Organic Themes, one of the oldest WordPress theme shops, was founded in 2009 in the town of Lahaina on the island of Maui, which was ground zero for the recent devastating wildfires. Until recently, Lahaina was home to Organic Themes co-founder David Morgan, who hosted the Maui WordPress meetups for years, and co-organized WordCamp Maui in 2015.
Morgan and his co-founder Jeff Milone have been best friends since high school. In 2007, Morgan sold everything and moved to Oahu, working as a freelance designer while living out of his car after arriving.
“While living on Oahu, Jeff and I began working long-distance on freelance WordPress projects,” Morgan said. “This led to the idea of starting a theme business together, and I invited Jeff to Hawaii in 2009. While he was visiting me on Oahu, we flew to Maui and fell in love with the island. We decided to start our business there.”
Organic Themes operated out of Lahaina for ten years before Morgan eventually returned to the mainland to start his family in Sarasota, Florida. Milone still resides in Maui part-time.
“We have friends that have lost their homes,” Morgan said. “We’ve been in touch with old neighbors and friends, and it’s been beyond shocking for us to see what has happened.”
The company recently created the Kokua Lahaina website and apparel products as a way to give back to their community. The site is built on WordPress and WooCommerce and uses the STAX block theme. Organic Themes is donating all profits to the Maui Strong Fund, which provides shelter, food, financial assistance, and other services to those impacted by the wildfires.
Work on WordPress 6.4 is kicking off with a post from Editor Triage Co-Lead Anne McCarthy that highlights everything the team has planned for the release. This will be the third major release of 2023, and is unique in that it’s being led by an underrepresented gender release squad.
Although WordPress is moving into Phase 3 of the Gutenberg project, which focuses on collaboration, 6.4 will primarily extend existing features in the block and site editors.
“Initial explorations for phase 3 will continue in the Gutenberg plugin, and any early wins will be added alongside the foundational work already planned in this major release,” McCarthy said.
WordPress 6.4 is anticipated to introduce typography management features, including a Font Library and server-side @font-face CSS generation and printing. This means users will be able to browse a library of fonts in the admin, similar to how they manage media. It will not be dependent on the theme that is activated but will be a library that is extensible for plugin developers.
WordPress 6.4 will also ship with a new Twenty Twenty-Four default theme that will showcase the latest capabilities of block themes.
McCarthy emphasized that the features published in the roadmap are “being actively pursued” but may not represent what actually lands in the final release.
WordPress 6.4 is anticipated to be released on November 7, 2023, with Beta 1 expected on September 26.
WordPressCS 3.0.0 was released this week with what its maintainer, Juliette Reinders Folmer, says are significant changes to improve the accuracy, performance, stability, and maintainability of all sniffs, and its handling of modern PHP. The project is a collection of PHP_CodeSniffer rules (sniffs) that are used to validate code developed for WordPress, helping developers meet the requirements of the official WordPress Coding Standards.
This update adds many of the non-controversial rules proposed in March 2020 to the Coding standards guidelines but leaves those that generated more discussion or objections for a future release. Many of the new rules are now available as sniffs in WordPressCS.
Version 3.0.0 includes important architecture changes. Most notably, Composer is now the only supported way to install WordPressCS, as this update includes four run-time dependencies. The release contains breaking changes for those using ignore annotations and those who maintain custom rulesets or have created a custom PHPCS standard based on the project. A detailed upgrade guide is available for these various scenarios.
WordPressCS is largely maintained by Folmer and a small group of volunteers, but the future of the project is in jeopardy if they cannot get funding. Folmer said it is currently in a good place with this release but this will not last long with the pace at which PHP is moving.
“WordPressCS 3.0.0 has cost thousands of hours of work and the vast majority of work has been done by one, mostly unpaid, contributor, with code review support from two fellow maintainers,” she said.
“Unless funding is found to continue maintaining WordPressCS and its dependencies, the future is bleak and maintenance will be halted.”
Folmer is calling on corporation and agency users of WordPressCS to find a way to fund the project’s continued maintenance and development. She elaborated on the dire need to have more contributors involved:
If we are being realistic, the bus factor of WordPressCS is 1, which is the most dangerous situation for any project to be in.
A large part of the WordPress community, including WordPress Core, relies heavily on the WordPress Coding Standards for code quality and security checks and while the community has been pretty vocal with copious complaints about the delayed release, barely anyone has stepped up and actually contributed.
The majority of the work for WordPressCS requires specialized knowledge. Knowledge which can be learned with enough time investment, but in recent years nobody has stepped up to do so.
This is an unsustainable situation and it ends now.
WordPressCS has become one of the most highly used open source tools in the WordPress ecosystem that is now in a vulnerable place with so few contributors. Although many developers commented on the release, thanking Folmer for her efforts, no contributors or corporations have publicly stepped forward to support the project’s continued develpment.
