WordPress profile badges. On July 3, Timi Wahalahti opened a discussion on the Community WordPress blog on whether WordCamp volunteers, WordCamp attendees, or Meetup attendees should be awarded a WordPress.org profile badge. The discussion stemmed from a nearly two-year-old Meta ticket that was recently resurfaced. The general consensus from the comments on the post seems to be that volunteers should …
How to Get the Most Out of Smush Image Optimization
Optimizing your images manually would involve a lot of resizing, a fair bit of coding, and heaps of time. Luckily, Smush does all the hard work for you and plenty more besides, all of which you will find covered in this guide to help you get the most out of the plugin. Smush offers an abundance of features to help …
New Block-based Navigation and Widgets Screens Sidelined for WordPress 5.5
The new navigation block and navigation and widget screens that were originally planned for WordPress 5.5 have been pushed back to the next release. These projects are currently available in the Gutenberg plugin experiments screen but are not yet ready to land in core. Converting the widget-editing areas and updating the widgets UI to use the block editor is a project that …
WordPress Contributors Seek Sponsorship for Improving Gutenberg Developer Docs
WordPress developers Milana Cap and Jonathan Bossenger are starting a fundraiser for improving Gutenberg developer documentation. The conversation began yesterday when Cap tweeted about how documentation is often overlooked when companies hire full-time contributors to work on WordPress. I wish someone pay people to work on Gutenberg Docs. All devs who understand Gutenberg are working on building it and no …
Build Static or Dynamic Blocks With the WP Block Builder Script
Today, Jeffrey Carandang released WP Block Builder, an npm script for developers to begin building WordPress blocks. It is just one of many such scripts in a sea of block scaffolding tools, but Carandang may just have the experience and clout to rise above the rest. Thus far, developers have downloaded his custom setup over 500 times. Developers wanting to …
Web File Management Comes to WPMU DEV Hosting
We ran our 2020 survey. We asked you what you’d like. You told us, among other things, a web-based file manager for your managed WordPress hosting. So, here you go. Basically you were looking for the ability to simply upload and edit files in your hosting account using a file manager interface instead of SFTP. We get that. It’s a …
Flywheel Relaunches Local Pro with Revamped Live Links and New Host-Agnostic Pre-Launch Tools
Flywheel has relaunched Local Pro, the commercial upgrade for its free local WordPress development product. The first version of Local Pro, launched in July 2019, was heavily geared towards Flywheel customers, but the tool has gradually evolved to be more host-agnostic. This major update focuses on pre-launch features that allow developers to check links, optimize images, share a live link, …
Revamp Your WordPress Admin With These 12 Awesome Plugins
When you think about making WordPress more useful, the dashboard probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. However, if you spend a lot of time logged into /wp-admin/ but have never taken the time to customize your experience, you can almost certainly get more out of it than you’re getting right now. If you run a Multisite network, …
Smash Balloon Joins Awesome Motive
On June 23, Awesome Motive announced it had acquired Smash Balloon, a company that focuses on a family of social feed plugins for WordPress. John Brackett, the founder of Smash Balloon, is now a partner at Awesome Motive through the deal. His entire team will be staying on as part of the larger company. Currently, Smash Balloon’s plugins are installed …
The Best Documentation Is No Documentation
Hear me out before telling me how wrong I am. Over the past couple of weeks, I have read a few different articles on writing good user documentation from a software developer’s perspective. It is an area I was always told I excelled at by people who read the docs I wrote through the years. However, by the time I …






