One of Matt Mullenweg’s announcements at the 2022 State of the Word was the addition of new taxonomies for the theme and plugin directories that will help users more quickly ascertain the purpose of the extensions they are considering. With nearly 60,000 free plugins available and more than 10,000 free themes, it’s not always immediately…
Gutenberg 14.8 was released today with a major update to the Site Editor’s interface that makes it feel more unified as a design tool. In August, Gutenberg designer James Koster shared some mockups for updating the Site Editor to include a “navigable frame” where users can select from a menu of features and styles on…
ClassicPress is polling its users to determine the next step for the software. The project is a pared back fork of WordPress based on version 4.9 that uses the TinyMCE classic editor as the default option with no block editor. It’s run under a non-profit organization called the ClassicPress Initiative. In July 2022, the project…
Block Protocol, a project that launched earlier this year that aims to build a universal block system, has announced a new WordPress plugin coming in early 2023. It will allow users to embed interactive blocks that are compatible with Gutenberg. Given WordPress’ footprint on the web (43% by W3Tech’s estimate), this plugin is a major…
WordPress.com has launched a newsletter product just in time to capture those escaping Gumroad’s price increase and editors displaced by Revue shutting down. Newsletters, which were already booming as a communication tool in recent years, have become more critical than ever, as the uncertainty around Twitter has people scrambling to find reliable ways to stay…
Drupal Gutenberg, the Gutenberg module for Drupal that was created by Frontkom, has released version 2.6 with compatibility for Drupal 10. The module offers Drupal users a better authoring experience using blocks, allowing them to quickly build landing pages and save reusable blocks inside the editor without any code required. There are more than 3,300 active Drupal…
State of the Word (SOTW) watch parties kicked off around the world this afternoon as Matt Mullenweg delivered his annual address to the WordPress community. A small group of people gathered live in New York City to participate while the majority of enthusiasts watched via the livestream. Mullenweg spent an hour reviewing and celebrating the…
WordPress’ Performance Team contributors have merged a new experimental SQLite integration module that is on track to be included in the upcoming version 1.8.0 of the Performance Lab plugin. (This is the plugin that contains a collection of feature plugins with performance-related modules the team hopes to land in WordPress core.) The new module allows…
Danny van Kooten, creator of the Mailchimp for WordPress plugin, has indicated that he is interested in selling his plugin for somewhere in the ballpark of €1.6M. It is the most popular Mailchimp solution for WordPress, although it is “unofficial” in that it is not developed by or affiliated with Mailchimp in any way. It…
Sometimes Gutenberg introduces features that you never knew you needed. Such is the case with the new color coding system in the Site Editor. The latest 14.7 release adds color to template parts and reusable blocks in the list view, block toolbar, and block selection outlines. The colorization is intended to help users differentiate between…
WooCommerce Blocks version 9.10 was released today, hitting a major milestone for the development of its new Products Block. The plugin serves as a place to iterate and test new blocks, and this release introduces the new Product Query-powered Products block in beta. In this first iteration, users can arrange products by popular presets and…
WordPress Sandbox, an experimental project that uses WebAssembly (WASM) to run WordPress in the browser without a PHP server, has been chugging along steadily since Automattic-sponsored core contributor Adam Zieliński introduced it earlier this year in September. Zieliński published three new updates to Twitter this week, demonstrating the project’s potential to provide an in-browser IDE…
Sensei LMS, Automattic’s teaching and learning management plugin, has released a new free block theme called Course. In February 2022, version 4.0 of the plugin introduced support for full-site editing with its bundled “Learning Mode” theme. Course features a new bold design made to be customized in the Site Editor. Although Sensei works with neaerly…
The block editor was introduced to WordPress in 2018 and has matured into a more user-friendly tool for expression over the past four years. WordPress.org’s Meta Team is now experimenting with how they can bring the block editor into the support forums. That they are even considering this is a testament to how far the…
Google is in the process of rolling out its December 2022 “helpful content” system update, which started on the 5th and is becoming more visible in search results. The company estimates it will take approximately two weeks to fully roll out. The helpful content system generates a signal that is used by Google’s automated ranking…