Guteblock Joins the Block Collection Plugin Arena With an Initial 12 Custom Blocks

Last week, London-based digital marketing agency Sweans Technologies released Guteblock, its new block collection plugin. Currently, the plugin boasts 12 custom blocks. The company plans to add more and has big plans for the plugin’s future. While the team earns no points for originality in plugin naming, they are nevertheless throwing their hat into the ring of ever-growing block collection …

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 …