As activity ramps up to try to get WordPress 5.0 released in November, Matt Mullenweg has announced who will lead phase two of the Gutenberg project. Phase two focuses on Customization and entire site layouts.

Alexis Lloyd, Head of Design Innovation at Automattic, will handle the design and product side. Riad Benguella, a JavaScript Engineer at Automattic, will handle the technical side of the project.

One of the goals of phase two is to replace widgets with blocks and menus with a navigation block. Lloyd and Benguella commented on the post, introducing themselves to the community.

“Hi all! I’m thrilled to be working on phase 2 of Gutenberg,” Lloyd said. “I think there’s a huge opportunity to take the ease of use that has been brought to page/post editing in phase 1 and extend that to the full site experience.

“I’m coming from many years leading design and product teams in news organizations (including designing and building custom CMSes), and am looking forward to bringing my experience to WordPress, as well as learning from the deep expertise in the community!”

“Hi all! I’m so excited to be working with you all alongside @alexislloyd to build upon the amazing technology that is Gutenberg in order to bring the content creation experience in WordPress to a whole new level,” Benguella said.

“For those who don’t know me yet, I’m a JavaScript engineer at Automattic. I’ve been fortunate to have contributed to the Gutenberg project since its beginning, including a lot of work on Gutenberg APIs, JavaScript in Core, and Accessibility.

“I look forward to bringing my humble expertise to achieve the second phase of this project, as we look into things like widgets, menus, templates, and site-building in general.”

Theseus’s Paradox Makes More Sense Now

In episode 331 of WordPress Weekly, one of the items we discussed with Gary Pendergast is the future of Gutenberg beyond the editor. At its core, Gutenberg is supposed to unify a number of areas of WordPress.

Blocks are the unifying evolution of what is now covered, in different ways, by shortcodes, embeds, widgets, post formats, custom post types, theme options, meta-boxes, and other formatting elements. They embrace the breadth of functionality WordPress is capable of, with the clarity of a consistent user experience.

From the Gutenberg Plugin Page

I hypothesized that since Gutenberg is an interface to manage blocks and that menus as well as widgets will become blocks, the menus and widget management pages in the WordPress backend can be replaced or removed in favor of Gutenberg.

In this way, the Menu and Widget management boards on the Ship of Theseus would be replaced without sinking or disrupting the entire boat.

With Mullenweg’s announcement regarding phase two, the Ship Of Theseus or Theseus’s paradox begins to make more sense. Gutenberg becomes the foundation for bringing many areas of the WordPress project up to par without starting from scratch.

Welcome to the first of my weekly Remkus’ Roundup post. This is the beginning of a series where I’ll share what’s happening in the WordPress community. Let’s start with this week!

The road to WordPress 5.0

The most important news of this week revolves around two blog posts over at the Make WordPress Core blog. The first one is from Matt Mullenweg in which he explains his plan for WordPress 5.0.

In case you’ve missed it, WordPress 5.0 is considered a major release with the inclusion of a completely new editor experience named Gutenberg. We’re very excited about the possibilities that Gutenberg adds to WordPress. So much so, that if you’ve activated the Gutenberg plugin on your site, we’ve added two blocks to the editor already.

Matt Mullenweg explains in his post what the road towards 5.0 is going to look like. He also explains how the Core team is going to make sure all angles are covered via various focused teams. One of those teams, the JavaScript Packages team, will be led by our CTO: Omar Reiss. Omar will focus on integrating JavaScript packages on NPM.

Following Mullenweg’s post, the second post I’d like to highlight is Gary Pendergast’s post on the same blog. It’s about the Proposed WordPress 5.0 scope and schedule. In it, he outlines a proposed schedule that looks like this:

• Beta 1: October 19, 2018
• RC 1: October 30, 2018
• Release: November 19, 2018

Meaning, that if all goes well, WordPress 5.0 will be available before the end the year. I myself, couldn’t be more excited about this!

Bonus blog post: Gary Pendergast’s call to action post on his own blog about to get involved with the integration of Gutenberg into WordPress 5.0 is worth a read as well.

