Last month WPZOOM released a free plugin called Block Patterns for Food Bloggers that I finally got the chance to test. Food blogs commonly have a strong focus on category and tag-driven grid layouts with big featured images and multiple sections showcasing different types of recipes. Prior to the block editor, customizing these types of…
Gutenberg 13.6 was released this week with an expansion of full-site editing features and 26 bug fixes. One of the highlights includes the addition of the pattern modal for users when they create new content within a custom post type. WordPress 6.0 introduced the ability to display patterns in a modal when a user creates…
The Gutenberg Times will be hosting representatives from the Pew Research Center in its Live Q&A session on July 22, 2022, with co-hosts Birgit Pauli-Haack and Anne McCarthy. After an eight-month hiatus, the show will return with guests who are doing some exciting things with Gutenberg out in the wild. The Pew Research Center is…
WordPress theme author Anders Norén has remade his popular Davis theme to support full-site editing. The new theme, Davis Blocks, is sporting the same clean design as its predecessor, and can be used as a starter theme or a lightweight blog theme. Norén said he built Davis Blocks to be as small as possible, while…
Envato, the Australia-based digital assets company, announced it is shutting down Envato Studio, its community freelance platform, and Twenty20, a stock photo website. The company continues to tighten its belt and focus on newer products after it laid off 100 of its 700 employees, citing global conflicts and inflation. “We were spread too thin across…
WordPress’ Performance team is kickstarting a proposal for developing a plugin checker tool similar to the theme check plugin, which ensures themes are meeting the latest standards and best practices. In 2021, WordPress’ Meta team built a code scanner that detects potential security risks, such as unescaped SQL queries in plugin code, with the goal of reducing…
The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), a non-profit that provides infrastructure support for free and open source software projects, is urging developers to stop using GitHub and move their projects to other platforms. The organization has historically had a number of public grievances with GitHub, which it outlines on its Give Up On GitHub site. GitHub’s public launch of Copilot…
One year ago, WordPress 5.8 introduced support for WebP, allowing users to upload and use WebP images in their content. In March 2022, the Performance Team moved to expand core support for the image format by proposing WordPress enable WebP by default. This would include generating WebP images for new JPEG uploads and using WebP images…
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…
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