Elementor launched its Hello theme on WordPress.org this week. After just a few days in the directory, the theme already has more than 10,000 active installations. It is essentially a blank starter theme that offers 100% compatibility with Elementor. Page builders with a large user base are in a unique position to influence the WordPress…
Public libraries are one of the few remaining community centers where people freely pass on valuable skills to neighbors young and old. In addition to offering free access to books, computers, and the internet, libraries often host educational classes as a public service, with an emphasis on teaching fundamental skills for navigating the digital world.…
WordPress plugin developer Jeffrey Carandang continues to plough forward with new features for EditorsKit, a collection of page building block options for Gutenberg. What began as a block visibility management plugin has grown to include more features aimed at tweaking various settings in the editor. Version 1.5 adds some text, heading, and paragraph styling and…
CoBlocks, a collection of page builder blocks that was recently acquired by GoDaddy, has added four new blocks in version 1.9.5. This is the first major release since the plugin was acquired from Rich Tabor and his co-creators. Tabor now heads up a WordPress Experience team at GoDaddy where CoBlocks’ development continues. This release merges…
Jetpack has opened a signup for the beta of its upcoming Membership feature in order to collect feedback from potential testers. The changelog for version 7.3, released two weeks ago, hinted at a new Membership block coming to the plugin. The work in progress was added behind the JETPACK_BETA_BLOCKS constant, presumably in preparation for wider…
Jetpack 7.3 was released last week and if you didn’t read the changelog, you may have missed that the spelling and grammar checking module that uses After the Deadline has been retired. “Grammar and Spelling: Remove from Jetpack. We’ve chekced the spelling alot over the years, but now time to retire.” From the Jetpack 7.3…
VVV 3.0 was released this week, introducing a new Ubuntu 18.04 LTS box. The project’s previous versions used Ubuntu 14, which has now reached end of life (EOL). Support for VVV 2 is now discontinued, due to an unforeseen complication with its PHP dependencies. Ondřej Surý, who maintains all the PHP packages VVV uses, deleted…
Not everyone is able or willing to build blocks in JavaScript just yet, and sometimes you have to install three or four block collections until you find the blocks you would like. There is a third way: plugins that create the blocks for you from a set of specific custom fields, with a template to…
Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg has launched a new blog and podcast at Distributed.blog where he will be sharing what he has learned over the past 15 years of managing a distributed workforce. In 2019, Automattic now employs more than 900 people from 68 countries who have all worked in a distributed fashion since day one.…
Today’s release of Gutenberg brings a major improvement to the usability of the Group block. In previous versions of the editor, it wasn’t easy to see if a block had been inserted as a child block, especially since the default behavior was to insert an empty paragraph block. Gutenberg 5.7 brings more clarity to the…
Reakit is a new toolkit for building accessible web apps with React. Brazilian developer Diego Haz launched his MIT-licensed open source project this week with a stable version 1.0 now available to the public. The toolkit offers offers composable, themeable, and accessible UI components that strictly follow WAI-ARIA 1.1 standards. Out of the box, Reakit…
For several years, Bear App users have eagerly requested the ability to publish their notes to WordPress. Bear features a zen writing experience blended seamlessly with note-taking capabilities, a combination that landed the app an Apple Design Award in 2017. People use Bear for everything from taking notes to writing chapters for books. Many users…
Submitting a theme to the WordPress.org theme directory is a great way to share your work and contribute to the WordPress community. Currently, there are over 7000 themes in the directory, the most popular of which exceeds 300,000 active installations. (Not including Twenty____ Themes which are packaged with WordPress and have install counts in the…
WordPress Translation Day 4 was held over the weekend. The 24-hour global event hosted 77 local events in 35 countries and the Polyglots team added 183 new contributors to their ranks. The team also designated 12 new GTEs (Global Translation Editor) and 14 PTEs (Project Translation Editor). Naoko Takano, a Polyglots Team Global Mentor and…
WordPress Trac is one of the more utilitarian and uninspiring interfaces that many contributors have to contend with in the process of giving back to the project. After growing tired of Trac’s mediocre search functionality, William Earnhardt set out to improve it with a new project called WPTracSearch that gave him an opportunity to play…