Your WordPress mobile app is a convenient way to create and manage your WordPress site. Now, you can design a new page right from your phone or tablet — and build the site of your dreams — with predesigned page layouts.
Introducing starter page layouts
Not all of us are designers, and building a page on your site with the layout in your mind can be intimidating and time-consuming — but it doesn’t have to be that way! Now when you create a new page on WordPress for iOS or Android, you can choose from premade layouts. You can also customize them to fit your needs, right from the block editor.
Choosing a layout
When you create a new page in the app, you’ll see a list of premade page layouts, including about pages, contact pages, team pages, services pages, and more. Whether you’re the owner of an online shop of sustainably made clothing, the founder of a newly formed digital magazine, or a financial strategist who’s just launched a consulting business, you can use these premade layouts to build the most essential pages on your website.
Once you find a layout that you’d like to try, tap it to select it. After you’ve selected a layout, you can either preview it or create a new page with the chosen layout.
Ready to try these new Starter Page Layouts? Be sure to update your WordPress app to the latest version. If you don’t have the app yet, download it for free, on both Android and iOS.
We’d love to hear your feedback on these new layouts. Reach out to us from within the app by going to My Site, tapping your photo on the top right, tapping Help & Support, and then selecting Contact Support.
WordPress 5.7 Beta 2 is now available for testing!
This software is still in development, so it’s not recommended to run this version on a production site. Consider setting up a test site to play with it.
You can test the WordPress 5.7 Beta 2 in two ways:
Install/activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (select the Bleeding edge channel and the Beta/RC Only stream)
The current target for final release is March 9, 2021. That’s just four weeks away, so your help is vital to making sure that the final release is as good as it can be.
Some Highlights
Since Beta 1, 38 bugs have been fixed. Here is a summary of some of the included changes:
Italicized text has been removed to improve accessibility and readability (#47326)
Pause any playing media when closing the the media modal (#48562)
Gutenberg editor support for custom spacing (#51760)
Resolved Menu UI issues on medium-large screen sizes (#49576)
Admin UI color palette: ensure that all interactive elements have an appropriate contrast ratio (#52402)
How You Can Help
Watch the Make WordPress Core blog for 5.7-related developer notes in the coming weeks, which will break down these and other changes in greater detail.
Testing for bugs is a vital part of polishing the release during the beta stage and a great way to contribute.
If you think you’ve found a bug, please post to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. We would love to hear from you! If you’re comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, file one on WordPress Trac. That’s also where you can find a list of known bugs.
Figma — one of the most popular and fastest growing digital design tools today — was recently voted “the most exciting design tool of 2021.”
In many organizations, a smaller group — often the design team — uses Figma on a daily basis. But designers need a seamless way to share their work and gather feedback from other disciplines across the organization. Enter P2. P2 is a product powered by WordPress.com that boosts remote, asynchronous team collaboration. With P2, team members can share ideas, collect feedback, and assign tasks to one another.
You can now embed Figma files on P2 and get contextual feedback from everyone, creating a more inclusive environment, eliminating the need for others to learn and navigate design-specific software.
Sharing Figma files on P2 allows teams to review designs and comment where everyone collaborates. It integrates all work in a single spot, helping track project progress. P2 is fully searchable for future reference too! As you iterate in Figma, your files will magically sync on P2. No more messy screen grabs or wondering which Figma file is the most up-to-date.
Step 1 : Copy the link to the art board or prototype from FigmaStep 2: Add the Figma block and paste the link into it
Get P2
Want to know more about how P2 can help improve communication and collaboration on your teams? Check out a demo. You can also create your own P2 here and take it for a spin. Any questions? Feel free to comment on the demo P2.
WordPress is open source software, maintained by a global network of contributors. There are many examples of how WordPress has changed people’s lives for the better. In this monthly series, we share some of the amazing stories that are lesser-known.
Pooja Derashri shares the story of how she went from being an introvert from a small village in India to becoming a developer and working on international projects, thanks to the WordPress community.
As her interest grew, Pooja started following some WordPress-based groups on Facebook, where she first heard about conference-style WordPress events known as WordCamps. She later joined her first WordCamp in Ahmedabad, India. This three day event in 2017 opened up a new world—the WordPress community—and what would become a life changing moment. “WordCamp Ahmedabad has one of the best WordPress communities in India,” she said, “and everyone, including organizers and attendees were so humble and welcoming.”
