If you have been testing the latest development version of WordPress in the past week or so, you may have noticed that the ability to drag and drop meta boxes seemingly disappeared. This is not a bug. Nine days ago, lead developer Andrew Ozz committed a change that requires end-users to click the “screen options”…
WordPress 5.6 is set to include a new default theme, Twenty Twenty-One, designed to give users a blank canvas for the block editor. The theme doesn’t fall under any particular category and is meant to be suitable for use across different types of websites. One new feature that has very recently come under consideration is…
Gutenberg 9.2 was released this week and is the last release of the plugin to be rolled into WordPress 5.6. It features the long-awaited video tracks functionality, closing a ticket that has been open for more than two years under development. Video tracks includes things like subtitles, captions, descriptions, chapters, and metadata. This update introduces…
In 2015, WordPress 4.4 introduced a REST API, but one thing that has severely limited its broader use is the lack of authentication capabilities for third-party applications. After considering the benefits and drawbacks of many different types of authentication systems, George Stephanis published a proposal for integrating Application Passwords, into core. Stephanis highlighted a few…
The new block-based navigation screen is once again delayed after it was originally slated for WordPress 5.5 and then put on deck for 5.6. Contributors have confirmed that it will not be landing in WordPress core until 2021 at the earliest. “The Navigation screen is still in experimental state in the Gutenberg plugin, so it hasn’t had…
WordPress contributors are discussing different strategies for responding to Facebook and Instagram dropping unauthenticated oEmbed support on October 24. WordPress will be removing both Facebook and Instagram as oEmbed providers. When a user attempts to embed content by pasting a URL as they have in the past, they may not understand why it no longer works. They…
If you haven’t played around with Gutenberg’s experiments lately, the Navigation block is getting some exciting updates. Version 9.0 was released today with drag-and-drop support added to the list view of navigation items. Contributors have been working through several different prototypes aimed at unifying the controls and simplifying the menu building process. The Navigation screen…
In an extraordinarily inconvenient API change, Facebook and Instagram will be dropping unauthenticated oEmbed support on October 24, breaking content across millions of websites. The change will force users to generate an app ID with a developer account in order to continue embedding links via oEmbed: Changes to tokenless access for User Picture and FB/IG OEmbed endpoints: By October…
WordPress 5.5.1 was released yesterday with 34 bug fixes, 4 enhancements, and 5 bug fixes for the block editor. Version 5.5 removed 19 legacy JavaScript localization objects, in favor of using the new functions and utilities found in the i18n package introduced in WordPress 5.0. One of the most notable changes in this maintenance release is the inclusion of a backfill for…
Juliette Reinders Folmer released a proposal for WordPress to drop old PHP version support on a fixed schedule. She wrote the proposal after Matt Mullenweg, WordPress co-founder and project lead, reached out to discuss solutions. This was after he closed a Trac ticket last week that sought to drop support for PHP 5.6 and bump…
We should be leading the users, not following them.We should be guiding the users, not coddling them.We should carve out the road to the future, not continue to fix a broken road to the past.We should say what we do and do what we say. Juliette Reinders Folmer wrapped up her final thoughts on a…
In just one week since WordPress 5.5 was released, the Enable jQuery Migrate Helper plugin has passed 10,000 active installs, as users look for a fix for broken sites. The plugin was developed by the WordPress Core team to mitigate jQuery-related problems users may face after updating to 5.5. WordPress has removed jQuery Migrate 1.4.1,…
WordPress 5.5 has already been downloaded more than 4 million times after its release earlier this week, and it’s time to kick off work on 5.6. Josepha Haden will be leading the release alongside coordinator Dee Teal, with additional leads for Triage (Tonya Mork), Core Tech (Helen Hou-Sandì), Editor Tech (Isabel Brison), Design (Ellen Bauer…
In the summer of 2019, I was asked to help out with a WordPress release. A few months before, the Core Team representatives reached out to other teams in an effort to increase the diversity of the release teams, and I started seriously considering it. At the time, I was already heavily involved in the…
With all of the advancements made in JavaScript and newer, shinier frameworks, it is sometimes easy to forget that WordPress still relies on the aging jQuery library. The same holds true for thousands of plugins and themes in the official WordPress directories. For some, this may feel like a journey back to the mid-2000s, a…