WP Engine is deepening its investment in headless WordPress with the creation of a new team dedicated to furthering the technology developers rely on when opting for this architecture. The company has hired WPGraphQL creator and maintainer Jason Bahl as part of this new team and will be investing in more engineers and other roles to support decoupled setups. For …
Gutenberg 9.9 Adds Color Options for Social Icons, Includes Rounded Borders for Images, and Changes the Theme JSON Format
Version 9.9 of the Gutenberg plugin landed earlier today. While it includes several minor UI improvements, the biggest user-facing change is the inclusion of icon and background color options for the Social Links block. Theme authors can now add support for rounded image borders. They are also faced with a breaking change to their theme JSON files. WordPress 5.7 Beta …
Newspack Publishes Showcase with 60 Newsrooms Launched
Newspack, a project funded by the Google News initiative and WordPress.com, has published a showcase of 60 news sites running on the platform. WordPress.com announced its plans to build the Newspack CMS two years ago and successfully signed on more than 50 sites in the first year. The cloud-based platform is open source and highly customized to generate revenue for …
New Report Estimates WordPress’ Market Share of US Higher Education Institution Websites at 40.8%
A new report from eQAfy, a company that collects and analyzes data about higher education websites, has benchmarked which content management systems US institutions are using. The report is a snapshot of data from December 2020, sourced from the National Center for Education Statistics IPEDS database. After scanning a list of 4,000 active institutions, EQAfy’s headless browser was able to detect the …
Skinning the WordPress Admin, CSS Custom Properties on the Way
Using CSS custom properties for the WordPress admin color scheme system is listed for the WordPress 5.7 milestone. It feels low-key enough that most would pass it over as a simple upgrade to keep up with the times. However, this feature can create ripples that spread and benefit the ecosystem in the years to come. Kirsty Burgoine, a front-end developer …
Block Manager Redesign Coming Soon
WordPress’ block management interface was introduced in Gutenberg 5.3, released in March 2019, and is due for an update. In case you haven’t explored the editor’s Tools menu, the block manager setting allows you to select which blocks will be shown or hidden in the block inserter. Last week, Automattic engineer Nik Tsekouras opened a new issue in the Gutenberg …
Upsells, Barriers, and the End/Beginning of the Quality $free Themes Era
The WordPress.org theme directory is becoming little more than a crippleware distributor. I suppose it was inevitable given its reach, which can be worth $1,000s/month for theme authors. Justin Tadlock via Twitter As I think back on that tweet from 2019, I realize how unfair it was to refer to the themes coming into the directory as “crippleware.” At the …
WP Lookout Lets WordPress Users Track and Receive Notifications for Their Preferred Plugins and Themes
Should WordPress notify users of plugin ownership changes? That was the question that Ian Atkins asked two months ago. WP Tavern readers seemed to think it was a good idea, at least those who commented on our coverage of it. However, the original Trac ticket has not seen any movement since. There are real technical issues with automating the process. …
Automattic Launches the Blank Canvas WordPress Theme for Building Single-Page Websites
Split Screen pattern from Blank Canvas. On Monday, Automattic announced its Blank Canvas theme on WordPress.com. The goal is to allow end-users to build single-page websites, such as an “about me” or product landing page. Blank Canvas is a child theme of Seedlet, which Automattic’s Theme Team has been using as a launchpad. One example is its recently-released Spearhead child …
Jetpack Launches Customer Research Project to Improve the Plugin and Reduce User Frustration
Jetpack’s Design and Research Team is launching a new customer research panel as part of an ongoing effort to collect feedback in advance of launching new features. They are allocating one day every month to talk with users: It’s a small step toward an important goal of better understanding what our users need, seeing and hearing first hand where they …