Earlier today, the WordPress theme directory welcomed its fourth block-based theme. Built by UXL Themes, Hansen is one of the more stylish projects capable of working with the site editor in the Gutenberg plugin. The theme author also stepped it up a notch and included several block patterns. I have written about how patterns will…
Anne McCarthy announced the second round of testing for the Full Site Editing (FSE) Outreach program. The call for testing asks that users build a homepage from the Gutenberg plugin’s site editor. Feedback is open until March 5. The first round of testing began in December 2020 and ended last month. Testers were able to…
Felix Arntz, a WordPress core committer and developer programs engineer at Google, announced upcoming support for lazy loading iframes. The feature is included in the latest WordPress 5.7 beta and will officially ship next month to the larger community. WordPress has supported lazy loading for images since version 5.5. However, support for iframes was not…
Plausible Analytics is not new on the scene. The two-person, EU-based team behind the company has been trying to carve its slice of the analytics pie against players like Google Analytics and WordPress.com Stats for nearly two years. The self-funded and bootstrapped company is starting to gain a small foothold. It has been an uphill…
Today, GT Basic became the second theme from GermanThemes to go live in the WordPress theme directory. Like the company’s previous theme, GT Ambition, it is built around the block editor. It also introduces several custom block patterns. The theme will not knock anyone’s socks off with its artistic merit. GT Basic is very much…
Hello. I always supported the idea of a WordPress block editor as a whole, but lately, I’m a bit frustrated in that there are some blocks I need with urgency to work on a (non-visitor editable) wiki-like site (mostly a Tabs block, a Countdown block, an Accordion/Toggle block, a Table of contents block and a…
Earlier today, the Phoenix theme was merged into the WordPress Theme Experiments repository on GitHub. Like all themes in the repo, it is not meant for use on a live site. It is a project to test new ideas for the upcoming Full Site Editing (FSE) system. Imran Sayed of Codeytek Academy created the theme…
Automattic released its Newspack Newsletters project to the WordPress plugin directory earlier today. It is the first Newspack-related plugin the company has made available outside of GitHub or its custom platform. Newspack is primarily a service geared toward small and medium-sized publications. Its goal is to work with news industry leaders to create a platform…
Perhaps the fates have stepped in to prove a point. After I wrote a 2,000-word piece on the lack of quality themes in the theme directory, they decided to send a message. Not once, but twice this week, a new WordPress theme has managed to catch my eye. My rational mind knows that it was…
Earlier this week, WP Feedback founder Vito Peleg announced the company was changing its brand to Atarim. After 18 months since its launch, it would also be moving toward a complete Saas (Software as a Service) model. WP Feedback was created as a standalone plugin. The goal was to provide a visual feedback tool that…
On Monday, GoDaddy officially launched the Hub by GoDaddy Pro, a dashboard that brings together all of its products, pro-specific tools, and solutions. The experience is geared toward website developers and designers, creating a central location to manage their client work. GoDaddy Pro is not a new service by GoDaddy. The hosting company launched its…
George Mamadashvili’s Bookmark Card block is the sort of simple plugin that is easy to overlook. It is one of those plugins that suffers from the lack of block discoverability in WordPress at the moment. Like many other one-off blocks, you don’t know you need it until you need it. The plugin is essentially an…
Empt Lite, the latest theme by Rough Pixels, landed in the WordPress theme directory today. Like most of the company’s prior work, the design is on par with the best free themes currently available. I have come to disregard that icky feeling whenever I see “Lite” attached to a theme name, at least when it…
Version 9.9 of the Gutenberg plugin landed earlier today. While it includes several minor UI improvements, the biggest user-facing change is the inclusion of icon and background color options for the Social Links block. Theme authors can now add support for rounded image borders. They are also faced with a breaking change to their theme…
Automation. It is one of those dreams in the minds of many reviewers from the Themes Team. If there was a tool to take care of 90% of the issues, the team could focus on the 10% not easily found by automated scripts. Enter the Theme Review Action project. Steve Dufresne, a WordPress Meta team…