EDITS.WS

Tag: News

  • Automattic Acquires ActivityPub Plugin for WordPress

    Automattic has acquired the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress from German developer Matthias Pfefferle, who will be joining the company to continue improving support for federated platforms. Pfefferle, who is also the author of the Webmention plugin, said his new role is to see how Automattic’s products can benefit from open protocols like ActivityPub.

    In 2021, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg indicated that he would be interested in having Tumblr support the ActivityPub protocol for a greater level of interoperability across networks like Mastodon and others using the same protocol. That is still in the works, but WordPress sites already have this capability through the plugin.

    “ActivityPub and a lot of other Open Web Plugins (like the Webmention plugin) were spare time projects, so I was not looking for an acquisition,” Pfefferle said.

    “When Matt announced that Tumblr wants to implement ActivityPub on Twitter, I asked why not WordPress, so I came in contact with Automattic and they offered me the opportunity to work full time on the plugin and other Open Web projects.”

    The ActivityPub plugin makes it possible for readers to follow a WordPress site in the fediverse using the ActivityPub protocol. This includes Mastodon, one of the most popular platforms using the protocol, and other platforms like Pleroma, Friendica, HubZilla, Pixelfed, SocialHome, and Misskey. For those using Mastodon, this plugin will automatically send posts to the network and replies to it will become comments on the post.

    Last March, the ActivityPub plugin had just 700 users. Today it has grown to more than 2,000 active installs. Although it is not yet widely used, it has gotten more exposure since Elon Musk bought Twitter.

    “Thanks to Elon Musk, the number of downloads from my ActivityPub (WordPress) plugin and my followers on Mastodon have increased at least tenfold!” Pfefferle said in a post on his blog in January 2023. “This inspired me to work more actively on the plugin again and some great changes came about.”

    Most recently, Pfefferle added a new onboarding screen with recommended plugins, added the published date to author profiles, and added outgoing mentions, among other features.

    Pfefferle said he thinks the idea of the acquisition is not to have the protocol merged into core, but to “guarantee that it will stay open source and to maybe make it a canonical plugin.”

    As more social networks unite on open protocols, it won’t matter where you choose to create your home on the web. Interoperability between apps allows people to post from whatever network they enjoy, creating a richer, more diverse web. Automattic’s support of the ActivityPub plugin ensures WordPress’ place in the fediverse, where blogs will not isolated islands but rather interconnected as many were in the early days of blogging. Pfefferle’s work embodies these ideals.

    “I think my drive was always to build an alternative to the big walled gardens of Facebook & co,” Pfefferle said.

    “I fell in love with the idea of blogging and the spirit of the Web 2.0 movement and tried to keep the idea alive. I worked on several WordPress plugins and participated in several movements (DiSo, DataPortability and others) starting in 2007.

    “It is so exciting to finally see such a big interest in Open and Federated technologies!”

  • Toot the Word Survey Finds Mastodon Increasingly Important to WordPress’ Community of Tooters

    More than 200 users on Mastodon who consider themselves part of the WordPress community, responded to the recent Toot the Word 2023 Survey, which was conducted by the admins of five WordPress-oriented Mastodon instances. The purpose of the survey was to help those running these instances understand how important Mastodon is for the WordPress community and what they can do to improve their instances to foster a better meeting place.

    Key findings from the survey have been published alongside the raw data on GitHub for anyone to analyze. More than 82% of respondents (172/209) said they frequently use Mastodon. The community is active and Mastodon is an important social channel for those who have adopted it in addition to their other networks.

    A few other highlights from the published findings include:

    • Nearly all participants of the survey expect Mastodon to have some kind of influence on the WordPress community in the future, a majority thinks Mastodon will be very influential or extremely influential. Most of the participants want to see more WordPress content and community discussions on Mastodon in the future.
    • Generally, users on WordPress-oriented instances state that the communication with the community on Mastodon is important to their WordPress-related social media activity. They also are working with the community, or state that they are WordPress Community influencers, more often than users on common instances.

    The survey also found that the respondents who rated themselves as important to the WordPress community seem higher in WordPress-related instances, which may mean that those looking for more relevant WordPress-related content and interactions are better-suited joining these existing instances rather than unrelated ones or creating their own.

    “For me as an instance admin, it’s important to know that all the work I’m doing means something for the tooters on my instance and the entire community,” wptoot.social administrator Daniel Auener told the Tavern. “I think the survey has shown that many in the still small WP/Mastodon community see this network as important as I do. So I’m quite confident (as many of the surveys participants) that Mastodon will have its place in the WordPress community.”

