Last Tuesday, iThemes announced it had acquired the Restrict Content Pro plugin from Sandhills Development. iThemes is part of the Liquid Web family of brands. Pippin Williamson, Managing Director at Sandhills, said the company had no intention of selling the plugin last October when talks of the acquisition began. However, moving forward has created some…
On Wednesday, September 2, Gutenberg 8.9 launched with a set of new features, enhancements, and several bug fixes. The development team took the block-based widgets system out of its experimental stage, making it the default experience for all plugin users. Block-based widgets have taken months upon months of work. The team has surpassed some of…
On May 4, the StudioPress development team made a small but significant user-facing change to its Atomic Blocks plugin (now rebranded to Genesis Blocks). It removed the “AB” branding from its block titles. This minor update changed block titles such as AB Accordion and AB Button to Accordion and Button, respectively. On the surface, this…
Jeremey Herve, a Jetpack developer at Automattic, announced the release of Jetpack 8.9 earlier today. The update brings several major features to the plugin’s users. Jetpack now sports a new social preview option in the block editor, a newsletter signup form type, and a block for handling donations. Version 8.9 also adds support for the…
One year ago today, Elmastudio launched a beta version of its Aino WordPress theme and Aino Blocks plugin. While the team pushed the theme live in the theme directory earlier this year, it wasn’t until a couple of weeks ago that they officially released their blocks plugin. Elmastudio’s beta launch was one of the first…
Mario Peshev, the CEO of WordPress agency DevriX, officially announced he had acquired the WP-CRM System plugin this week. Formally, his company Premium WP Support is taking the reins for the project. Scott DeLuzio, the creator and previous owner of the plugin, published the news on his blog last month. DeLuzio originally built the plugin…
Elementor version 3.0 was launched on Tuesday. This release is the first major update to the plugin in over two years and is one of the largest upgrades in its history. The new version focuses on a design system, a new theme builder, and performance improvements. The driving motivation behind this release was to create…
StudioPress, which was acquired by WP Engine in 2018, is rebranding its popular Atomic Blocks plugin to Genesis Blocks. WP Engine also acquired Atomic Blocks in 2018, growing the plugin’s user base from 3,000 active installs to more than 60,000 over the past two years. The purpose of rebranding is to more tightly align the…
Ben Gillbanks decided to put an old idea into motion. After the discussion over Gravatar privacy concerns and local avatars in WordPress reignited a couple of weeks ago, he went to work building Pixel Avatars, a generated avatar solution that requires no connection to a third-party service. Gravatar solves a huge problem. It creates a…
One of the minor but useful additions to WordPress 5.5 is the new wp_get_environment_type() function. It makes it possible for plugin and theme authors to do some interesting things based on whether a site is identified as staging, development, production, or some other custom environment type. In discussion on the original trac ticket, Marius Jensen suggested…
Yesterday, Automattic dropped version 4.4 of its popular WooCommerce plugin. The new release is a minor update with the biggest changes around the plugin’s blocks and coupon management in the admin. Two dozen people made 450 contributions to the release. The WooCommerce team brought several updates to the plugin’s blocks. The biggest user-facing change is…
Now that WordPress 5.5 has shipped, block patterns are available in core for all users. If you have previously been relying on reusable blocks but prefer the flexibility of block patterns, you may want to convert these. WordPress core developer Jean-Baptiste Audras has made this possible in the latest update of his Reusable Blocks Extended…
In light of the recent conversations about the Unsplash plugin’s CDN, several extensions have popped up this week for disabling it. By default, the plugin serves images from the CDN but saves copies to the WordPress media library in case the plugin is disabled or removed. The plugin does not currently have an option to…
On Wednesday, the Gutenberg team pushed what was primarily minor enhancements and bug fixes to the WordPress platform’s primary project. Everyone is mostly gearing up for the WordPress 5.5 release, so we are not seeing any major features dropping at the moment. However, steady work continues on improving the Gutenberg plugin. Gutenberg 8.7 contains over…
Samir Shah is ready to part ways with his popular Disable Comments plugin. The WordPress extension has garnered over a million users and a solid 220 five-star reviews out of 229, but its owner no longer has the time to maintain it. Rather than simply give it away or sell it for profit, he plans…