Oh, how easily we forget the WordPress of 10, 15 years ago. We are spoiled. We are spoiled by the gluttony of documentation and tutorials, a wealth of knowledge created over more than a decade. We are spoiled by our own expertise, built-in our more vigorous youth, now sitting on our haunches as we have…
Yesterday, the WordPress pattern directory went live to the world as the development team behind it put the finishing touches on the project. It will work similarly to the theme and plugin directories in time. Along with WordPress 5.8, users can browse and use block patterns directly from the post editor. Officially, the pattern directory…
WordPress 5.8 “Tatum,” named in honor of jazz pianist Art Tatum, landed earlier today. It is the second major release in 2021. It includes duotone media filters, block-based widgets, theme-related blocks, template editing, and theme JSON file support. The release also ships tons of other notable features, such as support for new Emoji and an…
It is hard not to look through a list of upcoming WordPress 5.8 changes and not find at least a little something to whet your appetite. With so many enhancements headed our way, even we have not been able to keep up with them all here at WP Tavern. The next release will bring a…
Features such as the upcoming block-based widgets system, the template editor, theme-related blocks, and others have taken up much of the spotlight as of late. However, one of the best user-focused tools shipping with WordPress 5.8 is a duotone filter for Image and Cover blocks. The term “duotone” in this sense means combining two colors…
Yesterday evening Chris Klosowski, Sandhills Development Partner and Director of Technology, tweeted out a problem with the way WordPress.org’s Download page was appearing in Google’s Search results snippets when searching for “WordPress.” Underneath the link, the preview text referenced WordPress.com’s hosting: WordPress.com is the easiest way to create a free website or blog. It’s a…
In the upcoming 5.8 release, WordPress is updating its version of Twemoji, Twitter’s open source emoji library that supports the latest Unicode emoji specification. Version 13.1.0 introduces five new smileys and emotions, including heart on fire, mending heart, face with spiral eyes, face in clouds, and face exhaling. Version 13.1 adds mixed skin tone support for…
It is hard to believe that it was over a year ago — March 23, 2020, to be exact — that I wrote a post on why block patterns would be the future of WordPress. It has been a slow process as I have patiently waited for the feature to mature into a powerful tool…
It has been a while since I have touched widgets. Once the site editor landed in the Gutenberg plugin, I almost exclusively dropped the old sidebar paradigm and moved to block templates. Reactivating old themes and jumping into the widgets screen felt like time-traveling into a bygone era. After months of being deeply embedded within…
WordPress 5.8 is slated for release on July 20. In just over a month, many users will get their first taste of one of my favorite new features: template-editing mode. The template editor is a new tool that allows end-users to create custom templates without ever leaving the post-editing screen. It exists as a stepping…
Matt Mullenweg and Matías Ventura joined WordCamp Europe to chat about what’s happening with the Gutenberg project and celebrate the progress contributors have made over the past four years. “For me, 2020 was the year that really felt like people started to see the vision of Gutenberg from four or five years ago, when it…
WebP support is coming to WordPress 5.8. This modern image file format was created by Google in September 2010, and is now supported by 95% of the web browsers in use worldwide. It has distinct advantages over more commonly used formats, providing both lossless and lossy compression that is 26% smaller in size compared to PNGs and…
WordPress is celebrating 18 years today since the first release of the software to the general public. That release post, titled, “WordPress Now Available,” kicked off an exciting era in the history of the blogosphere where WordPress emerged as an unofficial successor to the abandoned b2/cafelog software. Reading the comments on the first release, you…
Almost since the dawn of the plugin and theme upgrade mechanisms inclusion in core over a decade ago, third-party developers have asked for an easy way to bypass the system. WordPress 5.8 will finally deliver on this feature request. While it has long been possible to filter the update system, methods for doing so were…
In today’s WP Briefing podcast episode, The Commons of Images, host Josepha Haden Chomphosy discussed the Openverse project with WordPress lead Matt Mullenweg. Automattic recently paid the non-profit Creative Commons organization for their Creative Commons Search engine. However, WordPress.org will host it, and there will be a community-run team. Openverse will be the name of…