Tag Archives: Tavern

Yoast Joins Newfold Digital, Team To Stay in Place – WP Tavern

[ad_1] Earlier today, Yoast CEO Marieke van de Rakt announced the company had been acquired by NewFold Digital. Yoast and its SEO-related business are expected to continue operating as usual with its current team and maintaining its product line. Newfold Digital is a global web solutions provider that serves small-to-medium businesses. The company has many brands under its umbrella, such as Network Solutions, Bluehost, and more. “Yoast never had any funding before, it grew organically into a company with 140 employees maintaining a plugin with over 12 million active installs,” wrote van de Rakt in the announcement. “We don’t want to stop there! We’re planning to grow and improve even further! Joining Newfold Digital provides us with the freedom to build and iterate on ideas to further our mission.” There are no plans to change the team or the culture around Yoast. One of the goals during the acquisition was to keep everyone in place, continuing work on their product line. “Of course, some things change,” said Yoast founder and CPO Joost de Valk. “We’ll integrate into their systems (HR and finance). We’ll work on special offers for customers from Newfold. Our company changed so much over the five years, so it will change no matter what. I do feel that this opens up more security for growth and for developing new ideas.” While Yoast does not plan to change its 140-person team, it is still bringing in fresh talent. The company has been hiring a lot lately and expects that trend to continue with 19 current job openings. As host Nathan Wrigley and guest Cory Miller discussed on the latest episode of the Jukebox, acquisitions can be a welcome change for all parties. It can provide more financial stability and backing for the acquired company. It may allow the team to explore new features or new products that were not possible before. This can also work in the user’s favor in the long term. “Marieke and I felt ever since this Covid pandemic hit that we needed a partner or some more financial backing,” said Joost de Valk. “Being totally bootstrapped was getting to us. We worried about the exchange rate of the dollar, for instance. We got risk-averse, and all around us other companies got financial injections.” The husband-and-wife duo thought about selling part of their stock for additional funding but was worried about potential consequences. One such downside may have been the need to grow fast to keep investors happy. “We wanted to find a place to keep Yoast SEO growing and to keep working on WordPress,” said de Valk. “We had help from RBC, a company that helps with these types of acquisitions. They introduced us to Newfold, and we had a really good connection right from the start.” He remained tight-lipped about any new products or features in the pipeline, only saying that a lot is coming and things will speed up. Newfold is the owner of several high-profile hosting brands, including Bluehost and HostGator — both offer a managed WordPress service. It would not be unheard of to see a company mix and match its various products to draw in more customers. Nor would it be surprising to eventually see Yoast SEO or even some of the commercial Yoast offerings as part of packaged hosting deals. WP Engine fully integrates StudioPress products, for example, into its packages. However, de Valk said they have yet to discuss anything on that front. “You’re absolutely right that the things you’re proposing here make perfect sense,” he said. “So, I think we’ll work on those deals and, at the same time, team Yoast will work independently on their products.” Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link

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Google Site Kit Plugin Ships Hot Fix for Critical Error That Caused Broken Websites – WP Tavern

[ad_1] Google published an update to its Site Kit plugin for WordPress this afternoon with a hot fix for a critical issue affecting an unknown number of users. Reports of broken websites were popping up on Twitter and in the plugin’s support forum on WordPress.org. Users affected by the issue reported having a critical error on all sites using Site Kit, which forced deactivation of the plugin in recovery mode. In some cases it prevented them from accessing their dashboards. “On Wednesday, August 11, we identified a fatal error in the Site Kit plugin that could be triggered by other plugins or themes using an unprefixed version of Composer,” Google Site Kit Support Lead Bethany Chobanian Lang said in a pinned post on the support forum. Version 1.38.1 contains a hot fix for this issue, since it was critical enough to take down users’ websites. The plugin’s maintainers began investigating the issue less than 24 hours ago but are still not sure which plugins trigger the error due to their usage of Composer. “The reports do not include which specific plugins or themes were causing this, but the error message clearly highlighted the code in Site Kit that was the problem,” Google Developer Relations Engineer Felix Arntz said. “Technically, that problematic code had been in Site Kit since several versions ago (months back), so maybe another plugin/theme recently got updated with new code that exposed the problem.” After looking at popular plugins, Arntz said he hasn’t been able to find one so far that would have triggered the problem. Given Site Kit’s broad usage, other affected sites are bound to turn up once users realize there is a problem. Google launched the plugin in 2019 and has since amassed more than a million active installations. The majority of the plugin’s user base is running older versions, which may or may not be affected by the current issue. WordPress.org shows 35.6% of the plugin’s users are on version 1.38.x. The hot fix is not backported for older releases, but users running Site Kit version 1.38 with background updates enabled should automatically receive the fix. Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link

