For the first time in 21 years, WordPress.org has partially closed sections of its website, supposedly to give its contributors a break.
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Program transcript
Hello, I’m Alicia Ireland, and you’re listening to WPpodcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
In this episode, you’ll find the information from December 16th to 22th, 2024.
For the first time in 21 years, WordPress.org has closed parts of its site. This is being done because Matt Mullenweg, co-creator of WordPress, wants to take a break and also offer one to the volunteers who contribute.
The services that will be closed include the creation of new user accounts, except for event ticket purchases, which are accounts that affect the inability of a new user to submit a support request for a plugin, for example.
The submission of new plugins to the repository, as well as their review and approval, is also paused, along with themes and photos, which directly affects the contributors of those teams, most of whom are sponsored.
This also affects all WordCamp payments, which will be halted between December 21 and January 5.
While this idea may seem reasonable, there is an underlying issue that’s less reasonable. Although the Holiday Break post begins with this explanation, it quickly shifts to the background of the issue: the legal battle between Automattic and WP Engine. According to Matt, he is forced to offer free work and services to the company due to the expensive lawyers employed by his competitor, although it should be noted that the justice system has defined the bad practices Matt is applying to WordPress.org itself.
The most important thing is that there is no set date for when this decision will be reversed, meaning that all developers who want to contribute to WordPress right now are unable to do so.
Once again, WordPress users are suffering the consequences of these decisions, especially during a time when certain websites with high traffic require extra support, which is currently unavailable.
It should be noted that this decision coincides with another controversy of the week: pineapple pizza. Yes, although this may seem unrelated to WordPress, after the forced removal of the WP Engine affiliation checkbox, a new one was introduced that, during the first days, forced users to check the box stating “you are a pineapple pizza person.” After the absurdity of the situation, the mandatory checkbox has finally been removed, though it remains visible.
Still, perhaps the most festive detail of the situation is that it’s snowing on the WordPress.org website. It’s subtle, but it’s noticeable.
With the release of Gutenberg 19.9, improvements to the Editor are introduced.
The first of these is the inclusion of the Style Book in classic themes, allowing us to see all blocks with the final design on a single screen, which developers will need to enable for it to function.
The other major addition in this version is the new Counter block, which basically shows the number of results in a list, such as posts in a category or entries on the homepage.
A new experiment called BlockDocs has been introduced… The WordPress block editor now allows users to create eBooks and other documents completely offline. Using the EPUB format, which is compatible with various reading apps like Kindle or Apple Books, users can easily write, organize, and export their books. The editor also allows for adding covers and structuring content into chapters using headings, making navigation within the file easier.
Although this is a new feature, future improvements are planned, such as the integration of revisions and the ability to open external EPUB or DOC files.
The editor is available as a Progressive Web App (PWA) and is open source, allowing collaboration and feedback from users to continue its development.
The Core team has decided to rename the role that manages the coordination of a new release, due to translation reasons.
Previously, the role was Release Coordinator, which in some languages required a double gender translation, so it will now be called Release Coordination, which is gender-neutral.
On the Developer Blog, a post has been published detailing the best way to create and style a block in dark mode, especially depending on the user’s operating system settings or their personal choice.
The result is to add as much code as possible in the theme.json file, though some manual CSS code will still need to be added.
The Playground team has announced some changes to the systems that enable new functionalities.
The first of these is enabling CORS to allow all requests. It’s important to note that for some time, it has been possible to embed a WordPress Playground on any website, so it’s necessary to properly manage this security feature.
On the other hand, the experimental Data Liberation functionality is now available, along with scheduled tasks and WP-cron features.
And taking advantage of the opening of ticket sales for WordCamp Europe 2025, it has been announced who will be the recipient of the Kim Parsell scholarship for this WordCamp: Lena Stergatou, GTE of the Greek community, among many other contributions.
Also, the Diversity Scholarship for WordCamp Europe has opened, aimed at individuals who actively contribute to the community, have never attended WordCamp Asia, Europe, or the United States, and belong to an underrepresented group.
And finally, this podcast is distributed under a Creative Commons license as a derivative version of the podcast in Spanish; you can find all the links for more information, and the podcast in other languages, at WPpodcast .org.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
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