WordCamp Europe tickets

Tickets are being released in batches, so get them while they’re hot :) . See you in Berlin?

Read more: What is Gutenberg »

The post Remkus’ Roundup: Are you ready for WordPress 5.0? appeared first on Yoast.

A tentative 5.0 release schedule was published during today’s core dev chat. The official release is targeted for November 19, 2018 with beta 1 expected October 19 and RC 1 released October 30.

In addition to getting Gutenberg merged into core, the scope for 5.0 includes a few new items that Gary Pendergast outlined in his post:

• Updating the default themes to work well with the block editor, and creating the new Twenty Nineteen theme.
• Creating an upgrade experience to remove the Gutenberg plugin and offer the Classic Editor plugin.

November 19 is the week of the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S., when many are traveling or spending time with friends and family. As this is scheduled during a busy time of year and may have unexpected delays, the release leads have come up with a backup plan that includes a secondary schedule.

“We know there is a chance that 5.0 will need additional time, so these dates can slip by up to 8 days if needed,” Pendergast said. His post proposes an additional timeline that would have 5.0 land in January:

Secondary RC 1: January 8, 2019

Secondary Release: January 22, 2019

“The current release date is November 19, but it can be pushed as late as November 27 if needed,” Pendergast said. “To avoid the numerous holidays from the end of November through to January, we’ll move the release to January if more time is needed.”

Although the backup timeline should allay concerns about December holidays, if the release is at all delayed, it will run up against the Thanksgiving holiday.

“Should we need to switch to the secondary dates, this will be communicated as soon as we’re aware,” Pendergast said. “It’s also important to note that we have some updates for PHP 7.3 compatibility that must be released in 2018 regardless, and we would have a short 4.9.9 release cycle for them if needed.”

Contributors had the opportunity to ask questions of the release leads during today’s 5.0 kickoff meeting. There was some uncertainty in yesterday’s announcements about whether 5.0 will ship a new default theme. Matt Mullenweg confirmed that they are aiming to get Twenty Nineteen into 5.0.

“It’s the biggest variable though, so if it takes longer we won’t delay the release for it,” Mullenweg said.

Twenty Nineteen development will happen on GitHub and contributors can join the discussion in the #core-themes Slack channel where regular meetings will happen.

Gutenberg engineer Riad Benguella posted a technical overview of the integration process for merging the new editor into core. He also laid out a plan for how Gutenberg development will continue in the future.

“After WordPress 5.0 is released, the Gutenberg plugin will continue to exist,” Benguella said. “Its purpose will be changed to the development and the maintenance of the WordPress npm packages, including the editor itself, and will also serve to develop the second phase (site customization) of the Gutenberg project. Plugin updates will continue to be released during the 5.0 cycle.

“The PHP part of the plugin won’t be needed anymore, as the plugin will just register new versions of the scripts of the packages to replace the ones already registered by Core.”

Mullenweg confirmed during the dev chat that the team plans to add a link to the Classic Editor plugin in the admin when 5.0 ships. Overall, contributors in attendance seemed excited about the prospect of finally having the new editor in core, despite the ambitious timeline proposed for release.

“A big benefit even beyond the user improvements is that plugin and theme developers will be able to truly use it as a base in a way that they can’t right now as a plugin,” Mullenweg said. “If previous adoption curves hold true, we’d be on 10m sites (20x current adoption) by new year.”

Gutenberg development has been moving quickly and after it is shipped to millions of WordPress users there are bound to be more issues discovered. Mullenweg said quick point releases may be an option for maintaining the flexibility to introduce fixes and improvements in a timely way for users.

“Since 5.0 will be very tight (just Gutenberg, PHP 7.3, and possibly theme) I am open to having 5.0.x releases that are like the 4.9.x releases that bring in some larger updates or improvements we push off, like servehappy stuff,” he said.

Gutenberg technical lead Matias Ventura has outlined the tasks remaining on the editor. An updated schedule for the 5.0 release cycle is now available for the public to follow. Gary Pendergast, who is shepherding the merge, said he expects WordPress 5.1 will be available around March 2019.

