Sometimes Gutenberg introduces features that you never knew you needed. Such is the case with the new color coding system in the Site Editor. The latest 14.7 release adds color to template parts and reusable blocks in the list view, block toolbar, and block selection outlines. The colorization is intended to help users differentiate between…
WooCommerce Blocks version 9.10 was released today, hitting a major milestone for the development of its new Products Block. The plugin serves as a place to iterate and test new blocks, and this release introduces the new Product Query-powered Products block in beta. In this first iteration, users can arrange products by popular presets and…
WordPress Sandbox, an experimental project that uses WebAssembly (WASM) to run WordPress in the browser without a PHP server, has been chugging along steadily since Automattic-sponsored core contributor Adam Zieliński introduced it earlier this year in September. Zieliński published three new updates to Twitter this week, demonstrating the project’s potential to provide an in-browser IDE…
Sensei LMS, Automattic’s teaching and learning management plugin, has released a new free block theme called Course. In February 2022, version 4.0 of the plugin introduced support for full-site editing with its bundled “Learning Mode” theme. Course features a new bold design made to be customized in the Site Editor. Although Sensei works with neaerly…
The block editor was introduced to WordPress in 2018 and has matured into a more user-friendly tool for expression over the past four years. WordPress.org’s Meta Team is now experimenting with how they can bring the block editor into the support forums. That they are even considering this is a testament to how far the…
Google is in the process of rolling out its December 2022 “helpful content” system update, which started on the 5th and is becoming more visible in search results. The company estimates it will take approximately two weeks to fully roll out. The helpful content system generates a signal that is used by Google’s automated ranking…
Jetpack has introduced a major update to its Form block in the latest version 11.6 release. Users can now interact with the various form templates as patterns. A new quick start placeholder appears anytime users invoke a new form block. It displays a selection of the most commonly used form types as icons. Clicking on…
ChatGPT passed 1 million users today and Twitter is brimming with a steady stream of creative questions and applications for the AI-powered chatbot. The language model, created by OpenAI, is powered by GPT-3.5, a series of models trained on text and code from before Q4 2021. The model features a dialogue format that gives ChatGPT…
The WP Community Collective (WPCC) officially launched today as a new nonprofit organization dedicated to funding individual WordPress contributors and community-led initiatives. It was founded by Sé Reed, Katie Adams Farrell, and Courtney Robertson. The organization was created to address some of the challenges of contribution, where larger companies tend to have more resources to…
A group of 130,000 businesses publishing around 1,750,000 websites and applications in the UK have filed a lawsuit against Google and its parent company, Alphabet. The claim is being managed by law firms Humphries Kerstetter and Geradin Partners, who allege that “Google abused its dominant position in the market for online advertising, earning super-profits for…
The 2022 WordPress Survey is now open to anyone using WordPress – from beginners to professional developers and everyone in between. This annual survey helps project leaders and contributors learn more about how and why the software is being used. This year’s survey is available in the seven most frequently installed languages based on the…
WordPress Core Committer Jb Audras, CTO of the France-based Whodunit agency, has released two new accessibility plugins in cooperation with Guillaume Turpin, another developer on the Whodunit team. These are small “micro” plugins developed to fill gaps in the block editor’s accessible content creation experience. The first plugin is called Lang Attribute for the Block…
10up has released version 4.4.0 of ElasticPress, its enhanced search plugin that speeds up searching while reducing the load on WordPress sites. The plugin is based on Elasticsearch and is used by customers of the ElasticPress.io service (a SaaS solution), as well as those who are hosting their own Elasticsearch instance. This update adds a…
In September, WordPress’ Security Team announced it would be dropping support for versions 3.7 through 4.0 by December 1, 2022. Yesterday the final releases for these versions (3.7.41, 3.8.41, 3.9.40, and 4.0.38) were made available to the very small percentage of users who are running ancient versions of WordPress. As part of the final releases,…
Gutenberg 14.6 was released last week with a long list of small but impactful refinements to core blocks and the full-site editing experience. One of the most practical enhancements included in this update is the new list view for editing the Navigation block. Gutenberg contributor Fabian Kägy published a quick video that helps to visualize…