WordPress is 20 years old today, an estimable milestone for open source software running on the web. Parties are happening all over the world – in Geneva, Los Angeles, Istanbul, Bangkok, Lahore, Jakarta, Mumbai – in over 150 different locations.
The software has been downloaded more than 2.8 billion times but the most impressive stat is the project’s staggering 112,000 contributors, past and present, who have improved and energized WordPress with their passion, talent, and hard work.
None of the global collaboration we enjoy today would exist without the inspiration and leadership of co-founders Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. They worked in a distributed way from day one, having never met when they started WordPress. This way of working created the foundation for a global contributor base that now supports 43% of the world’s websites.
WordPress celebrates 20 years tomorrow. It's grown from a comment on a blog post to a web spanning phenomenon. Thanks to an outstanding community and the freedoms of Open Source. Happy Birthday, WordPress! #WP20#WordPresspic.twitter.com/fght4XMJXb
WordPress has had a profound impact on the lives of millions of users, giving them a voice on the web and the tools to launch businesses, create jobs, and bring ideas to life. The #WP20 hashtag is replete with stories of how WordPress and its community have given people a place of belonging and launched them into successful endeavors.
Congratulations WordPress – 20 already
I discovered WordPress at the lowest point in my life back in 2012 when I was homeless and jobless in the new city. I was desperate to get back to tech but as a college dropout – there were no jobs for me in IT.
Does WordPress have 20 more years in its future? Two of the biggest challenges ahead are capturing the hearts of the next generation of builders and maintainers, and preserving the open web where WordPress has thrived. The project’s 2022 annual survey showed that the respondent demographic is aging. The percentage of respondents under age 40 has decreased every year, as WordPress enters its third decade.
Ensuring that WordPress remains resilient and relevant to future generations has required some courageous leadership decisions, like introducing the block editor, and may bring some significant shifts down the road, as we enter a new era of AI-powered innovation.
Major milestones are are a good time to acknowledge the efforts that made all of this possible. Thank you, dedicated contributors, for lending WordPress a little bit of your fire and a lot of your patience, nurturing, and support. The code under the hood may look very different from the early days in 2003, but WordPress is still that same scrappy, irrepressible force of good on the web that users can count on for years to come.
WordPress is celebrating its 20th anniversary tomorrow and recently its co-founders, Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, joined Drupal founder Dries Buytaert together on stage at a private event for the first time on May 17. They discussed how their lives were influenced by open source and how they built their projects around the freedoms it guarantees.
Founders of both projects expounded on the benefits of open source collaboration, and Buytaert characterized their continued improvements as an example of the flywheel effect, accumulating small wins that compound over time. They discussed the early history of WordPress and how something as seemingly insignificant as a comment on a blog can be the first step towards building a better future for the web.
Mullenweg acknowledged that it may not be possible to reach everyone with open source philosophy so “at the end of the day you have to make the best user experience.” This has been WordPress’ path over the past 20 years, working in tandem with the power of its open source license and the freedoms that has enabled for the community.
“I consider all proprietary software to be an evolutionary dead end,” Mullenweg said. They discussed how AI is changing the developer experience. Mullenweg is optimistic about AI working with open source and reiterated what he said recently on Post Status’ Slack:
Open source and AI are the two mega trends of the next twenty years, and the reason they are complimentary is that GPT4 hasn’t read Shopify’s code. It’s read Drupal’s code and WordPress’ code, and all 55,000 plugins and everything else, so it can write it. If you ask it to write a website, it’s going to write it in an open source thing. It’s not going to write it in these propriety things. From an evolutionary point of view, if you go far enough into the future, someday we’ll see even our proprietary competitors – the Wix’s and Squarespace and Shopify’s of the world, actually running on open source software.
That’s part of our vision with Gutenberg as well as why we made it an even more permissive license than the GPL. We dual-licensed it under the MPL so it could even be embedded in commercial applications, because I really think it’s so important that I want it to be in even commercial applications.
Check out the video embedded below to hear this historic conversation between some of the pioneers of open source publishing on the web.
