The Preferred Languages project is gaining some momentum with this week’s 2.0 release of the feature plugin. In 2017, WordPress Core Committer Pascal Birchler released a prototype that lets users select multiple preferred languages in their settings so that WordPress will load the first translation available, falling back to the next language in the list.
“More than half of all WordPress sites in the world use a language other than US English,” Birchler said in a previous update. “For these sites and users, the options to change the site and user language are great. But when there’s no translation for a given plugin or theme, WordPress falls back to US English. That’s a poor user experience for many non-English speakers.”
Version 2.0 introduces some major changes with a full refactoring of the UI to use React. (Previously it was using jQuery and jQuery UI.) Birchler removed the drag and drop sorting functionality to improve accessibility but users should find that almost everything the plugin still looks the same as before.
This update also brings compaibility with with WP_Textdomain_Registry and switch_to_user_locale() for users on WordPress 6.1+ and brings unit test coverage to nearly 100%.
The Preferred Languages plugin has more than 2,000 active installs but Birchler is calling for people to test the update, as he believes the plugin is close to a core merge proposal.
“One big remaining question mark is the concept of translation merging,” he said. “By default, if there are only some missing strings in a selected locale, these would be displayed in English. But with translation merging, the missing strings will be taken from the locale next in line instead. While this works great, it could be a tad slow due to the way translations are loaded in WordPress. Any help addressing this potential performance concern would be greatly appreciated.”
Testers can contribute to the code on GitHub, leave feedback on the support forum, and open new issues to submit bug reports. Getting this project into core will make using WordPress and its plugin and theme ecosystems more accessible for non-English speakers.
ACF (Advanced Custom Fields) version 6.1 was released this week with support for creating Custom Post Types and Taxonomies. This is a long-awaited feature that users have been asking for since the earliest days of the plugin when it was still developed by its original author, Elliot Condon.
When Delicious Brains acquired the plugin, the ACF community reiterated this feature request. WP Engine kept it on the roadmap when they acquired ACF in June 2022 and has finally been able to deliver. Registering post types and taxonomies is now available through a simple interface that works in a similar way to creating field groups and fields.
After registering the CPT, users can then add an existing or new field group for it or create a taxonomy, and move on from there. The advantage is that users don’t have to break their workflows and use a different plugin for this functionality. For those managing client websites, it is one fewer plugin required.
“We know there are a large number of ACF users registering custom post types (CPTs) and creating custom fields for them,” WP Engine Senior Product Manager Iain Poulson said. “But they have to register the CPTs either manually with code or using another plugin. The overarching workflow of modeling the data needed for a site build is fragmented between different plugins, UIs, and user experiences. We wanted to fix that!”
ACF reports more than 4.5 million users, so it will be interesting to see how having this built in will impact the CPTUI user base, which is active on more than a million websites. Some users simply need custom post types but won’t require all of ACF’s capabilities, but there is certainly a large overlap between the two plugins.
After expanding well beyond the creation of custom fields with this and previous updates, Poulson said they will be referring to the plugin as “ACF” more going forward. The plugin’s admin sidebar menu has been updated from “Custom Fields” to ACF.
Version 6.1 also includes the following highlights and important changes:
New ‘browse fields’ button opens a modal to search and showcase all field types
Post Object, Page Link and Relationship fields now support filtering by post status
 Full compatibility with PHP versions 8.1 and 8.2
New option to filter field settings tabs so other plugins can add custom tabs and arrange their fields
Security fix backported to ACF 5.12.5 for a security issue where ACF might unserialize maliciously manipulated data which instantiates a class
All of these new features are available in both the free version and ACF Pro. Check out the changelog for the full rundown of everything included in version 6.1.
iThemes, one of the oldest brands in WordPress that originally launched around theme products nearly 15 years ago, is rebranding to SolidWP. Over the years, the company’s products became increasingly centered on plugins, yet the old brand had so much name recognition that its leadership was not quick to change it.
