WordPress 6.2 Beta 1 was released on time today, and can be tested by using the WordPress Beta Tester plugin or downloaded directly. In just seven weeks, the upcoming major release will roll in the last nine Gutenberg plugin releases, which account for 292 editor enhancements and 354 bug fixes. The beta 1 announcement confirms that WordPress…
During the most recent BuddyPress development meeting, contributors decided to focus the upcoming 12.0 release on merging the BP Rewrites feature plugin into core. This plugin is the result of a ten-year-old effort to migrate BuddyPress’ custom URI parser to use WordPress’ Rewrite API. One year ago, BP Rewrites went into beta. It’s not certain how…
Beginning February 9, 2023, Twitter will turn off free access to its APIs. The company announced yesterday that it will be offering “a paid basic tier” with more details coming next week. In response to a user who conjectured that this move is more about raising the friction to making bots, Elon Musk responded, saying…
WordPress Core Committer Adam Silverstein has published a proposal for adding automated performance tooling that would offer continuous monitoring for performance issues so they can be resolved before major regressions are committed to core. “Similar to our unit test suite, automated performance testing would help protect core from introducing large performance regressions by catching problems immediately and…
In 2020, WordPress began prioritizing education as critical to the project’s future, launching Learn.WordPress to support beginners to advanced learners with free educational content. Over the past two years, WordPress’ Training team has been instrumental in building and expanding this resource with synchronous and asynchronous learning opportunities, as well as downloadable lesson plans for instructors…
WordPress.com users are getting early access to some of the major new features that are shipping with the upcoming WordPress 6.2 release. The platform rolled out Browse Mode today, describing it as “an easier way to navigate the Site Editor.” This is one of the most impactful changes coming to customization, as it unifies the…
During the 2022 State of the Word, Matt Mullenweg highlighted a few examples of how Gutenberg adoption is growing beyond WordPress and how he believed it could become “bigger than WordPress itself.” Engine Awesome, a Laravel-based SaaS application, is one example he cited that is using the block editor to allow customers to build their own…
Will WordPress be ready to remove the Beta label from the Site Editor in the upcoming 6.2 release? The project’s Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy addressed this question in her latest WP Briefing podcast episode titled “What Does Concluding a Gutenberg Phase Really Mean?“ “All of the projects, with the exception of two, I believe,…
As part of the big picture goals for WordPress in 2023, the project is embarking on an effort to work through old tickets that are stuck due to no consensus, missing decisions, or multiple possible solutions. WordPress Core Committer Jb Audras has organized Trac triage sessions dedicated to moving these tickets forward or closing the…
OpenLogic, a company that provides technical support for enterprise open source infrastructure, and the Open Source Initiative (OSI), the nonprofit stewards of the Open Source Definition (OSD) have published the 2023 State of Open Source Report. The annual vender-neutral survey received 872 qualified responses from people in more than 20 major industries. Responses indicate that open source adoption…
WordPress and Matrix contributors are proposing a new Meta team subproject that would explore replacing Slack communication with Matrix, an open source federated chat system. Matrix already powers a variety of communication tools, including Element, the most mature Matrix client – a universal chat app that is often described as “a Slack alternative.” In 2020, Automattic…
WordPress’ Performance Team is working on unbundling the Performance Lab plugin after feedback from Matt Mullenweg who requested large features become their own community plugins with the possibility of becoming canonical plugins. As part of this effort, the new SQLite database integration is now available for testing as a standalone plugin. Yoast-sponsored contributor Ari Stathopoulos,…
Yoast SEO version 20.0 was released today with a new admin settings interface that also reorganizes the menu to into four main sections: General, Content types, Categories and Tags, and Advanced. In this update, the plugin did not add new features and settings but rather moved them to better match user workflows. The new sidebar…
Awesome Motive has acquired Thrive Themes, its second acquisition of 2023 following the Duplicator plugin deal that was announced earlier this month. Thrive’s premium plugin suite reports more than 200,000 users. This includes Thrive Architect, a visual drag and drop page builder, an LMS course builder, and other marketing-focused plugins for generating leads, creating quizzes…
WP Migrate, formerly known as WP Migrate DB and recently acquired by WP Engine, has long since expanded beyond its initial release as a database migration tool. Users may be familiar with the push/pull workflow of installing the plugin on two sites and migrating database, media, themes, and plugin changes back and forth. The most…