Automattic is working on a new experimental Full Site Editing plugin aimed at enhancing the page creation workflow in the block editor. Starting a new page from scratch may be overwhelming for those who don’t have a vision for how to tastefully put blocks together to lay out the page. This is a problem that…
Gutenberg 5.8 was released today with three new features and more than three dozen enhancements, documentation improvements, and bug fixes. This release gives users the ability to change the text color in the Heading block. The same color options available in the paragraph and button blocks are now available in the heading block. A recent…
Google is enabling mobile-first indexing (crawling sites with a mobile user-agent) by default for new domains as of July 1, 2019. These are sites Google defines as “previously unknown to Google Search.” Mobile searches are the primary way that users engage with the search engine for the past few years, which caused Google to begin…
Over the weekend, the WordPress community celebrated 16 years since Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little forked the B2/cafelog blogging platform to create the first official release of WordPress on May 27, 2003. It launched with a new admin interface, manual excerpts, intelligent line breaks, a link manager, and was compliant with XHTML 1.1 standards. The…
GitHub has launched a new Sponsors tool that allows open source developer to receive financial support. The program is rolling out slowly and currently has a waitlist for open source contributors or maintainers who want to join. For the first year developers are in the program, GitHub will cover all the payment processing fees and…
Automattic has acquired Prospress and its flagship WooCommerce Subscriptions product, along with the company’s entire suite of e-commerce plugins and automation tools. Prospress’ 20 employees will be joining Automattic to continue developing and supporting their products. There are no immediate changes planned for current WooCommerce Subscriptions customers. Automattic will begin working on a roadmap for…
Google is rolling out an update to mobile search results that includes website branding. The new design displays a website’s name and icon at the top of the listing so users can easily scan results. If the result is an ad, it will be indicated in bold next to the website’s address. Below is a…
Elementor launched its Hello theme on WordPress.org this week. After just a few days in the directory, the theme already has more than 10,000 active installations. It is essentially a blank starter theme that offers 100% compatibility with Elementor. Page builders with a large user base are in a unique position to influence the WordPress…
Public libraries are one of the few remaining community centers where people freely pass on valuable skills to neighbors young and old. In addition to offering free access to books, computers, and the internet, libraries often host educational classes as a public service, with an emphasis on teaching fundamental skills for navigating the digital world.…
WordPress plugin developer Jeffrey Carandang continues to plough forward with new features for EditorsKit, a collection of page building block options for Gutenberg. What began as a block visibility management plugin has grown to include more features aimed at tweaking various settings in the editor. Version 1.5 adds some text, heading, and paragraph styling and…
CoBlocks, a collection of page builder blocks that was recently acquired by GoDaddy, has added four new blocks in version 1.9.5. This is the first major release since the plugin was acquired from Rich Tabor and his co-creators. Tabor now heads up a WordPress Experience team at GoDaddy where CoBlocks’ development continues. This release merges…
Jetpack has opened a signup for the beta of its upcoming Membership feature in order to collect feedback from potential testers. The changelog for version 7.3, released two weeks ago, hinted at a new Membership block coming to the plugin. The work in progress was added behind the JETPACK_BETA_BLOCKS constant, presumably in preparation for wider…
VVV 3.0 was released this week, introducing a new Ubuntu 18.04 LTS box. The project’s previous versions used Ubuntu 14, which has now reached end of life (EOL). Support for VVV 2 is now discontinued, due to an unforeseen complication with its PHP dependencies. Ondřej Surý, who maintains all the PHP packages VVV uses, deleted…
Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg has launched a new blog and podcast at Distributed.blog where he will be sharing what he has learned over the past 15 years of managing a distributed workforce. In 2019, Automattic now employs more than 900 people from 68 countries who have all worked in a distributed fashion since day one.…
Today’s release of Gutenberg brings a major improvement to the usability of the Group block. In previous versions of the editor, it wasn’t easy to see if a block had been inserted as a child block, especially since the default behavior was to insert an empty paragraph block. Gutenberg 5.7 brings more clarity to the…