A ‘WordPress Jubilee’ moment, recently blocked folks from WordPress org and social accounts are being unblocked now. In this issue, new WordPress Plugins like ThemeSwitcher Pro, Modern Cart, and MailerPress. Also, watch out for the upcoming WordPress 6.8.1 update.
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What’s Buzzing in WordPress 💖
- ThemeSwitcher Pro… the team at Web Dev Studios has released a new ThemeSwitcher Pro plugin that enables you to run multiple WordPress Themes on the same WordPress install. It supports conditionals, is developer friendly, and works with the most popular page builders. Demo Video (YouTube).
- Modern Cart from CartFlows… the team at CartFlows has released a new (independent) Modern Cart plugin. It allows customizations that help bump up sales, with product recommendations, coupon handling, free shipping motivation, and custom cart labels.
- Upcoming MailerPress… the folks behind SEOPress plugin are soon launching the MailerPress plugin, which would enable email creation in a drag – drop editor and email sending to unlimited contacts from the WordPress dashboard.
New Plugins: Feedback, Restrict, Heading, Fetcher
B7 Feedback Engine WP… Giang Vi has released the B7 Feedback Engine WP plugin that adds a simple and customizable feedback form to your WordPress posts and pages. It is more than just like and dislike button for post feedback.
Restrict Specific Blocks… the team at Multidots has released a free MD Governance plugin that allows you to choose which blocks are available in the editor per user role. You can also control access to block settings for selected roles.
Advanced Heading… the team at BdThemes has released a free Advanced Heading for the Gutenberg Block Editor plugin. It provides various options to style headings like text highlighting, gradient, image masking, drop shadows, and background effects.
Fetcher for Gravity Forms… the team at JetSloth has released Fetcher for Gravity Forms – a new CommandBar for Gravity Forms which makes it easy to find and edit your form from WordPress admin or your website’s front end.
New Page Builder Features: Bricks and Divi
Bricks 2.0 Alpha… Bricks users can test drive the 2.0 alpha version with many new things in store. Like element manager, revamped UI, font and icon manager, WooCommerce product variation swatches, and nested components.
Divi Module Groups… Divi introduced module groups, which is a new container element in the Divi container hierarchy of Sections, Rows, Columns, and soon Groups. Groups can be used to group modules within columns.
Extended WordPress Buzz 🔥
- WordPress 6.8.1 Schedule… WordPress 6.8.1 RC1 is scheduled to be released on April 28, 2025. After two days, WordPress 6.8 General Release would happen on April 30, 2025, that would fix a few high priority items that cumulatively make this release necessary.
- AI Services + Google Gemini… Felix Arntz shared (LinkedIn) about 0.6.0v adding support for multimodal output (text and images) and implement it in the new Google Gemini model that supports it.
- For UK Woo Users… WooCommerce has expanded its partnership with Affirm Holdings, Inc., a payment network. This will enable WooCommerce merchants in the UK offer Affirm’s payment options to consumers.
- LMS Plugin Acquisition… Ionut Neagu shared (Links X) about the Themeisle team acquiring the Masteriyo LMS WordPress plugin. “The original crew stays on; we add fuel. Shared values turned a complex co-ownership deal into a quick handshake”.
- WordCamps Action… the call for speakers is open until June 15, 2025, for WordCamp Canada, scheduled for October 16 – 17, 2025, in Ottawa, Ontario.
- WP Milestones… SpeedyCache has reached the 400K active installs milestone in the repository. Elliot Sowers shared (LinkedIn) about the Simple Cloudflare Turnstile crossing the 80K+ installs milestone. Bit Integrations has reached the 20K installs milestone.
New : Virfice, MaxiBlocks, FluentSnippets, Gato+ACF
Virfice + Woo… email builder to design WooCommerce transaction emails, the 1.1.3v has added Global Header and Footer functionality, the ability to add product images in the order table, and seven new ready blocks.
MaxiBlocks Templates… the team at MaxiBlocks has added 12 essential blog elements, which includes: 4 blog single templates, 4 author bio patterns, 2 pagination designs, and 2 comment patterns.
Fluent Snippets… the completely free code snippets plugin has added export import feature 10.50v update. It has also added soft wrap for Editor and support for command + s for saving snippets.
Gato GraphQL + ACF… Leonardo Losoviz has added ACF support in the 11.3v release of Gato GraphQL. As a result, you can fetch and mutate custom fields for all the field types supported by ACF.
Quick Bits 👍
- WpStream now offers free unlimited live streaming option.
- Presto Player 3.1.0v now support vertical videos as well.
- Now Open: Grab your free ticket for Page Builder Summit.
- Gravity Wiz (Perks) website is celebrating 13 year milestone.
- Watch the Elementor Q2 2025 roadmap event (YouTube).
- Joost writes about the effects Yoast’s SEO for everyone.
- WordPress Courses
- Dynamic WordPress Course for Beginners, by Toby Salami
- How to build a website using Spectra, by Brainstorm Force.
Analyzing Contributions to WordPress 6.8
Shahjahan Jewel published an insightful breakdown analyzing contributions to WordPress 6.8 release. Country wise contributions, the USA leads with 1,000 props, followed by India, Japan, Australia, Georgia, and Italy.
Company wise, Automattic tops with 2,864 contributions from 113 contributors, followed by rtCamp, GoDaddy, kinsta, Yoast, and 10up. WordPress 6.8 did hit a record 924 contributors, an all-time high.
Removing Block on Community Folks
Many WordPress community members were blocked by the social profiles of Matt Mullenweg, WordPress, and Automattic. Also, people were blocked from WordPress org access. ‘WordPress Jubilee’ is about removing all human blocks.
Matt posted (Links X), “I tried to unblock all accounts today, but the X interface is broken. I’ll figure out how to unblock everyone. I’m removing all my blocks; it may take a few days. Any block that remains is a bug, not a statement”.
Matt also published a post reflecting on recent events. “My life, which was primarily about generative creative work that was free for everyone to use, has been subsumed by legal battles. From the start, I’ve said this: after many rounds of negotiation that I approached in good faith, WPE chose to sue”.
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