Publishing and distributing first-party packages for WordPress

Yesterday, the WordPress.org team started a long-term supply chain attack against Advanced Custom Fields. This involved effectively forking the project, repackaging it as Secure Custom Fields, and deploying it under the original slug which led to thousands of users updating to SCF without notification or the ability to select whether they wanted SCF. This is an unfortunate abuse of authority and only continues to highlight the significant vulnerability that the community faces with WordPress.org being… continue reading.

AspirePress releases AspireSync for downloading themes and plugins from the WordPress repository

I’m pleased to announce that AspirePress has released our first tool in the fight for distributed, federated mirroring of WordPress.org. It’s called AspireSync, and it’s designed to let you download plugins and themes in bulk from the .org repository. The tool is currently released as version 1.0-alpha-4. AspireSync is designed to be run as a fully containerized tool, meaning that you can download the container and go. It’s backed by a Postgres database, and it… continue reading.

Update on the “single-point-of-failure” problem

tl;dr: Review the tl;dr on this post and then read this: the plugin and themes repos are downloaded, scripts written to keep them up to date, plans in place for replicating the APIs, and also for allowing plugin authors to distribute directly to AspirePress CDN. Also, we have a major CDN backer for data transfer. Community matters, and you all are important. Recap For those of you just joining the conversation, here’s a short recap:  … continue reading.

Work continues on a WordPress.org mirror

Recent days have seen lots of work on the WordPress.org mirror. From the API and the plugins to the downloading of the WordPress plugin library, we’re making progress. AspirePress Updater Plugin The AspirePress Updater plugin has been completed in its initial phase. We still need to add an admin section that allows for greater configuration, but all told the plugin is designed and implemented. Configuration remains an issue. In order to use the plugin you… continue reading.