It is an age-old question. OK, well, it’s really a 10-year-old feature request, but that is age-old in software development years. Should WordPress have a local avatar system? Let’s be honest. Most of us have kind of gritted our teeth and quietly — and sometimes not so quietly — lived with the Automattic-owned properties that…
This was supposed to be the year that ushered in a revolution in how we work. Remote jobs would become a common practice, spurred on by the global COVID-19 pandemic. A time when everyone would start paying attention to those radical ideas from remote work evangelists such as Matt Mullenweg. The question is whether this…
Now that WordPress 5.5 has shipped, block patterns are available in core for all users. If you have previously been relying on reusable blocks but prefer the flexibility of block patterns, you may want to convert these. WordPress core developer Jean-Baptiste Audras has made this possible in the latest update of his Reusable Blocks Extended…
The world of open source tooling has expanded to welcome JSHint, as the project’s maintainers have finally completed the necessary work to adopt the MIT Expat license. Previously, the JavaScript linter’s code was partially published under the JSON license, with an additional seemingly innocuous clause that stated: “The Software shall be used for Good, not…
Over the weekend, David Gwyer announced a custom server-side render component for block plugins. The co-founder of WPGO Plugins primarily built his component to speed up the rendering process for dynamic blocks within his own plugins. However, he has now released this component for other block developers in the WordPress community. Most blocks are static.…
In the summer of 2019, I was asked to help out with a WordPress release. A few months before, the Core Team representatives reached out to other teams in an effort to increase the diversity of the release teams, and I started seriously considering it. At the time, I was already heavily involved in the…
With all of the advancements made in JavaScript and newer, shinier frameworks, it is sometimes easy to forget that WordPress still relies on the aging jQuery library. The same holds true for thousands of plugins and themes in the official WordPress directories. For some, this may feel like a journey back to the mid-2000s, a…
WordPress 5.5 “Eckstine” landed today, named for American jazz singer Billy Eckstine. This release introduces major improvements for the block editor and the security of WordPress. It was made possible by the contributions of 805 volunteers (with 38% of them being new contributors.) The 5.5 update is a testament to the stability of WordPress during…
The Themes Team suspended Astra from the official theme directory just a few short weeks after it became the first non-default WordPress theme to surpass one million active installs. The reason: the theme was breaking the directory’s ban on affiliate links. The theme has since been reinstated. However, it has been delisted from the popular…
In light of the recent conversations about the Unsplash plugin’s CDN, several extensions have popped up this week for disabling it. By default, the plugin serves images from the CDN but saves copies to the WordPress media library in case the plugin is disabled or removed. The plugin does not currently have an option to…
On Wednesday, the Gutenberg team pushed what was primarily minor enhancements and bug fixes to the WordPress platform’s primary project. Everyone is mostly gearing up for the WordPress 5.5 release, so we are not seeing any major features dropping at the moment. However, steady work continues on improving the Gutenberg plugin. Gutenberg 8.7 contains over…
A short while ago, Justin Tadlock posted an article titled Are Plugin Authors to Blame for the Poor Admin Notices Experience?. If you haven’t already, I recommend reading his article. It describes in detail one question I’ve been pondering since I originally posted the WP Notify feature project proposal almost a year ago now: Will…
Automattic’s relaunch of P2 is now in Beta. This is the long-awaited update to the company’s internal collaboration software that is also used on WordPress.org and other self-hosted sites via a theme. For years, Automattic, which now counts more than 1,200 employees in 77 countries, has had P2 at the core of its written communication…
Iain Poulson announced that Plugin Rank is open to the public yesterday. It is a new service that allows plugin authors to track their rankings by keyword on the official WordPress plugin directory. The service is geared toward plugin authors with freemium offerings. The tools were already in place for Poulson to build the service.…
As the world scrambles to invent and manufacture therapeutics and vaccines for COVID-19, the World Health Organization has declared the pandemic “a once-in-a-century health crisis, the effects of which will be felt for decades to come.” Outbreaks vary in severity across the globe, making it impossible to host international conferences safely for many months (and…
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