The first beta release of WordPress 5.5 is mere days away. This test release is expected to ship on July 7, and it carries with it a slew of new features that have primarily been developed between Gutenberg 7.6 and 8.5. One of the more pressing decisions the development team has to make is which…
Today, Jeffrey Carandang released WP Block Builder, an npm script for developers to begin building WordPress blocks. It is just one of many such scripts in a sea of block scaffolding tools, but Carandang may just have the experience and clout to rise above the rest. Thus far, developers have downloaded his custom setup over…
Flywheel has relaunched Local Pro, the commercial upgrade for its free local WordPress development product. The first version of Local Pro, launched in July 2019, was heavily geared towards Flywheel customers, but the tool has gradually evolved to be more host-agnostic. This major update focuses on pre-launch features that allow developers to check links, optimize…
Earlier today, Impress.org released version 2.7 of its popular donation plugin GiveWP. The update focuses on laying the foundation for donation form templates, handling per-form Stripe accounts, and allowing users to view fundraising reports in multiple currencies. “GiveWP 2.7 is not just a release,” wrote Devin Walker, the co-founder and CEO of GiveWP, in the…
On June 23, Awesome Motive announced it had acquired Smash Balloon, a company that focuses on a family of social feed plugins for WordPress. John Brackett, the founder of Smash Balloon, is now a partner at Awesome Motive through the deal. His entire team will be staying on as part of the larger company. Currently,…
As the pandemic and lockdown measures have caused major shifts in consumer behavior, accelerating the trend towards e-commerce, many WooCommerce-powered stores have seen a significant boost in sales. Major retailers like Amazon, Walmart, and Target have strained to meet the increase in consumer demand, creating an unprecedented opportunity for independent stores. According to the latest…
Hear me out before telling me how wrong I am. Over the past couple of weeks, I have read a few different articles on writing good user documentation from a software developer’s perspective. It is an area I was always told I excelled at by people who read the docs I wrote through the years.…
Tulsa’s first ever WordCamp, which was scheduled for August 29-30, 2020, has officially been canceled due to uncertainty surrounding the pandemic. The event would have been the second WordCamp in Oklahoma in four years, following WordCamp OKC in 2016. “We were trying to go for a hybrid event that was live streamed and included an…
Matt Watson, through his Wholesome Code brand, released a plugin called Wholesome Publishing on the WordPress plugin directory on Tuesday. Version 1.0 of the plugin adds a couple of simple but useful editing features that should help teams of writers or content designers. The plugin allows users to add nested comments on a per-block basis…
WordPress contributors are currently discussing adopting friendlier terms for some of the trac ticket resolutions to create a more welcoming environment for participants and newcomers. Since trac resolutions are not set in stone, organizations can customize these terms for different workflows. During a recent core developers chat, Sergey Biryukov proposed that WordPress trac rename “invalid,”…
Gutenberg 8.4 landed today with some major user-facing changes, including new image editing tools and the ability to edit options for multiple blocks. The previously experimental block directory search is now enabled for all Gutenberg installations. Version 8.4 is next to the last major version of Gutenberg planned for integration in WordPress 5.5. The first…
WordCamp Denver begins Friday this week and tickets are free for anyone who wants to join June 26-27. The event has been running since 2012, but like many other conferences, it is going virtual in 2020, as the pandemic continues to worsen around the globe. Attendees will have to forego the city’s extraordinary landscapes, friendly…
Last week, as I was making the final edits on a review of his Gutenberg Forms project, Munir Kamal was prepping for the launch of another kind of WordPress plugin for the block editor. This one was called EditorPlus, and it would create a design system for blocks. Kamal and his team quietly put the…
In response to recent events, where American police officers have been charged with murder for the deaths of George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks, along with the protests led by the Black Lives Matter movement, many repository owners are rejecting the use of the term ‘master’ for the default branch as oppressive terminology. As Git-based repository…
On Friday, June 26, Gutenberg Times will be holding a live Q&A on block-based themes and full-site editing. The Zoom webinar will begin at 18:00 UTC and last for around one hour, depending on how many questions are asked by viewers. The target audience of the event will be theme developers or anyone interested in…
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