The first beta for WooCommerce 4.3 was released yesterday. The team behind the popular eCommerce plugin added a new homepage screen, updated the product grid blocks, and is pushing users to update their version of PHP. Users who want to test the latest beta version can do so by grabbing the ZIP file from WordPress.org…
Review Signal founder Kevin Ohashi has published the site’s annual WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks for 2020, along with a smaller set of benchmarks for WooCommerce hosting. For the past seven years Ohashi has been using sentiment analysis to capture consumer reviews of hosting companies on Twitter. He also performs a set of tests to measure peak…
Yoast, the company behind the popular Yoast SEO plugin, announced it had acquired the Duplicate Post plugin earlier today. Along with the acquisition of the project, the company brought on its creator, Enrico Battocchi, as a senior developer. He will continue in a lead role with the future development of the plugin. Duplicate Post currently…
The quest for the perfect form plugin is nearly as old as WordPress. Projects have come and gone. There are some great form plugins out there, but far too often the choices are between massive builders that do things their own way and solutions so simple that they do not quite live up to expectations.…
Late last week WordPress made major progress towards the goal of getting users to adopt newer versions of PHP. The ServeHappy API has been updated to set the minimum acceptable PHP version to 7.2, while the WordPress downloads page recommends 7.3 or newer. Sergey Biryukov committed this change on the meta trac after Marius Jensen…
Like many tech conferences, OpenJS World 2020 was forced to go virtual for its upcoming event scheduled for June 23-24, in Austin. The global conference was designed to be representative of all 32 projects hosted with the OpenJS Foundation. This includes Node.js, webpack, jQuery, Mocha, ESLint, Lodash, Grunt, and other popular projects. The Foundation is also…
Yesterday, the Gutenberg team released version 8.3 of the ongoing plugin behind the block editor. While much of the focus for the team is on the upcoming full-site editing, this update includes several user-facing features, such as a reorganized set of block categories, a parent block selector, a spacing control, and link color options. One…
The Gutenberg team is currently immersed in bringing full-site editing capabilities to the block editor as part of Phase 2 in the project’s longterm roadmap. Meanwhile, Gutenberg engineer Riad Benguella has been experimenting with ideas for the collaboration features coming in Phase 3, which aims to deliver a more intuitive way to co-author content. Today,…
A fake ransomware scam is going around that targets website contact forms. It sends an email to the site owner with the subject “Your Site Has Been Hacked.” The body of the email claims the hackers have exploited a vulnerability to gain access to the site’s database and “move the information to an offshore server.”…
Highrise Digital is set to host the first of a new video series under the banner of WP Café. The first episode will begin at 11 am BST (10 am UTC) on June 11, which will be a discussion on building WordPress themes in the new era of the block editor. Highrise Digital is a…
This week the web is celebrating 25 years since Rasmus Lerdorf released version 1.0 of his “Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools).” PHP is now used by 78.9% of all the websites whose server-side programming language W3Techs can detect. (This includes sites in the Alexa top 10 million or in the Tranco top 1 million list.)…
Full-site editing is a mere half a year away from becoming a reality. The feature is expected to land in WordPress 5.6, scheduled for release in December. To prepare theme authors for this upcoming change, Carolina Nymark has created a new website and training course, aptly titled Full Site Editing. Nymark has been a long-time…
One of the most exciting parts of Matt Mullenweg’s session at WordCamp Europe 2020 Online was the live demo of the new image editing tools that will land in the next release of the Gutenberg plugin. The video is already available on WordPress.tv (and embedded below). At the 8:30 mark, Mullenweg and Matías Ventura, lead…
Over the past few weeks, I have had the GenerateBlocks plugin sitting in my test environment. I have built a few layouts with it, tinkering with the plugin between other projects. The one thing I kept thinking was that it had huge potential. Aside from a couple of issues, I began enjoying the plugin more…
I wish we lived in a world in which we could discuss code each day, not allowing political1 opinions to seep into the discourse. We could talk about the next exciting project around the corner. We could chat about a small startup getting its first big break or new investments into WordPress companies. However, I…