Rick Viscomi, one of the maintainers of the HTTP Archive, tweeted some interesting data from a report he is working on that tracks churn for different JavaScript frameworks and CMS’s over a specified period of time. He detected the changes using the open source Wappalyzer project. The first graph he shared shows shows data from…
WordPress is hosting a live online event tomorrow called “Beginner’s Guide to Full Site Editing.” Within three minutes of WordPress’ Twitter account tweeting about it, all 70 spaces were booked and the waiting list kicked in. As part of the project’s big picture goals for 2022, WordPress will be ramping up community efforts to help…
The FSE Outreach Program is back with another round of testing. Anne McCarthy asks for volunteers to test and provide feedback on media-related features in WordPress. Anyone is welcome to contribute, and feedback is open until February 23. This round of the program includes two tasks. The first has users explore today’s media-related experience. The…
In late January, a Munich regional court ruled that a plaintiff was entitled to injunctive relief and damages of 100 € from an undisclosed website owner for passing on the visitor’s IP address to Google through the use of Google Fonts. Since it is possible to use the fonts without connecting to Google, the court…
Gutenberg 12.5 landed in the WordPress plugin directory earlier today. I have already been excited about at least one new enhancement, global styles variations. However, this is a beefy update with several developer and user-centric features. With WordPress 5.9 now out into the wild, it looks like all hands are back on deck as we…
Full-site editing has come to Sensei LMS in the plugin’s latest 4.0 release. The headline feature of this update is Learning Mode – a new block-based theme that gives course authors the ability to customize the learning experience in ways that were not possible before. This version also updates the nine-year-old plugin’s menus and admin…
One of my favorite tools in the past few days is the Block X-ray Attributes plugin by Sal Ferrarello. It is geared toward developers and shows block attributes in the WordPress editor. After seeing his tweet on Friday, I immediately installed it. The plugin is currently only available via its GitHub repository, and anyone who…
Freelance WordPress developer Aurooba Ahmed released the Super List Block plugin earlier today. Essentially, it is like the core WordPress List block — just supercharged. It is her first publicly-released extension on WordPress.org. The primary use case for the plugin is adding other blocks within the list items. However, its options allow users to take…
Essential Addons for Elementor, a popular plugin with more than a million active installs, has patched a critical vulnerability that would allow for a local file inclusion attack. The vulnerability was discovered by security researcher Wai Yan Myo Thet and reported to Patchstack on January 25, 2022. Patchstack customers received a virtual patch the same…
It was a busy week, and I almost missed one of my most-wanted components landing in Gutenberg 12.5 RC 1. The global style variations feature quietly snuck its way in as everyone else was getting acquainted with WordPress 5.9. The official release of version 12.5 is not expected until next week, but that did not…
Block Protocol is a new project that aims to build a block system for embedding interactive blocks in any web application. The goal is to create a more interoperable and open web where these blocks can be shared through a standardized protocol. The initial draft of the Block Protocol spec is being incubated by the…
WordPress 5.9 has already been downloaded nearly 12 million times since its release earlier this week. Millions of WordPress users are discovering full-site editing (FSE) for the first time. What will they think? What struggles with they have that will need to be addressed? WordPress developers and power users have done an immense amount of…
With WordPress 5.9 only just stepping its toes out the door and greeting the world, the lead developers seem to have hardly taken a moment to catch their breath. Yesterday, Matías Ventura posted the preliminary roadmap for 6.0. It covers the general scope of the planned features to land this year. Version 6.0 is expected…
It seems that Andrew Starr is quietly building a legion of block themes. He is the sole developer behind UXL Themes and has released six of them in the past year, with most landing in the last few months. Framboise, his latest project, is a child theme of Alara. He promised a new design variation,…
Google is burying FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) in its sea of abandoned experiments. FLoC’s proposed mechanism for replacing third-party cookies grouped people together and labeled them using machine learning. The controversial origin trial caused a group of WordPress contributors to propose blocking it in core before it was even out of the experimental stage. In…