Upsells, Barriers, and the End/Beginning of the Quality $free Themes Era

The WordPress.org theme directory is becoming little more than a crippleware distributor. I suppose it was inevitable given its reach, which can be worth $1,000s/month for theme authors. Justin Tadlock via Twitter As I think back on that tweet from 2019, I realize how unfair it was to refer to the themes coming into the directory as “crippleware.” At the …

Automattic Launches the Blank Canvas WordPress Theme for Building Single-Page Websites

Split Screen pattern from Blank Canvas. On Monday, Automattic announced its Blank Canvas theme on WordPress.com. The goal is to allow end-users to build single-page websites, such as an “about me” or product landing page. Blank Canvas is a child theme of Seedlet, which Automattic’s Theme Team has been using as a launchpad. One example is its recently-released Spearhead child …

Jetpack Launches Customer Research Project to Improve the Plugin and Reduce User Frustration

Jetpack’s Design and Research Team is launching a new customer research panel as part of an ongoing effort to collect feedback in advance of launching new features. They are allocating one day every month to talk with users: It’s a small step toward an important goal of better understanding what our users need, seeing and hearing first hand where they …

Gutenberg 9.8 Brings Rounded Borders To the Group Block and Moves the Site Editor Canvas Into an Inline Frame

Gutenberg 9.8 launched yesterday with a few minor UI improvements. The development team added an initial implementation for border-radius support for the Group block that theme authors can opt into. They also moved the site editor into an iframe element to remove CSS conflicts from the global admin styles. Those who have been testing Full Site Editing should be pleased …

Biden White House Sticks with WordPress for Website Relaunch

President Joe Biden took office today and unveiled a new whitehouse.gov that has been relaunched on WordPress. The previous administration switched from Drupal to WordPress in 2017, and technologists working with the Biden administration decided to stick with the same CMS. In keeping with the multilingual and accessibility features implemented on the Biden-Harris transition team website, whitehouse.gov launched with toggles …

Custom Layouts Plugin Creates a Posts Display System for Both the Classic and Block Editors

Ross Morsali, via his brand Code Amp, released the Custom Layouts plugin last week. The plugin’s goal is to provide a visual post layout builder for users of both the block and classic editors. For end-users, this is yet another choice between the multitude of plugins for displaying posts. After years of new plugins launching in this space, it would …