Twenty Twenty-Two, the new default theme coming in WordPress 5.9, was unveiled today on WordPress.org. The design goes full steam ahead in support of full site editing and new customization capabilities. Like its predecessor, Twenty Twenty-One, the new default theme makes some bold design choices wrapped around a central theme. In this case it’s bird…
WordCamp US took place online last Friday. Organizers pulled off a successful one-day event with an engaging group of speakers who highlighted timely and important topics. There were 3,608 people registered for the event and the livestream had as many as 400 concurrent viewers at a time. “Online events are notoriously difficult to get attendee…
The GiveWP team announced an extension of its flagship donation plugin for allowing peer-to-peer (P2P) fundraising in late September. The solution should make the project even more appealing than before for those looking to break from third-party donation services and go the self-hosted route. The first version rolls out individual and team fundraising pages, leaderboards,…
Facebook, Workplace, Instagram, and WhatsApp went down today for roughly six hours due to a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) configuration error. Cloudflare describes BGP as “the postal service of the Internet.” It is responsible for routing Facebook’s traffic and making all of its domains accessible to visitors. At first glance, the outage appeared to be…
Last week, under its news section, The Next Web published what could only be described as a hit piece: Developers hate WordPress — and so should marketers. The claim was that, despite its current 40% market share, folks should start looking at alternatives for a better experience. The first developer interviewed for this piece was…
Launched by Ralph Morris and Steve Burge in June this year, Logtivity is a plugin and service that allows site owners to track everything that happens on their WordPress installs. The duo has made continual updates to the plugin since. In the past couple of months, they have added deep integration with Easy Digital Downloads.…
Gutenberg 11.6 was released this week with a new API for managing lock control at the block-type level. When defining a block, developers can now use the lock attribute to designate whether a block can be moved or removed. The PR introduces parts of the locking support mechanisms proposed by Matias Ventura in a separate…
Gutenberg 11.6 landed yesterday. Contributors added dozens of enhancements and bug fixes. Admittedly, there was not a whole lot that excited me as a user about this release. Typography options for the Post Title block. Nice. Cropping for the Site Logo. A necessary addition. Toolbar button for converting old Gallery blocks to the new —…
Andrew Starr, the owner of UXL Themes, has cobbled together a new project around block patterns. His new site, aptly named WP Block Patterns, allows users to preview any WordPress.org-hosted block themes and patterns together. The project does not allow visitors to download anything or ask them to sign up. It is a basic demo…
WordCamp US, WordPress’ largest flagship event in the Western Hemisphere, is set to kick off on Friday, October 1, at 11:45 AM EDT. The single-day event will include sessions, workshops, networking events, virtual sponsor booths, and musical interludes. Get ready to be inspired by new ideas and learn about the latest and greatest capabilities in…
Ari Stathopoulos announced a proposal for implementing a web fonts API in core WordPress. The goal is to standardize how theme authors register and enqueue font styles. It may also serve as the foundation of other features down the road. Jono Alderson opened the original ticket for such an API in February 2019. The discussion…
WooCommerce is celebrating 10 years since WooThemes launched the first iteration of the WooCommerce plugin. Paul Maiorana, WooCommerce’s current CEO, covered a few high highlights of the plugin’s rising popularity over the years in his anniversary post. After 16 months in the wild, WooCommerce had been downloaded 500,000 times and passed the 1 million downloads…
Nick Diego released the Icon Block plugin last week. Unlike similar blocks that are available, it does not rely on a third-party library. Instead, it caters to the developer and DIY crowd, allowing them to add any SVG directly to the editor. Diego is the author of the Block Visibility plugin, which is just a…
As always, I like to highlight some things on the lighter side of the WordPress world. We have had enough business acquisitions in the past week — the whole year, really — that we need to take a break and enjoy the more experimental developments that the community has to offer. Such as the case…
WooCommerce shipped version 5.7.0 through a forced update for some users earlier this week. The minor release was not billed as a security update but the following day WooCommerce published a post explaining that the plugin was vulnerable to having analytics reports leaked on some hosting configurations: On September 21, 2021, our team released a…