Castos Picks Up $756K in Funding from Automattic and Joost de Valk to Expand Services in the Private Podcasting Market

Castos, a WordPress-powered podcast hosting provider, announced a $756K pre-seed fundraising round today from Automattic, Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast SEO, and other individuals. The company raised money from all the investors in this round via a SAFE note, which founder and CEO Craig Hewitt said is a fairly standard investment vehicle for companies at Castos’ stage of growth. …

WordPress Green Lights In-Person Meetup Events for Vaccinated Attendees

After considerable discussion, the WordPress Community Team is lifting the requirements of the in-person meetup safety checklist for meetups that gather fully-vaccinated attendees. The checklist is still applicable to all meetup groups but in places where vaccines are freely available, meetup organizers can now forego its requirements if they limit gatherings to those self-reporting as fully vaccinated. When Andrea Middleton …

Gatsby WP Themes Launches New Marketplace

The Gatsby WP Themes project has launched a new marketplace for developers who are building WordPress-powered sites with Gatsby on the frontend. Originally founded by Zac Gordon and Alexandra Spalato, the commercial venture is now primarily managed by Spalato and Paulina Hetman. The team’s first project involved porting the Twenty Twenty WordPress Theme to a Gatsby WP Theme. They are …

WP Engine Makes Local Pro Free for All Users

WP Engine announced today that Local Pro, the commercial upgrade for its local WordPress development product, is now free for all users. Beginning with version 6.0, all features that formerly required a paid subscription are now available with a free Local account. These include Live Links Pro, Instant Reload, Link Checker, and MagicSync. “We believe Local Pro features benefit a …

BuddyPress 9.0 Scheduled for Short Development Cycle to Ship Block-Based Widgets Ahead of WordPress 5.8

BuddyPress 8.0 was just released earlier this month on June 6, but the core development team is gearing up for a short development cycle for 9.0. The release will be specifically targeted at getting BuddyPress core widgets ready for WordPress 5.8’s new block widgets experience. Contributors are aiming to hit the following timeline to ship 9.0 before the next major …

Major Revamp Coming to GitHub Issues

This week GitHub unveiled new features that will be included in a total revamp of GitHub Issues, including project tables that are similar to spreadsheets, custom fields, a keyboard driven command palette, improved task lists, and issue forms. The new project table view is an alternative to project boards, allowing users to filter, sort, and group issues and pull requests. …

Gutenberg 10.9 Renames the Query Block, Adds Collapsible List View Items, and Rolls Out Rich URL Previews

Yesterday, Gutenberg 10.9 landed in the WordPress plugin directory. The update overhauls the Query and Query Loop blocks, allows users to expand or collapse items in the editor list view, and introduces rich URL preview cards for links. The new version also packs in an updated template-mode creation modal and moves the blocks manager. This update ships several enhancements, particularly …