Public Interest Registry (PIR), the organization behind the .ORG TLD (Top Level Domain), has announced the winners of the 3rd annual .ORG Impact Awards. The .ORG Impact Awards honor and celebrate mission-driven organizations and individuals working to make the world a better place. The award winners were announced as part of an online global event to celebrate and honor “Champions for Change.”
633 organizations and individuals submitted entries from more than 40 countries across eight categories:
There are a total of 8 winners this year. The .ORG of the Year receives a donation of $35,000 USD for an eligible charitable entity of its choice, while the other award winners will receive donations of $10,000 USD.
Donation Amount: $35,000 USD
The 2021 .ORG of the Year winner is ADES, a mission-driven organization that manufactures energy-efficient stoves in Madagascar and promotes the use of renewable energy. ADES’ work protects the climate, biodiversity, and health while facilitating a path out of poverty in Madagascar.
ADES has been promoting energy-efficient cooking in Madagascar since 2001. Now, the organization manufactures and distributes solar and fuel-efficient stoves that do not require the use of significant amounts of wood and charcoal. In honoring the ADES’ work, the .ORG of the Year judges were impressed by ADES’ holistic approach, which educates future generations, develops sustainable manufacturing, empowers women, leads to reforestation, and reduces carbon dioxide emissions.
ADES is also the winner of the 2021 .ORG Impact Award for Overcoming Climate Change. Watch to learn more: https://youtu.be/xt6oYXwT2Ac
Donation Amount: $10,000 USD
Litro de Luz Colombia is a decentralized solar energy company that operates in rural areas and post-conflict zones in Colombia and Latin America. More than thirty million people live without electricity in Latin America, including more than two million in Colombia. To address this challenge, Litro de Luz brings public lighting with Wi-Fi Internet to communities in need. Since 2013, Litro de Luz has installed more than 3,100 solar street lights in more than 200 communities, helping more than 270,000 people. Their work helps alleviate digital poverty while improving public safety and providing access to the Internet in marginalized communities. Watch to learn more about Litro de Luz Colombia: https://youtu.be/7fvQPiqISIU
Donation Amount: $10,000 USD
Good Sports, which is headquartered in Boston, works to give kids in need the benefits of sport and physical activity by providing new equipment, apparel, and footwear to youth organizations in high-need communities. While some families have the ability to afford sports gear, league fees, and travel costs, many do not. As a result, kids are left on the sidelines. Since 2003, Good Sports has given more than eight million kids across the United States and Puerto Rico greater access to sport and fitness opportunities. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Good Sports launched the Restore Play initiative which provided $15 million in equipment and over 27,000 at-home Play Packs (including 541,000 pieces of sports equipment, apparel, and footwear) to children in need. Good Sports creates opportunities to play in each state and is determined to continue to help communities most impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Watch to learn more about Good Sports: https://youtu.be/6Dc98Q8rkDo
Donation Amount: $10,000 USD
MAIA educates and prepares indigenous girls in rural Guatemala to become the next generation of empowered female leaders in the country. MAIA focuses on the question: “What would happen if these young women had the opportunity to go as far as their talent could take them?” That’s why the organization established The MAIA Impact School in 2017. The school is the first female, indigenous-led secondary school in Central America. MAIA’s pillars of academics, community, and culture work together to create a support system for young women and their families to ensure they can break the cycles of exclusion and poverty. Currently, 239 girls are enrolled in grades seven through eleven. The school helps to prepare students to enter university and the modern workforce. Watch to learn more about MAIA: https://youtu.be/6Dc98Q8rkDo
Donation Amount: $10,000 USD
In addition to being named the 2021 .ORG of the Year, ADES is also the winner of the Overcoming Climate Change category. Over the last two decades, ADES has saved over two million tons of wood and reduced carbon dioxide emissions by three and a half million tons. Four percent of all households in Madagascar use an ADES cooker, and ADES’ reforestation program has planted over 430,000 trees with another 100,000 to be planted by the end of this year. Watch to learn more about ADES: https://youtu.be/T6WrsY5ngBk
Donation Amount: $10,000 USD
Skateistan, based in Berlin with programs in South Africa, Jordan, and Cambodia, is the first international development organization dedicated to empowering children through education and the power of skateboarding. A 2019 .ORG Impact Award winner, Skateistan provides opportunities to children aged five to seventeen, with a goal of having fifty percent of its students be girls. The organization runs five programs within its Skate Schools: Outreach, Dropping In, Skate and Create, Back to School, and Youth Leadership. These programs combine life skills with fun, freedom, and creativity to help create leaders for a better world. In total, Skateistan reaches 2,700 children in the countries in which it operates, making an enormous difference in their lives and communities. Watch to learn more about Skateistan: https://youtu.be/sdNcHKb1j7c
Donation Amount: $10,000 USD
Zoe Empowers, which is based in Raleigh, N.C., and works in Kenya, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Rwanda, Liberia, Tanzania, and India, equips orphaned children and vulnerable youth with tools and training to help them overcome life-threatening poverty. Zoe Empowers started as a relief mission responding to the 2004 HIV/AIDS pandemic in Africa. Then, in 2007, after seeing a positive response to its empowerment model in Rwanda, the organization adopted this approach in all countries in which it works. Since then, Zoe Empowers has helped more than 124,000 vulnerable children overcome extreme poverty to achieve self-sufficiency across eight areas of life: https://youtu.be/ekxDbxHzAdQ
Donation Amount: $10,000 USD
Esther Ejiroghene Ajari became involved in community development at age sixteen, working as a serial volunteer with twenty five national and international organizations. Esther, determined that she could do more to help people, founded The TriHealthon in 2018, to lead the effort to achieve health equity in Africa. As part of this work, Esther identified and is addressing five prevalent public health problems affecting young people in Nigeria: period poverty, teenage pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, childhood diarrhea, and childhood malnutrition. Through their programs, Esther and The TriHealthon are helping tens of thousands of young people in Nigeria escape the cycle of poverty, improve access to quality education, and live healthier lives. Watch to learn more about Esther and The TriHealthon: https://youtu.be/jyGf6rwJoJE
The 2021 .ORG Impact Awards recognize .ORGs that make an enormous difference in their communities and the world. Submissions for the awards were reviewed and scored by a panel of judges who are leaders in the Internet, non-profit, health, education, and marketing sectors. The .ORG of the Year was chosen by PIR from the winners in the other categories. All nominations were required to be tied to an active website with a .ORG domain. Please visit www.orgimpactawards.org for complete rules and information.
