The Jetpack team announced today that its search service is now available as a separate package from the professional bundle it was previously under. The move should make it more affordable for small sites to use the service. Larger sites might have to shell out more money, depending on how much content is on the…
Denis Žoljom, the automation representative for the WordPress theme review team, proposed moving much of the theme review system over to GitHub. The idea is to move the interactive parts of the review away from the current system. The proposal claims such a move would streamline the process via automated tools and make the manual,…
On Wednesday, Garret Hyder announced a feature proposal for a WordPress Consent API. The proposal is one step on the larger privacy roadmap for core. If merged into WordPress, it would establish a standard method for core, plugins, and themes to obtain consent for various privacy-related features. The idea is to create a consistent experience…
Have I mentioned how excited I am about the potential of block patterns? For regular Tavern readers, I may sound like a broken record at this point, but I am going to continue evangelizing this upcoming feature for WordPress. With no social plans or other important things requiring my attention this past weekend, it made…
The team behind BuddyPress dropped the first version 6.0 beta release of the plugin yesterday. One of the most important features is the introduction of the new member and group blocks for the WordPress editor. The plugin now requires at least PHP 5.6 and WordPress 4.8 (5.0 to use the new blocks). “I think it’s…
WordPress 5.4 “Adderley”, named in honor American jazz musician Nat Adderley, was released today and is now available for download. The update includes new social icons and buttons blocks, usability improvements to the block editor, and new APIs for developers to use in plugins and themes. This release saw contributions from 168 new volunteers. There…
WordPress is a dinosaur. If you are a PHP programmer and have had the opportunity to work outside of WordPress in the past 10 years, there are likely one or two or a few dozen things that frustrate you when diving back into the project’s 16-year-old codebase. At a time when WordPress is gifting JavaScript…
On Monday, the Font Awesome team launched a new set of icons to promote awareness around COVID-19. The solid icons available in the Font Awesome 5.13 update are all available for free and are open-source. The regular, light, and duotone versions of the icons are a part of the pro package. The goal of the…
Version 7.8 of the Gutenberg plugin landed yesterday. The team continues to improve the editor with the refreshed interface work that began in version 7.7. The most useful feature with this update of the plugin is the inclusion of the Patterns API for plugin and theme developers. This release is not the massive feature release…
There is a popular saying, which has been used in several memes, among my developer and remote-working friend groups. It goes something like the following: Government and Doctors: Practice physical distancing during this pandemic. Remote Workers: I’ve been preparing my whole life for this moment. I got this. The truth is that we don’t “got…
Yoast, the company behind the popular Yoast SEO plugin, launched its free block editor training course today. The course is available to anyone by signing up for Yoast Academy, which also includes multiple other free and paid courses. Users can learn everything from SEO and copy writing to basic WordPress skills. The Academy team’s latest…
It was about a year ago. I was happily designing a theme for aspiring novelists. I wanted to get ahead of the competition and market a theme specifically to writers who would be attempting the National Novel Writing Month 2019 challenge. NaNoWriMo, for short, is a whirlwind of a month where 1,000s of people from…
It has been a bit of a slow news week in the land of WordPress with the COVID-19 pandemic reaching across the globe. Most people are hunkering down or getting accustomed to a change in their daily lives. For some people, that has meant figuring out a way to work with children at home. For…
The Gutenberg project and its eventual full-site editing feature is coming upon a major issue that will need to be solved. Block-based themes of the future are currently on a path toward a template system that will comprise of plain HTML files. While that will work for the majority of a theme’s output, the trouble…
Meta Box released its MB Views add-on plugin last week. The new extension allows developers to build custom templates from the comfort of their WordPress admin. The goal is to provide an easy-to-use interface for outputting custom fields without editing theme files, but its flexibility pushes the boundaries of full-site editing. Quick take: MB Views…