WordPress’ Performance Team has published a summary of a core performance analysis they completed in order to identify and prioritize areas for improvement. As part of this process, contributors created a methodology with a standard set of tools that can be used to collect and share profiling data for various components of the application.
The team tested a classic theme (Twenty Twenty-One) and a block theme (Twenty Twenty-Three) configured with the Theme Unit Test data. They tested out of the box functionality, in addition to different scenarios such as a homepage displaying the latest posts, a basic text-only page, a page with a large set of images and default blocks, and a homepage and a basic page with translation.
These tests uncovered numerous performance issues which the team has documented with related trac tickets and detailed in the summary of the findings. The first priority identified for improvement is template loading for classic themes.
Although WordPress contributors are blazing forward on the project’s roadmap for the block editor, with most of the headline release features focused on site editing, block theme adoption is not where one might expect it to be more than four years after Gutenberg landed in core.
“A majority of websites still use the classic theme architecture, so improvements made here could have the largest horizontal impact,” 10-up sponsored WordPress Core Committer Joe McGill said in the summary.
McGill referenced data collected in April 2023 for the HTTPArchive which uses a query based on a new HTTP Archive custom metric to detect block theme adoption. Based on this information, improving template loading and rendering for classic themes should remain a high priority. Most of the WordPress-powered web is still running on classic themes.
The summary highlights the improvements for template loading that would make the most impact:
In the classic theme tested, the most expensive process is related to locating and rendering template parts. This starts with get_template_part(), includes the process of locating the template part files with locate_template(), and rendering the content for each template part. This whole process accounted for approximately 30–60% of the entire server response in the test results, with much of that time spent handling filesystem checks (e.g., file_exists() is responsible for 4–9% of all time measured and can likely be optimized with a cache), rendering widget blocks, etc. Given many of these filesystem checks aren’t likely to produce different outcomes often between requests, there are likely opportunities to find substantial improvements here.
These improvements are the first of five priorities the Performance Team identified as the result of analysis. The second recommendation is to improve translation loading, as more than 56% of all WordPress websites are using translations.
The other three priorities include improvements for block-powered sites, with the first two ringing up as the most costly operations in terms of performance:
Improve handling of block registration from metadata
Improve resolving block templates
Improve rendering of block widgets
“These efforts will likely require additional research and architectural design before engineering begins,” McGill said. “All other items identified could be worked on directly through individual Trac tickets as capacity allows.”
The Performance Team is considering making the tooling for performance profiling more broadly available so other contributors can extend their work. In the future, they may also consider contacting hosting companies to get them to run analysis on their infrastructure and examine additional use cases, such as PHP versions, Object Caching configuration, and more. Once the methodology used for this analysis is nailed down, future efforts to improve performance may become more frequent and easier to produce.
Tammie Lister is our guest on the latest Hostinger Academy podcast. As a product creator, open-source designer, and core contributor involved in WordPress releases, we discuss how Gutenberg evolves and empowers its users.
WordPress is almost synonymous with websites. After all, the CMS makes up 45% of websites on the internet, and over 70% of Hostinger clients use it to build their websites. As WordPress keeps evolving and growing its user base, we talked to Tammie Lister to find out how the core contributors are working to improve WordPress and bring more value to its users.
Tammie has been involved with WordPress since the project’s early days. She started using WordPress for blogging after someone introduced it to her as a solution for a customizable CMS, and she never looked back.
After attending WordCamp in Portsmouth, she started contributing to WordPress herself. She described her WordPress contribution journey as a beautiful spiral as she became increasingly involved until she eventually became a full-time core contributor.
Fast-forward to today, Tammie is contributing as a hobby and working between design and development, as she is interested in the product side of things.
In this podcast episode, Hostinger’s Head of Content, Emma Young, sits down with Tammie to discuss how the core contributors are working to improve WordPress to bring more value to its users. Tammie also shared some insights into the future of WordPress and Gutenberg.
Watch the Full Podcast
Watch the full podcast on the Hostinger Academy YouTube channel.