“With over 15 million installations on Packagist and a 400% increase in monthly installation in the past three years alone, WPCS’s popularity is surging and shows no sign of stopping,” Lucas Bustamante, a backend developer specialized in automated tests, commented on the post. “The situation is alarming as WPCS is a foundational tool that flags not only code style issues but also critical security issues, making WordPress a more secure CMS. Letting WPCS fall into limbo poses a risk to the entire WordPress ecosystem.”
WordPress Playground, an experimental project that uses WebAssembly (WASM) to run WordPress in the browser, makes it possible for users to quickly test plugins and themes without having to set up a local development environment.
Ordinarily, testing a plugin or theme with Playground requires visiting playground.wordpress.net, which will instantly create a real WordPress instance with admin access without having to install PHP, MySQL, or Apache. It runs inside the browser using a SQLite database. Adding a plugin or theme to the instance is as easy as appending the slug to the URL when creating the test site:
A new Chrome browser extension, created by LUBUS, a development agency, makes this even easier by adding a “Playground” button to theme and plugin pages on WordPress.org. Users can fire up a sandbox instance to test drive a theme or plugin in just one click.
I tested the extension and it works as advertised. It’s a neat little shortcut for launching a Playground instance without having to remember the URL or get the plugin/theme’s slug to append to it. The video below shows a site created with a selected plugin installed in under 20 seconds.
“We have been using Playground internally a lot for testing out plugins, and quick demos for internal or client meetings,” LUBUS founder Ajit Bohra said. “We often find a plugin or theme which we would like to test drive. It involves copying the slug of the theme or plugin and using them in the URL. To make this quick we thought of building and quick browser extension to add a button on wordpress.org to quickly launch a plugin or theme in the Playground.”
Bohra posted his process of creating the extension in a thread on X. He used the Plasmo framework, which offers a dedicated runtime for building browser extensions, taking the project from idea to built in approximately 30 minutes.
Bohra said the browser extension is currently a proof of concept that he would like to further extend with more settings based on feedback from users. He also hopes to collaborate with the Meta team in the future to see something like this added to the plugin and theme pages on WordPress.org so that users don’t have to rely on a browser extension.
Equalize Digital, a WordPress accessibility products and services company, has added a new frontend highlighting feature to its free accessibility checker plugin, which is used to perform audits on self-hosted sites. The feature was funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), through Equalize Digital’s consulting work on the new NASA websites.
Equalize Digital was contracted to perform accessibility testing, user testing with screen reader users, and provide accessibility governance recommendations.
“As part of the contract for those services, they also contracted us to develop this feature for the plugin,” Equalize Digital CEO Amber Hinds said. “They have an enterprise license but we decided in collaboration with them that we would make it a feature in the free plugin so everyone could benefit, not a paid-only feature.
“They were actually really interested in that because it’s part of their mission to give back to humanity.”
Prior to developing the frontend highlighting feature, the accessibility checker plugin only had reports inside the post edit screen, with output that is nearly indecipherable for less technical users who are not accustomed to reading HTML.
The new frontend highlighting feature makes the accessibility report’s output far more approachable for users who may not be developers. It puts a “view on page” link next to each issue found in the report, which brings users to the frontend where the element in question is highlighted with a dashed pink box. It also displays a panel that explains the issue in a way that is easier to understand as well as how to fix it.
The report in the admin has been updated as well so that it’s easier to read. A new image column displays any images related to issues and the Actions column includes a “View on Page” link leading to the issue highlighted on the frontend.
Hind said her team is working on making the tool more friendly to content creators and not just a development tool. The plugin will stay on the NASA website to help their team as they add and edit content over time.
“In the future, we’re planning to add the ability to jump to the element in the block editor as well,” Hinds said. “(That’s slightly tricky because we scan the whole page, not just the content area so we have to exclude elements created by other parts of the editor or theme.)”
“Our goal is to make accessibility testing easier for every WordPress user, not just developers,†Equalize Digital CEO Amber Hinds said. “Accessibility Checker was developed to include a robust free version with this in mind. We want to make building websites that work for people with disabilities standard practice and were excited to work with NASA to make accessibility testing reports easier for non-developers to understand and take action on. Adding this feature to the free plugin was a no-brainer for us. We’re looking forward to seeing more WordPress website owners finding and fixing accessibility problems on their websites.â€
This year’s WordCamp US includes a Community Summit, an invitation-only contributor-focused event that will take place prior to the main conference on August 22-23, 2023, in National Harbor, Washington, DC. It will be the first summit in six years, since the last one was held in Paris, France in 2017.
Historically, the summit has offered contributors the rare opportunity to hold in-person discussions on important topics across teams. In order to ensure the gathering is diverse and inclusive, previous community summit organizers have included a travel assistance program to remove the financial barriers of attending.
