WordPress’ block management interface was introduced in Gutenberg 5.3, released in March 2019, and is due for an update. In case you haven’t explored the editor’s Tools menu, the block manager setting allows you to select which blocks will be shown or hidden in the block inserter.
Last week, Automattic engineer Nik Tsekouras opened a new issue in the Gutenberg repository for tracking block manager enhancements. A few planned enhancements are already on deck, including moving the block manager into the Preferences Modal, redesigning it to use panels, and adding support for toggling block variations on and off.
The updated Preferences Modal is expected in the Gutenberg 9.9 milestone, which will be included in WordPress 5.7. (Gutenberg versions 9.3 – 9.9 will be rolled into the release.) Moving the block manager into its future home inside the Preferences modal will be completed in a follow-up PR, since it needs to be refactored to use the panels design. Tsekouras shared a gif of the design plan for this update:
In the discussion on the tracking issue, Birgit Pauli-Haack requested that the updated block manager also include information about how many times each particular block is used on the site. She described a common scenario where this feature could be helpful:
We recently took a site live were multiple team members collaborated designing the site and adding content, each aiming for the best outcome with blocks.
Some installed additional blocks from plugins to test and provide options or just do a proof of concept.
Before we took the site live, we noticed there are now 148 blocks available over 4 additional plugins + core.
We now have no way to find out which blocks were used over 40 pages and posts. I looked at a few Block managers plugins and none seems to be able to provide an answer to a fairly basic question: Which blocks did we actually use throughout the site?
We would need the information to decide on which plugin can we safely uninstall.and which should we keep.
A revamp of Block managers could – and should- provide an answer.
An example of instances displayed in the Find My Blocks plugin
The Find My Blocks plugin, created by Eddy Sims, offers a more advanced version of what Pauli-Haack is requesting. It has its own dedicated settings page for displaying a list of the block types in use on the site, along with the number of times each has been used, posts/pages where the blocks are in use, if it is a reusable block, a nested block, and much more information. Pauli-Haack suggests the block manager simply show the number of instances where the block is in use.
As the block editor becomes more widely adopted, it is going to become imperative for users to be able to see, at a glance, the number of instances where a block is in use. Right now, even those who adopted the block editor right away haven’t been using it for more than a few years. Long term, after years of adding blocks, people are going to need more information when managing them, and they may not know about utility plugins like Find My Blocks.
Discussion is still open on the topic Pauli-Haack raised regarding block manager enhancements. You can subscribe to the new block manager enhancements tracking issue if you want to follow the progress on updates coming in the next few months.
Excerpts are vital for your WordPress posts. They’re a short snippet from your posts that you can display on your homepage or elsewhere.
The more fine-tuned the excerpt, the faster your site can load. Plus, your SEO can improve, and the snippet can be the clincher to entice users to read your article.
All of this can lead to increased traffic and a much higher quality WordPress site.
This article takes a look at what precisely an excerpt looks like, how they’re used, ways to add them, customizing their look, and more.
Plus, I’ll point out the differences between an excerpt and a meta description. Then, show you how you can boost your meta descriptions with our very own SEO plugin, SmartCrawl.
By the time you get through this article, you’ll be a (wait for it…) excerpt expert.
Expect More With an Excerpt
When you create an excerpt for your post, you expect to get results from it. And you will.
Excerpts are an essential feature to get a grip on because, by default, WordPress shows full posts on your blog, the home page, and the archives of your site.
That can lead to a lag when it comes to site speed. It can also cause search engines issues because of duplicate content on your site.
As for page speed, your pages will load faster due to it just loading a small portion of articles. Along with engagement that an excerpt can bring due to a catchy glimpse of the article, they keep users happy with quick load times.
All this being said, you will want to use excerpts on:
Any archive pages for categories and tags
The blog post page if it’s featured on your static home page
Your WordPress homepage if blog posts are displayed
Many WordPress themes are set up to use excerpts by default or give you the option to display the full article or a snippet. Be sure to find out if your theme has this setup or not.
