WordPress 5.0 Beta 3 was released this morning. This beta incorporates all the changes from Gutenberg 4.2 RC1, which was released last week. It fixes a bug with the display of the custom fields meta box and also improves REST API requests. Gutenberg has undergone a few UI tweaks and introduces a Formatting API for…
In August, GitHub announced Project Paper Cuts, an effort aimed at bringing small improvements to the developer and project maintainer experiences. These are fixes for issues that don’t generally fall within larger initiatives. Some of the first improvements that have already been implemented include the following: Unselect markers when copying and pasting the contents of…
Google introduced reCAPTCHA v3 this week, which promises a new “frictionless user experience.” Earlier versions of the API stopped bots but also drew the ire of internet users across the globe. Users were regularly inconvenienced with distorted text challenges, street sign puzzles, click requirements, and other actions to prove their humanity. v3 offers a marked…
Frontkom, the team behind the Gutenberg Cloud project, has published the beta version of its WordPress plugin to the official repository. Cloud Blocks serves as a connector, allowing WordPress users to browse and install open source blocks from Gutenberg Cloud. The blocks are hosted on NPM and their assets are served from CloudFlare using unpkg.com.…
WordPress.com launched a new Activity feature today, a tool for monitoring changes that occur on the site and actions initiated through the admin. It’s also available for Jetpack-enabled sites and the activity log can be viewed on WordPress.com or on the WordPress mobile apps. Activity logs the following actions and presents them in an easy-to-read…
WordPress’ accessibility team has published a statement on the level of overall accessibility of Gutenberg. The team, largely a group of unpaid volunteers, collaborated on a detailed assessment that publicly challenges Gutenberg’s readiness for core in a way that no other WordPress team has done through official channels to date. After a week of testing…
![php[world] 2018 to Feature Full-Day Gutenberg Development Workshop](https://wptavern.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/phpworld-2018.png)
The fourth annual php[world] conference is just two weeks away. The event is dedicated to uniting the PHP community and will be held November 14-15, 2018, in Washington, D.C. This year the organizing team created a “Content Advisory Board” to ensure the event included sessions that will appeal to everyone. The board includes two WordPress…
WooCommerce 3.5 was released this week. It’s a minor update that has been in development since May and began testing in September. The release should be backwards compatible to version 3.0 of the plugin but users are always advised to test all of their themes and extensions before updating. Store owners can expect to see…
WP Engine has acquired Array Themes and Atomic Blocks from Mike McAlister for an undisclosed amount. McAlister has been developing WordPress themes since 2009. He initially sold his themes on ThemeForest. In 2011, he founded Array Themes. I reached out to McAlister to learn why he chose to be acquired, what excites him most about…
WPCampus is looking to hire a company to perform an accessibility audit of the Gutenberg editor. The organization is a community of more than 800 web professionals, educators, and others who work with WordPress in higher education. WPCampus director Rachel Cherry published a request for proposals detailing the organization’s specific concerns: Our organization is sensitive…
WordPress 5.0 is marching forward with beta 1 released this evening. Major items that need testing include the Gutenberg editor, the new Twenty Nineteen default theme, and all previous default themes, which have been updated to be compatible with the new editor. You’ll want to make sure you are using Gutenberg version 4.1 before updating…
WordCamp Europe’s new PWA (Progressive Web App) was one of the highlights of the 2018 event in Belgrade. It allowed attendees to view the schedule, venue map, create bookmarks for sessions, and provided offline access in case of network failure. Attendees could add the app to their home screens and opt to receive push notifications…
One of the most pressing concerns for users in the Gutenberg era is how page builder plugins will respond. Speculation about the new editor “killing off page builders” has run rampant, but these plugins are slowly evolving ahead of Gutenberg’s imminent inclusion in WordPress 5.0. In February, Elementor, one of WordPress’ most popular page builders,…
Upcase, a subscription learning platform for developers, is now free and open to the public. The content, which includes workshops, videos, flash cards, and coding exercises, was built by thoughtbot, a design and development consultancy. “We’ve loved building Upcase, both as a business and as a way to share what we’ve learned with the community,”…
Polldaddy was founded in 2006 by David Lenehan in Sligo, Ireland and was acquired by Automattic in 2008. Polldaddy is a platform agnostic service providing users with the ability to create polls and surveys. Today, 12 years later, Automattic is retiring the Polldaddy name and replacing it with Crowdsignal. Outside of some minor color changes, and…