Gutenberg 3.3 is available and continues the trend of refining the user experience, user interface, and tools. Two new Widget blocks have been added, Post Archives and Recent Comments. If your archives span across multiple months and years, you can configure the block to display as a drop-down menu. Otherwise, the list may be too…
WordPress contributors are working on getting support for Progressive Web Apps (PWA) into core. A new PWA feature plugin is now available on WordPress.org, spearheaded by the teams at XWP, Google, and Automattic. Progressive Web Apps are applications that run on the web but provide a speedy app-like experience inside a mobile browser. Google describes…
Gutenberg development continues along the roadmap Matt Mullenweg announced at WordCamp Europe with WordPress 4.9.8 set to introduce a “Try Gutenberg” prompt to increase usage and testing. Core design contributors are currently working on a few new iterations of the callout. They are also considering including a section inside the prompt with an option to…
If you’re writing all your posts in the new Gutenberg editor but don’t want to give up convenient access to your fancy gifs and stock images, the new Drop It plugin has you covered. Riad Benguella, one of the engineers who is working on Gutenberg, created the plugin to offer one-click image insertion/upload from Unsplash.com.…
WordCamp Orange County, CA, took place this past weekend and the winners of the Plugin-a-Palooza have been crowned. Nathan Tyler and Natalie MacLees took the first place prize of $3,000 with their submission, Plugin Detective. When it comes to troubleshooting WordPress, disabling and re-enabling plugins is one of the first steps in the process. This…
Simple:Press, a forum plugin for WordPress that has been around for more than a dozen years, is available for adoption. Developers Andy Staines and Steve Klasen announced their plans to shutdown operations last August on their customer support forum and have had little luck finding a suitable replacement. Staines and Klasen will retire on August…
In an effort to free up resources on WordPress.org, the WordPress Plugin Review Team is closing unused plugins. An unused plugin is one that has been approved for the directory but no code was uploaded by the developer in six months or more. An unused plugin reserves a URL slug on WordPress.org and prevents others…
Jetpack 6.1 is available and is considered a general maintenance release. This version adds two improvements to the WordAds module. Users can now use the [wordads] shortcode to place an inline ad on any post or page. Support for the ads.txt file has also been added. A new filter is available that honors the Do…
XWP, Automattic, and Google’s AMP team, has released 0.7 Release Candidate 1 of the AMP for WordPress plugin. Hinted at during AMP Conf 2018 earlier this year, 0.7 is a major release that contains significant new features. This release adds Native AMP support for all of the default widgets, embeds, and commenting. Notifications will be…
Gutenberg 2.7 is available for testing and not only does it refine the visuals around block controls, it adds the highly requested ability to edit permalinks. A new pagination block is available that adds a page break, allowing users to break posts into multiple pages. The block is located in the Blocks – Layout Elements…
The plugin review team has amended guideline number nine which states, developers and their plugins must not do anything illegal, dishonest, or morally offensive, to include the following statement: Implying that a plugin can create, provide, automate, or guarantee legal compliance Mika Epstein, a member of the WordPress.org plugin review team, says the change was…
Gutenberg 2.6 is available for download and with it, comes a new way of sorting blocks. In addition to using up and down arrows, this version introduces the ability to sort blocks by dragging and dropping. If you hover the cursor over the up and down arrows on the left side of a block, you’ll…
Not long after I published my experience with Gutenberg, developers reached out to me to work on some of the issues I mentioned. Riad Benguella figured out why meta boxes were not collapsing or expanding. It turns out that some meta boxes depend on the post script which has a side effect of calling the…
There have been many discussions over the years on whether or not Hello Dolly should be unbundled with WordPress. Seven years ago, it was argued that the lyrics are copyrighted and could potentially violate the GPL license. The latest issue with Hello Dolly is that some lyrics that appear in users dashboards with the plugin…
In 2016, WordFence published their findings of a vulnerability that could have compromised the servers that are used to send out WordPress updates. It turned out to be a complex, obscure vulnerability that ignited a conversation surrounding the security of api.wordpress.org and what could happen if the servers were compromised. One idea that was brought…