WordPress will automatically create an excerpt for you that uses your post’s first 55 words (and, depending on the theme, possibly more) if it is included with your theme.
Automatic excerpts are frequently a poor reflection of the article. Those first few words or sentences need to reflect your post with a nice summary. Frequently, an introduction to an article won’t convey that.
Therefore, it’s good to…
Customize Excerpts in WordPress
Luckily, WordPress makes it easy to customize the excerpts, so you don’t just rely on the default.
All of this is done in the WordPress content editor. There should be a dropdown that says Excerpts. If it’s not there, check your Post’s Screen Options.
Clicking on Excerpt will get one created.
From here, it’s a matter of creating an actual excerpt for your post. The dropdown will enable it.
You’ll want to come up with something catchier than this example.
You can create an excerpt for a new or existing post. Either way works the same.
Some themes have a Read More link. If that’s not displayed, a user can click on the post title or featured image to get to the full post.
However, to get the Read More to display, it’s easy to do.
Add Even More With the More Tag
Another option of creating a short version of your post is using the More tag.
The More tags function differently than excerpts by breaking off your post at a specific point. It makes only the beginning of your post displayed, followed by Read More.
It’s easy to create in the WordPress admin with a new post or existing one.
When creating a post (or updating an existing one), click on the plus sign to add the More block where you want the More tag to go.
The More block is all you need to create a short excerpt of your posts.
Once you add the More block to wherever you want it in your article, it will appear as Read More in your draft.
This is how it will look when editing your article.
And with that, you now have an excerpt of your articles created. When it’s published, it will look like this on the page:
Users can then click Continue Reading for the entire article.
As you can see, it’s simple to do and worthwhile when it comes to creating excerpts from the WordPress admin.
Stand Out in Search Engines With Meta Descriptions and SmartCrawl
Another area you want to summarize posts are in search engines.
The little summary is called a meta description — not an excerpt — when viewing a snippet of your post on search engines.
I wanted to touch on meta descriptions because they are similar but work differently. It’s essential to know how they both function.
So, what’s the difference between an excerpt and a meta description?
An excerpt doesn’t use an HTML element and is just considered text to a search engine. That being said, a WordPress excerpt could end up as a description in a search listing if the excerpt is more pertinent to the search request than the meta description.
Meta descriptions are put into the <head> section of your page. It’s created to relay to search engines and other sites your post features.
A plugin like our very own SmartCrawl can help you create and fine-tune your meta titles, tags, and description for your pages and posts — for free.
SmartCrawl is here to help with your meta descriptions.
Plus, with SmartCrawl, you can add focused keywords, see if you’ve hit the recommended length of the title & description, and more.
Additionally, you’re able to get a glimpse in SmartCrawl’s dashboard of what your title and description will look like on Google.
The green status bars underneath the text indicates that you’re right on target for an SEO title and description.
An excerpt may contain the same text as a meta description, but they are not the same. With a plugin like SmartCrawl, you can easily separate the two.
Both of these plugins function differently, but, as you’ll see, they can create some good results when it comes to excerpts on your WordPress site.
Advanced Excerpt
Advanced Excerpt is by far the most popular plugin for excerpts from wordpress.org. With this plugin, you can enhance your excerpts with HTML markup, customize excerpt trims at any length, customizable ellipsis characters, and more.
It has a ton of customization options in the WordPress admin under Settings > Excerpt. From here, you can do it all.
It starts with the excerpt length. You can enter a numeric value of words or characters and customize however you’d like.
Then, there’s the option to tweak the ellipsis to substitute the part of the post that’s omitted in the excerpt. You can pick any entity you want to use for this. If you need help figuring out the entity code, there’s a website that contains them all for your convenience.
As you can see, there are a ton of tweaks you can make to enhance your excerpts, including opening the Read More link in a new tab, removing shortcodes from the excerpt, and adding various filters.
There’s a lot of customization options in the dashboard.
