WordPress 5.8 Adds Support for New Emoji Introduced in Twemoji 13.1.0

In the upcoming 5.8 release, WordPress is updating its version of Twemoji, Twitter’s open source emoji library that supports the latest Unicode emoji specification. Version 13.1.0 introduces five new smileys and emotions, including heart on fire, mending heart, face with spiral eyes, face in clouds, and face exhaling. Version 13.1 adds mixed skin tone support for all variations of the “Kiss” …

New WordPress Plugin Serves Pre-Compressed Emoji

WordPress emoji are served from s.w.org, but they are not compressed. This impacts the SVG loading time, depending on how many emoji you are using, and can even throw warnings on Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. Turkey-based WordPress developer Mustafa Uysal has just released Compressed Emoji, a plugin that makes use of the emoji_svg_url filter introduced in 4.6. This filter allows …

New Plugin Adds Emoji Reactions to the BuddyPress Activity Stream

photo credit: Emoji – (license) Three weeks ago, a discussion about the possibility of adding emoji reactions to BuddyPress core turned into a heated conversation in the #BuddyPress Slack channel. The topic was inspired by the new BP Reactions plugin, which recently landed on WordPress.org. This experimental plugin, created by BuddyPress core developer Mathieu Viet, adds an API that allows …