WordPress

  • WordPress Theme Developers Begin Marketing Themes as Gutenberg Compatible

    WordPress Theme Developers Begin Marketing Themes as Gutenberg Compatible

    WordPress theme developers are starting to advertise their themes as being compatible with Gutenberg, ahead of the new editor’s imminent merge into core. Work on the 5.0 release may be ramping up sooner than expected after yesterday’s announcement that 4.9.9 may be a quick release for PHP 7.3 compatibility or possibly cancelled altogether. Themeforest, the…

  • Gutenstats Blog Is Live, Tracking Gutenberg Beta Testing Data

    Gutenstats Blog Is Live, Tracking Gutenberg Beta Testing Data

    Matt Mullenweg tweeted out a link to Gutenstats.blog this evening, a new site dedicated to tracking Gutenberg beta testing data. The site shows there are currently more than 420,000 active installations of Gutenberg, a slightly more precise number than reported on the WordPress.org plugin page (400K+). Gutenstats also tracked 213,000 posts written with the new…

  • Gutenberg is Slowly Rolling Out to WordPress.com Users

    Gutenberg is Slowly Rolling Out to WordPress.com Users

    As part of the roadmap unveiled at WordCamp EU earlier this year, WordPress.com has started rolling out Gutenberg to a subset of users. According to a WordPress.com Happiness Engineer, the team is testing the implementation to determine the best way and time to enable it. Users will not be able to use Gutenberg unless their…

  • WordPress 4.9.9 Release Focus Items Include Site Health Project and Gutenberg Preparation

    WordPress 4.9.9 Release Focus Items Include Site Health Project and Gutenberg Preparation

    The WordPress 4.9.9 release leads published a roadmap for the release this week. The minor release will be led by Anthony Burchell and Alain Schlesser. It is targeted for November 5 with the first beta arriving near the end of October. The leads identified four key focus areas for the upcoming release: accessibility, internationalization, the…

  • Dark Mode is Possibly Coming to a WordPress Dashboard Near You

    Dark Mode is Possibly Coming to a WordPress Dashboard Near You

    For the past year, Daniel James has been developing the Dark Mode plugin for WordPress. The plugin is actively installed on more than 1K sites. Dark Mode replaces the white and grey colors in the backend with darker colors that are easier on the eyes. James has published a proposal to merge the plugin into…

  • Gutenberg Contributors Considering a “Focus Mode” for Writing

    Gutenberg Contributors Considering a “Focus Mode” for Writing

    After overwhelming feedback from testers indicating that Gutenberg is not well suited for simply writing posts, the project’s contributors are considering a few options for improving the writing flow. These proposals are spread across several tickets on GitHub. Two weeks ago, Gutenberg technical lead Matias Ventura submitted a PR exploring the possibility of introducing a…

  • A Proposal for Improving the Change Block Type User Interface in Gutenberg

    A Proposal for Improving the Change Block Type User Interface in Gutenberg

    In Gutenberg 3.6.2, the development team moved the Convert Block option to the left most icon in the toolbar. As long as the toolbar is visible, so is the option to change block types. However, there are a few user experience issues with this approach. The first is obvious. The paragraph block icon looks like…

  • Gutenberg Block Library Provides a Searchable Index of Individual Blocks

    Gutenberg Block Library Provides a Searchable Index of Individual Blocks

    An avalanche of blocks is pouring into the WordPress ecosystem ahead of Gutenberg’s inclusion in core. A few block collections, such as Atomic Blocks, Stackable, and CoBlocks, can be found on WordPress.org, but it’s not easy to search the individual blocks they contain. Other collections and standalone blocks are spread across the web. WordPress theme…

  • Mario Peshev Explains the Advantages of Gutenberg for Users who Rely on Page Builders

    Mario Peshev Explains the Advantages of Gutenberg for Users who Rely on Page Builders

    Mario Peshev, CEO of DevriX, has published a video that explains how Gutenberg will change the way users create content. If your background as a WordPress user is maintaining your website with the help of a page builder like Beaver Builder, Divi Builder, Elementor, or a similar plugin, this video will acquaint you with a…

  • How a Munich-based Game Studio is Using WordPress and Gutenberg to Power Its Website

    How a Munich-based Game Studio is Using WordPress and Gutenberg to Power Its Website

    Mimimi, an award-winning game studio based in Munich, has launched a new WordPress website that provides an interesting case study of Gutenberg in the wild. Although you may not be able to tell from the frontend, behind the scenes the new block-based editor is powering the layout with custom blocks, allowing the Mimimi team to…

  • Gutenberg 3.6 Adds New Icons for All Core Blocks

    Gutenberg 3.6 Adds New Icons for All Core Blocks

    Gutenberg 3.6 was released today, featuring a design overhaul for the core icons in the block inserter. The blocks now use Material icons, which offer more options than the Dashicons. This update also improves the icons for the core embeds, which now display the corresponding icon for each embed service. Gutenberg testers logged an issue…

  • Gutenberg Plugin Garners Mixed Reactions from New Wave of Testers

    Gutenberg Plugin Garners Mixed Reactions from New Wave of Testers

    WordPress 4.9.8 was released as an automatic update last week, featuring the “Try Gutenberg” callout. The goal of the prompt is to get more users testing the new editor and to raise awareness. Within the first 72 hours of the prompt going into user dashboards, sites with Gutenberg installed have shot up to more than…