Joris van Montfort, a freelance WordPress developer, released the JVM Gutenberg Rich Text Icons plugin over the weekend. The goal was simple: allow users to insert icons nearly anywhere in the block editor at the click of a button. The plugin uses version 4.7 of the Font Awesome library out of the box. However, developers…
Chrome’s upcoming version 90 will use https:// by default in the address bar, bringing a significant improvement to security and loading speed. HTTPS adoption has shot up significantly over the past six years after Google announced in 2014 that HTTPS would be used as a ranking signal in search results. In February 2021, W3Techs found that 82.2% of websites…
Anders Norén’s new Eksell theme is now available for download from the WordPress Themes directory. Eksell was inspired by Swedish graphic designer Olle Eksell. It arrives a year and a half after Norén’s popular Chaplin theme was released. Last week Justin Tadlock published a preview of the theme while it was still making its way…
Like many others, I often have pinned tabs of all sorts of things in my browser. Some of them linger there for months. Others for years, I shamefully admit. Of the handful of Gutenberg-related browser tabs I have had pinned since late 2020, one of them finally had the sort of movement I have been…
Ulysses, the writing app for Mac, iPad and iPhone, released version 22 this week with support for updating WordPress posts as the headline feature. The app aims to provide a distraction-free writing experience and has offered the ability to export to WordPress for years. Ulysses began alpha testing the highly requested WordPress post updating feature…
As part of an experiment designed to improve coordination of contributor teams, WordPress has launched a new Slack channel for full-time sponsored contributors. Josepha Haden Chomphosy, the project’s executive director, announced the new closed Slack channel on Friday evening in a post that drew critical feedback from contributors who pushed for more clarification. “2020 was…
In 2018, WebARX launched the first version of its security platform and grew to 3,000 users. Earlier this month, the company decided to rebrand to Patchstack. Outside of customers getting the name wrong, the company had grown beyond its original SaaS product, providing other services like PlugBounty, an open-source bug-hunting platform. Earlier this year, they…
On Wednesday, WordPress executive director Josepha Haden Chomphosy posted the next steps forward for themes and reviews for the official theme directory. In the post, she describes the tools and types of access the Themes Team needs. She also laid out some other goals for the system. The timeline is to have much of this…
Yesterday, version 10.2 of the Gutenberg WordPress plugin landed. Users can now add a Spacer block between Navigation items, categorize custom template parts, and pick between patterns when inserting the Query block. The user experience continues to improve in some areas. The Media & Text block, one of the few holdouts, can now be transformed…
Elementor users who haven’t updated recently will want to get on the latest version 3.1.4 as soon as possible. Researchers at Wordfence disclosed a set of stored Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities in the plugin to its authors in February, which was partially patched at that time and additional fixes were released the second week of March.…
WooCommerce Live Africa is hosting its first online meetup on Thursday, March 18, 2021, from 5:30 PM to 7:00 PM GMT+1. The new regional group is part of the WooCommerce network of more than 100 meetups with nearly 30,000 members across 40 countries. Events will be focused on topics pertinent to store owners and entrepreneurs with a…
Earlier today, core WordPress contributor Nick Halsey released Full Screen Galleries, a plugin that automatically creates a full-screen slideshow when site visitors click on an image. The plugin works with all images, regardless of whether they are in a gallery block. It also supports both the classic and block editors. Lightbox-type plugins are a dime…
Last week, security researchers at Seravo and WP Charged reported a critical zero-day vulnerability in The Plus Addons for Elementor on March 8, 2021. WPScan categorized it as an authentication bypass vulnerability: The plugin is being actively exploited to by malicious actors to bypass authentication, allowing unauthenticated users to log in as any user (including…
Just before the weekend, Google published a caustic statement on Microsoft’s public support of Australia’s new law that forces Google and Facebook to pay publishers for their content. The law requires the companies to negotiate licensing agreements with publishers in order to include news articles in both search and news feeds, including snippets. Last month,…
The world of Gutenberg blocks is expanding. WordPress’ official block directory launched in June 2020 with just 60 single-block plugins. Today, it has grown to more than 480 blocks. As users incorporate more blocks into their websites, the block inserter can become a very long list to scroll when browsing. Block management capabilities were added…