WordPress’ accessibility team is evaluating the possibility of organizing a virtual Global Accessibility Day, similar to the Polyglots’ Global Translation Day. This marathon-style contributor event has proven to be valuable for the Polyglots in terms of recruiting, onboarding, and fueling progress on translation projects. Accessibility contributors proposed the idea at a meeting two weeks ago…
WordCamp US announced today that the event will be offering free on-site childcare for children aged 6 weeks to 12 years old. Organizers have contracted A Helping Hand, a licensed conference childcare service company based in Virginia Beach, VA, to provide childcare for all three days, with flexible drop off and pick up throughout the…
WordCamp Europe’s continuing success has inspired other parts of the WordPress world to work towards getting their own regional camps off the ground. With a little help from WCEU mentors and inspiration from WordCamp Nordic’s proposal, WordCamp Asia is now officially on the schedule for February 21-23, 2020, in Bangkok, Thailand. WordCamp Central America is…
Alex Young, creator of the WPCasts video tutorials site, has published a free crash course that offers a brief introduction to using WordPress as a headless CMS. The 28-minute tutorial covers the basics of setting up a bare bones React application that uses WPGraphQL to query ACF data. Young begins by installing four plugins: WPGraphQL,…
WPCampus 2019 kicks off tomorrow at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, for its fourth year running. The niche WordPress conference is focused on accessibility and WordPress in higher education. All sessions, with the exception of the workshops, will be live streamed with captioning, beginning at 2PM PDT on Thursday, July 25. The event…
The WPGraphQL for Advanced Custom Fields plugin is now available for free on GitHub after a short time as a commercial product. Jason Bahl, creator and maintainer of the WPGraphQL project, released the extension in April 2019 with a pricing tier ranging from $49/annually (for one site’s support) to lifetime subscription options. Bahl created the…
The first ever WordCamp Asia has launched a teaser website and announced February 21-23, 2020, as the dates for the event. This will be the first regional WordCamp for the continent, which is home to 127 WordPress meetup chapters with 73,000 members across 23 countries, according to stats from lead organizer Naoko Takano. After four…
Block Comments is a new experimental plugin from Tom Nowell that replaces WordPress’ default comment form with a trimmed down version of the block editor. Nowell gave a presentation at WordCamp Europe 2019 about using blocks outside the editor, including on the frontend. Block Comments is one example he brought to life using the block…
Earlier this year, Newspack chose twelve publications to take part in the initial rollout phase of the platform. Newspack is a collection of themes, plugins, and features geared towards newsrooms such as revenue generation wizards, mobile delivery, and search engine optimization. Steve Beatty, head of Newspack Communication says they’re seeking up to 50 newsrooms to…
WordPress core committer Felix Arntz is working on an experimental Block Areas plugin that would enable users to create and edit content sitewide using the Gutenberg editor. Inspired by a conversation with Morten Rand-Hendriksen at WordCamp Europe, Arntz created the plugin to “explore what the theming of tomorrow could look like already today.” Block Areas…
One of the more interesting trends this year is that WordPress developers are beginning to explore JAMstack setups for their sites. JAMstack is a term coined by Netlify CEO Mathias Biilmann to describe development architecture that includes client-side JavaScript, reusable APIs, and prebuilt Markup, the three pillars of a modern static website. Static websites are…
For years, the WordPress admin has become increasingly overloaded with admin notices. Some of them are giant, branded notices with their own particular designs that obstruct users’ activities in the admin. The Theme Review Team is taking action to curb obtrusive notices that fall within its purview – those generated by themes hosted in the…
Gutenberg plugin users who update to version 6.1 should notice a considerable difference in how the UI reacts to block moving actions. This release brings in the animation experiments that Matías Ventura introduced in a post titled “Using Motion to Express Change.” The subtle animations add realistic motion to block changes, creation, removal, and reordering,…
The WordPress Theme Review Team (TRT) met today and agreed to put new accessibility requirements in place for themes hosted in the official directory. These include some of the items that are required for theme authors who want to add the accessibility-ready tag. A handful of these requirements will soon be added to the standard…
Anders Norén has released Chaplin, his 20th free WordPress theme, designed specifically for use with the block editor. Chaplin could be loosely described as an agency or business style theme but the capabilities of the block editor enable users to create advanced page layouts that would suit many different types of websites. The layout for…