I have been fascinated by the concept of Carolina Nymark’s Miniblock OOAK theme for a couple of weeks now. It has served as inspiration for a design idea I have been working on, and I am happy to see Nymark pushing boundaries in a space where few pioneers are left. Her design style always dares to take the road less …
#13 – Chris Lubkert and Rich Tabor on Building Sites With Extendify
About this episode. On the podcast today we have Chris Lubkert and Rich Tabor, from Extendify. Extendify is a library of block patterns and full page layouts which you can use inside of the Block Editor. Chris and Rich, as you will hear, decided a few years ago that they were going to dedicate themselves to working with blocks. They …
Convesio Raises $5M to Expand Docker-Powered Hosting Platform
WordPress hosting company Convesio has raised $5 million from private investors. This funding round includes some of the company’s original investors who participated in Convesio’s 2019 Wefunder crowdfunding campaign, which brought in more than $1 million from 800+ investors. “I started Convesio because legacy hosting providers have not evolved their technology, struggled to provide high uptime, and lacked the capability …
Creating Content Dividers With the Wavy Divider WordPress Plugin
Kevin Batdorf, the Project Lead Developer at Extendify, released the Wavy Divider plugin earlier this week. It is described as “a colorful, fun, lightweight divider block to energize your website with character and pizazz.” As someone who believes every Friday should be officially titled “Fun Friday,” how could I not install and activate it? I have not seen many block …
CMS and E-Commerce Churn Data Shows WordPress Maintaining Market Lead, Shopify Gaining on WooCommerce
Rick Viscomi, one of the maintainers of the HTTP Archive, tweeted some interesting data from a report he is working on that tracks churn for different JavaScript frameworks and CMS’s over a specified period of time. He detected the changes using the open source Wappalyzer project. The first graph he shared shows shows data from 8 million websites, 12 months …
German Court Fines Website Owner for Violating the GDPR by Using Google-Hosted Fonts
In late January, a Munich regional court ruled that a plaintiff was entitled to injunctive relief and damages of 100 € from an undisclosed website owner for passing on the visitor’s IP address to Google through the use of Google Fonts. Since it is possible to use the fonts without connecting to Google, the court deemed this a violation of …
#12 – Amber Hinds on Why Accessibility Matters
About this episode. On the podcast today we have Amber Hinds. She works at Equalize Digital, and became interested in online accessibility when she was given the job of creating a website for a public university. Given that the site was funded with public money, the finished site needed to be built with accessibility in mind. Since then Amber has …
Nesting and Grids: Super List Block Supercharges Lists in WordPress
Freelance WordPress developer Aurooba Ahmed released the Super List Block plugin earlier today. Essentially, it is like the core WordPress List block — just supercharged. It is her first publicly-released extension on WordPress.org. The primary use case for the plugin is adding other blocks within the list items. However, its options allow users to take it further by supporting grid-based …
Essential Addons for Elementor Patches Critical Security Vulnerability
Essential Addons for Elementor, a popular plugin with more than a million active installs, has patched a critical vulnerability that would allow for a local file inclusion attack. The vulnerability was discovered by security researcher Wai Yan Myo Thet and reported to Patchstack on January 25, 2022. Patchstack customers received a virtual patch the same day. The issue was already …
Global Style Variations, “Skins” for Themes, Have Landed in Gutenberg
It was a busy week, and I almost missed one of my most-wanted components landing in Gutenberg 12.5 RC 1. The global style variations feature quietly snuck its way in as everyone else was getting acquainted with WordPress 5.9. The official release of version 12.5 is not expected until next week, but that did not stop me from giving it …





