Join the Future of WordPress Themes Conversation: Theme Review Team to Hold Biweekly Discussions

In collaboration with the core design and editor teams, the WordPress theme review team will begin hosting biweekly (fortnightly) meetings on the future of themes. The meetings will be held every other Wednesday on the #themereview WordPress Slack channel at 16:00 UTC. The first meeting is on February 5. Phase 2 of the Gutenberg project is about tackling site customization. …

Native Lazy Loading Support Coming to WordPress

It seems to be the week for dropping news of WordPress feature plugins. Felix Arntz, WordPress core committer and developer programs engineer at Google, announced a plan to push a lazy loading feature to the platform. If testing goes well, this feature could land in WordPress 5.4 in March. The concept of lazy loading allows a webpage to render without …

Customizing WordPress User Roles With Branda

Human beings may be created equal, but admin users–not so much. Some admins know their roles and stick to them, while others behave like over-stimulated children in a toy store, touching everything in sight until something breaks. In this post, we’ll show you how to use Branda, WPMU DEV’s ultimate white label branding plugin, to customize the default WordPress user …

XML Sitemaps Feature Plugin Open for Testing and Feedback

Thierry Muller, a Developer Relations Program Manager at Google, and several contributors posted an update on the XML sitemaps feature that may land in WordPress this year. After seven months of development, the team has made the XML Sitemaps feature plugin available on GitHub. It is currently open for testing and feedback. The plugin should also be available in the …

How To Choose The Best CDN For WordPress

If you’re serious about speeding up your site and you’ve optimized the heck out of it (smushed images, minified CSS and JavaScript, set up a caching plugin…), it’s time to think about signing up to a content delivery network, or CDN. A Content Delivery Network (CDN) will drastically reduce server lag by storing static resources on a network of faster …

Gutenberg 7.3 Brings Navigation Block Colors, Block Collections API, and Dynamic Post Blocks

The Gutenberg team announced version 7.3 of the plugin yesterday. This was the second release of the year, which included 159 contributions from 56 people. The major changes to the plugin include settings for changing the navigation block’s text and background colors, a new Block Collections API for developers, and placeholder blocks for post elements. One of the most significant …