Ollie Dash Plugin Now Available for Ollie Block Theme

The Ollie block theme, created by Mike McAlister and Patrick Posner, now has a companion plugin available called Ollie Dash. The theme made headlines earlier this month after a contentious WordPress.org review process led its authors to remove the innovative onboarding features. Ollie was approved for WordPress.org but without the time-saving onboarding features its authors initially hoped to include. Testing …

Elementor Postpones DreamWeb Event

Elementor, the most popular website builder plugin for WordPress with more than 5 million active installations, has postponed its upcoming DreamWeb event. The Israel-based company was set to host its first in-person conference on November 2, in Berlin, Germany, but has postponed it due to the circumstances following Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel on October 7. In 2022, Elementor hosted …

Kinsta Launches Free Static Site Hosting for Up to 100 Websites, Including WordPress

Kinsta launched its static site hosting product today, making a strong entrance into the market with a free tier that is competitive with established solutions from Vercel, Netlify, and GitHub Pages. Companies can host up to 100 static sites for free, including static WordPress sites, which Kinsta deploys from its global edge network of more than 300 locations. Static sites …

WordPress 6.4 RC1 Released

WordPress 6.4 is one step closer to prime time with RC1 available today. The dev notes are rolling out with details on technical improvements in the upcoming release –block hooks for dynamic blocks, improvements to template loading, changes to attachment pages, and many more. RC1 is ready for another round of testing. There are 40 additional closed Trac tickets since …

Gutenberg 16.8 Makes Cover Block Smarter, Adds Experimental Pages List in Site Editor

Gutenberg 16.8 was released this week with improvements to existing blocks and some experiments that lay the foundation for Phase 3 focused on collaboration. The Cover block now automatically sets an overlay color when a user applies the initial background image. If the user doesn’t manually set an overlay color prior to uploading the image, the code extracts the overlay color …

WordPress.com Enters the Fediverse with ActivityPub Support

WordPress.com added support for ActivityPub today, a decentralized social networking protocol that is now available for across free and paid plans. This allows users to join the fediverse from their WordPress.com sites, and interact with content across federated platforms like Mastodon (and many others) with replies automatically published back to the blog as comments. The latest version of the ActivityPub …

WordPress Contributors Speed Up Twenty Twenty-Four Default Theme Performance by 40%

WordPress 6.4 will be shipping a new default theme, Twenty Twenty-Four (TT4), expected in early November. This theme is more feature-rich than previous default themes, and contributors have been working on identifying potential performance improvements that can be made ahead of the release. As a starting point, Google-sponsored Performance team contributor Felix Arntz conducted several benchmarks comparing TT4 with the …

WordPress Reverts Live Preview Button on Plugins After Developer Backlash

Last week WordPress meta contributors implemented a “Live Preview” button for plugins in the official directory, with the intention of allowing users to safely test any plugin in one click. The button went live across all of WordPress.org’s 59,000+ plugins but took plugin developers by surprise as it was pushed through without any communication or input from stakeholders. The implementation …

Ollie Theme Now Available on WordPress.org

The free Ollie block theme, created by Mike McAlister and Patrick Posner, is now available for download on WordPress.org. A contentious review process led the team to remove the onboarding features, despite having gotten the green light from WordPress’ leadership who advocated for moving forward with the experiment. The version of Ollie available on WordPress.org is simply the theme without …