WordCamp US 2020, previously scheduled for October, was cancelled due to pandemic stress and online event fatigue. Organizers did not opt for running it as an online event, but Matt Mullenweg’s annual State of the Word address will be delivered virtually this year. It will be streamed on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter on Thursday, Dec 17th, 2020 at…
WordPress 5.6 “Simone,” named in honor of American performer and civil rights activist Nina Simone, was released today and is now available for download. The release was led by an all-women release squad, a first in WordPress history. The new version includes many enhancements for the block editor, accessibility improvements, application password support for the…
Automattic has acquired MailPoet, a popular email marketing solution for WordPress, to give WooCommerce store owners more integrated email management capabilities in the admin. The plugin is used by more than 300,000 websites for everything from building a mailing list to managing transaction and abandoned cart emails. The nine-year old company is now a team…
Easy WP SMTP has patched a vulnerability that allows attackers to capture the password reset link from the plugin’s debug log file and gain unauthorized access to the site. The plugin is used by more than 500,000 WordPress sites to configure and send all outgoing emails via a SMTP server so they are less likely…
The State of CSS 2020 survey results have just been published, with a summary of the tools, methodologies, frameworks, and libraries that are currently favored by CSS professionals. It includes data from 11,492 respondents in 102 countries, after the questions were translated for the first time into a dozen different languages. In the layout category,…
Although the promise of effective COVID-19 vaccines is shining a light at the end of a long tunnel, the world remains firmly in the virus’ grip until distribution can ramp up to cover at-risk groups as well as the general populace. As pandemic-weary communities muster the discipline to ride out the next few months under…
Gutenberg 9.5 went live today. The development team is continuing forward with work that we will start seeing down the road in WordPress 5.7 and beyond. The big user-facing highlights for this release were the additions of a full-height alignment option for the Cover block, font-size support in the Code block, and improved previews for…
Multidots, a development agency and WordPress VIP Agency Partner, has released a plugin that brings content collaboration to the block editor. The Google-Doc Style Gutenberg Block Commenting plugin landed on WordPress.org in October and is just starting to gain traction. It adds inline commenting to the editor where users can highlight text or select entire…
Fränk Klein, a Principal Engineer at Human Made, is now the second theme developer to release a block-based theme to the WordPress theme directory. Block-Based Bosco is a recreation of his Bosco theme, which he released in 2014. Block-based themes, also called FSE (full-site editing) themes, are currently experimental. They require the use of the…
Six months ago, Admin 2020 captured the attention of WordPress users with its fresh approach to skinning the admin screens. Version 2 of the plugin has been completely rewritten to support a modular architecture so users can enable or disable features, or selectively enable them by user role or username. Some users prefer the default menu…
On Monday, WordPress core contributor Jonathan Desrosiers published a detailed post on the Make WordPress Core blog about the upcoming PHP 8 release and how it affects WordPress. PHP 8 Is Coming Scheduled for release on November 26, 2020, PHP 8 is the next major update to our favorite scripting language. While previous PHP releases…
On November 11, StudioPress announced an open beta for its Genesis Block Theme. This is a pivotal moment, or at least one moment in a series of significant moments, for adoption of the block editor. Feel free to call me on this in a year or two if it does not pan out. The original…
Gutenberg 9.4.0 was released this week with many small improvements to existing features, while work on full site editing continues. This release will not be included in the upcoming WordPress 5.6 release but those who are using the Gutenberg plugin will have access to the improvements right away. The button block now has a width…
Six weeks ago, WordPress 5.6 release lead Helen Hou-Sandí breathed new life into two almost-forgotten features around the WordPress website and platform. The idea was to take the starter content feature, which themes can optionally add for new installs, and apply it to the WordPress.org theme preview system. It was not a new idea. However,…
Local 5.9.2 was released this month with a new image optimization feature. The Pro version of Flywheel’s local WordPress development product got a revamp four months ago, bringing in a new collection of pre‑launch tools. While image optimization falls into that category, the company decided to make this new feature available to both free and pro…