Matt Watson, through his Wholesome Code brand, released a plugin called Wholesome Publishing on the WordPress plugin directory on Tuesday. Version 1.0 of the plugin adds a couple of simple but useful editing features that should help teams of writers or content designers. The plugin allows users to add nested comments on a per-block basis…
WordPress contributors are currently discussing adopting friendlier terms for some of the trac ticket resolutions to create a more welcoming environment for participants and newcomers. Since trac resolutions are not set in stone, organizations can customize these terms for different workflows. During a recent core developers chat, Sergey Biryukov proposed that WordPress trac rename “invalid,”…
Gutenberg 8.4 landed today with some major user-facing changes, including new image editing tools and the ability to edit options for multiple blocks. The previously experimental block directory search is now enabled for all Gutenberg installations. Version 8.4 is next to the last major version of Gutenberg planned for integration in WordPress 5.5. The first…
WordCamp Denver begins Friday this week and tickets are free for anyone who wants to join June 26-27. The event has been running since 2012, but like many other conferences, it is going virtual in 2020, as the pandemic continues to worsen around the globe. Attendees will have to forego the city’s extraordinary landscapes, friendly…
In response to recent events, where American police officers have been charged with murder for the deaths of George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks, along with the protests led by the Black Lives Matter movement, many repository owners are rejecting the use of the term ‘master’ for the default branch as oppressive terminology. As Git-based repository…
The University of Wisconsin is offering a free self-paced course on Creating WordPress Websites for students through its Stevens Point branch. It is one of ten free courses offered to the general public in a catalog that includes courses on management, communication, personal finance, customer service, and small business marketing. Creating WordPress websites has become…
Yesterday, core contributor Aaron Jorbin proposed renaming the default “master” branch for all WordPress-owned Git repositories to “main.” The proposal comes among a flurry of related terminology changes that the larger tech community is considering around oppressive language. Based on the ongoing discussion in the comments of the proposal, the term “trunk” has gained popularity,…
WebDevStudios released its custom block scaffolding tool to the public on Tuesday. It is a fork of the core WordPress script, which was rolled out in February alongside Gutenberg 7.4. The goal is to allow plugin developers to get started building without all the tedious setup required to build even the most basic block. The…
One year ago developers at Google and Yoast began collaborating with other contributors on a proposal to add XML sitemaps to WordPress core. The XML Sitemaps feature plugin went into testing in late January and the feature is now on deck for inclusion in WordPress 5.5. This week contributors merged a basic version of sitemaps that plugin developers…
BuddyPress broke into the world of blocks last month with its 6.0 release. Group and Member blocks were the first blocks to make it into the core plugin and next up are block versions of the existing widgets. Contributors are also working on block requests based on community feedback. Today, BuddyPress core developer Mathieu Viet…
The first beta for WooCommerce 4.3 was released yesterday. The team behind the popular eCommerce plugin added a new homepage screen, updated the product grid blocks, and is pushing users to update their version of PHP. Users who want to test the latest beta version can do so by grabbing the ZIP file from WordPress.org…
Review Signal founder Kevin Ohashi has published the site’s annual WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks for 2020, along with a smaller set of benchmarks for WooCommerce hosting. For the past seven years Ohashi has been using sentiment analysis to capture consumer reviews of hosting companies on Twitter. He also performs a set of tests to measure peak…
Yoast, the company behind the popular Yoast SEO plugin, announced it had acquired the Duplicate Post plugin earlier today. Along with the acquisition of the project, the company brought on its creator, Enrico Battocchi, as a senior developer. He will continue in a lead role with the future development of the plugin. Duplicate Post currently…
Late last week WordPress made major progress towards the goal of getting users to adopt newer versions of PHP. The ServeHappy API has been updated to set the minimum acceptable PHP version to 7.2, while the WordPress downloads page recommends 7.3 or newer. Sergey Biryukov committed this change on the meta trac after Marius Jensen…
Like many tech conferences, OpenJS World 2020 was forced to go virtual for its upcoming event scheduled for June 23-24, in Austin. The global conference was designed to be representative of all 32 projects hosted with the OpenJS Foundation. This includes Node.js, webpack, jQuery, Mocha, ESLint, Lodash, Grunt, and other popular projects. The Foundation is also…