In the upcoming 5.8 release, WordPress is updating its version of Twemoji, Twitter’s open source emoji library that supports the latest Unicode emoji specification. Version 13.1.0 introduces five new smileys and emotions, including heart on fire, mending heart, face with spiral eyes, face in clouds, and face exhaling. Version 13.1 adds mixed skin tone support for…
WordPress emoji are served from s.w.org, but they are not compressed. This impacts the SVG loading time, depending on how many emoji you are using, and can even throw warnings on Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. Turkey-based WordPress developer Mustafa Uysal has just released Compressed Emoji, a plugin that makes use of the emoji_svg_url filter introduced…
Three weeks ago, a discussion about the possibility of adding emoji reactions to BuddyPress core turned into a heated conversation in the #BuddyPress Slack channel. The topic was inspired by the new BP Reactions plugin, which recently landed on WordPress.org. This experimental plugin, created by BuddyPress core developer Mathieu Viet, adds an API that allows…
Last week when Beyoncé released her new Lemonade album, lemon and bee emoji usage spiked on Twitter. According to Twitter’s stats, during the month of April there were more than 2 million tweets that included at least one lemon emoji, 62% of which happened since the album release. The bee emoji, representing the Beyhive of…
Gary Pendergast is looking to bring WordPress users a new way of giving feedback on posts that goes beyond simple text-based comments. A core committer and emoji aficionado, Pendergast spearheaded the effort to add emoji support to WordPress and is now working on an emoji reactions feature plugin. The plugin is being developed to offer…
WordPress 4.2 will soon be released with expanded core support for emoji, a new feature that users either love or love to hate. By making a key database change from utf8mb3 to utf8mb4 to add support for emoji, WordPress also receives the benefit of being able to natively handle Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters. On…
In this week’s episode of WordPress Weekly, Marcus Couch and I are joined by Wade Foster, CEO and Co-founder of Zapier. Zapier is a service that acts as an integration point for more than 300 applications. During the interview, Foster tells us how the company was founded, how Zapier works, and why it’s different from…
Emoji characters were born in Japan in the late 90’s but took nearly a decade to break into global usage. They entered popular culture full force when select emoji character sets were incorporated into Unicode in 2010. Since that time, emoji popularity has grown, and there’s no denying that they are mainstream and here to…
Twitter announced today that it has open sourced Twemoji, a set of 872 emoji characters. This means that emoji characters tweeted from phones will now be visible on the web and will look the same across all platforms. Twitter also partnered with Automattic to bring emoji to WordPress.com, and users can start adding emoji to…
Emoji One is a new open source emoji set that is the first of its kind, designed specifically for the web. The set boasts more than 840 emoji. It was created to solve the perennial problem of translating emoji code from mobile devices while legally displaying the corresponding emoji icon on the web. The idea…
It started off as a blog post. Fresh out of WordCamp Norway, Slobodan Manic shared his experience at the event. Near the end of the post, Slobodan asked fellow developers if they’d like to release a plugin together. The idea being that working together creates more opportunities to learn. The plugin would have a few…