WordCamp Attendance Badges Could Be a Good Thing, but That’s the Wrong Discussion

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 …

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 …

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, …

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 …