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Legal and technical systems struggle to keep pace with AI and open source development.

Changelog updated for version 5.0

Stop copying designs between client sites by hand. Compare three ways to reuse WordPress templates, from pattern export to cloud libraries.

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Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday announced a civil lawsuit against TikTok on Aug. 11, 2026, filed in Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas and accusing the social media platform of violating state consumer protection laws in ways that harm youth.

There are two central charges.

One is deceit: for example, making false statements about how much of TikTok’s content contains mature themes, and about the ability of its guardrails to protect youth from that content.

The second alleges that “TikTok knowingly created platform features intended to cause excessive, compulsive, and addictive use, despite knowing that young people are more susceptible to – and acutely harmed by – those features.” Those features include infinite scrolling, autoplay and push notifications designed to trigger the release of dopamine, the neurotransmitter that drives the brain’s reward system.

The company rejects the charges. In a statement to the Pennsylvania Capital-Star, a spokesperson for TikTok said, “This lawsuit relies on misleading and inaccurate claims and deliberately ignores the concrete safety measures TikTok has voluntarily implemented to support the well-being of our community.”

I’m a public policy professor, not a lawyer, so I won’t predict who’ll win in court. But after nearly 40 years studying how addictive products are marketed, I agree that goods and services that lead to compulsive behaviors – whether scrolling or smoking – deserve special scrutiny. However, they do not fall neatly into binaries such as being addictive or not, or dangerous for youth but safe for adults. Lawsuits that find defendants liable or not liable risk imposing black-and-white distinctions on trade-offs that require nuanced thinking.

Binary thinking doesn’t work

There is a long history of binary thinking about addictive goods.

Drugs such as heroin were seen as dangerous and bad, so they were banned.

Most everything else was good, or at least neutral. The government might tax and regulate, but traditionally it does not focus on protecting consumers from the consequences of overindulgence. The health department may regulate what goes into a doughnut, but not how many doughnuts go into you.

Reality is closer to a continuum. Alcohol, nicotine and caffeine are psychoactive chemicals that can cause varying degrees of problems, but they were never lumped together with heroin. And even when cannabis was prohibited, neither sentencing guidelines nor the public equated its dangers with crack. The public was sophisticated enough to know that some drugs cause more harm.

Gambling also challenges black-and-white thinking. It triggers neural pathways similar to those activated by drug addiction, and the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual recognizes that it can produce compulsive, self-destructive behavior even without a drug involved. Yet no compulsion-inducing product – not even the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl – always induces addictive or self-destructive behavior. After all, many patients have “used” fentanyl during surgery.

Countries regulate gambling with that variation in mind. Until recent decades, the U.S. banned commercial sports betting. Japan limits casino visits to a set number per week or month. Norway permits gambling only via state monopolies aimed at preventing gambling problems and at funneling profits to nonprofits.

I’m not arguing that Japan’s or Norway’s gambling policies are right, or that the U.S. should follow Australia, Indonesia and Malaysia in blocking youth social media accounts. I’m only suggesting such actions merit real debate, not automatic dismissal.

Binary distinctions between bad and good don’t work because products and their features vary widely in how likely they are to cause regrettable, repetitive engagement. Free societies rightly presume that adults can manage their own affairs without government interference – but children are a different matter, and even adult freedom has exceptions.

Is TikTok engineered to addict?

Pennsylvania’s lawsuit charges that TikTok is engineered to trap users and thereby maximize the time they spend generating revenue for the company. That is reminiscent of cigarette manufacturers intentionally modifying chemical formulations, such as adding ammonia compounds, to enhance the speed and efficiency of nicotine absorption to maintain user addiction.

On the other hand, keeping users continuously engaged – through casino floor design, gym membership contracts or automated billing for subscriptions – is a mainstream strategy across industries. Plenty of legal, respected organizations use it to maximize profit.

