Insert Font Awesome Icons Into the Block Editor via the JVM Gutenberg Rich Text Icons Plugin

Joris van Montfort, a freelance WordPress developer, released the JVM Gutenberg Rich Text Icons plugin over the weekend. The goal was simple: allow users to insert icons nearly anywhere in the block editor at the click of a button. The plugin uses version 4.7 of the Font Awesome library out of the box. However, developers can modify this to include …

WordPress.com and Jetpack Launch Story Block for Mobile Apps

Automattic-owned WordPress.com launched its new Story-publishing feature today. Currently, only users with the WordPress for Android or iOS apps can add stories. Self-hosted users with Jetpack-connected sites can publish via the mobile apps too. The development team previewed the Story feature in January, launching a public beta on the Android app. Stories are essentially media and text slideshows. They have …

Ask the Bartender: What Happens When Block Markup Changes?

I’m a developer that has started developing with Gutenberg recently. There are a bunch of amazing benefits and features, but there are also a ton of drawbacks, inconsistencies, as well as absolutely awful and outdated documentation. One of the worst aspects of Gutenberg from a developer perspective has been block validation. Consider the following scenario. I build a custom (non-dynamic) …

Gutenberg 9.9 Adds Color Options for Social Icons, Includes Rounded Borders for Images, and Changes the Theme JSON Format

Version 9.9 of the Gutenberg plugin landed earlier today. While it includes several minor UI improvements, the biggest user-facing change is the inclusion of icon and background color options for the Social Links block. Theme authors can now add support for rounded image borders. They are also faced with a breaking change to their theme JSON files. WordPress 5.7 Beta …

Upsells, Barriers, and the End/Beginning of the Quality $free Themes Era

The WordPress.org theme directory is becoming little more than a crippleware distributor. I suppose it was inevitable given its reach, which can be worth $1,000s/month for theme authors. Justin Tadlock via Twitter As I think back on that tweet from 2019, I realize how unfair it was to refer to the themes coming into the directory as “crippleware.” At the …