Two weeks ago, WordPress theme author Rich Tabor tweeted, “Even with my theme developer hat on, I’m finding it easier and easier to create block themes ~ within ~ WordPress. I’m positive one day (soon) this will be the norm.” It looks like that day has arrived sooner than expected, as Automattic has had a…
WordCamp US will be hosting its first in-person event since 2019 in San Diego this year. The three-day event will run from September 9-11 at Town and Country Resort. Tickets went on sale today and are still available but likely to sell out soon. Unlike previous years, which had attendees number in the thousands, WCUS 2022…
WordPress theme authors and contributors from the Themes team are exploring ways to make block themes more prominent on the official directory. These are themes that are specifically tagged with support for full-site editing. Despite WordPress having a block theme for its most recent default theme, authors have been slow to create more. There are…
Rich Tabor’s new Wei theme is one of the most well-designed contributions to hit WordPress.org’s free themes directory this month. Wei is a minimalist block theme that keeps things simple while offering users a range of artfully selected accent color combinations. It also includes support for full-site editing and Global Styles for a wider range…
Recent turbulence in the ClassicPress community has resulted in the directors resigning and new leadership installed. The WordPress fork is run under a non-profit organization called the ClassicPress Initiative. It supports work on a pared back version of WordPress, based on version 4.9, that uses the TinyMCE classic editor as the default option with no…
The developers of the Rollback Update Failure feature plugin put out a call for testing over the weekend, with the aim of getting it included in WordPress 6.1. The goal of the plugin is to offer a safety mechanism in core for when updates or auto-updates fail. Instead of leaving the user’s site in a…
In a recent Twitter storm, Matt Mullenweg characterized GoDaddy as “a parasitic company,” that is “an existential threat to WordPress’ future.” In a series of tweets that were subsequently deleted, Mullenweg contended that GoDaddy is lacking support for WordPress and WooCommerce, relative to how much the company is benefiting from the projects. He also said…
Awesome Motive, makers of popular plugins like OptinMonster, WPForms, and MonsterInsights, acquired WP Charitable this week. The plugin is used by more than 10,000 non-profits for creating fundraising campaigns and collecting online donations. It does not charge any transaction fees and currently has a 4.9/5-star average rating on WordPress.org. “Wes and I launched Charitable in…
On Thursday Matt Mullenweg responded to an inquiry on Twitter from Jeff Matson, a Pagely employee, about whether Automattic’s Newspack platform had all open open source components or some proprietary elements. In his response, he formally identified GoDaddy as “an existential threat to WordPress’ future.” The response raised more than a few eyebrows on Twitter…
Gutenberg 13.5 is now available. The release comes two weeks after the plugin introduced support for button elements in theme.json, axial spacing in the Gallery block, and a redesigned Publish popover in 13.4. The latest release includes 12 enhancements and 15 bug fixes with the most notable changes landing in the Cover block. Prior to 13.5, the…
At the risk of spoiling the answer to a clue included in the image below, WordPress made an appearance in the New York Times crossword puzzle today. Likely nobody reading this post would struggle to answer the clue “popular blogging platform” with nine letters. New York-based digital consultant and media co-founder Matt DeSiena tweeted a…
GitHub has announced that Copilot, its new AI pair programming assistant, is now available to developers for $10/month or $100/year. Verified students and maintainers of open source projects will have free access to Copilot. The assistant is available as an extension for popular code editors, including Neovim, JetBrains IDEs, Visual Studio, and Visual Studio Code.…
With inflation rising and the unemployment rate falling, economic forecasters are predicting an impending recession in 2023. A few major WordPress companies are tightening their belts ahead of what many believe will be an unavoidable economic downturn. Elementor announced that it is laying off 60 employees, 15% of its workforce, in a tightly controlled release…
In light of a recent German court case, which fined a website owner for violating the GDPR by using Google-hosted webfonts, WordPress.org’s themes team is updating its recommendations for hosting webfonts. Most theme authors have been enqueuing Google Fonts from the Google CDN for better performance, but this method exposes visitors’ IP addresses. “The themes…
Late last week, Ninja Forms users received a forced security update from WordPress.org for a critical PHP Object Injection vulnerability. This particular vulnerability can be exploited remotely without any authentication. It was publicly disclosed last week and patched in the latest version, 3.6.11. Patches were also backported to versions 3.0.34.2, 3.1.10, 3.2.28, 3.3.21.4, 3.4.34.2, and…
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