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Building a Higher Ed Header – WP Tavern

[ad_1] It feels like it has been ages since the WordPress community has had a call for testing Full Site Editing (FSE) features. The FSE Outreach Program was on a small hiatus. However, the WordPress 5.8 launch was also underway last month. The program is an open call for testing various components of FSE. Thus far, volunteers have successfully provided feedback on features that have already landed in core WordPress, such as block-based widgets and template editing. Testers have delved into others that have yet to be released. Each testing round is open to anyone who can spare a little of their free time and share their findings. The goal is to break things and point out problematic areas of the user experience. FSE Outreach #9 is a community-driven suggestion that calls for building a Higher Ed site’s header. Volunteers are asked to follow a 26-step process using the site editor beta feature in the latest version of the Gutenberg plugin and the TT1 Blocks theme. I am a fan of this take on testing, and program lead Anne McCarthy seems to favor doing more of it in the future. “If you’d like to suggest an idea for a call for testing, know it’s very welcomed and all ideas will be weighed against current project priorities to figure out what makes the most sense to pursue,” she wrote in the announcement. Since the project was all about Higher Ed, I decided to pay homage to my alma mater and use the colors that I wore proudly around campus for five years — and still do to this day. The following screenshot is the end result: Before going forward, I must admit that I cheated to get that final look. The call for testing asked that we build from the TT1 Blocks theme. I was able to get close to that result, but I had to switch to a custom theme I have been working on to get past a few hurdles. I went through each stage of testing with TT1 Blocks and will cover the issues I encountered. Building a Higher Ed Header Just getting off the ground, I ran into my first issue, which turned out to be a non-issue. The internet gods decided to play a trick on me, disallowing me from editing both the Site Title and Site Description blocks. I really wanted my fictional university to be “Gutenberg University,” but I could not do so without saving my progress and refreshing the browser tab. I was unable to replicate the issue, so I am hoping it was simply a fluke. Using the Navigation block still seems the most troublesome area of site editing. I know how much work the development team has put behind the user experience for this feature but cannot help but wonder if there is a point where users can opt into managing its content (the links) via the traditional Nav Menus screen in WordPress. The site editor works fine for the design aspect, but I have yet to feel comfortable using it to manage links. This stage of testing calls for adding multiple page links as both top-level and sub-menu items. When clicking the + button to add a link, my first instinct is to search for the page itself. However, the available field is a block search rather than a page search. Accidentally searching for link in block search field. To add an actual link, users must first add the Page Link block. Then, they can search for a specific page. This two-step process gets me every time. I ran into the issue for nav menus mentioned in the call for testing where there is no space between items when used inside a Columns block. It pains the purist in me to admit it, but I had to use the Spacer block between each item to fix this. I did not need to do this with my custom theme because, I am guessing, I addressed this somewhere along the way. The “space between items” option also failed to work with the Navigation block, ruining one of the early design ideas I had. I decided to go in a different direction. Using right-alignment with the Search block did not work. Therefore, I used the 100% width option to align it with my right-aligned nav menu. Time and time again, I needed to rely on the Spacer block to make adjustments. Part of this was because default margins and paddings are inconsistent among different blocks. The still-missing margin controls on nearly every block also played a hand in this. This is not particularly noteworthy. The development team is aware of and working on extending spacing controls — they just can’t get here fast enough for some of us. A spacing issue is what led me to ditch TT1 Blocks and switch to a custom theme. The following screenshot is my final work with the former. You may notice the gaping green background between the nav menu group and the header image below it. TT1 Blocks theme version with gap in header. No amount of tricks or rearrangement of blocks seemed to remove that space, and I simply could not live with that. I had already solved about 90% of Gutenberg’s spacing issues with my own theme and did not feel like writing any new CSS to address this. Making the switch also meant that I could get rid of several Spacer blocks I had in place. Aside from dropping in a header image, one other modification I made was skipping the addition of a Button block for the latest “Covid update.” I could not bear looking at TT1 Blocks’ overuse of padding. Instead, I nested a paragraph with a link within a column alongside a Navigation block. As always, I enjoyed the process. This post is meant to be critical of specific areas in the hopes that it helps build a better WordPress. For all its faults, many other parts offer a

