Spearheaded by Munir Kamal, GutenbergHub launched a free block library to the WordPress community today. Currently, there are 37 custom-designed blocks that users can copy and paste to their website. Unlike the block directory on WordPress.org, the blocks available from this project are not plugins. They are handled through copying and pasting a bit of…
This week WordPress’ Documentation team announced a ban on links to commercial websites in a revision to its external linking policy: During discussion about external linking policy, we came to conclusion that we won’t allow, at least in the beginning and for the time being, any commercial blogs. So before you start arguing that some…
Ariele Lite, the latest theme from Rough Pixels, went live in the WordPress theme directory today. In an ecosystem where designers are dubbing most themes as multipurpose, it is refreshing to see a well-designed theme that is unafraid to cater specifically to bloggers. It is not often that I get the opportunity to test a…
OSI (Open Source Initiative) is hosting a new 24-hour, virtual conference called State of the Source Summit, September 9-10. The non-profit organization plays an important role in the open source ecosystem as stewards of the Open Source Definition (OSD). OSI is responsible for reviewing and approving licenses as OSD-conformant, which indirectly helps mediate community conflicts. As part…
On Wednesday, the Gutenberg team released version 8.5 of its plugin to the public. This will be the final major plugin release to make its way into the upcoming WordPress 5.5, which has a target release date of August 11. This update does not include any groundbreaking features, but it does offer several enhancements and…
Did anybody listen to Peter Thiel? In 2011, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, dubbed “contrarian investor” by the New York Times, created the Thiel Fellowship. A collection of 24 youngsters under the age of 20 were awarded $100,000 in exchange for dropping out of college to start tech companies. Thiel said: I believe you have a…
Jetpack 8.7 was released this week with an exciting new feature that allows users to “unroll” a tweetstorm and publish it in a post. The feature works inside the Tweet block. After a user embeds a tweet, it will automatically detect a tweetstorm and display a prompt to fetch the rest of the tweets. It…
It has been a long road. Eleven long years. WordPress will finally allow end-users to update an installed plugin or theme by uploading a ZIP file. After over a decade, most people who had hoped to see this day have likely moved on. However, for those of us still waiting for this long sought after…
Gatsby announced its new source plugin (v4) for WordPress is now in beta. The plugin has been completely revamped to improve headless WordPress setups where Gatsby powers the frontend. It also integrates with Gatsby Cloud to provide real-time previews and incremental builds. The Gatsby team has had a long journey towards creating an integration for WordPress sites…
Yesterday, Iain Poulson and Ashley Rich launched community-curated, news-sharing site WP Content. The launch comes on the heels of ManageWP.org shutting down its own news-sharing service and the WordPress community losing out on a valuable resource. Both Poulson and Rich are based in the UK and work for Delicious Brains, a development company that focuses…
On July 3, Timi Wahalahti opened a discussion on the Community WordPress blog on whether WordCamp volunteers, WordCamp attendees, or Meetup attendees should be awarded a WordPress.org profile badge. The discussion stemmed from a nearly two-year-old Meta ticket that was recently resurfaced. The general consensus from the comments on the post seems to be that…
WordProof, the company behind the WordProof Timestamp plugin for WordPress, has received a €1 million grant from the European Commission as the reward for winning a competition called “Blockchains for Social Good.” The Dutch startup beat 175 other participants from around Europe. The competition was designed to reward developers’ efforts in exploring decentralized applications of blockchains…
The new navigation block and navigation and widget screens that were originally planned for WordPress 5.5 have been pushed back to the next release. These projects are currently available in the Gutenberg plugin experiments screen but are not yet ready to land in core. Converting the widget-editing areas and updating the widgets UI to use the block…
Google announced a public beta of its new Web Stories WordPress plugin this week. The plugin’s description aptly reads, “Visual storytelling for WordPress.” It is essentially a custom editor for creating AMP-powered stories within WordPress. Users can download the beta plugin directly from the Web Stories beta page. Developers who want to contribute or take…
WordPress developers Milana Cap and Jonathan Bossenger are starting a fundraiser for improving Gutenberg developer documentation. The conversation began yesterday when Cap tweeted about how documentation is often overlooked when companies hire full-time contributors to work on WordPress. “When your community is unable to learn your software then you have no contributors,” Cap said. “Documentation…
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