It has been a long road. Eleven long years. WordPress will finally allow end-users to update an installed plugin or theme by uploading a ZIP file. After over a decade, most people who had hoped to see this day have likely moved on. However, for those of us still waiting for this long sought after…
Yesterday, Iain Poulson and Ashley Rich launched community-curated, news-sharing site WP Content. The launch comes on the heels of ManageWP.org shutting down its own news-sharing service and the WordPress community losing out on a valuable resource. Both Poulson and Rich are based in the UK and work for Delicious Brains, a development company that focuses…
On July 3, Timi Wahalahti opened a discussion on the Community WordPress blog on whether WordCamp volunteers, WordCamp attendees, or Meetup attendees should be awarded a WordPress.org profile badge. The discussion stemmed from a nearly two-year-old Meta ticket that was recently resurfaced. The general consensus from the comments on the post seems to be that…
Google announced a public beta of its new Web Stories WordPress plugin this week. The plugin’s description aptly reads, “Visual storytelling for WordPress.” It is essentially a custom editor for creating AMP-powered stories within WordPress. Users can download the beta plugin directly from the Web Stories beta page. Developers who want to contribute or take…
The first beta release of WordPress 5.5 is mere days away. This test release is expected to ship on July 7, and it carries with it a slew of new features that have primarily been developed between Gutenberg 7.6 and 8.5. One of the more pressing decisions the development team has to make is which…
Today, Jeffrey Carandang released WP Block Builder, an npm script for developers to begin building WordPress blocks. It is just one of many such scripts in a sea of block scaffolding tools, but Carandang may just have the experience and clout to rise above the rest. Thus far, developers have downloaded his custom setup over…
Earlier today, Impress.org released version 2.7 of its popular donation plugin GiveWP. The update focuses on laying the foundation for donation form templates, handling per-form Stripe accounts, and allowing users to view fundraising reports in multiple currencies. “GiveWP 2.7 is not just a release,” wrote Devin Walker, the co-founder and CEO of GiveWP, in the…
On June 23, Awesome Motive announced it had acquired Smash Balloon, a company that focuses on a family of social feed plugins for WordPress. John Brackett, the founder of Smash Balloon, is now a partner at Awesome Motive through the deal. His entire team will be staying on as part of the larger company. Currently,…
Hear me out before telling me how wrong I am. Over the past couple of weeks, I have read a few different articles on writing good user documentation from a software developer’s perspective. It is an area I was always told I excelled at by people who read the docs I wrote through the years.…
Matt Watson, through his Wholesome Code brand, released a plugin called Wholesome Publishing on the WordPress plugin directory on Tuesday. Version 1.0 of the plugin adds a couple of simple but useful editing features that should help teams of writers or content designers. The plugin allows users to add nested comments on a per-block basis…
Gutenberg 8.4 landed today with some major user-facing changes, including new image editing tools and the ability to edit options for multiple blocks. The previously experimental block directory search is now enabled for all Gutenberg installations. Version 8.4 is next to the last major version of Gutenberg planned for integration in WordPress 5.5. The first…
Last week, as I was making the final edits on a review of his Gutenberg Forms project, Munir Kamal was prepping for the launch of another kind of WordPress plugin for the block editor. This one was called EditorPlus, and it would create a design system for blocks. Kamal and his team quietly put the…
On Friday, June 26, Gutenberg Times will be holding a live Q&A on block-based themes and full-site editing. The Zoom webinar will begin at 18:00 UTC and last for around one hour, depending on how many questions are asked by viewers. The target audience of the event will be theme developers or anyone interested in…
Yesterday, core contributor Aaron Jorbin proposed renaming the default “master” branch for all WordPress-owned Git repositories to “main.” The proposal comes among a flurry of related terminology changes that the larger tech community is considering around oppressive language. Based on the ongoing discussion in the comments of the proposal, the term “trunk” has gained popularity,…
WebDevStudios released its custom block scaffolding tool to the public on Tuesday. It is a fork of the core WordPress script, which was rolled out in February alongside Gutenberg 7.4. The goal is to allow plugin developers to get started building without all the tedious setup required to build even the most basic block. The…