Matt Mullenweg has announced a plan for releasing WordPress 5.0 with a tentative estimate for a release candidate to ship in November. “With known knowns and known unknowns, I believe we will be at RC in about a month,” Mullenweg said. “However, I’ll be keeping a close eye on feedback during the beta process and…
DigitalOcean, along with GitHub and new partner Twilio, are sponsoring the 5th annual Hacktoberfest. The event was created to encourage participants to make meaningful contributions to open source projects. Last year 31,901 completed the challenge, opening 239,164 pull requests in 64,166 repositories. In previous years, participants were required to submit four pull requests to GitHub-hosted…
The first batch of tickets for WordCamp Europe 2019 were released early this morning and all 250 standard tickets sold out within three hours and nine minutes. Berlin won out as the next city to host the camp, in part due to the region’s strong local WordPress community. The city is international, diverse, and easily…
WordCamp Tokyo 2018 was held two weeks ago on September 14-15 and recordings of the sessions should be published to WordPress.tv soon. The theme of the WordCamp was “Challenge!”, a celebration of the challenges the WordPress project has overcome over the past 15 years, as well as a rallying call for embracing the challenges introduced…
WordPress theme developers are starting to advertise their themes as being compatible with Gutenberg, ahead of the new editor’s imminent merge into core. Work on the 5.0 release may be ramping up sooner than expected after yesterday’s announcement that 4.9.9 may be a quick release for PHP 7.3 compatibility or possibly cancelled altogether. Themeforest, the…
Lyft has open sourced its color algorithm for creating an accessible color system. The company’s design team also packaged the algorithm as a web tool called ColorBox. It makes it easy for anyone to produce color sets with accessible contrast ratios, as outlined in the WCAG 2.0 standards. “We made accessibility a cornerstone of our…
The plans for WordPress 4.9.9 are currently in limbo after today’s core developers’ chat. Here’s what we know right now: Discussions are underway regarding making it a quick PHP 7.3 compatibility release or cancelling it in favor of moving ahead with the 5.0 release cycle. “Progress and communication on 4.9.9 has been very vague as…
In February 2017, Creative Commons launched the beta version of its new multi-source search tool, built on a lean budget by a single contractor over seven months. Since that time a new tech team has taken over the project to further the mission of finding and indexing all 1.4 billion+ CC-licensed works on the web.…
Gutenberg 3.9 was released last week with a new feature that allows users to group multiple blocks into reusable templates. The templates can also be exported and imported as a JSON file. The idea of reusable templates is an expansion of the concept of dynamic reusable blocks that Gutenberg technical lead Matias Ventura proposed in…
Milan Dinić, a WordPress developer based in Serbia, has released his commonWP plugin that enables WordPress sites to use the free, public jsDelivr CDN. Last year jsDelivr was revamped to allow any file from GitHub and npm to be served by the CDN. WordPress’ mirror on GitHub made it possible for Dinić to create a…
Matt Mullenweg tweeted out a link to Gutenstats.blog this evening, a new site dedicated to tracking Gutenberg beta testing data. The site shows there are currently more than 420,000 active installations of Gutenberg, a slightly more precise number than reported on the WordPress.org plugin page (400K+). Gutenstats also tracked 213,000 posts written with the new…
ACF version 5.0 landed on WordPress.org this week with Gutenberg compatibility now available for more than one million sites where the plugin is active. The release is a welcome update for developers who were concerned about what would happen in real world usage of Gutenberg on sites with ACF-powered customizations. ACF’s Gutenberg compatibility is arriving…
WPForms has acquired Pirate Forms, a popular WordPress contact form and SMTP plugin originally created by ThemeIsle in 2015. The announcement coincides with International Talk Like a Pirate Day but the pirate branding of the plugin is set to be retired and its users will be given the option to migrate to WPForms. Pirate Forms…
The team at Big Bite Creative has developed a new website for Amnesty International using Gutenberg, soon to be launched at amnesty.eu. The agency worked in partnership with WordPress.com VIP to provide the London-based human rights organization with the tools to create multiple sites that could be uniquely customized for their editorial needs. After successfully…
During their presentation at Drupal Europe, the Frontkom team behind the Drupal Gutenberg project announced that they are working on a block management system called Gutenberg Cloud, a collective library of blocks online. The library will offer a content repository for custom Gutenberg blocks, such as forms, a call-to-action section, product grid, or even a…