‘Universal’ WordPress Themes Virtual Hallway Hangout Planned for May 14

Core contributor Jeff Ong announced an upcoming virtual hangout around the concept of universal themes. The meeting could cover much ground for theme authors learning how new and upcoming tools will fit into their workflows, businesses, and more. For an invitation, attendees should leave a comment on the announcement post or message Ong directly. The hangout is slated for May …

Openverse: Why This Project Is Good for WordPress and the Web

In today’s WP Briefing podcast episode, The Commons of Images, host Josepha Haden Chomphosy discussed the Openverse project with WordPress lead Matt Mullenweg. Automattic recently paid the non-profit Creative Commons organization for their Creative Commons Search engine. However, WordPress.org will host it, and there will be a community-run team. Openverse will be the name of the new project when it …

Classic Widgets Plugin Disables WordPress 5.8’s Upcoming Block-Based Widgets System

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 group of core leads following …

New Schema Markup For SmartCrawl: Recipe, Job Posting, Movie, Course, Books & Software Application

SmartCrawl is picking up the pace with new supported schema types. Here is a quick rundown of the plugin’s new schema markup types. We recently published a detailed tutorial on using SmartCrawl’s schema options feature. See this post if you’re not sure what schema is (tl;dr – schema types help search engines better understand your site’s content, increasing your visibility …

Jetpack 9.7 Makes More Features Available without Connecting to WordPress.com

Jetpack 9.7 was released today with updates under the hood that ensure the plugin’s blocks are compatible with the full-site editing features coming in WordPress 5.8. It also changes how sites access features that require the WordPress.com infrastructure. A pull request merged in version 9.7 changes the connection flow to make Jetpack active as soon as the plugin enables a …