On the podcast today we have three guests… Dave Smith, Isabel Brison and Joen Asmussen. They’re all employed by Automattic, and whilst, as you will hear, they’ve had a variety of backgrounds, most recently they’ve been working on the new Navigation Block. Up until now WordPress menus have had their own dedicated area of the admin, but as of the …
BP Rewrites Feature Plugin Now in Beta
The ball is moving on a nine-year-old effort to migrate BuddyPress’ custom URI parser to use WordPress’ Rewrite API. BuddyPress currently requires sites to use pretty permalinks in order to be compatible with its URL parser. The plugin analyzes the URL for whatever component you are viewing and performs internal checks to decide what to display there and determine the …
Clarity Ad Blocker for WordPress Announced, Receives Mixed Reactions
Stanislav Khromov announced Clarity, a plugin for hiding obtrusive banners, via Twitter and the Advanced WordPress (AWP) Facebook group today. It was first pushed to WordPress.org around a year ago, but the developer seems to be just now publicizing it. The Clarity website describes its mission as: “Ads, upsells, and analytics banners have been running rampant in our WordPress dashboards …
WordPress Photo Directory Gets Its Own Make Team
The WordPress Photo Directory is taking off, growing to more than 1,400 approved free photos in under two months. After a successful call for testers and volunteer photo moderators, the directory has an enthusiastic team of contributors ready to move the project forward. Angela Jin’s pitch for photo moderators resonated with a lot of people for a couple reasons – …
Kadence Blocks 2.2.4 Adds Lottie Animations Block
Kadence Blocks, a popular block collection plugin, added a new Lottie Animations block today in version 2.2.4. Most of the blocks in the plugin offer commonly used page building features like rows, buttons, galleries, and testimonials. The Lottie Animations block introduces something a little more fun and whimsical. Developed by the design team at Airbnb, Lottie is a lightweight, open …
Miniblock OOAK and Outside-the-Box Ideas in the Theme Directory
I have been fascinated by the concept of Carolina Nymark’s Miniblock OOAK theme for a couple of weeks now. It has served as inspiration for a design idea I have been working on, and I am happy to see Nymark pushing boundaries in a space where few pioneers are left. Her design style always dares to take the road less …
#13 – Chris Lubkert and Rich Tabor on Building Sites With Extendify
About this episode. On the podcast today we have Chris Lubkert and Rich Tabor, from Extendify. Extendify is a library of block patterns and full page layouts which you can use inside of the Block Editor. Chris and Rich, as you will hear, decided a few years ago that they were going to dedicate themselves to working with blocks. They …
Convesio Raises $5M to Expand Docker-Powered Hosting Platform
WordPress hosting company Convesio has raised $5 million from private investors. This funding round includes some of the company’s original investors who participated in Convesio’s 2019 Wefunder crowdfunding campaign, which brought in more than $1 million from 800+ investors. “I started Convesio because legacy hosting providers have not evolved their technology, struggled to provide high uptime, and lacked the capability …
Creating Content Dividers With the Wavy Divider WordPress Plugin
Kevin Batdorf, the Project Lead Developer at Extendify, released the Wavy Divider plugin earlier this week. It is described as “a colorful, fun, lightweight divider block to energize your website with character and pizazz.” As someone who believes every Friday should be officially titled “Fun Friday,” how could I not install and activate it? I have not seen many block …
CMS and E-Commerce Churn Data Shows WordPress Maintaining Market Lead, Shopify Gaining on WooCommerce
Rick Viscomi, one of the maintainers of the HTTP Archive, tweeted some interesting data from a report he is working on that tracks churn for different JavaScript frameworks and CMS’s over a specified period of time. He detected the changes using the open source Wappalyzer project. The first graph he shared shows shows data from 8 million websites, 12 months …