WooCommerce is calling on its developer community to join a new monthly chat focused on WooCommerce block extensibility. The chat is being run as a three-month pilot program with different topics each month. “During these sessions, we want developers to actively shape the future of WC Blocks by hearing what developers’ integrations need from us to be successful and get …
WordPress.com Is Testing AI-Generated Images and Content
WordPress.com is currently testing two new blocks for generating images and paragraph content using AI. The blocks, which are currently labeled as experimental, were first spotted by Jen T of WPcomMaven who published a few examples on her blog this week. WordPress.com developed the blocks through a partnership with OpenAI, creators of ChatGPT and DALL·E. Automattic engineer Artur Piszek gave …
Twitter Outage Uncovers More Details on Upcoming API Access Changes, Giving the Fediverse a Shot in the Arm
Twitter experienced a major outage today lasting several hours, which left most users unable to tweet or send private messages to each other. Some reported receiving error messages telling them they were “over the daily limit for sending tweets.” Twitter’s development team took the opportunity to update users on the upcoming changes to API access, which it appears the team …
WordPress Opens Applications for 2023 Community Summit
The WordPress open source project will be hosting a Community Summit as part of WordCamp US this year. It will take place prior to the main conference on August 22-23, 2023, in National Harbor, Washington, DC. The invitation-only event will be the first summit in six years, since the last one was held in Paris, France in 2017. In the …
BuddyPress 12.0 to Focus on Merging BP Rewrites Into Core, Moving Legacy Widgets Into BP Classic Plugin
During the most recent BuddyPress development meeting, contributors decided to focus the upcoming 12.0 release on merging the BP Rewrites feature plugin into core. This plugin is the result of a ten-year-old effort to migrate BuddyPress’ custom URI parser to use WordPress’ Rewrite API. One year ago, BP Rewrites went into beta. It’s not certain how the change will interact with …
WordPress Plugin Developers Alerted Ahead of Twitter API Changes
Beginning February 9, 2023, Twitter will turn off free access to its APIs. The company announced yesterday that it will be offering “a paid basic tier” with more details coming next week. Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API, both v2 and v1.1. A paid basic tier will be available instead — Twitter …
New Proposal Calls for Automated Performance Monitoring for WordPress Core
WordPress Core Committer Adam Silverstein has published a proposal for adding automated performance tooling that would offer continuous monitoring for performance issues so they can be resolved before major regressions are committed to core. “Similar to our unit test suite, automated performance testing would help protect core from introducing large performance regressions by catching problems immediately and tracking performance over time,” Silverstein …
WordPress.com Introduces Browse Mode, Style Book, and Push to Global Styles Features
WordPress.com users are getting early access to some of the major new features that are shipping with the upcoming WordPress 6.2 release. The platform rolled out Browse Mode today, describing it as “an easier way to navigate the Site Editor.” This is one of the most impactful changes coming to customization, as it unifies the design and makes it less …
A Look Under the Hood at Engine Awesome, a Laravel-based SaaS App Using Gutenberg
During the 2022 State of the Word, Matt Mullenweg highlighted a few examples of how Gutenberg adoption is growing beyond WordPress and how he believed it could become “bigger than WordPress itself.” Engine Awesome, a Laravel-based SaaS application, is one example he cited that is using the block editor to allow customers to build their own custom applications. Steve Bruner, SlipFire …
WordPress Contributors Work Towards Removing Site Editor Beta Label for 6.2 Release
Will WordPress be ready to remove the Beta label from the Site Editor in the upcoming 6.2 release? The project’s Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy addressed this question in her latest WP Briefing podcast episode titled “What Does Concluding a Gutenberg Phase Really Mean?“ “All of the projects, with the exception of two, I believe, in the Phase 2 scoping …