WordPress 5.8.2 is now available!
This security and maintenance release features 2 bug fixes in addition to 1 security fix. Because this is a security release, it is recommended that you update your sites immediately. All versions since WordPress 5.2 have also been updated.
WordPress 5.8.2 is a small focus security and maintenance release. The next major release will be version 5.9.
You can download WordPress 5.8.2 by downloading from WordPress.org, or visit your Dashboard → Updates and click Update Now. If you have sites that support automatic background updates, they’ve already started the update process.
For more information, browse the full list of changes on Trac, or check out the version 5.8.2 HelpHub documentation page.
The 5.8.2 release was led by Jonathan Desrosiers and Evan Mullins.
In addition to the release squad members mentioned above, thank you to everyone who helped make WordPress 5.8.2 happen:
Ari Stathopoulos, Bradley Taylor, davidwebca, Evan Mullins, Greg Ziółkowski, Jonathan Desrosiers, Juliette Reinders Folmer, Mukesh Panchal, Sergey Biryukov, shimon246, and Yui.Props @circlecube and @pbiron for peer review.
In this monthly update I explain what happened with Xdebug development in this past month. These will be published on the first Tuesday after the 5th of each month.
Patreon and GitHub supporters will get it earlier, around the first of each month.
You can become a patron or support me through GitHub Sponsors. I am currently 58% towards my $2,000 per month goal. If you are leading a team or company, then it is also possible to support Xdebug through a subscription.
In October, I worked on Xdebug for about 30 hours, with funding being around 25 hours. Please become a supporter of Xdebug through Patreon or GitHub.
Xdebug 3.1.0 and 3.1.1 have now been released!
Xdebug 3.1 adds support for PHP 8.1, as well as a set of new features. These new features include: file compression for trace and profiling files, the new xdebug_notify() and xdebug_connect_to_client() functions, an API through xdebug_info() to request which modes are enabled, and the possibility to set the Xdebug Cloud ID through Xdebug's triggers, including browser extensions.
The full list of changes can be found on the updates page on the Xdebug website.
Unfortunately Xdebug 3.1.0 introduced some bugs in the thread-safe version, which is most notably used on Windows. After some back and forth with Christoph Becker, the PHP on Windows maintainer, we managed to track down the problem and fix it. This resulted with some other fixes in the Xdebug 3.1.1 release.
Since then, users found a few more minor issues which will result in 3.1.2, to be released early in November.
To help with funding my work on Xdebug, I have a paid-for-service, called Xdebug Cloud.
Xdebug Cloud is the Proxy As A Service platform to allow for debugging in more scenarios, where it is hard, or impossible, to have Xdebug make a connection to the IDE. It is continuing to operate as Beta release.
One of the new features in Xdebug 3.1 makes it possible to allow for each team member in a team that uses a (remote) shared development server to have their own debugging session between the development server and their own IDE, without interfering with other developers.
Packages start at £49/month, and revenue will be used to further the development of Xdebug.
If you want to be kept up to date with Xdebug Cloud, please sign up to the mailinglist, which I will use to send out an update not more than once a month.
I have published one new video on how to use Xdebug on my YouTube channel.
This video is of a series to explain how to use Xdebug and the new features introduced in Xdebug 3.1:
Xdebug 3.1: Improvements to Step Debugging: Explains how to use and configure the new file compression support for profiling and trace files.
I will continue to create more videos, and also convert some of them to tutorials.
If you would like to suggest a topic for a 5 to 15 minute long video, feel free to request them through this Google Form.
In October, no new business supporters signed up.
If you, or your company, would also like to support Xdebug, head over to the support page!
Besides business support, I also maintain a Patreon page and a profile on GitHub sponsors.
Latest PECL Releases:
** Task * [PHPC-1994] - Fix Evergreen builds for testing different libmongoc versions * [PHPC-1995] - Use https:// instead of git:// for git clone