Drupal Gutenberg, the Gutenberg module for Drupal that was created by a Norway-based agency called Frontkom, has received a €20,000 donation from Automattic to fund the next phase of development. The module was one of five projects, selected from 35 proposals, that was granted funding during the DrupalCon Pitchburgh innovation contest. The winners were announced as part of Dries Buytaert’s State of Drupal …
Gutenberg 16.0 Introduces Page Management in the Site Editor
Gutenberg 16.0 was released today with page management now available inside the Site Editor. This is the first step towards a more unified experience of editing both content and design. Users can now create new pages and view page details in the sidebar, an experience that is very similar to editing a page in the block editor except it keeps the …
WordPress Accessibility Day Secures Nonprofit Status for Annual Event, Calls for Speakers and Sponsors
WordPress Accessibility Day, an independent 24-hour virtual conference, will return in 2023 – this time under an official non-profit status. The first edition of the event was hosted in 2020 by the WordPress core Accessibility Team. They wanted to manage it independently of the WordPress Foundation in order to reserve the option to do things like pay speakers for their time …
WordPress.org Enables Commercial and Community Filters on Plugin and Theme Directories
During the 2022 State of the Word, Matt Mullenweg announced a plan to add new “Community” and “Commercial” taxonomies for the theme and plugin directories that would help users more quickly ascertain the purpose of the extensions they are considering. Shortly after the announcement, instructions were published for theme and plugin authors to opt into the new taxonomies. The new …
WordPress Turns 20
WordPress is 20 years old today, an estimable milestone for open source software running on the web. Parties are happening all over the world – in Geneva, Los Angeles, Istanbul, Bangkok, Lahore, Jakarta, Mumbai – in over 150 different locations. The software has been downloaded more than 2.8 billion times but the most impressive stat is the project’s staggering 112,000 …
WordPress and Drupal Co-Founders Discuss Open Source, AI, and the Future of the Web
WordPress is celebrating its 20th anniversary tomorrow and recently its co-founders, Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, joined Drupal founder Dries Buytaert together on stage at a private event for the first time on May 17. They discussed how their lives were influenced by open source and how they built their projects around the freedoms it guarantees. Founders of both projects …
WordPress 6.2 Core Performance Analysis Finds Improving Template Loading for Classic Themes Could Make a Major Impact
WordPress’ Performance Team has published a summary of a core performance analysis they completed in order to identify and prioritize areas for improvement. As part of this process, contributors created a methodology with a standard set of tools that can be used to collect and share profiling data for various components of the application. The team tested a classic theme …
MariaDB Health Checks Plugin Now Available on WordPress.org
A new MariaDB Health Checks plugin is now available on WordPress.org, thanks to the efforts of contributors involved in the 2023 CloudFest Hackathon which took place in Germany. MariaDB is a popular open source database used by those looking to further scale their websites, as it is generally faster than MySQL with better support for a concurrent number of connections. …
Automattic Releases wp-now: A Local Development Environment Powered by WordPress Playground
Automattic has published a new project called wp-now that creates a local development environment in seconds. The tool is a NodeJS app that is powered by WordPress Playground, an experimental project that uses WebAssembly (WASM) to run WordPress in the browser. wp-now allows developers to quickly spin up a new WordPress site with their chosen theme and then open it in …
Gutenberg 15.8 Adds Pages Menu to Site Editor, Revisions UI to Global Styles
Gutenberg 15.8 was released with some exciting features that were included in the tentative WordPress 6.3 roadmap. Users are getting closer to a more unified content editing experience with the addition of the Pages menu to the Site Editor. Clicking on Pages will load the ten most recently updated pages with a link to “Manage All Pages” at the bottom …