Automattic has acquired Prospress and its flagship WooCommerce Subscriptions product, along with the company’s entire suite of e-commerce plugins and automation tools. Prospress’ 20 employees will be joining Automattic to continue developing and supporting their products. There are no immediate changes planned for current WooCommerce Subscriptions customers. Automattic will begin working on a roadmap for the product after integrating the …
Elementor Launches Hello Theme on WordPress.org
Elementor launched its Hello theme on WordPress.org this week. After just a few days in the directory, the theme already has more than 10,000 active installations. It is essentially a blank starter theme that offers 100% compatibility with Elementor. Page builders with a large user base are in a unique position to influence the WordPress theme market. Loyal users will …
Loveland Public Library to Host Free Beginners WordPress Class Online May 22, 2019
image credit: Janko Ferlic Public libraries are one of the few remaining community centers where people freely pass on valuable skills to neighbors young and old. In addition to offering free access to books, computers, and the internet, libraries often host educational classes as a public service, with an emphasis on teaching fundamental skills for navigating the digital world. Many …
CoBlocks 1.9.5 Merges Block Gallery Plugin into Collection, Adds New Form Block
CoBlocks, a collection of page builder blocks that was recently acquired by GoDaddy, has added four new blocks in version 1.9.5. This is the first major release since the plugin was acquired from Rich Tabor and his co-creators. Tabor now heads up a WordPress Experience team at GoDaddy where CoBlocks’ development continues. This release merges the three gallery blocks (Masonry, …
Jetpack Opens Signup for Membership Block Beta
Jetpack has opened a signup for the beta of its upcoming Membership feature in order to collect feedback from potential testers. The changelog for version 7.3, released two weeks ago, hinted at a new Membership block coming to the plugin. The work in progress was added behind the JETPACK_BETA_BLOCKS constant, presumably in preparation for wider testing. Based on the feature’s …
Block building without JavaScript: Testing ACF, Block Lab, and Lazy Blocks
Not everyone is able or willing to build blocks in JavaScript just yet, and sometimes you have to install three or four block collections until you find the blocks you would like. There is a third way: plugins that create the blocks for you from a set of specific custom fields, with a template to control the frontend display of …
Gutenberg 5.7 Adds New Block Appender for Group and Columns Blocks
Today’s release of Gutenberg brings a major improvement to the usability of the Group block. In previous versions of the editor, it wasn’t easy to see if a block had been inserted as a child block, especially since the default behavior was to insert an empty paragraph block. Gutenberg 5.7 brings more clarity to the UI for Group blocks by …
WordPress Translation Day 4 Successfully Hosts 77 Local Events in 35 Countries, Recruits 183 New Translators
WordPress Translation Day 4 was held over the weekend. The 24-hour global event hosted 77 local events in 35 countries and the Polyglots team added 183 new contributors to their ranks. The team also designated 12 new GTEs (Global Translation Editor) and 14 PTEs (Project Translation Editor). Naoko Takano, a Polyglots Team Global Mentor and Japanese GTE, gave an introduction …
WPTracSearch: An Elasticsearch-Powered Search Interface for WordPress Trac Tickets
WordPress Trac is one of the more utilitarian and uninspiring interfaces that many contributors have to contend with in the process of giving back to the project. After growing tired of Trac’s mediocre search functionality, William Earnhardt set out to improve it with a new project called WPTracSearch that gave him an opportunity to play around with Elasticsearch and React. …
Advanced Custom Fields 5.8.0 Introduces ACF Blocks: A PHP Framework for Creating Gutenberg Blocks
After six months in development, Advanced Custom Fields 5.8.0 was released yesterday with a new PHP-based framework for developing custom Gutenberg block types. ACF Blocks was announced in October 2018, to the great relief of many developers who didn’t know how they were going to keep pace with learning the JavaScript required to use WordPress’ Block API. ACF’s creator, Elliot …