The Gutenberg team has officially responded to recent concerns about the new editor’s accessibility. Matias Ventura, the project’s technical lead, published a post with examples of the accessibility efforts the team has made, many which may not be easy to discover. These include features such as keyboard shortcuts, slash command and insertion, high-contrast mode, and…
Product designer Dave Martin has published a free video course called JavaScript for Designers. The course is made up of 46 bite-sized videos that walk students through the basics via a hands-on tutorial for building an interactive HTML prototype. Martin said he created the course specifically for designers who have been putting off learning how…
Discussion surrounding Gutenberg’s independent accessibility audit is heating up. Two weeks ago, Matthew MacPherson, who was named WordPress 5.0’s new accessibility lead, proposed the audit and agreed to it being performed by an independent third party. The audit had gained strong support among accessibility contributors and others following the ticket. After soliciting detailed proposals from…
Advanced Custom Fields is now actively testing its new block creation feature in ACF 5.8 beta 1, released this week. ACF Blocks is a feature aimed at PHP developers who have not taken the deep dive into JavaScript yet. It essentially offers a shortcut to creating custom blocks using PHP and HTML instead of JavaScript.…
Contributors to WordPress’ core Privacy component are collaborating on a V2 roadmap to address broader privacy and data protection issues that fall outside of legal requirements. The group organized at the beginning of the year to work on GDPR-specific objectives but has since expanded its scope to tackle concerns that are not attached to any…
WordCamp For Publishers’ distributed organizing team is looking for a new host city in 2019. The industry-focused camp gathers together professionals who use WordPress to manage publications. This year’s successful event hosted speakers who highlighted important topics, such as ethics in journalism, the open web, AMP, Gutenberg, and communication between tech and editorial teams. The…
Riad Benguella, the technical lead for phase 2 of the Gutenberg project, has published an educational resource to help WordPress developers get started building JavaScript plugins. The WordPress JavaScript Plugin Starter is unique in that it is built as a tutorial, not just a boilerplate. The GitHub repo contains eight commits that have been structured…
After many years of planning, WordPress’ Nordic communities are finally getting a regional WordCamp. The first WordCamp Nordic 2019 is set to be held in Helsinki, Finland the weekend of March 7-8 at the Paasitorni Congress Center. “Some folks from the Norwegian community came up with idea in 2016,” lead organizer Marco Martins said. “Then…
A pre-release of Gutenberg 4.0 RC 1 is now available for testing. During today’s core developer chat, Matias Ventura, the project’s technical lead, said he plans to post a full changelog and a video tomorrow. In the meantime, a call for testing 4.0 RC 1 has been posted to the make.wordpress.org/test blog with a list…
Jetpack 6.6 was released today with an update to the Site Verification tools that enables one-click verification and sitemap.xml registration with Google. This release also introduces the beta of Jetpack’s Asset CDN. The new module, built on the same infrastructure as the Photon CDN, speeds up sites by cloud-hosting widely-used Jetpack and core WordPress scripts,…
WordPress Accessibility Team lead Rian Rietveld has resigned due to what she describes as political complications and problems with working on Gutenberg accessibility. “The last year, especially the last few weeks have been too politically complicated for me,” Rietveld said. “It’s better that someone else takes the lead now.” Her post outlines challenges the accessibility…
When the News of Pelham became another casualty of the blighted newspaper industry, student journalist contributors lost a platform for their voices to be heard. Their advisor, Rich Zahradnik, called a meeting to address the paper’s closure. More than a dozen middle and high school kids showed up and decided to start their own paper:…
WooSesh, the virtual WooCommerce conference, is now less than two weeks away. The two-day event will be held October 18-19 and is free for all attendees who join the livestream. Organizers Patrick Rauland and Brian Richards published the schedule this week with descriptions for each session. Day 1 will feature speakers on a variety of…
Many WordPress theme shops started out with themes as their only products but over the years have moved into selling plugins that enhance their core products. This came about partially because theming standards evolved to encourage developers to put non-presentational functionality into plugins. For many, the revenue from plugins quickly eclipsed that of their theme…
A tentative 5.0 release schedule was published during today’s core dev chat. The official release is targeted for November 19, 2018 with beta 1 expected October 19 and RC 1 released October 30. In addition to getting Gutenberg merged into core, the scope for 5.0 includes a few new items that Gary Pendergast outlined in…