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#6 – Cory Miller on the WordPress Mergers and Acquisitions Landscape – WP Tavern

[ad_1] So in 2016 or so I started to think, what does the future look like? It feels like one day somebody at all the hosting companies goes, I wonder how much this thing called WordPress, what kind of footprint is it in our customer base, in our stack and somebody came back and probably said 40%, 50% or something like that, I’m sure way back in the day. And it seemingly overnight a bunch of money and attention from particularly the hosting space turned to WordPress and rightfully so, I mean WordPress is a huge CMS and its footprint on the web is enormous. So around that time, I’m seeing all these players kind of come in and, big money, start to come in, and we’re talking about billion dollar companies or billion dollar valuation companies or companies with private equity in the billions coming into the space and really turning their attention, and I thought, my job as the leader is to fast forward the movie and see where we’re going and make sure, you mentioned in our pre-talk about Monopoly, the game Monopoly, and I thought, wow, we are definitely the David versus Goliath now. We’ve been bootstrapped from the beginning from 2008 on, and what does the future look like, and our toolset, the software we’re offering at the time, it was very utility, backup security, and maintenance. GoDaddy had bought Sucuri, ManageWP. Automattic was already kind of our competition from the beginning anyway, with Jetpack and at one point their backup service VaultPress. And so Jetpack is another behemoth out there. And, I just go, I think it’s time for us to figure this out, what’s the next step in a big way, and really that ultimately came down to being acquired. We had a partner in Liquid Web. So they were obviously the first people that had been partnered with him for like a year and really appreciated their leadership team. Eventually my friend, Chris Lema joined them and then my friend AJ Morris was the one that put us on the map for Liquid Web. And they were doing some, wanting to really do some big things and WordPress and long story short that just all worked out. But for us, it was like, at what point do you just need to pull up your stakes and tents and move on and see what you can get? And two reasons, one is financial, of course, but the other is my team. You know, we had about 25 people at that time and I want to make sure our team has a place to land and a great career, and that up until that point, it was either Matt Danner and I, and we had to leave for anybody to have upward mobility really well. When we joined a Liquid Web, at the time, they were like 600 people. So there was a lot of opportunity, career opportunity to move within the company. And they were also doing some great stuff. Now, maybe early in my worries, you know, Mark from Wordfence a great founder, co-founder over there told me, he said, great book called only the paranoid survive. I spent about 10 years in paranoia, like insecurity. But it was time it’s turned out to be everything Joe Oesterling and the C Suites team over at Liquid Web, everything they said to me, they have been to the letter of their word. I have really great respect for them. And so iThemes is under the leadership now of Matt Danner is killing it. There have been on the acquisition tear in the last year. [ad_2] Source link

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Elastic Hits Back at OpenSearch, Making Client Libraries Incompatible with Amazon-led Open Source Fork – WP Tavern