“iThemes is known today for security, backups, and site maintenance – none of which are well-represented in the name ‘iThemes,’” StellarWP Senior Director of Ops and Marketing Matt Cromwell said. “Additionally, the brand evokes the early 2000’s Apple era of technology, and we want to look toward the future.”
This week the company kicked off a “rebrand in public” approach to updating its identity to be more aligned with promoting iThemes’ key offerings – its security, backup, syncing, and educational products. They will all be rebranded to the following:
Solid Security
Solid Backups
Solid Central
Solid Academy
“This shift in branding signifies our renewed focus on providing a solid foundation for every WordPress website,” Cromwell said. “Our whole team, as well as our products, will pivot to focus on security, backups, site maintenance, and training as we enhance and improve our solutions for all of our users.”
The rebranding is a massive undertaking, as the company’s products have millions of users and years worth of articles, webinars, eBooks, and tutorials. SolidWP will present reworked pricing and retire some legacy products in the process.
“Currently on ithemes.com you’ll find a lot of products that are either part of a bundle, or sold on other websites in a variety of ways,” Cromwell said in the FAQ section of the announcement. “Some products will continue to thrive on their own, and others will be retired. We plan on reviewing publicly the complete inventory of our current products and bundles and working with the community to shape what the future plan is for each.”
The company is not planning to increase prices on its products at this time but Cromwell said they reserve the right to adjust pricing as needed. iThemes will also be consulting its community regarding products that are slated to be retired.
“We will continue to support any and all who land in our support queue with our best efforts and service,” Cromwell said. “The official end-of-life for the products being sunset will be discussed with the community and decided on before the full launch of our new brand.”
Our access to the Twitter API is currently blocked. As a result, Jetpack Social is temporarily unable to automatically share your posts directly from https://t.co/eRvNKWaolr to Twitter. We have reached out to Twitter for more information on how to get unblocked.
The API enables features like Jetpack Social’s Twitter connection. Users who rely on this Jetpack module to auto-tweet their published posts will see errors in the dashboard until this issue is resolved.
WordPress.com advised that reconnecting will not work at this time, nor will trying to establish a new connection. Connections to other social networks are still operational.
On large publishing sites some authors may not be aware that the auto-tweet functionality is broken. For the time being, the solution is to manually tweet published posts.
Jetpack users reported the issue in the plugin’s support forums 10 hours ago, as some of them are Jetpack Social paid subscribers. In October 2022, Jetpack announced a paid plan for its Social plugin and limited the free version to 30 social shares per month, a controversial monetization decision that left many users in search of alternatives.
Several users asked if refunds will be coming their way if the fix for the issue is not forthcoming, as auto-sharing to Facebook and Twitter is one of the main reasons customers subscribe to the service.
“We are aware of issue and are looking into it with Twitter, but at this stage we don’t know when it will be fixed,” a Jetpack support representative responded to customers. “We’re working with Twitter to find the best solution possible.”
Twitter launched its new API access tiers on March 29, 2023. Access to the Enterprise tier requires an application process. Over the next 30 days Twitter is deprecating its previous access tiers and is encouraging developers to migrate to the new tiers as soon as possible to avoid disruption.
Abisko places a strong emphasis on both images and typography, featuring the geometric “Plus Jakarta Sans” font for both headings and paragraph text. Plus Jakarta Sans was designed by Gumpita Rahayu from Tokotype in 2020. It seems to be gaining popularity and was mostly recently featured in the free Lemmony theme we reviewed last month. Plus Jakarta Sans is available as a free variable font and also on Google Fonts.
Abisko includes five different style variations, with unique color palettes that will change the entire look and feel of the site. These are found under Appearance > Editor and can be accessed through the Styles panel and applied globally when editing any template.
Abisko packages more than 30 patterns for users to mix and match in creating pages. These include a grid with logo types, various artfully designed gallery layouts, contact section, various calls-to-action, hero patterns with images and background colors, testimonials grid, FAQ section, features list, a pricing table, large numbered lists, a wide separator with vertical margins, and more.
