Today we have a very special guest who is an expert in virtual reality, augmented reality, XR, metaverse, Anthony Burchell. Anthony is a software engineer on ACF and he’s the brilliant mind behind the innovative Three Object Viewer plugin for WordPress.

This post is the first in a three-part series about Core Web Vitals. In it, we want to go over each of the three metrics that are at the heart of Google’s new yard stick for website quality. Our first stop: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and how to improve it in WordPress. By now, Core Web Vitals are a critical ranking factor in Google. As measurements for user experience, they determine whether or not visitors have a good time on your site and also influence how well you do in search engines. For that reason, it’s important that you get […]

With the advent of the WordPress Site Editor (aka Full-Site Editing) and block themes, the way WordPress users have to think about how to modify their websites and themes has changed dramatically. These days, instead of style.css and functions.php, there is a new central file for block themes: theme.json. Plus, instead of CSS and PHP, you need to be familiar with a new type of markup to make changes to it. Its name is JSON. While that might sound scary, the good news is that JSON is actually quite approachable. With a bit of technical understanding and tenacity, it’s not […]

Our guest today, James Dominy, was an attendee at WordCamp EU 2023 who also gave a workshop titled “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love our AI Rulers”. James is a Technical Architect at WP Engine, and we are gonna talk to him about his speech.

Well, it’s June again and you know that means: time for a report from WordCamp Europe 2023! Like many others, I descended on Athens this summer to attend the annual WCEU convention. It was the second in-person WordCamp Europe since the pandemic after last year in Porto. Besides meeting old friends, making new connections, and general socializing, I came to learn what’s new in WordPress and listen to talks on different topics. The two main themes that dominated the discussion for me this year were artificial intelligence and the problem of bringing members of the younger generation to the WordPress […]

The Torque Social Hour is a weekly livestream of WordPress news and events. On this episode, we talk with Felix Arntz, a Developer Relations Engineer at Google and a WordPress core committer. Felix recently shared a tweet-thread about his experience with Q&As during WordCamp Europe, so we talked about how he’d like to see this format changed. We also talk about new projects that the Performance Team have been working on lately, including a proposal for enhancing LCP image performance with the fetchpriority attribute in WordPress core and enhancing the Scripts API with a loading strategy in WordPress 6.3. Join […]

Widgets are a popular way to add extra functionality, features, and information to different locations of WordPress websites. They allow you to put anything from contact forms over calendars to lists of your latest blog posts on your web pages. However, in order to do so, you first need widget areas — at least in classic WordPress themes. These are special designated parts of WordPress themes where, if you add widgets to them in the back end, they will show up in the front end as well. Block themes using the WordPress Site Editor, on the other hand, no longer […]

The WordPress Repository has always been a great place to find powerful and free tools to extend your WordPress site. You can find plugins, blocks and themes, and you can even sort by features such as block compatible. One of the newest of which is Frost and my guest today is Brian Gardner, a Principal Developer Advocate at WP Engine and the creator of Frost Theme.

As an open-source project, you are probably aware that the WordPress platform is built by a large, global network of volunteers. While the developers and designers often get the most attention, there’s a lot of effort going on in the background that’s just as essential — even if it doesn’t involve a code editor. In this post, we want to look at some of those unsung heroes: the WordPress Polyglots team. In today’s interconnected world, language plays a vital role in bringing people together and bridging communication gaps. That extends to WordPress. As one of the most popular content management […]

The Torque Social Hour is a weekly livestream of WordPress news and events. On this episode we talk with Evangelia Pappa about this year’s WordCamp Europe, happening June 8th-10th in Athens, Greece. Evangelia is a Global Lead for WCEU overseeing budget, sponsors, community, and content. Join us next each Wednesday from 3-4pm PST for WordPress news and interviews.