Local 5.9.2 was released this month with a new image optimization feature. The Pro version of Flywheel’s local WordPress development product got a revamp four months ago, bringing in a new collection of pre‑launch tools. While image optimization falls into that category, the company decided to make this new feature available to both free and pro…
The Conservative Treehouse, a political publication hosted on WordPress.com for the past 10 years, is moving to a new host after receiving a notice from Automattic regarding violations of its Terms of Service. The site’s owner, previously identified as Florida resident Mark Bradman, claims to have a 500,000 – 1,000,000 unique readers per day. He…
Version 1.0 of the WPGraphQL plugin is now available in the official plugins directory on WordPress.org. This is the first stable version recommended for use in production, landing nearly four years from when the project started in November 2016. In an effort to keep WPGraphQL in line with WordPress’ commitment to preserving backwards compatibility, Jason…
Twenty years ago, every aspect of developing a website and putting it online was more complex than it is today – an enchantment of Merlin’s wand to most common folks. The term “webmaster” hasn’t aged well, but it was commonly used in a different era when tech wizards were the only people creating and managing…
Envato has passed $1 billion in community earnings after 14 years in business. The company reached the goal a year earlier than anticipated, thanks to the contributions of 81,000 different creators around the globe and millions of customers who have purchased products from Envato Market, Envato Studio, Envato Tuts+ and Envato Elements. “To this day, we’re very proud that…
Six months ago, Google announced its plans to introduce a new ranking signal for Search, based on page experience as measured by Core Web Vitals metrics. At that time, Google promised to give site owners at least six months notice before rolling out the update so they can improve their scores on the metrics before the update. The company…
The Biden-Harris presidential transition team has launched a new Twitter account and a website powered by WordPress. BuildBackBetter.com is hosted by Automattic and is zippy fast, thanks to Jetpack, Cloudflare CDN, and a lot of other performance optimizations. It loads in 333 ms, performing just 19 requests. The site was created by Ben Ostrower’s team…
WooCommerce 4.6.2 was released yesterday with a fix for a vulnerability that allowed account creation at checkout, even when the “Allow customers to create an account during checkout” setting is disabled. The WooCommerce team discovered it after several dozen users reported their sites were receiving spam orders, or “failed orders” where the payment details were fake.…
Frontity has launched a partnership program to support the maintenance of its open source framework for building React-based WordPress sites. 10up, a large agency that provides headless solutions to enterprise customers, is the first partner to join in support of the project. “Since we launched Frontity Framework last year, dozens of WordPress publishers have asked our team…
WordPress 5.6 is set to add a UI that allows users to opt into auto-updates for major versions of core. Previously, developers could turn these updates on by setting the WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE constant to true or by using the allow_major_auto_core_updates filter. Version 5.6 exposes this setting in the UI to make it more accessible for users. Jb Audras posted a dev note…
WordPress has opened its 2020 Annual Survey, a short set of questions designed to collect more information on how different groups of people are using the software. It takes approximately 5 minutes to complete and all data is anonymized. WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy said she uses the results from the survey to inform…
WordPress’ Core systems team had an eventful Friday when an error in the auto-update system caused sites to update to WordPress 5.5.3-alpha-49449, including live production sites with no auto-update constants defined. Those who received an email about the update logged into their sites to see the message: “BETA TESTERS: This site is set up to install…
Block patterns were one of the most exciting and transformative features introduced in WordPress. 5.5, giving users a giant head start on building pages by allowing them to insert sets of pre-designed blocks. Core now includes a handful of default patterns available in the block inserter but contributors are exploring the idea of expanding this…
WordPress 5.6 is set to include a new default theme, Twenty Twenty-One, designed to give users a blank canvas for the block editor. The theme doesn’t fall under any particular category and is meant to be suitable for use across different types of websites. One new feature that has very recently come under consideration is…
Gutenberg 9.2 was released this week and is the last release of the plugin to be rolled into WordPress 5.6. It features the long-awaited video tracks functionality, closing a ticket that has been open for more than two years under development. Video tracks includes things like subtitles, captions, descriptions, chapters, and metadata. This update introduces…