WordCamp US 2020, which was originally scheduled for October 27-29, was officially canceled today. In April, organizers transitioned to planning for it to be held as a virtual event, but the tenuous situation with the pandemic in the United States and the stress on the event’s large crew of volunteers has precipitated a full cancellation. […]
I am always on the lookout for interesting syntax-highlighting plugins, particularly for those occasions when I write tutorials or other articles that lean heavily on code. Far too many plugins use shortcodes, custom blocks, or other odd solutions. However, there is one option that I intentionally overlooked when it was released over a year ago:
Riad Benguella released BlockBook, a project that promises to overhaul how developers build blocks and more, on Tuesday. It is a development environment that allows creators to work with blocks in isolation, outside of WordPress. Developers can view individual block properties and test output from a defined block library. BlockBook is available as an npm
Concerns are mounting regarding Unsplash’s terms and image licensing after the site launched its official WordPress plugin this week. Several people commented on the restrictions and lack of clarity in the license. “The irony here is that this goes against Unsplash’s own licensing for images,” Aris Stathopoulos commented. “It’s vague and restrictive to the point
Yesterday, Alex Shiels posted an update to the proposed guidelines for the WordPress block directory. The document adds eight rules for plugin authors to follow if they plan to add their one-off blocks to the directory. The guidelines are additional requirements on top of the existing plugin directory guidelines. While the wording and organization of
Google had set September 2020 as the deadline for when it would begin to fully switch over to crawling and indexing sites using mobile-first indexing but announced today that site owners will have more time to prepare. The deadline has been extended to March 2021. Mobile-first indexing is a long-term plan that Google began rolling
Jetpack CRM welcome screen. Mike Stott, co-creator of Zero BS CRM, announced the launch of Jetpack CRM on Monday. The news was the seemingly inevitable rebranding of the original plugin that he and Woody Hayday had built. Automattic, the owner of the Jetpack plugin, acquired the project almost a year ago. While Jetpack CRM carries
WordPress has almost always provided a top-level admin menu item for themes. It is clearly labeled “Appearance.” It is the single location that all WordPress users know to visit to modify any appearance-related things for their WordPress site. However, there is a movement within the Themes Team to allow themes to place an additional top-level
WPCampus, a community focused on WordPress and higher education, will host its 5th annual in-person conference as a free, online event this year. The two-day event will feature sessions, lightning talks, sponsor demonstrations, and trivia, July 29-30, 2020. Although the WPCampus community is no stranger to hosting online events (they usually host a virtual conference
All in One SEO Pack patched an XSS vulnerability this week that was discovered by the security researchers at Wordfence on July 10. The popular plugin has more than 2 million active installs, according to WordPress.org. Wordfence researchers categorized it as “a medium severity security issue” that could result in “a complete site takeover and
On Tuesday, Brainstorm Force announced its Astra theme passed 1 million active installations. It is the only non-default theme in the official WordPress theme directory to reach such a height. Popularity breeds popularity. Once the theme broke 50,000 installs in January 2019, it was a quick hop and skip to 500,000 in October and 1
Blocksy is one of the best free themes available for the block editor right now and is rapidly growing in popularity. CreativeThemes, the Romania-based company behind the theme, released an update to Blocksy this week, along with a new starter site for charities. The concept of “starter sites” is an interesting new twist on “starter
