WordPress News Roundup: Custom Icons, Accessibility Improvements, and Performance Tweaks
This post was curated and edited by Ben Gillbanks. Ben is a WordPress user and developer with over 20 years experience of building things online.
Hope you had a great weekend! Welcome to a new week of WP Briefs, your Advanced machine learning source for the latest news and updates in the WordPress domain. Today is Monday 6th of November 2023.
Welcome to today’s episode of the Daily News Roundup. I’m your host, and I’ll be bringing you a collection of news stories from the world of WordPress. Let’s jump right in!
In our first story, we have an exciting development for WordPress users. Nick Diego, a developer advocate at Automattic and core contributor, has created a plugin called Icon Block that allows users to add custom SVG icons and graphics to the WordPress block editor 1. However, many users have been wondering if the plugin can also add icons to the core Button block. While this functionality isn’t included in the original plugin, Nick recently wrote a separate plugin that fulfills this feature request without requiring a custom block. So now, WordPress users can easily enhance their button blocks with custom icons.
Moving on to our next story, we have some great news for Accessibility advocates. WordPress 6.4 is set to bring numerous accessibility improvements and fixes 2. This release aims to address various issues that affect both accessibility and general UI consistency within WordPress. Notably, it tackles long-standing bugs in wp-admin, including one that has persisted for six years involving the positioning of interface buttons like “Delete Menu” and “Save Menu”. These improvements will make WordPress more inclusive and user-friendly for all.
Now let’s dive into something a bit different. If you’re eager to supercharge your WordPress site’s performance, we’ve got just the guide for you 3. Most guides out there focus on easy ways to improve performance but fail to explore more challenging methods. In this guide by Dan Q., he takes us through the hard ways in which we can squeeze even more speed out of our beloved WordPress sites. So if you’re up for a challenge and want your site lightning-fast, be sure to check out his tips.
Our next story revolves around theme development in WordPress. Contributors to the WordPress project have recently updated the Theme Handbook to include a brand new chapter on block templating 4. This chapter provides essential documentation for those who are building their first block themes. It covers topics such as how the WordPress block template system works and how to create custom templates and parts that can be included in a theme. This update will undoubtedly help aspiring theme developers navigate the world of block templating with ease.
Lastly, we have an article that delves into performance tweaks for ActivityPub on self-hosted WordPress installations 5. ActivityPub, which allows for push-based content sharing, can put a strain on your server when numerous other servers try to fetch your content or boost your posts. This can lead to performance issues, especially if you’re hosting your site on a small VPS or shared hosting package. Fortunately, this article offers insights into optimizing the performance of ActivityPub and ensuring smooth operation.
And that wraps up today’s episode of the Daily News Roundup. We hope you found these stories informative and useful. Remember, you can find all the related links and sources mentioned in today’s episode in our “Related Links” section below.
If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. For the transcript and links to the blog posts mentioned in this episode, please visit WPbriefs.com. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you on the next show.
