Awesome Motive, the company behind MonsterInsights, OptinMonster, WPForms, and several other popular products, has acquired SearchWP, a commercial plugin that enhances WordPress’ search functionality. No changes have been announced for the plugin and Awesome Motive CEO Syed Balkhi says it will be “business as usual” for current customers. “We have built a lot of internal…
Gutenberg 11.0 landed yesterday with a pile of changes. The development team has been moving fast, and it shows. For a two-week cycle, version 11.0 includes an insane number of bug fixes. Contributors squashed over 70 in this release alone. This seems to be in preparation for WordPress 5.8, which is expected to land on…
Ella van Durpe, a core WordPress contributor and software engineer at Automattic, released a note-taking plugin earlier today. Hypernotes is a simple custom post type that allows end-users to take private notes or serve as a journaling tool. I have seen similar plugins in the past. I even began building one years ago before ultimately…
In the upcoming 5.8 release, WordPress is updating its version of Twemoji, Twitter’s open source emoji library that supports the latest Unicode emoji specification. Version 13.1.0 introduces five new smileys and emotions, including heart on fire, mending heart, face with spiral eyes, face in clouds, and face exhaling. Version 13.1 adds mixed skin tone support for…
Today, Automattic released version 9.9 of its popular Jetpack plugin. The development team improved the modal animation and transition speed for the Instant Search module and added the Social Preview panel to the pre-publish sidebar. However, the most notable user-facing update was a refresh of its Carousel feature. The module creates a fullscreen overlay gallery…
Castos, a WordPress-powered podcast hosting provider, announced a $756K pre-seed fundraising round today from Automattic, Yoast SEO, and several individuals. The company raised money from all the investors in this round via a SAFE note, which founder and CEO Craig Hewitt said is a fairly standard investment vehicle for companies at Castos’ stage of growth.…
Earlier this week, the WordPress Biratnagar Facebook group announced a WordCamp scholarship in honor of Ujwal Thapa. The goal is to honor the legacy left behind by one of Nepal’s leaders both inside and outside of the WordPress community. Thapa passed away a month ago at age 44 from complications with COVID-19. He was a…
After considerable discussion, the WordPress Community Team is lifting the requirements of the in-person meetup safety checklist for meetups that gather fully-vaccinated attendees. The checklist is still applicable to all meetup groups but in places where vaccines are freely available, meetup organizers can now forego its requirements if they limit gatherings to those self-reporting as…
Automattic released a new plugin titled Sketch Block earlier today. It is a one-off block that allows end-users to draw directly in the editor. The plugin is marked as a beta release and requires Gutenberg to be activated to use. It is a part of the company’s Block Experiments project. To be perfectly honest, I…
The Gatsby WP Themes project has launched a new marketplace for developers who are building WordPress-powered sites with Gatsby on the frontend. Originally founded by Zac Gordon and Alexandra Spalato, the commercial venture is now primarily managed by Spalato and Paulina Hetman. The team’s first project involved porting the Twenty Twenty WordPress Theme to a…
WP Engine announced today that Local Pro, the commercial upgrade for its local WordPress development product, is now free for all users. Beginning with version 6.0, all features that formerly required a paid subscription are now available with a free Local account. These include Live Links Pro, Instant Reload, Link Checker, and MagicSync. “We believe…
Rich Tabor, the Senior Product Manager of WordPress Experience at GoDaddy, tweeted that he had an idea for a new block at the end of last week. Shortly after, the Markdown Comment Block plugin appeared on WordPress.org. The plugin is a one-off block. It allows users to enter notes directly into the post editor that…
BuddyPress 8.0 was just released earlier this month on June 6, but the core development team is gearing up for a short development cycle for 9.0. The release will be specifically targeted at getting BuddyPress core widgets ready for WordPress 5.8’s new block widgets experience. Contributors are aiming to hit the following timeline to ship…
This week GitHub unveiled new features that will be included in a total revamp of GitHub Issues, including project tables that are similar to spreadsheets, custom fields, a keyboard driven command palette, improved task lists, and issue forms. The new project table view is an alternative to project boards, allowing users to filter, sort, and…
Round #8 of the Full Site Editing (FSE) Outreach Program began yesterday. Instead of the user-centric call for testing features from the UI, program lead Anne McCarthy asks that volunteers dive into code. The new adventure is all about testing theme.json files. The twist is likely to limit the pool of usual volunteers. However, it…