WordPress 6.2 RC 1 was released today, marking the hard string freeze and readiness for translation ahead of the official release on March 28. There are three weeks remaining for testing. WordPress contributors published the 6.2 Field Guide, which includes the dev notes – technical updates for many of the new features and changes included…
Lemmony is a new WordPress block theme designed by the team at Shufflehound, a theme development company based in Europe with commercial products on Themeforest. This is the team’s first block theme on WordPress.org and it is a strong debut. Lemmony is a beautifully-designed multipurpose theme that would work well for businesses, agencies, and portfolio…
Jetpack 11.9 was released this week with support for sharing posts to Mastodon. The new button allows readers to click an icon to launch a sharing window that will ask the user to enter the full URL of the Mastodon instance where they want to share the post. Adding the URL will update the window…
WP Engine is beta testing its new Pattern Manager plugin for creating and maintaining patterns. The plugin is intended for WordPress professionals – developers, agencies, and freelancers, who could benefit from having an interface and system for pattern management. “There are some plugins out there that provide an interface for creating patterns on a production…
WordPress contributors have updated the legacy default themes to bundle Google Fonts locally in the theme folder, instead of loading them from Google’s servers. In years past, loading fonts from the the Google CDN was the recommended practice for performance reasons, but new privacy concerns have emerged following a German court case, which fined a website…
If you’re not yet excited about the upcoming WordPress 6.2 release, you will be after watching the new live demo product video that was recorded last week. The demo was presented by Anne McCarthy and Rich Tabor, and moderated by Nathan Wrigley. The team used a beautifully customized version of the default Twenty Twenty-Three theme,…
Representatives of the WordPress Themes Team are looking to carry forward the momentum contributors found in creating the Twenty Twenty-Three theme’s style variations by launching a new Community Themes initiative. Leading up to WordPress 6.1’s release, 19 designers from eight countries built 38 unique style variations, and 10 were selected to ship with the release.…
Last month’s Twitter outage gave Mastodon a boost, as the company also announced unpopular changes to its API access. People from the WordPress community continue to trickle into the fediverse, with many going so far as to shutter their Twitter accounts. A fledgling community of WordPress users on Mastodon has made the network home and…
MonetizeMore, an ad revenue optimization company, has acquired the Advanced Ads plugin and will be hiring the team behind the products. The plugin’s ad management tools are used by more than 150,000 websites to create, display, and rotate ad units, as well as schedule and target ads based on preset conditions. It integrates with many…
Wordfence has published the details of two stored XSS vulnerabilities the company responsibly disclosed to the developers of the All In One SEO plugin in January 2023. The vulnerabilities potentially impacted more than 3 million users on versions 4.2.9 and earlier. One vulnerability, which received a 6.4 (Medium) CVSS score, Wordfence attributes to insufficient input…
WordPress 6.2’s Openverse integration is getting some last minute changes after contributors expressed concerns about it hotlinking images by default. The new feature allows users to quickly insert free, openly-licensed media into their content. It also allows users to upload external images through a button in the block toolbar, but this creates an extra step…
Gutenberg 15.2 is now available with support for revisions when editing templates and template parts. The Site Editor can be an intimidating place if you’re new to making changes there. A few clicks can make a drastic impact and some users won’t know how to return to where they started. Surfacing the revisions panel gives…
WordPress 6.2 is set to introduce an integration with Openverse that allows users to quickly insert free, openly-licensed media into their content. It was not readily apparent when the feature made its debut in version 15.1 of the Gutenberg plugin that the inserted images are hotlinked. WP Engine developer Phil Johnston brought up this issue…
The Prison Journalism Project (PJP), a non-profit organization founded in April 2020, trains incarcerated writers to be journalists and publishes their stories with the goal of empowering them to be a vital voice in criminal justice reform. Over the past three years, the project has published over 1,700 pieces of work from more than 600…
Automattic has a new theme in the WordPress Themes Directory. Bibimbap, named for a beloved Korean comfort food, is a restaurant theme. It is described as “simple and fun” but does not come with a live demo, so users will need to be prepared to work with patterns to get their restaurant sites put together.…