WordPress 6.4 “Shirley” was released today, named for famed American jazz pianist and singer Shirley Horn. This release introduces a new batch of writing and design tools that give users more powerful customization capabilities inside the editor. We covered most of the changes as they were released in the Gutenberg plugin and added to core, but here are a few …
Newspack Plugin Update Checker Lets Users Update from GitHub
Adam Schweigert, an independent media and technology consultant, has released a plugin called Newspack Plugin Update Checker that enables self-hosted Newspack users to keep their plugins up-to-date. The Newspack project was launched in 2019 by WordPress.com, with support from the Google News Initiative, the Knight Foundation, and The Lenfest Institute. It provides local news organizations a powerful, yet cost effective …
Add Icons to WordPress’ Core Button Block
Nick Diego, a developer advocate at Automattic and core contributor, is the author of the popular Icon Block plugin that enables users to add custom SVG icons and graphics to the WordPress block editor. He is often asked if the plugin can add icons to the core Button block, but that is outside the scope of what it does. Last …
Wordfence CLI 2.0.1 Update Adds Free Vulnerability Scanning
Wordfence CLI 2.0.1 introduced free vulnerability scanning this week. The new CLI product was launched at WordCamp US two months ago with malware detection capabilities, but the latest update brings in the most highly requested feature – vulnerability scanning at scale. Wordfence is most well-known for its Web Application Firewall, malware scanner, and login security product, which is packaged as …
WooCommerce Rebrands as Woo
WooCommerce is rebranding to “Woo,” a shorter, more playful version of the company name that many customers are already using. Automattic acquired WooCommerce in 2015, along with WooThemes. The open source commerce platform now powers more than 4.4 million live websites, including 33% of the top 1 million online stores. The rebranding extends to the Woo Marketplace, WooExperts program, and all other …
Upgrade Your Hosting Experience with 2X SSD Storage and 10X Bandwidth
MORE BANDWIDTH, MORE SSD STORAGE SPACE, UNLIMITED VISITORS! WPMU DEV’s managed WordPress hosting now gives you everything you need to scale your business to even greater heights. We’ll keep this short and sweet because there’s a lot to take in. We’ve made significant changes to our award-winning hosting, which we’re sure you will love: Increased Bandwidth Limit Doubled SSD Storage …
WP Data Dashboard Tracks WordPress.org Themes Ecosystem
Munich-based digital agency owner Hendrik Luehrsen has been tracking the usage of themes with the FSE tag (block themes) using a spreadsheet that pulls in data from the WordPress.org API. Wrangling the data in a spreadsheet became too cumbersome, so Luehrsen launched WP Data Dashboard over the weekend as a “centralized hub for exploring, analyzing, and visualizing data across the …
Target Website Visitors More Effectively With SmartCrawl’s Location-Based Redirects
No one likes to be given the runaround…especially potential customers looking to buy from you! Learn how to use SmartCrawl‘s Location-Based Redirects to automatically send your site visitors to the right place based on their location. If you run a simple site, you can easily direct visitors to different sections of your site using elements like navigation menus, breadcrumbs, keyword …
Gutenberg 16.9 Lets You Rename (Almost) Any Block, Adds Experimental Form and Input Blocks
Delivering on an highly-requested feature, Gutenberg contributors have made it possible to rename almost any block in the List View. Version 16.9 was released this week with the new feature, which builds on Gutenberg 16.7‘s introduction of the ability to rename Group blocks. It works in a similar way to naming Photoshop layers. Users can now open the list view, …
TaxoPress Adds New AI Integrations for Generating Taxonomy Terms
TaxoPress, a plugin that allows users to create and manage Tags, Categories, and taxonomy terms, has joined a growing number of WordPress products using AI to innovate and enhance user experience. The latest release adds support for OpenAI and IBM Watson to auto-detect the best taxonomy terms for content. “Honestly, I’m amazed how good these services are,” TaxoPress founder Steve Burge said. “For …







