Google is churning out updates to its WordPress products ahead of WordCamp Europe in Berlin this weekend, with the AMP Plugin 1.2 release and Site Kit’s developer beta launch landing the same day. Site Kit is a new addition to Google’s WordPress plugin lineup that was announced at WordCamp US 2018. It provides a dashboard…
Developers at Google and Yoast are collaborating with other contributors on a proposal to add XML sitemaps to WordPress core. This capability has traditionally been handled by plugins, which provide a variety of implementations. The goal of this new feature project is to ship basic XML sitemaps in core while providing an XML Sitemaps API…
The Spanish WordPress community hit a remarkable milestone with translations this week. Polyglots volunteers have now translated the meta sites, WordPress apps, and the top 200 plugins at 100% completion, with no pending translations to review. La comunidad #WordPress España @wp_es sigue batiendo récords. No solo no hay traducciones pendientes de revisar, sino que tiene…
Fred Schott, a software developer and former Google employee on the Polymer team, has launched a new CDN for his Pika project. Schott’s mission with Pika is “to make modern JavaScript more accessible by making it easier to find, publish, install, and use modern packages on npm.” Pika provides a searchable catalog of “module” packages…
Gutenberg 5.9 is now available for those who are running the plugin to get the latest features on their sites. This release brings significant improvements to the grouping capabilities, allowing users to group and ungroup blocks inside a container block. Once placed inside a group, the blocks can be moved up or down within the…
The Gutenberg module for Drupal, created by Frontkom, reached the 1.0 milestone earlier this month. It is the first stable release recommended for use in production with Drupal 8.x. The 1.0 release removes the Gutenberg-JS dependency and uses Gutenberg core files directly. It is based on Gutenberg version 5.6.1, which was released in early May.…
CJ Silverio, former CTO of npm Inc., gave a presentation at JSConf EU 2019 in Berlin earlier this month titled “The Economics of Open Source.” More specifically, she discussed the economics of package management as it applies to open source software, based on her unique perspective and experience gained in working for the company that…
BuddyPress 5.0 development began in December 2018 after 4.0.0 was released in November. The core BuddyPress team has not published a roadmap for what will be coming in 5.0, but features and fixes added so far can be found on GitHub in the commit log. One noteworthy addition to the upcoming major release is that…
Branch, a Docker-based continuous integration service for WordPress, has been selected for TinySeed’s startup accelerator. The company was founded by Peter Suhm who is also the creator of WP Pusher, a plugin that lets developers install and update WordPress themes and plugins directly from GitHub, Bitbucket, and GitLab. TinySeed, founded by Rob Walling and Einar…
Automattic announced today that a team inside the company will be adopting Alex Mills‘ plugins and continuing their development and support. Mills, also known around the web as @Viper007Bond, was a WordPress core contributor and prolific plugin developer who passed away in February 2019 after a battle with Leukemia. At one time last year, Mills…
Google’s rich results testing tool has been updated to include a selector for desktop or mobile so website owners can check their results on both platforms. This tool shows if pages are properly structured for display in Google’s carousels, images, breadcrumbs, events, books, and other types of rich snippets. A glossary is available with images…
Tantek Çelik, Web Standards Lead at Mozilla and co-founder of IndieWebCamp, delivered an inspirational talk titled “Take Back Your Web” at the most recent beyond tellerrand conference in Düsseldorf, Germany. He opened the presentation with a litany of Facebook’s wrongdoings, taking the world’s largest social network to task for its role in increasing polarization, amplifying…
In a post titled “Using Motion to Express Change,” Gutenberg designer and engineer Matías Ventura takes a deep dive into how animation can be applied to interfaces to replicate realistic motion. These animations can sometimes more clearly communicate changes, particularly in relationship to the action of moving or reordering items on a page. “Even though the…
WordProof Timestamp is a new free plugin that bridges the WordPress and blockchain communities in an approachable, user-friendly way. It gives users the ability to timestamp their posts and pages to demonstrate transparency and claim ownership of content. WordProof works with any EOSIO blockchain to create the timestamp and provides a custom certificate link with…
After four years of publishing on Medium, FreeCodeCamp is migrating all of its articles to its own open source publishing platform, a modified version of Ghost. The platform allows approved authors to cross-post their blog articles on the new FreeCodeCamp News site for free, without any ads. “Medium was a great place to publish because…