After more than two years in beta, Creative Commons has launched its new search engine, featuring a completely redesigned search page, improved navigation and search filters, better search loading times, and more accurate search phrase relevance. It has replaced the old search portal and is now linked from the homepage. This update to CC Search…
The upcoming BuddyPress 5.0 release will add plugin-specific debug info to the new Site Health Info screen that is coming in WordPress 5.2. Mathieu Viet, who contributed the patch, said the information could be very useful to help solve issues on the BuddyPress forums. The panel is displayed at the bottom of the screen. It…
npm, Inc. has released a preview of the results of its Enterprise JavaScript in 2019 survey, which was conducted from 12/1/18 – 1/8/19. The company received 33,478 responses from developers across 23 industries and 194 countries and territories. Twenty-two languages were represented and less than half of respondents spoke English (47.13%), although the survey was…
WordPress 5.2 was originally scheduled to be released on April 30, but has now been pushed back to May 7, due to the number of open tickets last week (43). There is now only one ticket remaining on the 5.2 milestone for completion of the About page and WordPress 5.2 RC 1 is ready for…
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), a non-profit corporation of decentralized volunteers from the open source developer community, has officially approved the NetBeans IDE as a Top-Level project. NetBeans joins more than 350 other open source projects and initiatives managed by the foundation after spending two years in the Apache Incubator. The IDE supports Java, JavaScript,…
Clean Blocks is a new free theme from Catch Themes that was released last week on WordPress.org. The design is suitable for businesses, agencies, freelancers, and other service professionals who require featured content, a portfolio, testimonials, a blog, and a services section. Clean Blocks includes basic Gutenberg compatibility in that it supports all core blocks…
The family of Gutenberg derivatives is expanding with the beta release of Laraberg, an implementation for Laravel. Maurice Wijnia, a developer at Van Ons, an agency based in Amsterdam, created Laraberg as an easy way for developers building applications with Laravel to integrate the Gutenberg editor. It includes a simple API and support for the…
Maintainers Anonymous is a new podcast created by Henry Zhu, who has been the primary maintainer of Babel for the past two years. Babel is a JavaScript compiler used by Facebook, Netflix, Spotify, and millions of others. It is downloaded over 18 million times per month and used by more than 1.8 million repositories on…
Today is Earth Day, a worldwide annual event first celebrated in 1970 that focuses on addressing environmental concerns. Earth Day Network coordinates 192 countries with more than a billion people participating in today’s event. The organization uses WordPress to build the world’s largest environmental movement through education, public policy, and consumer campaigns. Over the past…
Version 1.1 of the AMP Plugin for WordPress was released this week after four months in development and 125 merged pull requests from contributors. It includes CSS tree shaking improvements that restore AMP compatibility for WordPress’ default Twenty Nineteen theme, reducing the size of its stylesheet by 53%. In an effort to get more users…
Dashicons, the WordPress admin icon font, will be getting its first update in three years when WordPress 5.2 ships. The library will be updated to use WOFF2 (Web Open Font Format 2), replacing the previous WOFF 1.0 format for improved compression. WOFF 1.0 will still be included in core to maintain backwards compatibility. In addition…
WooCommerce 3.6 was released this week after six months in development. Store owners with sites running on WordPress 5.0+ will now have access to eight new product blocks, including hand picked products, featured products, products by category/attribute, sale products, new products, top rated, products, and best selling products. These blocks were previously available as a…
Gutenberg 5.5 was released with the long-awaited Group block, previously known as the Section block. It was renamed to avoid confusion with the HTML5 section element and prevent potential overlap with future site/theme type sections, such as headers, sidebars, and footers. The first iteration of the Group block supports the ability to nest other blocks…
A security service called Plugin Vulnerabilities, founded by John Grillot, is taking a vigilante approach to addressing grievances against WordPress.org support forum moderators. The company is protesting the moderators’ actions by publishing zero-day vulnerabilities (those for which no patch has been issued) and then attempting to contact the plugin author via the WordPress.org support forums:…
The third edition of WordCamp for Publishers will be held in Columbus, OH, August 7-9, 2019, at the Vue Columbus. This unique event is a niche-specific WordCamp for professionals working in the publishing industry. Previous locations include Denver and Chicago. In looking for a host city for 2019, organizers had a preference for cities that…