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Experimentation is at the heart of Gutenberg. After all, the tool exists because people with different visions and ideas experimented for five to six years before the project officially began.
Tammie uses the old parable to describe the process:
“The whole process resembled the story of the blind men and the elephant. The men are all trying to describe what an elephant looks like without being able to see one in the flesh. Someone probably got the trunk right, and someone figured out the leg, but they all had to work together to piece out the complete elephantâ€, she explains. That’s what happened with Gutenberg – the project combined input from various contributors together to bring us the final result.
Experimentation will also be an important part of the upcoming Gutenberg development phase. After all, experiments could help develop game-changing features or uncover technical roadblocks that need to be fixed.
Or, as Tammie explains: “Someone could come up with an incredible experiment that completely pivots our plans.†In order to create the best possible tool out there, experiments, together with community input and feedback, have become a staple with Gutenberg and WordPress core updates.
For the project to be successful, it needs to cater to different users – from agencies and product people to multilingual users, and so on. Initially, it was difficult to get feedback on new developments, as the team didn’t organize calls for testing. Organizing in-depth feedback sessions can be time-consuming, but the team agrees that the benefits outweigh the hassle. Now, they are trying to make testing calls a habit.
“So we’ve had testing tables and tried to get different people to participate. Ideally, the people who are developing certain features would also attend to hear what users think first-hand. I did some user interviews in Japan. That was amazing,†Tammie shares her experience in gathering feedback. She agrees that it’s all about getting into the habit of collecting feedback rather than just expecting someone to report an issue or share their two cents with you.
And thanks to that habit, the project now has initiatives focused on user feedback. Full Site Editing (FSE) calls for testing are a prime example of this. People can run a user test at home, do tasks on WordPress, such as building a front page, and send feedback. This feedback is powerful because it can come from anyone, not just the contributors. “You don’t create the next evolution of WP just by listening to the people who are full-time contributorsâ€, Tammie says.
Testing and sending feedback are also great ways to contribute to WordPress. Contribution is often tied to a specific WordPress team, like core or design. But in Tammie’s mind, contributing means you move the project on in some way or another.
Maximizing Gutenberg’s Potential
Tammie sees Gutenberg as a toolkit that should provide the bare minimum to help you achieve what you want. Ideally, the tool should have all the features for site editing, from beginners to pros and beyond.
Tammie’s main advice for WordPress users is to not go against the Site Editor, as it’s more of a sliding scale. Users don’t have to do everything with it – they can use it just to colorize the text or use theme.json for development. Ultimately, it’s in the user’s hands to choose their own adventures.
Beginners don’t have to learn everything either to get started. Tammie recommends using a default theme and core blocks, and getting to know how they work by using them. There’s also the Create Block Theme plugin that helps you create a child theme. If you feel brave, you could just start editing the theme itself, making it your own. It’s the easiest way to learn how to edit a theme without learning to code.
The Gutenberg and block themes have also grown, with more theme options available in the WordPress repository.
“Look at the themes that are out there and look at people who are building on top of them to start building one yourself,†Tammie says. Browsing for themes can open up more design options for you, and seeing how people build a website based on one can inspire your build, too.
Keeping your website light from the beginning is also important. “Don’t load too many blocks to start off with. Know the core blocks,†Tammie advises. While there are plenty of great block library plugins, it’s highly advisable not to install them before knowing what you can already do with the core blocks. Determine what you need first, and see if the core blocks fit them.
The Future of Gutenberg and WordPress
WordPress is celebrating its 20th anniversary on May 27, 2023, and Tammie shared her hopes for WordPress for the next 10-20 years with us.
Ideally, Tammie would have more diverse groups of people involved with WordPress. This way, younger people could also share their views and perspectives on the project. It’s clear that involving a wider range of people is key to developing WordPress further. “I want most of the things I’ve put into WordPress to not exist anymore – because then that means other voices have become part of WordPress,†explains Tammie.
