Strattic, a WordPress hosting company that creates static files managed via a headless install, has acquired WP2Static, an open source plugin for generating a static WordPress site. Leon Stafford, the plugin’s creator, has been working for the company for the past nine months and will continue to maintain WP2Static. In 2020, Stafford removed WP2Static from…
WPExperts, a Pakistan and Egypt-based WordPress development agency with more than 120 employees, has acquired the Post SMTP plugin from its former developer, Yehuda Hassine. This is the agency’s second acquisition this year, after picking up Rich Tabor’s Login Designer plugin in January. The Post SMTP plugin is a fork of the Postman SMTP plugin,…
There is not much I miss about the classic editor. It was dead to me when the block system became the new normal. However, there might be a feature or two that I miss. The biggest of those features? The “Add New” button at the top of the post editor. So, when Aurooba Ahmed mentioned…
Piklist, a development framework that helped people build things faster with WordPress, is shutting down. Its creators, Steve Bruner and Kevin Miller, launched the framework on June 12, 2012, at WordCampNYC. Over the next nine years it gained a devoted following. The framework was used by developers to speed up tasks such as creating fields…
Gutenberg 12.6 landed in the WordPress plugin directory yesterday. The update includes several transform-related enhancements and new Read More and Post Author Biography blocks. Users can now also show visible labels via the Social Icons block. Nothing seems to be broken with this release, which is always welcome. Gutenberg has not fundamentally wrecked something I…
It has been over nine years since the late Alex Mills opened a ticket on WordPress Trac titled Plugin Dependencies (Yet Another Plugin Dependencies Ticket). It is not the oldest of similar feature requests, but it is still open. Most predecessors were closed with the “wontfix” label, which is usually the final nail in the…
Stanislav Khromov announced Clarity, a plugin for hiding obtrusive banners, via Twitter and the Advanced WordPress (AWP) Facebook group today. It was first pushed to WordPress.org around a year ago, but the developer seems to be just now publicizing it. The Clarity website describes its mission as: “Ads, upsells, and analytics banners have been running…
Kadence Blocks, a popular block collection plugin, added a new Lottie Animations block today in version 2.2.4. Most of the blocks in the plugin offer commonly used page building features like rows, buttons, galleries, and testimonials. The Lottie Animations block introduces something a little more fun and whimsical. Developed by the design team at Airbnb,…
I “officially” dubbed Newsletter Glue my favorite plugin in the 2021 yearly recap post. WordPress’s block system makes such projects more feasible than before, or at least more easily built and extended. Since I first took note of it, I have kept a watchful eye on its progress. Late last month, the plugin’s development team…
There is a problem. Well, it is not an OMGBBQ problem, but it has the potential to become one. Maybe by calling attention to it, I will set off a landslide of copycats who will see this as another trick of the marketing trade, implementing it in their own projects. I am torn, but it…
Over the weekend, Virgiliu Diaconu asked me to check out his Carousel Slider Block plugin, a project he has maintained for three years. It has slowly garnered more than 5,000 active installs since its release. I get emails like this every day. More often than not, the projects are fundamentally broken or are a bit…
Kevin Batdorf, the Project Lead Developer at Extendify, released the Wavy Divider plugin earlier this week. It is described as “a colorful, fun, lightweight divider block to energize your website with character and pizazz.” As someone who believes every Friday should be officially titled “Fun Friday,” how could I not install and activate it? I…
Gutenberg 12.5 landed in the WordPress plugin directory earlier today. I have already been excited about at least one new enhancement, global styles variations. However, this is a beefy update with several developer and user-centric features. With WordPress 5.9 now out into the wild, it looks like all hands are back on deck as we…
Full-site editing has come to Sensei LMS in the plugin’s latest 4.0 release. The headline feature of this update is Learning Mode – a new block-based theme that gives course authors the ability to customize the learning experience in ways that were not possible before. This version also updates the nine-year-old plugin’s menus and admin…
One of my favorite tools in the past few days is the Block X-ray Attributes plugin by Sal Ferrarello. It is geared toward developers and shows block attributes in the WordPress editor. After seeing his tweet on Friday, I immediately installed it. The plugin is currently only available via its GitHub repository, and anyone who…