Gutenberg 0.8.0 was released over the weekend with five new blocks, major improvements to existing blocks, and support for more publishing features that have been missing from the new editor’s sidebar. The release also carries out the controversial decision to remove the opt-in usage tracking code from the plugin. The new Categories block can be…
Earlier this year, NRKbeta, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation’s media and technology site, open sourced its comment quiz plugin for WordPress. The site’s publishers have been experimenting with requiring their readers to complete a short, three-question quiz before giving access to the comment form on certain articles. The goal of the plugin was to prevent rants…
WordPress core contributors have set a tentative schedule for the upcoming 4.9 release, which will be co-led by Mel Choyce and Weston Ruter. The development cycle kicked off in early August with Beta 1 scheduled for early October and the official release targeted for November 14. Choyce published a list of goals today that outlines…
The opt-in user tracking that was added to Gutenberg 0.7.0 will be pulled from the plugin in the upcoming 0.8.0 release. The data collection included in last week’s release reignited the discussion regarding adding telemetry to WordPress. James Nylen and an Automattic engineers involved in Gutenberg added the feature with the goal of improving the…
The WooCommerce development team has forked select2 to create a more accessible, drop-in replacement library called selectWoo. select2 is a widely used jQuery-based library for making custom drop down menus. Many users are wondering if the project has been abandoned, because the repository hasn’t seen any activity since February and 115 pull requests have piled…
The WordPress Foundation is sponsoring a new series of workshops and training events that will introduce people to WordPress and related open source software. The program targets communities in Latin and South America, Africa, Oceania, and Asia. “Specifically, we want to shine more light on the potential of open source software in countries where there…
The discussion surrounding how Gutenberg will handle meta boxes heated up over the weekend after a participant commented on the GitHub issue with concern regarding meta box support being removed from the most recent milestone. “I see this vital issue has been removed from any milestone,” @steveangstrom said. “It has been de-prioritized again while bells…
Gutenberg 0.7.0 was released just before the weekend with improvements to the writing flow and greater flexibility for theme authors to add their own customizations. Last week’s version 0.6.0 release made significant changes to the way paragraphs are created within text blocks, allowing for blocks to split when pressing enter. However, it inserted a “New…
In July 2015, Automattic won its Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP) case against Chris Pearson regarding Thesis.com after the panel determined that he failed to establish all three elements required under the ICANN Policy. A party must satisfy all three of the burdens imposed under the Policy in order for the Panel to order transfer…
The Awl, ThinkProgress, Film School Rejects, and several other publishers have moved back to WordPress after short experiments on Medium. In early 2016, Medium convinced a collection of small, independent publications to move to its platform but shortly thereafter discontinued its unsuccessful ad-driven publishing model without notifying publishers. In March 2017, Medium CEO Ev Williams…
The 3rd Global WordPress Translation Day has been set for September 30, 2017. The success of previous events has generated momentum to continue the 24-hour global translation sprints and has also increased the visibility of the Polyglots team’s contributions. These sprints have provided a catalyst for the team’s growth from 5,000 contributors in April 2015…
Jetpack’s Contact Form module hasn’t seen too many changes since its first release (version 1.3) in 2012. It is easily one of the most compelling features included in the plugin and has long been overdue for a refresh. Today’s 5.2 release brings major improvements to the Contact Form module. Previously, Jetpack launched the form builder…
With the right combination of plugins and events, the WordPress admin area can quickly become a confusing mess of notices. WordPress’ notification system is often abused and overused by plugin authors who want to inject upsells and announcements into the admin. These can stack up like a pile of junk mail vying for users’ attention…
Gutenberg 0.6.0 was released over the weekend with significant changes to the way paragraphs are created within text blocks. In previous versions of the plugin, pressing enter would create a line break inside a paragraph. This release modifies the behavior of the text/paragraph block to split the block when a user presses enter. (Line breaks…
While at WordCamp Europe I had the opportunity to meet Russian designer and developer Dmitry Mayorov, whose themes I had noticed earlier in the year in the WordPress Theme Directory. Mayorov’s design style is reminiscent of other niche theme developers like Anders Norén and Mike McAlister. He launched his own commercial themes business on ThemePatio.com…