It’s that time in the release cycle when all the dev notes are rolling out ahead of the next major update. These notes include technical summaries of all the goodies coming in the next release. If you haven’t been paying close attention, there are always a few happy surprises in there that pop up as…
Anne McCarthy announced the second round of testing for the Full Site Editing (FSE) Outreach program. The call for testing asks that users build a homepage from the Gutenberg plugin’s site editor. Feedback is open until March 5. The first round of testing began in December 2020 and ended last month. Testers were able to…
Felix Arntz, a WordPress core committer and developer programs engineer at Google, announced upcoming support for lazy loading iframes. The feature is included in the latest WordPress 5.7 beta and will officially ship next month to the larger community. WordPress has supported lazy loading for images since version 5.5. However, support for iframes was not…
Plausible Analytics is not new on the scene. The two-person, EU-based team behind the company has been trying to carve its slice of the analytics pie against players like Google Analytics and WordPress.com Stats for nearly two years. The self-funded and bootstrapped company is starting to gain a small foothold. It has been an uphill…
After noticing suspicious review activity for the AccessiBe plugin, accessibility consultant Joe Dolson reported the fake reviews to WordPress.org’s plugin team. The reviews were removed in under 48 hours, thanks to Dolson’s detailed research. At the time of reporting, Dolson found 31 five-star reviews, 2 four-star reviews, and 2 one-star reviews. After putting these into…
Today, GT Basic became the second theme from GermanThemes to go live in the WordPress theme directory. Like the company’s previous theme, GT Ambition, it is built around the block editor. It also introduces several custom block patterns. The theme will not knock anyone’s socks off with its artistic merit. GT Basic is very much…
Hello. I always supported the idea of a WordPress block editor as a whole, but lately, I’m a bit frustrated in that there are some blocks I need with urgency to work on a (non-visitor editable) wiki-like site (mostly a Tabs block, a Countdown block, an Accordion/Toggle block, a Table of contents block and a…
Gutenberg 10.0 was released today as the 100th iteration of the block editor since the project began four years ago. Although 10.0 may seem like a big number, it’s just another incremental step forward in terms of new features, improvements, and bug fixes. Version 10.0 introduces a new dynamic pages block for building navigation menus.…
Earlier today, the Phoenix theme was merged into the WordPress Theme Experiments repository on GitHub. Like all themes in the repo, it is not meant for use on a live site. It is a project to test new ideas for the upcoming Full Site Editing (FSE) system. Imran Sayed of Codeytek Academy created the theme…
Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) is coming up on a major milestone with version 3.0 in active development, a huge undertaking spanning nearly three years. The first beta was released today with one of the most extensive and technically detailed beta testing guides I’ve seen for a major plugin update. Version 3.0 will migrate the bulk…
If you are living in part of the world where the polar vortex has plunged the weather into record-cold temperatures, you might enjoy this fireside chat from WordCamp India 2021. The event was held online over the span of three weekends from Jan 30 to Feb 14. Matt Mullenweg and Josepha Haden Chomphosy joined organizers…
Automattic released its Newspack Newsletters project to the WordPress plugin directory earlier today. It is the first Newspack-related plugin the company has made available outside of GitHub or its custom platform. Newspack is primarily a service geared toward small and medium-sized publications. Its goal is to work with news industry leaders to create a platform…
WordPress contributors are considering scaling back the planned number of releases in 2021. In a post titled “Making WordPress Releases Easier,” WordPress’ Executive Director, Josepha Haden Chomphosy summarized three years of research on reducing the effort required to have a successful WordPress release: From my research, the work to automate what we can (and potentially…
Perhaps the fates have stepped in to prove a point. After I wrote a 2,000-word piece on the lack of quality themes in the theme directory, they decided to send a message. Not once, but twice this week, a new WordPress theme has managed to catch my eye. My rational mind knows that it was…
Earlier this week, Elementor announced a significant pricing hike coming in March 2021 for new customers: On March 9th, 2021, Elementor will be adding new Studio and Agency Pro subscription plans and adapting the Expert plan, to best accommodate users’ growing needs. These changes will only apply to new purchases. If you’re on an existing active…