Earlier this year, Newspack chose twelve publications to take part in the initial rollout phase of the platform. Newspack is a collection of themes, plugins, and features geared towards newsrooms such as revenue generation wizards, mobile delivery, and search engine optimization. Steve Beatty, head of Newspack Communication says they’re seeking up to 50 newsrooms to…
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. Changes to WordPress PHP Coding Standards Based on changes that were proposed…
WordPress core committer Felix Arntz is working on an experimental Block Areas plugin that would enable users to create and edit content sitewide using the Gutenberg editor. Inspired by a conversation with Morten Rand-Hendriksen at WordCamp Europe, Arntz created the plugin to “explore what the theming of tomorrow could look like already today.” Block Areas…
One of the more interesting trends this year is that WordPress developers are beginning to explore JAMstack setups for their sites. JAMstack is a term coined by Netlify CEO Mathias Biilmann to describe development architecture that includes client-side JavaScript, reusable APIs, and prebuilt Markup, the three pillars of a modern static website. Static websites are…
For years, the WordPress admin has become increasingly overloaded with admin notices. Some of them are giant, branded notices with their own particular designs that obstruct users’ activities in the admin. The Theme Review Team is taking action to curb obtrusive notices that fall within its purview – those generated by themes hosted in the…
If you’ve been looking for a way to add slots and controls to the Document panel in WordPress’ content editor, check out a new plugin released by 10up called Gutenberg SlotFill and Filter Demos. SlotFill and Filters is a new take on the classic filters, actions, and hooks system in WordPress. Slot and Fill are…
Gutenberg plugin users who update to version 6.1 should notice a considerable difference in how the UI reacts to block moving actions. This release brings in the animation experiments that Matías Ventura introduced in a post titled “Using Motion to Express Change.” The subtle animations add realistic motion to block changes, creation, removal, and reordering,…
The WordPress Theme Review Team (TRT) met today and agreed to put new accessibility requirements in place for themes hosted in the official directory. These include some of the items that are required for theme authors who want to add the accessibility-ready tag. A handful of these requirements will soon be added to the standard…
The News Project founded by Merril Brown has launched its first customer site, CALmatters. CALmatters is a nonprofit journalism venture that covers politics, environmental regulation, education, and more. The site sports a new design, a fresh logo, and was built using WordPress. The News Project describes itself as a “solution that integrates best-of-breed content, audience…
Anders Norén has released Chaplin, his 20th free WordPress theme, designed specifically for use with the block editor. Chaplin could be loosely described as an agency or business style theme but the capabilities of the block editor enable users to create advanced page layouts that would suit many different types of websites. The layout for…
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I are joined by Jill Binder, Founder, and Chief Consultant and Trainer at Diverse Speakers In Tech. We discussed how and why the Diverse Speaker Training group was created, how the training encourages underrepresented people to speak at WordCamps, and how the recent 50% sponsorship funds from Automattic…
Website owners have been excluding web crawlers using the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) on robots.txt files for 25 years. More than 500 million websites use robots.txt files to talk to bots, according to Google’s data. Up until now, there has never been an official Internet standard, no documented specification for writing the rules correctly according…
Font Awesome 5.9 was released last month with 421 new and updated icons. The popular icon font library has grown to include more than 5,000 vector icons and is used on 34% of the top million websites. It’s also one of the top open source projects on GitHub and a popular choice for WordPress theme…
I have a hard time walking a mile or two let alone 718km, but that’s what Marcel Bootsman did on his journey to WordCamp EU to generate funds for DonateWC. In this interview, Bootsman explains how he prepared for the journey, what he experienced during his trip, and why he chose DonateWC as the charity…
msgWP piqued public interest this week with a demo of its new microblogging product that allows users to publish text messages and photos to WordPress sites using Telegram. Although the plugin hasn’t officially launched yet, a live demo on the website allows people to anonymously publish a post to msgWP’s demo blog from their own…
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