TeamWP Launches Team Experience Index To Measure Employee Engagement and Satisfaction in the WordPress Ecosystem

In February 2023, James Giroux founded TeamWP, a project that aims to advocate for open, people-first workplaces in the WordPress ecosystem. His first initiative was to launch the Team Experience Index, a benchmark employee engagement survey designed specifically for people working in the world of WordPress. “The distributed nature of WordPress companies means they often lack the resources and knowledge …

Gutenberg 15.5 Introduces Experimental Grid Layout Support

Gutenberg 15.5 was released this week with more new features and refinements to WordPress’ full-site editing capabilities. The project will soon be moving on to Phase 3 with real-time collaboration on the roadmap, but there are still many improvements on the way for the Site Editor and core blocks. This release introduces experimental support for grid layouts in the Group …

Preferred Languages Feature Plugin Needs Testing

The Preferred Languages project is gaining some momentum with this week’s 2.0 release of the feature plugin. In 2017, WordPress Core Committer Pascal Birchler released a prototype that lets users select multiple preferred languages in their settings so that WordPress will load the first translation available, falling back to the next language in the list. “More than half of all …

Twitter Suspends WordPress.com’s Access to Twitter API, Breaking Jetpack Social Sharing

Twitter suspended WordPress.com’s access to the Twitter API without notice yesterday. Representatives at WordPress.com do not know why their access is currently blocked but are working to regain it. Our access to the Twitter API is currently blocked. As a result, Jetpack Social is temporarily unable to automatically share your posts directly from https://t.co/eRvNKWaolr to Twitter. We have reached out …

WooCommerce to Host Virtual Contributor Day April 19, 2023

WooCommerce has announced a 24-hour virtual contributor day that will happen on April 19, 2023. Contributors will be working on the WooCommerce Core and WooCommerce Blocks repositories. To give better coverage over time zones, organizers will have two kickoff times (0 UTC and 12 UTC). WooCommerce hasn’t had a WooConf in-person conference since 2017, opting instead for virtual events like WooSesh where people can …

WordPress Contributors Propose New Interactivity API for Frontend Blocks

Over the past year a group of WordPress contributors have been working on making it easier for developers to build interactive blocks. These are the kinds of experiences that allow visitors to submit a form and get feedback without reloading the page, load paginated content without refreshing, and improve e-commerce stores with more dynamic responses based on visitor interaction. A …

WordPress 6.2 “Dolphy” Introduces a Revamped Site Editor, Distraction-Free Writing Mode, and Updated Block Inserter 

image credit: Charles Mingus Sextet – Feat. Eric Dolphy – Take The A Train WordPress 6.2 “Dolphy” was released today, named in honor of American jazz alto saxophonist, bass clarinetist, and flautist Eric Allan Dolphy Jr. This is the first of three planned major releases in 2023. It includes more than 900 enhancements and bug fixes, with a strong focus on …

WordPress 6.2 Delayed to March 29 Due to Bug With Date Formats

WordPress 6.2 was scheduled for release today, but contributors discovered a bug with date formats during the 24-hour freeze that they believe could have a significant impact on functionality like bookings, date permalinks, and e-commerce stores. The decision was made this morning to delay with a consensus to apply a revert and release a silent 6.2 RC5 with the fix. …