The last time I looked at anything OpenID related was back in 2008 when federated authentication was the hype before it was overtaken by the blockchain, machine learning and artificial intelligence. Times have changed and all of that is back as project Solid run by Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

Below are my notes on the building blocks of the project since I’ve started working on a prototype for a Solid Pod plugin for WordPress.

Authentication and Authorization

Federated identity is built around these two concepts and making it simple to setup and use has been a long standing challenge since the days of SAML and whatever went before it.

For authentication the Solid project uses the WebID-OIDC protocol which adds a layer on top of the OpenID Connect protocol which in turn is built on top of the OAuth 2.0 protocol for authorization.

Here is the best overview of the OpenID Connect protocol that I could ever find by Nate Barbettini:

WebID and OpenID Connect

WebID is the key here — it adds the Semantic Web and linked data on top of the OpenID Connect for data discovery and exchange. Probably the nicest thing about WebID is the name Turtle — a markup language for writing up RDF graphs. Good luck understanding those.

I’ll be adding to this section as I dig deeper.

Personal Data

The Solid project builds on a recent revelation among the regular web users that having full control over their personal data and identity online is very important. This is a huge change from the previous narrative of linked data and the Semantic Web which was focused on computers harvesting and using that data which is hard to relate to for most of us.

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Matt Mullenweg has announced a plan for releasing WordPress 5.0 with a tentative estimate for a release candidate to ship in November.

“With known knowns and known unknowns, I believe we will be at RC in about a month,” Mullenweg said. “However, I’ll be keeping a close eye on feedback during the beta process and adjust as needed and keep the community fully up-to-date with our best estimate.”

Gutenstats.blog shows that the beta plugin has passed 490,000 active installations, which Mullenweg said “far exceeds pre-release testing of anything that has ever come into core.” The Classic Editor plugin also has more than 400,000 installations, indicating nearly half a million site owners have already prepared to preserve their existing workflows.

“If we keep the 5.0 release to strictly 4.9.8 + Gutenberg, we will have a release that is both major and a non-event in terms of new code,” Mullenweg said. “It’s all battle-tested. In some ways 5.0 is already de facto out in the wild, with some forward-looking hosts already installing and activating Gutenberg for new installs.”

Mullenweg is leading the release but has designated 11 other leads to head up various focuses, including triage, design, JavaScript packages, REST API, merge process and several other important aspects of the release.

WordPress users can also expect a new default Twenty Nineteen theme to ship with 5.0. Designer Allan Cole will be leading that project, which involves adapting an existing Gutenberg theme for use as WordPress’ next default theme.

Last week’s developer chat left many attendees wondering about the status of WordPress 4.9.9. Contributors discussed the possibility of making it a quick PHP 7.3 compatibility release but it now appears to be all hands on deck as the focus shifts to 5.0.

Based on today’s announcement, it seems very likely that WordPress 5.0 will land before the end of 2018, barring any major impediments. The timeline for this major release falls during a busy time of year for many who will be responsible for preparing their products and client sites. Mullenweg said he will keep the community up-to-date as the release cycle progresses. The agenda for tomorrow’s dev chat will focus on 5.0 planning.

WordPress theme developers are starting to advertise their themes as being compatible with Gutenberg, ahead of the new editor’s imminent merge into core. Work on the 5.0 release may be ramping up sooner than expected after yesterday’s announcement that 4.9.9 may be a quick release for PHP 7.3 compatibility or possibly cancelled altogether.

Themeforest, the largest marketplace for commercial WordPress themes with more than 11,000 products, has a specific tag for Gutenberg-compatible theme listings. Searching for themes that mention Gutenberg in the description turns up 139 products. But what does “Gutenberg compatible” mean?

Gutenberg compatibility seems to be more of a buzzword among most of the Themeforest listings, indicating that the theme includes styles for all core blocks. However, in some instances theme authors have also tested shortcodes for compatibility with the new editor. A smaller number include access to premium blocks as part of their advertised Gutenberg compatibility.

