Google’s rich results testing tool has been updated to include a selector for desktop or mobile so website owners can check their results on both platforms. This tool shows if pages are properly structured for display in Google’s carousels, images, breadcrumbs, events, books, and other types of rich snippets. A glossary is available with images…
Joost de Valk has announced that he’s stepped down from the WordPress Marketing and Communications Lead role. The position was created and awarded to de Valk earlier this year. Not only was it a new position, but it also expanded the leadership roles in the WordPress project. Despite making progress, de Valk didn’t feel as…
Tantek Çelik, Web Standards Lead at Mozilla and co-founder of IndieWebCamp, delivered an inspirational talk titled “Take Back Your Web” at the most recent beyond tellerrand conference in Düsseldorf, Germany. He opened the presentation with a litany of Facebook’s wrongdoings, taking the world’s largest social network to task for its role in increasing polarization, amplifying…
In a post titled “Using Motion to Express Change,” Gutenberg designer and engineer MatÃas Ventura takes a deep dive into how animation can be applied to interfaces to replicate realistic motion. These animations can sometimes more clearly communicate changes, particularly in relationship to the action of moving or reordering items on a page. “Even though the…
WordProof Timestamp is a new free plugin that bridges the WordPress and blockchain communities in an approachable, user-friendly way. It gives users the ability to timestamp their posts and pages to demonstrate transparency and claim ownership of content. WordProof works with any EOSIO blockchain to create the timestamp and provides a custom certificate link with…
After four years of publishing on Medium, FreeCodeCamp is migrating all of its articles to its own open source publishing platform, a modified version of Ghost. The platform allows approved authors to cross-post their blog articles on the new FreeCodeCamp News site for free, without any ads. “Medium was a great place to publish because…
Automattic is working on a new experimental Full Site Editing plugin aimed at enhancing the page creation workflow in the block editor. Starting a new page from scratch may be overwhelming for those who don’t have a vision for how to tastefully put blocks together to lay out the page. This is a problem that…
Panethon, a managed host geared towards Drupal and WordPress sites, has acquired StagingPilot. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed. Nathan Tyler, founder of StagingPilot, and his brother Phil Tyler will be brought into the company. StagingPilot is a four year old company that runs a barrage of visual regression tests on WordPress sites…
Gutenberg 5.8 was released today with three new features and more than three dozen enhancements, documentation improvements, and bug fixes. This release gives users the ability to change the text color in the Heading block. The same color options available in the paragraph and button blocks are now available in the heading block. A recent…
Google is enabling mobile-first indexing (crawling sites with a mobile user-agent) by default for new domains as of July 1, 2019. These are sites Google defines as “previously unknown to Google Search.” Mobile searches are the primary way that users engage with the search engine for the past few years, which caused Google to begin…
Over the weekend, the WordPress community celebrated 16 years since Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little forked the B2/cafelog blogging platform to create the first official release of WordPress on May 27, 2003. It launched with a new admin interface, manual excerpts, intelligent line breaks, a link manager, and was compliant with XHTML 1.1 standards. The…
GitHub has launched a new Sponsors tool that allows open source developer to receive financial support. The program is rolling out slowly and currently has a waitlist for open source contributors or maintainers who want to join. For the first year developers are in the program, GitHub will cover all the payment processing fees and…
Automattic has acquired Prospress and its flagship WooCommerce Subscriptions product, along with the company’s entire suite of e-commerce plugins and automation tools. Prospress’ 20 employees will be joining Automattic to continue developing and supporting their products. There are no immediate changes planned for current WooCommerce Subscriptions customers. Automattic will begin working on a roadmap for…
WP&UP is a mental health and well-being charitable organization founded by Dan Maby in 2018, whose mission is to promote positive mental health throughout the WordPress ecosystem. The organization is currently hosting a survey to better understand the needs of the community. The questions cover the general work environment, general mental health and well-being, and…
Google is rolling out an update to mobile search results that includes website branding. The new design displays a website’s name and icon at the top of the listing so users can easily scan results. If the result is an ad, it will be indicated in bold next to the website’s address. Below is a…