You don’t have to be rich to have an online presence. You don’t have to find loopholes in proprietary platforms and hope that they never change their terms of service. You own all of the content that you create on a WordPress site and have the liberty to move it to a new host if you need to, or switch your theme if it fits your mood.
That was Josepha Haden Chomphosy on WordPress is Free(dom) episode of the WP Briefing Podcast, speaking about the four freedoms of open-source software. Those four freedoms are core to how WordPress is developed. A lot of the updates we bring you this month will resonate with those freedoms.
WordPress now powers 40% of the web
W3Techs reported that WordPress now powers 40% of the top 10 million websites in the world! Every two minutes, a new website using WordPress says, “Hello world”! For the top 1000 sites, the market share is even higher at 51.8%. Over the past 10 years, the growth rate has increased, which is reflected by the fact that 66.2% of all new websites use WordPress!
WordPress release updates
February was an eventful month for WordPress releases!
Want to contribute to upcoming WordPress releases? Join the WordPress #core channel in the Make WordPress Slack and follow the Core team blog. The Core team hosts weekly chats on Wednesdays at 5 AM and 8 PM. UTC. You can also contribute to WordPress 5.7 by translating it into your local language. Learn more on the translation status post.
Gutenberg celebrates its 100th release with version 10
The 100th release of the Gutenberg plugin — Version 10, launched on February 17th, more than four years after the project was first announced at WordCamp US 2016. Matias Ventura’s post offers a bird’s eye view of the project over the last four years. Version 10 adds the basic pages block and makes the parent block selector visible in the block toolbar. Version 9.9 of Gutenberg — coincidentally, the 99th release of the plugin, which is also the latest Gutenberg release that will be featured in WordPress 5.7, also came out in February. Key highlights of the release include custom icons and background colors in social icons, a redesigned options modal for blocks (which is now called block preferences), and text labels in the block toolbar.
Want to get involved in building Gutenberg? Follow the Core team blog, contribute to Gutenberg on GitHub, and join the #core-editor channel in the Making WordPress Slack group.
Full Site Editing updates
Full Site Editing (FSE) is an exciting new WordPress feature that allows you to use blocks outside the post or page content. The main focus of the Core team for 2021 is to merge FSE into WordPress core. Here’s the latest on the Full Site Editing project:
Decision-making checklist for in-person meetups
The Community Team has published handbook pages and a decision-making checklist for organizers to restart in-person meetups at areas where it is safe to do so (e.g., countries such as New Zealand, Australia, and Taiwan, where there are lower COVID-19 risks). However, WordPress meetups and WordCamps in most parts of the world will remain online due to COVID-19.
Further Reading
Have a story that we should include in the next “Month in WordPress” post? Please submit it using this form.
The Month in WordPress post series is a collective effort, and it would not be possible without contributions from different members of the WordPress Community. Starting this month, we would like to credit and thank all individuals that support this effort with their contributions. I would like to thank the following folks for their contributions to February’s Month in WordPress: @adityakane @chaion07 @courtneypk @kristastevens and @psykro.
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