    Administrating a Mastodon instance is not trivial. The users depend on the administrator to keep everything up and running with system updates, hosting, community moderation, curating community lists, and other housekeeping tasks. Auener said his current hosting costs are $20-30/month and they are 70-80% covered by one-time donations and commitments on Patreon.

    “If nothing more, the [survey] results will keep me and my wptoots-instance going,” Auener said. “I even hope that the results will show others within the community that Mastodon as a social network is worth supporting and finding their own ways to contribute.”

    Auener hasn’t planned anything specific yet but based on the results it is clear that participants want to have more WordPress content in their timelines.

    “I think one of the best ways of achieving that would be to onboard more WordPress sites to the fediverse via ActivityPub,” he said. “Working in that direction is something I’m thinking about.”

    There is an ActivityPub plugin for WordPress that implements the ActivityPub protocol for so that readers can follow your site’s posts on Mastodon and other federated platforms that support ActivityPub. It is currently used by more than 2,000 WordPress sites and is one avenue for users to automate sharing their content across the fediverse. A search for Mastodon plugins turns up several other auto sharing plugins and Jetpack is also considering adding Mastodon support to Publicize after many requests on a ticket opened in 2017.

    Some Mastodon users on other instances have considered switching to a WordPress-oriented instance, so increasing education for users on how to move to a new instance is another improvement Auener is considering.

    “The data even seems to support that the quality of (WordPress-)conversation is better on our instances,” he said. “So spreading that information, helping people to move and keeping our instances a safe space for great WordPress discussions is another cause for action.”

    Joining Mastodon’s federated network is still intimidating for some who are not familiar with how the instances work and are not sure which one to join. Others fear they may lose out on interactions and connections by moving to a lesser-used social network. This survey indicates that the WordPress-related instances are active and important to the community interacting there. Auener has created a document called The WordPressers Guide to the Fediverse for those who are new and want to learn more.

    “I would like to align my work more with the WordPress community and the work all the amazing people in the community teams and initiatives do,” he said. “I’m quite new in the game and think I can learn a lot from people working within the community for years. I think Mastodon/the Fediverse aligns very well with WordPress values but there is still a lot of convincing to do.”

  • WordPress 6.2 RC 1 Released and Ready for Testing

    WordPress 6.2 RC 1 was released today, marking the hard string freeze and readiness for translation ahead of the official release on March 28. There are three weeks remaining for testing.

    WordPress contributors published the 6.2 Field Guide, which includes the dev notes – technical updates for many of the new features and changes included in this release. These include editor component updates, notes on new and expanded APIs, accessibility updates, and more.

    Plugin and theme developers are advised to test their extensions for compatibility and update the “Tested up to”  version in their readme files to 6.2. (A separate testing guide is available for those who are testing the changes in this release.)

    A bug that was introduced in 6.2 Beta 1, which showed a white screen when using the browser’s back button inside the Site Editor, was fixed earlier this week in the 6.2 Beta 5 release. This is a major issue that would likely affect millions of users, and it underscores the fact that testing at this phase is still important. Bugs can be reported via the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums or by filing a bug report on WordPress Trac.

  • Lemmony: A Free WordPress Block Theme with 30+ Patterns

    Lemmony is a new WordPress block theme designed by the team at Shufflehound, a theme development company based in Europe with commercial products on Themeforest. This is the team’s first block theme on WordPress.org and it is a strong debut.

    Lemmony is a beautifully-designed multipurpose theme that would work well for businesses, agencies, and portfolio websites. It features the Plus Jakarta Sans font face for both headings and paragraph text, a geometric sans serif style, designed by Gumpita Rahayu from Tokotype.

    The homepage includes bold, full-width immersive images offset with calls-to-action and blocks featuring a variety of different ways to present information. Scrolling the page reveals tasteful (and optional) animation that brings the content to life.

    Lemmony packages more than 30 custom block patterns to help users design and build pages. These include multiple heroes with lists and calls-to-action, heroes with images and titles, partner logos, query with a sidebar, services grid, services with video, team members, and more – nearly every kind of pattern that a business website might require.

    Lemmony also packages five full-page patterns for services, gallery, contact, about, and the front page, making it easy to simply drop the pattern in place for the most common pages found on a brochure website.

