In July, Termly announced its acquisition of the GDPR/CCPA Cookie Consent Banner plugin. The new direction was an overhaul of the WordPress extension, turning what was once a free offering into, essentially, a commercial SaaS product. Users could run the service for up to 100 visitors. After that, the cheapest tier would cost $180 per…
Automattic is organizing its 2nd annual Worldwide WordPress 5K during the month of October this year. Registration for the race is free and participants will have the opportunity to donate to a charity of their choice, with Automattic matching donations up to $50,000. Just like the first Worldwide WP 5K that was held in 2015,…
Wordfence has published two vulnerabilities that affect users of the Redux Framework plugin, which has more recently come to be know as the “Gutenberg Template Library & Redux Framework” on WordPress.org. Extendify purchased the plugin from its creator, Dōvy Paukstys, in November 2020, in a deal that was not highly publicized. It is currently active…
What if WordPress developers lived in a world where we could create PHP-based templates that would output data on the front end and handle editable fields via the block editor? Or, we had a system where we could create blocks without a build step? While there are many reasons the modern WordPress editor is not…
Another two weeks have flown by, and another Gutenberg plugin update is in the books. I always look forward to the latest release, awaiting what goodies our contributor community has produced. Sometimes I jump the gun and install a development version of the plugin to understand an upcoming feature, such as the new “block gap”…
WordPress Translation Day kicked off today, and the event has been expanded to run from September 1-30 this year. WordPress Polyglots contributors from all over the world will be hosting mini-events throughout the month where they will be translating themes, plugins, apps, meta, docs, and other important projects. Events will also focus on recruitment, virtual training…
The block-based Navigation editor screen got a status check last week as part of a Hallway Hangout meeting aimed at identifying what needs to happen to bring the screen out from behind the “experimental” flag. Once the Navigation screen is available by default in the Gutenberg plugin, the team working on the feature will be able to gather…
Automattic has acquired Frontity, the company behind an open source framework for building WordPress themes with React. The acquisition comes more than a year after the company raised €1M in funding in a round led by K Fund, with Automattic covering 22%. Frontity co-founders Pablo Postigo and Luis Herranz and their team will no longer be…
In December 2020, WordPress launched its new “Learn” platform with free courses, workshops, and lesson plans. Since then, the Training Team has continued adding more material. The latest proposal is an open discussion for the community on adding participatory badges for completing coursework. “I’d like to nail down what kind of thing we would like…
Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) has released version 5.10, the first major release since the plugin was acquired by Delicious Brains. It introduces several new features that were previously experimental, closing out tickets that were started by previous owner Elliot Condon. The release enables HTML escaping by default, which helps prevent Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks. It…
Earlier this week, websevendev released its fourth WordPress plugin to the official directory named Block Attributes. The extension allows end-users to add any HTML attribute to nearly any block. One of the problems with the WordPress editor is that it can be a bit fussy about customizing HTML. Blocks are built on a set of…
Last week, I reached out to several members of the core WordPress committers to see if we could get an official word on whether Classic Editor support would continue beyond the mere months it seemingly had left to live. I received a semi-official answer but was asked to hold off on publishing for a more…
Google announced today that it has completed its rollout of the link spam update, which was started a month ago. In an effort to combat sites using spammy links to manipulate rankings, the search engine has developed more effective ways to identify and nullify link spam across multiple languages. The update took a couple weeks…
Last week, a GitHub pull request I had been watching since October 2020 on the Gutenberg repository was finally merged into the codebase. It changes the structure of the WordPress Gallery block to be a container for nested Image blocks. The new format is expected to land in WordPress 5.9. For those who want to…
WordCamp US 2021 will be held online this year on October 1. The free, one-day event will be packed with speaker sessions, workshops, and networking opportunities for attendees. Organizers opened the call for speaker nominees earlier this month to speak on topics within the scope identified for this year: Connection, Contribution, and Inspiration: We want…