Frontity co-founders Pablo Postigo and LuisHerranz Automattic has acquired Frontity, the company behind an open source framework for building WordPress themes with React. The acquisition comes more than a year after the company raised €1M in funding in a round led by K Fund, with Automattic covering 22%. Frontity co-founders Pablo Postigo and Luis Herranz and their team will no longer …
Proposal for Adding Badges and Other ‘Learner Achievements’ to WordPress Profiles
In December 2020, WordPress launched its new “Learn” platform with free courses, workshops, and lesson plans. Since then, the Training Team has continued adding more material. The latest proposal is an open discussion for the community on adding participatory badges for completing coursework. “I’d like to nail down what kind of thing we would like to see regarding recognising learner …
ACF 5.10 Introduces Block API v2 Support, Block Preloading, and Security Improvements
Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) has released version 5.10, the first major release since the plugin was acquired by Delicious Brains. It introduces several new features that were previously experimental, closing out tickets that were started by previous owner Elliot Condon. The release enables HTML escaping by default, which helps prevent Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks. It runs content rendered by ACF …
WordPress Classic Editor Support Extended for at Least Another Year
Last week, I reached out to several members of the core WordPress committers to see if we could get an official word on whether Classic Editor support would continue beyond the mere months it seemingly had left to live. I received a semi-official answer but was asked to hold off on publishing for a more detailed and nuanced response. Earlier …
Gallery Block Refactor Expected To Land in WordPress 5.9
Last week, a GitHub pull request I had been watching since October 2020 on the Gutenberg repository was finally merged into the codebase. It changes the structure of the WordPress Gallery block to be a container for nested Image blocks. The new format is expected to land in WordPress 5.9. For those who want to begin testing it early, it …
Jeremy Keith Resigns from AMP Advisory Committee: “It Has Become Clear to Me that AMP Remains a Google Product”
Jeremy Keith, a web developer and contributor to the web standards movement, has resigned from the AMP Advisory Committee. Keith was selected for the committee last year, despite his well-documented criticisms of the AMP project. In his resignation email, he cites Google’s control of the project and its small percentage of open source parts as reasons for his growing resentment: …
Gutenberg 11.3 Introduces Dimensions Panel, Adds Button Padding Support, and Speeds Up the Inserter
Earlier today, Gutenberg 11.3 landed in the WordPress plugin directory. The latest update introduces a new dimensions panel for toggling spacing-related block options. The Button block now supports the padding control, and the Post Featured Image block has new width and height settings. One of the release’s highlights was a speed improvement for both opening and searching within the inserter. …
WordPress.org Experiments with Rejecting Plugin Submissions with the “WP” Prefix to Mitigate Potential Trademark Abuse
Many in the WordPress developer community were surprised to learn that WordPress.org is rejecting plugins with the “WP” prefix in the name after Joe Youngblood tweeted the rejection note he received. Although that restriction was put into place approximately seven months ago, there was no official communication on the change. WordPress is now claiming that the @WordPress Foundation has demanded …
Early WordPress 5.9 Look: The Road Toward Deeper Responsive Block Design
Gutenberg project lead Matías Ventura announced the Preliminary Road to 5.9 on the Make Core blog earlier today. He covered several big picture items, including several sub-points for each. He also linked to a GitHub issue with specific tasks and tickets that need work. The post covers notes on block patterns, navigation menus, the theme.json interface (global styles), design tools, …
Wordfence and WPScan Publish Mid-Year WordPress Security Report
WPScan is on track to post a record-breaking year for WordPress plugin vulnerabilities submitted to its database, according to a collaborative mid-year security report the company published with Wordfence. In the first half of 2021, WPScan has recorded 602 new vulnerabilities, quickly surpassing the 514 reported during all of 2020. The report is based on attack data from Wordfence’s platform …