It’s easy to get lost while trying to get around the Site Editor unless you are working day and night inside the tool. The navigation is jumpy and confusing, especially when going from template browsing to template editing to modifying individual blocks. A large PR is in progress for redesigning this UI with the introduction…
Openverse, formerly known as Creative Commons Search before it joined the WordPress project, has passed an important milestone with its support for audio files. The catalog has now indexed more than 800,000 audio files and its development team has taken audio support out of beta. Openverse visitors can now confidently search for and explore audio…
WordPress.org theme previews just got a major improvement this week with the addition of Style Variation previews. The previews now appear on block themes that include style variations. Themes that have more variations than what fits in the space beneath the preview pane will display all variations in a carousel with little arrows to navigate…
WordPress’ Documentation Team will be hosting an online Contributor Day on October 25, 2022, ahead of WordPress’ anticipated 6.1 release the following week. Milana Cap, who has been volunteering with the Documentation team for years and is currently sponsored by XWP, announced the event this week. “The primary goal is to catch up with a…
Earlier this month WordPress.org meta contributors removed the active install growth chart from plugins, sending plugin developers who relied on this data into a state of dismay and outrage. The commit cited “insufficient data obfuscation” but there was no clear communication about when and where this decision had been made. Developers demanded more transparency around…
10up has published a Gutenberg Best Practices website as a public resource with tutorials, documentation, and example code. Maintaining current documentation has not been a strong point of the official Gutenberg project as the pace of the project makes it difficult for contributors and extenders to keep up. “Gutenberg introduced an entirely new editorial paradigm…
Jetpack has announced changes to its Jetpack Social plugin that may impact publishers who frequently share across social media networks. Previously, users could share an unlimited number of posts automatically via their connected social media accounts. Jetpack is shuffling its monetization strategy for this extension and has capped social sharing at 30 shares per month…
For more than a decade, WordPress developers have been discussing how core can support plugins that require one or more other plugins in order to work. Having a standardized way of managing plugin dependencies would be a useful and time-saving feature for developers, who currently have to roll their own solutions for this. “The situation…
WPZOOM is coming in strong with its first block theme approved for the WordPress Themes Directory. UniBlock is a beautifully designed theme that is well-suited for businesses and freelancers. The company plans to adopt the concept of full-site editing in other WPZOOM themes as well, following the release of UniBlock. UniBlock’s default look is sporting…
Gutenberg 14.3 was released this week with drag-and-drop improvements for both the block editor and the site editor. Automattic-sponsored contributor Aaron Robertshaw published a video, illustrating how the block editor now supports dropping an image onto an empty paragraph block to replace it with a new Image block. The site editor has also added drag-and-drop…
The Shortcodes Ultimate plugin, used on more than 700,000 WordPress sites for creating things like tabs, buttons, and accordions, has patched a vulnerability in version 5.12.1. The plugin’s changelog simply says, “This update fixes a security vulnerability in the shortcode generator. To the author’s credit, the changelog clearly denotes it as a security update, although…
We are less than three weeks out from WordPress 6.1’s official release on November 1, 2022. RC 1 was released this week, marking the hard string freeze, which means 6.1 is ready to be translated. The features landing in this release are heavy on block and site editor improvements that will bring users a greater level…
WooSesh kicked off this week with a keynote session from WooCommerce CEO Paul Maiorana, who gave an overview of the current state of the ecosystem. More than 3.4 million websites use WooCommerce, according to Builtwith, including 25% of the top million online stores. It is by far the most popular solution among WordPress sites with…
Themeisle, longtime masters of the multipurpose WordPress theme, has launched its first block-based theme with the same trademark style and flexibility of its previous products. The shop currently distributes its Hestia (100K+ installs) and Neve (300K+ installs) themes on WordPress.org, commercializing pro versions with upgrades and support. Raft is the latest addition to the lineup.…
Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) put out a big release today, following several maintenance releases and the last major release in July. Version 3.1 introduces 10 new core blocks available to users who are running WordPress 5.8 or newer: These blocks enable store owners to do more than their shortcode predecessors. Although the shortcodes still work,…