World of WordPress: March ’19

As we head into March we took a look back at some of the biggest WordPress news from the past couple of weeks, including a new WordPress version, an exciting plugin release for theme authors and a brand new Gutenberg announcement.

WordPress 5.1 is Released

At the end of February we saw the release of WordPress 5.1 (‘Betty’, named after jazz singer Betty Carter). This new release brought with it the Site Health feature, which features a number of services to keep your site running at peak performance. We shared details of some of WordPress 5.1’s new features here.

Theme Sniffer Plugin

The recently released Theme Sniffer plugin is one that’s caught our attention, aimed primarily at developers who are creating WordPress themes. The plugin analyses your work to ensure that code is PHP compatible and that the theme as a whole is compliant with WordPress development conventions. Further information about the plugin can be found in the WordPress plugin repository.

Gutenberg for Mobile is Announced

Following the release of Gutenberg as part of WordPress 5.0, focus has now switched to preparing Gutenberg for mobile devices. Featuring a pared back design more in line with mobile usage, we shared the full details of the release in a previous post.