Developers give WordPress the much needed expansion in terms of features set and use cases. Let’s focus on a few developer focussed goodies this week like UI inspiration for plugin creators, keeping track with plugin performance metrics. Plus, the other good and surprising WordPress buzz.
WordPress Dev Focus 💡
- WP Admin Gallery is an amazing endeavour for plugin developers looking for inspiration for the best user interface design for plugin settings page within the WordPress dashboard.
- Plugin Rank is an SEO tool for WordPress plugin (freemium) developers on the WordPress plugin repo to improve and monitor their plugin positions in search results.
- WordPress Theme developers should take note of new admin menu page requirements. What’s next in Gutenberg? A full roundup of important items like global styles, widget screen, full site editing.
Standout WordPress Buzz 🔥
- Oops… Bing WordPress plugin claimed to index your WordPress website content immediately. Well, Ben from LayerWP did a check and wrote about findings in detail.
- New shortcuts… like blog.new goes to WordPress.com website and post.new opens the post editor on the WordPress.com website. While podcast.new opens the Anchor website to record a podcast.
- Page Builders…. ecosystem buzz, as Beaver Builder added new modules, templates, enhancement, and accessibility improvements. Elementor shared a video preview of their new theme builder. Also, there is new Brizy 2.0 with a theme builder, and a lot more.
- And… Astra Theme overlooked theme guidelines for affiliate links and was de-listed temporarily from the official WordPress theme directory. Astra team fixed the issue immediately and now it’s back.
Quick Bits 👍
- Bootstrap introduced own 1000+ icons library pack.
- Grammarly adds better support for Google Docs.
- Mozilla is launching VPN in 6 countries to begin with.
- WebARX released Website Security in 2020 report.
- You might be overthinking about website speed.
- Now there is disable Unsplash CDN plugin for users.
- Adding cool gradient presets in the WP blocks editor.
- Redux Framework relaunched with Gutenberg focus.
[Observation] Better Help Docs!
Usually, WordPress product’s documentation website is powered by a speciality plugin like Better Docs or by a service like Help Scout. Beaver Builder unveiled new knowledge base website powered by Docusaurus and it looks really good.
Why this? They mention, “With Docusaurus we are able to create versioned docs, which allows our team to focus on writing new docs and tutorials instead of focusing most of their time updating existing docs.” Interesting!
