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…
The plans for WordPress 4.9.9 are currently in limbo after today’s core developers’ chat. Here’s what we know right now: Discussions are underway regarding making it a quick PHP 7.3 compatibility release or cancelling it in favor of moving ahead with the 5.0 release cycle. “Progress and communication on 4.9.9 has been very vague as…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
During the 2017 State of the Word address, Matt Mullenweg announced the availability of the Classic Editor plugin for site owners who are not ready to adopt Gutenberg when it makes its debut in WordPress 5.0. Since its release, the community has speculated about what the plugin’s active installation numbers mean and how long it…
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…
It has been three weeks since the “Try Gutenberg” prompt was sent out in WordPress 4.9.8 and the plugin has now passed 200,000 active installations. The callout has increased the visibility of the Gutenberg project and brought necessary feedback to the development and design of the new editor. Prior to WordPress 4.9.8, Gutenberg reviews held…
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…
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 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…
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…