My question to you is how you see the future (or even the present) of integrating software with WordPress and when you should make the distinction of going the integration vs. native approach. In other words, with the vast ecosystem of WordPress plugins out there, how can a website owner discern which responsibilities WordPress the…
All hands on deck. 2021 will be the year of the Site Editor. Anne McCarthy announced the official start of the Full-Site Editing (FSE) Outreach Program last Friday on the Make Core blog. The program is primarily geared toward end-users. With few channels for average users to communicate with the development team, this offers an…
Block-based themes are not complicated. Their structure is almost simple enough that developers are unlikely to need a tool to generate a blank theme. However, for those unfamiliar with how themes are built for the upcoming full-site editing (FSE) feature, a boilerplate is a good place to start. The Theme Experiments repository now has a…
Two weeks ago, Ashan Jay released LifePress to the WordPress plugin directory. It is an interactive, front-end calendar for tracking past events — a journal of sorts. For a version 1.0 launch, it has enough features with just the right touch of simplicity to show promise. This is not Jay’s first rodeo when it comes…
Update some of the things. That was the goal that Jon Quach, a Principal Designer at Automattic, laid out in the roadmap for integrating the G2 Components project into Gutenberg and, eventually, core WordPress. The project is a reimagining of the pieces that make the block editor, a “from-scratch” overhaul of the component system. Updating…
On Tuesday of this week, Munir Kamal released version 2.4 of his EditorPlus plugin. Aside from a few bugs and making sure the plugin was compatible with WordPress 5.6, he added an icon selector for the Button block and SVG shape overlays for the Image block. This is on top of a new “Extend Core…
WordPress 5.6 “Simone,” named in honor of American performer and civil rights activist Nina Simone, was released today and is now available for download. The release was led by an all-women release squad, a first in WordPress history. The new version includes many enhancements for the block editor, accessibility improvements, application password support for the…
Gutenberg 9.5 went live today. The development team is continuing forward with work that we will start seeing down the road in WordPress 5.7 and beyond. The big user-facing highlights for this release were the additions of a full-height alignment option for the Cover block, font-size support in the Code block, and improved previews for…
Fränk Klein, a Principal Engineer at Human Made, is now the second theme developer to release a block-based theme to the WordPress theme directory. Block-Based Bosco is a recreation of his Bosco theme, which he released in 2014. Block-based themes, also called FSE (full-site editing) themes, are currently experimental. They require the use of the…
Álvaro García wrote the first code for his Block Navigation plugin back in November 2018. It is one of those hidden gems that I wish I had known about two years ago as I began using the block editor. It has been available. I simply did not know about it until blindly stumbling upon it…
Over the past several weeks, I have received around four dozen emails, texts, PMs, and other messages related to Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals. Last year, we ran a roundup of deals happening throughout the WordPress ecosystem. However, we are not running such a post this year. It took a solid week to compile…
WordPress 5.6 development is winding down as we begin to close out the beta testing round, inching toward the final release on December 8. That means it is time to think about what WordPress 5.7 will look like. This is one of my favorite times of the WordPress development cycle because I get to see…
On November 11, StudioPress announced an open beta for its Genesis Block Theme. This is a pivotal moment, or at least one moment in a series of significant moments, for adoption of the block editor. Feel free to call me on this in a year or two if it does not pan out. The original…
In early September, WP Engine announced the launch of Genesis Custom Blocks, a block-creation plugin made possible by its StudioPress team. The concept should feel familiar to developers who have made use of Advanced Custom Fields and similar plugins. However, the focus of this new plugin is entirely on blocks. The plugin is more of…
Six weeks ago, WordPress 5.6 release lead Helen Hou-Sandí breathed new life into two almost-forgotten features around the WordPress website and platform. The idea was to take the starter content feature, which themes can optionally add for new installs, and apply it to the WordPress.org theme preview system. It was not a new idea. However,…