A new proposal on WordPress.org explores the ramifications of dropping support for Internet Explorer 11 (IE11). Héctor Prieto summarized the current state of IE usage among WordPress users, citing three metrics that demonstrate declining usage that is now cumulatively below ~1%: 0.71% from StatCounter’s GlobalStats 1.2% from W3 Counter 0.46% from WordPress.com StatCounter’s GlobalStats record IE11 having dipped…
It’s that time in the release cycle when all the dev notes are rolling out ahead of the next major update. These notes include technical summaries of all the goodies coming in the next release. If you haven’t been paying close attention, there are always a few happy surprises in there that pop up as…
Felix Arntz, a WordPress core committer and developer programs engineer at Google, announced upcoming support for lazy loading iframes. The feature is included in the latest WordPress 5.7 beta and will officially ship next month to the larger community. WordPress has supported lazy loading for images since version 5.5. However, support for iframes was not…
Gutenberg 10.0 was released today as the 100th iteration of the block editor since the project began four years ago. Although 10.0 may seem like a big number, it’s just another incremental step forward in terms of new features, improvements, and bug fixes. Version 10.0 introduces a new dynamic pages block for building navigation menus.…
WordPress contributors are considering scaling back the planned number of releases in 2021. In a post titled “Making WordPress Releases Easier,” WordPress’ Executive Director, Josepha Haden Chomphosy summarized three years of research on reducing the effort required to have a successful WordPress release: From my research, the work to automate what we can (and potentially…
WordPress has passed 40% market share of all websites, up from 35.4% in January 2020, as measured by W3Techs. These numbers are derived from the Alexa top 10 million websites, along with the Tranco top 1 million list. By W3Techs’ estimates, every two minutes, another top 10m site starts using WordPress. Among the top 1,000 sites, WordPress’ market share is even…
Josepha Haden Chomphosy, the Executive Director of WordPress, posted a follow-up to her outline of the upcoming year. Questions mounted about what a minimum viable product (MVP) looked like for Full Site Editing (FSE), which is expected to be ready in the Gutenberg plugin in April. The core team is also shooting for a June…
WordPress 5.7 Beta 1 was released this week on schedule and is ready for wider testing. This release will introduce 68 new features and enhancements, dozens of bug fixes, and versions 9.3 – 9.9 of the Gutenberg plugin. A few of the highlights expected in 5.7 include the following: Lazy-load iframes: When WordPress 5.4 added…
The next major release of WordPress will make it much easier for users to migrate their sites from HTTP to HTTPS. It introduces new capabilities to detect if the user’s hosting environment has support for HTTPS and provides a one-click update process, handling mixed content rewrites where possible. “A major pain point in WordPress has…
WordPress’ block management interface was introduced in Gutenberg 5.3, released in March 2019, and is due for an update. In case you haven’t explored the editor’s Tools menu, the block manager setting allows you to select which blocks will be shown or hidden in the block inserter. Last week, Automattic engineer Nik Tsekouras opened a…
True to its name, the first WP Briefing podcast lasted just over 12 minutes. Josepha Haden Chomphosy, the Executive Director of WordPress, jump-started the second month of 2021 with a show that should arrive on the our doorstep every two weeks. With what seems to be overwhelming positive support on Twitter, the podcast was welcomed…
WordPress core contributors are pushing forward on an ambitious plan to land full-site editing in core before the end of the year. Josepha Haden Chomphosy, the open source project’s executive director, published an updated roadmap for 2021 that aims to get an MVP of full-site editing (FSE) in the Gutenberg plugin by April, 2021. FSE…
Gutenberg project contributors are considering implementing a stale bot to tame the repository’s overgrown issues queue, which currently has 2,733 open issues. Stale bots are usually employed to automatically close “stale” issues and PRs based on a predefined set of parameters for inactivity. “The current recommendation is to set our policy to a 180-day of…
If you haven’t yet tested the Gutenberg team’s progress on the full site editing (FSE) project, WordPress developer Carrie Dils has created a blueprint for Local that makes it easy to jump right in. Full site editing is phase 2 on the Gutenberg roadmap and is one of the main focuses for WordPress core development…
Yesterday, Francesca Marano opened a proposal for changing the phases of the core WordPress release cycle. It was a recap of a discussion the began in October 2020. The goal is to align the platform’s phases with the larger development industry standard. Aside from naming, WordPress has mostly followed the software industry in how it…