The theme also has five full-page layouts available as patterns: About Us, Contact Us, FAQ, Front Page, and a Linktree style page.
The evolution of WordPress themes, becoming fully editable and packaged with style variations and dozens of patterns, means there is no single screenshot that can fully represent what a theme might look like. Check out the live demo to see what is possible and the page that previews all the block patterns.
WooCommerce has announced a 24-hour virtual contributor day that will happen on April 19, 2023. Contributors will be working on the WooCommerce Core and WooCommerce Blocks repositories. To give better coverage over time zones, organizers will have two kickoff times (0 UTC and 12 UTC).
WooCommerce hasn’t had a WooConf in-person conference since 2017, opting instead for virtual events like WooSesh where people can attend and watch presentations for free. The open source project has focused more on virtual communication channels to help contributors stay connected, such as the new monthly chat focused on WooCommerce block extensibility. This virtual contribution day will be the first of its kind for WooCommerce.
“We are asking for a minimum of 4 hours of your time to dedicate to a curated list of issues,” WooCommerce developer advocate Stephanie Pi said. “These issues have been selected based on the effort needed to solve them –we’re only including issues that we believe can be solved within the day.
“Any issues picked up and worked on during contributor day will be merged before the next release. We are committed to making sure this happens because we want to honor the time our community is dedicating to this event.”
The virtual event will be a more intense, focused time than what one might experience at a WordCamp contributor day, with key WooCommerce decision makers present to help keep things moving.
Organizers will be creating new channels in the WooCommerce Community Slack, that will be dedicated to the different issues they plan to work on during the 24-hour event. This includes a channel for helping contributors get set up with a development environment. Those interested to attend can watch for updates in the #announcements channel.
Over the past year a group of WordPress contributors have been working on making it easier for developers to build interactive blocks. These are the kinds of experiences that allow visitors to submit a form and get feedback without reloading the page, load paginated content without refreshing, and improve e-commerce stores with more dynamic responses based on visitor interaction.
A new proposal for an Interactivity API aims to provide a standard way for developers to add interactivity to the frontend, making it faster to build these experiences without reinventing the wheel every time.
Automattic-sponsored core contributor Mario Santos cast the vision for what the new API will deliver:
What if effortlessly creating performant, fluid, and idiomatic frontend interactivity on block-based WordPress sites was possible? Imagine plugins providing interactions like “heart this post†or “add to cart†without page reloads. Picture instant search, commenting, and native full-page transitions as best-in-class built-ins without complex scaffolding or external tools. Envision achieving this in any block theme by default without sacrificing PHP server rendering and the plugin ecosystem for a JS runtime. Visualize block developers easily declaring and extending such behaviors in a way that is immediately familiar and compatible with the block ecosystem.
Santos published a demo video accompanied by a live interactive demo where visitors can favorite movies and have the favorite count instantly updated in the block in the header. Pagination and search update the content without refreshing the page. The code for the demo is available on GitHub.
The Interactivity API is being created for use on the frontend of block-based websites but contributors may also explore the possibility of reusing some of its directives inside the editor. They are taking a similar approach to Alpine.js with “directives” that extend HTML with special attributes, except designed specifically for WordPress and backwards compatible with its APIs.
“The API is designed for the world of blocks and takes WordPress history of being closely attached to web standards to heart,” Santos said.
“As directives are added to the HTML, they work great with dynamic blocks and PHP.”
Having a standard in place means that WordPress developers don’t have to roll their own solutions for things like tooling, inter-block communication, and frontend performance. They would be primarily responsible for the block logic, making creating interactive blocks easier and more approachable for less experienced developers.
Contributors on the project have selected Preact to build the directives system due to its HTML-friendliness, small size, performance, extensibility, and compatibility with React.
The Interactivity API is currently in the stage of gathering feedback to incorporate in development as well as expanding technical documentation.
“Although it is now distributed as a plugin, it aims to be added as an experimental feature to Gutenberg,” Santos said. “The goal is to include it in Core once enough feedback has been gathered, and it’s clear that it’s the right direction.”
