Automattic has acquired Tumblr, a long-time friendly rival company, for an undisclosed sum. Just six years after Yahoo acquired Tumblr for $1.1 billion, the company is said to have been acquired for “a nominal amount” from Verizon, who indirectly acquired Tumblr when it bought Yahoo in 2017. Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg declined to comment on…
WooCommerce 3.7 was released today after four months in development. This minor release is backwards compatible with previous versions. Despite containing more than 1,290 commits, 3.7 is smaller than previous releases, as the WooCommerce team is working towards delivering more frequent releases to improve the stability of the platform. WooCommerce 3.7 bundles updates from the…
BuddyPress 5.0 will include a way for developers to organize their blocks under a BuddyPress blocks category. Mathieu Viet shared a code example on the BuddyPress Dev Updates blog, demonstrating how to set the category property of a block to BuddyPress when registering a block type. The blocks registered with this category will appear under…
WordPress contributors, developers, and community members are currently debating a proposal to would implement a new policy regarding security support for older versions. The discussion began last week when security team lead Jake Spurlock asked for feedback on different approaches to backporting security fixes to older versions. Following up on this discussion, Ian Dunn, a…
Jetpack 7.6 was released this week with several improvements to the plugin’s AMP compatibility. Automattic was one of the earliest publishing partners on Google’s AMP project, as well as the original author of the official AMP plugin for WordPress. This release makes three more Jetpack features compatible with AMP: Related Posts now display on AMP…
EditorsKit 1.9 was released this week with a new Block Styling feature for the image and cover blocks. It allows users to change these blocks to be displayed as circular, diagonal, inverted diagonal, rounded corners, or with a shadow. It also adds a “full screen height” display option to the Advanced block settings panel. This…
The first-ever WordCamp Long Beach is happening October 5-6 at the Pointe Conference Center at Walter Pyramid (CSULB). Organizers are planning to host practical, skill-building talks and panels, abstract discussions, and networking events at locally-owned eateries. The event will be the only WordCamp happening in Los Angeles county this year. Last week organizers opened the…
If you are following the JAMstack (JavaScript, APIs, and markup) craze and want to learn more about the history and best practices of the architecture, O’Reilly has published a short book called Modern Web Development on the JAMstack that is now available as a free download. Netlify CEO Mathias Biilmann, who coined the term “JAMstack”…
WordPress contributors are weighing in on a proposal for the formation of a nomination-based advisory board with set term limits for its members. Josepha Haden, the project’s Executive Director, published a first draft two weeks ago with ideas for how the board might operate and feedback is rolling in. WordPress experimented with a growth council…
Bootstrap, the most widely used open source front-end component library on the web, has adopted a new Long Term Support plan that will make the development cycle a little more predictable. From now on, each major version will receive at least six months of support after it is retired, followed by six months of critical…
Gatsby, the open source app and website framework based on React, celebrated the stable release of Gatsby themes by launching a Theme Jam contest. Participants were invited to create their own Gatsby Themes and submit them for an opportunity to win swag or the grand prize: an all-expenses-paid trip to the Gatsby Days event of…
Saturday Drive, makers of Ninja Forms, Ninja Shop, and SendWP, has acquired Caldera Forms, a React-based, drag-and-drop forms builder plugin. In addition to the free plugin on WordPress.org, which has more than 200,000 active installs, CalderaWP’s product line includes a Pro version and more than 30 free and commercial add-ons for things like payment processors…
Gutenberg 6.2 has two new user-facing features that were added based on community feedback. The Cover and Media & Text blocks now allow for nesting any type of block inside. Previously, the Cover block only allowed users to add a heading, button, or paragraph block. Users had resorted to employing clunky solutions to get around…
Meta Box, one of the most popular WordPress custom fields frameworks, has released a new extension for creating custom Gutenberg blocks using only PHP. MB Blocks gives developers the ability to build blocks with various settings, using a similar syntax as creating a meta box, without having to know React, Webpack, or Babel. MB Blocks…
The WordPress Security Team is exploring different approaches to backporting security fixes to older versions of the software. The effort that goes into supporting versions back to 3.7 (the release that introduced automatic background updates) increases with each major version released. “For the Core Security team, that means when security updates need to be released,…