Website owners have been excluding web crawlers using the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) on robots.txt files for 25 years. More than 500 million websites use robots.txt files to talk to bots, according to Google’s data. Up until now, there has never been an official Internet standard, no documented specification for writing the rules correctly according…
Font Awesome 5.9 was released last month with 421 new and updated icons. The popular icon font library has grown to include more than 5,000 vector icons and is used on 34% of the top million websites. It’s also one of the top open source projects on GitHub and a popular choice for WordPress theme…
msgWP piqued public interest this week with a demo of its new microblogging product that allows users to publish text messages and photos to WordPress sites using Telegram. Although the plugin hasn’t officially launched yet, a live demo on the website allows people to anonymously publish a post to msgWP’s demo blog from their own…
Honeypot, a tech-focused job platform based in Europe, has produced a documentary that offers a fascinating look at the origins of GraphQL. The 28-minute video explores how quickly the project began to have an impact on the wider tech industry after Facebook publicly released it as an open source project. GraphQL co-founder Nick Schrock, who…
The second edition of the JavaScript for WordPress conference will be streamed online July 11-13, 2019. Based on the success of the 2018 event, which had 1,200 attendees watching live, organizer Zac Gordon decided to expand the event to feature three free days of talks, workshops, and a contribution day focused on JavaScript and WordPress.…
BuddyPress 5.0 is on track to introduce a new BP REST API, which has been in development as a feature plugin on GitHub since 2016. Contributors plan to merge the API with 14 endpoints for popular components like activity updates, groups, members, private messages, and extended profile fields. Another eight endpoints for blogs, friends, and…
WordPress for iOS 12.6.1 is now available in the iTunes App Store. The User Interface as well as the backend that powers stats has been revamped and more closely resembles what you see on the Jetpack Stats module. There are now date selectors and individual stats contain more detail. More often than not over the…
Recent EditorsKit releases have introduced a set of new tools that some writers may have found missing from Gutenberg. The plugin’s creator, Jeffrey Carandang, said version 1.6 was targeted at improving the writing flow for writers, bloggers, and content creators. Gutenberg has decent support for copying and pasting Markdown. It will automatically convert links, blockquotes,…
Gutenberg 6.0 was released today with a major update to the Columns block. Users can now select from a set of pre-defined layouts for their columns, with additional features that address many long-standing complaints regarding the block’s usability. Although many plugins are already doing more advanced things with columns and grid layouts, WordPress core’s current…
The first ever State of CSS survey results have been published. The data includes responses from more than 11,000 developers in 135 countries. Respondents identified themselves as male (84.71%), female (9.9%), non-binary/third gender (0.86%), and “prefer not to say” (2.62%). Sacha Greif and Raphaël Benitte, creators of the survey, said it’s skewed towards early adopters,…
In a move that caught some people by surprise, WP Engine has announced that it has reached a definitive agreement to acquire Managed WordPress host, Flywheel. While financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, Heather Brunner, WP Engine’s CEO confirmed to TechCrunch that the company needed to raise a small round of funding to…
Google released version 1.2 of its official AMP plugin for WordPress ahead of WordCamp Europe in Berlin. This release introduces a new AMP Stories editor that is powered by Gutenberg. AMP Stories are separate from the capabilities that enable AMP for the rest of the website, and they can be used together or independently. The…
Another successful edition of WordCamp Europe concluded this weekend in Berlin. The event was the largest WordCamp in history, with 3,260 tickets sold and 2,734 attendees present on the ground. WCEU sold 800 more tickets than the previous year in Belgrade. Contributor Day gathered 611 attendees into 25 teams, and approximately 28% of them (169…
A new section named Contribution has been added to WordPress.org user profiles. This section contains fields that enable users to share how much time they contribute to WordPress on a weekly basis, which teams they contribute to, and whether or not those contributions are sponsored. Each field is optional and will only appear if the…
Matt Mullenweg took the stage at WordCamp Europe in Berlin this afternoon to give a summer update on the progress of the block editor. He attributed much of its continued success to the availability of the Gutenberg plugin, which allows for quick iteration and testing. More than 150,000 posts are published per day using the…