ACF released the results of their annual survey. There are some interesting results. For example, hybrid theme use has caught up to classic themes and Bricks is the #2 most popular builder among the respondents.

Wow, the Generate team has done it again. The alpha versions of GenerateBlocks free and pro have been released. They were totally rewritten, made ultimately performant in that every thing is rendered before saving so no front-end rendering is needed. Also there is good attention to flexibility. For example, the new Query Loop can loop over ACF repeaters and other data as well as post queries. There is a new dynamic tag system for dynamic data and it is easy to register your own. Read about these changes and watch a video overview on the announcement page.

As part of Gutenberg phase 3 a new inline commenting feature is being released in the Gutenberg plugin version of the block editor.

If a site has a plugin installed that was closed in the WP plugin directory there is no notice in the site admin, which could be a security issue. The WordPress org Experiments plugin adds the notice in the admin that users would see if they were on the dot org site.

This release includes important security fixes, improvements and bug fixes.

An overview of a new tool, WPCodeBox IDE. It is currently in beta and only available for WPCodeBox owners. The plugin installs a feature rich file manager and IDE into your site.

The Kadence team held their annual Amplify event yesterday. At the end Ben Ritner shared about a new plugin being developed called Kadence Insights. It is used in the Gutenberg editor for A/B testing. Of course it works with Kadence Blocks but is a separate plugin and works with any blocks. Much of the presentation is how to do an A/B test and a look at the UI. It reminds me of If-So.

Of interest to developers and those working with code, JetBrains has now released 4 of their tools for free (not open source) for non-commercial use. This includes: WebStorm IDE for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript related development. Rider IDE for .NET and game development. Aqua IDE for test automation. RustRover and IDE for Rust developers.

The WordPress theme directory reaches a major milestone with 1,000 block themes. It has been a while coming, but the number of submissions seems to have picked up.