Last week, London-based digital marketing agency Sweans Technologies released Guteblock, its new block collection plugin. Currently, the plugin boasts 12 custom blocks. The company plans to add more and has big plans for the plugin’s future. While the team earns no points for originality in plugin naming, they are nevertheless throwing their hat into the…
In December of 2019, Nick Hamze, the owner of Sorta Brilliant, quietly launched Block Garden with a proposal for plugin authors to build block-based plugins off concepts, called seeds, from his site. He has since written extensively on the block editor and has shared a multitude of ideas, many of which are sorta brilliant. It…
David Vongries, creator of the Page Builder Framework theme, launched the Swift Control plugin last week. The plugin is billed as a replacement for the core WordPress toolbar (admin bar). It allows site owners to customize the front-end control panel’s appearance and what links are displayed. Swift Control adds a new button on the front…
On Tuesday, 10up released its Autoshare for Twitter plugin. The plugin is designed to automatically tweet blog posts as they are published. By default, it will send the post title, featured image, and link to Twitter. Users can also add a custom message. The plugin is available in the WordPress plugin directory. If you threw…
I have been running a blog of some kind since the Spring of 2003. In a few short months, it will be my 17th blog-aversary. The most important lesson I have learned over the years is to not do more work than is necessary to publish a blog post. There was a time when I…
For users of the Classic WordPress editor who often needed to insert special characters into their posts, life was once simple. Click the “Ω” button in the editor to open a modal with a list of characters not found on a standard keyboard. The user then only needed to click on the character they wanted…
On Tuesday, John James Jacoby announced that bbPress 2.6 was available to the public after a six-year wait in a post titled bbPress 2.6 — Better Great Than Never. The announcement landed with a whimper as it was overshadowed by the release of WordPress 5.3 on the same day. bbPress is an official WordPress project…
I had the opportunity to test the Image SEO plugin over the past week. Image SEO is a plugin that connects to an accompanying online service that processes images uploaded to a WordPress installation. The plugin can automatically rename file names, create alt tags for screen readers, and optimize images for Pinterest. The plugin is…
Kioken Blocks creator Onur Oztaskiran is teaming up with Niklas Jurij Plessing, a Berlin-based developer and author of the Gutenslider plugin, to improve both products under the same roof. Oztaskiran said the partnership is not an acquisition but rather a unification of efforts that may eventually result in combining under the same name. “Our short…
After years of unpredictable development and support, it seemed the Edit Flow plugin had finally given up the ghost last week when an Automattic support representative confirmed that it is no longer being actively developed and recommended users switch to an alternative. Nick Gernert, head of WordPress.com VIP, has since commented on our post to…
Edit Flow, the modular editorial plugin that enables collaboration inside the WordPress admin, is no longer being actively developed. After no updates for nine months, Mark Warbinek, a frustrated user, contacted Automattic to ask if they have abandoned the plugin or still plan to update it. A support representative from Automattic confirmed the company will…
After tracking exploits of a zero day XSS vulnerability in the Rich Reviews plugin for WordPress, Wordfence is recommending that users remove it from their websites. The company estimates that there are 16,000 active installations vulnerable to unauthenticated plugin option updates: Attackers are currently abusing this exploit chain to inject malvertising code into target websites.…
Human Made has created a Publication Checklist plugin built specifically for the block editor. It was developed as a headline feature of Altis, the company’s enterprise publishing platform based on WordPress, but is also available as a standalone plugin that developers can customize for their own particular use cases. Ryan McCue, Human Made’s Director of…
Google recently announced a new Breadcrumbs report available in the Search Console to inform site owners about markup issues. In 2015, Google introduced support for schema.org structured data, including the breadcrumbs URL structure, in order better present URLs in search results. The Search Console’s new report uses this data to help site owners fix any…
WPHelpful is a plugin created by Zack Gilbert and Paul Jarvis that allows users to rate the helpfulness of a post. It can be a useful addition to sites that offer tutorials, lessons, documentation, or any content where user feedback is warranted. Version 1.0 is available for free in the official WordPress plugin directory, but…