The Gatsby source WordPress plugin, Gatsby Cloud’s official WordPress integration, has been marked stable as of v4 and has been released to the public. The plugin sources data from WordPress for headless setups that use Gatsby on the frontend. It is a complete rewrite of Gatsby’s previous source plugin and works in combination with the…
WP Engine is deepening its investment in headless WordPress with the creation of a new team dedicated to furthering the technology developers rely on when opting for this architecture. The company has hired WPGraphQL creator and maintainer Jason Bahl as part of this new team and will be investing in more engineers and other roles…
Version 9.9 of the Gutenberg plugin landed earlier today. While it includes several minor UI improvements, the biggest user-facing change is the inclusion of icon and background color options for the Social Links block. Theme authors can now add support for rounded image borders. They are also faced with a breaking change to their theme…
Newspack, a project funded by the Google News initiative and WordPress.com, has published a showcase of 60 news sites running on the platform. WordPress.com announced its plans to build the Newspack CMS two years ago and successfully signed on more than 50 sites in the first year. The cloud-based platform is open source and highly…
Automation. It is one of those dreams in the minds of many reviewers from the Themes Team. If there was a tool to take care of 90% of the issues, the team could focus on the 10% not easily found by automated scripts. Enter the Theme Review Action project. Steve Dufresne, a WordPress Meta team…
A new report from eQAfy, a company that collects and analyzes data about higher education websites, has benchmarked which content management systems US institutions are using. The report is a snapshot of data from December 2020, sourced from the National Center for Education Statistics IPEDS database. After scanning a list of 4,000 active institutions, EQAfy’s headless browser…
Josepha Haden Chomphosy, the Executive Director of WordPress, posted a follow-up to her outline of the upcoming year. Questions mounted about what a minimum viable product (MVP) looked like for Full Site Editing (FSE), which is expected to be ready in the Gutenberg plugin in April. The core team is also shooting for a June…
WordPress 5.7 Beta 1 was released this week on schedule and is ready for wider testing. This release will introduce 68 new features and enhancements, dozens of bug fixes, and versions 9.3 – 9.9 of the Gutenberg plugin. A few of the highlights expected in 5.7 include the following: Lazy-load iframes: When WordPress 5.4 added…
Using CSS custom properties for the WordPress admin color scheme system is listed for the WordPress 5.7 milestone. It feels low-key enough that most would pass it over as a simple upgrade to keep up with the times. However, this feature can create ripples that spread and benefit the ecosystem in the years to come.…
The next major release of WordPress will make it much easier for users to migrate their sites from HTTP to HTTPS. It introduces new capabilities to detect if the user’s hosting environment has support for HTTPS and provides a one-click update process, handling mixed content rewrites where possible. “A major pain point in WordPress has…
WordPress’ block management interface was introduced in Gutenberg 5.3, released in March 2019, and is due for an update. In case you haven’t explored the editor’s Tools menu, the block manager setting allows you to select which blocks will be shown or hidden in the block inserter. Last week, Automattic engineer Nik Tsekouras opened a…
True to its name, the first WP Briefing podcast lasted just over 12 minutes. Josepha Haden Chomphosy, the Executive Director of WordPress, jump-started the second month of 2021 with a show that should arrive on the our doorstep every two weeks. With what seems to be overwhelming positive support on Twitter, the podcast was welcomed…
This week GitLab announced a pricing change that eliminates its Bronze/Starter tier in favor of a three-tier subscription model. The Starter tier, previously offered at $4/month, included features like single-team project management, next day business support, and 2,000 CI/CD minutes. GitLab’s updated pricing page shows the benefits that were included in the Starter plan are…
Should WordPress notify users of plugin ownership changes? That was the question that Ian Atkins asked two months ago. WP Tavern readers seemed to think it was a good idea, at least those who commented on our coverage of it. However, the original Trac ticket has not seen any movement since. There are real technical…
Elastic, makers of the search and analytic engine Elasticsearch, have re-licensed its core product so that it is no longer open source. The company is moving new versions of both Kibana and Elasticsearch from the Apache 2.0-license to be dual-licensed under the Server Side Public License (SSPL) and the Elastic License, which do not meet the Open Source Definition. In a…