Advanced Excerpt is the right choice for a free to use excerpt plugin if you want to make some big-time changes. It has a solid 4.5-star review and over 100K active installations.
Advanced Post Excerpt
The Advanced Post Excerpt plugin is not nearly as popular as the Advanced Excerpt plugin, but it’s a straightforward, functional, and easy-to-use option for your excerpts. It’s an excellent choice for adding links, bolding text, blockquotes, and other tweaks.
Once activated, it functions by adding an interface at the bottom of posts. From here, you can customize the text and include options that you’d find in a typical text editor.
Adding extra features in an excerpt is easy with Advanced Post Excerpt.
There are no additional features to it, except the one demonstrated, which might work out perfectly for you.
This free plugin has a 5-star review and only 2k active installations.
No Excuses to Not Use Excerpts
There are many benefits to using excerpts, as you can see. There’s no excuse not to use them, considering how easy and effective they are.
Plus, ramp-up things with meta descriptions with the help of a plugin like SmartCrawl, and your site will be in even better shape for search engines.
And now I can officially say that you’re a (last time, I promise) excerpt expert!
Volvo Cars has announced an all-new open data platform that provides developers and researchers with access to valuable resources pertaining to automobile data, LiDAR specifications, and more. The Volvo Cars Innovation Platform is free for non-commercial use.
Here’s the situation: Your site offers a “scroll back to top” button, and you’ve implemented smooth scrolling. As the page scrolls back to the top, users see something that catches their eye and they want to stop the scrolling, so they do a smidge of a scroll on the mouse wheel,, trackpad, or whatever. That’s what I mean by cancellable. Without any further action, the scroll event goes to the destination. Cancellable means you can stop it with a subsequent scroll. I find the cancellable behavior better UX, although I have no data to back that up.
I’m finding some discrepancies between browsers, as well as between CSS and JavaScript on how this all works.
Scroll down on this demo and give it a shot:
Here’s what I experienced on the browsers I have easy access to:
CSS Smooth Scroll
JavaScript Smooth Scroll
Chrome
Cancellable (Speed: Slowish)
Not Cancellable
Firefox
Cancellable (Speed: Very Fast!)
Cancellable (Speed: Fast!)
Safari
No Smooth Scrolling
No Smooth Scrolling
Edge
Cancellable (Speed: Fast)
Not Cancellable
iOS
No Smooth Scrolling
No Smooth Scrolling
If it was up to me, I’d:
make smooth scroll actions triggered either through CSS or JavaScript cancellable.
define “cancellable” because it isn’t really the right word. Maybe “interrupted”? Or “controlled”? Ideas welcome!
make the speed controllable, or if not, attempt to get browsers to agree on a medium-ish speed (that stays consistent regardless of scroll distance).
make Safari have it. Smooth scrolling makes things like carousels without JavaScript very practical, and that’s great, particularly on mobile where iOS Safari is forced on Apple devices.
Open Web Docs was created to ensure the long-term health of web platform documentation on de facto standard resources like MDN Web Docs, independently of any single vendor or organization. Through full-time staff, community management, and our network of partner organizations, we enable these resources to better maintain and sustain documentation of core web platform technologies. Rather than create new documentation sites, Open Web Docs is committed to improving existing platforms through our contributions.
Well that’s… awesome. I know a lot of people were worried about the long-term health of MDN after the Mozilla layoffs, even though they have made some strong moves.
But wait, hasn’t this been tried before with Web Platform Docs? There is a big difference:
Q: Is this the same as Web Platform Docs was?
A: No, Web Platform Docs was a new documentation platform, whereas this is aimed at contributing to existing platforms.
Working through my mental checklist of things I would think this needs to succeed… does it have leadership? Does it have a plan? ✅
Florian Scholz joined the project in November 2020 as our Content Lead, working with stakeholders to define initial workstreams. Our 2021 priorities include working with Mozilla’s MDN writers and engineers to support the recent infrastructure transition and to prioritize and move forward with key documentation work, developing a community of contributors around core web technology documentation, browser compatibility data, and improving JavaScript documentation.