Welcoming more investment in the WordPress ecosystem in the future is also a great way to bring in diversity. This also allows people who need a job or who want to pivot their career to find it in the WordPress community.
Tammie also expects more frequent changes in interfaces. In Tammie’s opinion, we tend to be tied to the interfaces, which can be a problem in terms of usability.
If we stick closely to an iteration of an interface, its extensibility will be limited. One size doesn’t fit all when considering accessibility and usability, especially with both aging and younger users coexisting in the WordPress ecosystem.
Meet Tammie Lister and Hostinger at WordCamp Europe 2023
Tammie will attend the WordCamp Europe 2023 in Athens, Greece. She’s looking forward to hearing some thoughts from other visitors and will also participate in the Contributor Day. She wants to be involved in many different teams, as more interesting discussions happen when you get multiple teams together and start talking together.
If you’re coming to WordCamp Europe, it’s your chance to talk with Tammie face-to-face. She will also be a part of the WordPress 6.3 Release Squad, so if you have any feedback or ideas for the upcoming updates, you can share them with Tammie.
A new MariaDB Health Checks plugin is now available on WordPress.org, thanks to the efforts of contributors involved in the 2023 CloudFest Hackathon which took place in Germany. MariaDB is a popular open source database used by those looking to further scale their websites, as it is generally faster than MySQL with better support for a concurrent number of connections.
“At the moment it appears WordPress is dominating the PHP world, so this seemed to be the perfect target,” MariaDB Foundation Chief Contributions Officer Andrew Hutchings said about creating the plugin at the hackathon.
“The MariaDB Foundation loves WordPress (I’m writing this post in WordPress right now) so it seemed like a logical project.”
The plugin helps users debug their MariaDB databases by displaying important information, such as logs, locale, connections, character set and collation, and options. It also shows a graph of the number of queries and the execution time over the last 24 hours.
The plugin also integrates with WordPress’ Site Health feature with two checks: an end-of-life check and a check for whether Histograms have been run. Histograms are an optimizer that can help improve MariaDB performance, and the plugin enables calculation of histograms to run on WordPress tables with the click of a button under the plugin’s Tools menu.
“There are a few features now and it is a good framework to add more features to in future,” Hutchings said. “This is a community project and is open to suggestions and pull requests. This is a project that we at the MariaDB Foundation want to support in the future.”
MariaDB Health Checks is developed on GitHub where developers can follow the plugin’s progress, contribute to new features, and report bugs.
But most importantly, it is the reason why we are all here. We as a community, as an ecosystem, would not exist without that spark of inspiration back in 2003.
This is a love letter to 20 years of WordPress and a toast to 20 more.
WordPress: A History
The tale has been told a thousand times. The features of the existing blogging platforms in 2003 were incredibly limiting. They lacked customization and expandability, so 19-year old college student Matt Mullenweg wrote a blog post in January wondering what a better blogging platform could look like. Across the world in England, professional developer Mike Little commented on that post expressing interest in the project. With a little help from some friends, the skeleton for WordPress was created.
However, every WordPresser worth their salt knows the lore of these two men and that fabled fork. We are going to celebrate what makes WordPress so special and how it’s endured two decades.
Free for All
In 2003, the biggest competitor to WordPress was Moveable Type, which had strict licensing restrictions that limited what most bloggers wanted to do. From day one, Mullenweg was committed to keeping the WordPress project open source. Crucial to this mission was instituting a General Public License (GPL) with every instance of WordPress.Â
The GPL provides four core freedoms:
The freedom to run the program for any purpose.
The freedom to study how the program works and change it to make it do what you wish.
The freedom to redistribute.
The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others.
This pivotal decision is what sets WordPress apart from so many other CMSs. Anyone with a computer and a Wifi connection can create a beautiful website or contribute to the project at large. It is this foundational step that has set the CMS up for the phenomenal success it has seen.
