• EatsWP Brings Virtual Restaurant Menus to the WordPress Block Editor

    EatsWP Brings Virtual Restaurant Menus to the WordPress Block Editor

    Yesterday, Jack Kitterhing launched EatsWP, his new restaurant-related WordPress plugin. It is a menu creation system that works in the block editor. It also has a built-in QR code feature to work with customers’ phones. Kitterhing is the Product Manager at LearnDash. He is also the founder of Immerseus, a shop that builds plugins for…

  • WordPress Community Team Proposes Using a Decision Checklist to Restart Local Events

    WordPress Community Team Proposes Using a Decision Checklist to Restart Local Events

    WordPress’ Community Team has been discussing the return to in-person events since early December 2020, and has landed on an idea that would allow local meetup organizers to determine readiness using a COVID-19 risk-assessment checklist. This would enable organizers to restart meetups when it is safe for their communities, instead of applying a blanket global…

  • Blocked-Based Version of Twenty Twenty-One Nearing Readiness for the Theme Directory

    Blocked-Based Version of Twenty Twenty-One Nearing Readiness for the Theme Directory

    Twenty Twenty-One Blocks, now renamed to TT1 Blocks, is inching its way toward the WordPress theme directory. Kjell Reigstad mentioned the prospect in this week’s block-based themes meeting. Contributors to the theme, which is part of the Theme Experiments project, have pushed some much-needed code updates to the repository. TT1 Blocks is the block-based version…

  • JetBrains Denies Being Under Investigation for SolarWinds Attack

    JetBrains Denies Being Under Investigation for SolarWinds Attack

    JetBrains, makers of Phpstorm, one of the most popular IDEs for PHP developers, has published a statement denying any involvement in the SolarWinds attack, which compromised multiple US federal agencies and private companies. The company stated that it has not been the subject of an official investigation: JetBrains has not taken part or been involved…

  • Liquid Web Acquires The Events Calendar WordPress Plugin From Modern Tribe

    Liquid Web Acquires The Events Calendar WordPress Plugin From Modern Tribe

    Liquid Web announced today via the iThemes blog that it acquired The Events Calendar from Modern Tribe. The acquisition gives them ownership of the plugin, its suite of event-related plugins, and the team behind it all. “We’ve acquired all the associated plugins, including Event Tickets, etc.,” said Matt Danner, the COO at iThemes. “They identify…

  • Block System Will Create More Commercial Opportunities for WordPress Theme Authors

    Block System Will Create More Commercial Opportunities for WordPress Theme Authors

    Ten years ago, a potential WordPress theme buyer might stumble upon a site like ThemeForest. The themes on the site would primarily tout the hundreds of shortcodes they included. These shortcodes would allow the user to build anything they wanted with simple BBCode-like brackets around some tag or another. The practice was not limited to…

  • WordPress.com Rattles Freelancer Community with New Website Building Service Launch

    WordPress.com Rattles Freelancer Community with New Website Building Service Launch

    WordPress.com launched a new website building service today with prices starting at $4,900. Automattic has been beta testing the service since the last quarter of 2020. The product announcement invites customers to let WordPress.com’s professional team “translate your vision into a compelling and modern website” but does not specify pricing for more customized websites: Whether you…

  • 2021: Reshaping the Tavern Experience

    2021: Reshaping the Tavern Experience

    Resolutions. Goals. Guidelines for the year ahead. Call them what you want. Not everyone takes part, but I am a firm believer in having a vision for the coming months. That vision can be malleable, flowing with the changes of time, yielding to new ideas as they are birthed. However, some large, beaming guideposts help…

  • 2020: Step Away From the Fire

    2020: Step Away From the Fire

    If there was a common theme that held humanity together in 2020, it was that most of us agreed that the year was nothing short of a dumpster fire. That and sweatpants. As people learned to cope with a new reality in the Covid-19 era, the WordPress community has been a beacon of hope. When…

  • Understanding the Query Block and Its Importance in Site Editing

    Understanding the Query Block and Its Importance in Site Editing

    I really don’t understand this Query block even though it’s been mentioned in several Tavern posts. My eyes seem to gloss over when reading about it – ha! Is it important that regular WordPress users understand this block, or is it really a block for developers? Marcus I have given the Query block a lot…

  • GitHub’s 2020 State of the Octoverse Report Highlights: Developers are Working More Hours but Turning to Open Source Projects for Creative Outlets

    GitHub’s 2020 State of the Octoverse Report Highlights: Developers are Working More Hours but Turning to Open Source Projects for Creative Outlets

    GitHub has published its annual Octoverse report for 2020. The code hosting platform currently serves more than 56 million developers who created 60+ million new repositories this past year. The volume of work pumping through GitHub’s pipes and its preeminence as the world’s largest developer platform gives the company access to a trove of data…

  • Armando WordPress Theme Provides Insight Into the Current State of Full Site Editing

    Armando WordPress Theme Provides Insight Into the Current State of Full Site Editing

    As we inch closer to a year in which WordPress’s primary focus will be on Full Site Editing, it is fortunate timing that Themes Team representative Carolina Nymark publicly announced her latest theme, Armando. It is a blogging theme that makes use of the latest features from the Gutenberg plugin. The theme is currently awaiting…

  • AMP Under Fire in New Antitrust Lawsuit Against Google

    AMP Under Fire in New Antitrust Lawsuit Against Google

    AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), an open source initiative that originated with Google, is coming under greater scrutiny at the tail end of 2020, as the company is facing a rash of antitrust lawsuits beginning in October. The second suit is the one most pertinent to the AMP project. (A third suit brought by 38 state…