Most WordPress professionals managed to escape 2022’s round of tech layoffs, which primarily affected venture capital-funded startups and larger companies that had overhired during the economic upswing that came with pandemic precautions being lifted in many places. Mass layoffs hit Meta, Peleton, Stripe, Carvana, and more during the last half of 2022. Tech layoffs have…
The global WordPress community is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the software’s first release on May 27, 2023. Two decades ago, WordPress made its debut featuring Texturize, XHTML 1.1, manual excerpts, and a new admin interface. An official anniversary website is publishing updates about how the community can get involved in the upcoming celebration plans.…
WordPress 6.2 Beta 2 was released today and is now available for testing, one week after Beta 1. Testers can easily download the latest beta zip file or install the WordPress Beta Tester plugin and set it to the “Bleeding edge” channel and the “Beta/RC Only” stream. Beta 2 includes fixes for ~71 issues since last week’s release, along…
WordPress enthusiasts from around the world are beginning their journeys to attend the inaugural WordCamp Asia, which is happening in Bangkok, Thailand, February 17-19. Organizers are expecting 1,500 attendees at this new flagship event. For those who cannot attend in-person, there will be a livestream broadcasting the sessions from the conference days after Contributor Day,…
WooCommerce is calling on its developer community to join a new monthly chat focused on WooCommerce block extensibility. The chat is being run as a three-month pilot program with different topics each month. “During these sessions, we want developers to actively shape the future of WC Blocks by hearing what developers’ integrations need from us…
Gutenberg 15.1 was released this week with Openverse integration in the Media tab. The Openverse library of openly licensed and public domain works has also moved to its own website with an updated design. It contains more than 600 million free-to-use images and audio files that are now available inside WordPress’ editor: Clicking on an Openverse…
WordPress.com is currently testing two new blocks for generating images and paragraph content using AI. The blocks, which are currently labeled as experimental, were first spotted by Jen T of WPcomMaven who published a few examples on her blog this week. WordPress.com developed the blocks through a partnership with OpenAI, creators of ChatGPT and DALL·E.…
Twitter experienced a major outage today lasting several hours, which left most users unable to tweet or send private messages to each other. Some reported receiving error messages telling them they were “over the daily limit for sending tweets.” Twitter’s development team took the opportunity to update users on the upcoming changes to API access,…
The WP Community Collective (WPCC), a newly formed nonprofit organization dedicated to funding individual WordPress contributors and community-led initiatives, has announced its first Accessibility Fellow. Alex Stine, a fully blind individual contributor who has been working with the WordPress Accessibility team since 2016, is the first recipient of the fellowship. WPCC is managing its finances…
The WordPress open source project will be hosting a Community Summit as part of WordCamp US this year. It will take place prior to the main conference on August 22-23, 2023, in National Harbor, Washington, DC. The invitation-only event will be the first summit in six years, since the last one was held in Paris,…
WordPress 6.2 Beta 1 was released on time today, and can be tested by using the WordPress Beta Tester plugin or downloaded directly. In just seven weeks, the upcoming major release will roll in the last nine Gutenberg plugin releases, which account for 292 editor enhancements and 354 bug fixes. The beta 1 announcement confirms that WordPress…
During the most recent BuddyPress development meeting, contributors decided to focus the upcoming 12.0 release on merging the BP Rewrites feature plugin into core. This plugin is the result of a ten-year-old effort to migrate BuddyPress’ custom URI parser to use WordPress’ Rewrite API. One year ago, BP Rewrites went into beta. It’s not certain how…
Beginning February 9, 2023, Twitter will turn off free access to its APIs. The company announced yesterday that it will be offering “a paid basic tier” with more details coming next week. In response to a user who conjectured that this move is more about raising the friction to making bots, Elon Musk responded, saying…
WordPress Core Committer Adam Silverstein has published a proposal for adding automated performance tooling that would offer continuous monitoring for performance issues so they can be resolved before major regressions are committed to core. “Similar to our unit test suite, automated performance testing would help protect core from introducing large performance regressions by catching problems immediately and…
In 2020, WordPress began prioritizing education as critical to the project’s future, launching Learn.WordPress to support beginners to advanced learners with free educational content. Over the past two years, WordPress’ Training team has been instrumental in building and expanding this resource with synchronous and asynchronous learning opportunities, as well as downloadable lesson plans for instructors…