Searching the WordPress.org Theme Directory for “Gutenberg” produces 26 results where compatibility is mentioned in the theme descriptions. Themes are noted to be “fully compatible” with Gutenberg or specifically “designed to work with the new editor.” There is a wide spectrum of interpretation on those selling points – from basic styles for core blocks to themes that explore all the possibilities that Gutenberg opens up with features created specifically for manipulation inside the new editor.

Independent theme shops have been leading the charge in creating themes built to showcase what Gutenberg can do through pairing with plugins that offer block collections. Themes like Editor Blocks, Atomic Blocks, and CoBlocks all have accompanying plugins that add custom blocks. This particular approach of packaging blocks into collections may not last very long, as it tends to make individual blocks more difficult to find.

At the moment, advertising a theme as “Gutenberg compatible” is a temporary marketing strategy, as Gutenberg will soon lose its code name and become simply “the editor.” That special distinction will evaporate as soon as WordPress 5.0 lands. Gutenberg support will quickly become a matter of basic WordPress compatibility. The days of using it as a marketable feature are limited, and the pressure is on for theme developers to ensure their products are ready.

In the video below, an excerpt from the “Theming with Gutenberg Course,” Zac Gordon examines considerations for theme developers who are working towards making their products compatible with the new editor. Gordon emphasizes that Gutenberg should work out of the box with any theme. However, there are a few features, such as the full width cover image, that may require special styles in order to work on the front end. The bulk of the compatibility work is ensuring that the editing experience matches the frontend and that Gutenberg blocks are styled harmoniously with the rest of the theme’s features.

There are many tutorials available to help theme developers (and agencies preparing client sites) get started with making their themes ready for the Gutenberg era. Check out the resources below:

Things to consider when updating a WordPress theme for Gutenberg

Preparing WordPress themes for Gutenberg with the Block Unit Test

Getting your theme ready for Gutenberg

This is a reminder that one of our guidelines is respecting trademarks and brands.

tl;dr

Using someone else’s trademarked logo in your plugin logo or banner is a trademark violation, and they have the right to have us remove your plugin at any time.

Explanation

Normally trademark situations come up when you submit a plugin like Facerange Messenger, but you don’t happen to work for Facerange. We change your slug from facerange-messenger to messenger-for-facerange (or something to that effect) and ask you to rename the plugin to “Messenger for Facerange”. Another common instance is when we have to explain bobo-facerange-messenger.com is a violation of their trademark use, and you need to rename your domain.

As of late, companies have begun enforcing logo usage as well. Originally they were just picky about the icon or banner being only their logo, but now they’ve moved on to the use at all. What this means to you is simple: Don’t use someone else’s logo in your plugin’s icon or banner. Period.

If you don’t have the legal rights to use it, don’t. If you’re not sure if you do, assume you don’t. If you lose the legal right (like no longer being a part of PayFriend’s trusted developer program), you must immediately remove their logo from your plugin’s public facing pages.

FAQ

What happens if a company complains?

You will receive a warning via email that a complaint has been filed and you are to correct the icon and/or banner immediately.

How long do I have to comply?

0-days. Technically you’re already a violation. They don’t have to let us give you a chance to come correct, so we would appreciate it being done within 48 hours.

Do I have to push a new version of my code to do this?

Nope. Just fix the images in your assets folder.

Addendum by Otto: This includes screenshots. If you have somebody else’s logos in your plugin itself, or displayed on your service, then you might want to consider getting those removed as well.

What do I do if a company asks me to change my icon/banner?

Change it. Seriously, it’s not worth it. Make your own unique and distinct logo for your plugin. It’ll make you more memorable in the long run.

Do I have to change my display name as well?

Yes, you do. Remember: Don’t start your display name with someone else’s trademark/copyright/commonly known name. If it’s not your name, it’s not a good idea.

Isn’t this contrary to the GPL and open source?

No. Licences like GPLv2 are separate entities, and in fact the GNU supports the use of copyright in code. As for open source, it’s not above the law. Check out FOSSMarks for more information and as always, contact a lawyer with your legal questions.

Addendum by Otto: Also note that Trademark and Copyright are two entirely different things. There is no “licensing” for trademarked items. The GPL and any other license will not apply. Basically, if something is trademarked, then you need to get explicit permission to use it, in writing, or you just don’t use it.

