Josepha Haden Chomphosy, the Executive Director of WordPress, posted a follow-up to her outline of the upcoming year. Questions mounted about what a minimum viable product (MVP) looked like for Full Site Editing (FSE), which is expected to be ready in the Gutenberg plugin in April. The core team is also shooting for a June…
Using CSS custom properties for the WordPress admin color scheme system is listed for the WordPress 5.7 milestone. It feels low-key enough that most would pass it over as a simple upgrade to keep up with the times. However, this feature can create ripples that spread and benefit the ecosystem in the years to come.…
True to its name, the first WP Briefing podcast lasted just over 12 minutes. Josepha Haden Chomphosy, the Executive Director of WordPress, jump-started the second month of 2021 with a show that should arrive on the our doorstep every two weeks. With what seems to be overwhelming positive support on Twitter, the podcast was welcomed…
The WordPress.org theme directory is becoming little more than a crippleware distributor. I suppose it was inevitable given its reach, which can be worth $1,000s/month for theme authors. Justin Tadlock via Twitter As I think back on that tweet from 2019, I realize how unfair it was to refer to the themes coming into the…
Should WordPress notify users of plugin ownership changes? That was the question that Ian Atkins asked two months ago. WP Tavern readers seemed to think it was a good idea, at least those who commented on our coverage of it. However, the original Trac ticket has not seen any movement since. There are real technical…
On Monday, Automattic announced its Blank Canvas theme on WordPress.com. The goal is to allow end-users to build single-page websites, such as an “about me” or product landing page. Blank Canvas is a child theme of Seedlet, which Automattic’s Theme Team has been using as a launchpad. One example is its recently-released Spearhead child theme.…
Earlier today, WP Buffs announced that it had acquired WP EZI, a WordPress maintenance and support service. It was a five-figure acquisition for 64 active subscriptions and 343 total customers. Paul Tselekidis, the former owner of WP EZI, is stepping away from the project. WP Buffs offers 24/7 WordPress website management. Its team works directly…
On Sunday, Bridget Willard announced her latest project, Launch With Words. In collaboration with Ronald Huereca, who performed the development work, they built a plugin that helps clients jump-start routine, monthly blog posts. In the future, there will be premium “content packs” that include content for various industries. The Launch With Words plugin is essentially…
I was wondering if you could help me. I want to convert all of my old posts (about 600) to Gutenberg blocks. Do you know an easy way to do that? Philip I often get these short questions via private messages. I always try my best to help other WordPress users whenever I can. This…
Gutenberg 9.8 launched yesterday with a few minor UI improvements. The development team added an initial implementation for border-radius support for the Group block that theme authors can opt into. They also moved the site editor into an iframe element to remove CSS conflicts from the global admin styles. Those who have been testing Full…
The Full Site Editing (FSE) Outreach Program has now concluded its first round of testing. Its first focus area was centered on the template-editing mode introduced in Gutenberg 9.6. The volunteers involved with the project identified several pain points. Gutenberg 9.6 added a new button that allows end-users, provided they are using a block-based theme,…
Ross Morsali, via his brand Code Amp, released the Custom Layouts plugin last week. The plugin’s goal is to provide a visual post layout builder for users of both the block and classic editors. For end-users, this is yet another choice between the multitude of plugins for displaying posts. After years of new plugins launching…
Kinsta, a managed WordPress hosting company, announced its local development tool named DevKinsta earlier today. The tool allows developers to spin up new WordPress sites, including multisite support, in moments. Each site is automatically configured with Nginx, PHP, and MySQL. DevKinsta packages Adminer, an open-source database manager. The system also includes an SMTP server and…
Around 2010, child theming had finally caught its stride. Bigger theme shops were starting to take note, and some were implementing advanced parent themes that were meant to serve as a “framework” for creating child themes. The theme development community hit a bit of a brick wall amid this explosion of child theming. Grandchild themes…
Nick Diego’s Block Visibility is not the only plugin to take on the challenge of controlling when blocks are visible on the front end. Other plugins like EditorsKit do a fine job of it. However, Block Visibility is a solution users should not overlook, even if they have already begun testing other options. Diego first…