WordPress’ Performance Team met this week with the express purpose of responding to Matt Mullenweg’s recent request to stop adding functionality to the Performance Lab plugin which could otherwise work as a standalone plugin. At the end of December 2022, the Performance Team published instructions for how to test the new SQLite implementation, which was bundled into the Performance Lab …
SmartCrawl’s Newest Release Adds A Handful of New Features, Plus Greater Flexibility in Options
SmartCrawl version 3.4 adds multiple keyword analysis, additional SEO recommendations, the ability to disable SEO & Readability Analysis in the post list, and more. For free. SmartCrawl has been SEO optimized from the start, but each new version further improves site performance while boosting your PageRank on Google. With automated SEO scanning, automatic XML sitemaps, real-time keyword and content analysis, …
Gutenberg Times to Host Webinar on How to Use New WordPress Layout Features
Gutenberg Times will be hosting a live Q&A webinar titled “Layout, Layout, Layout” on January 11, 2023, at 05:00 PM in Eastern Time (US and Canada) via Zoom. This event is open to WordPress users of all experience levels who are interested to learn more about how to use WordPress’ layout features when building sites with blocks. Host Birgit Pauli-Haack will …
WordCamp Europe 2023 Speaker Applications Open, Organizers Call for More Interactive Sessions
WordCamp Europe 2023 is being hosted in Athens this year with two conference days scheduled for June 9 and 10. The first day’s theme is “WordPress Now” (Everything that can be currently achieved with WordPress) and the second day is “WordPress Tomorrow.” Organizers have opened the call for speakers and are especially interested in scheduling talks that “empower people to …
Awesome Motive Acquires Duplicator Plugin
Awesome Motive’s product suite of nearly 20 commercial plugins has expanded to include a backup plugin. The company announced its acquisition of Duplicator today, a 12-year-old freemium product with more than 1.5 million users. In addition to the backup utility, the plugin enables users to migrate, copy, move, or clone a site from one location to another. Commercial licenses range …
New CF7 Blocks Plugin Brings Blocks to Contact Form 7
WordPress developer Munir Kamal has released a new plugin called CF7 Blocks that does exactly what it says in the name. It brings blocks to one of WordPress’ most beloved plugins, which has kept the same familiar interface and has not yet adopted the block editor. The Contact Form 7 plugin was created by WordPress developer Takayuki Miyoshi, who has …
Icon Block 1.4.0 Adds Height Control, Improves Color Handling to Better Support Global Styles
Nick Diego, developer advocate at WP Engine, has released version 1.4.0 of his Icon Block plugin. Diego launched it in October 2021, after struggling to find an efficient way to add SVG icons to the block editor. He is aiming for this small but useful plugin to become “the definitive SVG icon and graphic block.” In the past year, it …
Commercial and Community Categorization Is Live on WordPress.org Theme and Plugin Directories
One of Matt Mullenweg’s announcements at the 2022 State of the Word was the addition of new taxonomies for the theme and plugin directories that will help users more quickly ascertain the purpose of the extensions they are considering. With nearly 60,000 free plugins available and more than 10,000 free themes, it’s not always immediately evident which extensions are officially …
Gutenberg 14.8 Overhauls Site Editor Interface, Adds Style Book
Gutenberg 14.8 was released today with a major update to the Site Editor’s interface that makes it feel more unified as a design tool. In August, Gutenberg designer James Koster shared some mockups for updating the Site Editor to include a “navigable frame” where users can select from a menu of features and styles on the left. This was one …
ClassicPress at a Crossroads, Directors Consider Re-Forking WordPress
ClassicPress is polling its users to determine the next step for the software. The project is a pared back fork of WordPress based on version 4.9 that uses the TinyMCE classic editor as the default option with no block editor. It’s run under a non-profit organization called the ClassicPress Initiative. In July 2022, the project appeared to be on the …