I think it’s fair use. Will you let me keep the icon while I fight them?

Alas, no. We have to consider the directory as a whole and it’s over 60k plugins. The risk for us is too high, and we will side with the legal request.

Addendum by Otto: There is no concept of “fair use” in trademark law. Don’t use other people’s trademarks. Period.

What about existing plugins that you let violate trademarks in the slugs?

That’s because we do not have the technical ability to rename a slug without breaking it for all users. They’d be abandoned. And you can’t automatically migrate users from one plugin to another, so because of that limitation, most companies have permitted us to retain plugins that violate their trademark in the slug. Some have not, and we’ve been forced to close those plugins.

Since the logo and display name can be safely changed, it’s a different matter.

Someone else is violating too! Why didn’t you shut them down?

We email people in batches. You’re welcome to report fellow plugin devs who are violating the guideline, but the odds are we’ve already been in contact with them (or will be shortly). You’re not being singled out, we just have a lot of plugins to work through and we take breaks.

Someone’s using my trademark in their icon/banner, how do I get them to stop?

Contact them first and point to this post (and the 17th guideline) and just ask them NICELY to please change it. If they blow you off or don’t respond in a reasonable time (like 2 weeks), you can email us at [email protected] and we’ll follow up.

#guidelines #trademarks

Wouldn’t it be awesome to have a virtual WordPress development environment added to any plugin or theme as a Composer dependancy? Today I discovered the Drupal VM project which enables exactly that.

It should be relatively easy to add this kind of support for both VVV and Chassis — it only has to sync the VAGRANT_OLD_ENV_PWD directory to a theme or plugin directory within the WP install.

Never lose a single business lead or enquiry again! Get my latest plugin Storage for Contact Form 7 now!

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When running and maintaining a website you will encounter many different types of issues and errors. ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS is one of the many errors that usually confuses most users. In this post, we take a look at what causes this error and how to fix it. Thankfully, this is quite an easy error to fix. Since you’re using WordPress, you’ll be.... Continue Reading

The post What Is ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS Error & How To Fix It In WordPress is written by Roshan Perera and appeared first on WPKube.

Matt Mullenweg tweeted out a link to Gutenstats.blog this evening, a new site dedicated to tracking Gutenberg beta testing data. The site shows there are currently more than 420,000 active installations of Gutenberg, a slightly more precise number than reported on the WordPress.org plugin page (400K+).

Gutenstats also tracked 213,000 posts written with the new editor and 8,142 posts written yesterday. These numbers were collected from posts made on WordPress.com and Jetpack sites since late August 2018 and a note on the site says the actual number is higher.

In June, Mullenweg unveiled a roadmap for Gutenberg to land in WordPress 5.0. At that time the plugin was active on just 14,000 sites. He proposed 100K+ sites having made 250K+ posts using Gutenberg as a threshold for adequate pre-5.0 testing.

Gutenstats tracking shows testing has far exceeded the original goal for active installations and should reach the posts written goal in just a few days. Mullenweg said they plan to add some block stats to the tracking page in the future.

As part of the roadmap unveiled at WordCamp EU earlier this year, WordPress.com has started rolling out Gutenberg to a subset of users.

According to a WordPress.com Happiness Engineer, the team is testing the implementation to determine the best way and time to enable it. Users will not be able to use Gutenberg unless their theme is updated to support blocks and the various alignment options.

Theme Wranglers are already in the process of adding support to WordPress.com’s nearly 100 free themes.

A quick search of the WordPress.com support forums for Gutenberg provides some insight into what users think about the new editor. For example, this user provided feedback on the use of so many icons without displaying their textual equivalent.

For now, Gutenberg is opt-in but eventually will be opt-out. Once Gutenberg is made available to a wider audience, support documents and official blog posts will be published to inform users about the new editor.

The WordPress 4.9.9 release leads published a roadmap for the release this week. The minor release will be led by Anthony Burchell and Alain Schlesser. It is targeted for November 5 with the first beta arriving near the end of October.