Does it have a team? ✅ Looks like 11 already and new hiring is happening.
Does it have money? ✅
That’s a good chunk of change, and covers that whole first year’s budget (Nov-Nov). Here’s hoping the big contributors keep that contribution up annually. But even if they don’t, I imagine a ton of good will come from just one year of this much focus and investment.
A membership website is a great business model. Many WordPress users have realized big profits by offering memberships on their websites. And it’s not only the little guy having all the fun. Big brands, too, are making a killing. A great example is Amazon Prime, which makes over $19 billion annually. Costco reportedly makes about […]
True to its name, the first WP Briefing podcast lasted just over 12 minutes. Josepha Haden, the Executive Director of WordPress, jump-started the second month of 2021 with a show that should arrive on the our doorstep every two weeks. With what seems to be overwhelming positive support on Twitter, the podcast was welcomed by the WordPress community.
This will be different from many other podcasts in the WordPress ecosystem. It will not cater specifically to a developer audience. Haden also said there would be no hot-takes on Twitter. “Just bite-sized chunks about the WordPress OSS project and the how/why around what it does.”
The show promises to be short. And, because it will only come around every fortnight, it gives people time to keep up to date at their leisure.
“You can think of this as a sort of WordPress appreciation for any level — and honestly, all levels of WordPress awareness,” said Haden of the podcast’s purpose. “Bite-sized insights into what makes it all work. “
Haden will be running the show every couple of weeks and plans to follow a specific format of three segments:
An easy-to-digest overview of a cool WP philosophy.
A highlight of a community success story or a noteworthy contributor.
A small list of big things to know about (or do) in the coming weeks.
Guest speakers may join the show from time to time to cover specific topics when their expertise is warranted.
A common theme in the past few years, particularly as the pace of block development has quickened, is that many people find it hard to keep up with the project. Even those who are neck-deep in WordPress development can feel a little lost at times. A podcast built on the idea of keeping the community in the loop may even be a bit overdue.
“It’s been on my list of needs since late 2017, but hasn’t been my highest priority during that time,” said Haden. “It’s been years since WordPress has been small enough for any single, part-time contributor to keep track of what’s next. Contributors across the project are doing excellent work to communicate efficiently about the work we’re all focused on, but it never hurts to lend some clarification where possible.”
The Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin currently powers the podcast. The plugin is developed by Castos, which is a podcasting host and analytics service. It has over 20,000 active installs and a 4.8-star rating.
Haden said they chose Seriously Simple Podcasting because the WP Briefing crew was already familiar with it. “I didn’t want to ask folks to learn an entirely new software while we’re still working out the process.”
The first episode focused on an introduction to WP Briefing. The overview segment covered three trends in action from Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word 2020 address. Dave Loodts was this week’s success story after sharing how he “blindly” chose a career in freelance web development and is still going strong after 15 years (congrats, Dave!). Haden wrapped up the podcast with notes on Full Site Editing, Learn WordPress, and automation tools to help contributor teams.
It is definitely worth a listen if you can spare a few minutes. I am excited to see where this project goes in the future and see how it helps keep more of the community in the loop.
If I had one feature request, it would be for the development team to put the podcast player in the WordPress embed, which is easy enough to do with a custom embed template. This would let bloggers embed the show on their pages and share it with more people.
However, there may be ways to embed it via third-party services down the road. “It just went live and we’re working on getting it listed everywhere,” said Automattician Marcus Kazmierczak in response to whether it would be on Google Podcasts or Spotify. “Hopefully it’ll be showing up shortly.”
Figma is just blowing up, and for good reason. It’s good software aligned with what digital designers need. It’s fast. It’s on the web, so you can’t lose stuff and don’t need to figure out a storage strategy. It’s useful beyond designers directly, as the feedback mechanisms are nice and sharing is so easy. The collaborative team features are straightforward and what people expect out of software today. Godspeed.
I also love how it incorporates newfangled web tech so well. I just used the Remove BG plugin in Figma the other day and was like: nice.
