WP Engine’s Local development app has released version 6.7.0 with Site Grouping, a highly requested feature that will greatly improve users’ workflows. It allows users to create custom groups in the sidebar of the Local dashboard page for better organization of their sites. Local users have been asking for this feature since 2017, as many…
WooCommerce 7.5.0 was released this week with three new blocks for the Product Archive templates. These include a new Store Breadcrumb block, Product Results Count block, and a Catalog Sorting block, all seen in action below. These blocks were released as part of an effort to “blockify” Product Archive templates so that they can more…
Gutenberg 15.3 was released this week with a new “Time to Read” block that calculates the estimated reading time for the post or page using the same method that appears in the details panel. The block displays this information on the frontend wherever it is inserted. This is the first iteration of the Time to…
WordPress 6.2 RC 2 was released today on schedule. The new Navigation section in the Site Editor was dropped from the upcoming release in a somewhat unusual turn of events this late in the release cycle. The feature will remain in the Gutenberg plugin and will be iterated on for a future core release. Users…
Patchstack, a WordPress security maintenance and management tool, has published its “State of WordPress Security” whitepaper for 2022, tracking a few key metrics on publicly reported vulnerabilities. The findings highlight the risk of using unmaintained themes and plugins along with developers’ need to keep pace with updates to libraries and dependencies included in their work.…
Automattic has acquired the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress from German developer Matthias Pfefferle, who will be joining the company to continue improving support for federated platforms. Pfefferle, who is also the author of the Webmention plugin, said his new role is to see how Automattic’s products can benefit from open protocols like ActivityPub. In 2021,…
More than 200 users on Mastodon who consider themselves part of the WordPress community, responded to the recent Toot the Word 2023 Survey, which was conducted by the admins of five WordPress-oriented Mastodon instances. The purpose of the survey was to help those running these instances understand how important Mastodon is for the WordPress community…
WordPress 6.2 RC 1 was released today, marking the hard string freeze and readiness for translation ahead of the official release on March 28. There are three weeks remaining for testing. WordPress contributors published the 6.2 Field Guide, which includes the dev notes – technical updates for many of the new features and changes included…
Lemmony is a new WordPress block theme designed by the team at Shufflehound, a theme development company based in Europe with commercial products on Themeforest. This is the team’s first block theme on WordPress.org and it is a strong debut. Lemmony is a beautifully-designed multipurpose theme that would work well for businesses, agencies, and portfolio…
Jetpack 11.9 was released this week with support for sharing posts to Mastodon. The new button allows readers to click an icon to launch a sharing window that will ask the user to enter the full URL of the Mastodon instance where they want to share the post. Adding the URL will update the window…
WP Engine is beta testing its new Pattern Manager plugin for creating and maintaining patterns. The plugin is intended for WordPress professionals – developers, agencies, and freelancers, who could benefit from having an interface and system for pattern management. “There are some plugins out there that provide an interface for creating patterns on a production…
WordPress contributors have updated the legacy default themes to bundle Google Fonts locally in the theme folder, instead of loading them from Google’s servers. In years past, loading fonts from the the Google CDN was the recommended practice for performance reasons, but new privacy concerns have emerged following a German court case, which fined a website…
If you’re not yet excited about the upcoming WordPress 6.2 release, you will be after watching the new live demo product video that was recorded last week. The demo was presented by Anne McCarthy and Rich Tabor, and moderated by Nathan Wrigley. The team used a beautifully customized version of the default Twenty Twenty-Three theme,…
Representatives of the WordPress Themes Team are looking to carry forward the momentum contributors found in creating the Twenty Twenty-Three theme’s style variations by launching a new Community Themes initiative. Leading up to WordPress 6.1’s release, 19 designers from eight countries built 38 unique style variations, and 10 were selected to ship with the release.…
Last month’s Twitter outage gave Mastodon a boost, as the company also announced unpopular changes to its API access. People from the WordPress community continue to trickle into the fediverse, with many going so far as to shutter their Twitter accounts. A fledgling community of WordPress users on Mastodon has made the network home and…