WordPress.com Announces Marketplace Vision and Plan To Partner With Developers in the WordPress Ecosystem

Donna Cavalier announced the vision of WordPress.com’s marketplace earlier today via the site’s news blog. This future will include bringing more premium themes, plugins, and services to users. Automattic, the company behind the site, will be partnering with third-party developers to bring these commercial offerings to its customers. Plugin developers, theme designers, and WordPress service providers can get on the …

Gutenberg 12.7 Adds Multi-Block Selection in List View and Brings Margin Support to Group Blocks

Another two weeks have flown by, and another Gutenberg plugin update is in the books. This release is not as feature-heavy as the last, but it feels solid overall. Other than one breaking issue, version 12.7 includes several nice-to-have enhancements. The latest update includes some early work for a new style engine. This is a longer-term project that should improve …

The WordPress Web Fonts API Has Arrived

The journey toward a web fonts API in WordPress has been a rollercoaster of emotions for developers. After being punted from the WordPress 5.9 release, it was moved to the Gutenberg project, where it could be built alongside related features that relied on it. The API has been merged into the Gutenberg plugin and should land in version 12.8. Theme …

WordPress Multisite Is Still a Valuable and Often Necessary Tool

Rob Howard rocked the boat last week in calling for the deprecation of WordPress multisite in the latest MasterWP newsletter. He argued that “the brave and noble add-on is no longer necessary or valuable to developers.” The responses via Twitter were swift and in disagreement. Before WordPress 3.0, multisite was an entirely separate system called WPMU (WordPress MultiUser). It was …

FSE Outreach Round #12: Building a Site Header With Blocks

On Wednesday, Anne McCarthy announced Round #12 of the FSE Outreach Program. As always, everyone is free to join by testing features and providing direct feedback on problem areas with the design tools in WordPress. Anyone interested should respond by March 16. For this round, volunteers are tasked with testing some oldies but goodies. Early in the program’s history, anyone …

WordFest Live to Host Free 24-Hour Festival of WordPress March 4, 2022

The third edition of WordFest Live is coming up on March 4, 2022. The online event will feature more than 60 sessions over the course of 24 hours, as well as workshops, socials, and celebrations. Sessions will be focused on WordPress, remote working, and mental wellbeing. Topics include leadership, freelancing, website performance, podcasting, WooCommerce, dealing with mental disorders in tech, …