[ad_1] After Elastic, makers of the search and analytic engine Elasticsearch, re-licensed its core product so that it was no longer open source, Amazon led a community effort to fork it. In July 2021, contributors to the project announced the first general availability (GA) release of OpenSearch 1.0, an Apache 2.0-licensed fork of Elasticsearch 7.10.2 and Kibana 7.10.2. In what appears to be a slap back at the open source fork, Elastic has begun making its client libraries incompatible with OpenSearch. The Python client was updated to perform an API request that will verify connection to Elasticsearch and raise an error if it doesn’t receive the proper response. The PR received 40 “thumbs-down” reactions from the community and a brief round of criticism before the discussion was shut down. “It’s disappointing to see this,” Invenio product manager Lars Holm Nielsen said. “You’re forcing us as bystanders in a battle to choose sides. We develop an Open Source product that could likely easily work with both Elasticsearch or OpenSearch and then the users can choose for themselves if they want Elasticsearch or OpenSearch. “Now, instead, we likely have to make choice for all our users if we want OpenSearch or Elasticsearch. This and other behaviors from Elastic really does not give me any confidence in Elastic and what you might do in the future. And don’t blame it all on Amazon – you’ve already changed the server license, you didn’t have to make this move.” Elastic Senior Engineering Manager Philip Krauss responded before turning off comments on the discussion. “Amazon OpenSearch is a different product,” Krauss said. “And while there is some shared history, there are already many differences that cause real confusion and issues.” Elastic has also modified its .NET Connector for Elasticsearch to include “a pre-flight check on first use,” which users do not consider to be an enhancement. Elastic Senior Engineer Steve Gordon said the change is not breaking in supported configurations and that the intent was “to make this incompatibility explicit by failing fast to avoid consumers incorrectly assuming they are running in a supported configuration which is not tested and may not function as expected.” Last week, OpenSearch responded to Elastic’s recent changes that render many clients incompatible, by committing to create a set of new client libraries that make it easy to connect applications to any OpenSearch or Elasticsearch cluster: Many developers who use Elasticsearch and OpenSearch in their applications also make use of the open source client libraries maintained by Elastic, which provide convenient high-level interfaces for several popular programming languages. Over the past few weeks, Elastic added new logic to several of these clients that rejects connections to OpenSearch clusters or to clusters running open source distributions of Elasticsearch 7, even those provided by Elastic themselves. While the client libraries remain open source, they now only let applications connect to Elastic’s commercial offerings. OpenSearch published a list of a dozen clients for which contributors plan to create forks that will maintain compatibility with all Elasticsearch distributions, even those produced by Elastic. “We do not recommend updating to the latest version of any Elastic-maintained clients, as this may cause applications to break,” OpenSearch maintainers urged users in the latest project update. Elastic’s decision to prevent official clients from working with open source forks has further undermined any remaining goodwill the company had after re-licensing Elasticsearch. “Looks like Elastic has sucked all the benefit they could from open source and is now spitting out the bones,” OSI Director of Standards and Policy Simon Phipps said. 10up, makers of the ElasticPress.io service, one of the most prominent Elasticsearch-powered products in the WordPress ecosystem, is still considering its next move after Elasticsearch abandoned its open source licensing. The company is not in any hurry to choose sides. Vasken Hauri, 10up’s VP of Platforms and Systems, said the dispute “isn’t something that we’re concerned about in the near term (the next 2-3 years).” Upgrading past Elasticsearch 7.11+ would require making a choice between continuing on with Elastic’s proprietary offering or switching to the open source fork. Hauri said that the company is “barely taking advantage of most of the features Elasticsearch offers now” and projects that the current roadmap “could probably run another couple of years without any need to get new features from Elasticsearch.” For the time being, the 6,000+ users of the ElasticPress WordPress plugin and customers of the ElasticPress.io service have nothing to worry about as a result of Elastic’s renewed war with Amazon. Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link

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Emoji Toolbar Plugin Brings an Emoji Picker Back to the WordPress Editor – WP Tavern

[ad_1] Earlier today, theme.es released its Emoji Toolbar project to the plugin directory. It is a simple picker that integrates with the WordPress Rich Text toolbar, allowing users to insert emoji directly from the editor interface. After Nick Hamze pulled his Emoji Conbini plugin from WordPress.org last year, there has been an emoji-sized hole in my editor toolbox. The plugin was the perfect implementation for quickly plopping a quick smiley face or any of the other thousands of characters available. Unfortunately, his departure from the WordPress space meant losing one of my favorite block-related plugins — and several others that I enjoyed. It was also on par with 10up’s Insert Special Characters plugin, a solution for users missing a similar picker from the classic editor era. Emoji Toolbar is filling that void and is a solid alternative for those who need a solution. The difference between the two implementations is the location. Emoji Conbini added the picker button directly to the toolbar, and Emoji Toolbar adds it to the “more” dropdown. Clicking the Emoji button in the Rich Text toolbar. Placing the picker button inside of the dropdown makes it a little harder to find. It also requires an additional mouse click to insert emoji. What matters is that the implementation works, but I would love to see it as a top-level toolbar item. Using the plugin is a simple matter. When in a Rich Text field, which includes blocks like Paragraph, Heading, List, and more, the Emoji Toolbar appears in the block toolbar. After clicking it, the plugin creates a popup of the emoji picker. Emoji Toolbar popup picker. From that point, users merely need to click the emoji they want to insert into the post. The plugin bundles the Emoji Mart library, which has quickly become almost a standard for emoji pickers. The component is a Slack-like box that categorizes each of the characters, and it provides a field for searching for that perfect emoji. There is still at least one emoji inserter alternative. Instead of adding a picker to the block toolbar, Emoji Autocomplete Gutenberg allows users to type : and use keywords for inserting characters. For those who prefer to work from the keyboard, it is a quicker method. Emoji Toolbar shines over Emoji Autocomplete Gutenberg and the now-retired Emoji Conbini based on how it formats its output. It inserts the actual characters into the content, but the other plugins insert an <img> tag instead. That method results in output that is not forward-compatible with any changes in the future or alternative libraries. Users who also prefer to disable image output on the front end cannot do so. This is a non-issue with Emoji Toolbar — it plays well with other solutions. On the whole, the plugin is solid. It has well-written code and provides an easy-to-use picker for inserting emoji. Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link

