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 …
Block Protocol Announces New WordPress Plugin Coming in 2023
Block Protocol, a project that launched earlier this year that aims to build a universal block system, has announced a new WordPress plugin coming in early 2023. It will allow users to embed interactive blocks that are compatible with Gutenberg. Given WordPress’ footprint on the web (43% by W3Tech’s estimate), this plugin is a major milestone on the project’s roadmap …
You’re Safe! Hummingbird’s Newest Release Allows for Manual Optimization in Protected Mode
Fine tuning your website through manual optimization can be tricky, but our new Safe Mode feature in Hummingbird puts that problem in the rearview. Now, you can now test optimization in a temporary area that allows for non-permanent changes, so you can work out any kinks, then push them to your live site. For free! Introducing Safe Mode for Manual …