While attending WordCamp Grand Rapids I had the opportunity to interview developers and business owners about their first impressions of the new Gutenberg editor. Many attendees I spoke to had not yet heard of the project but were intrigued and decided to install the plugin on a test site. A few attendees were developers who…
The 4th edition of WordCamp Grand Rapids was held last weekend at Grand Valley State University’s downtown Pew Campus. After a brief hiatus following previous events in 2012, 2013, and 2014, the WordCamp is back in action with first-time lead organizer Cate DeRosia at the helm. Tickets sold out shortly before the event and the…
Gutenberg 1.0.0 was released this week as another iteration in the beta period that will continue on with 1.1 next week. Design lead Tammie Lister said the team decided “not let numbers set expectations” and will carry on at the same pace with weekly releases. One of the most visible UI updates in version 1.0…
Although WordPress core currently maintains backwards compatibility with PHP 5.2.4+, plugin and theme authors are not required to do so. When developers include features that require more recent versions of PHP, it can break sites or cause otherwise unexpected behavior. As part of a larger effort to encourage users to upgrade their PHP versions, WordPress.org…
Matt Mullenweg published an appeal to WordPress users over the weekend in a post titled “We Called it Gutenberg for a Reason.” In it he offers a better look at his vision for Gutenberg, which he contends will be as transformative for WordPress’ future as the first movable type printing was for Europe’s printing revolution.…
WordPress 3.7 ‘Basie’ was released on October 24, 2013 and introduced automatic updates for minor releases to the masses. Although it’s not labeled as such, WordPress 3.7 has effectively acted as a LTS version or Long-term support. Security updates and crucial bug fixes have been ported back to previous branches up to 3.7. In this…
Every now and then, I’ll come across a user experience in WordPress that makes me scratch my head. Earlier today, I needed to edit a comment’s details before restoring it from the Trash. However, WordPress doesn’t allow this without restoring it first. After restoring the comment, it disappeared from the trash and nothing happened. This…
Over the years, I’ve received requests from people wanting their comments removed from the site. I recently received a request from a reader that I remove a comment they made three years ago because it was showing up in Google search results for their name. Normally, I ignore these requests as it makes me feel…
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I discuss a new initiative that will help educate users on the benefits of upgrading PHP. We share our thoughts on Facebook denying a request to remove its Patent clause from REACT’s license. We highlight a new onboarding wizard aimed at themes and discuss what Gutenberg means for…
As work continues on Gutenberg, members of the community are discussing its impacts on WordPress’ future. Morten Rand-Hendriksen considers Gutenberg to be a watershed moment, “This is a revolution,” he said. “This is a watershed moment for WordPress. This is entirely new and fundamentally different from how WordPress works and how we work with it…
Last month React users petitioned Facebook to relicense the project (and its other open source projects) after the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) added Facebook’s BSD+Patents license to its Category X list of disallowed licenses for Apache PMC members. Participants and subscribers to the GitHub thread waited weeks for a decision on re-licensing while Facebook’s engineering…
WordPress’ Core PHP team has created a new GitHub organization for initiatives focused on improving the use of PHP in the project. The first one they are tackling is a new page on WordPress.org dedicated to educating users about the benefits of upgrading PHP. Contributors are collecting third-party articles and tutorials on PHP upgrades to…
Google Search Console has started sending out notices to sites that have not yet migrated to HTTPS. Chrome 61 is now in beta and version 62 is on track to begin marking HTTP pages as “NOT SECURE” beginning in October. It will show the warning if it detects any forms on the page that transmit…
ThemeBeans founder Rich Tabor released Merlin WP on GitHub in public beta this week. The project provides a beautiful experience for installing and setting up WordPress themes with all of their plugin dependencies, Customizer settings, widgets, demo content, and more. “I was inspired by David Baker’s Envato Theme Setup Wizard and was working to add…
Over the past few months, reviews for Gutenberg have trended towards a love/hate relationship without much in between. To figure out why this is, Millie Macdonald and Anna Harrison of Ephox, the company behind TinyMCE, analyzed the feedback and concluded that many of the issues likely stem from timing. “In short, the nuances in the…