Sarah Gooding is an Editorial Ninja at Audrey Capital. When not writing about WordPress, she enjoys baking, knitting, judging beer competitions and spending time with her Italian Greyhound.
WordPress core committer Felix Arntz is working on an experimental Block Areas plugin that would enable users to create and edit content sitewide using the Gutenberg editor. Inspired by a conversation with Morten Rand-Hendriksen at WordCamp Europe, Arntz created the plugin to “explore what the theming of tomorrow could look (more…)
One of the more interesting trends this year is that WordPress developers are beginning to explore JAMstack setups for their sites. JAMstack is a term coined by Netlify CEO Mathias Biilmann to describe development architecture that includes client-side JavaScript, reusable APIs, and prebuilt Markup, the three pillars of a modern (more…)
For years, the WordPress admin has become increasingly overloaded with admin notices. Some of them are giant, branded notices with their own particular designs that obstruct users’ activities in the admin. The Theme Review Team is taking action to curb obtrusive notices that fall within its purview – those generated (more…)
Gutenberg plugin users who update to version 6.1 should notice a considerable difference in how the UI reacts to block moving actions. This release brings in the animation experiments that Matías Ventura introduced in a post titled “Using Motion to Express Change.” The subtle animations add realistic motion to block (more…)
The WordPress Theme Review Team (TRT) met today and agreed to put new accessibility requirements in place for themes hosted in the official directory. These include some of the items that are required for theme authors who want to add the accessibility-ready tag. A handful of these requirements will soon (more…)
Anders Norén has released Chaplin, his 20th free WordPress theme, designed specifically for use with the block editor. Chaplin could be loosely described as an agency or business stye theme but the capabilities of the block editor enable users to create advanced page layouts that would suit many different types (more…)
Website owners have been excluding web crawlers using the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) on robots.txt files for 25 years. More than 500 million websites use robots.txt files to talk to bots, according to Google’s data. Up until now, there has never been an official Internet standard, no documented specification for (more…)
Font Awesome 5.9 was released last month with 421 new and updated icons. The popular icon font library has grown to include more than 5,000 vector icons and is used on 34% of the top million websites. It’s also one of the top open source projects on GitHub and a (more…)
msgWP piqued public interest this week with a demo of its new microblogging product that allows users to publish text messages and photos to WordPress sites using Telegram. Although the plugin hasn’t officially launched yet, a live demo on the website allows people to anonymously publish a post to msgWP’s (more…)
Honeypot, a tech-focused job platform based in Europe, has produced a documentary that offers a fascinating look at the origins of GraphQL. The 28-minute video explores how quickly the project began to have an impact on the wider tech industry after Facebook publicly released it as an open source project. (more…)
The second edition of the JavaScript for WordPress conference will be streamed online July 11-13, 2019. Based on the success of the 2018 event, which had 1,200 attendees watching live, organizer Zac Gordon decided to expand the event to feature three free days of talks, workshops, and a contribution day (more…)
BuddyPress 5.0 is on track to introduce a new BP REST API, which has been in development as a feature plugin on GitHub since 2016. Contributors plan to merge the API with 14 endpoints for popular components like activity updates, groups, members, private messages, and extended profile fields. Another eight (more…)