From its inception, the block editor was always intended to be more than just an editor for the main content area. Gutenberg phase 2 brings the block editor to other parts of the site, including widgets, menus, and other aspects of site customization. Matias Ventura, one of the lead engineers on the project, has offered…
Anders Norén unveiled the designs for the new Twenty Twenty theme today. As speculated earlier this week, WordPress will repurpose Noren’s Chaplin theme in order to expedite shipping the new default theme on the constrained 5.3 release timeline. Although the new default theme will be based on Chaplin, it will not retain the same style.…
The most recent release of Chrome (76) added a new “loading” attribute that supports native lazy loading in the browser. An implementation for WordPress core is still under discussion. In the meantime, plugins that enable this for WordPress sites are starting to pop up, and Google has just released one of its own. Native Lazyload…
WordSesh EMEA, a 12-hour virtual conference designed for the WordPress community in the Middle East, Europe, and Africa, has published the full schedule for the upcoming event. The lineup includes speakers from the UK to Cape Town to Sri Lanka, and other parts of the wider world of WordPress. Approximately 8 of the 11 speakers…
WordPress 5.3’s release lead coordinators announced a new batch of focus leads during yesterday’s core dev chat. Anders Norén, one of the most well-respected theme authors in the community and an early adopter of Gutenberg, will be leading the design of the upcoming Twenty Twenty default theme. He is working alongside team Theme Wrangler Ian…
The WordPress Governance project is looking for new leadership after its current leaders, Rachel Cherry and Morten Rand-Hendriksen, announced that they will be stepping down. Weekly meetings have been canceled until the organization selects new leadership. After its introduction at WordCamp Europe 2018, the project went through what its leadership believed were the appropriate channels…
WordPress is changing the method it uses to prevent search engines from indexing sites. Previously, if a user checked the “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” option in a site’s Settings > Reading screen, WordPress would add Disallow: / to the robots.txt file. This would prevent crawling but did not always prevent sites from…
WordPress theme and plugin developer Ben Gillbanks is building a Jetpack alternative with an emphasis on speed, simplicity, and privacy. Toolbelt is a new, lightweight plugin that offers a collection of functionality that is commonly-used on WordPress sites. Currently available modules include features like breadcrumbs, browser native lazy loading, a Portfolio custom post type, related…
NetNewsWire 5.0 was released this week as a completely rebuilt, free and open source Mac app. Back in its earlier days, the 17-year old RSS reader was widely regarded as the best available. Since its creation, the app has changed hands multiple times through two acquisitions, finally landing back home with its creator, Brent Simmons,…
Feross Aboukhadijeh, maintainer of StandardJS, has formally ended the funding experiment he started lasted week, which inserted ads in the terminal whenever Standard 14 is installed. Although the experiment met widespread aversion, it successfully captured public attention and put a spotlight on the critical need for a viable model of funding open source infrastructure. It…
Gutenberg 6.4 arrived this week with two more improvements to the Cover block. The background can now be set to a solid color (in addition to images and videos). Users can also easily resize the block, making it far more useful for those who are designing their own pages. One notable change to Image block…
Feross Aboukhadijeh, maintainer of the StandardJS library, a JavaScript style guide, linter, and automatic code fixer, launched an experiment last week that places ads in the terminal in order to fund development. The experiment has since been paused after receiving negative feedback from the developer community, causing Linode, one of the initial sponsors, to remove…
The team behind Pootlepress has launched a new website that displays the top 50 WordPress plugins by downloads per day. It uses the WordPress.org Plugin API to pull the previous day’s download stats from plugins hosted in the directory. The site also shows the average rating as a percent in the right-hand column. As one…
Over the weekend, Micro.blog added Tumblr cross-posting to its service in response to Automattic’s acquisition of the company. Micro.blog users can now elect to have their blog posts automatically syndicated to Tumblr. Although Tumblr is somewhat of a competitor to Micro.blog’s social networking and microblogging service, founder Manton Reece said he sees Tumblr as more…
phpCE, a central European PHP conference that was previously scheduled for October 4-6, has been cancelled due to a public fiasco resulting from a lack of gender diversity in the speaker lineup. The event, previously known as PHPCon Poland, was set to be held in Dresden, Germany, after the concept changed last year to rotate…
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