Digital consultancies Alpha Particle and Flowspoke have acquired the Kanban for WordPress plugin, a tool that puts Kanban boards into the admin to measure progress on a goal. The plugin is used for agile project management, sales tracking, editorial scheduling, and other planning purposes. WordPress developer Corey Maass created Kanban for WordPress in 2015 but…
I reach over to grab my phone to check the time. I am debating whether I should stay awake and watch one more episode of The Walking Dead — it would be my fourth, maybe fifth, binge of the series. 11:12 pm. I noticed that Slack was blowing up my phone. I had it on…
Last month WordPress contributors published the initial designs for the upcoming pattern directory, which will host community-submitted patterns that can be installed with one click from the block inserter in the editor. A live prototype of the work in progress is available at wordpress.org/patterns. The previously planned masonry style, which accommodates variable thumbnail heights, has…
The Gravity Forms team formally announced version 2.5 of its form plugin yesterday. The product, owned by Rocketgenius, promises an overhauled experience that is more in line with the core block editor. The team also wanted to put accessibility at the forefront of this release. The design is fresh, ditching pieces of the older WordPress…
The Creative Commons search engine will soon be part of WordPress.org, as Automattic will begin sponsoring several members of the CC Search team to maintain it. The engine currently offers over 500 million images, audio, and videos, under Creative Commons licenses or the public domain, aggregating more than 45 different sources. Matt Mullenweg announced the…
WordPress theme development company Themix released its third free theme to the official directory this week. Churel is described as a theme for organizations and businesses that also works for traditional blogging. The development team has a keen eye for modern color schemes and font families. The theme has a refreshing design that is rare…
Now that COVID-19 vaccinations are becoming more widespread, many hope that in-person WordCamps can once again be a reality. There is no official path forward just yet, and decisions will likely be locally based in the coming months. Angela Jin, a community organizer for Automattic, announced an open discussion around the topic. Currently, all WordCamps…
Last week WordPress contributors began a heated discussion regarding blocking FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts). Google’s experimental alternative to third-party cookies has become a highly contentious topic that made its way into last week’s Core developers meeting. Representatives from the Chrome team also attended the meeting to clear up any confusion and answer questions about…
The WordPress Community Team is discussing banning companies from sponsoring WordCamps if they advertise competitively against WordPress. A WordCamp organizing team recently brought the concern to community deputies regarding a potential sponsor that is advertising its product in such a way that it puts WordPress in “an unflattering light.” This particular instance is prompting community…
Earlier this week, Plausible Analytics released version 1.2 of its WordPress plugin. The update includes a missing feature that should make it more appealing to end-users. The plugin now supports an “embedded mode” that displays a site’s stats directly in the WordPress admin interface. Without counting the self-hosted users of its open-source project, Plausible Analytics…
Any time I see a new block-ready WordPress theme, I am like a toddler in a toyshop. I cannot wait to bring it home, rip off the packaging, and play with it. Sometimes it is the type of fun that will create lasting, years-long memories. Other times, the toy is not all it is cracked…
Google announced this week that it will be delaying the rollout of the new page experience ranking signal to mid-June 2021. Page experience will be included along with existing search signals like mobile-friendliness, safe-browsing, HTTPS-security, and intrusive interstitial guidelines. The rollout, previously planned to begin in May, will be gradual and page experience will not be in full force…
For much of WordPress’s history, the foundational elements of building a theme have been slow to change. Every so often, developers would get a new feature, such as child themes, featured images, nav menus, and template parts. Each of these was epic in its own way. However, theme authors had ample time to adapt to…
WordPress contributors are proposing the project take an active position on Google’s Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC). This particular mechanism is Google’s alternative to third-party cookies that doesn’t require collecting users’ browsing history. The GitHub repository for FLoC explains how Google will group people together and label them using machine learning: We plan to explore…
Patchstack, which recently rebranded from WebARX, released its 2020 security whitepaper. The report identified a total of 582 security vulnerabilities. However, only 22 of the issues came from WordPress itself. Third-party plugins and themes accounted for the remaining 96.22%. “These are all security issues disclosed by the Patchstack internal research team, Patchstack Red Team community,…
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