WordPress plugin developer Jeffrey Carandang continues to plough forward with new features for EditorsKit, a collection of page building block options for Gutenberg. What began as a block visibility management plugin has grown to include more features aimed at tweaking various settings in the editor. Version 1.5 adds some text, heading, and paragraph styling and…
CoBlocks, a collection of page builder blocks that was recently acquired by GoDaddy, has added four new blocks in version 1.9.5. This is the first major release since the plugin was acquired from Rich Tabor and his co-creators. Tabor now heads up a WordPress Experience team at GoDaddy where CoBlocks’ development continues. This release merges…
WordPress 5.2, released earlier this month, added the first step towards fully secure updates with offline digital signatures. Scott Arciszewski, Chief Development Officer for Paragon Initiative Enterprises, explains how it works and how developers can migrate away from mcrypt to libsodium. When your WordPress site installs an automatic update, from version 5.2 onwards, it will…
Jetpack has opened a signup for the beta of its upcoming Membership feature in order to collect feedback from potential testers. The changelog for version 7.3, released two weeks ago, hinted at a new Membership block coming to the plugin. The work in progress was added behind the JETPACK_BETA_BLOCKS constant, presumably in preparation for wider…
Jetpack 7.3 was released last week and if you didn’t read the changelog, you may have missed that the spelling and grammar checking module that uses After the Deadline has been retired. “Grammar and Spelling: Remove from Jetpack. We’ve chekced the spelling alot over the years, but now time to retire.” From the Jetpack 7.3…
VVV 3.0 was released this week, introducing a new Ubuntu 18.04 LTS box. The project’s previous versions used Ubuntu 14, which has now reached end of life (EOL). Support for VVV 2 is now discontinued, due to an unforeseen complication with its PHP dependencies. Ondřej Surý, who maintains all the PHP packages VVV uses, deleted…
Not everyone is able or willing to build blocks in JavaScript just yet, and sometimes you have to install three or four block collections until you find the blocks you would like. There is a third way: plugins that create the blocks for you from a set of specific custom fields, with a template to…
HostCamp is a small, semi-informal, invitation-only, event with an unconference style that is bringing leaders together from within the hosting industry to discuss and share ideas on how to advance the WordPress infrastructure across the web. The organizing team is comprised of, Jonathan Wold, Ecosystem Consultant, Formerly VP of Strategy at XWP, Mile Rosu, Co-founder…
Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg has launched a new blog and podcast at Distributed.blog where he will be sharing what he has learned over the past 15 years of managing a distributed workforce. In 2019, Automattic now employs more than 900 people from 68 countries who have all worked in a distributed fashion since day one.…
Today’s release of Gutenberg brings a major improvement to the usability of the Group block. In previous versions of the editor, it wasn’t easy to see if a block had been inserted as a child block, especially since the default behavior was to insert an empty paragraph block. Gutenberg 5.7 brings more clarity to the…
WordPress 5.2, released last week, added two new pages to the WordPress backend to help users diagnose common configuration issues. The Site Health Check page runs a series of tests and categorizes the results as critical, recommended, and good. This helps users prioritize which issues require immediate attention. WordPress 5.2 adds filters for developers to…
Pressing Topics is a daily podcast hosted by Malcolm Peralty and myself. We discuss the news that’s making headlines in the WordPress ecosystem as well as related topics that catch our eyes. Generally speaking, if you listen to this show on a daily basis, you should have a good idea on what’s going on in…
Reakit is a new toolkit for building accessible web apps with React. Brazilian developer Diego Haz launched his MIT-licensed open source project this week with a stable version 1.0 now available to the public. The toolkit offers offers composable, themeable, and accessible UI components that strictly follow WAI-ARIA 1.1 standards. Out of the box, Reakit…
*Update* The previous mp3 attached to this post inadvertently ended around the 31 minute mark. I’ve reuploaded the episode and corrected the problem. The full episode is attached below. In this episode, John James Jacoby and I share what’s new in WordPress 5.2, discuss why not capitalizing one letter can make or break someone in…
For several years, Bear App users have eagerly requested the ability to publish their notes to WordPress. Bear features a zen writing experience blended seamlessly with note-taking capabilities, a combination that landed the app an Apple Design Award in 2017. People use Bear for everything from taking notes to writing chapters for books. Many users…
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