Patchstack released a major update today with performance enhancements, better hardening, simplified rules module, and more.

Jamie Marsland shared a video on Twitter where he did an experiment. He tried to use Bricks without doing any training first. It was a bit painful to watch because I would have expected Jamie to have noticed the “Templates” menu, which is a common feature with the Site Editor, and the Border styling for rounded corners, which is common with the Gutenberg block options. However, when everything is unfamiliar it is easy to missing things.

I think the video highlights some of the pain points for new users of tools like Bricks. Bricks, Oxygen, and Cwicly allow you to create all of the templates for your site. They don’t just allow it, but require you to do so. This is a large connotative disconnect for new users. It would be better, I think, to provide a very basic set of templates, like wire frames, for people to get started. I actually thought Bricks did that, but perhaps that is in the child theme(?). Cwicly doesn’t.

Here is a tutorial from the Meta Box team on how to create an FAQ page using Meta Box Views.

A first, rough, version of collaborative editing is available in the Gutenberg plugin. This article provides a look at what is coming. (The admin list of “experiments” reminds me of Elementor).

Block themes get their settings from the theme.json file and classic themes can use them also. Jamie Marsland has published a good resource article about the theme.json file. He does a walk-through of the theme.json file for the Twenty Twenty-Four theme and explains the various sections and settings.

Here is a good tutorial from the Oxygen team on how to import ACF fields using WP All Import. This is a good one to bookmark.

For PHP developers – New features and improvements in PHP 8.3.

This article has a bit of a behind the scenes look at the creation of the Twenty Twenty-Four theme.

Here is a preview of the Kadence Query Loop Bock that is under development.