In February 2023, James Giroux founded TeamWP, a project that aims to advocate for open, people-first workplaces in the WordPress ecosystem. His first initiative was to launch the Team Experience Index, a benchmark employee engagement survey designed specifically for people working in the world of WordPress. “The distributed nature of WordPress companies means they often…
As more WordPress plugins for AI-generated content and images, chatbots, and assistants, are landing in the official directory, developers are beginning to explore even deeper integration with the block editor. Moving beyond the prototypical content generators that are cobbled together into a plugin, the tools developers are experimenting with today will provide a more deeply…
Gutenberg 15.5 was released this week with more new features and refinements to WordPress’ full-site editing capabilities. The project will soon be moving on to Phase 3 with real-time collaboration on the roadmap, but there are still many improvements on the way for the Site Editor and core blocks. This release introduces experimental support for…
Support for the WordPress mobile apps is moving to the WordPress.org forums. Previously, users were routed to WordPress.com, even those who were self-hosted, and Automattic employees handled support tickets related to the mobile apps. This move to WordPress.org is part of an effort to disentangle the official WordPress mobile apps from Automattic’s services. In July…
The Preferred Languages project is gaining some momentum with this week’s 2.0 release of the feature plugin. In 2017, WordPress Core Committer Pascal Birchler released a prototype that lets users select multiple preferred languages in their settings so that WordPress will load the first translation available, falling back to the next language in the list.…
ACF (Advanced Custom Fields) version 6.1 was released this week with support for creating Custom Post Types and Taxonomies. This is a long-awaited feature that users have been asking for since the earliest days of the plugin when it was still developed by its original author, Elliot Condon. When Delicious Brains acquired the plugin, the…
iThemes, one of the oldest brands in WordPress that originally launched around theme products nearly 15 years ago, is rebranding to SolidWP. Over the years, the company’s products became increasingly centered on plugins, yet the old brand had so much name recognition that its leadership was not quick to change it. “iThemes is known today…
Twitter suspended WordPress.com’s access to the Twitter API without notice yesterday. Representatives at WordPress.com do not know why their access is currently blocked but are working to regain it. The API enables features like Jetpack Social’s Twitter connection. Users who rely on this Jetpack module to auto-tweet their published posts will see errors in the…
Designer and developer Anders Norén has released a new free block theme called Abisko, created to fully support the new design features available in the latest WordPress 6.2 release. The theme was named for one of Norén’s favorite stomping grounds, Abisko national park, where he hikes every summer. Abisko places a strong emphasis on both…
WooCommerce has announced a 24-hour virtual contributor day that will happen on April 19, 2023. Contributors will be working on the WooCommerce Core and WooCommerce Blocks repositories. To give better coverage over time zones, organizers will have two kickoff times (0 UTC and 12 UTC). WooCommerce hasn’t had a WooConf in-person conference since 2017, opting instead for virtual events…
Over the past year a group of WordPress contributors have been working on making it easier for developers to build interactive blocks. These are the kinds of experiences that allow visitors to submit a form and get feedback without reloading the page, load paginated content without refreshing, and improve e-commerce stores with more dynamic responses…
WordPress 6.2 “Dolphy” was released today, named in honor of American jazz alto saxophonist, bass clarinetist, and flautist Eric Allan Dolphy Jr. This is the first of three planned major releases in 2023. It includes more than 900 enhancements and bug fixes, with a strong focus on improving the site editing experience. One of the major…
WP Engine’s Pattern Manager is now available in the WordPress Plugins Directory. The plugin gives WordPress professionals a dedicated interface for browsing, designing, and organizing patterns with categories, keywords, descriptions, and more. It is still in beta and not recommended for use in production. Although it can be used on a lived website, the plugin’s…
WordPress 6.2 was scheduled for release today, but contributors discovered a bug with date formats during the 24-hour freeze that they believe could have a significant impact on functionality like bookings, date permalinks, and e-commerce stores. The decision was made this morning to delay with a consensus to apply a revert and release a silent…
Gutenberg Phase 3 is officially in the planning stage, as the Site Editor is set to exit the beta in 6.2 and the major tasks of Phase 2 are nearing completion. Gutenberg lead architect Matias Ventura published a preliminary outline of what is planned to be included in the next “Collaboration” phase of the project.…