Building leadership qualities starts early at home and within our immediate environment. When we think about leadership characteristics, most of us tend to focus on "hard and soft" skills and lose sight of other intangible qualities that we are exposed to in our daily lives. The lessons gained from experiencing these traits have a huge impact on our personalities and these go on to help develop our leadership style in all walks of life. Below are some of the impactful traits influencing young minds and adults in developing their leadership qualities.
Adventure Loving: Adventurous individuals love challenges and demonstrate grit, resourcefulness, and tenacity to overcome them. There is a discipline gained from overcoming any challenges, and that discipline will help one to be well prepared, and to be able to navigate tough situations and bold endeavors in the future. Surrounding yourself with other adventurous people is a plus.
My mind goes immediately to repeating-linear-gradient and hard-stop gradients when thinking of creating stripes in CSS. You make one stripe by using the same color between two color stops, and another stripe (or more) but using a different color between two colors stops (sharing the one in the middle).
That will make angled dark gray stripes 10px apart on black.
But this is how it renders on my screen:
Can you see that rendering jankiness where one or two of the stripes seems lighter and thinner than the others? I have no idea why. I assume it’s something to do with sub-pixel rendering or the like. This is not hard to replicate. It’s not just these two colors or this particular angle is just about any stripes created at all with repeating-linear-gradient. It stops being so noticeable with thicker stripes though (say, 5px and thicker).
I needed to do this the other day, found the jankiness, and remembered this little note in our stripes article. It amounts to: don’t use repeating-linear-gradient. Just use linear-gradient, set a background-size and let it repeat. Indeed, that seems to do the trick. The trouble with this is… how big do you make the background-size? If the stripes are vertical or horizontal, it’s fairly easy to smudge something. But if the stripes are at an angle… calculating the perfect width×height is tricky. I’d guess it’s related to the Pythagorean theorem, but I’m out of my depth there.
It does whatever fancy math necessary to get it right. You can see the unminified JavaScript here. Search for / GET BACKGROUND SIZE / to see all the math going on. Whatever it’s doing there, the stripes come out perfectly.
Kind of a shame repeating-linear-gradient doesn’t have better visual output as that’s so much easier to reason about, but hey, you gotta do what you gotta do.
This is the February 2021 edition of “This Month in WordPress with CodeinWP.” Hey, everyone! We hope this year has been going great for you all so far. We’re back with a new edition of the WordPress news to let you know how the first month of the year went for WordPress.
Back in March 2018, the pleasing news that the family of Symfony components was replenished with a useful Messenger tool spread quickly among developers. According to the creators, this Symfony tool had to take on the task of sending/receiving messages to/from other applications, as well as queue management.
Naturally, the appearance of an interesting tool causes a desire to implement it quickly in projects. However, few people can afford it. Therefore, we did not risk our time, as well as the stability of our customers’ applications, and postponed looking into it.
AWS offers a range of storage solutions, but for many users with typical storage needs, the decision comes down to these three services: EBS, EFS, or S3.
Deploying Docker containers to AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS) is straightforward and automated when you make use of CloudFormation to define your infrastructure in a YAML template. Here we'll be running through a simple example where we'll setup everything required to run an NGINX container in AWS and access it over the internet.
AWS ECS Overview
We've chosen to run the NGINX official Docker image as it will allow us to browse to port 80 and view the response to prove the container is running. To get this deployed into ECS, we'll need the following buildings blocks:
Facebooks algorithm changes over the last few years have emphasized friends, family, and meaningful connections. Thus, the content that drives the most engagement is going to be viral. Lets look at the best time for Facebook marketing.
Best time to post on Facebook- between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m.
Best days to post on Facebook- Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday The worst time to post on Facebook- early morning hours, and also, in the evenings after 6 pm.
The worst day to post on Facebook- Tuesday.
