ThemeBeans founder Rich Tabor released Merlin WP on GitHub in public beta this week. The project provides a beautiful experience for installing and setting up WordPress themes with all of their plugin dependencies, Customizer settings, widgets, demo content, and more. “I was inspired by David Baker’s Envato Theme Setup Wizard and was working to add…
Over the past few months, reviews for Gutenberg have trended towards a love/hate relationship without much in between. To figure out why this is, Millie Macdonald and Anna Harrison of Ephox, the company behind TinyMCE, analyzed the feedback and concluded that many of the issues likely stem from timing. “In short, the nuances in the…
Over the past few months the WordPress Support Team has been brainstorming ways to improve support across various aspects of the community. One new idea they are pursuing is hosting workshops where WordPress.org theme and plugin authors can present how they approach supporting their free, open source products that have been released to the community.…
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I open the show by discussing our observations of social media lately. Our feeds are filled with anger and for me personally, Twitter is becoming less useful. We discussed the news of the week, including a lengthy conversation about Automattic opening up the WordPress.org ecosystem of plugins and…
Wider Gravity Forms Stop Entries is a new plugin that helps website owners protect the privacy of form submissions by preventing entries from being stored in the database. The plugin was created by UK-based web developer Jonny Allbut for internal use at Wider, a company he set up for handling WordPress clients’ needs. One aspect…
The WordPress mobile apps are sporting a new login experience that Automattic’s mobile designers and developers released in the latest versions. The login flow has been completely redesigned to provide a more unified experience for connecting both self-hosted and WordPress.com-hosted sites. These flows were completely separate in the past and users were often confused about…
In addition to taking place in a new location this year, WordCamp US will have a Community Bazaar. An area will be set aside in the venue allowing those chosen to showcase their WordPress communities. Raquel Landefeld, Randy Hicks, and Dustin Meza are organizing the Bazaar. Landefeld says the idea was inspired by the people…
maekit, a cloud-based platform that handles the business aspect of web design, has acquired WP Remote from Human Made. Two years after Human Made began searching for a buyer, maekit purchased WP Remote to integrate it with the company’s existing platform that caters to designers managing multiple clients. “WP Remote had remained a much-loved product…
Gutenberg 0.8.0 was released over the weekend with five new blocks, major improvements to existing blocks, and support for more publishing features that have been missing from the new editor’s sidebar. The release also carries out the controversial decision to remove the opt-in usage tracking code from the plugin. The new Categories block can be…
Earlier this year, NRKbeta, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation’s media and technology site, open sourced its comment quiz plugin for WordPress. The site’s publishers have been experimenting with requiring their readers to complete a short, three-question quiz before giving access to the comment form on certain articles. The goal of the plugin was to prevent rants…
There’s a lot of great WordPress content published in the community but not all of it is featured on the Tavern. This post is an assortment of items related to WordPress that caught my eye but didn’t make it into a full post. Using WordPress to Publish Law Reviews Kevin O’Keefe of Above the Law,…
WordPress core contributors have set a tentative schedule for the upcoming 4.9 release, which will be co-led by Mel Choyce and Weston Ruter. The development cycle kicked off in early August with Beta 1 scheduled for early October and the official release targeted for November 14. Choyce published a list of goals today that outlines…
Earlier this year, WordPress.com launched an experiment giving Business plan subscribers the ability to install third-party plugins and themes. Automattic concluded the experiment earlier this week and officially made the features part of the subscription plan. “With support for plugins and third-party themes, WordPress.com Business users will be able to connect their sites to great…
The opt-in user tracking that was added to Gutenberg 0.7.0 will be pulled from the plugin in the upcoming 0.8.0 release. The data collection included in last week’s release reignited the discussion regarding adding telemetry to WordPress. James Nylen and an Automattic engineers involved in Gutenberg added the feature with the goal of improving the…
The WooCommerce development team has forked select2 to create a more accessible, drop-in replacement library called selectWoo. select2 is a widely used jQuery-based library for making custom drop down menus. Many users are wondering if the project has been abandoned, because the repository hasn’t seen any activity since February and 115 pull requests have piled…
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