Take your blocks to more places on your WordPress website. GeneratePress theme is taking the lead and working on block elements to be used for sidebars, header, footer, and more. Blocks everywhere is the future and most popularly recommended themes would follow this path ‘made with blocks’.
Hot & Cool WordPress bits… 😱
- Heated views… on two topics from either end of the spectrum. The official Unsplash plugin for adding free stock photos in WordPress got called out for breaking a few rules and even Matt jumped in. Also, who should take the blame for intrusive plugin notifications in the WordPress dashboard?
- Plugin updates… LifterLMS 4.2.0 added ‘view as’ for admins to see checkout screen as a student or visitor. WP Feedback Pro 1.5 with a lot of updates and fixes as they approach 10K installs milestone. Thrive Themes added 11 new features including integration with ThriveCart service.
- Blocks life… here are 20+ eminent people from the WordPress ecosystem sharing their take on Gutenberg Blocks editor with specific pros and cons. Yeah, blocks are very much here (& not yet there). Also, check BlockBook for WP that let you test static WordPress blocks in isolation.
Quick Bits 👍
- New Bing Search WordPress plugin indexes content immediately.
- Google’s mobile-first indexing deadline is now March 2021.
- Cloudways added bot protection feature at zero additional cost.
- Anh Tran’s Slim SEO plugin crossed the milestone of 10k installs.
- Stream Plugin for real-time alerts, when something goes wrong.
- Hulu will be removed from oembed in WP 5.5 & onwards.
- Listing of developer-focused changes in WordPress 5.5 version.
- The official WordPress.com Growth Summit (Aug 11-13, 2020).
- Carbon creates a screenshot of your code (via Toolbox Weekly).
[The View] Blocks vs Bloat 💣
Blocks editor buzz is attracting a lot of page builder users. Of course page builder like Elementor falls flat when HTML code bloat is compared to blocks editor’s pretty code output. However, as of now the ease of using a page builder like Elementor or Beaver Builder tops user experience which blocks editor is yet to touch.
In the overall comparison, a lot of people will still prefer Elementor and a lot of people will have a sigh of relief that blocks are getting better. Mind you, there are a few third party blocks plugin for Gutenberg which produce equally horrendous HTML code output – no perfect world here!
