If there was a common theme that held humanity together in 2020, it was that most of us agreed that the year was nothing short of a dumpster fire. That and sweatpants. As people learned to cope with a new reality in the Covid-19 era, the WordPress community has been a beacon of hope. When…
I really don’t understand this Query block even though it’s been mentioned in several Tavern posts. My eyes seem to gloss over when reading about it – ha! Is it important that regular WordPress users understand this block, or is it really a block for developers? Marcus I have given the Query block a lot…
GitHub has published its annual Octoverse report for 2020. The code hosting platform currently serves more than 56 million developers who created 60+ million new repositories this past year. The volume of work pumping through GitHub’s pipes and its preeminence as the world’s largest developer platform gives the company access to a trove of data…
As we inch closer to a year in which WordPress’s primary focus will be on Full Site Editing, it is fortunate timing that Themes Team representative Carolina Nymark publicly announced her latest theme, Armando. It is a blogging theme that makes use of the latest features from the Gutenberg plugin. The theme is currently awaiting…
AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), an open source initiative that originated with Google, is coming under greater scrutiny at the tail end of 2020, as the company is facing a rash of antitrust lawsuits beginning in October. The second suit is the one most pertinent to the AMP project. (A third suit brought by 38 state…
Last week, Kalimah Apps released its Editor Block Outline plugin to the WordPress plugin repository. The idea is simple. The plugin adds a bordered outline to each block in the document along with their associated labels. For some users, this will help them navigate more complex layouts. There is little information available about Kalimah Apps…
Google’s Rich Results Test came out of beta in July with support for all Google Search rich result features like carousels, images, or other non-textual elements. At that time, Google announced it would be deprecating the Structured Data Testing Tool, which SEOs, developers, and site owners have relied on for testing structured markup and troubleshooting…
Jonathan Desrosiers, a WordPress core committer and software engineer at Bluehost, has published a new workshop titled “How to Use Trac” on the Learn WordPress platform. The 20-minute video offers a crash course on the ticket tracking software that WordPress relies on to manage core development. Trac is also used for contributing to WordPress’ meta…
For some people, Christmas arrived a couple of days early. Gutenberg 9.6 launched with its first iteration of drag-and-drop blocks from the inserter. There are some other enhancements like vertical buttons, heaps of bug fixes, new APIs, and other improvements. But, let’s be real. The ability to drag blocks from the inserter into the content…
Kjell Reigstad announced the Photo Blocks theme on December 9. It is a part of an ongoing set of experimental work from the WordPress Theme Experiments repository on GitHub. It is essentially a testbed of ideas that are helping to propel the upcoming block-based theming era. In the past few months, I have covered the…
Shutterstock has released an official plugin for WordPress. The 17-year old company is as old as WordPress itself but this is the first time it has provided convenient access to its library inside the admin. Seven years ago, Shutterstock released a plugin for affiliates using a third-party development company, but it failed to gain much…
As I said last week, 2021 will be the year of the site editor. Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word confirms it. WordPress 5.7’s release planning is focused on it. It has been a long journey getting to this point, and it will be a much longer adventure afterward. The ultimate promise of the work…
If the 2020 State of the Word address was any indication, WordPress is moving full steam ahead to land full site editing in 2021. The 5.7 release cycle kicked off this week with the proposed scope centered around full site editing via Gutenberg. Matt Mullenweg will be leading the release and the rest of the team…
My question to you is how you see the future (or even the present) of integrating software with WordPress and when you should make the distinction of going the integration vs. native approach. In other words, with the vast ecosystem of WordPress plugins out there, how can a website owner discern which responsibilities WordPress the…
WordPress enthusiasts around the world tuned into Matt Mullenweg’s annual State of the Word address this week, delivered virtually for the first time. Mullenweg recognized the community’s efforts in working together during a global pandemic, without the benefit of periodic in-person events that have traditionally re-energized collaboration on the project. During a most unusual year…
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