Likewise, reputable studies also find some degree of dopamine response to video games, milkshakes and even music. The intensity of that response is far lower than what drugs such as cocaine or heroin produce, but it illustrates that one should not leap from the mere existence of a dopamine response to a reflexive ban.

Ideally, legislatures would strike a balance between freedom and protecting the minority who’d misuse it. But lately, state and national legislatures have been stalled by partisan division, swayed by commercial interests and reluctant to pass new restrictions.

When courts do the regulating

Given this legislative lethargy, state attorneys general sometimes step in to protect the public from companies that exploit compulsion-inducing products. Pittsburgh Public Schools made a similar case years before Sunday’s lawsuit: The district sued TikTok and other social media platforms in federal court, arguing the companies induced students to “compulsively use their services” and left the district to absorb the resulting mental health costs. That case, consolidated with similar suits from districts nationwide, ended when TikTok settled rather than go to trial this spring – a resolution that came just months before Pennsylvania filed its own case making a similar addictive-by-design argument.

Important elements of modern tobacco control came not from Congress but from the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement. This agreement resolved lawsuits brought by state attorneys general against major cigarette manufacturers. It also eliminated cigarette billboard ads, cartoon mascots like Joe Camel, most free samples and tobacco-brand sponsorships, and it banned cigarette marketing aimed at youth. Congress didn’t give the FDA broad authority over tobacco until a decade later, in 2009.

The opioid crisis provides a more recent example. Settlements of lawsuits against opioid manufacturers, distributors and pharmacy chains imposed not only billion-dollar fines but also rules governing future conduct. Johnson & Johnson agreed to stop selling and promoting opioids for 10 years. Major drug distributors agreed to stronger systems for identifying suspicious wholesale opioid orders and sharing distribution data, while CVS, Walgreens and Walmart agreed to systems for flagging suspicious opioid prescriptions. Litigation accomplished some of the work ordinarily associated with regulation.

Regulation by litigation has drawbacks. Courts and attorneys general are no substitute for legislatures and expert regulatory agencies. But when conventional regulation fails to keep pace with powerful new products capable of inducing self-destructive, compulsive consumption, courts offer another route.

The path Attorney General Sunday has now opened may prove long and contentious, but the TikTok suit could come to be seen as the beginning of an important new layer of public protection against compulsion-inducing product design.

Jonathan Caulkins receives funding from The National Science Foundation and is an adjunct researcher with the RAND Corporation. The opinions expressed here are those of Caulkins alone, and do not reflect the views of either Carnegie Mellon University or RAND.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Open Channels FM launched version 5.0, featuring new shows, enhanced navigation, and updated content focus, shifting toward open source philosophy and community engagement.

I come from a transitional generation, and somehow, I’ve ended up as a hard core non-tech person in a heavily tech-driven space. Fitting into a box has never really been my thing.

And perhaps, that has been the point.

How often do you think you’re lost?

We often mistake not seeing a path for being lost.

We grow up believing that a meaningful life comes with a roadmap: choose a direction, follow it, and eventually arrive somewhere. But what happens when you can’t see the road ahead?

Sometimes, the path doesn’t exist yet.

My own journey has rarely looked linear. I started blogging on WordPress at 16 because I wanted somewhere to put my thoughts and my poetry. I studied law, organised events alongside it, and while pursuing my passion for public speaking, discovered my love for community building.

And eventually, through a rather topsy-turvy turn of events, I found myself turning my legal background into entrepreneurship.

From the outside, these may look like a lot of deviations. Even to me, there were moments when the future looked bleak and hazy. I wondered whether I was falling behind while people around me seemed to have “figured it out,” found their direction, and were already excelling.

I found myself feeling lost.

Regaining control by finding a pattern

But looking back, and eventually connecting the dots, I realised there was a constant. A pattern I kept coming back to: people, ideas, purpose, and the desire to contribute.

The mediums kept changing. The underlying pull did not.

And that’s when it hit me:

Sometimes, not fitting into the box isn’t the problem. Rather, it is the answer.

