WordPress’ block editor, colloquially still widely known as Gutenberg, is making inroads into the segment of users who have heavily relied on page builders for years. For the most part, page builder plugins have either declined in growth or stagnated in 2020, with the exception of Elementor. In contrast, block collections with page builder features…
If there was a common theme that held humanity together in 2020, it was that most of us agreed that the year was nothing short of a dumpster fire. That and sweatpants. As people learned to cope with a new reality in the Covid-19 era, the WordPress community has been a beacon of hope. When…
Jonathan Desrosiers, a WordPress core committer and software engineer at Bluehost, has published a new workshop titled “How to Use Trac” on the Learn WordPress platform. The 20-minute video offers a crash course on the ticket tracking software that WordPress relies on to manage core development. Trac is also used for contributing to WordPress’ meta…
As I said last week, 2021 will be the year of the site editor. Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word confirms it. WordPress 5.7’s release planning is focused on it. It has been a long journey getting to this point, and it will be a much longer adventure afterward. The ultimate promise of the work…
If the 2020 State of the Word address was any indication, WordPress is moving full steam ahead to land full site editing in 2021. The 5.7 release cycle kicked off this week with the proposed scope centered around full site editing via Gutenberg. Matt Mullenweg will be leading the release and the rest of the team…
WordPress enthusiasts around the world tuned into Matt Mullenweg’s annual State of the Word address this week, delivered virtually for the first time. Mullenweg recognized the community’s efforts in working together during a global pandemic, without the benefit of periodic in-person events that have traditionally re-energized collaboration on the project. During a most unusual year…
WordPress 5.6 “Simone,” named in honor of American performer and civil rights activist Nina Simone, was released today and is now available for download. The release was led by an all-women release squad, a first in WordPress history. The new version includes many enhancements for the block editor, accessibility improvements, application password support for the…
WordPress 5.6 development is winding down as we begin to close out the beta testing round, inching toward the final release on December 8. That means it is time to think about what WordPress 5.7 will look like. This is one of my favorite times of the WordPress development cycle because I get to see…
The “version 1.0” launch of block patterns in WordPress 5.5 was overall successful. However, it was easy to overlook the problems while waiting for this feature to land after months of anticipation. Now that we have had a couple of months of seeing the block pattern system baked into core WordPress, it is time to…
Earlier today, release lead Josepha Haden announced the team was pushing back the release of WordPress 5.6 Beta 4 to Thursday, November 12. The beta release was slated to go live today. Questions around the readiness of the auto-updates feature held the beta update back. However, those questions are now resolved. Haden followed up the…
WordPress 5.6 will ship with the latest jQuery library next month. This is a major update that all plugin and theme developers should begin testing against. Last week, Marius Jensen announced the change on the Make Core blog. The following jQuery-related libraries are expected to ship in the update (WordPress Trac ticket): jQuery 3.5.1 jQuery…
WordPress 5.6 is set to add a UI that allows users to opt into auto-updates for major versions of core. Previously, developers could turn these updates on by setting the WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE constant to true or by using the allow_major_auto_core_updates filter. Version 5.6 exposes this setting in the UI to make it more accessible for users. Jb Audras posted a dev note…
WordPress has opened its 2020 Annual Survey, a short set of questions designed to collect more information on how different groups of people are using the software. It takes approximately 5 minutes to complete and all data is anonymized. WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy said she uses the results from the survey to inform…
WordPress’ Core systems team had an eventful Friday when an error in the auto-update system caused sites to update to WordPress 5.5.3-alpha-49449, including live production sites with no auto-update constants defined. Those who received an email about the update logged into their sites to see the message: “BETA TESTERS: This site is set up to install…
Block patterns were one of the most exciting and transformative features introduced in WordPress. 5.5, giving users a giant head start on building pages by allowing them to insert sets of pre-designed blocks. Core now includes a handful of default patterns available in the block inserter but contributors are exploring the idea of expanding this…