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 writing the rules correctly according…
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 popular choice for WordPress theme…
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 demo blog from their own…
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. GraphQL co-founder Nick Schrock, who…
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 focused on JavaScript and WordPress.…
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 endpoints for blogs, friends, and…
Recent EditorsKit releases have introduced a set of new tools that some writers may have found missing from Gutenberg. The plugin’s creator, Jeffrey Carandang, said version 1.6 was targeted at improving the writing flow for writers, bloggers, and content creators. Gutenberg has decent support for copying and pasting Markdown. It will automatically convert links, blockquotes,…
Gutenberg 6.0 was released today with a major update to the Columns block. Users can now select from a set of pre-defined layouts for their columns, with additional features that address many long-standing complaints regarding the block’s usability. Although many plugins are already doing more advanced things with columns and grid layouts, WordPress core’s current…
The first ever State of CSS survey results have been published. The data includes responses from more than 11,000 developers in 135 countries. Respondents identified themselves as male (84.71%), female (9.9%), non-binary/third gender (0.86%), and “prefer not to say” (2.62%). Sacha Greif and Raphaël Benitte, creators of the survey, said it’s skewed towards early adopters,…
Google released version 1.2 of its official AMP plugin for WordPress ahead of WordCamp Europe in Berlin. This release introduces a new AMP Stories editor that is powered by Gutenberg. AMP Stories are separate from the capabilities that enable AMP for the rest of the website, and they can be used together or independently. The…
Another successful edition of WordCamp Europe concluded this weekend in Berlin. The event was the largest WordCamp in history, with 3,260 tickets sold and 2,734 attendees present on the ground. WCEU sold 800 more tickets than the previous year in Belgrade. Contributor Day gathered 611 attendees into 25 teams, and approximately 28% of them (169…
Matt Mullenweg took the stage at WordCamp Europe in Berlin this afternoon to give a summer update on the progress of the block editor. He attributed much of its continued success to the availability of the Gutenberg plugin, which allows for quick iteration and testing. More than 150,000 posts are published per day using the…
Post Status will be live streaming Publish Online on July 8-9, 2019. The event, which is geared towards WordPress professionals, has traditionally been limited to club members. This year Post Status creator Brian Krogsgard is opening up the live stream for anyone to watch for free. “I debated so strongly on this,” Krogsgard said. “But…
Jason Bahl, creator of WPGraphQL, is joining the Gatsby team to work on WPGraphQL (and its immediate ecosystem) full-time. Gatsby, the immensely popular static site generator for React.js, lets users pull data into pages from WordPress, Drupal, Contentful, Google Docs, AirTable, markdown, and any other data sources. It is used by tens of thousands of…
WordCamp Europe 2019 kicks off tomorrow, June 20, with Contributor Day. If you have been following the event on Twitter, hundreds of WordPress enthusiasts and professionals have been descending upon Berlin this week in preparation for the world’s largest WordCamp. For those who cannot attend in person, WCEU will be live streaming the main conference…