Like most years, I spent this U.S. Independence Day cooped up with my furry friends. I closed all the windows, shuttered the blinds, switched on a couple of fans for white noise, and clicked the television on. My cats and I relaxed. It is my job to keep them calm while my — usually drunken…
Earlier this week, the WordPress Biratnagar Facebook group announced a WordCamp scholarship in honor of Ujwal Thapa. The goal is to honor the legacy left behind by one of Nepal’s leaders both inside and outside of the WordPress community. Thapa passed away a month ago at age 44 from complications with COVID-19. He was a…
Automattic released a new plugin titled Sketch Block earlier today. It is a one-off block that allows end-users to draw directly in the editor. The plugin is marked as a beta release and requires Gutenberg to be activated to use. It is a part of the company’s Block Experiments project. To be perfectly honest, I…
It is hard to believe that it was over a year ago — March 23, 2020, to be exact — that I wrote a post on why block patterns would be the future of WordPress. It has been a slow process as I have patiently waited for the feature to mature into a powerful tool…
Rich Tabor, the Senior Product Manager of WordPress Experience at GoDaddy, tweeted that he had an idea for a new block at the end of last week. Shortly after, the Markdown Comment Block plugin appeared on WordPress.org. The plugin is a one-off block. It allows users to enter notes directly into the post editor that…
It has been a while since I have touched widgets. Once the site editor landed in the Gutenberg plugin, I almost exclusively dropped the old sidebar paradigm and moved to block templates. Reactivating old themes and jumping into the widgets screen felt like time-traveling into a bygone era. After months of being deeply embedded within…
Round #8 of the Full Site Editing (FSE) Outreach Program began yesterday. Instead of the user-centric call for testing features from the UI, program lead Anne McCarthy asks that volunteers dive into code. The new adventure is all about testing theme.json files. The twist is likely to limit the pool of usual volunteers. However, it…
Yesterday, Gutenberg 10.9 landed in the WordPress plugin directory. The update overhauls the Query and Query Loop blocks, allows users to expand or collapse items in the editor list view, and introduces rich URL preview cards for links. The new version also packs in an updated template-mode creation modal and moves the blocks manager. This…
Earlier today, Ana Segota tweeted and announced via the Anariel Design blog that her company had submitted its second block-based theme to WordPress.org. Clove is a more well-rounded follow-up to her first such theme, Naledi. It is currently under review for inclusion in the official directory, but anyone can give it a test run by…
For many years, I was a hardcore advocate of separating any non-design functionality from themes into their own plugins. I wrote extensively on the issue. Whether it was shortcodes, custom post types, user metadata, and any number of things related to a user’s content/data, I drew a deep line in the sand. This belongs in…
What began as a project in August 2020 has now become a reality. All past Twenty* default WordPress themes now have their own unique block patterns. In recent weeks, Twenty Ten through Twenty Fifteen received updates. Designer Mel Choyce-Dwan kick-started tickets for all previous 10 default themes before the WordPress 5.5 release, the first version…
WordPress 5.8 is slated for release on July 20. In just over a month, many users will get their first taste of one of my favorite new features: template-editing mode. The template editor is a new tool that allows end-users to create custom templates without ever leaving the post-editing screen. It exists as a stepping…
Extendify has been scooping up some successful block-related plugins in recent months. It acquired the Redux Framework in November 2020 and followed it up with a purchase of Editor Plus and Gutenberg Hub in December. Its latest pickup? EditorsKit. This ownership change was an adoption rather than an acquisition. The company is compensating Jeffrey Carandang,…
Automattic released its second block theme to the WordPress theme directory last week. Mayland Blocks is geared toward photographers and other users who want to showcase their projects. It is the child of Blockbase, a sort of starter/parent hybrid the company’s Theme Team recently announced. I had high hopes for Mayland Blocks going in. I…
No. Nada. Nah. Nope. That’s a negative. Under no circumstances. My mama didn’t raise no fool. Heck naw. Not on your life. And, the other thousands of ways to tell anyone asking for site credentials to bugger off, even plugin support staff of a “trusted” WordPress development company. That is my way of saying that…