BuddyPress 9.0 was released one day before WordPress 5.8. As all major BuddyPress releases are named for pizza joints, this one has been dubbed “Mico” in honor of Pizzéria Chez Mico, a small restaurant on the French riviera, where you just may find capers and anchovies on your pie. This short release cycle was laser…
WordPress 5.8 “Tatum,” named in honor of jazz pianist Art Tatum, landed earlier today. It is the second major release in 2021. It includes duotone media filters, block-based widgets, theme-related blocks, template editing, and theme JSON file support. The release also ships tons of other notable features, such as support for new Emoji and an…
Tiny, the makers of TinyMCE, have acquired Setka, a content design and editing platform, for an undisclosed amount. Founders Katya Bazilevskaya, Alexey Ametov, Vasily Esmanov, Roman Khudonogov, and the rest of the Setka team will join Tiny as part of the agreement. Tiny has been tracking an increasing developer demand for rich text editing components,…
Last week, WPBeginner released Comment Moderation Role to the WordPress plugin directory. The plugin does a simple job of creating a single user role that can only moderate comments. The most common use case for such a role — named “WPB Comment Moderator” in the admin — is for larger teams that need a separate…
Christopher John, a Seattle-based designer and UX engineer, released his first project to the plugin directory yesterday. Announced via Twitter to high praise, Wayfinder is a block outline solution for the WordPress editor. Like similar plugins, the goal is to make it easier for end-users to select nested blocks, which can sometimes be tough to…
Automattic has acquired Pocket Casts, a popular podcast listening, search, and discovery app for Android and iOS. Australian co-founders Russell Ivanovic and Philip Simpson are staying on to continue leading Pocket Casts as a part of the acquisition. The app allows users to keep all of their podcast subscriptions together in one place and sync…
Google quietly concluded its FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) origin trial this week. The trial was part of Google’s Privacy Sandbox initiative, a suite of new technologies designed to replace third-party cookies, fingerprinting, and other commonly-used tracking mechanisms. This particular experiment groups people together based on browsing habits and labels them using machine learning. FLoC’s…
“We’re basically building the Jetpack for Higher Ed,” said Blake Bertuccelli as he pitched me on the idea of Edupack, a project still in its early stages. He and his team are looking for more advisors to join the eighth round of their once-monthly braintrust events. It is a project they began in November 2020,…
It is hard not to look through a list of upcoming WordPress 5.8 changes and not find at least a little something to whet your appetite. With so many enhancements headed our way, even we have not been able to keep up with them all here at WP Tavern. The next release will bring a…
WooCommerce has patched an unspecified, critical vulnerability identified on July 13, 2021, by a security researcher through Automattic’s HackerOne security program. The vulnerability impacts versions 3.3 to 5.5 of the WooCommerce plugin, as well as version 2.5 to 5.5 of the WooCommerce Blocks feature plugin. “Upon learning about the issue, our team immediately conducted a…
Competition in the sandboxing products space is heating with the entrance of InstaWP, a new service for setting up disposable WordPress testing sites. Founder Vikas Singhal created the tool to provide a quick way to set up live testing sites online or to show something to a client or team. InstaWP joins the ranks of…
Features such as the upcoming block-based widgets system, the template editor, theme-related blocks, and others have taken up much of the spotlight as of late. However, one of the best user-focused tools shipping with WordPress 5.8 is a duotone filter for Image and Cover blocks. The term “duotone” in this sense means combining two colors…
OpenUK, a WordPress-powered not-for-profit company, has released its State of the Open report with data from the UK in 2021. The company advocates for open source software, open source hardware, and open data, while providing a central point of collaboration for people working in the open sectors. The State of the Open report offers a…
A week ago, I published my thoughts on the block system from a developer’s perspective. Taking a weekend-afternoon deep dive into creating custom block types meant learning some tough lessons and familiarizing myself with a programming language I had little experience using. Programming has always been a trial-and-error affair for me: write code, refresh the…
WordPress 5.8 is on deck for July 20, just a mere 10 days from now. The release is geared up to be the most feature-packed update the community has seen in a while. Block-based widgets, the pattern directory, WebP image support, template-editing mode, and many more tools are nearly ready to ship to the masses.…
Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.