To further ensure the future of the project, Mullenweg announced his Five for the Future initiative in 2014. This urges every single contributor and company to donate either five percent of their time or money back into WordPress.Â
Expanding Your World With Plugins
In May 2004, just a year after its inception, plugin architecture was added to WordPress. This decision is what took WordPress from a blogging platform to a website builder. As of writing, there are over 60,000 free plugins in the Plugin Repository.Â
The plugin ecosystem not only allows you to expand your website, it is also an incredible way to become a business owner. You can develop plugins at any time of day anywhere in the world giving WordPressers the freedom to take control of their lives.
Any functionality you can dream up is achievable with the addition of a plugin. Can’t find what you’re looking for? Develop and submit one of your own. The possibilities are truly endless.
Make it Beautiful With Themes
Another crucial WordPress component was introduced in version 1.5 in 2005, themes. The theme framework changed the game. No longer did all WordPress sites look the same. As with plugins, anyone can develop a theme and submit it to the repository, which currently houses over 10,000 unique options.
Starting in 2010, a new default theme was included with each major release. In this year’s Twenty Twenty-Three Theme, designers from around the community submitted style variations, a trend that will continue in the future. Â
Each theme has a variety of customization options so no two sites will look alike even when using the same template. You are not boxed into a handful of templates your platform provides.
Full Site Editing and Gutenberg
Speaking of boxes, the most impactful change to date occurred in 2018 with the Gutenberg editor. For the first time in 15 years, Mullenweg announced a huge change to the editor. Instead of the classic WYSIWYG model, pages are now broken down into blocks.
This announcement came with some trepidation, but has since been embraced, spawning block developers all over the world.
With the world changing and the likes of Squarespace and Wix entering the market, WordPress had to do something to capture the attention of non-developer website owners. Blocks are intuitive and getting better every day, making it easier for someone with little experience to build something they love.
Gutenberg led to Site Editing, a way to customize every part of your site using blocks.
This is an exciting advancement and one Mullenweg sees taking on a life of its own outside of WordPress entirely.
In a conversation with WP Engine at DE{CODE}, Mullenweg was joined by MatÃas Ventura, Lead Architect of Gutenberg; Developer Experience Team at Automattic to discuss just this.
“We’re seeing designers who haven’t touched code at all be able to express and share their creations using Gutenberg,†Ventura said. “What I really want to see is that expansion of catering to all the facets of human creativity and expression and I think all these tools speak to that.â€
Mullenweg agreed saying, “We are aiming to build something for humanity, for the web, not just for the WordPress community.â€
The WordPress Community
While all of these things make up the bones of WordPress the most important aspect makes up the heart, the community. At times intimidating but more often uplifting, the group of people that build, use, and sell WordPress are unlike any other. At any time of day there is someone to answer a tech question, or give design advice.
In Mullenweg’s annual State of the Word Address in December, he announced there were 22 in-person WordPress events held in 2022. When the pandemic shut down travel, folks all across the globe held online meetups and conferences, starved for the companionship that is the community. Something that should have separated us even more managed to bring us back together stronger than ever with the biggest WordCamp Europe to date in 2022.Â
Code is Poetry
From the outside, WordPress is an excellent CMS that can support websites of any size . But from the inside, it is a living, breathing thing with the most passionate people you will ever meet. When I joined Torque in 2015, I had no idea I would travel the globe and make lifelong friends. I had no idea I would grow both professionally and personally with the guidance of the people in this community.
20 years is both a long time and a blink of an eye. All of you reading this were brought here at this moment by the same thing.
So raise a glass, update your plugins, and celebrate 20 years of WordPress.
For more, check out this conversation with Executive Director of the WordPress Project, Josepha Haden Chomphosy:Â Â
Automattic has published a new project called wp-now that creates a local development environment in seconds. The tool is a NodeJS app that is powered by WordPress Playground, an experimental project that uses WebAssembly (WASM) to run WordPress in the browser.
wp-now allows developers to quickly spin up a new WordPress site with their chosen theme and then open it in the browser automatically logged in as admin without having to enter any credentials. It uses the SQLite Database Integration plugin for its database and developers can quickly swap out versions of PHP and WordPress for testing.
