Automattic Donates €20,000 to Fund Next Phase of Drupal Gutenberg Development

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 …

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 …

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 …