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Automattic Invests $30M in Titan, a Business Email Startup – WP Tavern

[ad_1] source: Titan.email Automattic has invested $30 million in Titan, a professional email suite aimed at businesses and companies offering white-labeled email solutions for customers. At WordCamp India 2021, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg said that the company had just made “a pretty large investment” in the India-based startup and stated that it “will be a big part of how WordPress.com offers email going forward.” The Series A investment in Titan is Automattic’s largest to date and values the company at $300 million. Although Automattic has gained notoriety for its “no offices or email” approach to business, most of the working world has not yet transitioned away from relying heavily on email. “I think email is definitely on its way out, between things like P2 and Slack, which is a work place chat tool,” Mullenweg said on Glenn Leibowitz’s podcast in 2015. “Email just has so many things wrong with it. I’ve never heard anyone who’ve said they love email, they want more of it–have you?” Six years later, email is still a reliable source of misery for most working people, but Titan aims to transform it into a more meaningful communication channel for businesses with help of Automattic’s investment. It includes features like scheduled send, follow-up reminders, smart filters and custom folders, email templates, and white labeling with deep integration for various platforms. WordPress.com’s marketing has increasingly been aimed at small businesses over the past few years with a strong push for users to make money by selling things through their websites. It’s easy to see how Titan makes sense as a supporting product that legitimizes any business with a custom branded email address. Customers who have registered, transferred, or mapped a custom domain through WordPress.com are offered a three-month free trial of Titan-powered email services. Setting up custom branded email addresses separately would be a much more inconvenient process and most customers with custom domains are likely better off rolling email services into their existing WordPress.com setup. This strategically enables WordPress.com to be more of a one-stop shop for business needs. People are often reluctant to change their email providers so Titan has the effect of making WordPress.com’s products a more sticky subscription that would require some effort to reproduce elsewhere. “We need an alternative to Google and Microsoft, which have started to monopolize email,” Mullenweg told Bloomberg. “Of about 6 billion email accounts in the world, only a fraction are small business email accounts and they need a product that’s focused on their needs,” he said. After just two years, Titan has more than 100,000 small business customers. In addition to its relationships with WordPress.com, HostGator, NameSilo, and other web providers, Titan aims to grow its customer base by partnering with popular hosting companies, domain registrars, and site builders. Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link

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Is WordPress Development Really All That Hard To Get Into Today? – WP Tavern

