Gutenberg 10.7 landed yesterday. Within a few hours, the development team also released version 10.7.1 of the plugin with a few bug fixes. The latest update primarily focuses on work expected to land in WordPress 5.8 this July. The feature freeze deadline for the current WordPress development cycle passed on Tuesday. This should mean that…
Tom de Visser, a developer from Amsterdam, released the Post Descriptions plugin last week. It was his first submission to the WordPress.org plugin repository. It allows users to write short descriptions on a per-post basis, which are then displayed on the post-management screen. For an initial outing, it already seems to be a hit with…
Almost since the dawn of the plugin and theme upgrade mechanisms inclusion in core over a decade ago, third-party developers have asked for an easy way to bypass the system. WordPress 5.8 will finally deliver on this feature request. While it has long been possible to filter the update system, methods for doing so were…
When Sergiu Radu and Andrei Glingeanu launched their free Blocksy theme nearly two years ago, they were surprised by how quickly their business grew during a global pandemic without any investment in marketing. Blocksy is now active on more than 20,000 WordPress sites and its commercial version, launched in October 2020, has grown to where…
Less than two weeks after publishing about the broken user experience of the former Dark Mode plugin being renamed and repurposed, another plugin development company decided to do the same. The consensus seems to be that this is a bad idea. However, the ProfilePress Team forged ahead and repurposed the WP User Avatar plugin. Instead…
The Gutenberg development team has taken massive strides in the latest release. Version 10.6 of the plugin introduces several user-facing features and changes that upgrade the block-editing experience. The new duotone filter for images is just downright fun to play with. The UIs for the Query pattern selector and template-editing mode have been overhauled. Plus,…
GiveWP, one of the most popular donation and fundraising plugins with more than 100,000 active installs, has been acquired by Liquid Web. The team behind the plugin will be joining Liquid Web as part of the asset sale, which includes the whole company, products, and leadership. GiveWP made its debut in 2015 with a 0%…
Yesterday, WordPress released a core plugin named Classic Widgets. Core contributors Tonya Mork and Andrew Ozz created the plugin under the WordPress Contributors account. It allows end-users to disable the upcoming block-based widgets system. Support is expected through 2022 or as long as necessary according to the plugin description. Decided last month by a small…
Last year, I asked Tavern readers if WordPress should notify end-users when a plugin’s owner changes. The post was not entirely based on theory. There have been some cases of real-world confusion. The consensus from the comments on that post seemed to be that, yes, such notifications would be welcome. When I wrote that post,…
Jetpack 9.7 was released today with updates under the hood that ensure the plugin’s blocks are compatible with the full-site editing features coming in WordPress 5.8. It also changes how sites access features that require the WordPress.com infrastructure. A pull request merged in version 9.7 changes the connection flow to make Jetpack active as soon…
Digital consultancies Alpha Particle and Flowspoke have acquired the Kanban for WordPress plugin, a tool that puts Kanban boards into the admin to measure progress on a goal. The plugin is used for agile project management, sales tracking, editorial scheduling, and other planning purposes. WordPress developer Corey Maass created Kanban for WordPress in 2015 but…
I reach over to grab my phone to check the time. I am debating whether I should stay awake and watch one more episode of The Walking Dead — it would be my fourth, maybe fifth, binge of the series. 11:12 pm. I noticed that Slack was blowing up my phone. I had it on…
The Gravity Forms team formally announced version 2.5 of its form plugin yesterday. The product, owned by Rocketgenius, promises an overhauled experience that is more in line with the core block editor. The team also wanted to put accessibility at the forefront of this release. The design is fresh, ditching pieces of the older WordPress…
Earlier this week, Plausible Analytics released version 1.2 of its WordPress plugin. The update includes a missing feature that should make it more appealing to end-users. The plugin now supports an “embedded mode” that displays a site’s stats directly in the WordPress admin interface. Without counting the self-hosted users of its open-source project, Plausible Analytics…
The Jetpack team has been quietly testing a new plugin called Jetpack Boost, which addresses website owners’ performance and SEO concerns. Version 1.0 was released today, one month after the final pre-release came out in March. Boost is a separate plugin under the Jetpack brand and it does not require Jetpack core to work. The…