Who am I and where it all started

So, let me start again.

My name is Astha, and I discovered the WordPress community back in 2023.

I was a law student who happened to stumble upon a WordPress anniversary meetup, where conversations were already underway about WordCamp Bhopal happening again after quite a while.

I started as an organiser, partly because of the sheer joy of doing what the job demanded— the knack for managing things… and people.

We had two broad purposes: reignite the WordPress ecosystem in town and show attendees a glimpse of Bhopal in the best possible way.

And then, WordCamp Bhopal happened.

WordCamp Bhopal felt like a family reunion, except that you’re meeting those people for the very first time.

Read my experience as an Organiser at my first ever WordCamp | WordCamp Bhopal 2023

What next after organizing the first WordCamp?

I had an incredible time, but also, I had no intentions of dwelling any further.

But credit to the people I met here— WordCamp Mumbai happened.

And somewhere between Bhopal and Mumbai, something shifted.

The fire these two events ignited in me was insane. By 2024, I found myself thinking much more consciously about the gap I saw between my own field and the technology ecosystem, and between technology and the larger society around us.

I started looking for ways to bridge those gaps wherever I could.

I began seeing community events differently.

Not just as events.

But as opportunities to bring people together around something that could potentially make a difference.

I think community events are a great way— a stage from where you could bring a change. It’s an opening for you to utilize, to serve a purpose.

Outsider to Builder

I was supposed to be an outsider. I was one.

But the cordial, welcoming, “just a smile away” setup of this community had me, for good.

I think the give-and-take in my case sums up as perspective.

Witnessing grandeur of the OG Camp

And then came the ultimate, Crown of Jewels, Camp of Camps: WordCamp Asia.

I had an opportunity to emcee at WCAsia. Absolutely loved the energy. That’s probably the least I can say, because words still don’t quite justify how I felt at that moment.

Exposure is so important— culturally, professionally, and in all the other ways possible. For me, WordCamp Asia was exactly that.

Some people knew of my presence there. A majority did not. The people I knew helped me connect with the people I didn’t. But there were also those who came by without knowing me at all— just a smile or a kind word away.

I can’t seem to get over from WordCamp Asia!

It reminded me, once again, how simple yet profound human connections can be.

I came back apart from a sore throat, with a rejuvenated sense of self, and perhaps a little more courage… which led me to lead EmpowerWP Bhopal 2025.

Shifting focus from What → Why : EmpowerWP Bhopal

This time, the question wasn’t simply what event can we organise? It was who are we organising it for?

This was the time when Women In WordPress were organising women’s day event across the globe. We wanted to bring women in Bhopal into the conversation who weren’t necessarily already part of the ecosystem— homemakers, women looking to upskill, women on career breaks, small business owners, and women who had, for one reason or another, found themselves somewhere outside the active workforce.

When we envisioned EmpowerWP Bhopal, we knew it had to be inclusive— not just for the conventional attendees, but also for the very women who have shaped our lives. Trying to make digital opportunities feel a little closer to home. It went beyond our expectations in the best possible way.

Read about EmpowerWP: A journey of Growth and Inclusion

And then came the WP Build Tour.

Touring across the State: Igniting the fire amongst students

If EmpowerWP was about creating a bridge for women, WP Build Tour took the idea of access beyond the city.

We went across Madhya Pradesh, our state with 55 districts but just one active WordPress chapter, reaching more than 1,700 college students and helping them build their own websites in a day.

WP Build Tour 2025 was never just about code or content. It was about confidence. About potential realised. About futures being built— one student, one website, one breakthrough at a time.

The idea was rooted in something I had been thinking about for a while— the gap between what the industry needs, what students are taught, and what students actually get an opportunity to do.

So we took WordPress to them.

Bhopal Hosts WP Build Tour 2025: Empowering 1700+ Students Across Central India

The WordPress community had given me the space to try these things— to experiment, to bring in ideas that perhaps didn’t fit the conventional definition of a tech event, and to push boundaries.

