WordPress Digest #63: The Guten-train Keeps A-Rollin

This bi-weekly serves to inform and enlighten our minds on latest happenings in the sprawling countryside we call WordPress Land.

All glory to the Gutenberg.

Release News

  • A recent update in the progress of Gutenberg mentions the ability to create reusable templates. This is probably one of the most useful features I’ve seen yet for Gutenberg, particularly for those of us who regularly build WordPress sites for non tech savvy clients. The ability to have some canned templates of pre-chosen blocks is going to bridge a large gap with clients who don’t particularly want to spend the time building a whole page.
  • WP 4.9.9 is evidently possibly going to be cancelled in favor of focusing on the larger 5.0 release. Either that or it’ll just mainly focus on PHP 7.3 compatibility.

Extending WordPress

  • Yoast SEO 8.2 is out and contains some new functionality developed specifically for Gutenberg. It sounds like it’ll make incorporating structured data (like Schema.org) easier for people who can’t modify themes, so that’s cool.
  • My favorite plugin, Advanced Custom Fields, has released version 5.0 of their free plugin. This brings a bunch of the Pro plugin functionality into the free version, along with Gutenberg compatibility.

Grab Bag

  • WPForms has purchased Pirate Forms. This purchase left me with such questions as “who?” and “why?” and “why would you use anything other than Gravity Forms?”
  • WordCamp Tokyo happened a few weeks ago and by all accounts was another smashing success. And on the other side of the globe, the early release standard tickets for WordCamp Europe sold out in just over 3 hours. If this is an event you hope to attend, I would recommend keeping an eye on their updates to see when the next batch will go on sale.
  • Minor update, but something I fully support: themes in the WP Theme Directory are no longer allowed to contain any affiliate links or urls.

Believe Survivors.

Side note: I will be skipping the next regularly scheduled issue (Oct 15) as I will be on my honeymoon. Feel free to send hate mail in the form of contributions from our wedding registry.