BuddyPress 8.0 was just released earlier this month on June 6, but the core development team is gearing up for a short development cycle for 9.0. The release will be specifically targeted at getting BuddyPress core widgets ready for WordPress 5.8’s new block widgets experience. Contributors are aiming to hit the following timeline to ship…
Yesterday, WordPress released a core plugin named Classic Widgets. Core contributors Tonya Mork and Andrew Ozz created the plugin under the WordPress Contributors account. It allows end-users to disable the upcoming block-based widgets system. Support is expected through 2022 or as long as necessary according to the plugin description. Decided last month by a small…
I was wrong. I assured our readers that “the block-based widget system will be ready for prime time when WordPress 5.6 lands” in my previous post on the new feature’s readiness. I also said that was on the condition of not trying to make it work with the customizer — that experience was still broken.…
Two weeks ago, the Gutenberg team put out an open call for block-based widgets feedback. I had already written a lengthy review of the new system earlier in September but was asked by a member of the team to share my thoughts on the most recent iteration. With the upcoming freeze for WordPress 5.6 Beta…
I could hardly sleep last night. Once in a blue moon, I have an idea I want to try out. While my day job as a writer means I spend far less time breaking sites through the rigorous trials and errors of building plugins and themes, some problems bug me with WordPress, the sort that…
The new navigation block and navigation and widget screens that were originally planned for WordPress 5.5 have been pushed back to the next release. These projects are currently available in the Gutenberg plugin experiments screen but are not yet ready to land in core. Converting the widget-editing areas and updating the widgets UI to use the block…
The Gutenberg team has published a Blocks in Widget Areas RFC (request for comments) document, detailing a technical approach that brings blocks to the wp-admin/widgets.php screen and the Customizer. This is one of the goals on the roadmap Matt Mullenweg outlined in his 9 Projects for 2019 post. Based on the requirements outlined in the…
Gutenberg phase 2 development is underway and one of the first orders of business is porting all existing core widgets to blocks. This task is one of the nine projects that Matt Mullenweg outlined for 2019, along with upgrading the widgets-editing areas in wp-admin/widgets.php and adding support for blocks in the Customizer. Contributors on phase…
WordPress 4.8 brought TinyMCE to the core Text widget, along with brand new Image, Video, and Audio media widgets. The upcoming 4.9 release builds on this progress and will introduce some long-awaited improvements to Text widget. Users will finally be able to use shortcodes in the Text widget without the help of additional code from…
The Core Media Widgets feature plugin introduced a gallery widget in the 0.2.0 release this week. WordPress 4.8 added the new audio, image, and video widgets from this feature plugin. The gallery widget is targeted for merge into the upcoming WordPress 4.9 release. In testing the new feature I found it to be a simple,…
WordPress 4.8.1 is available for download or as an update from the WordPress Dashboard. This release contains 29 bug fixes and improvements. The most notable addition is a dedicated Custom HTML widget. The Custom HTML widget works similar to the Text widget in WordPress 4.7 and below. To see a full list of changes in…
WordPress 4.8 “Evans” is available for download and is the first major release of the year under the new release cycle. WordPress 4.8 is named after William John “Bill” Evans, an American jazz pianist. New Image, Video, and Audio Widgets WordPress 4.8 includes three new widgets. All three widgets make it easier to display images, video, or audio without using…
WordPress 4.8 Beta 1 is available for testing and has a couple of features that will likely have a big impact. New Image, Video, and Audio Widgets WordPress 4.8 has three new core widgets and adds a visual editor to the Text widget. Adding video, audio, or images to text widgets typically involves using custom…
Adding images to sidebars in WordPress is a cumbersome task that requires users to upload an image to the Media Library, find the URL, copy it, and paste it into a Text widget along with additional HTML. Nearly two years ago, Mel Choyce opened a ticket on WordPress Trac proposing that a media widget be…
WordPress 4.5 is right around the corner with the first release candidate now available for download. It includes 49 changes from the last beta – improvements to the new custom logo feature, a minor update to jQuery, updates to inline documentation, and fixes for various small bugs. The upcoming release is packed full of improvements…