Query and WP_Network_Query help craft advanced      queries with less effort.

WordPress 4.7 is already in the works, though the company didn’t specify a month for its release. That said, we would estimate it probably won’t be out before November.

Courtesy : Venturebeat

Saturday, August 13, 2016

The 10 biggest European tech stories

Tech.eu tracked 14 technology M&A transactions and 46 funding deals (totalling €258 million) in Europe, Turkey and Israel.

Like every week, we listed every single one of them in our free weekly newsletter, along with interesting news regarding fledgling European startups, tech investors old and new, a number of good reads published elsewhere, government and policy news, as well as an overview of interesting lists, facts and figures from a wide variety of sources.

You can subscribe to our newsletter below to receive all this information in your inbox every Friday afternoon for free, but here’s an overview of the 10 biggest European tech news items for this week:

1) Randstad, an Amsterdam-based human resources and recruitment specialist, is acquiring job hunting portal Monster for $429 million in cash.

2) Uber has made a small, direct investment in four European tech startups.

3) Russia’s national regulator fined Google $6.75 million for violating antitrust rules on tablets and mobile phones, after reviewing a complaint filed by local search engine Yandex last year.

4) Dutch data visualisation startup Silk has been acquired by Peter Thiel’s Palantir for an undisclosed amount, will shut down its service.

5) American-Israeli open-source video platform Kaltura has raised $50 million from Goldman Sachs.

6) Apple’s planned €850 million data center in Ireland has been approved.

7) British mobile banking startup Mondo has been granted a UK banking licence ‘with restrictions’ by regulators.

8) Airbnb paid less than €70,000 in taxes in France in 2015, according to reports in French media, as authorities in Barcelona have stepped up a crackdown on homes illegally rented out to tourists on the website.

9) Online retailer Amazon plans to create 500 new jobs when it opens another distribution center in northern England next year.

10) Telecoms companies will face new EU rules on how they can access Internet networks under a change to European law that could stoke tensions between large, former monopolies and smaller operators.

This post first appeared on Tech.eu