WordPress 4.9.8 is available for download and is a maintenance release. Headlining this version is the “Try Gutenberg” callout. Note that not everyone will see the callout. Its visibility is determined based on certain criteria. WordPress 4.9.8 continues to improve the foundation set forth by the privacy improvements that went into core earlier this year.…
The official Gutenberg information site has been updated to feature an interactive demo that can be manipulated on the frontend. It is based on Frontenberg, a site created by Tom Nowell, VIP Wrangler at Automattic. It loads an instance of WordPress with Gutenberg on the frontend so visitors don’t have to login or create a…
Gutenberg 3.4 was released yesterday with fixes intended to prepare the plugin for converting existing content to blocks. A wave of new users will soon be testing the new plugin as the result of the “Try Gutenberg” prompt in WordPress 4.9.8. The release date has been pushed back to Thursday, August 2nd. In early July,…
In 2014, Pods lead developer, Scott Kingsley Clark, took over the primary lead role for the Metadata UI project. In 2015, the Metadata UI project was reborn as the Fields API. The Fields API was developed to allow registering fields to different screens in the admin area through a single API. New meta boxes and…
WordPress 4.9.8 Beta two recently shipped and although much of the focus will be on the “Try Gutenberg” call-out, there’s a patch included that addresses a memory leak that was quite a problem for some users. When WordPress 4.9.7 shipped, the WordPress.org support forums saw an increase in reports of memory exhausted errors due to the…
WordPress 4.9.8 Beta 2 was released today, featuring the new “Try Gutenberg” prompt that will appear in user dashboards when the official release drops at the end of the month. The prompt invites users to install Gutenberg if they want to try the new editor or install the Classic Editor to keep using the current…
WordPress contributors are working on getting support for Progressive Web Apps (PWA) into core. A new PWA feature plugin is now available on WordPress.org, spearheaded by the teams at XWP, Google, and Automattic. Progressive Web Apps are applications that run on the web but provide a speedy app-like experience inside a mobile browser. Google describes…
Paul Biron and Joshua Wold are leading the upcoming WordPress 4.9.8 release, which was originally announced as 4.9.7. WordPress core contributors met yesterday to decide the general focus and set the release schedule. In the meantime, the 4.9.7 security and maintenance release was rolled out to fix an authenticated arbitrary file deletion vulnerability, along with…
At WordCamp Europe I had the opportunity to sit down with Matías Ventura, the technical lead for Gutenberg. Ventura, who has been responsible for building the vision for Gutenberg (in addition to building the actual product), shared a few things the team might have done differently in the earlier days to improve its reception in…
At his WCEU keynote address in Belgrade, Matt Mullenweg laid out a detailed roadmap for Gutenberg to land in WordPress 5.0 within the next few months, garnering mixed reactions from attendees. Gutenberg’s timeline is one of the most pressing questions for those who work in the WordPress ecosystem. The Gutenberg team has sustained a rapid…
Jack Lenox, a Software Engineer at Automattic, has launched a new site called SustyWP that focuses on web sustainability using WordPress. By removing the parts of Underscores he didn’t need, using one inline SVG image, no sidebars, limited CSS, and no webfonts, Lenox was able to launch a WordPress site that only has 7 Kilobytes…
Providing support on the WordPress.org forums is one of the easiest ways to contribute to WordPress and those who do are some of the unsung heroes of the project. One of those heroes is James Huff known as MacManX on the forums. Huff has been supporting users for 13 years and recently celebrated an awesome…
This Sunday, May 27th, marks the 15th anniversary of the first release of WordPress. Users are celebrating the occasion across the world with huge cakes, cupcakes, memorable photos, parties, and meetups. To see if there is an event near you, visit the official WordPress 15th anniversary site and type your city into the search box.…
WordPress 4.9.6 was released last week and was labeled a minor release. Minor releases trigger WordPress’ automatic update system. Shortly after its release, some users began questioning why their sites were not automatically updating to 4.9.6. I wondered the same thing after logging into a site I maintain and discovering it had not updated. It…
WordPress 4.9.6 Release Candidate 1 is available for download and addresses some of the issues that have been reported in beta 1. Since the beta’s release, there have been 30 bugs fixed. Many of the fixes in this release are focused on the new privacy tools that help with GDPR compliance. The verbiage has been…