Last week Gutenberg contributors were engaged in a spirited debate regarding a proposal to rename the new Command Center to Wayfinder. The feature, designed to be an extensible quick search and command execution tool, will land in WordPress 6.3. The majority of participants in the discussion were strongly against calling it Wayfinder, as the term…
WordCamp Europe 2023 in Athens attracted more than 2,500 attendees from 94 countries, made possible by 112 organizers and 250 volunteers. The event is now looking forward to 2024, which will be hosted by the Italian WordPress community in Torino, Italy, June 13-15. This modern city is located at the foot of the Alps in…
There has always been some confusion and overlap between reusable blocks and patterns. The difference was that reusable blocks can be created and edited in the block editor and then reused in other places – inserted into posts or pages. Block patterns, once inserted, can be edited and are not synced. They give users the…
Really Simple SSL, a popular plugin used on more than five million sites for installing SSL certificates, handling website migrations, mixed content, redirects, and security headers, has added a new feature in its most recent major update. Version 7.0.0 introduces vulnerability detection as part of a partnership with WP Vulnerability, an open source, free API…
If you haven’t visited the WordPress Pattern Directory lately, it may look very different from when it launched two years ago. At first there was an emphasis on getting the community to contribute to the resource but the directory has now passed more than 1,500 patterns. Contributors are making changes to provide a more curated…
WordPress.com has been known to experiment with its pricing from time to time, and the platform announced another major change today. Users on the Free plan are now able to use monetization features without upgrading. In the past, WordPress.com users who wanted to earn money on their websites by collecting donations, creating a newsletter, or…
Up until yesterday, the Gravatar (Globally Recognized Avatar) blog lay dormant for nine years, the last post chronicling how the team set out to create a Gravatar app that somehow “morphed into a Selfies app.” Communication went silent after that, although the Twitter account posted occasionally. The service has pivoted to become “a personal digital business…
Blocknotes is a new experimental app that runs WordPress natively on the iPhone. It was created by WordPress core committer Ella van Durpe and is powered by WordPress Playground, a project that runs the software in the browser without a PHP server. “WordPress’ ecosystem can now run anywhere – desktop, mobile, web, even fenced ecosystems,” WordPress Playground creator…
A lively discussion is happening on the Gutenberg repository about renaming the Command Center. This new feature, designed to be an extensible quick search and command execution tool, was introduced in Gutenberg 15.6. In version 16.0, it came out of the experimental stage and its API is now public, ready for developers to create their…
In May 2023, WordPress’ Community Team announced that it would be evolving the WordCamp format to promote adoption, training, and networking for professionals, leaving the flagship events to focus more on connection and inspiration. This major shift opens the door for more experimentation through varied formats. In a recent update, the team shared that progress…
Drupal Gutenberg, the Gutenberg module for Drupal that was created by a Norway-based agency called Frontkom, has received a €20,000 donation from Automattic to fund the next phase of development. The module was one of five projects, selected from 35 proposals, that was granted funding during the DrupalCon Pitchburgh innovation contest. The winners were announced as part of…
In 2005, Timothy “Wolf” Bishop was serving time in an Iowa prison for charges related to a gambling addiction. “When I was 25, I made a bet that I could not cover,” Bishop said. “I had gambled with a local thug on a local semi-pro baseball game between the Burlington Bees and the Clinton Lumberkings.…
Gutenberg 16.0 was released today with page management now available inside the Site Editor. This is the first step towards a more unified experience of editing both content and design. Users can now create new pages and view page details in the sidebar, an experience that is very similar to editing a page in the block…
Patchstack is reporting an Insecure Direct Object References (IDOR) vulnerability in WooCommerce Stripe Gateway, the most popular WooCommerce Stripe payment plugin with more than 900,000 active users. It was discovered by Patchstack researcher Rafie Muhammad on April 17, 2023, and patched by WooCommerce on May 30, 2023, in version 7.4.1. The security advisory describes the…
WordPress Accessibility Day, an independent 24-hour virtual conference, will return in 2023 – this time under an official non-profit status. The first edition of the event was hosted in 2020 by the WordPress core Accessibility Team. They wanted to manage it independently of the WordPress Foundation in order to reserve the option to do things like…