The leads identified four key focus areas for the upcoming release: accessibility, internationalization, the Site Health Project, and Gutenberg preparation. The internationalization focus is aimed at improving translations and RTL support, as well as ensuring that date/time values work. The roadmap doesn’t identify any specific accessibility items but Burchell said the leads see lots of ways they can “drastically improve the experience for a lot of people with minimal effort.”

Contributors to the Site Health Project, previously known by the “Servehappy” code name, will be working on resolving issues that will allow users to stay on WordPress 4.9.9 while they prepare for 5.0 and still have access to the important information about how to update their PHP versions.

“It will be crucial to get the Servehappy components included: WSOD protection, update dashboard notice, plugin version requirements,” Burchell said. “The reason for this focus is because, when 5.0 ships, users who decide not to upgrade will be on 4.9.9 for a potentially extended time period. If we don’t have these Servehappy components included in 4.9.9, getting rid of old PHP versions will only happen after 5.0.”

Another major part of WordPress 4.9.9 will be landing items that lay the groundwork for anything necessary for Gutenberg’s merge into 5.0. Two items identified include user locale support in REST API endpoints and endpoints to lock/unlock and release posts.

With an unusually quick turnaround, WordPress 5.0 could arrive before the end of 2018. Development will kick off in mid-November, one week ahead of the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday.

While we’re still only at the start of the Gutenberg adventure, we’re presenting an awesome, brand-new feature for the new WordPress editor today. Meet the Yoast SEO structured data content blocks! The content blocks automatically add valid structured data code to the content that is added to these blocks. Our initial line-up consists of How-to and FAQ content blocks, plus address and map blocks for our Local SEO plugins, but we’re looking to add more in the future.

Optimize for synonyms and related keywords and prevent broken pages on your site with Yoast SEO Premium! »

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Info

Adding structured data in Gutenberg

Structured data is important but pretty hard to implement. By adding Schema.org structured data to your pages you can tell search engines exactly what’s on there. For most people implementing it comes down to asking their developer to hard-code it into the site. Or learning to master Google Tag Manager so you can inject the necessary code into your pages — this is what we teach you in our Structured data training. This complexity is one of the reasons structured data has been struggling to reach critical mass, even though Google has been pushing it for years. This is now changing with Gutenberg structured data content blocks in Yoast SEO 8.2!

As of today, we’re adding that structured data metadata automatically to the content that’s added to two new Gutenberg blocks inside Yoast SEO, namely How-to and FAQ. Local SEO and WooCommerce SEO have blocks for addresses and maps. So, if you have an FAQ page on your site you can now build these pages inside Gutenberg. Yoast SEO will automatically add the necessary Question Schema.org to that block. The same goes for How-to. Build your how-to article with the How-to content block in Gutenberg, including all the necessary steps and even images, and see a valid piece of structured data appear in the source of your page. It is now easier than ever for Google to find and understand that particular piece of content. Fantastic, right?

Our CEO Joost de Valk and CTO Omar Reiss explain the how and why of Yoast SEO structured data content blocks in this interview »

How-to structured data

How-to structured data is a fairly new addition to the Schema.org vocabulary. You use it to mark up content that teaches you how to do something following a series of steps. This could be how to cat-proof your apartment or how to install Yoast SEO Premium or something else entirely. We published a post a while back on how to add how-to structured data to your how-to articles. Please read that if you need more background information.

The structured data content blocks come with default styling, but we made it easy for you to change these. Our UX designer Luc wrote a post detailing how you can give the How-to content blocks your own styling so they fit right in with the rest of your site. There will be a post about styling your FAQ content blocks later on.

Using the Gutenberg How-to structured data content blocks is incredibly easy.

1. Choose the Yoast SEO structured data block for How-to
2. Type the description for the how-to
3. Enter the time needed to do the how-to
4. Fill in the first step title
5. Fill in supporting text for the step
6. If necessary, add an image using the Add image button
7. Hit the Add step button to add a new step
8. Use the Insert step button to insert a new step between existing steps
9. Done? Save your draft!