And for that, I remain deeply grateful.

Organising events is one thing, and adding purpose to them takes it to another level. For us in Bhopal, organising events has never been just about the “event.” It’s about going a step further and sparking change, no matter how small.

The realisation at WC Pokhara

WordCamp Asia had felt like a peak, and I was quite happy simply soaking in its afterglow.

Then, out of nowhere, I heard whispers of WordCamp Pokhara happening in Nepal. And just like that, something stirred again.

I had no plans. But this one felt like it had plans for me.

There was another thought that kept ringing in my mind:

When I’ve had the privilege of being on both sides– non tech in tech, why not support the people who are still somewhere in the middle? So I wanted to talk about what we can do for the community and also how the community supports us.

Packed up and flew to Nepal. And what did I find? My alter ego, perhaps.

I didn’t go looking for a community this time. But by the end of it, I knew— I belong here.

Read about WCPokhara: People and Purpose

The Ultimate. The Calling. The Answer.

Just made me realise how our calling is not always something we discover at the beginning. Sometimes, it is the urge that keeps bringing us back, again and again, even when we try to walk somewhere else.

And how a community can make that uncertain journey possible: giving us people who encourage us, opportunities we couldn’t have seen alone, and sometimes simply the reassurance that we are not the only ones without a map.

Thanks to constant supporters in this journey including (but not limited to) Aditya Shah, the WP Bhopal community, the global WordPress Community at length, and Yoast! From celebrating WordPress anniversaries together to honoring WP Bhopal’s decade long journey… It’s been worthwhile to grow along.

It got me friends, and somewhere along the way, it got me a life!

What’s up with me now?

Now, I am a lawyer turned entrepreneur, in the tech space. Building Ariham, a people-first agency, with WordPress at its core.

And when I look back at the 16-year-old who simply wanted somewhere to put her thoughts and poetry, I realise I couldn’t have possibly mapped this journey out. I don’t think I was supposed to.

To so many firsts… first time making a website for somebody else, to the first international trip to the Philippines, to first time being a speaker at a foreign land… the WordPress community has taken me places, and I am so excited to see what we’re gonna be up to next!

A lesson I would like to pass on

Maybe the unconventional path isn’t a lack of direction.

Maybe it’s a different way of finding direction.

Maybe your calling isn’t always something you recognise immediately.

Maybe it’s the thing that keeps pulling you back.

The idea you can’t let go of.

The work you keep returning to.

The thing that, even after you’ve tried to walk away, somehow finds its way back into your life.

Because sometimes, the road not taken doesn’t look like a beautiful path waiting for you.

Sometimes, it looks like there is no path at all.

Maybe you’re not lost. Maybe you’re early. Or maybe you are the one building the road.

The post How a Law Student Ended up with WordPress appeared first on HeroPress.

See how a WordPress site stack, precompressed WebP files, and Optimole compare for payload, visual quality, delivery speed, and maintenance.

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The Trump administration’s proposal to crack down on voting by mail in federal elections – articulated in a March 2026 executive order – faces its toughest legal test so far, as the Supreme Court decides whether to allow the measure to go ahead, or maintains a lower court’s block on its implementation.

Despite offering no evidence of widespread fraud, the White House has said the many measures it wants to put in place will “enhance election integrity via the United States Mail.” Those measures include using the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Postal Service and the Department of Justice to vet the eligibility of voters, establish new standards for mail ballots and who can use them, and investigate and prosecute any state and local officials who issue federal ballots to ineligible voters, including noncitizens.

Two major lawsuits were filed to stop the administration from carrying out plans related to the Postal Service. The lawsuits say the plans would result in widespread disenfranchisement and that the administration had no constitutionally granted authority to interfere in how states run elections.

