WordPress 5.2 beta 1 was released this evening with an exciting lineup of new user-facing features that are ready for testing. The upcoming release introduces new blocks for RSS, Search, Calendar, Tag Cloud, and Amazon Kindle embed. The proliferation of block collection plugins as a block distribution mechanism has caused some WordPress installations to become…
WordPress has officially ended support for PHP 5.2 – 5.5 and bumped its minimum required PHP version to 5.6. The plan announced last December was to bump the minimum required version in early 2019 and, depending on the results, bump it again to PHP 7 in December 2019. Sites on PHP 5.5 or earlier can…
Gutenberg 5.3 was released today with basic block management, a feature that will be included in WordPress 5.2. It is a new modal that can be launched from the vertical ellipses menu, inspired by Rich Tabor’s CoBlocks implementation. Users can turn individual blocks on/off or even entire sections, such as Common Blocks, Formatting, and Embeds.…
At WordCamp Nordic’s contributor day I had the opportunity to chat with Andrey “Rarst” Savchenko about WordPress’ Date/Time component, the code that manages date, time, and timezone functionality. Savchenko is one of the maintainers of this lesser-known component, which includes code that dates back to PHP 4 times. After volunteering for years in the WordPress…
WordPress 5.1.1 was released yesterday evening with an important security update for a critical cross-site scripting vulnerability found in 5.1 and prior versions. The release post credited Simon Scannell of RIPS Technologies for discovering and reporting the vulnerability. Scannell published a post summarizing how an unauthenticated attacker could take over any WordPress site that has…
One of the the most important factors in WordPress’ growth is the software’s availability in 186 languages. Its vibrant community of translation volunteers, known as the Polyglots team, continually update the translations to ensure access for millions of non-English speakers around the world. In 2016, the team began hosting their own events dedicated to educational…
Creating a block for navigation menus is one of the nine projects Matt Mullenweg identified as a priority for 2019, and the future of WordPress menus is starting to take shape. Designers working on the new Navigation Menu block have published a prototype this week with detailed notes on how users will interact with the…
WordPress release cycles may soon take a more predictable cadence, as contributors are considering moving to a time-based approach. The discussion began during a recent core dev chat in mid-February when Gutenberg phase 2 lead Riad Benguella proposed the project move to shorter, automated release cycles. The Gutenberg team has successfully been releasing a new…
The new Gutenberg block editor that arrived in WordPress 5.0 is now in beta testing on the mobile apps. The editor will be available in version 11.9, which is planned to be released to the public on March 11. “For this first version, our main focus was to build a pleasant writing experience with support…
WordPress 5.1 has been downloaded more than 3.6 million times since its release last week and work on 5.2 is now underway. The upcoming release will be led by Matt Mullenweg with Josepha Haden acting as Release Coordinator. Gary Pendergast posted a proposed scope and schedule that would have 5.2 arriving April 23, 2019. One…
WordPress 5.1 “Betty” was released today, honoring American jazz singer Betty Carter. This is the first major release since Gutenberg came into core. As part of WordPress’ 2019 “tighten up” theme, this release was focused on improving performance in the editor and helping users update outdated versions of PHP. WordPress 5.0 had been downloaded more…
Today, we are reminded that life is fleeting and that plugins, themes, and WordPress itself is built and maintained by humans. Alex (Viper007Bond) Mills announced that he is ending his fight with Leukemia. Due to liver inflammation and GvHD, the liver is too damaged to continue with treatment and there are no further options. I don’t…
Version 5.0 of the Gutenberg plugin was released yesterday with a new RSS block. Riad Benguella, the project’s technical lead for phase 2, published a demo of the block and its settings. Users can set the number of items displayed and also toggle on/off the author, date, and excerpt. RSS is still relevant today as…
Alex Mills, the author of several plugins, including the popular Regenerate Thumbnails plugin, published an update on his fight with cancer and it’s not looking too good. The blood test had been showing a fraction of a percent and then later 3%. That was obviously trending in the wrong direction but the hope was increasing…
Gutenberg phase 2 development is underway and one of the first orders of business is porting all existing core widgets to blocks. This task is one of the nine projects that Matt Mullenweg outlined for 2019, along with upgrading the widgets-editing areas in wp-admin/widgets.php and adding support for blocks in the Customizer. Contributors on phase…