Tiny, the company formerly known as Ephox has raised $4M in Series A funding from BlueRun Ventures. Tiny is the company behind TinyMCE, a popular text editor used in many opensource projects, including WordPress. In addition to the funding, Jeff Tannenbaum, partner at BlueRun Ventures is joining Tiny’s board of directors. The company has also…
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I are joined by Mike Schroder. Schroder co-led the release of WordPress 3.9 and in 2016, he led the release of WordPress 4.5. In the interview, we learn his WordPress origin story, his thoughts on Gutenberg and whether or not he sees it as the future of WordPress, the…
A pre-release of Gutenberg 4.0 RC 1 is now available for testing. During today’s core developer chat, Matias Ventura, the project’s technical lead, said he plans to post a full changelog and a video tomorrow. In the meantime, a call for testing 4.0 RC 1 has been posted to the make.wordpress.org/test blog with a list…
Jetpack 6.6 was released today with an update to the Site Verification tools that enables one-click verification and sitemap.xml registration with Google. This release also introduces the beta of Jetpack’s Asset CDN. The new module, built on the same infrastructure as the Photon CDN, speeds up sites by cloud-hosting widely-used Jetpack and core WordPress scripts,…
WordPress Accessibility Team lead Rian Rietveld has resigned due to what she describes as political complications and problems with working on Gutenberg accessibility. “The last year, especially the last few weeks have been too politically complicated for me,” Rietveld said. “It’s better that someone else takes the lead now.” Her post outlines challenges the accessibility…
As activity ramps up to try to get WordPress 5.0 released in November, Matt Mullenweg has announced who will lead phase two of the Gutenberg project. Phase two focuses on Customization and entire site layouts. Alexis Lloyd, Head of Design Innovation at Automattic, will handle the design and product side. Riad Benguella, a JavaScript Engineer…
The WordPress 5.0 release schedule has been published and not everyone is excited about the expected November 19th release. November 19th is three days before Thanksgiving, a major holiday in the U.S. Historically, WordPress has shipped major versions in early to mid December rather than November. Holidays were considered because of the sharp drop-off in…
Many WordPress theme shops started out with themes as their only products but over the years have moved into selling plugins that enhance their core products. This came about partially because theming standards evolved to encourage developers to put non-presentational functionality into plugins. For many, the revenue from plugins quickly eclipsed that of their theme…
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I discuss the headlines making the rounds in the WordPress community. This includes the start of the WordPress 5.0 release cycle, the 5th annual Hacktoberfest, and theme developers marketing their themes as Gutenberg-compatible. Near the end of the show, I describe how much of the press surrounding WordPress…
A tentative 5.0 release schedule was published during today’s core dev chat. The official release is targeted for November 19, 2018 with beta 1 expected October 19 and RC 1 released October 30. In addition to getting Gutenberg merged into core, the scope for 5.0 includes a few new items that Gary Pendergast outlined in…
Matt Mullenweg has announced a plan for releasing WordPress 5.0 with a tentative estimate for a release candidate to ship in November. “With known knowns and known unknowns, I believe we will be at RC in about a month,” Mullenweg said. “However, I’ll be keeping a close eye on feedback during the beta process and…
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…
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I are joined by Gary Pendergast, Gutenberg and WordPress core contributor to get an update on Gutenberg’s progress. We discuss its rollout on WordPress.com, the feedback and sentiment shared thus far, and when we can expect to see it merged into WordPress 5.0. We also talk about what…
Matias Ventura, Gutenberg’s technical lead, published an update on the progress of Gutenberg 4.0 and what users can expect. This version will mark the project’s 40th release. Ventura outlined a number of tasks that have been completed up to this point. These include, Full Screen, Unified Toolbar, and Spotlight modes to adapt to a user’s…
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…