The cases have worked their way through lower courts, and now the Supreme Court is considering the plans for the second time, having allowed them on Aug. 24, 2026, to go ahead in a technical decision that did not deal with the substance of the administration’s plans. A federal court then issued an injunction to stop the rollout of the Postal Service plans, and after the Trump administration appealed that injunction, the Supreme Court is now, finally, considering whether the injunction should be lifted and the administration’s plan regarding new mail-in ballot rules can be carried out. The Conversation U.S. Politics and Legal Affairs Editor Naomi Schalit spoke about the importance of the legal battle with John E. Jones III, the president of Dickinson College, who served for almost two decades as a federal court judge.

Schalit: I’d like to talk less about the legal issues and more with you about the importance of this case. I thought I’d start with a really obnoxious kind of question that I have never asked before in my whole career: On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the most important and 1 being the least, how important is this?

Jones: Ultimately, the decision in this case is at least a 9, if not a 10. It has the potential, if decided in a certain way, to interfere with the franchise of voting in a way that the federal government has never attempted to do, and certainly the president has never attempted to do before. It literally could disenfranchise thousands and thousands of voters, depending on where the decision lands.

Has it happened before that such a momentous case with potential ramifications for voting has come to the Supreme Court this close to an election? The midterms are less than 60 days away.

I can’t think of any historical analog to this case. My overarching sense from a process standpoint is that it didn’t have to be this way. The Supreme Court could have decided it on the first go-round, when it rendered the decision that allowed the order to go ahead by staying the injunction from the lower court and would not address the merits of the challenger’s claims.

You’re a former federal judge. You understand the culture, how things work. How will the justices approach consideration of this case?

The Supreme Court doesn’t convene its term until October. It is not uncommon for the justices to sort of scatter and do different things. Some teach, some lecture, some write books, some probably relax during the break. That creates some logistical difficulties when there needs to be a coalescing of the members of the court.

The briefs are immediately due, and it does not appear that they’re going to have oral argument, since this is coming off the so-called shadow or emergency docket.

Given all those things, and the urgency with which some resolution is required in light of the upcoming election, I am going to go out on a judicial limb and say that I think what the court will likely do is engage in an exercise in balancing. We call it a balancing of the equities. To determine whether one side or the other will suffer irreparable harm.

In other words, who is harmed more? That’s what happens when you enter an injunction. You have to weigh the equities. That’s what courts do.

So it would be easy to see that the justices could say that, because of state elections apparatus, the states stand to be harmed more than the administration if this kind of patched-together regime is implemented by the Postal Service. They could say, in fact, it may be impossible to implement it in time for the midterm elections.

I think it is highly possible that they will deny a stay of the lower court’s injunction and not allow the executive order to be implemented, at least the part involving the U.S. Postal Service, which is the problematic part in terms of this election. And they may not rule on the constitutionality of the executive order until sometime after the election, perhaps after they conduct oral argument and they have an opportunity to more thoroughly consider the case.

So instead of entering this discussion thinking about whether the executive order was constitutional, they would be beginning their consideration by looking at the very immediate problems that may be caused by it, and asking, “Where’s the greatest damage going to be done if we let this go on or if we stop it?”

That’s precisely correct. An injunction or a temporary restraining order is not a decision on the merits of a case. When a court enters an injunction or vacates an injunction, the court has got to look at where the greater harm occurs if it acts and when it acts.

The government’s argument, which is that the greater harm is to our democracy because of the potential for fraud and for noncitizens to vote, is not supported by the record in this case.

From the standpoint of the challengers, they assert the almost sheer impossibility of implementing this. In fact, there are major logistical problems. It appears that the Postal Service is cobbling the process together on the run, so to speak.

I think the court might say that the public interest and equities lead us to say that we’re just going to deny the stay and thus keep the injunction in place. It’s not workable for this election. But we will reserve for another day – another election, so to speak – whether in fact the executive order is unconstitutional.

