WordPress contributors are weighing in on a proposal for the formation of a nomination-based advisory board with set term limits for its members. Josepha Haden, the project’s Executive Director, published a first draft two weeks ago with ideas for how the board might operate and feedback is rolling in. WordPress experimented with a growth council…
Gutenberg 6.2 has two new user-facing features that were added based on community feedback. The Cover and Media & Text blocks now allow for nesting any type of block inside. Previously, the Cover block only allowed users to add a heading, button, or paragraph block. Users had resorted to employing clunky solutions to get around…
Back in September of 2016, GoDaddy acquired ManageWP. What was odd about the acquisition was the amount of backlash that was generated by ManageWP customers. While most were happy for Vladimir Prelovac, founder of ManageWP, many customers worried about GoDaddy’s reputation, unsatisfactory service, and how such a great service would fit into GoDaddy without changing…
For the past several years, I’ve used the Post Template plugin developed by Vincent Prat to create and manage post templates. For example, some of the information in the WordPress Weekly and In Case You Missed It posts never changes and instead of manually entering it each time, it’s nice to use a template where…
Gutenberg 5.8 was released today with three new features and more than three dozen enhancements, documentation improvements, and bug fixes. This release gives users the ability to change the text color in the Heading block. The same color options available in the paragraph and button blocks are now available in the heading block. A recent…
WordPress 5.2, released earlier this month, added the first step towards fully secure updates with offline digital signatures. Scott Arciszewski, Chief Development Officer for Paragon Initiative Enterprises, explains how it works and how developers can migrate away from mcrypt to libsodium. When your WordPress site installs an automatic update, from version 5.2 onwards, it will…
Today’s release of Gutenberg brings a major improvement to the usability of the Group block. In previous versions of the editor, it wasn’t easy to see if a block had been inserted as a child block, especially since the default behavior was to insert an empty paragraph block. Gutenberg 5.7 brings more clarity to the…
WordPress Trac is one of the more utilitarian and uninspiring interfaces that many contributors have to contend with in the process of giving back to the project. After growing tired of Trac’s mediocre search functionality, William Earnhardt set out to improve it with a new project called WPTracSearch that gave him an opportunity to play…
WordPress 5.2 “Jaco” named after bassist Jaco Pastorius, is now available for download. Normally, I’d start listing new features but I’m going to do something a little different this time. Let’s begin by recognizing the 327 people who contributed to this release with 109 of those being first time contributors. It was led by Matt Mullenweg,…
The admin can be intimidating to navigate if you’re just getting started with WordPress. After installing a few plugins, top-level menu items begin to pile on. This adds even more complexity to grapple with in a narrow space with long lists of items hidden behind flyout menus that make managing WordPress on mobile a frustrating…
WordPress 5.2 was originally scheduled to be released on April 30, but has now been pushed back to May 7, due to the number of open tickets last week (43). There is now only one ticket remaining on the 5.2 milestone for completion of the About page and WordPress 5.2 RC 1 is ready for…
Dashicons, the WordPress admin icon font, will be getting its first update in three years when WordPress 5.2 ships. The library will be updated to use WOFF2 (Web Open Font Format 2), replacing the previous WOFF 1.0 format for improved compression. WOFF 1.0 will still be included in core to maintain backwards compatibility. In addition…
A security service called Plugin Vulnerabilities, founded by John Grillot, is taking a vigilante approach to addressing grievances against WordPress.org support forum moderators. The company is protesting the moderators’ actions by publishing zero-day vulnerabilities (those for which no patch has been issued) and then attempting to contact the plugin author via the WordPress.org support forums:…
The Gutenberg team has published a Blocks in Widget Areas RFC (request for comments) document, detailing a technical approach that brings blocks to the wp-admin/widgets.php screen and the Customizer. This is one of the goals on the roadmap Matt Mullenweg outlined in his 9 Projects for 2019 post. Based on the requirements outlined in the…
The Gutenberg team merged a pull request three days ago that adds a local “playground” development environment for testing outside of the WordPress admin. Riad Benguella, the technical lead for Gutenberg phase 2, said that the playground could grow over time to contain “more than just a standalone version of the editor” and could become…