Equalize Digital, a WordPress accessibility products and consulting company, has received an undisclosed amount of pre-seed funding from Emilia Capital, the investment company owned by Joost de Valk and Marieke van de Rakt. The investment will be used to accelerate the growth of Equalize Digital’s Accessibility Checker plugin, a tool for auditing websites for WCAG,…
Automattic has acquired the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress from German developer Matthias Pfefferle, who will be joining the company to continue improving support for federated platforms. Pfefferle, who is also the author of the Webmention plugin, said his new role is to see how Automattic’s products can benefit from open protocols like ActivityPub. In 2021,…
Jetpack 11.9 was released this week with support for sharing posts to Mastodon. The new button allows readers to click an icon to launch a sharing window that will ask the user to enter the full URL of the Mastodon instance where they want to share the post. Adding the URL will update the window…
WP Engine is beta testing its new Pattern Manager plugin for creating and maintaining patterns. The plugin is intended for WordPress professionals – developers, agencies, and freelancers, who could benefit from having an interface and system for pattern management. “There are some plugins out there that provide an interface for creating patterns on a production…
Beginning February 9, 2023, Twitter will turn off free access to its APIs. The company announced yesterday that it will be offering “a paid basic tier” with more details coming next week. In response to a user who conjectured that this move is more about raising the friction to making bots, Elon Musk responded, saying…
WP Migrate, formerly known as WP Migrate DB and recently acquired by WP Engine, has long since expanded beyond its initial release as a database migration tool. Users may be familiar with the push/pull workflow of installing the plugin on two sites and migrating database, media, themes, and plugin changes back and forth. The most…
Gutenberg 15.0 was released this week with some exciting new features for working with blocks and an improved UI for managing controls in the inspector panel. This release marks the end of the block inspector tabs experiment, which is now stabilized in the plugin. Users will notice that some blocks will now have separate tabs…
WordPress’ Performance Team met this week with the express purpose of responding to Matt Mullenweg’s recent request to stop adding functionality to the Performance Lab plugin which could otherwise work as a standalone plugin. At the end of December 2022, the Performance Team published instructions for how to test the new SQLite implementation, which was…
Awesome Motive’s product suite of nearly 20 commercial plugins has expanded to include a backup plugin. The company announced its acquisition of Duplicator today, a 12-year-old freemium product with more than 1.5 million users. In addition to the backup utility, the plugin enables users to migrate, copy, move, or clone a site from one location…
WordPress developer Munir Kamal has released a new plugin called CF7 Blocks that does exactly what it says in the name. It brings blocks to one of WordPress’ most beloved plugins, which has kept the same familiar interface and has not yet adopted the block editor. The Contact Form 7 plugin was created by WordPress…
Nick Diego, developer advocate at WP Engine, has released version 1.4.0 of his Icon Block plugin. Diego launched it in October 2021, after struggling to find an efficient way to add SVG icons to the block editor. He is aiming for this small but useful plugin to become “the definitive SVG icon and graphic block.”…
One of Matt Mullenweg’s announcements at the 2022 State of the Word was the addition of new taxonomies for the theme and plugin directories that will help users more quickly ascertain the purpose of the extensions they are considering. With nearly 60,000 free plugins available and more than 10,000 free themes, it’s not always immediately…
Block Protocol, a project that launched earlier this year that aims to build a universal block system, has announced a new WordPress plugin coming in early 2023. It will allow users to embed interactive blocks that are compatible with Gutenberg. Given WordPress’ footprint on the web (43% by W3Tech’s estimate), this plugin is a major…
Danny van Kooten, creator of the Mailchimp for WordPress plugin, has indicated that he is interested in selling his plugin for somewhere in the ballpark of €1.6M. It is the most popular Mailchimp solution for WordPress, although it is “unofficial” in that it is not developed by or affiliated with Mailchimp in any way. It…
Jetpack has introduced a major update to its Form block in the latest version 11.6 release. Users can now interact with the various form templates as patterns. A new quick start placeholder appears anytime users invoke a new form block. It displays a selection of the most commonly used form types as icons. Clicking on…