Earlier today, Yoast CEO Marieke van de Rakt announced the company had been acquired by NewFold Digital. Yoast and its SEO-related business are expected to continue operating as usual with its current team and maintaining its product line. Newfold Digital is a global web solutions provider that serves small-to-medium businesses. The company has many brands…
It feels like it has been ages since the WordPress community has had a call for testing Full Site Editing (FSE) features. The FSE Outreach Program was on a small hiatus. However, the WordPress 5.8 launch was also underway last month. The program is an open call for testing various components of FSE. Thus far,…
Google published an update to its Site Kit plugin for WordPress this afternoon with a hot fix for a critical issue affecting an unknown number of users. Reports of broken websites were popping up on Twitter and in the plugin’s support forum on WordPress.org. Users affected by the issue reported having a critical error on…
After Elastic, makers of the search and analytic engine Elasticsearch, re-licensed its core product so that it was no longer open source, Amazon led a community effort to fork it. In July 2021, contributors to the project announced the first general availability (GA) release of OpenSearch 1.0, an Apache 2.0-licensed fork of Elasticsearch 7.10.2 and Kibana…
Earlier today, theme.es released its Emoji Toolbar project to the plugin directory. It is a simple picker that integrates with the WordPress Rich Text toolbar, allowing users to insert emoji directly from the editor interface. After Nick Hamze pulled his Emoji Conbini plugin from WordPress.org last year, there has been an emoji-sized hole in my…
Automattic has invested $30 million in Titan, a professional email suite aimed at businesses and companies offering white-labeled email solutions for customers. At WordCamp India 2021, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg said that the company had just made “a pretty large investment” in the India-based startup and stated that it “will be a big part of…
Oh, how easily we forget the WordPress of 10, 15 years ago. We are spoiled. We are spoiled by the gluttony of documentation and tutorials, a wealth of knowledge created over more than a decade. We are spoiled by our own expertise, built-in our more vigorous youth, now sitting on our haunches as we have…
A few weeks ago, Automattic released Quadrat on the WordPress.org theme directory. It is now the company’s fourth block theme. Like its predecessors, it is a child of Blockbase, a project that serves as a foundation for the work of Automattic’s Theme Team. After spending a couple of months diving deep into the world of…
Gutenberg 11.2.0 was released today with expanded color support for the Search and Pullquote blocks. Historically, customizing these elements has been out of reach for most users if their themes didn’t include them as options. This release introduces color support and border color support for the search button. Pullquotes are getting a similar treatment with…
Marketing consultant Bridget Willard announced the first commercial content pack for her Launch With Words project. Last week, she released a set of 12 blog posts for roofing contractors, but there are more on the way for industry-specific content. In January, alongside Ronald Huereca of MediaRon, Willard launched the Launch With Words plugin. The initial…
It has been several months since I last dived into Nick Diego’s Block Visibility plugin, and it is now one year since the initial release. Recently moved on from his past job into the WordPress product space, he has been building one of the best context-based plugins for showing or hiding content. In January, Diego…
It was the early days of the Gutenberg project. Many on the Theme Review Team and those in design circles were trying to wrap their heads around this new concept called blocks. In particular, we wanted to know how it could be applied to theme development. There were many discussions on the pros and cons…
Company A sells its plugin. Company B picks it up and moves forward with an overhauled version that looks and feels much different than the original. Users are outraged by the changes. It seems to be a repeating theme in 2021, almost as a rule rather than an exception. Last month, Termly announced its acquisition…
WordPress 5.8 introduced an opt-in system for themes to configure block settings, styles, templates, and more. It is done through a new theme.json file that authors can put at the root of their theme folders. Anne McCarthy, the lead of the FSE Outreach Program, announced a survey earlier today to get feedback from developers on…
PublishPress, makers of the PublishPress and PublishPress Blocks plugins, have adopted the Organize Series plugin from Darren Ethier. Organize Series is a 15-year-old plugin for organizing and displaying posts in a series, useful for novel writers, educators, magazine sites, and anyone breaking their longer content up into a series. PublishPress is also adopting seven extensions…
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