State of the Word (SOTW) watch parties kicked off around the world this afternoon as Matt Mullenweg delivered his annual address to the WordPress community. A small group of people gathered live in New York City to participate while the majority of enthusiasts watched via the livestream. Mullenweg spent an hour reviewing and celebrating the…
In September, WordPress’ Security Team announced it would be dropping support for versions 3.7 through 4.0 by December 1, 2022. Yesterday the final releases for these versions (3.7.41, 3.8.41, 3.9.40, and 4.0.38) were made available to the very small percentage of users who are running ancient versions of WordPress. As part of the final releases,…
WordPress.com has expanded its library of blocks to include a new Pocket Casts block that makes it easy to embed any show or episode in the WordPress editor. The block is branded for Pocket Casts and will display a podcast player and a selection of episodes when the show URL is selected. Alternatively, users can…
WordPress’ Create Block Theme plugin, which is used for creating a new theme, blank theme, child theme, or style variation, has a dedicated screen for managing fonts. It lists and previews all the font families and font faces embedded in the theme and allows users to embed Google fonts, embed local font assets, and remove…
While WordPress’ site editing capabilities have been in development, the term full-site editing (FSE) has been widely used but sometimes poorly understood outside of contributor groups. Three months ago, WordPress’ Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy proposed renaming FSE to something more user friendly. After a lengthy discussion, Haden Chomphosy has announced the decision to use…
WordPress’ default site tagline, “Just another WordPress site,” is now a thing of the past, though not yet fully retired to the realm of nostalgia. The recent 6.1 release resolved a ticket that lead developer Mark Jaquith opened 15 years ago to encourage people to change their taglines. The tagline has now been changed to…
WordPress 6.1 “Misha” was released today, named for Soviet-Norwegian jazz pianist Mikhail “Misha” Alperin, who was born in Ukraine in 1956. A founding member of the first Moldavian jazz quartet, and later the Moscow Art Trio, Alperin became known for his distinct and bewitching blend of jazz and folk music. This release is the culmination of…
WordPress’ Documentation Team will be hosting an online Contributor Day on October 25, 2022, ahead of WordPress’ anticipated 6.1 release the following week. Milana Cap, who has been volunteering with the Documentation team for years and is currently sponsored by XWP, announced the event this week. “The primary goal is to catch up with a…
Gutenberg 14.2 brings some important changes to the writing flow in the block editor that simplify the experience and remove unnecessary obtrusions. One small but significant change is that the sibling and line inserters have been updated to use a more natural animation effect with a slightly increased delay to minimize accidental triggers. This release…
In June 2022, WordPress.org’s Themes Team began strongly urging theme authors to switch to locally hosted webfonts, following a German court case, which fined a website owner for violating the GDPR by using Google-hosted webfonts. For years, theme authors have been enqueuing Google Fonts from the Google CDN for better performance, but this method exposes visitors’…
WordPress 6.1 beta 1 was released today, and testing has begun with the general release expected in just under six weeks on November 1. Versions 13.1 – 14.1 of the Gutenberg plugin will be rolled into core for 6.1. This includes features like improved block placeholders, more design tools for blocks, fluid typography, improvements to…
Last month, the plan for WordPress to generate WebP images by default for new JPEG image uploads was put on hold for the upcoming 6.1 release after objections from lead developers. The original proposal had been merged into core at the end of July, despite significant critical feedback and concerns from WordPress’ developer community. Yesterday,…
Members of the WordPress 6.1 release squad recently gathered for a product walkthrough on Zoom, where Gutenberg lead architect Matías Ventura gave an informal tour of some of the new features coming in the next release. After the success of the 6.0 walkthrough, this gathering on Zoom has become a new part of the release…
WordPress’ design team has announced the winners of the challenge to create a style variation for the upcoming Twenty Twenty-Three (TT3) default theme. Organizers received 38 submissions from 19 contributors (some submitted multiple variations) hailing from eight countries. Given the wide range of colors and typography combinations, TT3 is gearing up to be a vehicle…
WordPress’ Security Team announced it will be dropping support for versions 3.7 through 4.0 on December 1, 2022. To give some context for how old these versions are, in 2013, WordPress 3.7 introduced automatic background updates and 3.8 updated the admin with a new design based on the MP6 plugin. WordPress’ official policy is that…