Gutenberg 16.7 was released this week, packed with several features that are headlining the upcoming WordPress 6.4 release. This will be the last plugin release that will be rolled into the next version of WordPress. Font management with the new font library is now available for testing in the plugin. These features standardize a way…
Mike McAlister, creator of the free Ollie theme, has been working towards getting his theme approved for hosting on WordPress.org. Ollie went into public beta in April 2023 and gained momentum over the next few months when McAlister previewed the theme’s new onboarding wizard. WordPress users have been slow to adopt the block editor and block themes…
WordPress has launched its 2023 annual survey, which is open to the entire community, including users, site builders, plugin and theme authors, and contributors. The 2022 survey collected responses from roughly 3,400 people, including approximately 800 contributors, a decline in submissions from previous years. The 2022 survey introduced the Likert scale, a rating scale that…
WordPress 6.4 Beta 1 was released today on schedule, led by an underrepresented gender release squad. It includes the last five releases of the Gutenberg plugin (16.2, 16.3, 16.4, 16.5, 16.6) along with the upcoming 16.7 release and 190 tickets for core. If you are following Gutenberg development, many of these features have already been released in the plugin.…
WordPress.org began testing two-factor authentication (2FA) as an opt-in feature in May 2023. The interface and functionality are still in beta but it’s operational. This week contributors have expanded support for 2FA with a new interface for adding security keys, which are more secure than the one-time passwords. A logged in user can set up…
WordPress developer Corey Maass has sold his Social Link Pages plugin to Matthaus Klute, an independent WordPress consultant and developer with Alpha Particle. It’s another story of small plugins changing hands, where developers get the opportunity to test ideas and business models. Even the most modest creations have value in a thriving marketplace where business…
When WordPress contributor and developer Nick Diego released version 3.0 of his Block Visibility plugin earlier this year in March, he made all the Pro features available in the free version, with the exception of a few that would take more time. The plugin, which is used on more than 10,000 WordPress sites, allows users to…
WordPress’ Plugin Review Team continues to dig out from under a massive backlog that has grown to 1,260 plugins awaiting review. Developers submitting new plugins can expect to wait at least 91 days, according to the notice on the queue today. “Currently there are 1,241 plugins awaiting review,” Automattic-sponsored Plugin Review team member Alvaro Gómez…
WP Accessibility Day (WPAD), an independent 24-hour virtual conference, has published its schedule for the upcoming event on September 27, 2023. Co-lead organizer Amber Hinds reports that more than 1,248 people have registered for the event so far with attendees across 30 different countries. Approximately 50% of attendees are from the U.S. WPAD has attracted…
WordPress’ Community team is evolving the WordCamp format to promote adoption, training, and networking for professionals, leaving the flagship events to focus more on connection and inspiration. This change opens the door for more creative concepts around the events’ new mission: WordPress events spark innovation and adoption by way of accessible training and networking for users,…
WordPress.com plugin pages have been updated to include a download link for WordPress.org plugins listed in the .com directory. These are the listings that are scraped from WordPress.org. The plugins are available for free on WordPress.org for self-hosted sites but can only be used on WordPress.com with a paid subscription. The text in the sidebar…
WP Tavern is launching forums today. If you have ever sat up all night with a feverish infant, searching for answers on a mommy messaging board, hunted down solutions for obscure bugs, or wasted an entire afternoon on a subreddit, then you know that forums are not dead. Since the early days of BBSes (Wikipedia…
Openverse has landed an Open Education Award for Excellence in the Open Infrastructure category. Open Education Global (OEG) is a non-profit organization that supports the use of open education to expand education access and affordability. Its annual awards recognize outstanding contributions to the Open Education community and its network of resources. Openverse is one of…
Citations is a new plugin created by WP Munich and the team at Luehrsen // Heinrich, a German WordPress agency. It makes it easy to create in-text citations and assign them a specific source. Most of the existing plugins that do this are for older versions of WordPress. This one is created specifically for those using the…
The WordPress community is ending two days of heated discussions that rapidly descended into a mire of unbridled emotional confrontations across multiple social channels, following a tweet from John Blackbourn that raised concerns about WordPress.com plugin listings outranking WordPress.org on Google Search. Developers expressed concerns about the SEO impact of the practice of cloning WordPress.org’s…
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