Automattic has acquired Zero BS CRM, a free plugin with more than 30 commercial extensions that provide deeper integrations with third-party services. Zero BS was co-founded by a two-person team that includes Mike Stott and Woody Hayday. The team marketed the plugin as a “no-nonsense CRM” and have been operating it with a successful subscription-based…
Major accessibility improvements are the headline feature of this week’s Gutenberg plugin release. Version 6.3 introduces new Navigation and Editor modes to address long-standing problems navigating the block UI with a screen reader. The editor is now loaded in Navigation mode by default. Riad Benguella described it as “an important milestone in terms of accessibility…
After several months of discussion, WordPress.org’s Theme Review Team has decided to discontinue the Trusted Authors (TA) Program that launched in April 2018. The program, which was controversial from its inception, allowed certain authors to bypass the normal theme review queue after demonstrating an ability to submit themes with fewer than three issues. Trusted Author…
WP Tavern is hiring full-time writers. We are looking for reporters with the ability to write WordPress news every day, covering a wide range of topics, including (but not limited to) Gutenberg, core development, community, open source software, plugin and theme ecosystems, Tumblr, developer trends, and the open web. The position requires the ability to…
David Bisset launched mycamp.rocks today, a newsletter targeted at conference organizers, speakers, and attendees. The WordPress newsletter landscape is currently dominated by general industry and developer news digests, such as Master WP, WpMail.me, Post Status, and The WP Daily. mycamp.rocks is the first newsletter to drill down into community event topics and will be sending…
Automattic has acquired Tumblr, a long-time friendly rival company, for an undisclosed sum. Just six years after Yahoo acquired Tumblr for $1.1 billion, the company is said to have been acquired for “a nominal amount” from Verizon, who indirectly acquired Tumblr when it bought Yahoo in 2017. Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg declined to comment on…
WooCommerce 3.7 was released today after four months in development. This minor release is backwards compatible with previous versions. Despite containing more than 1,290 commits, 3.7 is smaller than previous releases, as the WooCommerce team is working towards delivering more frequent releases to improve the stability of the platform. WooCommerce 3.7 bundles updates from the…
BuddyPress 5.0 will include a way for developers to organize their blocks under a BuddyPress blocks category. Mathieu Viet shared a code example on the BuddyPress Dev Updates blog, demonstrating how to set the category property of a block to BuddyPress when registering a block type. The blocks registered with this category will appear under…
Kirki is a free open-source (MIT-licensed) framework built for developers who are looking to add Customizer Controls to their themes or plugins. Aristeides Stathopoulos, Kirki’s lead developer has been working on the framework since 2014. Thanks to the continuous updates and improvements, Kirki has built a community on Github which includes over 1000 stars and…
WordPress contributors, developers, and community members are currently debating a proposal to would implement a new policy regarding security support for older versions. The discussion began last week when security team lead Jake Spurlock asked for feedback on different approaches to backporting security fixes to older versions. Following up on this discussion, Ian Dunn, a…
Jetpack 7.6 was released this week with several improvements to the plugin’s AMP compatibility. Automattic was one of the earliest publishing partners on Google’s AMP project, as well as the original author of the official AMP plugin for WordPress. This release makes three more Jetpack features compatible with AMP: Related Posts now display on AMP…
EditorsKit 1.9 was released this week with a new Block Styling feature for the image and cover blocks. It allows users to change these blocks to be displayed as circular, diagonal, inverted diagonal, rounded corners, or with a shadow. It also adds a “full screen height” display option to the Advanced block settings panel. This…
The first-ever WordCamp Long Beach is happening October 5-6 at the Pointe Conference Center at Walter Pyramid (CSULB). Organizers are planning to host practical, skill-building talks and panels, abstract discussions, and networking events at locally-owned eateries. The event will be the only WordCamp happening in Los Angeles county this year. Last week organizers opened the…
If you are following the JAMstack (JavaScript, APIs, and markup) craze and want to learn more about the history and best practices of the architecture, O’Reilly has published a short book called Modern Web Development on the JAMstack that is now available as a free download. Netlify CEO Mathias Biilmann, who coined the term “JAMstack”…
WordPress contributors are weighing in on a proposal for the formation of a nomination-based advisory board with set term limits for its members. Josepha Haden, the project’s Executive Director, published a first draft two weeks ago with ideas for how the board might operate and feedback is rolling in. WordPress experimented with a growth council…