The 200th version of the Gutenberg plugin was released and has updates that will be included in the next version of core in March. There were a number of enhancements including improvements to the Style Book and pattern suggestions. What caught my eye was the ability to include hooks in content, which has been a feature only of PHP based themes up to now.

The Meta Box team has released a new free plugin that makes it easier to use Meta Box features for creating Custom Post Types, custom taxonomies, and custom fields. In this video I show what was involved previously and how it is now more convenient.

Matt has removed Joost and Karim from WordPress org and challenged them to create their own fork.

Meta Box Lite is a new plugin from the Meta Box team that includes the free extensions as well as the Builder extension. Now users have a complete UI in a single plugin for creating Custom Post Types, taxonomies, custom fields, and post relationships.

Automattic is lowering their contributor hours to 45 hours a week, to match those of WPE.

While some companies are moving away from lifetime packages it is interesting to see some adding them. The Droip team announced that they will be adding a lifetime option later this month. I haven’t tried Droip because as far as I know it does support dynamic data.

Congratulations to the top 5 winners of the WP Awards: ACF, WooCommerce, Elementor, WordFence, and The Admin Bar.

Also congratulations to the winners in their categories.

Marko Krstic has released a free plugin on the WordPress plugin directory. It helps you find where blocks are used and also helps you find where synced patterns have been used. This is useful if you are changing out block collections, among other uses.

The entire Patchstack app is now available as an API for free for people on their Developer plan. This allows for the integration of Patchstack with your own workflow and automations.