The Five for the Future program, an initiative Matt Mullenweg proposed in 2014, may soon be addressing the problem of spam and outdated pledges that appear on the program’s dedicated website. The idea behind the program is that organizations and individuals will contribute five percent of their resources back to WordPress development, ensuring the future of the project. Five for …
Tove: A Block-Based WordPress Theme by Anders Norén
I have been secretly keeping tabs on Anders Norén over the past couple of weeks, awaiting the moment he pushed his first block theme to the WordPress directory. I first noticed it when he tweeted a screenshot two weeks ago. And, today was the day it happened. Tove landed in the review portal several hours ago, and I have been …
Gutenberg 11.5 Adds Widget Grouping, Iterates on the Block Gap Feature, and Updates Nav Menus
Gutenberg 11.5 landed earlier today. It is a hefty release that includes extensive changes to the Navigation block, a new way for grouping widgets, and more block gap feature integration. I have had mixed reactions to the features that made it into the latest release. At some points, I thought to myself, finally, this made it in. At other moments, …
Newsletter Glue Pro, My First Foray Into Journalism, and New Ideas
As a teen, I would visit my Uncle David’s house every other week or so. He was the only family member with a computer. It was an old, bulky monstrosity that ran whatever the latest version of Windows that existed at the time. It was one of my first introductions to dial-up, but my primary interest was not the internet. …
Konstantin Kovshenin Launches Sail, a CLI Tool for Deploying to Digital Ocean
Last week, Konstantin Kovshenin launched Sail, a CLI tool for deploying WordPress applications to the DigitalOcean cloud. The project is free to use and open source. However, he has plans for an upgraded premium experience down the road. Kovshenin cited speed and efficiency as the two primary reasons developers should give his new tool a try. “You don’t need to …
Theme Author Survey Results: Uploading via ZIP Files Preferred, SVN Access Forthcoming
Earlier today, Dion Hulse announced the results of a six-week survey on the WordPress.org theme upload process. The goal was to figure out if uploading a ZIP file was a “pain point” and see what other methods theme authors prefer. Then, move forward based on the feedback. In total, 256 people responded to the survey. Of the weighted results, uploading …
Theme Authors Should Be Able To Opt Out of Any Design Feature
As I debugged issues with the new block gap feature added in Gutenberg 11.4 last week, I found the ticket introducing it. And, there was already a new ticket for one problem I had hit. However, there was some discussion over whether themes should be allowed to opt-out, rolling their own solution. There was no way to do it at …
Add a Little Pumpkin Spice to Your WordPress Admin This Autumn
Autumn is my favorite time of the year. On some weekends, I like to drive through my old hometown with the windows rolled down. I crawl through the school zone at 25 mph and breathe in the football field’s freshly cut grass. All those memories of blood, guts, and glory under the Friday night lights flood back. Nervous homecoming dances. …
Automattic Acquires Social Image Generator Plugin, Plans to Integrate with Jetpack
Automattic has acquired the Social Image Generator plugin, a commercial product that automatically creates social share images for WordPress content from a set of fully customizable templates. The plugin launched in February 2021, with a starting price of $39/year but is now closed to new sales. Daniel Post, the plugin’s creator, is joining Automattic to continue developing it as a …
#7 – Ajit Bohra on Gutenberg, Full Site Editing and React
About this episode. On the podcast today we have Ajit Bohra. Ajit is a keen advocate of WordPress, having used it and committed to it, for many years. He’s a full stack developer working at Lubus which is based in Mumbai, India. His team works with WordPress as well as offering solutions built with Laravel and React. He’s on the …