[ad_1] Oh, how easily we forget the WordPress of 10, 15 years ago. We are spoiled. We are spoiled by the gluttony of documentation and tutorials, a wealth of knowledge created over more than a decade. We are spoiled by our own expertise, built-in our more vigorous youth, now sitting on our haunches as we have aged along with our beloved platform. We have grown to become the proverbial grumpy old men. “Back in my day, we didn’t need all these fancy tools to help us write code. We pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps and built everything from scratch.” I kid. Sort of. I count myself among the old-school developers who helped build the WordPress that so many are still nostalgic about — I think I have earned the right to joke about myself. They were “simpler” times but not really. Having been in the community as long as I have, I can remember the backlash each time a new feature landed. I recall the days when there really was non-existent documentation for pretty much everything. Lately, there has been a growing conversation around the difficulty of overcoming WordPress’s current barrier to entry for developers. This has been an ongoing discussion for a few years now, but the latest flare-up comes on the heels of a tweet by Chris Wiegman: The deeper I get with modern WP dev the more I understand why newer devs don’t like to work on it. This is not the same project as it was in the past. The learning curve is now extremely high regardless of past experience. I built my first block plugin in a few hours about a month ago. When writing on the experience, I said the barrier to entry was much higher than when I had built my first plugin in 2007. Having had the time to sit back and think about that, I am not sure it was a fair statement. We tend to view the past through rose-colored glasses while forgetting the real struggle. What I had wanted was to build the plugin in 30 minutes. Had everything been in PHP, that would have been an easy feat for me. Objectively, I am an expert (or close enough) in the language. However, my JavaScript knowledge is 10 years behind. It had been a while since I had been challenged in that way. That was a distressing experience for someone who had become comfortable in his own skills. I griped about the docs. But, let’s be honest. WordPress has never had the sort of deep documentation that could teach a budding developer everything. I know this because I have written at least a couple hundred tutorials in my career. Nearly every time, I dug into the project’s source code to make sense of it, which allowed me to teach other developers how to work with various features. And many other developers in the space did the same. In time, WordPress.org added more robust developer documentation, but this was not built overnight. It is a constantly evolving project. I also built my first block type with vanilla JavaScript. No build tools. No React docs open. Just plain ol’ JS code in my editor. I needed to crawl before I could walk, and getting that first iteration of the code into a workable state was necessary before I jumped into anything more complex. In the days after, I re-coded it all to use more modern JavaScript and compiled it with webpack. A week after that, I built a second block plugin with more advanced features. Was it hard? Definitely. Was the barrier to entry higher than when I first developed plugins? Probably. Truthfully, I did not struggle as much, but I am also at a different point in my life. At 37, I no longer have quite as much drive and likely less capacity for picking up new skills as quickly as in my late teens and early 20s. However, I have a strong foundation and enough experience to overcome some of the hurdles I encountered. Would a 20-year-old me struggle with this JavaScript landscape more than a strictly PHP-based WordPress? I doubt it. Both had huge learning curves for someone new. Someone’s first introduction to Subversion or Composer can be just as scary as their initial dive into webpack and npm. For a fresh mind, an open canvas that has yet to be painted with over a decade of doing things the “WordPress way,” I am unsure if the barrier to entry is so much higher. For us old-schoolers, our world has been flipped upside down. There is no denying that. The Gutenberg project, which is at the core of nearly every new WordPress feature, moves so fast that it is next to impossible to keep up with while also upping your skills. It is easy to get overwhelmed. When this happens to me, I usually take a step back and return when I have had a chance to rest my mind. Contributing to the WordPress ecosystem has always had one barrier or another. Whether it be the privilege of time, knowledge of PHP, or some other skill, the project has left some people out. That is changing in some ways. Some parts are now available to users that were never accessible before. This is easiest to see from the theming side of things. “I wish people would see that theme development is heading the opposite way,” tweeted Carolina Nymark. “The entry barrier for designers and new developers will be lower. When people get stuck saying, ‘But I can’t use my hooks in a block theme,’ it is because they are looking at what exists today, not ahead.” Having spent more time on the theming side of the block editor than plugin development, I agree wholeheartedly. Theme authors have been given a clean slate, or at least by the time block-based themes are supported in core WordPress, this will be true. While I could write ad nauseum on

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Automattic Releases Quadrat, a Block-Based Podcasting WordPress Theme – WP Tavern

