Yesterday, version 10.2 of the Gutenberg WordPress plugin landed. Users can now add a Spacer block between Navigation items, categorize custom template parts, and pick between patterns when inserting the Query block. The user experience continues to improve in some areas. The Media & Text block, one of the few holdouts, can now be transformed…
[The Eksell theme] does such a great job of selling a block editor-driven WordPress. It was a missed opportunity to not pair something of this quality with the block editor when WordPress 5.0 was released. It’s responsive! I’m amazed this stands out as a highlight for me, but, as the official theme, Twenty Twenty-One breaks…
Earlier today, core WordPress contributor Nick Halsey released Full Screen Galleries, a plugin that automatically creates a full-screen slideshow when site visitors click on an image. The plugin works with all images, regardless of whether they are in a gallery block. It also supports both the classic and block editors. Lightbox-type plugins are a dime…
It is easy to become jaded after reading the same old keyword-stuffed theme descriptions. After viewing the same hero-plus-three-boxes theme designs. After seeing another theme with “block editor styles” that utterly fails to deliver on its promise. As I peruse the demo of Anders Norén’s latest WordPress theme, Eksell, I am reminded that artists still…
Atarim is launching its 2nd annual Web Agency Summit in a couple of weeks. The free event will run from March 23 – 26. The goal of the event is to help agencies and freelancers in the WordPress space grow sustainable businesses. Atarim is the company formerly known as WP Feedback. In February, the business…
Yesterday, Happy Prime owner and engineer Jeremy Felt released Shortnotes, a plugin for writing notes from the WordPress editor. The intention is for users to create short pieces of content, such as that found on Twitter, Instagram, and similar social networks. However, it does not come with a front-end posting interface, at least not in…
It was 2003. I was just getting my first taste of blogging and similar experiments on the world wide web. Seemingly every blog I toured showcased a long list of the owner’s friends. These were all the other cool kids jumping onto this blogging bandwagon — the blogroll was almost a status symbol. You had…
Automattic-owned WordPress.com launched its new Story-publishing feature today. Currently, only users with the WordPress for Android or iOS apps can add stories. Self-hosted users with Jetpack-connected sites can publish via the mobile apps too. The development team previewed the Story feature in January, launching a public beta on the Android app. Stories are essentially media…
The GPL is so embedded into WordPress that it is not just the license the platform is under but a part of the community’s culture. Friends have been gained and lost over discussions of it. Bridges burned. Battles waged. People cast out to the dark corners of the web that “we don’t talk about.” There…
Living on the bleeding edge of Gutenberg’s development is not particularly easy for everyone. There is a ton of work and know-how involved with getting everything set up. You have to clone a Git repository, grab pull requests, and run a build process. Non-developers may find themselves facing an overwhelming learning curve. It can be…
Gutenberg 10.1 landed yesterday with several new features, many of which focused on improvements to the interface and user experience. Users can now control the justification of items in the Social Icons block. The new release also enhances the UX for creating reusable blocks, groups the Image block toolbar controls, and introduces categorized template parts…
One of my favorite activities each week is to peruse the latest themes to land in the WordPress theme directory. Often, there are intriguing design concepts. However, much of the time, I am disappointed to learn that homepage designs of many rely on theme options instead of the block editor. While the editor has several…
A couple of weeks ago, Munir Kamal released version 2.6 of his Editor Plus WordPress plugin. The latest version does not add a slew of features as its users have seen in the past. However, it introduces one major upgrade. The new version lets users insert templates from Gutenberg Hub’s growing library directly from the…
I’m a developer that has started developing with Gutenberg recently. There are a bunch of amazing benefits and features, but there are also a ton of drawbacks, inconsistencies, as well as absolutely awful and outdated documentation. One of the worst aspects of Gutenberg from a developer perspective has been block validation. Consider the following scenario.…
What was once likely viewed as plugin territory is now a reality as part of the Gutenberg project. Yesterday, the team merged a pull request for a Table of Contents (TOC) block into the plugin’s codebase. It was a contribution driven by developer Zebulan Stanphill, starting nearly a year ago. The TOC block may feel…