Two weeks ago, the Gutenberg team put out an open call for block-based widgets feedback. I had already written a lengthy review of the new system earlier in September but was asked by a member of the team to share my thoughts on the most recent iteration. With the upcoming freeze for WordPress 5.6 Beta…
Ari Stathopoulos released his new Local Gravatars plugin last week. The goal of the plugin is to allow site owners to take advantage of the benefits of a global avatar system while mitigating privacy concerns by hosting the images locally. In essence, it is a caching system that stores the images on the site owner’s…
Munir Kamal shows no signs of slowing down. He continues to push forward with new features for his EditorPlus plugin, which allows end-users to customize the look of the blocks in their posts and pages. He calls it the “no-code style editor for WordPress.” The latest addition to his plugin? Animation styles for every core…
Jetpack’s highly anticipated 9.0 release has landed, introducing some of the new features the team has previewed over the past week. Users can now publish WordPress posts to Twitter as threads. This new feature is available as part of the Publicize module when you have connected a Twitter account. Posting Twitter threads is a feature…
I have been eagerly awaiting the moment when I could install a theme and truly test Gutenberg’s full-site editing feature. By and large, each time I have tested it over the past few months, the experience has felt utterly broken. This is why I have remained skeptical of seeing the feature land in WordPress 5.6…
Gutenberg 9.1 was released to the public on Wednesday. The team announced over 200 commits from 77 contributors in its release post yesterday. One of the biggest changes to the interface was the addition of a new dropdown selector for block pattern categories. The team also reverted the block-based widgets section in the customizer and…
Jetpack 9.0, coming on October 6, will debut a new feature that allows users to share blog posts as Twitter threads in multiples tweets. A recent version of Jetpack introduced the ability to import and unroll tweetstorms for publishing inside a post. The 9.0 release will run it back the other way so the content…
I am often on the hunt for those hidden gems when it comes to block-related plugins. I like to see the interesting places that plugin authors venture. That is why it came as a surprise when someone recommended I check out the Twentig plugin a few days ago. Somehow, it has flown under my radar…
Facebook and Instagram are dropping unauthenticated oEmbed support on October 24. WordPress will be removing both Facebook and Instagram as oEmbed providers in an upcoming release. After evaluating third-party solutions, WordPress VIP is recommending its partners enable Jetpack’s Shortcode Embeds module. Jetpack will be shipping the update in its 9.0 release, which is anticipated to land prior to…
Peter Adams, the owner of the PhotoPress plugin, announced a couple of weeks ago that now is the time for his project to take center stage. “It’s Time for PhotoPress,” read the title of his post in which he laid out a four-phase plan for the future of his project. Adams is no stranger to…
Two and a half months after the launch of its public beta, Google released its Web Stories for WordPress plugin. So far, the plugin has over 10,000 active installations and has garnered a solid five-star rating from four reviews. Google created the Web Stories format through its AMP Project to allow publishers to create visually-rich…
After publishing a post about the new Recipe Block plugin last week, several people were quick to point out that WPZOOM had released a recipe-related block plugin two years ago. Among them, was the plugin author, Pavel Ciorici. I had previously tested the Recipe Card Blocks plugin and thought it fit into that “overly complex”…
Overnight, the Meta Team for WordPress.org flipped the switch for a new plugin author feature in the official directory. It allows plugin authors to opt into confirming plugin updates via email. Release confirmations will strengthen security and make sure any updates sent in are intentional. Dion Hulse opened the original ticket six weeks ago with…
The official AMP plugin for WordPress recently crossed the 2.0 milestone, a major release that closed 141 issues and merged 174 pull requests. The release was originally planned for v1.6 but due to the number of major changes the team decided to bump it to 2.0. One of the most significant updates in this release…
“Organize your quarantine-inspired baking blog with a ‘Recipe’ block!” read the opening description of Kelly Choyce-Dwan’s new plugin, Recipe Block. That was enough to pique my interest. I love food. I love baking — mostly pizza and bread. Food-related plugins and themes almost inspire me to spin up a recipe blog of my own. Almost.…