Last month, WordPress design contributors proposed creating a new kind of default theme that would bundle a curated set of style variations, instead of creating a new theme from scratch. This idea resonated with participants in the discussion and plans are now underway to use a stripped-back version of Twenty Twenty-Two as the base for…
The practice of merging experimental APIs from Gutenberg into WordPress core may soon be coming to an end. A new proposal, published by Automattic-sponsored contributor Adam Zielinski, calls for contributors to stabilize APIs before merging them into core. Over the years, approximately 280 experimental APIs have been merged from the Gutenberg plugin, which Zielinski audited…
ServerPress, makers of DesktopServer, a WordPress local development tool, announced it is shutting down after 12 years in business. The company emailed its customers and posted a farewell message on its website after disabling new purchases and is in the process of canceling renewals for existing subscriptions. ServerPress was founded by Steve Carnam in 2010.…
WordCamp US (WCUS) kicks off one month from today in San Diego, CA, and organizers have published the full schedule for all sessions. The three-day event will feature three tracks with a combination of lightning talks (15 min), standard talks (45 min), and workshops (1 hr+). This year’s lineup is heavy on educating professionals on…
Gutenberg 13.8 was released last week with some major enhancements that should delight block theme authors and users alike. The long-awaited fluid typography support landed in this version. It provides smooth scaling between smaller and larger viewports, adapting in a fluid way to varying widths. Release lead George Mamadashvili demonstrated how this works in a…
It’s easy to get lost among a sea of Cover, Group, and Paragraph blocks while navigating the block editor’s List View. Clicking around wildly will generally surface the block you’re seeking, but it’s not efficient or intuitive. Gutenberg contributors have some ideas and prototypes aimed at giving the List View more context. Rich Tabor proposed…
WebP, an image format developed by Google, which is intended to replace JPEG, PNG, and GIF file formats, will soon be generated by default for new JPEG image uploads in WordPress and used for website content. The main work for this feature was committed to core for inclusion in the upcoming WordPress 6.1 release. The…
The WordPress Themes team is poised to change its guidelines on remote hosting Google Fonts and is once again strongly urging theme authors to host their fonts locally. Yoast-sponsored contributor Ari Stathopoulos published an update today to answer some questions the team has been receiving about fonts in themes: Historically, WordPress themes hosted in the w.org…
WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy is proposing contributors rename the terms “full-site editing” and “full-site editor” to something more user friendly. The terms came into use as WordPress moved into the Customization phase and are still used to differentiate the work being done on site editing as opposed to content editing in the block…
The WordPress mobile team announced today that it will be pulling all the Jetpack and WordPress.com features from the official WordPress mobile apps. They will be moved into the Jetpack app through a gradual process that is anticipated to conclude by the end of this year. “Over the years, the WordPress app has evolved to…
For years, the vast majority of Akismet releases have been centered around bug fixes and improving compatibility with various plugins. Version 5.0 was released today, following 4.2.5 earlier this month, with a new feature that should improve Askismet’s ability to detect spam comments. Akismet engineer Christopher Finke explained how the plugin will now analyze how…
Kevin Ohashi from Review Signal has published the 2022 WordPress and WooCommerce hosting performance benchmarks. These benchmarks are some of the most trusted review sources in the hosting industry due to Ohashi’s transparent methodology. No hosting company sponsors the work. Instead, Ohashi charges a standard, publicly documented fee for participation that covers the cost of…
More consolidation is happening in the WordPress maintenance services space, as SiteCare announced it has acquired Maintainn, a long-time competitor, from WebDevStudios. “As we’ve grown and our clientele has grown [with] definitely more of a focus on the enterprise and big business, we’ve simply kind of grown away where that side of the house wasn’t…
WordPress Accessibility Day, a free, 24-hour virtual event, is set for November 2-3, 2022. The event was first founded in 2020 and will continue this year led by Joe Dolson and Amber Hinds. It was previously run by the WordPress core Accessibility Team through the WordPress Foundation but organizers are running it independently this year…
Gutenberg 13.7 was released this week with major updates to full-site editing (FSE) capabilities that expand custom template creation. Users can now create templates for custom taxonomies, specific terms, and single categories and tags. The update also includes the ability to create templates for specific pages. Clicking on “Add New” template and selecting Category will…