Clean Blocks: A Free Multipurpose WordPress Theme Compatible with Gutenberg

Clean Blocks is a new free theme from Catch Themes that was released last week on WordPress.org. The design is suitable for businesses, agencies, freelancers, and other service professionals who require featured content, a portfolio, testimonials, a blog, and a services section. Clean Blocks includes basic Gutenberg compatibility in that it supports all core blocks and is has a few …

Henry Zhu Launches New Maintainers Anonymous Podcast

Maintainers Anonymous is a new podcast created by Henry Zhu, who has been the primary maintainer of Babel for the past two years. Babel is a JavaScript compiler used by Facebook, Netflix, Spotify, and millions of others. It is downloaded over 18 million times per month and used by more than 1.8 million repositories on GitHub. Zhu recently left his …

Celebrate Earth Day by Learning about Environmentally Friendly Web Development on WordPress.tv

Today is Earth Day, a worldwide annual event first celebrated in 1970 that focuses on addressing environmental concerns. Earth Day Network coordinates 192 countries with more than a billion people participating in today’s event. The organization uses WordPress to build the world’s largest environmental movement through education, public policy, and consumer campaigns. Over the past few years, environmentally-friendly web development …

AMP Plugin for WordPress 1.1 Adds Experimental PWA Plugin Integration, Pre-release of AMP Stories Editor Available in 1.2-alpha

Version 1.1 of the AMP Plugin for WordPress was released this week after four months in development and 125 merged pull requests from contributors. It includes CSS tree shaking improvements that restore AMP compatibility for WordPress’ default Twenty Nineteen theme, reducing the size of its stylesheet by 53%. In an effort to get more users opting for the Native mode …

PluginVulnerabilities.com is Protesting WordPress.org Support Forum Moderators by Publishing Zero-Day Vulnerabilities

image credit: Jason Blackeye A security service called Plugin Vulnerabilities, founded by John Grillot, is taking a vigilante approach to addressing grievances against WordPress.org support forum moderators. The company is protesting the moderators’ actions by publishing zero-day vulnerabilities (those for which no patch has been issued) and then attempting to contact the plugin author via the WordPress.org support forums: Due …

WordCamp for Publishers is Coming to Columbus, OH, August 7-9, Call for Speakers Now Open

The third edition of WordCamp for Publishers will be held in Columbus, OH, August 7-9, 2019, at the Vue Columbus. This unique event is a niche-specific WordCamp for professionals working in the publishing industry. Previous locations include Denver and Chicago. In looking for a host city for 2019, organizers had a preference for cities that are “underrepresented media markets” where …

New GPL-licensed Quirk App Open Sources Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Quirk is a new GPL-licensed Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) app for iOS and Android built in React Native/Expo. The app helps users challenge their “automatic thoughts,” a term that refers to thoughts that come to a person spontaneously in response to a trigger, which can often be negative. Quirk lets users record a quick thought and will automatically narrow down …

WPGraphQL Project Gains Momentum with Growing Library of Extensions for Popular WordPress Projects

The WPGraphQL project, a plugin that provides an extendable GraphQL schema and API for WordPress sites, has been gaining momentum over the past several months. Creator and maintainer Jason Bahl put the project up on Open Collective last week after people frequently asked how the community can support the project. WPGraphQL already has five backers, an $800 balance, and an …

WooCommerce 3.6 RC2 Removes Marketplace Suggestions from Product Listing, Adds Setting to Turn them Off

WooCommerce 3.6 RC2 was released today with changes to the planned Marketplace Suggestions feature after core developers received overwhelmingly negative feedback on its implementation. This RC removes the ads from the product listings, which was one of the most controversial placements for them. It also adds a new setting to turn Marketplace Suggestions off entirely. Fix: Remove Product Listing suggestions. …