    This theme offers a solid user experience for those who are just getting started building their websites. After installing and activating Lemmony on a fresh site, it will look nearly exactly like the live demo. Everything on the front page is in place with placeholder content, including different menu items, just waiting for the user to add, remove, or edit the blocks. The user doesn’t have to start from scratch do any guesswork about where things go in the design. This is the kind of experience that all block themes should provide.

    Lemmony comes with a companion plugin that includes additional customer blocks and other features, such as the custom icons seen in the demo. It will prompt the user after installing the theme to install the plugin as well to get more features. If the user is editing a page and inserts a pattern that includes icons, the theme will allow users to install the plugin directly from the editor. It’s a very smooth experience for including features that require an additional plugin. The plugin is optional and most of the designs seen in the demo work without it installed.

    In the future, Lemmony’s creators plan to include more website templates, which would make it easier and faster to set up different kinds of sites. Overall, the theme feels snappy, has an unusually large variety of patterns, and is responsive and looks great on mobile. The installation experience is user-friendly and provides a good starting point for jumping into full-site editing. Check out the live demo and download Lemmony for free from the WordPress Themes Directory.

  • Jetpack 11.9 Adds Sharing Button for Mastodon, Updates Stats Dashboard Design

    Jetpack 11.9 was released this week with support for sharing posts to Mastodon. The new button allows readers to click an icon to launch a sharing window that will ask the user to enter the full URL of the Mastodon instance where they want to share the post.

    Adding the URL will update the window to automatically insert the link for the post and share from your account.

    Mastodon makes its usage numbers publicly accessible. As of March 8, 2023, the total user count is at 6,487,821, with 1,293,309 considered active users. Many WordPress community members who have moved over to Mastodon report having more quality interactions and higher engagement than on other social media platforms. This new sharing button gives your posts more opportunities to reach that audience. It can be enabled at Jetpack > Settings > Sharing in the admin.

    The Jetpack team is also looking at adding Mastodon support to Publicize so users can have their posts automatically shared when they are published. Many people have requested this feature on GitHub and it may land in the plugin sometime in the future.

    Jetpack 11.9 also updates the design of the Stats dashboard. In place of the dusty blue bar graphs and sections with referrers and top pages and posts, the updated design is now more in line with Jetpack’s green branding. It features 7-day highlights at the top and the trends shown are in comparison to the previous seven days. The UI is more modern than the previous version and provides a more mobile-friendly experience. It is enabled by default but can be disabled in the Settings for those who prefer the traditional Stats design.

    Also included in version 11.9 is a new “Sync Fields” style option in the Forms block that allows users to ensure fields maintain the same style as the blocks are edited.

    This release includes more than a dozen bug fixes and compatibility updates. Check out the changelog for all the details on the Development tab on the plugin’s WordPress.org page.

  • WP Engine Pattern Manager Plugin Now in Beta

    WP Engine is beta testing its new Pattern Manager plugin for creating and maintaining patterns. The plugin is intended for WordPress professionals – developers, agencies, and freelancers, who could benefit from having an interface and system for pattern management.

    “There are some plugins out there that provide an interface for creating patterns on a production site, but this is not built for that,” WP Engine Principal Engineer Mike McAlister said. “This is meant to slide into a dev workflow where you’re creating, editing, managing patterns for a client, for release in a theme, etc.”

    Plugins like Build & Control Block Patterns (2k active installs) and MyWP Block Pattern (200 active installs) allow users to build block patterns from the admin instead of writing code for them. They offer features like saving page content made with blocks into a pattern, unregistering block patterns, creating custom pattern categories, and more.

    After taking WP Engine’s Pattern Manager for a test run, it’s clear that the emphasis in this plugin is going to be more on pattern organization than on the builder aspect. After activating the plugin, clicking on the Patterns screen takes you to a catalogue of all the existing patterns, based on the site’s active theme. They are organized by category and are also searchable.

    I installed the plugin alongside a theme with more than 30 block patterns included to get a better feel for how it works. From the main pattern management screen users can edit, duplicate, and delete existing patterns. Clicking through to edit a pattern lets users add their own pattern categories, keywords, extended description, designate which post types the pattern shows up in, and optionally hide the pattern from the inserter.

    Pattern creation happens on its own dedicated screen, which works just like the block editor but with the pattern-specific settings in the sidebar. Once a pattern is saved, it will appear with the others on the pattern management screen. The pattern is attached to the theme, so users should understand that they will not have access to their custom patterns if they activate a different theme.

    Users might be curious about creating patterns directly in the block editor. After putting some blocks together in an artful arrangement, it might be convenient to be able to save them as a new pattern for the theme. McAlister said this is not currently possible but it is under consideration.

