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  • CloudFest Hackathon 2023 Kickstarts Innovative WordPress Projects: VS Code Extension for In-Browser Development, WapuuGotchi Gamification Plugin, and More

    CloudFest Hackathon 2023 Kickstarts Innovative WordPress Projects: VS Code Extension for In-Browser Development, WapuuGotchi Gamification Plugin, and More

    More than 6,000 people are attending CloudFest in Europa-Park, Germany, this week. A strong contingent of WordPress developers and contributors are among them. During the Hackathon portion of the event, web professionals gather for a friendly competition, tackling problems for existing not-for-profit, OSS projects, creating solutions with a concentrated effort at a quicker pace than…

    belinda@verytwisty.com

  • WordPress Launches Wapuu Coloring Giveaway to Celebrate Upcoming 20th Anniversary

    WordPress Launches Wapuu Coloring Giveaway to Celebrate Upcoming 20th Anniversary

    Wapuu lovers who are looking for a relaxing weekend activity will want to check out WordPress’ recently launched Wapuu Coloring Giveaway. The challenge is to style your own 20th anniversary party Wapuu using crayons, markers, colored pencils, pastels, or even digital drawing tools. Three random entries will be selected (which is why it’s called a…

    belinda@verytwisty.com

  • Equalize Digital Raises Pre-Seed Funding for Expanding Accessibility Checker Plugin Development

    Equalize Digital Raises Pre-Seed Funding for Expanding Accessibility Checker Plugin Development

    Equalize Digital, a WordPress accessibility products and consulting company, has received an undisclosed amount of pre-seed funding from Emilia Capital, the investment company owned by Joost de Valk and Marieke van de Rakt. The investment will be used to accelerate the growth of Equalize Digital’s Accessibility Checker plugin, a tool for auditing websites for WCAG,…

    belinda@verytwisty.com

  • Local 6.7.0 Adds Long-Requested Site Grouping Feature

    Local 6.7.0 Adds Long-Requested Site Grouping Feature

    WP Engine’s Local development app has released version 6.7.0 with Site Grouping, a highly requested feature that will greatly improve users’ workflows. It allows users to create custom groups in the sidebar of the Local dashboard page for better organization of their sites. Local users have been asking for this feature since 2017, as many…

    belinda@verytwisty.com

  • WooCommerce 7.5.0 Introduces 3 New Blocks, Expands Support for Global Styles

    WooCommerce 7.5.0 Introduces 3 New Blocks, Expands Support for Global Styles

    WooCommerce 7.5.0 was released this week with three new blocks for the Product Archive templates. These include a new Store Breadcrumb block, Product Results Count block, and a Catalog Sorting block, all seen in action below. These blocks were released as part of an effort to “blockify” Product Archive templates so that they can more…

    belinda@verytwisty.com

  • Gutenberg 15.3 Adds New “Time to Read” Block 

    Gutenberg 15.3 Adds New “Time to Read” Block 

    Gutenberg 15.3 was released this week with a new “Time to Read” block that calculates the estimated reading time for the post or page using the same method that appears in the details panel. The block displays this information on the frontend wherever it is inserted. This is the first iteration of the Time to…

    belinda@verytwisty.com

  • WordPress 6.2 RC 2 Drops Navigation Panel from Site Editor

    WordPress 6.2 RC 2 Drops Navigation Panel from Site Editor

    WordPress 6.2 RC 2 was released today on schedule. The new Navigation section in the Site Editor was dropped from the upcoming release in a somewhat unusual turn of events this late in the release cycle. The feature will remain in the Gutenberg plugin and will be iterated on for a future core release. Users…

    belinda@verytwisty.com

  • Patchstack Tracks 328% More Security Bugs Reported in WordPress Plugins in 2022

    Patchstack Tracks 328% More Security Bugs Reported in WordPress Plugins in 2022

    Patchstack, a WordPress security maintenance and management tool, has published its “State of WordPress Security” whitepaper for 2022, tracking a few key metrics on publicly reported vulnerabilities. The findings highlight the risk of using unmaintained themes and plugins along with developers’ need to keep pace with updates to libraries and dependencies included in their work.…

    belinda@verytwisty.com

  • Automattic Acquires ActivityPub Plugin for WordPress

    Automattic Acquires ActivityPub Plugin for WordPress

    Automattic has acquired the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress from German developer Matthias Pfefferle, who will be joining the company to continue improving support for federated platforms. Pfefferle, who is also the author of the Webmention plugin, said his new role is to see how Automattic’s products can benefit from open protocols like ActivityPub. In 2021,…

    belinda@verytwisty.com

  • Toot the Word Survey Finds Mastodon Increasingly Important to WordPress’ Community of Tooters

    Toot the Word Survey Finds Mastodon Increasingly Important to WordPress’ Community of Tooters

    More than 200 users on Mastodon who consider themselves part of the WordPress community, responded to the recent Toot the Word 2023 Survey, which was conducted by the admins of five WordPress-oriented Mastodon instances. The purpose of the survey was to help those running these instances understand how important Mastodon is for the WordPress community…

    belinda@verytwisty.com

  • WordPress 6.2 RC 1 Released and Ready for Testing

    WordPress 6.2 RC 1 Released and Ready for Testing

    WordPress 6.2 RC 1 was released today, marking the hard string freeze and readiness for translation ahead of the official release on March 28. There are three weeks remaining for testing. WordPress contributors published the 6.2 Field Guide, which includes the dev notes – technical updates for many of the new features and changes included…

    belinda@verytwisty.com

  • Lemmony: A Free WordPress Block Theme with 30+ Patterns

    Lemmony: A Free WordPress Block Theme with 30+ Patterns

    Lemmony is a new WordPress block theme designed by the team at Shufflehound, a theme development company based in Europe with commercial products on Themeforest. This is the team’s first block theme on WordPress.org and it is a strong debut. Lemmony is a beautifully-designed multipurpose theme that would work well for businesses, agencies, and portfolio…

    belinda@verytwisty.com

  • Jetpack 11.9 Adds Sharing Button for Mastodon, Updates Stats Dashboard Design

    Jetpack 11.9 Adds Sharing Button for Mastodon, Updates Stats Dashboard Design

    Jetpack 11.9 was released this week with support for sharing posts to Mastodon. The new button allows readers to click an icon to launch a sharing window that will ask the user to enter the full URL of the Mastodon instance where they want to share the post. Adding the URL will update the window…

    belinda@verytwisty.com

  • WP Engine Pattern Manager Plugin Now in Beta

    WP Engine Pattern Manager Plugin Now in Beta

    WP Engine is beta testing its new Pattern Manager plugin for creating and maintaining patterns. The plugin is intended for WordPress professionals – developers, agencies, and freelancers, who could benefit from having an interface and system for pattern management. “There are some plugins out there that provide an interface for creating patterns on a production…

    belinda@verytwisty.com

  • WordPress’ Legacy Default Themes Updated to Bundle Google Fonts Locally

    WordPress’ Legacy Default Themes Updated to Bundle Google Fonts Locally

    WordPress contributors have updated the legacy default themes to bundle Google Fonts locally in the theme folder, instead of loading them from Google’s servers. In years past, loading fonts from the the Google CDN was the recommended practice for performance reasons, but new privacy concerns have emerged following a German court case, which fined a website…

    belinda@verytwisty.com