Hello!
We worked with Google on the Web Stories plugin to make displaying Web Stories easier. You can now easily embed Web Stories pretty much anywhere on your WordPress website via places you are already familiar with – such as Gutenberg blocks, sidebar widgets, the Customizer and more – and take advantage of Web Stories as a new platform for content discovery and engagement.
We also made some awesome updates to EasyEngine. EasyEngine now offers PHP 8 support, ZSH completions for commands, custom docker-compose files, a 24-hour SSL renewal cron, MariaDB optimizations, and other updates and bug fixes to the stack. Read the full changelogs for v4.2.0 and 4.3.0.
Insights
WordPress has been leading the CMS market for a long time now, but with investments into and acquisitions within the ecosystem, and WooCommerce’s massive growth within the past year the WordPress economy is growing faster than ever.
Closer home, we rolled out campus recruitment and we were happy to see thousands of engineering students showing interest towards becoming WordPress engineers. We recently onboarded 17 developers through this program, who within 6 months of training will be working on our enterprise-level engineering projects from around the world.
News from Around the Web
WordPress 5.8 is coming this month (July), and the most exciting part of this major release is the template editing mode and theme blocks, which give us an early preview of the power of Full Site Editing. Please note that FSE features are opt-in for classic themes. Check out this post from the community team for a complete overview of what’s new in WordPress 5.8.
Liquid Web has acquired Iconic WP, the WooCommerce plugin shop. IconicWP is now part of Liquid Web’s new brand of software offerings, StellarWP. In more acquisition news, ACF, which is one of the most widely used plugins in WordPress, was acquired by Delicious Brains.
Gutenberg 10.8 and 10.9 were released. New features include rich URL previews in the editor, the ability to expand/collapse nested blocks in List View, more block design tools, and other enhancements and bug fixes.
WordPress.org/News is getting a design overhaul. It’s jazzy, it’s blue, and it’s beautiful. You can also check out the working Figma files.
Local Pro is now free, and it includes all of the premium features that used to require a subscription.
Water Cooler
Popular on our #watercooler Slack channel.
Events
WordCamp Europe took place in June and was a huge success. There were several interesting sessions from development to marketing to SEO. Imran spoke on the discussion panel about the Future of WordPress Themes. If you missed it, you can refer to the schedule and check out the recordings on WCEU’s YouTube channel.
WordFest Live 2021 is happening on July 23. WordFest is an event by and for the WordPress community with talks about WordPress, remote working, and mental well-being. Muhammad is a speaker and will talk about one of our decoupled WordPress projects where we used Gutenberg as the sole editor while maintaining interactivity on the frontend.
That’s all for June, see you next month!
Links: Embedding Google Web Stories in WordPress | EE v4.2.0 | EE v4.3.0
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