    “Right now, pattern creation is limited to the Pattern Manager UI, where we can do some interesting and powerful things under the hood,” he said. “That doesn’t mean we won’t one day be able to do it inline, but in terms of exploring this concept as a workflow enhancement, we’ve limited it to a specific screen.”

    After launching the beta, web designer Wolfgang Stefani asked on Twitter if it is possible to update patterns globally using the plugin.

    “No, not yet,” McAlister responded. “It’s not a shortcoming of the plugin, rather how WP treats patterns right now. However, this will be possible with patterns soon, probably sometime this year.”

    Although there are many additional feature requests that might benefit developers and designers’ workflows, the plugin’s creators are launching the beta to test the waters and see how users fare with this initial set of features.

    “Certainly parts of this workflow are opinionated, based on how we’re building patterns, but we’re doing this beta to understand how other folks are building,” McAlister said. “We’re open to any and all feedback to improve the overall workflow.”

    In a recent post titled “Patterns are gonna be a game changer for WordPress,” McAlister outlined his vision for how pattern functionality could be expanded in WordPress.

    What if, for starters, patterns were a treated more like intelligent components? What if instead of being treated as just a collection of blocks, patterns were an entity that WordPress could use as a conduit to do more advanced site building?

    McAlister explored a few ideas, such as making patterns more like template parts, globally synced and editable, adding pattern locking, and adding the ability to build style variations for patterns. The future is wide open for patterns to become far more useful than they currently are today, and third-party developers are exploring how they can extend this feature that has become so indispensable to building pages with WordPress.

    WP Engine’s Pattern Manager fits in nicely into the admin interface, almost like a natural part of core, but the top-level menu for Patterns seems too prominent and should be relocated under Appearance. After testing the plugin, I can see how it could become a valuable tool for managing pattern visibility for clients and speeding up page building by offering a more organized system for patterns. The CMS use case is strong here. Agencies that build the same kinds of sites over and over again could benefit from using this tool to quickly add and duplicate custom block patterns and restrict those that don’t make sense in certain parts of a client-managed site.

    During the live product demo for WordPress 6.2, a viewer asked if core will be adding more robust pattern management capabilities in the future à la WP Engine’s Pattern Manager plugin. The response was that this is a possibility for the future but is not currently a strong priority.

    In the meantime, WP Engine plans to release the plugin for free on WordPress.org after testing with users and updating it based on feedback.

    “We have no plans of monetizing,” McAlister said. “Right now, we’re more interested in digging into the developer workflow and finding unique solutions we can offer to folks who are digging into these modern WordPress tools.”

    If you want to get in on the beta program, you can sign up to get access to a zip file of the plugin. Your feedback may be incorporated into future versions of the plugin that will eventually land on WordPress.org.

  • WordPress’ Legacy Default Themes Updated to Bundle Google Fonts Locally

    WordPress contributors have updated the legacy default themes to bundle Google Fonts locally in the theme folder, instead of loading them from Google’s servers. In years past, loading fonts from the the Google CDN was the recommended practice for performance reasons, but new privacy concerns have emerged following a German court case, which fined a website owner for violating the GDPR by using Google-hosted webfonts, 

    All of the default themes from Twenty Twelve to Twenty Seventeen have been updated. The process began nine month ago but the approach took some time for contributors to refine. Updates to default themes are usually done in coordination with major and minor releases of WordPress, as core contributor Jonathan Desrosiers explained in the ticket.

    “The reason the updates are usually coordinated is that the themes are usually updated to be compatible with new versions of WordPress, so releasing at the same time makes a lot of sense,” Desrosiers said. “Also, the number of contributors that focus on the tickets within the Bundled Themes component is usually very low unless these compatibility issues are being addressed.”

    A dev note to accompany these updates to the legacy default themes was published to WordPress.org. It contains code examples for serving a new stylesheet from the theme directory, fixing the editor style within a custom theme-setup function, removing the font stylesheet, and including a custom set of fonts in a child theme. This change particularly impacts those who have edited or removed the font stylesheet in a child theme of these default themes or a plugin.

    WordPress’ Themes Team has strongly urged theme authors to switch to locally hosted webfonts, and is expected to officially ban remotely hosted fonts following WordPress’ legacy default themes getting updated.

  • WordPress 6.2 Product Demo Video Now Available

    If you’re not yet excited about the upcoming WordPress 6.2 release, you will be after watching the new live demo product video that was recorded last week. The demo was presented by Anne McCarthy and Rich Tabor, and moderated by Nathan Wrigley.

