WordPress.com launched a new website building service today with prices starting at $4,900. Automattic has been beta testing the service since the last quarter of 2020. The product announcement invites customers to let WordPress.com’s professional team “translate your vision into a compelling and modern website” but does not specify pricing for more customized websites: Whether you need a fast and performant …
Master WordPress Security This January #SecurityMonth
There’s nothing more important than keeping your site(s) safe. So we figured what better topic to dedicate a whole month on the blog to than WordPress security? With a juicy perk thrown in for good measure. 😉 No more WordPress security lectures! You know how important securing all your sites, themes, and plugins is. You’re well aware of the consequences …
2020: Step Away From the Fire
If there was a common theme that held humanity together in 2020, it was that most of us agreed that the year was nothing short of a dumpster fire. That and sweatpants. As people learned to cope with a new reality in the Covid-19 era, the WordPress community has been a beacon of hope. When other industries needed to learn …
Understanding the Query Block and Its Importance in Site Editing
I really don’t understand this Query block even though it’s been mentioned in several Tavern posts. My eyes seem to gloss over when reading about it – ha! Is it important that regular WordPress users understand this block, or is it really a block for developers? Marcus I have given the Query block a lot of attention as of late. …
GitHub’s 2020 State of the Octoverse Report Highlights: Developers are Working More Hours but Turning to Open Source Projects for Creative Outlets
GitHub has published its annual Octoverse report for 2020. The code hosting platform currently serves more than 56 million developers who created 60+ million new repositories this past year. The volume of work pumping through GitHub’s pipes and its preeminence as the world’s largest developer platform gives the company access to a trove of data on how people have been …
AMP Under Fire in New Antitrust Lawsuit Against Google
AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), an open source initiative that originated with Google, is coming under greater scrutiny at the tail end of 2020, as the company is facing a rash of antitrust lawsuits beginning October. The second suit is the one most pertinent to the AMP project. (A third suit brought by 38 state attorneys general alleges that Google is …
Google to Migrate Structured Data Testing Tool to New Domain after Backlash from Deprecation Announcement
Google’s Rich Results Test came out of beta in July with support for all Google Search rich result features like carousels, images, or other non-textual elements. At that time, Google announced it would be deprecating the Structured Data Testing Tool, which SEOs, developers, and site owners have relied on for testing structured markup and troubleshooting schema issues. The SEO community …
Exploring Photo Blocks, an Experimental FSE-Ready Photoblogging Theme
Kjell Reigstad announced the Photo Blocks theme on December 9. It is a part of an ongoing set of experimental work from the WordPress Theme Experiments repository on GitHub. It is essentially a testbed of ideas that are helping to propel the upcoming block-based theming era. In the past few months, I have covered the repository’s Carrd-like landing page theme, …
What Is Full Site Editing and What Does It Mean for the Future of WordPress?
Block-based Twenty Twenty-One theme in the site editor. As I said last week, 2021 will be the year of the site editor. Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word confirms it. WordPress 5.7’s release planning is focused on it. It has been a long journey getting to this point, and it will be a much longer adventure afterward. The ultimate promise …
Ask the Bartender: Integrate With Third-Party App or Use Native WordPress Plugin?
My question to you is how you see the future (or even the present) of integrating software with WordPress and when you should make the distinction of going the integration vs. native approach. In other words, with the vast ecosystem of WordPress plugins out there, how can a website owner discern which responsibilities WordPress the software should handle and whether …