The 2023 Community Summit travel fund is providing $48,000 in travel assistance, thanks to a group of sponsors that includes Automattic, A2 Hosting, Elementor, and Weglot. The funding will support 38 attendees with roundtrip transportation ($31K for 24 people) and hotel stays ($16,500 for 66 hotel nights for 22 people).
Attendees have been reminded about the non-attribution guideline which enables the event to offer a safe and inclusive environment for collaboration where comments are not attributed to specific individuals. Discussions, photographs, recaps, and summaries can be shared as long as they abide by the non-attribution guideline.
The schedule has been published, featuring 26 discussion topics. Contributors will have dedicated sessions to discuss the criteria for delaying the upgrade of foundational tech, understanding contributor leadership roles, refining Five for the Future for a robust WordPress community, accessibility in the WordPress project, open source participation in global legislation, backwards compatibility in Gutenberg, among other interesting topics that lend themselves to cross-team collaboration.
The WP Community Collective (WPCC), a non-profit organization created to support individual WordPress contributors and community-led initiatives, has funded its first fellowship. Alex Stine, a fully blind individual contributor who has been working with the WordPress Accessibility team since 2016, is the first recipient of the funds designated for the fellowship.
WPCC reports that the fellowship received donations from 59 individuals and organizations that want to support the cause of improving the open source project’s accessibility. The organization uses Open Collective as the fiscal sponsor for its 501(c)3 status, enabling donations to be classified as charitable giving. All donations coming into the organization are transparent and publicly documented.
The fellowship provides Stine with five paid contribution hours per week for six months, which allows him to continue his work on accessibility reviews and patches in WordPress core. It includes a travel stipend for WordCamp US where Stine is volunteering as a co-organizer and participating in the Community Summit. As the first to embark on a WPCC fellowship, Stine will also help establish a framework for future Accessibility Fellowship cohorts.
“I am really excited for the future as this will allow me to commit real time to improving the project,” Stine said. “The support I received from the community shows me there are others who recognize the importance of accessibility.
“Time itself is the biggest win here. The funding allows me to focus more of my day on WordPress and less on side work. The main projects include the Gutenberg post editor.”
Stine recently conducted an accessibility audit of Gutenberg, which shows the current state of the block editor in WordPress 6.3. This video is very enlightening for anyone who hasn’t yet seen how Gutenberg works with assistive technology like a screen reader.
Stine has performed many accessibility audits for different products in the WordPress ecosystem. The fellowship funds enable him to continue his contributions on existing WordPress open source accessibility initiatives without having to take on as much consulting work.
group.one, a European cloud hosting and digital marketing services provider, has acquired the BackWPup, Adminimize, and Search & Replace plugins from Inpsyde. Together the products have more than 1.1 million active installs and will join group.one’s growing portfolio of WordPress products, which include WP Rocket, Imagify, and Rank Math SEO.
Inpsyde sold the plugins to focus more on its consulting and product services.
“This sale lets us concentrate on our core competencies and work more closely with our clients, like PayPal, Payoneer, and Mollie, providing the know-how to develop and reach their full potential with new avenues for advancement,” Inpsyde CEO Alex Frison said.
 The acquired plugins will be managed by the development team at WP Media, one of group.one’s brands, expanding its offerings beyond optimization and SEO to include backup and site management capabilities.
“Backup and recovery solutions are crucial to protect websites against data loss and we look forward to further developing BackWPup, along with Adminimize and Search & Replace,” group.one CEO Daniel Hagemeier said. “Together with WordPress hosting from WP.one and one.com, and our flagship products WP Rocket, Imagify, and Rank Math SEO, WordPress users can now come to group.one to optimize, secure, maintain and promote their online presence.â€
When asked what specific features are being prioritized on the immediate roadmap, group.one representative Simon Kraft said “the smooth transition over to WP Media” is their focus following the sale. He was unable to comment on whether the commercial versions of the acquired plugins would be subject to any pricing changes.
WordPress.org’s support forums are a vital resource and communication tool for users supporting their own sites and developers extending the software. Visiting the forums often means users have gotten stuck somehow and need to have a successful support experience in order to continue on their WordPress journeys. They are looking for help deciphering the meaning of error messages, migrating sites, debugging their sites after an update, and many other common struggles of self-hosting.
A ticket on Meta trac, which was opened three weeks ago, proposes that WordPress.org remove auto-closure from support forum threads and instead add a warning that the thread is old. Threads currently auto-close after a year unless manually closed sooner than that.
Amber Hinds, plugin author and CEO of Equalize Digital, made a case for instances where it is necessary to respond to an old thread:
As a plugin dev, we forgot to subscribe to a plugin’s forum and only saw support threads many months later. Currently, there is no way to provide assistance on these threads.
