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 …
Refactoring Gutenberg’s Gallery Block To Support Nested Images
Like many others, I often have pinned tabs of all sorts of things in my browser. Some of them linger there for months. Others for years, I shamefully admit. Of the handful of Gutenberg-related browser tabs I have had pinned since late 2020, one of them finally had the sort of movement I have been waiting on. The Gallery block …
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 …
Recreating the Music Artist WordPress Theme Homepage With the Block Editor
One of my favorite activities each week is to peruse the latest themes to land in the WordPress theme directory. Often, there are intriguing design concepts. However, much of the time, I am disappointed to learn that homepage designs of many rely on theme options instead of the block editor. While the editor has several design limitations, theme authors 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amazing benefits and features, but there are also a ton of drawbacks, inconsistencies, as well as absolutely awful and outdated documentation.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) …
Ask the Bartender: Frustrations and Finding the Right WordPress Block Plugins
Hello. I always supported the idea of a WordPress block editor as a whole, but lately, I’m a bit frustrated in that there are some blocks I need with urgency to work on a (non-visitor editable) wiki-like site (mostly a Tabs block, a Countdown block, an Accordion/Toggle block, a Table of contents block and a Footnotes block) and have not …
Phoenix, a Block-Based WordPress Theme With a Sidebar
Earlier today, the Phoenix theme was merged into the WordPress Theme Experiments repository on GitHub. Like all themes in the repo, it is not meant for use on a live site. It is a project to test new ideas for the upcoming Full Site Editing (FSE) system. Imran Sayed of Codeytek Academy created the theme and is hosting a live …
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 …
Skinning the WordPress Admin, CSS Custom Properties on the Way
Using CSS custom properties for the WordPress admin color scheme system is listed for the WordPress 5.7 milestone. It feels low-key enough that most would pass it over as a simple upgrade to keep up with the times. However, this feature can create ripples that spread and benefit the ecosystem in the years to come. Kirsty Burgoine, a front-end developer …
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 …