In June 2022, WordPress.org’s Themes Team began strongly urging theme authors to switch to locally hosted webfonts, following a German court case, which fined a website owner for violating the GDPR by using Google-hosted webfonts. For years, theme authors have been enqueuing Google Fonts from the Google CDN for better performance, but this method exposes visitors’…
WordPress 6.1 beta 1 was released today, and testing has begun with the general release expected in just under six weeks on November 1. Versions 13.1 – 14.1 of the Gutenberg plugin will be rolled into core for 6.1. This includes features like improved block placeholders, more design tools for blocks, fluid typography, improvements to…
Last month, the plan for WordPress to generate WebP images by default for new JPEG image uploads was put on hold for the upcoming 6.1 release after objections from lead developers. The original proposal had been merged into core at the end of July, despite significant critical feedback and concerns from WordPress’ developer community. Yesterday,…
Members of the WordPress 6.1 release squad recently gathered for a product walkthrough on Zoom, where Gutenberg lead architect Matías Ventura gave an informal tour of some of the new features coming in the next release. After the success of the 6.0 walkthrough, this gathering on Zoom has become a new part of the release…
WordPress’ design team has announced the winners of the challenge to create a style variation for the upcoming Twenty Twenty-Three (TT3) default theme. Organizers received 38 submissions from 19 contributors (some submitted multiple variations) hailing from eight countries. Given the wide range of colors and typography combinations, TT3 is gearing up to be a vehicle…
WordPress’ Security Team announced it will be dropping support for versions 3.7 through 4.0 on December 1, 2022. To give some context for how old these versions are, in 2013, WordPress 3.7 introduced automatic background updates and 3.8 updated the admin with a new design based on the MP6 plugin. WordPress’ official policy is that…
Last week Performance team contributors were working on refining their follow-up patches for the multi-mime/WebP feature, after the main work for it was merged into core for 6.1 at the end of July. This includes smaller related items like the shim for non-supporting browsers and adding PDF support, which are being handled in separate tickets.…
In response to the recent controversy about how long WordPress.org’s new homepage and download page designs should take to implement, Gutenberg YouTuber Jamie Marsland decided to try his hand at recreating it with the block editor. Matt Mullenweg had commented on the plans for the new designs moving into development, saying that it should have…
Gutenberg designers are considering replacing the current welcome guide modal with a new onboarding screen that prompts users to configure some of the editor’s many individual preference settings. The existing welcome setup was designed during the earlier days of the block editor when many WordPress users were experiencing it for the first time. It briefly…
Last month, WordPress design contributors proposed creating a new kind of default theme that would bundle a curated set of style variations, instead of creating a new theme from scratch. This idea resonated with participants in the discussion and plans are now underway to use a stripped-back version of Twenty Twenty-Two as the base for…
The practice of merging experimental APIs from Gutenberg into WordPress core may soon be coming to an end. A new proposal, published by Automattic-sponsored contributor Adam Zielinski, calls for contributors to stabilize APIs before merging them into core. Over the years, approximately 280 experimental APIs have been merged from the Gutenberg plugin, which Zielinski audited…
Gutenberg 13.8 was released last week with some major enhancements that should delight block theme authors and users alike. The long-awaited fluid typography support landed in this version. It provides smooth scaling between smaller and larger viewports, adapting in a fluid way to varying widths. Release lead George Mamadashvili demonstrated how this works in a…
It’s easy to get lost among a sea of Cover, Group, and Paragraph blocks while navigating the block editor’s List View. Clicking around wildly will generally surface the block you’re seeking, but it’s not efficient or intuitive. Gutenberg contributors have some ideas and prototypes aimed at giving the List View more context. Rich Tabor proposed…
WebP, an image format developed by Google, which is intended to replace JPEG, PNG, and GIF file formats, will soon be generated by default for new JPEG image uploads in WordPress and used for website content. The main work for this feature was committed to core for inclusion in the upcoming WordPress 6.1 release. The…
Gutenberg 13.7 was released this week with major updates to full-site editing (FSE) capabilities that expand custom template creation. Users can now create templates for custom taxonomies, specific terms, and single categories and tags. The update also includes the ability to create templates for specific pages. Clicking on “Add New” template and selecting Category will…