In June 2022, WordPress.org’s Themes Team began strongly urging theme authors to switch to locally hosted webfonts, following a German court case, which fined a website owner for violating the GDPR by using Google-hosted webfonts. For years, theme authors have been enqueuing Google Fonts from the Google CDN for better performance, but this method exposes visitors’…
WooCommerce Blocks 8.6.0 was released yesterday with support for a new block that displays cross-sells for products that are based on the current product in the customer’s cart. For example, if a customer is purchasing a new gardener’s kit, the store may cross-sell gardening gloves as a complementary product. This is a new feature is…
WooSesh, a virtual conference for WooCommerce professionals and store builders, has published the schedule for the upcoming three-day event beginning on October 11. This year’s lineup includes 24 speakers from across the WooCommerce ecosystem, including engineers, product managers, sales directors, and WooCommerce core developers. Each day of the event has a theme with sessions running…
Molten is a new block theme from first-time WordPress.org theme author Paul Truong, designed for chefs and restaurateurs to showcase their work. The theme puts the spotlight on food photography offset with bold typography featuring the Playfair Display font for headings and Source Sans Pro for paragraph text. Truong is working on setting up a…
Automattic-sponsored core contributor Adam Zielinski published a demo today of WordPress running in the browser with no PHP server. This is accomplished using WebAssembly (WASM), a format for a stack-based virtual machine that enables deployment on the web for client and server applications, and Emscripten, an open source compiler toolchain to WebAssembly. It’s not stable…
After a seven-month long effort across multiple contributor teams, the Twenty Twenty-Two (TT2) default theme will be tagged as “Accessibility-Ready” when WordPress 6.1 ships in November. It is the first block theme to meet the requirements for gaining this distinction. During its development the theme was also tested and found to meet WCAG AA level…
PublishPress, a company that develops free and commercial publishing and permissions plugins for WordPress, has acquired MetaSlider from Extendify. The plugin is used on more than 700,000 sites to build sliders, slideshows, carousels, and galleries. The company’s mission is to help publishers succeed, so this is a curious acquisition as sliders seem to have fallen…
Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) has announced the availability of version 6.0, an update that applies to both the free and pro versions of the plugin. This release introduces a refreshed admin UI that ACF product manager Iain Poulson said users had been requesting since 2021. “We didn’t want this to be a huge change that…
WordPress 6.1 beta 1 was released today, and testing has begun with the general release expected in just under six weeks on November 1. Versions 13.1 – 14.1 of the Gutenberg plugin will be rolled into core for 6.1. This includes features like improved block placeholders, more design tools for blocks, fluid typography, improvements to…
The count for WordPress block themes has reached 137. It’s a far cry from the 500 block themes WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden-Chomphosy set as a goal for 2022, but the number is steadily climbing as theme authors find their footing and discover how quickly block themes can be created. Brian Gardner is throwing his…
Last month, the plan for WordPress to generate WebP images by default for new JPEG image uploads was put on hold for the upcoming 6.1 release after objections from lead developers. The original proposal had been merged into core at the end of July, despite significant critical feedback and concerns from WordPress’ developer community. Yesterday,…
AI image generation has quickly become more accessible over the past few months and is making its way into different industries that require asset creation. Although it’s still somewhat limited, AI image generators can create breathtaking photorealistic images from complex prompts. AI-assisted artists have even begun selling their works on stock photography sites. DALL-E 2…
SiteGround launched a new managed Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) hosting product today, the first of its kind among WordPress hosts. The company currently powers more than 2,800,000 domains and is targeting small businesses and digital product creators with new plans that make it easy to onboard new EDD store owners. Plans range from $2.99/mo. (1…
Gutenberg 14.1 was released today with some much-needed improvements to the Navigation block, which still seems to be on rocky journey towards better usability. Contributors are moving functionality around the Navigation interface to figure out where it works best. The menu selector has been removed from the Navigation block toolbar in favor of placement in…
WordPress users looking for a block theme for blogging will have no shortage of options while Anders Norén is on a run with back-to-back theme submissions. Beaumont, his second theme release this month, is another one designed for personal sites and blogs but with an emphasis on longform content. It was named for Thaddeus Beaumont,…
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