A lot of WordPress News this Week

After months of talking about the release of WordPress 5.8, it has finally arrived. Matt Mullenweg announced that “Tatum”, our latest and greatest release now available for download or update is in your dashboard. This release is named in honor of Art Tatum, the legendary Jazz pianist. 

But if you need a thorough review, I recommend you head over to Kinsta’s blog where Carlo Daniele had time to write an amazing summary that covers all the new features of WordPress 5.8. His full-featured post includes a table of contents along with the videos discussing what has been worked on and added in the latest few months. It is a great source for all of the new things in WordPress 5.8.

Speaking of great sources…

Birgit Pauli-Haack covers more WordPress Themes for Full-Site Editing along with their Resources in the latest post on Gutenberg Times. Birgit says: 

“Just remember that themes may be wonky at times until developers have had time to make updates.”

Bob over at Do-the-Woo covers the latest WooCommerce updates. These updates cover the Action Scheduler 3.2.0 and 3.2.1. The AS library from 3.1.6 to 3.2.1 has been updated in this latest release. Sounds fascinating. This release comes with several fixes and an additional database index to speed up performance for sites with heavy traffic. We all love that.

Lastly, Sarah over at WPTavern reports that Tiny, the makers of TinyMCE, have acquired Setka, a content design and editing platform, for an undisclosed amount of money. TinyMCE is used by millions of WordPress users, most visibly in the Classic Editor plugin as well as the Advanced Editor Tools plugin, previously known as TinyMCE Advanced. 

Advanced Editor Tools adds a “Classic Paragraph” block to the block editor that gives access to the TinyMCE editor with configurable rows and buttons. It provides a stepping stone for those who are not quite ready to switch to the block editor.

Events

This is the week folks. Wordfest Live starts on July 23, 2021. It’s the 24-hour festival of WordPress.

From the Grabbag

Changes are being made to meetup.com, the platform where local WordPress events are based. WPCalendar.io will no longer receive any more updates.

If you think we can’t keep up with Acquisitions, join the club. Quite literally, Cory Miller over at Post Status has an Acquisition Tracker and it shows you when a WordPress business was sold and who bought it.

Over on the Matt Report, my latest interview is with Dave Rodenbaugh. He shares he was never even working on a part-time basis with his business Recapture.io. In fact, the way he put it, he was only devoting 10% of his energy into the business while being contracted at a corporate gig he recently had the chance to exit from. Go check out the latest episode.