John E. Jones III does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

In July, students at two campuses in Kishoreganj, Bangladesh, built 108 websites. In eastern Uganda, a workshop that arrived to find no electricity at the school ran anyway, for more than 100 learners, because a former student had asked for it. In Costa Rica, three university students taught a three-session WordPress class to 40 high schoolers, then wrote down exactly how they did it so anyone else could run the same class. None of these students paid to take part, and most had never built a website before.

Those workshops came out of two programs. WordPress Campus Connect brings free, hands-on WordPress sessions to schools and universities, run by local volunteers working from a shared curriculum. WordPress Credits goes further, placing students in mentored internships where they contribute to WordPress itself and earn academic credit for the work. Credits passed 226 graduates in July, up from 199 in June, and now works with 38 partner institutions across 16 countries.

What the Students Built

The Kishoreganj series was organized by Muhibul Haque, who brought Campus Connect to two institutions two weeks apart. Students at Kishoreganj University built 38 sites in the first session. At Kishoreganj Polytechnic Institute, where guest speaker Shipon Karmakar traveled more than 80 kilometers to attend, they built nearly 70 more. The success stories page for the series counts more than 150 participating students so far, with two further institutions still to come.

A workshop in Spain took a different route to the same result. Josep Morán ran two four-hour sessions for 100 vocational students at Escola Pia Sta. Anna in Mataró, who used Playground and AI assistance to build a working plugin that calculates the best time for shore fishing in the city. Students and faculty pointed to the same two takeaways afterward: the certificate they received, and the fact that the skills map onto jobs that exist locally.

A Workshop Without Power

Bulamogi College Gadumire is on the list of Campus Connect schools in eastern Uganda because of Mariam Nairuba. At an event in Kaliro last December, she asked organizer Moses Ssebunya whether the program could come to her former school. She handled the arrangements with the administration herself, and on July 29 she navigated the team there. More than 100 learners were waiting. So was the school’s Director of Studies, who learned that day there was no electricity.

The team had brought laptops, a projector, and extension cables, none of which were useful now. Rather than cancel, they put two questions to the room instead: what do you already know about WordPress, and what would you like to know? “The room exploded,” the organizers wrote in their recap of the day. Students asked whether WordPress was free, how secure WordPress sites really are, and whether they could become developers themselves. John Wayera, one of two first-time volunteers alongside Nairuba, wrote the questions up on the blackboard as they came. The team copied down every answer. Before they left, they presented the school with a Certificate of Appreciation, which the Head Teacher received in front of the governing body.

Students Teaching Students in Costa Rica

Rita Robles Loaiza published two pilots built on the premise that the students who just learned this are the best people to teach it next. In the first, three students from the second WordPress Credits cohort at Universidad Fidélitas designed and delivered a workshop for 40 high school girls. The goal of the event is to encourage and increase female participation in STEM academic careers. Their venue was Patrones Hermosos, a science and engineering camp run by Tecnológico de Monterrey and MIT that came to Costa Rica for the first time this year. Every participant built and presented a website, satisfaction came back at 100 percent, and the team turned the whole thing into a replicable guide that any school or community group can pick up and run.

The second pilot has a longer horizon. Thirteen students at Liceo Experimental Bilingüe José Figueres Ferrer, the first high school in the Americas to join WordPress Credits, are working with the Costa Rican Spanish Polyglots team to translate WordPress into es_CR for their community service requirement. When they finish, WordPress will read a little more like home for every Costa Rican who installs it.

Get Involved

There is no cost to bring any of this to a school. Campus Connect gives an organizer a ready-made curriculum and a certificate for every student who completes it. WordPress Credits gives a student a mentor, real contributions to software that runs more than 40 percent of the web, and something concrete to put on a resume. Student Clubs give a campus group a reason to keep meeting after the workshop ends.

The full Monthly Education Buzz Report for July 2026 has the events that didn’t fit here, including a Campus Connect run entirely by students at Kyoto University of Advanced Science and a Student Club in Dhaka now organizing its own campus event.

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