Here’s an example how-to on how to install Yoast SEO Premium:And here’s what Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool says of that page:Epic, right? Remember, due to restrictions by Google it is not possible to add more than one How-to content block on a page.

Want to dive into the mark-up and styling of our HowTo block? Read this post from our UX designer Luc.

FAQ structured data

If you have a section on your site for frequently asked questions — an FAQ— then you’ll enjoy the new FAQ structured data content block. Schema.org/Question is “A specific question – e.g. from a user seeking answers online, or collected in a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) document.” You can now easily add the structured data needed for search engines to understand FAQ content. Just fill in the questions, add the answers and maybe an image if needed. Hit publish and your perfectly structured FAQ block is ready!

Local SEO & WooCommerce SEO with Gutenberg blocks

Of course, we had to give some of our other SEO WordPress plugins some Gutenberg love as well. Do you own a local business or are you doing a lot of local SEO? If so, you need our Local SEO or WooCommerce SEO plugins. These plugins help you to improve your site so it can more easily rank in your local search results.

Today, the two local SEO plugins get structured data content blocks for Gutenberg as well: you can now add valid structured data to your site by adding the new address block. The fields will appear automatically if you’ve filled in the fields in the plugin settings. Of course, you can finetune what you do and don’t want to appear. In addition, you can use the new Google Maps structured data content block to easily add a good looking map with structured data to your site.

More to come

Gutenberg’s block-based design makes it a very interesting platform to design for. These structured data content blocks are our first tools specifically built for the new WordPress editor. We hope to expand our offering of structured data blocks in the near future. We can’t wait to bring you blocks for job postings, events and recipes, among others! And please, do give us your feedback so we can make these blocks even more awesome.

Polish readability analysis

Yoast SEO 8.2 also brings a new supported language: Polish! We can now analyze text written in Polish and make suggestions to improve the readability. In addition, we will now also suggest articles to link to using our internal linking tool in Yoast SEO Premium. The Polish readability analysis was made possible by contributions from the community. We’re thankful for the great support from the people at Macopedia, who sent us word lists which make a vital part of our analysis. We’re always super enthusiastic when people in the community show us their love for our products and also a commitment to the open source spirit by contributing to our code base!

Bug fixes and enhancements

As always, we’ve fixed a couple of annoying bugs. This time we focused on fixing bugs related to slugs, user input incorrectly triggering analyses, zooming issues on iPhones and several others. You can read up on them in the changelog. We do want to thank mt8, who helped us fix a bug related to OpenGraph images that wouldn’t correctly show for the front page in a couple of situations.

Update now!

Yoast SEO 8.2 is a very exciting release. With the launch of the structured data content blocks for Gutenberg, we’re heading into unknown and very exciting territory. We can’t wait to see what you do with the current set of blocks and hope to bring even more blocks to you in the near future. Try it, tell us what you think and enjoy using Yoast SEO 8.2!

Read more: Why you should buy Yoast SEO »

The post Yoast SEO 8.2: Automatically add structured data with Gutenberg content blocks appeared first on Yoast.

Google Smart Lock is an app for iOS and Android devices that can talk to U2F security keys over bluetooth and NFC. Wouldn’t it be great to use it with the WordPress Two Factor plugin?

Turns out the app registers a custom u2f-google URL protocol with the iOS which can be used by any other app (including the Safari browser) to open the app with the necessary payload for the U2F authentication, which has the following format:

u2f-google://auth?data=PAYLOAD&returnUrl=RETURNURL

where PAYLOAD is a JSON string (urlencoded twice) with the following schema:

{
	"type": "u2f_sign_request",
	"appId": "https://www.gstatic.com/securitykey/origins.json",
	"challenge": "CHALLENGEFROMTHEAPP",
	"registeredKeys": [{
		"version": "U2F_V2",
		"keyHandle": "UNIQUEKEYHANDLE",
		"transports": ["usb"]
	}, {
		"version": "U2F_V2",
		"keyHandle": "UNIQUEKEYHANDLE",
		"transports": ["ble", "usb", "nfc"]
	}],
	"timeoutSeconds": 180,
	"requestId": 123456789,
	"displayIdentifier": "[email protected]"
}

where CHALLENGEFROMTHEAPP is a cryptographic challenge generated by the U2F client (the WordPress plugin) and registeredKeys is a list of all the registered U2F devices with the U2F client (which must include the U2F key to be used over bluetooth).

