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 a prompt to install 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 Candidate is scheduled to follow…
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 discussion was led by WordPress…
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 the Full Stack course that…
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 come in across multiple issues…
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, and engagement. New dashboard widgets…
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 a mandate to ensure Brexit…
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 the five days I reached…
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 it with a successful subscription-based…
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 milestone in terms of accessibility…
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 than three issues. Trusted Author…
WP Tavern is hiring full-time writers. We are looking for reporters with the ability to write WordPress news every day, covering a wide range of topics, including (but not limited to) Gutenberg, core development, community, open source software, plugin and theme ecosystems, Tumblr, developer trends, and the open web. The position requires the ability to…
David Bisset launched mycamp.rocks today, a newsletter targeted at conference organizers, speakers, and attendees. The WordPress newsletter landscape is currently dominated by general industry and developer news digests, such as Master WP, WpMail.me, Post Status, and The WP Daily. mycamp.rocks is the first newsletter to drill down into community event topics and will be sending…
Automattic has acquired Tumblr, a long-time friendly rival company, for an undisclosed sum. Just six years after Yahoo acquired Tumblr for $1.1 billion, the company is said to have been acquired for “a nominal amount” from Verizon, who indirectly acquired Tumblr when it bought Yahoo in 2017. Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg declined to comment on…
WooCommerce 3.7 was released today after four months in development. This minor release is backwards compatible with previous versions. Despite containing more than 1,290 commits, 3.7 is smaller than previous releases, as the WooCommerce team is working towards delivering more frequent releases to improve the stability of the platform. WooCommerce 3.7 bundles updates from the…