News & Articles

• WordPress 5.0 RC 1 Released, Gutenberg Passes 1 Million Installations (wptavern.com)
  WordPress 5.0 RC 1 was released over the weekend after a string of five betas that began in late October. According to the Gutenberg stats page, more than 1.1 million sites have the Gutenberg plugin installed and users have written more than 980,000 posts using the new editor. These numbers are conservative estimates, as the numbers only include WordPress.com sites and sites running Jetpack.
• Drupal 8.7 to Introduce Layout Builder, Contributors Face Accessibility Challenges (wptavern.com)
  Drupal has traditionally appealed to a more technical audience, and probably wouldn’t count Squarespace, Wix, and Tumblr among their competitors, but the project is getting more friendly towards site builders and content editors. The project is currently testing a visual design tool for building layouts.
• The Colorful History of WooCommerce (www.codeinwp.com)
  WooCommerce is the biggest, baddest, most popular e-commerce plugin for WordPress, which, by extension, also makes it the most popular e-commerce platform of them all. But how did the journey begin? Was WooCommerce always the top dog right from day one?
• Freemius Announces a New Users Management Dashboard for WordPress Products (freemius.com)
  
• Sustainable UX: How Designers Can Help Make a Positive Impact on the Environment (www.shopify.com)
  
• Is PHP Dead? No! At Least Not According to PHP Usage Statistics (kinsta.com)
  

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Plugin News

• Prevent Account Sharing on Membership Sites (www.cozmoslabs.com)
  If you’re a membership site owner, having an easy way to prevent account sharing will protect your revenue and increase your subscriber base in the long term. There are of course multiple ways to tackle the login credentials sharing problem. From adopting only social login as a method of authentication, to limiting the number of sessions, MAC or IP addresses a member can use when accessing your paid resources. None of them is bullet proof. We wanted something simple, that will do the job in most cases.
• Implications Of Thinking In Blocks Instead Of Blobs (www.smashingmagazine.com)
  What does Gutenberg bring to the future of WordPress? In this article, Leonardo Losoviz shares a number of implications of building sites through a component-based architecture (as the concept) and through Gutenberg (as the implementation), including what new functionalities it can deliver and how much better it can integrate with current website development trends.
• WP Migrate DB Pro 1.9 Released: New Backups Tab and Refactored PHP (deliciousbrains.com)
  
• 10 Best WordPress Booking Plugins to Fully Automate Your Business (kinsta.com)
  
• Jetpack 6.8 Adds Gutenberg Blocks for Payment Buttons, Forms, Maps, and Markdown (wptavern.com)
  
• New Marketing Widgets: Evergreen Countdown Timer, Star Rating, Reviews & Sitemap (elementor.com)
  

Theme Releases

Blogger Era (wordpress.org)

Tethys (wordpress.org)

Flash Blog (wordpress.org)

Theme News

• 25 Best Single Property WordPress Themes (motopress.com)
  Whether you are a real estate owner or an intermediary side looking to rent out or sell a property online, you’ll find this collection of single property WordPress themes quite holistic! We’ve hand-picked the most used, regularly updated and popular website templates for real estate industry and lodging business.

Tutorials

• How to Improve a WordPress Site’s Performance with Minification (getflywheel.com)
  Site speed remains a perennial concern for pretty much all site owners. While there are several ways you can improve your site’s speed, there’s one often-overlooked (yet highly effective) technique to consider – minification.
• How to Add a FTP like File Manager in Your WordPress Dashboard (www.wpbeginner.com)
  Do you want to add an FTP like file manager in your WordPress admin area? A file manager can help you edit WordPress configuration, themes, plugins, and other files right from your WordPress dashboard. In this article, we will show you how to easily add an FTP like file manager in WordPress.
• Hot Module Replacement for Gutenberg Blocks (humanmade.com)
  
• A Helper Function for Admin Notices (tommcfarlin.com)
  
• Styling & Customizing File Inputs the Smart Way (tympanus.net)
  
• How to Create a WordPress Member Directory (And Why You’d Want To) (wplift.com)
  

Podcasts and Videos

• Things to Consider Before Updating to WordPress 5.0 | WP The Podcast (wpthepodcast.com)
  
• SEO Research with Joshua Hardwick from Ahrefs | Mastermind.fm (mastermind.fm)
  
• Dave Smith | Hallway Chats (hallwaychats.com)
  
• Interview With Pippin Williamson, Founder of Sandhills Development, LLC | WP Weekly (wptavern.com)