Blocksy Theme Adds New Charity Starter Site, Pro Version to Launch in 2020

Blocksy is one of the best free themes available for the block editor right now and is rapidly growing in popularity. CreativeThemes, the Romania-based company behind the theme, released an update to Blocksy this week, along with a new starter site for charities. The concept of “starter sites” is an interesting new twist on “starter templates,” which essentially allow users …

WordCamp Europe Goes Virtual for 2021, In-Person Conference to Resume 2022

While much of the world is currently suspended in the uncertainty caused by the pandemic, WordCamp Europe delivered a surprisingly decisive announcement today regarding the status of the 2021 event in Porto. Organizers moved to make it a virtual conference, 10 months in advance of the planned dates, June 3-5, 2021: After careful consideration, and following guidance from WordCamp Central, …

WordPress Documentation Team Bans Links to Commercial Websites

This week WordPress’ Documentation team announced a ban on links to commercial websites in a revision to its external linking policy: During discussion about external linking policy, we came to conclusion that we won’t allow, at least in the beginning and for the time being, any commercial blogs. So before you start arguing that some popular plugin’s blogs have valuable information, …

Open Source Initiative to Host Virtual State of the Source Summit, September 9-10

OSI (Open Source Initiative) is hosting a new 24-hour, virtual conference called State of the Source Summit, September 9-10. The non-profit organization plays an important role in the open source ecosystem as stewards of the Open Source Definition (OSD). OSI is responsible for reviewing and approving licenses as OSD-conformant, which indirectly helps mediate community conflicts. As part of the organization’s overall mission …

New Gatsby Source WordPress Plugin Now in Beta

Gatsby announced its new source plugin (v4) for WordPress is now in beta. The plugin has been completely revamped to improve headless WordPress setups where Gatsby powers the frontend. It also integrates with Gatsby Cloud to provide real-time previews and incremental builds. The Gatsby team has had a long journey towards creating an integration for WordPress sites that would satisfy more complex …

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 …