Gutenberg 10.1 landed yesterday with several new features, many of which focused on improvements to the interface and user experience. Users can now control the justification of items in the Social Icons block. The new release also enhances the UX for creating reusable blocks, groups the Image block toolbar controls, and introduces categorized template parts…
A couple of weeks ago, Munir Kamal released version 2.6 of his Editor Plus WordPress plugin. The latest version does not add a slew of features as its users have seen in the past. However, it introduces one major upgrade. The new version lets users insert templates from Gutenberg Hub’s growing library directly from the…
What was once likely viewed as plugin territory is now a reality as part of the Gutenberg project. Yesterday, the team merged a pull request for a Table of Contents (TOC) block into the plugin’s codebase. It was a contribution driven by developer Zebulan Stanphill, starting nearly a year ago. The TOC block may feel…
Plausible Analytics is not new on the scene. The two-person, EU-based team behind the company has been trying to carve its slice of the analytics pie against players like Google Analytics and WordPress.com Stats for nearly two years. The self-funded and bootstrapped company is starting to gain a small foothold. It has been an uphill…
After noticing suspicious review activity for the AccessiBe plugin, accessibility consultant Joe Dolson reported the fake reviews to WordPress.org’s plugin team. The reviews were removed in under 48 hours, thanks to Dolson’s detailed research. At the time of reporting, Dolson found 31 five-star reviews, 2 four-star reviews, and 2 one-star reviews. After putting these into…
Hello. I always supported the idea of a WordPress block editor as a whole, but lately, I’m a bit frustrated in that there are some blocks I need with urgency to work on a (non-visitor editable) wiki-like site (mostly a Tabs block, a Countdown block, an Accordion/Toggle block, a Table of contents block and a…
Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) is coming up on a major milestone with version 3.0 in active development, a huge undertaking spanning nearly three years. The first beta was released today with one of the most extensive and technically detailed beta testing guides I’ve seen for a major plugin update. Version 3.0 will migrate the bulk…
Automattic released its Newspack Newsletters project to the WordPress plugin directory earlier today. It is the first Newspack-related plugin the company has made available outside of GitHub or its custom platform. Newspack is primarily a service geared toward small and medium-sized publications. Its goal is to work with news industry leaders to create a platform…
Earlier this week, Elementor announced a significant pricing hike coming in March 2021 for new customers: On March 9th, 2021, Elementor will be adding new Studio and Agency Pro subscription plans and adapting the Expert plan, to best accommodate users’ growing needs. These changes will only apply to new purchases. If you’re on an existing active…
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…
George Mamadashvili’s Bookmark Card block is the sort of simple plugin that is easy to overlook. It is one of those plugins that suffers from the lack of block discoverability in WordPress at the moment. Like many other one-off blocks, you don’t know you need it until you need it. The plugin is essentially an…
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…
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…
WordPress’ plugin team has published a statement regarding plugins making changes to users’ update services: Unless your plugin has the purpose of managing updates, you must not change the defaults of WordPress’ update settings. You may offer a feature to auto-update, but it has to honor the core settings. This means if someone has set their site to “Never update any of my plugins or themes” you…
Jetpack’s Design and Research Team is launching a new customer research panel as part of an ongoing effort to collect feedback in advance of launching new features. They are allocating one day every month to talk with users: It’s a small step toward an important goal of better understanding what our users need, seeing and…