While much of the world is in lockdown, public gatherings and conferences have been cancelled, leaving a void in the lives of people who enjoy meeting their fellow open source contributors and colleagues in person throughout the year. Virtual events, which were already on the rise, are enjoying a bit of a renaissance by necessity. On Saturday, April 25, the …
Chatterbox Plugin Uses WordPress Blocks to Show Conversations
Chatterbox is a new plugin with a fun and creative use for the block editor. It displays chat or text threads using blocks that are styled as conversations. Users can type in a record of a chat, including timestamps, with a live preview in the editor. Since written conversations are essentially little blocks of text and media, the block editor …
Frontity Raises €1M with Automattic and K Fund
Frontity, a free, open source framework for building WordPress themes with React, has raised €1M in funding in a round led by K Fund, with Automattic covering 22%. The team behind the framework officially made it open source in May 2019, after battle testing it internally. In one year the framework has more than 12,700 npm downloads and has built …
Google Shopping Is Now Open to Free Product Listings
Google announced today that it is bringing free listings to the Shopping tab in the United States before the end of April and will expand globally by the end of the year. Previously, merchants were required to pay for ad placement and product listings, which led to major online retailers dominating the Shopping tab. “Beginning next week, search results on …
WordPress Dashicons Project to Discontinue Development in Favor of New Icon Component
Dashicons, the WordPress admin icon font, is now closed to new icon requests. After the block editor adopted the approach of using SVG icons directly, WordPress design contributors have recently reevaluated the efforts going into the Dashicons project. The team decided to wrap up existing tickets for new icons, push out a final release, and then pool their efforts on …
WPBlockTalk Videos Now Available on WordPress.tv
All of the recordings from the free WPBlockTalk virtual event are now available on WordPress.tv. In case you missed it, WPBlockTalk was a WordPress community event sponsored by Automattic, and produced by Brian Richards, creator of WPSessions. It took place earlier this month on April 2, though some of its momentum may have been lost in the torrent of pandemic …
Leave at Door: New Free WooCommerce Plugin Enables Contact-free Delivery
As many countries around the world are currently in some form of lockdown to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus, the hospitality industry has been one of the hardest hit by the new restrictions. Restaurants and breweries in particular have had to radically change how they do business and either lay off or furlough the majority of their employees. Many …
Gutenberg 7.9 Adds Gradients to More Blocks, Extra Typography Controls, and New Patterns
For Gutenberg junkies, the three-week wait between major releases has been rough, especially during this time when many are looking for new things to fill the gaps in our social calendars. Not to fret, the team dropped version 7.9 of the plugin earlier today. This release includes several goodies such as new typography-related controls for blocks, extra patterns for testing, …
Block-a-saurus Embeds a Side-Scrolling T-Rex Game via the Block Editor
Click to Play It is no secret that I love testing out the sort of fun WordPress blocks that hark back to my early days of the web. I have written on the subject once or twice. Imagine my surprise when I came across a side-scrolling dinosaur game that users could simply plop into the block editor and provide something …
The Road Ahead: What’s in Store for WordPress for the Rest of 2020?
Full-site editing, automatic theme and plugin updates, global styles, and more await. With the release of WordPress 5.4 and an open call version 5.5 tickets, it is time to peer into the future and catch a glimpse of what is to come. It is shaping up to be an exciting year thus far. Josepha Haden, executive director of WordPress, provided …