Jetpack has opened a signup for the beta of its upcoming Membership feature in order to collect feedback from potential testers. The changelog for version 7.3, released two weeks ago, hinted at a new Membership block coming to the plugin. The work in progress was added behind the JETPACK_BETA_BLOCKS constant, presumably in preparation for wider testing. Based on the feature’s …
Block building without JavaScript: Testing ACF, Block Lab, and Lazy Blocks
Not everyone is able or willing to build blocks in JavaScript just yet, and sometimes you have to install three or four block collections until you find the blocks you would like. There is a third way: plugins that create the blocks for you from a set of specific custom fields, with a template to control the frontend display of …
Gutenberg 5.7 Adds New Block Appender for Group and Columns Blocks
Today’s release of Gutenberg brings a major improvement to the usability of the Group block. In previous versions of the editor, it wasn’t easy to see if a block had been inserted as a child block, especially since the default behavior was to insert an empty paragraph block. Gutenberg 5.7 brings more clarity to the UI for Group blocks by …
WPWeekly Episode 352 – Capital P Dangit and My Future Plans
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I share what’s new in WordPress 5.2, discuss why not capitalizing one letter can make or break someone in the WordPress community, and what’s new in Jetpack 7.3. We also highlight the highly anticipated release of Advanced Custom Fields 5.8.0. Near the end of the show, I describe what I’ve been going through …
WordPress Translation Day 4 Successfully Hosts 77 Local Events in 35 Countries, Recruits 183 New Translators
WordPress Translation Day 4 was held over the weekend. The 24-hour global event hosted 77 local events in 35 countries and the Polyglots team added 183 new contributors to their ranks. The team also designated 12 new GTEs (Global Translation Editor) and 14 PTEs (Project Translation Editor). Naoko Takano, a Polyglots Team Global Mentor and Japanese GTE, gave an introduction …
WPTracSearch: An Elasticsearch-Powered Search Interface for WordPress Trac Tickets
WordPress Trac is one of the more utilitarian and uninspiring interfaces that many contributors have to contend with in the process of giving back to the project. After growing tired of Trac’s mediocre search functionality, William Earnhardt set out to improve it with a new project called WPTracSearch that gave him an opportunity to play around with Elasticsearch and React. …
Advanced Custom Fields 5.8.0 Introduces ACF Blocks: A PHP Framework for Creating Gutenberg Blocks
After six months in development, Advanced Custom Fields 5.8.0 was released yesterday with a new PHP-based framework for developing custom Gutenberg block types. ACF Blocks was announced in October 2018, to the great relief of many developers who didn’t know how they were going to keep pace with learning the JavaScript required to use WordPress’ Block API. ACF’s creator, Elliot …
WPWeekly Episode 351 – Results of the Gutenberg Accessibility Audit
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I are joined by Rachel Cherry, Senior Software Engineer for Disney Interactive and Director of WPCampus and Brian DeConinck, a front-end designer and developer with the OIT Design and Web Services team, part of the Office of Information Technology at NC State University. We learn how Tenon was chosen as the vendor to perform the audit and what …
Registration for WordSesh 6 Is Now Open
Registration for the sixth installment of WordSesh is now open and thanks to Pantheon, those who attend the conference live will be able to watch all of the sessions for free. WordSesh is a virtual WordPress conference with speakers from around the world sharing knowledge. This year’s event has 14 speakers with topics that include, the benefits of being the …
Tabor Theme Now Available as a Free Gatsby Theme for WordPress
Gatsby WordPress Themes, a project launched earlier this year by a group of collaborators, has just released its second free theme. The team is led by Gatsby and GraphQL aficionados Zac Gordon, Jason Bahl, Muhammad Muhsin, Hussain Thajutheen, and Alexandra Spalato. Inspired by the scalability, speed, and security that the React-based static site generator can bring to WordPress, the team …