Earlier today, the WPMarmite team released a massive study of 127 WordPress theme shops. It primarily focused on integration with the block editor. The team also surveyed 22 of the shops directly to dive deeper into what the future might look like when the Full Site Editing (FSE) project is entirely bundled into the core…
Any WordPress company that builds and maintains themes worth its salt is already doing at least some preliminary work as WordPress inches ever closer to bundling its upcoming block theme system. Automattic’s Theme Team is no exception. Ben Dwyer announced the team’s new Blockbase parent theme on the Theme Shaper blog yesterday. It includes support…
WordPress is celebrating 18 years today since the first release of the software to the general public. That release post, titled, “WordPress Now Available,” kicked off an exciting era in the history of the blogosphere where WordPress emerged as an unofficial successor to the abandoned b2/cafelog software. Reading the comments on the first release, you…
Gutenberg 10.7 landed yesterday. Within a few hours, the development team also released version 10.7.1 of the plugin with a few bug fixes. The latest update primarily focuses on work expected to land in WordPress 5.8 this July. The feature freeze deadline for the current WordPress development cycle passed on Tuesday. This should mean that…
Joomla has announced plans to block Google’s Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) by default going forward. The 3.9.2.7 security update, released yesterday, added a Permissions Policy header to disable FLoC. Users can now find a new setting in Global configuration on the Site tab in the Site Settings area, where they can toggle FLoC on…
Feedback for round #7 of the FSE Outreach Program opened today. Like round #6, the focus is once again on template-editing mode, a feature that is slated to ship with WordPress 5.8. All hands need to be on deck for it to have a chance of a successful landing. I have been eager for this…
When I reported on the WP User Avatar plugin’s rebranding and repurposing last week, it came as no surprise that users were angry. However, I did not expect pushback against those user complaints from a subset of commentators and others in the community. There were a few points, each boiled down to the argument that…
My Codeless Website is a new tool that detects if a site was built using a website builder. The app can detect more than 50 different tools that people use to create sites, including WordPress-powered ones like Beaver Builder, Elementor, and Divi, as well as Drupal, Squarespace, Shopify, Wix, and others. It was built using…
In a mature and ever-growing market of WordPress page builders, Thomas Ehrig decided to bring a new product to the ecosystem. Joined by Luis Godinho, the initial team launched Bricks in March. Unlike most other builder plugins, the project is bundled as a theme. As a small, 100% bootstrapped company, the team decided against going…
As I was perusing the WordPress plugin directory this morning, I noticed a new block plugin, which is always one of the highlights of my week. It was a simple pricing block. Of course, I installed it and began playing around with its features. It was a version-1.0 product, so I was not going to…
GitHub, in partnership with Tidelift, has set aside June 7-12, 2021, as Maintainer Week, a time for open source maintainers to share knowledge and experiences through a series of planned activities and events. Tidelift plans to kick off Maintainer Week on June 7 with a virtual event called Upstream, featuring 30+ sessions that attendees can…
The internet was set abuzz yesterday after Google officially confirmed that it has been testing a Follow button for websites in Chrome. In February, the publishers of Chrome Story spotted the button on Canary for Android, and speculated that it may be integrated with Google’s Discover feature. Chrome announced that it is building on RSS…
Tom de Visser, a developer from Amsterdam, released the Post Descriptions plugin last week. It was his first submission to the WordPress.org plugin repository. It allows users to write short descriptions on a per-post basis, which are then displayed on the post-management screen. For an initial outing, it already seems to be a hit with…
Almost since the dawn of the plugin and theme upgrade mechanisms inclusion in core over a decade ago, third-party developers have asked for an easy way to bypass the system. WordPress 5.8 will finally deliver on this feature request. While it has long been possible to filter the update system, methods for doing so were…
When Sergiu Radu and Andrei Glingeanu launched their free Blocksy theme nearly two years ago, they were surprised by how quickly their business grew during a global pandemic without any investment in marketing. Blocksy is now active on more than 20,000 WordPress sites and its commercial version, launched in October 2020, has grown to where…
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