    The team used a beautifully customized version of the default Twenty Twenty-Three theme, which showcases what is possible in 6.2 with just core blocks and themes. They started from the Site Editor view, demonstrating how easy it is to zip around from pages to templates and template parts with the new browse mode. This mode also features a resizeable pane that previews the site at different viewports.

    WordPress 6.2 is light years ahead in terms of its progression as a design tool. The team gave a short introduction to pushing styles globally, as well as the ability to copy and paste styles. The features make it much easier to make changes across the site, instead of having to apply them separately to each block. They also gave a tour of the Style Book, which is helpful for quickly making global changes to blocks with a preview. Tabor noted how users could actually use that screen to design the entire site.

    Other features covered in the live demo include the new sticky positioning for top-level group blocks, a tour of the new navigation and dedicated list view, distraction-free mode, and the improved pattern and media panel, which reduces the number of steps for exploring patterns and adding images. At the end, the presenters took questions from viewers, many of which cover what is and what isn’t currently possible with the Site Editor.

    WordPress 6.2 is expected on March 28, 2023, less than four weeks away. RC 1 has been delayed due to a regression which impacts the Site Editor. An additional Beta 5 is expected on March 7 to text a fix for this issue. In the meantime, the live demo video is a good way to familiarize yourself with all the major features coming in the next release.

  • WordPress Themes Team Proposes Community Themes Initiative

    Representatives of the WordPress Themes Team are looking to carry forward the momentum contributors found in creating the Twenty Twenty-Three theme’s style variations by launching a new Community Themes initiative. Leading up to WordPress 6.1’s release, 19 designers from eight countries built 38 unique style variations, and 10 were selected to ship with the release. At that time, contributors discussed a spinoff child theme project with additional style variations for Twenty Twenty-Three.

    Automattic-sponsored core contributor Maggie Cabrera published a proposal that seeks to extend this new era of increased design contribution through a Community Themes project.

    “The goal is to bring together a squad of people to build block themes all year around the same way the default themes are built,” Cabrera said. She cited other reasons for the proposal, including the need to increase the number and the variety of quality block themes in the directory, and capitalize on community momentum during times when no default theme is being actively developed.

    The reality is there simply are not enough block themes available to the community yet with the current count at 247. Last year, the WordPress project fell short of its goal to get 500 block themes in the repository by the end of 2022. The world of patterns and the ease of inserting blocks into templates gives users more design flexibility than ever before, so the landscape of themes is slowly changing, but there is no replacement for finding a theme design that just works and enabling it with one click.

    The new Community Themes initiative may offer an easier onramp for theme developers who are still getting into block theming, as well as a supportive community of builders who spur each other on to create themes that are compatible with the latest and greatest features of WordPress.

    The Themes Team’s next hallway hangout discussion will focus on the goals and purpose of this initiative. Contribution opportunities will be available for all skill levels, including designing, coding, testing, and reviewing themes. If you are interested to help on this project, the team is inviting people to join the next hangout on Tuesday, March 7, 2023, at 10:00 AM EST. RSVP is required to attend online.

  • WordPress Community on Mastodon Launches “Toot the Word” Survey

    Last month’s Twitter outage gave Mastodon a boost, as the company also announced unpopular changes to its API access. People from the WordPress community continue to trickle into the fediverse, with many going so far as to shutter their Twitter accounts. A fledgling community of WordPress users on Mastodon has made the network home and are reporting more quality interactions than they experience on other platforms.

    Daniel Auener, who runs a WordPress agency based in Sweden, curates and maintains a list of WordPress community members’ Mastodon accounts that anyone can follow by downloading a CSV file and importing it into Mastodon. He and the other admins of the five largest WordPress-related Mastodon instances have joined together to create a survey for WordPress users.

    The survey is being organized by the following admins:

    “The goal of this two-minute survey is to help us improve the WordPress-related Mastodon instances and Mastodon as a meeting place for the WordPress Community in general,” Auener said.

    “We want to know your needs and challenges and how you think we – as WordPress-related instances – can strengthen the WordPress community on Mastodon.”

    Respondents will be asked how frequently they use Mastodon and how important it is to their overall WordPress-related social media activity. They will also be asked about the quality of communication with the community and what they would like to see more of on Mastodon. So far the survey has received 112 responses. If you have embraced the fediverse, take two minutes to leave your feedback on the “Toot the Word Survey” before it closes on March 5, 2023.