Automattic software engineer Antonio Sejas explained how it works:
When you use wp-now from a directory, we create a php-wasm instance, download the selected WordPress version and mount the necessary directories in a virtual file system (VFS). Then, we initiate a NodeJS express server that listens and proxies all requests to the php-wasm. As a result, wp-now can easily log you into WordPress automatically, activate plugins and themes, and automatically configure your WordPress site.
wp-now can be installed directly from npm. It works across all platforms (Mac, Linux, and Windows). Although it doesn’t support custom domains or SSL yet, Automattic has it on the roadmap. wp-now contributors are also looking at auto detecting when a file is modified and automatically refreshing the browser, importing a database from another WordPress site, and adding a deploy feature for SSH/SFTP hosting, among other features.
Do you want to quickly generate content ideas for your blog?
Ever wished there was any easy way to create a year’s worth of content ideas without having to spend hours if not days for researching and mind mapping?
If you’re like me and most other smart bloggers, then you have at least wished for this solution a couple of times in your WordPress journey.
Today, I’m excited to release a free WPBeginner tool, Blog Post Idea Generator, which helps you come up with a year worth of content ideas in a second.
We built this tool because we believe content ideas are the backbone of a blog, and every blogger should be able to create tons of ideas quickly and easily.
It’s completely FREE for all WPBeginner readers… no signup or registration is required.
Without entering your email address, you can generate up to 29 ideas for the topic or noun you enter. If you want an extensive list of 250 blog post ideas, you can enter your email address and download the list right away.
One of the biggest reasons why most WordPress blogs fail is because they don’t brainstorm blog post ideas and plan their editorial calendar ahead of time.
Unfortunately, planning blog post ideas could be tedious and time-consuming. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Backed by data, our free tool analyzes the blog topic or noun you enter and provides you with content ideas that are proven to attract your target audience.
Some of the benefits of our blog post generator are…
Get loads of actionable blog post name ideas for FREE without hiring a content marketer
Download or export the ideas in a sheet for further analysis
Save time and money on topic research
How to Use WPBeginner’s Blog Post Idea Generator
The tool will instantly generate up to 29 post ideas, which you can copy individually and add to your editorial calendar. If you provide your email address, then you can get 250+ additional ideas and download the sheet instantly.
Once you have a list of potential ideas, you can fix a publishing schedule for your blog and start creating stunning blog posts that attract your audience.
#1 Reason Why Most Blogs Fails and How to Fix It
Most beginner bloggers fail because they seek instant gratification from blogging. As soon as they publish a blog post, they want readers to come in, post a comment, share it on social media, and so on.
But what they fail to realize is that blogging is a marathon, not a sprint. To win the blogging marathon, the first thing you’ll need to do is to get your content ideas ready… not just a week ahead, but a year ahead or at least a month ahead.
When post ideas aren’t prepared ahead of time, most beginners tend to publish mediocre content that fails to create an impact. This eventually hurts their motivation and causes them to stop publishing.
WPBeginner’s Blog Post Idea Generator gives you a head start on brainstorming content ideas. Once you generate the ideas, you can refine them and add them to your content calendar.
Use Headline Analyzer to Refine Your Ideas
Now you know how to generate content ideas and add them to your publishing calendar.
After preparing content ideas, you can also use the headline analyzer to make sure the post headlines are click-worthy before publishing the blog posts.
A headline analyzer analyzes your final post headline, grades it on a scale of 1-100, and offers suggestions to improve it.
You can then follow those recommendations and re-analyze your title to see if it improves your score. Then you can repeat the process until you get a great score. The general rule of thumb is to aim for a score of 70+.
Both of these plugins give you access to the headline analyzer right inside the WordPress post editor.
Alternatively, you can use our online headline analyzer tool, which offers similar headline analysis and can be accessed for free without installing a plugin or signing up for a newsletter.
What’s Coming Next?
Our blog post generator is a great tool to help step up your content strategy game.
We’ll continue to deliver more powerful tools for small businesses, so they can grow and compete with the big guys.
