HTTP Archive has published its annual State of the Web report, the 2022 Web Almanac. The report contains data on page content, user experience, content publishing, and distribution with contextual insights from subject matter experts. It draws from a dataset that evaluates millions of web pages and is continuously updated on a monthly basis. Metrics…
WP Accessibility Day 2022 is taking place next month on November 2-3. The one-day virtual event features 24 hours of talks on building accessible websites in WordPress. It is independently organized by volunteers from WordPress’ Accessibility Team and other community members. The schedule for the event is currently a password-protected page but should be available…
Frustrations are mounting, as WordPress.org plugin developers plead with WordPress leadership to restore access to the active install growth data for plugins after it was removed last weekend without any public discussion. A ticket calling for bringing back the charts is home to a heated discussion on the matter but so far the developer community…
Gutenberg 14.2 brings some important changes to the writing flow in the block editor that simplify the experience and remove unnecessary obtrusions. One small but significant change is that the sibling and line inserters have been updated to use a more natural animation effect with a slightly increased delay to minimize accidental triggers. This release…
Over the weekend, WordPress.org meta contributors removed the active install growth charts for plugins, a key metric that many developers and a handful of services rely on for tracking. “Insufficient data obfuscation” is the cryptic reason cited for the charts’ removal, but the decision-making process was not transparent. In a ticket titled “Bring back the…
In June 2022, WordPress.org’s Themes Team began strongly urging theme authors to switch to locally hosted webfonts, following a German court case, which fined a website owner for violating the GDPR by using Google-hosted webfonts. For years, theme authors have been enqueuing Google Fonts from the Google CDN for better performance, but this method exposes visitors’…
WooCommerce Blocks 8.6.0 was released yesterday with support for a new block that displays cross-sells for products that are based on the current product in the customer’s cart. For example, if a customer is purchasing a new gardener’s kit, the store may cross-sell gardening gloves as a complementary product. This is a new feature is…
WooSesh, a virtual conference for WooCommerce professionals and store builders, has published the schedule for the upcoming three-day event beginning on October 11. This year’s lineup includes 24 speakers from across the WooCommerce ecosystem, including engineers, product managers, sales directors, and WooCommerce core developers. Each day of the event has a theme with sessions running…
Molten is a new block theme from first-time WordPress.org theme author Paul Truong, designed for chefs and restaurateurs to showcase their work. The theme puts the spotlight on food photography offset with bold typography featuring the Playfair Display font for headings and Source Sans Pro for paragraph text. Truong is working on setting up a…
Automattic-sponsored core contributor Adam Zielinski published a demo today of WordPress running in the browser with no PHP server. This is accomplished using WebAssembly (WASM), a format for a stack-based virtual machine that enables deployment on the web for client and server applications, and Emscripten, an open source compiler toolchain to WebAssembly. It’s not stable…
After a seven-month long effort across multiple contributor teams, the Twenty Twenty-Two (TT2) default theme will be tagged as “Accessibility-Ready” when WordPress 6.1 ships in November. It is the first block theme to meet the requirements for gaining this distinction. During its development the theme was also tested and found to meet WCAG AA level…
PublishPress, a company that develops free and commercial publishing and permissions plugins for WordPress, has acquired MetaSlider from Extendify. The plugin is used on more than 700,000 sites to build sliders, slideshows, carousels, and galleries. The company’s mission is to help publishers succeed, so this is a curious acquisition as sliders seem to have fallen…
Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) has announced the availability of version 6.0, an update that applies to both the free and pro versions of the plugin. This release introduces a refreshed admin UI that ACF product manager Iain Poulson said users had been requesting since 2021. “We didn’t want this to be a huge change that…
WordPress 6.1 beta 1 was released today, and testing has begun with the general release expected in just under six weeks on November 1. Versions 13.1 – 14.1 of the Gutenberg plugin will be rolled into core for 6.1. This includes features like improved block placeholders, more design tools for blocks, fluid typography, improvements to…
The count for WordPress block themes has reached 137. It’s a far cry from the 500 block themes WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden-Chomphosy set as a goal for 2022, but the number is steadily climbing as theme authors find their footing and discover how quickly block themes can be created. Brian Gardner is throwing his…