Ever on the hunt for a more beautiful, simplified writing experience inside WordPress, I jumped at the chance to beta test the new Iceberg plugin. Rich Tabor and Jeffrey Caradang, the same team behind CoBlocks, have created a new markdown editor built on top of Gutenberg that provides the best writing experience for WordPress since…
Automattic-owned eCommerce platform WooCommerce launched its new WooCommerce Payments feature today. The company seeks to make it easier for plugin users to manage the entirety of their shop from a single location. For users based in the U.S. with WordPress.com-connected accounts, they can begin managing payments directly from their WordPress admin. WooCommerce Payments is available…
BuddyPress has entered the world of blocks with the release of version 6.0, the latest major update that has been in development since November 2019. The release, code-named “iovine’s” for a favorite pizza restaurant in Paris, introduces blocks for Groups and Members. It also marks the completion of the BP Rest API, adding the final…
Last week, the official Theme Review Team (TRT) decided to change its name. The re-branding was mostly about fixing a naming mistake for a team with multiple responsibilities outside of reviews. The hope is that it also shifts the public perception about what the team does. The idea isn’t new. The team has tossed the…
iA Writer has been delighting users with its minimal writing experience for nearly a decade, racking up more than 3 million downloads. The most recent version 5.5 release for Mac and iOS moves the bar higher for competing writing apps with new support for previewing PDFs and improved support for publishing to self-hosted WordPress sites.…
On Wednesday, the Gutenberg team released version 8.1.0 of the plugin. The update includes a new block-copying feature, block pattern search, testimonials pattern, and API changes. The new version does not add a lot of major user-facing changes but improves the experience overall. The update included two dozen bug fixes and nearly as many enhancements.…
In late April Wordfence discovered a critical vulnerability in Google’s Site Kit plugin for WordPress that would make it possible for any user on the site to gain full access to the Google Search Console without verifying ownership. Google patched the vulnerability and released the fix in version 1.8.0 on May 7, 2020. Wordfence published…
Watch out block patterns. There is an old player in town making the hard sell before you have even rolled out of bed. Envato just dropped a massive library of template kits for Elementor in your front yard. Not to worry, the company plans to open things up for the block editor in the future.…
Last weekend I had the opportunity to interview Andy Fragen, a longtime member of the WordPress community and core contributor. He is also the author of the GitHub Updater plugin, which allows developers to enable automatic updates to their GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab, or Gitea hosted WordPress plugins, themes, and language packs. In the video below,…
With full-site editing just around the bend, it is a fair question to ask whether the WordPress ecosystem is prepared for such a transition, particularly on the theme development side of things. It is no secret that theme developers have struggled to keep up with the barrage of changes between Gutenberg plugin updates and, ultimately,…
Yesterday, GitHub added a new setting to user-owned repositories called “Account Successors.” It allows users to designate repository access to another user to maintain ownership continuity in the event of any kind of personal disruption. “Open source maintainers, you can now invite a trusted user to manage your open source projects in the event that…
Last week, Tetsuaki Hamano contributed his first plugin to the official WordPress plugin repository. RichText Extension grants additional options for inline text in the block editor. RichText is a component in the editor that allows end-users to add and edit text. Typically, users may think of this component when dealing with paragraphs. However, it also…
The WordPress Accessibility Team is organizing a new online event called WP Accessibility Day that will take place on October 2, 2020. The event will feature 24 hours of educational sessions that focus on the intersection between WordPress and web accessibility. Inspired by the Polyglots’ Global Translation Day, which greatly expanded the team’s base of…
It is not often that I come across a free WordPress theme that instantly impresses me. Far too often, I spend half an hour or more just getting to know a theme, checking its options, and figuring out how long it will take to recreate something that looks remotely like the demo. However, every now…
Matt Mullenweg joined Matías Ventura at WordCamp Spain yesterday for a lively Q&A session. The virtual event drew 5,000 registered users, and attendees came prepared with some thought-provoking questions about the future of WordPress. Here are a few highlights on some recent topics of interest. WordCamps around the globe have been going virtual, embracing the…
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