After a short delay, WordPress 5.9 “Josephine” has finally arrived with the long-awaited full-site editing features that give users more control over site design and page templates. This release is named for American-born jazz singer Joséphine Baker, who found success on broadway before moving to Europe and becoming very popular in France. She frequently made…
I have had a block theme idea rattling around in my brain for a while. For months, I have considered building a single-page profile/card theme, and I finally sat down and put in the work over the weekend. In part, I just wanted to do this for fun. However, another part of me wanted to…
If you happened to be browsing WordPress.org on Sunday, you might have been in for a shock. The website got a bit of an upgrade. A partial one, at least, as developers implemented a new global header and footer across the site. This is the first stage of a longer-term overhaul of the site’s front…
Earlier this month the WordPress Community Team proposed stricter guidelines for hosting in-person events, as the pandemic continues to warrant vigilance and a nimble approach to ensuring attendees’ safety. The updated guidelines were published today with an important change that relieves volunteers of the burden of enforcing the safety measures. The new mandatory guidelines require…
WP Career Summit is a new event hosted by the Post Status community that will take place on April 8, 2022. The summit is the first of its kind in the WordPress space – an event entirely focused on job seekers and employers. Attendees will have the opportunity to network with each other, check out…
Established this year by Destiny Fox Kanno and Joe A. Simpson, Jr, the BlackPress Meetup group will host its first event next week. It will be a meet-and-greet social hour for attendees. The session will run from 7pm to 8pm CST on Thursday, January 27. There is also a BlackPress Slack group they want to…
BuddyPress 10.0.0 “La Pino’z” was released today, named for a popular pizza chain in India with more than 350 restaurants. This major release introduces a Site Membership Requests feature, which can be enabled in the Options screen of the BuddyPress settings menu in the admin. When active, it changes the registration process so that visitors…
Todo lists. Checklists. While there are differences in their purposes, their output is essentially the same. They are lists of items with boxes to tick off, and a plugin like David Towoju’s Todo Block allows users to create them. I first downloaded and installed the plugin two weeks ago, but it had a problem. It…
Gutenberg 12.4 landed in the WordPress plugin directory earlier today. With the push to get WordPress 5.9 out the door next week, it can be easy to forget all the development behind the scenes, waiting to make its appearance in future versions of WordPress. The latest release focuses more on polishing existing features and introducing…
Block themes are trickling into the official WordPress Themes Directory at a slow rate ahead of full-site editing’s debut in WordPress 5.9. There are now 39 themes that support site editing features, up from 28 in December 2021, when Matt Mullenweg commented on it during the State of the Word address. “That needs to be…
All the block themes seem to have something similar in how they look. Although unique in their own ways, being generally wide, spacy, and modular instantly make them look like they came from the same mold. This is not to say they’re bad though… I’m just not really fond of such design. I prefer something…
The WooCommerce development team announced today that they have started working on an implementation of custom tables for orders, a long-awaited improvement that promises significant performance gains for stores. Adding custom tables for orders is a complex undertaking that will impact the entire ecosystem, so the team is soliciting feedback from the developer community as…
Raise your hand if you have seen this before. Yet another social sharing plugin. But, with the block system, all things are new again. Some things simply need to be ported over from their former PHP-based equivalents. Others are fresh takes on old ideas, and a few may set the standard for years to come.…
WordCamp Birmingham’s organizers announced today that the in-person event planned for the first week in February is now postponed until April or May. Organizers had been planning the event since August 2021 and had just announced the last group of speakers a week ago. “In the last 30 days, our local COVID-19 numbers have risen…
Last week, Wicked Plugins launched version 1.0 of its Wicked Block Builder. I have kept my eye on this plugin since its November 2021 beta release. The project promised that developers would be able to “effortlessly build custom blocks,” and I was finally ready to put that to the test. In the past two months,…