State of the Word 2022: Matt Mullenweg Highlights Gutenberg’s Progress, Announces New Community Tools

State of the Word (SOTW) watch parties kicked off around the world this afternoon as Matt Mullenweg delivered his annual address to the WordPress community. A small group of people gathered live in New York City to participate while the majority of enthusiasts watched via the livestream. Mullenweg spent an hour reviewing and celebrating the work done across the project …

Performance Lab Plugin to Add New Experimental SQLite Integration Module in Upcoming 1.8.0 Release

WordPress’ Performance Team contributors have merged a new experimental SQLite integration module that is on track to be included in the upcoming version 1.8.0 of the Performance Lab plugin. (This is the plugin that contains a collection of feature plugins with performance-related modules the team hopes to land in WordPress core.) The new module allows the adventurous to test the …

New WordPress Sandbox Project Demos: Test-Drive Themes and Plugins in the Browser

WordPress Sandbox, an experimental project that uses WebAssembly (WASM) to run WordPress in the browser without a PHP server, has been chugging along steadily since Automattic-sponsored core contributor Adam Zieliński introduced it earlier this year in September. Zieliński published three new updates to Twitter this week, demonstrating the project’s potential to provide an in-browser IDE for plugin development along with …

The Block Editor Is Coming to WordPress’ Support Forums

The block editor was introduced to WordPress in 2018 and has matured into a more user-friendly tool for expression over the past four years. WordPress.org’s Meta Team is now experimenting with how they can bring the block editor into the support forums. That they are even considering this is a testament to how far the block editor has come, as …

The WP Community Collective Launches Nonprofit to Fund Individual Contributors and Community-Based Initiatives

The WP Community Collective (WPCC) officially launched today as a new nonprofit organization dedicated to funding individual WordPress contributors and community-led initiatives. It was founded by Sé Reed, Katie Adams Farrell, and Courtney Robertson. The organization was created to address some of the challenges of contribution, where larger companies tend to have more resources to sponsor contributors, while individuals and …

UK Publishers File £13.6 Billion Lawsuit Against Google Alleging Market Abuse

A group of 130,000 businesses publishing around 1,750,000 websites and applications in the UK have filed a lawsuit against Google and its parent company, Alphabet. The claim is being managed by law firms Humphries Kerstetter and Geradin Partners, who allege that “Google abused its dominant position in the market for online advertising, earning super-profits for itself at the expense of …

ElasticPress 4.4.0 Adds New Status Report Page and Instant Results Template Customization

10up has released version 4.4.0 of ElasticPress, its enhanced search plugin that speeds up searching while reducing the load on WordPress sites. The plugin is based on Elasticsearch and is used by customers of the ElasticPress.io service (a SaaS solution), as well as those who are hosting their own Elasticsearch instance. This update adds a new “Status Report” page in …