Initial reactions to the proposed API have been mostly positive, as developers have previously had to build their own solutions for interactivity in the absence of a standard.
“The Interactivity API is one of the most interesting proposals for WordPress frontend UX & DX that I’ve seen in awhile,” WordPress Core contributor Weston Ruter said.
“As someone who has been experimenting a lot with using AlpineJS, HTMX, Unpoly, StimulusJS, etc. for interactivity on the frontend, having a blessed solution in WP core would be most welcome,” another developer (@r1ckd33zy) commented.
WordPress developer and WPGraphQL contributor David Levine seemed less enthused about the approach outlined in the proposal. “Great idea but shortsighted execution,” Levine said. “We need an actual block data layer, not to further pollute our markup for our scripts to parse. This just exacerbates the same problems that got us into this mess.”
A few others in the comments of the post have been critical of the approach and others have questions about long term challenges of maintaining this approach.
“This is a pretty out-there which is quite a different approach to anything I’ve seen before,” WordPress core contributor Joe Hoyle said. “That does give me caution, as it’s very wp specific / centric. I think with the block editor there’s opportunity to align more with industry innovation around front-end tooling. I think it’s really great work and very creative; but again I’m not yet sure it’s the right direction. It could be that there’s no long term solution to bring an ‘nextjs’-ification to WordPress, but I’m not sure I’m looking at it.”
The proposal includes examples of how to create interactive blocks using the API and developers have opened a lively discussion on the approach. Contributors on the Interactivity API are planning to host two sessions on April 17, 2023 (one at 08:00UTC and another at 17:00UTC) that will include a live product demo followed by a Q&A. Check out the proposal for more details and the Interactivity API GitHub repo to see some experiments the team has been working on so far.
WordPress 6.2 “Dolphy” was released today, named in honor of American jazz alto saxophonist, bass clarinetist, and flautist Eric Allan Dolphy Jr. This is the first of three planned major releases in 2023. It includes more than 900 enhancements and bug fixes, with a strong focus on improving the site editing experience.
One of the major highlights of the 6.2 release is the completely revamped Site Editor interface. The browse mode style of navigation lets users quickly slide between editing and previews of templates and template parts, with a new unified design that makes it feel like it’s all part of the same application.
Color-coded labels have been added in 6.2, which give users more visual cues in finding their template parts and reusable blocks inside the List View, the Block toolbar, and on the Canvas.
With these and other updates, the Site Editor is now out of beta. Inside the admin, the About page includes beautifully designed screenshots of each feature with the vibrant blue color that has become part of WordPress’ identity in the new design that is slowly being rolled out across WordPress.org.
WordPress 6.2 About page
For those switching from a Classic theme to a Block theme, widgets will now automatically become Template Parts to make it an easier transition.
Improved Navigation Block Experience for Managing Menus
Managing Navigation menus just got easier with a new sidebar inside the Site Editor that allows users to quickly add, remove, and reorder menu items.
WordPress 6.2 About page
Updated Block Inserter with Media Tab and Openverse Integration
The Block Inserter is sporting a new design that better integrates media, making it faster to insert images, video, and audio, with a new tab alongside blocks and patterns. Users can select the new tab and select a media type to see the ten most recent items.
WordPress 6.2 also adds integration with Openverse to this new media tab. Users now have access to the Openverse library of more than 700 free-to-use openly licensed and public domain works, directly inside the editor. Clicking on an Openverse image will instantly insert it as an Image block with the proper attribution and license automatically added to the caption, a much faster experience than downloading and uploading to the Media Library.
New Distraction-Free Writing Mode
WordPress 6.2 introduces a distraction-free writing mode that offers a more focused writing experience, hiding unnecessary interface elements from the editor. This video from the 6.2 testing guide shows how it can be enabled and disabled.
