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…
Last month WordPress contributors published the initial designs for the upcoming pattern directory, which will host community-submitted patterns that can be installed with one click from the block inserter in the editor. A live prototype of the work in progress is available at wordpress.org/patterns. The previously planned masonry style, which accommodates variable thumbnail heights, has…
Last week WordPress contributors began a heated discussion regarding blocking FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts). Google’s experimental alternative to third-party cookies has become a highly contentious topic that made its way into last week’s Core developers meeting. Representatives from the Chrome team also attended the meeting to clear up any confusion and answer questions about…
WordPress contributors are proposing the project take an active position on Google’s Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC). This particular mechanism is Google’s alternative to third-party cookies that doesn’t require collecting users’ browsing history. The GitHub repository for FLoC explains how Google will group people together and label them using machine learning: We plan to explore…
Yesterday, Josepha Haden Chomphosy announced the roadmap for deciding whether Full Site Editing (FSE) will land in WordPress 5.8. After the launch of Gutenberg 10.4 on April 14, a small group of core leads will participate in a go/no-go demo. The following people will be on the call: Matias Ventura – Gutenberg Project Lead who…
More and more, open comments are becoming a thing of the past. Large news organizations have kicked them to the curb. Frustrated bloggers who no longer desire all of the hassles with moderation shut down their forms. The conversations have moved to corporate-controlled social media. It is hard to pinpoint the exact moment much of…
As part of an experiment designed to improve coordination of contributor teams, WordPress has launched a new Slack channel for full-time sponsored contributors. Josepha Haden Chomphosy, the project’s executive director, announced the new closed Slack channel on Friday evening in a post that drew critical feedback from contributors who pushed for more clarification. “2020 was…
The Full Site Editing (FSE) Outreach program has launched its third testing call, continuing the effort to engage users in a structured testing flow focused on specific practical tasks. Previous rounds had testers building a custom homepage and exploring the distinction between editing modes (template vs page/post). The challenge in round #3 is to create…
WordPress 5.7 “Esperanza” was released today, named for Esperanza Spalding, an American jazz bassist who became an accomplished singer, songwriter, and composer in her early 20’s. Versions 9.3 – 9.9 of the Gutenberg plugin are rolled into this update, bringing hundreds of enhancements and bug fixes that make working in the block editor more efficient…
A new proposal on WordPress.org explores the ramifications of dropping support for Internet Explorer 11 (IE11). Héctor Prieto summarized the current state of IE usage among WordPress users, citing three metrics that demonstrate declining usage that is now cumulatively below ~1%: 0.71% from StatCounter’s GlobalStats 1.2% from W3 Counter 0.46% from WordPress.com StatCounter’s GlobalStats record IE11 having dipped…
It’s that time in the release cycle when all the dev notes are rolling out ahead of the next major update. These notes include technical summaries of all the goodies coming in the next release. If you haven’t been paying close attention, there are always a few happy surprises in there that pop up as…
Felix Arntz, a WordPress core committer and developer programs engineer at Google, announced upcoming support for lazy loading iframes. The feature is included in the latest WordPress 5.7 beta and will officially ship next month to the larger community. WordPress has supported lazy loading for images since version 5.5. However, support for iframes was not…
Gutenberg 10.0 was released today as the 100th iteration of the block editor since the project began four years ago. Although 10.0 may seem like a big number, it’s just another incremental step forward in terms of new features, improvements, and bug fixes. Version 10.0 introduces a new dynamic pages block for building navigation menus.…
WordPress contributors are considering scaling back the planned number of releases in 2021. In a post titled “Making WordPress Releases Easier,” WordPress’ Executive Director, Josepha Haden Chomphosy summarized three years of research on reducing the effort required to have a successful WordPress release: From my research, the work to automate what we can (and potentially…
WordPress has passed 40% market share of all websites, up from 35.4% in January 2020, as measured by W3Techs. These numbers are derived from the Alexa top 10 million websites, along with the Tranco top 1 million list. By W3Techs’ estimates, every two minutes, another top 10m site starts using WordPress. Among the top 1,000 sites, WordPress’ market share is even…