photo credit: Burst The WordPress Community Team has officially updated its guidelines for WordCamps to be online-only events for the remainder of 2020. The six WordCamps on the schedule through the end of the year were already planning on using an online format but the guidelines also include local meetups. “The team acknowledges that this is not easy for the …
Develop, Test, and Showcase Blocks in Isolation With BlockBook
Riad Benguella released BlockBook, a project that promises to overhaul how developers build blocks and more, on Tuesday. It is a development environment that allows creators to work with blocks in isolation, outside of WordPress. Developers can view individual block properties and test output from a defined block library. BlockBook is available as an npm package. Developers can also contribute …
Revised Block Directory Guidelines Proposal Updates Wording but Changes Little Else
Yesterday, Alex Shiels posted an update to the proposed guidelines for the WordPress block directory. The document adds eight rules for plugin authors to follow if they plan to add their one-off blocks to the directory. The guidelines are additional requirements on top of the existing plugin directory guidelines. While the wording and organization of the block guidelines received a …
Google Delays Mobile-First Indexing Deadline to March 2021
Google had set September 2020 as the deadline for when it would begin to fully switch over to crawling and indexing sites using mobile-first indexing but announced today that site owners will have more time to prepare. The deadline has been extended to March 2021. Mobile-first indexing is a long-term plan that Google began rolling out in July 2019 by …
Unsplash Launches Official Plugin for WordPress
Unsplash has released its own official plugin for WordPress, co-developed with the team at XWP. The plugin seamlessly connects Unsplash’s 1 million+ free high-resolution image library with the WordPress editor. Users can easily search Unsplash directly inside the custom block and insert images with attribution and alt description info automatically filled in. The selected images are download and added to …
WordPress 5.5 to Remove Hulu from List of Supported oEmbed Providers
WordPress 5.5 will be dropping Hulu oEmbed support after Hulu silently disabled its oEmbed API. This is the API that allows users to copy and paste a link into the editor and have it automatically embed the content, as opposed to copying a chunk of embed code. Documentation contributors discovered that it wasn’t working while attempting to document the Hulu …
All in One SEO Pack Plugin Patches XSS Vulnerability
All in One SEO Pack patched an XSS vulnerability this week that was discovered by the security researchers at Wordfence on July 10. The popular plugin has more than 2 million active installs, according to WordPress.org. Wordfence researchers categorized it as “a medium severity security issue” that could result in “a complete site takeover and other severe consequences:” This flaw …
Astra Becomes the Only Non-Default WordPress Theme With 1 Million Installs
On Tuesday, Brainstorm Force announced its Astra theme passed 1 million active installations. It is the only non-default theme in the official WordPress theme directory to reach such a height. Popularity breeds popularity. Once the theme broke 50,000 installs in January 2019, it was a quick hop and skip to 500,000 in October and 1 million less than a year …
Blocksy Theme Adds New Charity Starter Site, Pro Version to Launch in 2020
Blocksy is one of the best free themes available for the block editor right now and is rapidly growing in popularity. CreativeThemes, the Romania-based company behind the theme, released an update to Blocksy this week, along with a new starter site for charities. The concept of “starter sites” is an interesting new twist on “starter templates,” which essentially allow users …
WordCamp Europe Goes Virtual for 2021, In-Person Conference to Resume 2022
While much of the world is currently suspended in the uncertainty caused by the pandemic, WordCamp Europe delivered a surprisingly decisive announcement today regarding the status of the 2021 event in Porto. Organizers moved to make it a virtual conference, 10 months in advance of the planned dates, June 3-5, 2021: After careful consideration, and following guidance from WordCamp Central, …