2. Best time for Instagram posts
Most businesses want to achieve maximum engagement level on their Instagram account. This is because more recently, people have begun to add views, shares, and directly message their favorite brands. Hence, Instagram has emerged as a crucial channel to boost brand recognition and brand loyalty. The best time to post on Instagram is:
Best Days- Monday, Wednesday, Thursday
Best Time- Between 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Worst Day- Sunday
Best time to post on Twitter
Given the huge number of users, Twitter is undoubtedly an excellent platform for creating brand awareness. Below is the best time to post on Twitter.
Best time- Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. to generate consistent engagement.
Best days- Tuesday and Wednesday.
The worst time to post- between 10 p.m and 4 a.m.
Least recommended days to post on Twitter-Saturday and Sunday.
The files and folders in your Google Drive are private by default until you decide to share them. You can share your documents with specific people or you can make them public and anyone on the Internet can view the shared files. Google Apps users have the option to share files and folders within the organization while restricting access to anyone outside the domain.
You can not only control who has access to your Google Drive files but can also assign the level of access they have on the shared files. You can set the access permissions to either view (read only) or edit (read & write). For instance, if you are to send a large file, you can upload the file to Google Drive and share it in view-mode with the recipient.
Who Can View or Edit your Drive Files
You may have a number of documents, spreadsheets and other files in your Google Drive that are accessible to other users. These users could be your contacts, someone within your Google Apps domain or some of the shared files could be public meaning they are available to anyone on the web who have the link (URL) to the file.
Would you like to know which files and folders in your Google Drive are shared with other users and what kind of access permissions they have on your files? Google Drive, unfortunately, doesn’t offer an easy option for you to figure out who you are sharing the files with either inside or outside your organization.
Meet Permissions Auditor for Google Drive, a new Google add-on that scans your entire Drive and then generates a comprehensive report revealing who has access to your shared files and what kind of permission they have on the files. If you have been collaborating with people for some time, the Drive Auditor is probably is the easiest way to find out what you’ve shared in Google Drive and sanitize it.
Here’s a sample audit report.
Google Drive - File Permissions Report
Getting started is easy. First, install the Google Drive Auditor add-on and authorize it. Internally, this is a Google Script that runs inside your Google Account, reads the files found in Google Drive and writes their access details in the spreadsheet. Not a single byte of data every leaves your Google Account.
After the Drive Audit add-on is installed, go to the Add-ons menu inside the Google Spreadsheet, choose Drive Permissions Auditor and select Start Audit. It will open a sidebar where you need to specify a query and all matching files that match the query will be analyzed by the add-on.
“me” in owners and trashed = false (all files owned by except those in trash)
modifiedTime > ‘2016-01-01T12:00:00’ (file modified since Jan 2016 UTC)
mimeType = ‘application/vnd.google-apps.spreadsheet’ (scan the access permissions of only Google Spreadsheets in my Google Drive)
Once the audit is complete, the report will reveal detailed information of every file including:
When was a file created and last modified
What is the file size and MIME type (file extension)
Who is the owner of the file
Who has edit, view and comment permissions on the file
Where is the file located in Google Drive
You can click the File Name in the spreadsheet to directly open the corresponding file in Google Drive. Also, you can use the find function or even filters in Google Spreadsheets to display specific files that match a certain criteria. For instance, if you wish to know about all files that are public, you can apply a filter on the Access column in the spreadsheet.
The Drive Permissions Auditor add-on works for both Gmail and Google Apps accounts. If you are a domain administrator, you can install the Drive Audit add-on for all users in your domain through the Google Apps Marketplace.
The add-on is free and lets you audit up to 200 files in your Google Drive. If you have more files, please upgrade to the premium edition and analyze every single file and folder in your Google Drive.
Bonus tip: Did you know that you can set an auto-expiry date for your shared links in Google Drive. The shared link will automatically stop working after a certain date or time set by you.
A membership website is a great business model. Many WordPress users have realized big profits by offering memberships on their websites. And it’s not only the little guy having all the fun. Big brands, too, are making a killing. A great example is Amazon Prime, which makes over $19 billion annually. Costco reportedly makes about […]
