This bi-weekly serves to inform and enlighten our minds on latest happenings in the sprawling countryside we call WordPress Land.
Release News
- WordPress 5.0 was released last week on December 6th. It was the release many have been waiting for…and many dreading…for a long time: Gutenberg was coming to core. It was a disaster of biblical proportions. What I mean is Old Testament…real wrath of God type stuff. Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies, rivers and seas boiling, 40 years of darkness, earthquakes, volcanoes, the dead rising from the grave, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria! Obviously I’m joking, but just before it released there was a pretty hefty outcry from the community when the December 6th release date was announced. It’s all the same issues: unresolved bugs, accessibility concerns, communication problems, etc. It’s only been a few days since the release but so far it’s been pretty quiet. I suspect most people did what I did: updated, activated the Classic Editor plugin, and signed off for the weekend. Starting next week, I’m sure a lot of developers who have been ignoring this, or haven’t had the time to get on board, will be digging into the handbook to get up to speed.
- Believe it or not, there’s more to WP 5.0 than just Gutenberg. Gasp! New media handling, post type labels, REST API updates, and a bunch more fixes and enhancements.
- The new WordPress Support HelpHub is live and now the official home for WordPress support. It’s a great resource and a much needed addition to a WordPress user’s toolkit. This tool will eventually completely replace the Codex, but in the meantime, both tools should be bookmarked for reference.
- The Gutenberg phase 2 plan was published. First on the agenda: converting widgets to blocks. Second on the agenda: me realizing I’ll be typing the word “Gutenberg” for the rest of my damn life.
Extending WordPress
- Jetpack 6.8 released and has started the process of converting it’s functionality to block editor friendly interfaces. Contact forms and simple payments are some of the first, and most important blocks included.
- Using Guteberg and want syntax highlighting on your code blocks? Look no further than the SyntaxHighligher Evolved plugin.
- It seems everyone but me loves a gallery. So for all you crazy people who for some reason click those left and right arrows, here’s a Block Gallery plugin so you can drop those resource heavy wastes of space into your Gutenberg powered sites.
- Version 1.0 of the AMP plugin released just the other day. Two of the biggest takeaways I have are that it’s Gutenberg-ready and that it offers considerably more control than previous versions.
Grab Bag
- WPCampus is raising funds to conduct a thorough accessibility audit of Gutenberg. They’ve recieved numerous proposals and have set their initial fund raising benchmark at $30,000 (at the time of writing this they are 1/3 of the way there with just over $10k). I urge people to contribute. It’s annoying that it still needs to be said that an accessible web is hugely important.
- WordCamp Europe is looking for a host city for 2020. I think it should happen in Avignon, France, because I want to go back there and this sounds like a good excuse. WC Europe 2019 will be in Berlin, Germany on June 20-22, which is also a place I’d like to go because I just want to go everywhere and see everything. Is that so much to ask?
- WordCamp US was this past weekend and I wasn’t there. I was in Palm Springs behaving badly. I’m sure some important stuff was discussed and I’ll probably talk more about that next issue, but in the meantime, the most important thing that’s popped up in my feeds is Matt Mullenweg’s list of the top 9 projects for 2019.
“Anybody can jump a motorcycle. The trouble begins when you try to land it.” -Evel Knievel