The app now sends this data to the U2F key via bluetooth which responds with a message that gets added to the RETURNURL as a URL hash RETURNURL#chaldt=PAYLOAD where PAYLOAD is again double-urlencoded and has the following format:

{
	"type": "u2f_sign_response",
	"requestId": 123456789,
	"responseData": {
		"clientData": "CLIENTDATA",
		"signatureData": "SIGNATUREDATA",
		"keyHandle": "KEYHANDLE"
	}
}

where responseData contains the SignResponse object as defined by the FIDO U2F JavaScript API. This data can now be used by the client to verify the signature and complete the authentication.

The Hack

To make the Google Smart Lock app work with the Two Factor plugin, we should adjust the u2f-google link payload with our own data and set the correct returnUrl.

Unfortunately, the Smart Lock app ignores all requests where the returnUrl doesn’t start with https://accounts.google.com/signin which is a real shame because it would allow any site to offer U2F authentication without creating a custom middleware app for talking to U2F keys over bluetooth or NFC.

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The Code of Conduct will apply to all plugin developers and their support crew, so we encourage you to be aware of these developments.

#ccoc, #crosspost

After overwhelming feedback from testers indicating that Gutenberg is not well suited for simply writing posts, the project’s contributors are considering a few options for improving the writing flow. These proposals are spread across several tickets on GitHub.

Two weeks ago, Gutenberg technical lead Matias Ventura submitted a PR exploring the possibility of introducing a “Focus Mode” to the editor. This mode would highlight the current selected block with all other blocks faded while the “fix toolbar to header” option is enabled. The video below shows an example of what that might look like:

“The aim is to provide a writing experience that can satisfy those that would prefer an environment with the least amount of distractions at the expense of tool clarity,” Ventura said. “I’ve been testing this and personally find it a very enjoyable mode to toggle when I just want to write for a bit. Paired with a robust set of keyboard shortcuts it could be quite nice to use. In this sense, it’d be important to provide an easy keyboard shortcut to toggle the mode on and off.”

Automattic designer Kjell Reigstad opened another ticket that proposes transforming the “Fix Toolbar to Top” setting into a “Focus Mode.”

“A key feedback point we hear is that Gutenberg’s interface can be a little overwhelming,” Reigstad said. “This often comes from users who more commonly focus on ‘writing’ versus ‘building’ their posts. They find the contextual block controls and block hover states to be distracting: When they’re focused on writing, they don’t necessarily want to think about blocks — they just want to write.”

Reigstad said this same subset of users also misses having the formatting toolbar at the top of the page, as it is in other applications like Google Docs, MS Word, and WordPress’ classic editor. He proposed a solution that addresses these concerns by combining the “Fix Toolbar to Top” option with the following UI changes that would provide a more complete “Focus Mode:”

• The block toolbar would be pinned to the top of the screen.
• The editor would be full screen.
• Block outlines would be removed for both hover and selected states.
• The block label would appear on a delay, and be toned down visually.
• Block mover + block options would also appear on a delay.

Reigstad also created a video demo of this concept:

This new “focus Mode” concept is also compatible with Ventura’s proposal for highlighting the current selected block and fading out the others. It could either be present in both modes or available as an add-on feature.

A couple of well-written reviews on the Gutenberg plugin describe how the concept of blocks complicates the writing experience and how Gutenberg’s current writing environment is visually distracting and disruptive. This has been a major concern since the plugin was first released for testing, as there are many users who depend on WordPress for its writing features more than the page building aspects.

The Gutenberg team’s new ideas go a long way towards decluttering the interface for writers. This is especially important for those who want to do their long-form writing inside WordPress, instead of beginning their work in an application that is dedicated to providing a distraction-free writing experience. Introducing a “focus mode” or “writing mode” will solve one of the most critical issues with the new editor and we’re looking forward to seeing how this develops.