If you are going all in on building sites with the new full-site editing (FSE) experience, then you may have noticed a lack of menu items that will deliver you directly to the tools you need to use. It may be because the Site Editor is still in beta, or because WordPress leadership may still…
Elon Musk has bought Twitter in a $44B deal that closed this week, tweeting “Let the good times roll,” on Friday after taking the helm. Musk fired top executives at the company and tweeted an appeal to Twitter’s advertisers to share his motivation in acquiring what is arguably the world’s most important social network: “The…
Gutenberg 14.4 was released today with long-awaited support for distraction-free editing, to the delight of content editors around the world. It hides all non-essential UI and clears the canvas for a focus on text-based content creation. The mode can be toggled on in the options menu in the top toolbar. Distraction-free mode hides the top…
The last two chapters of the 2022 Web Almanac were released this week – Structured Data and Performance, completing the 729-page ebook of the report. The WordPress-specific chapter was published earlier this month with metrics that indicate adoption is growing. The Performance chapter was written by Etsy performance engineer Melissa Ada and Google web transparency engineer Rick…
WordPress Accessibility Day is just one week away on November 2-3, and registration is still open. Co-lead organizer Amber Hinds published an impressive speaker lineup with 40 speakers from 14 countries. She also noted that 40% of the event’s sessions have at least one speaker who identifies as living with a disability. WordPress professionals who…
Olive Themes, a relatively new independent theme shop, has released its third block theme on the WordPress.org directory. Arc FSE is a high contrast, multipurpose theme, designed to enable a broad range of flexibility through support for full-site editing features. The theme features the open source and exceptionally readable Poppins web font in various weights…
It’s easy to get lost while trying to get around the Site Editor unless you are working day and night inside the tool. The navigation is jumpy and confusing, especially when going from template browsing to template editing to modifying individual blocks. A large PR is in progress for redesigning this UI with the introduction…
Openverse, formerly known as Creative Commons Search before it joined the WordPress project, has passed an important milestone with its support for audio files. The catalog has now indexed more than 800,000 audio files and its development team has taken audio support out of beta. Openverse visitors can now confidently search for and explore audio…
WordPress.org theme previews just got a major improvement this week with the addition of Style Variation previews. The previews now appear on block themes that include style variations. Themes that have more variations than what fits in the space beneath the preview pane will display all variations in a carousel with little arrows to navigate…
WordPress’ Documentation Team will be hosting an online Contributor Day on October 25, 2022, ahead of WordPress’ anticipated 6.1 release the following week. Milana Cap, who has been volunteering with the Documentation team for years and is currently sponsored by XWP, announced the event this week. “The primary goal is to catch up with a…
Earlier this month WordPress.org meta contributors removed the active install growth chart from plugins, sending plugin developers who relied on this data into a state of dismay and outrage. The commit cited “insufficient data obfuscation” but there was no clear communication about when and where this decision had been made. Developers demanded more transparency around…
10up has published a Gutenberg Best Practices website as a public resource with tutorials, documentation, and example code. Maintaining current documentation has not been a strong point of the official Gutenberg project as the pace of the project makes it difficult for contributors and extenders to keep up. “Gutenberg introduced an entirely new editorial paradigm…
Jetpack has announced changes to its Jetpack Social plugin that may impact publishers who frequently share across social media networks. Previously, users could share an unlimited number of posts automatically via their connected social media accounts. Jetpack is shuffling its monetization strategy for this extension and has capped social sharing at 30 shares per month…
For more than a decade, WordPress developers have been discussing how core can support plugins that require one or more other plugins in order to work. Having a standardized way of managing plugin dependencies would be a useful and time-saving feature for developers, who currently have to roll their own solutions for this. “The situation…
WPZOOM is coming in strong with its first block theme approved for the WordPress Themes Directory. UniBlock is a beautifully designed theme that is well-suited for businesses and freelancers. The company plans to adopt the concept of full-site editing in other WPZOOM themes as well, following the release of UniBlock. UniBlock’s default look is sporting…
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