I reach over to grab my phone to check the time. I am debating whether I should stay awake and watch one more episode of The Walking Dead — it would be my fourth, maybe fifth, binge of the series. 11:12 pm. I noticed that Slack was blowing up my phone. I had it on silent, so I had to …
Gravity Forms 2.5 Launches With an Overhauled UI and Focus on Accessibility
The Gravity Forms team formally announced version 2.5 of its form plugin yesterday. The product, owned by RocketGenius, promises an overhauled experience that is more in line with the core block editor. The team also wanted to put accessibility at the forefront of this release. The design is fresh, ditching pieces of the older WordPress UI in favor of cleaner …
Will We See In-Person WordCamps in 2021? An Open Discussion on a Path Forward
Now that COVID-19 vaccinations are becoming more widespread, many hope that in-person WordCamps can once again be a reality. There is no official path forward just yet, and decisions will likely be locally based in the coming months. Angela Jin, a community organizer for Automattic, announced an open discussion around the topic. Currently, all WordCamps are online-only events. There is …
Companies Running Competitive Ads Against WordPress May Soon be Banned from Sponsoring WordCamps
The WordPress Community Team is discussing banning companies from sponsoring WordCamps if they advertise competitively against WordPress. A WordCamp organizing team recently brought the concern to community deputies regarding a potential sponsor that is advertising its product in such a way that it puts WordPress in “an unflattering light.” This particular instance is prompting community leadership to clarify expectations for …
Patchstack Whitepaper: 582 WordPress Security Issues Found in 2020, Over 96% From Third-Party Extensions
Patchstack, which recently rebranded from WebARX, released its 2020 security whitepaper. The report identified a total of 582 security vulnerabilities. However, only 22 of the issues came from WordPress itself. Third-party plugins and themes accounted for the remaining 96.22%. “These are all security issues disclosed by the Patchstack internal research team, Patchstack Red Team community, by third-party security vendors, and …
Gutenberg 10.4 Introduces Block Widgets in the Customizer
The latest release of the Gutenberg plugin (10.4) brings block widgets into the Customizer. When customizing widget-enabled areas, a new block inserter icon is now available for dropping blocks into sidebars. This is the first iteration of block management in the Customizer, tackling the technical integration for editing blocks while also taking advantage of the live preview in the Customizer. …
Full Site Editing Is Partly a ‘Go’ for WordPress 5.8
Today, Josepha Haden Chomphosy announced the results of yesterday’s “go/no-go” demo and decision on whether Full Site Editing (FSE) would land in WordPress 5.8. The site editor and global styles are not landing in the next release. However, several other features should launch and allow users to build their sites with blocks in new ways. The following people attended the …
FSE Outreach Round #5: Venturing out a Query Quest
The Full Site Editing (FSE) outreach program is chugging along. Since December, it has called for and completed four rounds of testing. The latest round asks volunteers to provide feedback on the Query block, arguably one of the most crucial pieces of the FSE-puzzle. Automattic Developer Relations Wrangler Anne McCarthy has been overseeing the program since its inception. Each round …
Display Digital Sheet Music With the WordPress Block Editor
OSMD plugin output on the front end. PhonicScore, a company out of Vienna, recently released its OpenSheetMusicDisplay (OSMD) plugin. It is a WordPress block built for rendering digital sheet music in the browser. The OSMD plugin is built on top of the team’s JavaScript library of the same name, a project officially released in 2016. It is a bridge between …
Set Up a Gutenberg Test Site in 2 Minutes with the Gutenberg Nightly Plugin
WordPress contributors are working towards landing full site editing (FSE) sometime this year, an ambitious plan that will require all hands on deck for testing. A meeting of a small group of core leads on April 14 will start the process of deciding whether FSE will land in version 5.8. In the meantime, the FSE outreach program has extended the …