Feross Aboukhadijeh, maintainer of StandardJS, has formally ended the funding experiment he started lasted week, which inserted ads in the terminal whenever Standard 14 is installed. Although the experiment met widespread aversion, it successfully captured public attention and put a spotlight on the critical need for a viable model of funding open source infrastructure. It…
Gutenberg 6.4 arrived this week with two more improvements to the Cover block. The background can now be set to a solid color (in addition to images and videos). Users can also easily resize the block, making it far more useful for those who are designing their own pages. One notable change to Image block…
Feross Aboukhadijeh, maintainer of the StandardJS library, a JavaScript style guide, linter, and automatic code fixer, launched an experiment last week that places ads in the terminal in order to fund development. The experiment has since been paused after receiving negative feedback from the developer community, causing Linode, one of the initial sponsors, to remove…
The team behind Pootlepress has launched a new website that displays the top 50 WordPress plugins by downloads per day. It uses the WordPress.org Plugin API to pull the previous day’s download stats from plugins hosted in the directory. The site also shows the average rating as a percent in the right-hand column. As one…
Over the weekend, Micro.blog added Tumblr cross-posting to its service in response to Automattic’s acquisition of the company. Micro.blog users can now elect to have their blog posts automatically syndicated to Tumblr. Although Tumblr is somewhat of a competitor to Micro.blog’s social networking and microblogging service, founder Manton Reece said he sees Tumblr as more…
phpCE, a central European PHP conference that was previously scheduled for October 4-6, has been cancelled due to a public fiasco resulting from a lack of gender diversity in the speaker lineup. The event, previously known as PHPCon Poland, was set to be held in Dresden, Germany, after the concept changed last year to rotate…
The latest version of Chrome (76) shipped with a new “loading” attribute that allows developers to specify resources, such as images and iframes, to defer loading until the user scrolls nearer to them. In the past, developers have used third-party libraries to achieve lazy loading but soon this will no longer be necessary, as more…
Last month the WordPress Theme Review Team took action to curb obtrusive admin notices, requiring all themes to use the admin_notices API and follow the core design pattern. Prior to this rule going into effect, many themes would commonly display a large, branded notice upon activation. Sometimes these came with a prompt to install more…
WordPress 5.3 release dates were confirmed this week. The timeline has the official release arriving November 12, 2019, with a decent margin of time to avoid WordCamp US (early November) and the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday week at the end of November. Beta 1 is expected September 23 and a Release Candidate is scheduled to follow…
WordPress contributors from around the world joined in a lively meeting yesterday to continue the discussion regarding the proposal to auto-update old sites to version 4.7 in a controlled rollout. The idea is that sites would gradually update from one major version to the next (not all at once). The discussion was led by WordPress…
The University of Helsinki is offering its “Deep Dive Into Modern Web Development” course online for free. It provides an introduction to JavaScript-based web development with React, Redux, Node.js, MongoDB, and GraphQL. Participants will learn the basics of building single page applications with ReactJS. This course is the same as the Full Stack course that…
Gutenberg users are requesting an easy way to add a nofollow attribute to links in the block editor. Users can currently toggle a setting to designate a link to open in a new tab, but a similarly user-friendly option for adding a nofollow attribute is not yet available. Requests have come in across multiple issues…
Fabrica Dashboard is a relatively new plugin released earlier this year by the team at Yes We Work, after a long beta and extensive internal use on their own projects. The plugin revamps WordPress’ default Dashboard screen to display information that is useful for multi-user editorial sites, highlighting content, activity, and engagement. New dashboard widgets…
The Joomla World Conference in London, planned for November 2019, has been cancelled. Joomla’s Board of Directors announced the cancellation at the end of July, citing the updated October 31, 2019, Brexit deadline as the primary reason: Last week the new UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson has been elected with a mandate to ensure Brexit…
For five days next week, from August 19-23, the inaugural event of The Great WP Virtual Summit will be taking place. Conceived by South African based WordPress developer Anchen le Roux, the summit aims to bring together experts from various fields within the WordPress ecosystem to share their knowledge over the five days I reached…