[ad_1] A few weeks ago, Automattic released Quadrat on the WordPress.org theme directory. It is now the company’s fourth block theme. Like its predecessors, it is a child of Blockbase, a project that serves as a foundation for the work of Automattic’s Theme Team. After spending a couple of months diving deep into the world of block themes, I was beginning to feel a little burned out. When I wasn’t sleeping, eating, or doing yard work in my off-duty time, I was building or exploring one project or another. Soon, it all had become a blur. I knew I needed to take a small break, and I have not touched themes for a couple of weeks since, at least not outside of work. However, Quadrat appealed to the theme developer within me. I am not sure if it was the soothing color scheme or just seeing the work the professional designers had put into it, but it offered a pathway for easing myself back into the block theme world. Outside of the work by Anariel Design with Naledi and Clove, most block themes have felt more like proof of concepts or starting points. Quadrat can now be added to the list of those with some personality. It does not push any particular boundaries, but it is a well-designed blogging and podcasting theme. Mostly, I am just a fan of the color scheme — sometimes you just need something other than black, white, and gray to get yourself out of a funk. One of the other reasons I have been following the work of the Quadrat theme was because it was the first showcase of header patterns I had seen. Kjell Reigstad shared what this system would look like in June. The goal is to include the patterns shown in the video in core WordPress, so they are not currently included in the theme. However, there is still an open ticket for header patterns in Quadrat. The only real trouble I ran into with the theme is with fully aligned blocks in the content. There is an overflow issue in version 1.1.1 that creates a horizontal scrollbar. Horizontal scrollbar appears with full-width Cover block. Quadrat includes nine custom patterns. The focus for most is on podcasting, but some are general-purpose enough for other use cases, such as “Media and text with button”: Media and text with button pattern. The development team missed a prime opportunity with its podcast-related patterns. Instead of integrating with a podcasting solution, they are simple, static blocks from core WordPress. For example, the Latest Episodes pattern is a two-column layout that features Image, Heading, and Paragraph blocks. That is acceptable as a base pattern for users without a podcasting plugin. However, it may be practically useless for those with one enabled. Or, it creates unnecessary work because users must manually update their page content anytime they publish a new episode. Latest Episodes block pattern Given Automattic’s recent bet on Castos as part of a $756K pre-seed fundraising round, it would make sense to integrate with the podcasting company’s plugin, Seriously Simple Podcasting (SSP). If the development team wanted to take the Latest Episodes pattern to the next level, they would create it with the Query Loop block and display the latest podcast episodes from the plugin. For users without SSP installed, simply fall back to the current pattern. Or, offer both. Right now, it is little more than eye candy and not nearly as useful as it could be for real-world use cases. I often talk about the need for theme authors to elevate their game. Not only would such integration be beneficial to podcasters, but it would also showcase the power and flexibility of the block system. All of this is to say: If you are going to build a podcasting theme, build a podcasting theme. Quadrat appears to be one. However, when you peek behind the curtain, it is just a well-designed blogging theme. It has the potential to be so much more. Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link

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Gutenberg 11.2 Expands Color Support for Search and Pullquote Blocks, Introduces Experimental Flex Layout for Group Block – WP Tavern

[ad_1] Gutenberg 11.2.0 was released today with expanded color support for the Search and Pullquote blocks. Historically, customizing these elements has been out of reach for most users if their themes didn’t include them as options. This release introduces color support and border color support for the search button. Pullquotes are getting a similar treatment with border and color support, enabling some creative design options for those who enjoy taking the reins on customization. It’s these kinds of minute style changes that web developers would have been paid to perform back in the earlier days of theme customization gigs. Now the block editor enables anyone to jump in and do it themselves. These color support additions are part of a larger effort to improve the editor’s design tools to provide consistent application across blocks. “Another important goal of design tools is ensuring a wide range of exquisitely crafted patterns are possible; that best practices are not only possible but encouraged; and that customizing blocks is a consistent and natural experience,” Gutenberg Lead Architect Matias Ventura said in the ticket tracking design tool tasks. Gutenberg 11.2 also introduces support for a new experimental flex layout. The need for additional layouts was described by Rick Banister in a ticket submitted a year ago, requesting a “display horizontal” option for the Group block: When building patterns or trying to achieve a layout with multiple elements arranged horizontally it would help to have a parent block that would automatically arrange its children on a single line. Columns can be used to arrange things side-by-side, but they add quite a lot of extra nesting if you only need to arrange one set of blocks. We could leverage the Group block and add a ‘display horizontally’ or ‘act as a row’ option to it. It would wrap its children and act as a ‘flex container’ (display:flex; flex-direction:row;). Further flex parameters could be optional to align and distribute objects. A flex layout option has the potential to remove some of the complexity in nesting blocks. This early prototype shows a rough, unfinished UI for a layout switcher. It shows the difference between a flex layout and the default “flow” layout, which displays children one after the other vertically without any specific styles. The PR included in Gutenberg 11.2 makes it possible for blocks to support multiple layouts. Gutenberg engineer Riad Benguella said the plan is to introduce more layouts, such as “grid” and “absolute positioning container.” Adding “flex” layout support for the group block is the first step towards proving how multi-layout options can work in the block editor. “In the previous WordPress release, we introduced the layout config and the __experimentalLayout prop for inner blocks,” Benguella said. “The initial reason for these was to make alignments and content widths more declarative for themes. While this was an ambitious goal on its own and a hard one to achieve for the default layout, the goal has always been to absorb and support more kinds of layouts in the editor than the regular vertical list of blocks.” This experimental flex layout support can be useful for theme developers and makes sense in certain use cases with the Cover block, headers, social icons, columns, and other applications. The layout switcher UI is hidden in this release while the Gutenberg team works on a better design and wording for the feature. Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link

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