Other notable features and updates in 6.2 include the following:
 A new collection of header and footer patterns for block themes
Scaled block settings with split controls to better organize Styles and Settings options
A new Style Book that displays every block in the site’s library at a glance where they can be previewed and edited globally
Copy and Paste styles between blocks
Improved pattern insertion with patterns organized into more categories, like headers and footers
Custom CSS support sitewide and for specific blocks
Sticky positioning to keep top-level group blocks fixed to the top of a page as visitors scroll
Improved privacy for default themes with locally hosted Google Fonts
WordPress 6.2 was made possible by more than 600 contributors across 50 countries, with 178 of those contributing for the first time. Update today to get access to all these new features and bug fixes. For the most comprehensive coverage of all the under-the-hood changes for developers and extenders, check out the WordPress 6.2 Field Guide.
WP Engine’s Pattern Manager is now available in the WordPress Plugins Directory. The plugin gives WordPress professionals a dedicated interface for browsing, designing, and organizing patterns with categories, keywords, descriptions, and more. It is still in beta and not recommended for use in production. Although it can be used on a lived website, the plugin’s intended use is for managing patterns on a locally hosted development site.
The Pattern Manager makes it possible to use core features for which there isn’t yet an interface:
When a user makes a new page or post, auto-show a modal with your patterns, available to be used.
Make your pattern available in the block inserter, or choose to hide it from the inserter.
Allow users to transform any block into your pattern.
WP Engine made several improvements to the plugin based on beta feedback since the time we reviewed the plugin earlier this month. The matter of where the patterns are stored was one issue the testers were concerned about. Pattern Manager pushes the patterns to PHP files every time the user saves them, which also makes them available for collaboration via git.
“One of the most requested features was child theme support, so we added that,” WP Engine Principal Engineer Mike McAlister said. “Now, if you have a child theme active, Pattern Manager will save your new patterns to the child theme, while all of the patterns in your parent theme are still available.”
Another common request McAlister’s team received was the ability to register custom pattern categories. This feature is currently in development and will be available in the plugin in the near future.
“Other than that, we made a lot of nice little improvements like adding a setting for defining the pattern preview width, deprioritizing the Pattern Manager admin menu item (which was previously at the top of the admin menu), and some light UI touch-ups,” McAlister said.
“We had over 300 people in the beta and the feedback was highly positive, which is surprising for a niche developer tool like this. To me, it speaks to the interest in all of this new WordPress technology and how developers are looking for tools like Pattern Manager to help them start working with it.”
WordPress 6.2 was scheduled for release today, but contributors discovered a bug with date formats during the 24-hour freeze that they believe could have a significant impact on functionality like bookings, date permalinks, and e-commerce stores.
The decision was made this morning to delay with a consensus to apply a revert and release a silent 6.2 RC5 with the fix. WordPress 6.2 Core Tech Co-Lead Tonya Mork proposed reverting as the impact seemed too widespread to risk releasing today with a fix delayed to a minor release.
“I don’t think this can wait until 6.2.1 given that this isn’t just some text that won’t bold, but something that will have quite a big impact (including stress/financial) on site owners and staff managing bookings and such,” 6.2 Core Triage Lead Colin Stewart said.
WordPress Core Committer Jonathan Desrosiers also weighed in on the issue in favor of a revert and silent RC5.
“I also think that [it’s] impossible to anticipate the full impact of this change,” Desrosiers said. “This definitely illustrates the importance of accompanying even the smallest changes with appropriate tests. We owe this due diligence to our users.
“If we release the issue with 6.2 we could have a much greater problem on our hands. It’s not something that would not be easy to recognize or understand for the large majority of users, and it’s nearly impossible for Core to ‘auto-fix’ any occurrences of the bug in a future minor release. We also should really avoid having to include fixes like that anyway as they’re just a huge maintenance burden/technical debt.”
Contributors in the discussion this morning agreed that knowingly shipping broken code just to keep the schedule would be a wrong move and that shipping a fix today could introduce additional problems. An announcement will be posted to the Make/Core, followed by the 6.2 RC5 release, which will restart the 24-hour clock ahead of the official 6.2 release tomorrow.
