Jetpack Is Promoting Paid Upgrades on Plugin Search Screen, WordPress Plugin Team Says it “May be a Violation” of Directory Guidelines

Yesterday the discussion surrounding Jetpack’s implementation of feature suggestions in the plugin search screen became heated after developers pointed out that Automattic is also using these suggestions to promote paid upgrades. You can test this by searching for “backups” where you find that Jetpack’s commercial offering takes the place of the first result, pushing all other results further down one …

Jetpack 7.1 Adds Feature Suggestions to Plugin Search Results

Jetpack 7.1 was released earlier this month with new blocks for WordAds, Business Hours, Contact Info, Slideshows, and Videos. This release also quietly added suggestions to the plugin search screen, a change that has not been well-received by the developer community. If a user searches for a plugin that has a feature that is already offered by Jetpack, the plugin …

WordCamp Asia Proposed for 2020 in Bangkok, Thailand

photo credit: Eustaquio Santimano The organizers of WordCamp Asia, a brand new regional WordCamp, have published a proposal for making Bangkok, Thailand, the host city for a 2-3 day event in early 2020. They are currently planning for February or March to avoid clashing with other regional WordCamps (WCEU, WCUS). The camp has been informally discussed since 2015 while organizers …

New Gutenberg Playground Offers a Standalone Version of the Editor for Testing Outside the WordPress Admin

The Gutenberg team merged a pull request three days ago that adds a local “playground” development environment for testing outside of the WordPress admin. Riad Benguella, the technical lead for Gutenberg phase 2, said that the playground could grow over time to contain “more than just a standalone version of the editor” and could become a way for developers to …

rtCamp Releases GitHub Actions for Automated Code Review, Deploying WordPress, and Slack Notifications

rtCamp, a 60+ person agency and WordPress.com VIP service partner, has released three new GitHub Actions that handle automated code review, WordPress deployment, and Slack notifications. The PHPCS Code Review action takes advantage of GitHub’s pull request review feature. It performs an automated code review on pull requests using PHPCS. This Action is based on WordPress.com VIP’s GPL-licensed review scripts. …

How Will Gutenberg Phase 4 Impact Multilingual Solutions for WordPress?

During the 2018 State of the Word address, Matt Mullenweg announced that Phase 4 of the Gutenberg project would be aimed at developing an official way for WordPress to support multilingual sites. There are no technical details available yet for what approach core will take, because it’s still in the experimental stage. The site building objectives in Phase 2 are …

Gutenberg Cloud Team Advocates for Making WordPress.org’s New Block Directory a CMS-Agnostic Library

Frontkom‘s presentation at WordCamp Nordic introduced the audience to the Gutenberg Cloud project, which allows developers to share JS-only blocks across CMS platforms. Marco Fernandes and Thor Andre Gretland, representatives of the 45-person agency based in Europe, are also part of the Drupal Gutenberg project that brings WordPress’ open source editor to Drupal via an optional module. The module’s release …

WPWeekly Episode 349 – Sandy Edwards and the Kids Event Working Group Initiative

In this episode, John James Jacoby and I are joined by Sandy Edwards. Sandy gave us a behind the scenes look at what it takes to organize a WordPress event for children and teens. She also provides background information on a new group that’s been formed called the Kids Events Working Group. This group is responsible for setting the foundation …

Gutenberg 5.3 Introduces Block Management, Adds Nesting to the Cover Block

Gutenberg 5.3 was released today with basic block management, a feature that will be included in WordPress 5.2. It is a new modal that can be launched from the vertical ellipses menu, inspired by Rich Tabor’s CoBlocks implementation. Users can turn individual blocks on/off or even entire sections, such as Common Blocks, Formatting, and Embeds. Block management should help users …