Cloudflare Launches Automatic Platform Optimization for WordPress

Just a day after launching its new privacy-first web analytics product last week, Cloudflare announced Automatic Platform Optimization (APO) for WordPress. The new service boasts staggering performance improvements for sites that might otherwise be slowed down by shared hosting, slow database lookups, or sluggish plugins: Our testing… showed a 72% reduction in Time to First Byte (TTFB), 23% reduction to First …

Jetpack 9.0 Introduces Loom Block, Twitter Threads Feature, and Facebook and Instagram oEmbeds

Jetpack’s highly anticipated 9.0 release has landed, introducing some of the new features the team has previewed over the past week. Users can now publish WordPress posts to Twitter as threads. This new feature is available as part of the Publicize module when you have connected a Twitter account. Posting Twitter threads is a feature that only works with the …

Gutenberg 9.1 Adds Patterns Category Dropdown and Reverts Block-Based Widgets in the Customizer

Gutenberg 9.1 was released to the public on Wednesday. The team announced over 200 commits from 77 contributors in its release post yesterday. One of the biggest changes to the interface was the addition of a new dropdown selector for block pattern categories. The team also reverted the block-based widgets section in the customizer and added an image size control …

Cloudflare Launches New Web Analytics Product Focusing on Privacy

In pursuit of “democratizing web analytics,” Cloudflare announced it is launching privacy-first analytics as a new standalone product. The company is entering a market that has been dominated by Google Analytics for years but with a major differentiating feature – it will not track individual users by a cookie or IP address to show unique visits. Cloudflare Web Analytics defines …

W3C Selects Craft CMS for Redesign Project

W3C has selected Craft CMS over Statamic for its redesign project, after dropping WordPress from consideration in an earlier round of elimination: In the end, our decision mostly came down to available resources. Craft had already committed to reach AA compliance in Craft 4 (it is currently on version 3.5, the release of version 4 is planned for April 2021). …

Fuxia Scholz First to Pass 100K Reputation Points on WordPress Stack Exchange

Fuxia Scholz, a prolific WordPress Stack Exchange (WPSE) contributor, is the first member to reach 100,000 reputation points. The popular Q&A community site rewards expert advice by floating the highest quality answers to the top, allowing users to earn reputation points. The gamified help community has proven to be more motivating for developers than many traditional forums, since the upvotes …