Chrome Canary, the browser’s nightly build for developers, has been testing a new Follow button, as spotted on Android by the publishers of Chrome Story. The button appears on the homepage of a site, as well as in the browser menu: Chrome Story speculates that it may be integrated with Google’s Discover feature, allowing sites…
I’m a developer that has started developing with Gutenberg recently. There are a bunch of amazing benefits and features, but there are also a ton of drawbacks, inconsistencies, as well as absolutely awful and outdated documentation. One of the worst aspects of Gutenberg from a developer perspective has been block validation. Consider the following scenario.…
What was once likely viewed as plugin territory is now a reality as part of the Gutenberg project. Yesterday, the team merged a pull request for a Table of Contents (TOC) block into the plugin’s codebase. It was a contribution driven by developer Zebulan Stanphill, starting nearly a year ago. The TOC block may feel…
Bluehost was called out this week for misusing WordPress’ trademark, as the WordPress Foundation prohibits its use in advertising. The company has been featured on WordPress’ recommended hosting page for the past 16 years, as one of a handful of hosts that have been arbitrarily selected based on an incomplete list of criteria. The wording…
Earlier today, the WordPress theme directory welcomed its fourth block-based theme. Built by UXL Themes, Hansen is one of the more stylish projects capable of working with the site editor in the Gutenberg plugin. The theme author also stepped it up a notch and included several block patterns. I have written about how patterns will…
It’s that time in the release cycle when all the dev notes are rolling out ahead of the next major update. These notes include technical summaries of all the goodies coming in the next release. If you haven’t been paying close attention, there are always a few happy surprises in there that pop up as…
Anne McCarthy announced the second round of testing for the Full Site Editing (FSE) Outreach program. The call for testing asks that users build a homepage from the Gutenberg plugin’s site editor. Feedback is open until March 5. The first round of testing began in December 2020 and ended last month. Testers were able to…
Felix Arntz, a WordPress core committer and developer programs engineer at Google, announced upcoming support for lazy loading iframes. The feature is included in the latest WordPress 5.7 beta and will officially ship next month to the larger community. WordPress has supported lazy loading for images since version 5.5. However, support for iframes was not…
Plausible Analytics is not new on the scene. The two-person, EU-based team behind the company has been trying to carve its slice of the analytics pie against players like Google Analytics and WordPress.com Stats for nearly two years. The self-funded and bootstrapped company is starting to gain a small foothold. It has been an uphill…
After noticing suspicious review activity for the AccessiBe plugin, accessibility consultant Joe Dolson reported the fake reviews to WordPress.org’s plugin team. The reviews were removed in under 48 hours, thanks to Dolson’s detailed research. At the time of reporting, Dolson found 31 five-star reviews, 2 four-star reviews, and 2 one-star reviews. After putting these into…
Today, GT Basic became the second theme from GermanThemes to go live in the WordPress theme directory. Like the company’s previous theme, GT Ambition, it is built around the block editor. It also introduces several custom block patterns. The theme will not knock anyone’s socks off with its artistic merit. GT Basic is very much…
Hello. I always supported the idea of a WordPress block editor as a whole, but lately, I’m a bit frustrated in that there are some blocks I need with urgency to work on a (non-visitor editable) wiki-like site (mostly a Tabs block, a Countdown block, an Accordion/Toggle block, a Table of contents block and a…
Gutenberg 10.0 was released today as the 100th iteration of the block editor since the project began four years ago. Although 10.0 may seem like a big number, it’s just another incremental step forward in terms of new features, improvements, and bug fixes. Version 10.0 introduces a new dynamic pages block for building navigation menus.…
Earlier today, the Phoenix theme was merged into the WordPress Theme Experiments repository on GitHub. Like all themes in the repo, it is not meant for use on a live site. It is a project to test new ideas for the upcoming Full Site Editing (FSE) system. Imran Sayed of Codeytek Academy created the theme…
Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) is coming up on a major milestone with version 3.0 in active development, a huge undertaking spanning nearly three years. The first beta was released today with one of the most extensive and technically detailed beta testing guides I’ve seen for a major plugin update. Version 3.0 will migrate the bulk…
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