It’s time* again for a new roundup of WordPress news! Today I’m sharing a new commenting plugin for WordPress, the release of a new book about Object Oriented Programming in WordPress. The WordPress Project also crossed an imported milestone this week. Keep on reading and you’ll learn all about it!
New commenting plugin option
For a very long time when you, for whatever reason, wanted to replace the default WordPress commenting you basically only had Disqus as an option. We used to have IntenseDebate as well, but even though the site is still up, that really doesn’t look like a modern and solid solution.
Luckily, we have a new option again in the shape of ReplyBox. It’s a super lightweight solution and does a wonderful job delivering a robust commenting system. How lightweight you ask?
“The ReplyBox embed weighs in at under 17 KB. That’s almost 30x smaller than Disqus.”
We’ll be moving all our sites to https://t.co/jgZkktIf95 as soon as the Disqus importer is released.
— Brad Touesnard (@bradt) March 1, 2019
If you’re in the market for a smarter commenting system, you should definitely check them out!
Gutenberg expands on block editor location
Gutenberg 5.2 was released last week and it introduces a new @wordpress/block-editor module that allows building block editors to live outside the post editor context and even outside the WordPress Admin context. Meaning, we’ll be able to use the Gutenberg editor interface in other places besides the actual place where you craft your content. You can read more about in the release post for Gutenberg 5.2.
WordPress book on object-oriented programming
One of the advantages of WordPress moves towards updating its minimum PHP requirement is the opportunity to make better use of smarter coding. Object-oriented programming (OOP) is one of those things. To help you learn OOP, Carl Alexander published a book last week that will teach you the fundamentals of object-oriented programming using WordPress concepts, as well as getting familiar with the terminology.
200 Languages!
During WordCamp Nordic’s Contributor Day, 16 new languages were added to translate.wordpress.org according to Petya Raykovska. With those 16 extra languages, WordPress can now be translated into 200 languages! That’s an amazing milestone.
That’s if for me for this roundup. Hope you enjoyed it!
*WordPress 5.1 actually released the first improvements to the Date/Time functions in WordPress, so technically, we’re better at handling dates and time now! Well, WordPress is, that is.