The latest version of Chrome (76) shipped with a new “loading” attribute that allows developers to specify resources, such as images and iframes, to defer loading until the user scrolls nearer to them. In the past, developers have used third-party libraries to achieve lazy loading but soon this will no (more…)
Last month the WordPress Theme Review Team took action to curb obtrusive admin notices, requiring all themes to use the admin_notices API and follow the core design pattern. Prior to this rule going into effect, many themes would commonly display a large, branded notice upon activation. Sometimes these came with (more…)
WordPress 5.3 release dates were confirmed this week. The timeline has the official release arriving November 12, 2019, with a decent margin of time to avoid WordCamp US (early November) and the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday week at the end of November. Beta 1 is expected September 23 and a Release (more…)
WordPress contributors from around the world joined in a lively meeting yesterday to continue the discussion regarding the proposal to auto-update old sites to version 4.7 in a controlled rollout. The idea is that sites would gradually update from one major version to the next (not all at once). The (more…)
The University of Helsinki is offering its “Deep Dive Into Modern Web Development” course online for free. It provides an introduction to JavaScript-based web development with React, Redux, Node.js, MongoDB, and GraphQL. Participants will learn the basics of building single page applications with ReactJS. This course is the same as (more…)
Gutenberg users are requesting an easy way to add a nofollow attribute to links in the block editor. Users can currently toggle a setting to designate a link to open in a new tab, but a similarly user-friendly option for adding a nofollow attribute is not yet available. Requests have (more…)
Fabrica Dashboard is a relatively new plugin released earlier this year by the team at Yes We Work, after a long beta and extensive internal use on their own projects. The plugin revamps WordPress’ default Dashboard screen to display information that is useful for multi-user editorial sites, highlighting content, activity, (more…)
The Joomla World Conference in London, planned for November 2019, has been cancelled. Joomla’s Board of Directors announced the cancellation at the end of July, citing the updated October 31, 2019, Brexit deadline as the primary reason: Last week the new UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson has been elected with (more…)
For five days next week, from August 19-23, the inaugural event of The Great WP Virtual Summit will be taking place. Conceived by South African based WordPress developer Anchen le Roux, the summit aims to bring together experts from various fields within the WordPress ecosystem to share their knowledge over (more…)
Automattic has acquired Zero BS CRM, a free plugin with more than 30 commercial extensions that provide deeper integrations with third-party services. Zero BS was co-founded by a two-person team that includes Mike Stott and Woody Hayday. The team marketed the plugin as a “no-nonsense CRM” and have been operating (more…)
Major accessibility improvements are the headline feature of this week’s Gutenberg plugin release. Version 6.3 introduces new Navigation and Editor modes to address long-standing problems navigating the block UI with a screen reader. The editor is now loaded in Navigation mode by default. Riad Benguella described it as “an important (more…)
After several months of discussion, WordPress.org’s Theme Review Team has decided to discontinue the Trusted Authors (TA) Program that launched in April 2018. The program, which was controversial from its inception, allowed certain authors to bypass the normal theme review queue after demonstrating an ability to submit themes with fewer (more…)