Reakit is a new toolkit for building accessible web apps with React. Brazilian developer Diego Haz launched his MIT-licensed open source project this week with a stable version 1.0 now available to the public. The toolkit offers offers composable, themeable, and accessible UI components that strictly follow WAI-ARIA 1.1 standards. Out of the box, Reakit…
For several years, Bear App users have eagerly requested the ability to publish their notes to WordPress. Bear features a zen writing experience blended seamlessly with note-taking capabilities, a combination that landed the app an Apple Design Award in 2017. People use Bear for everything from taking notes to writing chapters for books. Many users…
WordPress Translation Day 4 was held over the weekend. The 24-hour global event hosted 77 local events in 35 countries and the Polyglots team added 183 new contributors to their ranks. The team also designated 12 new GTEs (Global Translation Editor) and 14 PTEs (Project Translation Editor). Naoko Takano, a Polyglots Team Global Mentor and…
WordPress Trac is one of the more utilitarian and uninspiring interfaces that many contributors have to contend with in the process of giving back to the project. After growing tired of Trac’s mediocre search functionality, William Earnhardt set out to improve it with a new project called WPTracSearch that gave him an opportunity to play…
Storefront, WooCommerce’s free flagship theme, has just released version 2.5.0 with updates that make it easier to setup and customize the homepage. In 2017, WooCommerce 2.2 introduced starter content to help users set up the homepage template, menus, widgets, and add some demo products. This content has been updated to incorporate the WooCommerce blocks that…
After six months in development, Advanced Custom Fields 5.8.0 was released yesterday with a new PHP-based framework for developing custom Gutenberg block types. ACF Blocks was announced in October 2018, to the great relief of many developers who didn’t know how they were going to keep pace with learning the JavaScript required to use WordPress’…
Nevena Tomovic, a Business Developer at Human Made, is researching the most important skills for pursuing a career in WordPress. She is conducting a survey for professionals that is open to anyone working in a WordPress-related capacity, including writers, developers, marketers, UI & UX designers, illustrators, community drivers, evangelists, project managers, and creatives. The survey…
Jetpack 7.3 was released yesterday with changes that improve the “out of the box” experience. The plugin now enables fewer features on setup so users can have more control over what they activate on their sites. The new version also integrates with WordPress 5.2’s new Site Health checks. It includes a status check and moves…
The WordPress Theme Review team has implemented a controversial change to its Trusted Authors Program that puts a hard requirement on participants to join the theme review team and perform a minimum number of reviews in order to continue having their own themes fast tracked through the review process. “As we can’t figure out a…
Gatsby WordPress Themes, a project launched earlier this year by a group of collaborators, has just released its second free theme. The team is led by Gatsby and GraphQL aficionados Zac Gordon, Jason Bahl, Muhammad Muhsin, Hussain Thajutheen, and Alexandra Spalato. Inspired by the scalability, speed, and security that the React-based static site generator can…
The admin can be intimidating to navigate if you’re just getting started with WordPress. After installing a few plugins, top-level menu items begin to pile on. This adds even more complexity to grapple with in a narrow space with long lists of items hidden behind flyout menus that make managing WordPress on mobile a frustrating…
Last week we reported on Laraberg, a Gutenberg implementation for Laravel that is now in beta. The project was based on Gutenberg.js, a package that makes it easier to bring Gutenberg into other applications. Nick Khaetsky, a backend developer at Biz-Mark, took Laraberg and used it to build a Gutenberg plugin for the open source…
WordPress plugin developer Jeffrey Carandang has rebranded his Block Options plugin to EditorsKit. Carandang created Block Options prior to co-founding CoBlocks, which was recently acquired by GoDaddy. It began as a plugin for controlling block visibility, inspired by his Widget Options plugin, but has since grown to include more features for managing Gutenberg blocks. EditorsKit…
Tickets for WordCamp US 2019 went on sale this week. The event will be held November 1–3, 2019, in St. Louis, MO, at America’s Center Convention Complex. For just $50, attendees will have access to everything throughout the three-day event, including more than 40 speaker presentations, workshops, “birds of a feather” meetups, and Contributor Day.…
WPCampus has published the results of the Gutenberg accessibility audit the organization commissioned from Tenon, LLC. The audit was crowdfunded by the WordPress community and Matt Mullenweg and Automattic pledged to cover the balance to ensure it would be fully funded. Tenon’s analysis includes a 329-page technical audit of the editor along with user-based testing…