The Gutenberg team merged a pull request three days ago that adds a local “playground” development environment for testing outside of the WordPress admin. Riad Benguella, the technical lead for Gutenberg phase 2, said that the playground could grow over time to contain “more than just a standalone version of the editor” and could become…
WordPress 5.2 beta 1 was released this evening with an exciting lineup of new user-facing features that are ready for testing. The upcoming release introduces new blocks for RSS, Search, Calendar, Tag Cloud, and Amazon Kindle embed. The proliferation of block collection plugins as a block distribution mechanism has caused some WordPress installations to become…
rtCamp, a 60+ person agency and WordPress.com VIP service partner, has released three new GitHub Actions that handle automated code review, WordPress deployment, and Slack notifications. The PHPCS Code Review action takes advantage of GitHub’s pull request review feature. It performs an automated code review on pull requests using PHPCS. This Action is based on…
During the 2018 State of the Word address, Matt Mullenweg announced that Phase 4 of the Gutenberg project would be aimed at developing an official way for WordPress to support multilingual sites. There are no technical details available yet for what approach core will take, because it’s still in the experimental stage. The site building…
Codecademy introduced a new free course today called Learn PHP. The company, which offers free coding courses, is rebuilding its PHP education after removing all of its PHP courses in 2017. A Codecademy representative explained that the courses were outdated and that their team thought PHP was declining in popularity: The PHP courses were very…
Frontkom‘s presentation at WordCamp Nordic introduced the audience to the Gutenberg Cloud project, which allows developers to share JS-only blocks across CMS platforms. Marco Fernandes and Thor Andre Gretland, representatives of the 45-person agency based in Europe, are also part of the Drupal Gutenberg project that brings WordPress’ open source editor to Drupal via an…
WordPress has officially ended support for PHP 5.2 – 5.5 and bumped its minimum required PHP version to 5.6. The plan announced last December was to bump the minimum required version in early 2019 and, depending on the results, bump it again to PHP 7 in December 2019. Sites on PHP 5.5 or earlier can…
Gutenberg 5.3 was released today with basic block management, a feature that will be included in WordPress 5.2. It is a new modal that can be launched from the vertical ellipses menu, inspired by Rich Tabor’s CoBlocks implementation. Users can turn individual blocks on/off or even entire sections, such as Common Blocks, Formatting, and Embeds.…
The 11th edition of WordCamp Miami was held this past weekend, a three-day event that featured multiple learning workshops and six different tracks. The speaker ratio was 50% male and 50% female, and nearly half of the speakers were new to WordCamp Miami. Another great year of amazing, diverse speakers! #WCMIA #WordPress pic.twitter.com/e2smmCpPAF — WordCamp…
WordPress contributor teams have shipped several new tools for theme developers in the past couple weeks, which have the potential to raise the quality of new themes coming into the ecosystem. The Theme Sniffer plugin is a new effort from the Theme Review team that uses custom sniffs for PHP_CodeSniffer to test a theme against…
At WordCamp Nordic’s contributor day I had the opportunity to chat with Andrey “Rarst” Savchenko about WordPress’ Date/Time component, the code that manages date, time, and timezone functionality. Savchenko is one of the maintainers of this lesser-known component, which includes code that dates back to PHP 4 times. After volunteering for years in the WordPress…
GitHub users may soon be able to contribute to projects on behalf of an organization. This feature has often been requested by developers who are contributing on behalf of their employers. “Corporate contributions to the third-party open source projects can still be a source of friction and ambiguity,” GitHub Product Manager Ben Balter said. “We’re…
10up has released a GitHub Action that enables developers to deploy to the WordPress.org Plugin repository by tagging a new version on GitHub. Helen Hou-Sandí, 10up’s Director of Open Source Initiatives, explained how it works: You’ll be able to manage your entire development lifecycle in GitHub—no more futzing with local Bash scripts or controlling commit/push…
WordCamp Miami (WCMIA) is heading into its 11th year running this weekend, making it one of the longest running non-profit tech conferences in South Florida. Known for its many learning opportunities and workshops, the event spans three days from March 15 – 17 at Florida International University. For the vast majority of the WordPress world…
Last week Automattic published a video titled “A meditation on the open web” that calls out Facebook as the antithesis of the open web: As you get closer the air gets smoggier and you realize it’s a vast metropolis. It’s surrounded by high concrete walls, completely contained. Inside it’s bustling, lots of honking traffic, people…