If a user requests a feature that is not currently available and you release it many months later, it would be nice to update their support request and let them know.
Hinds referenced a conversation on Post Status’ Slack where Matt Mullenweg recommended removing the closure for old threads completely and adding a warning in its place:
Let’s move away from auto-closing to just having a warning that you’re replying to an old thread
Not all participants in the discussion are in favor of leaving support tickets open. Several contributors contended that this approach can lead to unproductive replies piling up or multiple people jumping in on threads with similar unrelated issues, making it difficult for developers to solve the original request.
“Old topics mostly attract spam, me-too-pile’ons and random replies, its very rare when an actual reply is needed to something that has no activity for six months,” WordPress support forums moderator Yui said.
“Current policy is to leave such topics closed, however, making an exclusion and manually reopen it at request can be made possible when the reasons for it are compelling (It can be discussed on Support team weekly chat, if needed).”
WordPress accessibility contributor Joe Dolson is in favor of giving plugin authors the ability to determine when a thread gets closed, a modification that partially addresses the issues at play.
“It would help alleviate it to give plugin authors the ability to close a thread,” Dolson said. “Though when you have thousands of open support threads, that would still be a pretty significant potential burden.
“I think there should be a better way of handling closed support threads – it’s a problem that auto-closed threads literally *cannot* be re-opened because they’ll just auto-close again. But I’m dubious about just leaving them open.
“At the least, I think that removing the auto-closing *must* come with some ability for plugin authors to close threads; otherwise this would become totally unmanageable.”
Changing thread closure policy could also impact the metric displayed on plugins, indicating how many issues have been marked as resolved in the last two months. If more people are allowed to jump in on threads with them open, the resolved threads metric may not be as meaningful.
Hinds recommends a hybrid approach, keeping auto-close in place but allowing plugin contributors to reopen threads, restarting the clock for auto-closure.
“I discovered 12 support tickets yesterday on a plugin I had not realized we were not subscribed to, which I want to at least comment on to see if they still need help,” Hinds said. “I can’t do this. It’s a frustrating experience for me and clearly a poor user experience for the original poster or anyone else who encounters that thread with a similar problem.
“Another option might be to auto-close them but add a button that allows them to be reopened by plugin contributors that sets another six-month (or maybe a shorter time period) timeline before auto-close.”
It’s easy to forget that most people do have a vast network of WordPress professionals available to answer questions for them on Twitter or other networks, so the forums remain an important lifeline for users. Contributors have not yet come to a decision about whether leaving threads open for longer will provide a better experience or not. The discussion on changing the auto-close policy continues on Meta trac.
What are blocks? WordPress has added a new resource to its website at wordpress.org/blocks that attempts to explain blocks visually with simple language. The landing page is aimed at those who are new to the block paradigm or those who may not yet fully understand blocks’ ease of use and powerful features.
Automattic-sponsored core contributor Anne McCarthy announced the new page on WordPress.org with a request for feedback, as this is the first iteration. The project was born out of ticket on GitHub which outlines the need for more effective block marketing:
Currently, there isn’t a page on wordpress.org that explains in a compelling way what ‘Blocks’ are or markets it very effectively on the website. We have a filter in the plugin directory, which is useful, but that page is lacking the context of what blocks are, what the block editor is, and why it is so exciting. There are other pages, such as the documentation, that explains what the block editor is, but IMO it’s a bit wordy and explains how to use the editor, but not necessarily why you should use the editor and why it is unique and exciting.
One important consideration for contributors working on this project is the overlap with wordpress.org/gutenberg. The Blocks page is more of a static brochure style introduction, whereas the Gutenberg page is a fully interactive demo that offers an overview of how the editor works. Although they are similar resources, they both have distinct purposes.
McCarthy created a tracking issue for the first iteration of this page, which functions as a mini roadmap for future improvements based on feedback she has already received. More accessibility improvements are coming in future versions, along with some sort of visual that will concisely demonstrate the connection between blocks, patterns, and themes. Contributors are also considering integrating WP Sandbox to make it possible to see blocks in action.
“This is intended to be a starting point and not a final destination,” McCarthy said. “Your feedback is welcomed and needed to get to the next iteration.”
The blocks page is one area of contribution where even people who are brand new to blocks could help to make the content more compelling and less confusing by leaving feedback on the post.
Blocks are something many casual WordPress users may still be trying to wrap their heads around, not to mention how they impact the ecosystem of plugins and themes. The Classic Editor plugin, which insulates users from the world of blocks, remains one of the most popular plugins with more than 5 million users. Its continued support is not guaranteed forever, especially as WordPress looks to revamp the admin design to be more similar to the block editor. This landing page’s marketing for blocks offers a safe entry point for those who are curious about the block editor and want to explore more resources.
