A small maintenance release, 6.5.4, is planned for June 5th. It is to help address the issue on plugin activation that was introduced in 6.5 where nothing happens after clicking “activate” (except the button goes gray). It will provide a redirect hook.

The WordPress plugin directory raised the ceiling that shows the number of active installs from 5+ million to 10+ million. Elementor, Contract Form 7, Yoast SEO, and the Classic Editor are now in the 10+ million club.

Here is a comprehensive tutorial on creating a block from scratch. It’s fairly advanced and touches a lot of areas. The tutorial is from Ron Huereca and he chose a Gravatar block as an example to demonstrate REST calls and saving attributes.

ACF 6.3 Pro was released. It adds data validation for block fields and the ability to store block data in post meta. They are also bumped up the minimum PHP version to 7.4 and WordPress version to 6.0.

Despite the marketing hype that Google wants to help you find information on the net, Roger Montti reports that the direction is to fill the first screen of search with AI Overviews and ads. It looks like Google is intending to use our Search Engine Optimized content in its AI search summary to offer more value to advertisers.

A tutorial from the Meta Box team on how to show upcoming events using Meta Box and Bricks. There is a video version near the top of the article.

Oxygen released version 4.8.3 which is a security update. The security issue addressed is a privilege escalation vulnerability that would allow a user with “contributor” or higher permissions to escalate their privileges to an admin (CVE-2024-4662). This issue impacts anyone that has granted untrusted users Contributor+ access to their WordPress website. It does not affect you if you do not have Contributor+ users on your WordPress website.

Here is a nice design tutorial from Jeffrey Dalrymple. He shows how to create a subtle skeuomorphic (realistic 3d) effect that can be applied to buttons, cards, or other block elements. Elementor is used in the video, but the principles can be used with any builder.

Adam Preiser shares a preview of some quality of life enhancements coming in the free Spectra blocks collection. Some of these enhancements seem to have been inspired by Cwicly. It would be nice if all of them were included in core Gutenberg.