We have an exciting roadmap ahead of us, and in the coming weeks, hopefully, we’ll deliver more free tools at your disposal.
Here are a few more business tools that you can use RIGHT NOW.
Our goal is to continue to build best-in-class tools to help you level the playing field.
If you have ideas on how we can make WPBeginner’s Blog Post Idea Generator or other tools more helpful for you, then share your thoughts in the comments.
As always, I want to thank you for your continued support of WPBeginner, and we look forward to continue serving you for years to come.
Gutenberg 15.8 was released with some exciting features that were included in the tentative WordPress 6.3 roadmap. Users are getting closer to a more unified content editing experience with the addition of the Pages menu to the Site Editor. Clicking on Pages will load the ten most recently updated pages with a link to “Manage All Pages” at the bottom of the list. Users can quickly jump into editing content by selecting a page.
The interface also includes a little reminder about the nature of pages in WordPress: “Pages are static and are not listed by date. Pages do not use tags or categories.” It will be interesting to see how page editing in the Site Editor is received, whether it is too confusing for users to understand what they are editing, or whether the baseline expectation is that content can be edited anywhere.
Revisions for design changes have landed in 15.8 with a basic UI inside the Global Styles panel. It shows a timeline of saved changes along with who made the change, so users can easily revert back to previous design changes. This creates an extra cushion or safety net for those who are designing their own sites and should provide a greater level of user confidence when making design changes.
Version 15.8 also introduces theme previews for block themes, a feature that has been sorely missing for early adopters of block themes. This is made possible by a new theme_preview parameter, which allows the user to see what the site would like if a different theme was active.
A few other noticeable changes in this release include the following:
Post Featured Image: New design for Replace and Remove buttons. (50269)
More intuitive Details block with summary and innerBlocks content. (49808)
List View: Allow dragging to all levels of the block hierarchy. (49742)
Check out the full changelog for all the details on enhancements and bug fixes in 15.8.
Shufflehound made a big splash in March when it released Lemmony, a free WordPress block theme with more than 30 patterns. This was the company’s first block theme on WordPress.org and it is already active on more than 1,000 websites. Building on the success of this theme, Shufflehound has created a child theme for agencies.
Lemmony Agency bears a strong resemblance to its parent theme but with more agency-specific patterns. This theme ships with 25 new custom block patterns, on top of the ones already included in Lemmony, for a total of more than 50 patterns.
The patterns unique to this theme suit agencies but would also work well for non-profits, advocacy, portfolios, or businesses of any kind. These include a hero with services, accordions for things like FAQ, counters, more pricing tables, services with icons or images, a blockified sidebar, testimonials, and more.
The theme’s creators have done an excellent job in organizing all the patterns available to users. Inside the pattern explorer/inserter, they have been separated into different panels for the patterns specific to the Lemmony Agency theme, the Lemmony patterns, and the Lemmony full-page patterns. This makes it easier to build pages, since users won’t have to hunt through all the patterns lumped together.
The Lemmony Companion plugin, recommended when users install the theme, adds a handful of custom blocks that some of the patterns rely on to work. It includes blocks for a counter, icon, post featured image caption, typing text, hero auto-slider, and accordion.
This might be the best way to ensure these features are styled exactly to match the theme and give users more creative control inside these particular blocks. Sometimes using third-party plugins to add sliders or icons can look like it’s bolted onto the design in an unsightly way. A companion plugin designated specifically for this theme makes sense in this instance.
Shufflehound made an interesting choice creating Lemmony Agency as a child theme of what is already a very flexible multi-purpose theme. This certainly could have been shipped as full-page pattern but it would have also greatly expanded the patterns packaged with the parent theme. In these early days of block theming, it’s not yet clear what users might consider “pattern bloat” or too many patterns, especially since they can easily be categorized under various panels inside the explorer.
Lemmony Agency is a solid option for building websites that need to showcase their services, display pricing, or simply maintain an informational web presence. It’s available for free from WordPress.org and will auto-install the parent theme at the same time.