The thirst for learning
A fascination with how things worked and a desire never stop learning were traits that shone through in Pooja from a young age. She moved from Banera, a rural village in India, to a nearby city, where she lived with her uncle while completing her higher education. With her enthusiasm for learning, she decided to become an engineer. When thinking back on that time she says, “Being from a rural background, people in my village tended not to be keen on the idea of sending their girl child to another city for further studies. Fortunately, that was not the case for me because my parents were immensely supportive of me and my interests. They’ve always encouraged me to believe in myself and fulfill my dreams. With their support, I pursued my engineering in electronics and communication.”
Discovering the opportunities in web development
On completing her engineering training, Pooja was not sure what to do next. One of her friends suggested that she should explore web development. The idea intrigued her, and she sought out learning resources to study. She also secured an internship as a PHP Developer to give herself the chance to learn alongside professionals in the field.
Getting started with WordPress
“I found WordPress surpassed other platforms. The vast knowledge base made it easy for me to learn.” – Pooja
This internship led Pooja to her first job where she discovered a range of content management systems. Her view of the opportunities offered by these systems changed when the manager assigned her a small project using the WordPress platform.
She recalls: “I found WordPress surpassed other platforms I had worked on earlier. The vast knowledge base made it easy for me to learn.” She soon became comfortable managing WordPress, working with plugins and themes, and wanted to learn it more in-depth.
Pooja soon joined WPVibes as its first team member. Being part of a new startup gave her a lot of experience and a chance to be involved in new processes. As the company expanded they started providing custom plugin development services per the client’s requirement and created some free and paid plugins. Pooja said, “We found it very exciting and productive. Today, we are a team of 10.”
Encouragement from the WordPress community
Contributing to WordPress increases your knowledge
At the event, she was able to listen to speakers from India and abroad, many of whom shared their journey with WordPress and how it had changed their lives. “One of the most inspiring sessions was by Rahul Bansal,” she said. “He talked about contributing to WordPress and giving back to the community. He also explained how contributing to WordPress can help you to enhance your knowledge. It inspired me to contribute to WordPress.”
The WordPress community of Ahmedabad continued to inspire Pooja and her husband Anand Upadhyay, and they later started a Meetup group in their home city of Ajmer as part of their contribution to the community. They continue to be involved in supporting local users through the Ajmer Meetup.
At the next WordCamp Pooja attended, she joined its contributor day, which brings users together to give back to the open source platform and global community. Most of the contributors she met were interested in giving time to the WordPress CMS. She decided to venture into a different path and took her first steps by joining the WordPress TV group, where you can explore videos from WordPress events across the world. She also discovered the joy of translating into her local language, and is a Polyglot contributor for the Hindi language.
In 2019, she was selected as a volunteer for WordCamp Asia in Bangkok, Thailand, and it became an impetus to become even more involved with the community. She was very excited about this role, and to be part of her first WordCamp outside India. Sadly, due to the global COVID pandemic, the event had to be cancelled. Her enthusiasm has not diminished and she is eagerly waiting to support in-person WordCamps in the future and meet even more members of the global community.
Her determination to be part of making WordPress and sharing skills has only increased, which has led to contribute to the WordPress Training team. This team manages lesson plans and prepares content to support people who are training others to use WordPress. The team recently joined a few other teams to launch Learn WordPress, which brings learning materials together for users of all levels, and Pooja contributed to two different teams during the project.
Message to the WordPress Community
Pooja is eager to share her belief in the power for good in the WordPress community. “There is a huge community to help you with your learning, so start learning and try to give back to the community. It doesn’t matter if you are not comfortable with programming, there are many different ways in which you can contribute.”
“What I have learned in my life is that it doesn’t matter from where you came and what background you have. All that matters is your hard work and positive attitude towards life.”
This post is based on an article originally published on HeroPress.com, an initiative focused around people in the WordPress community created by Topher DeRosia.
This maintenance release features 20 bug fixes as well as 7 issues fixed for the block editor. These bugs affect WordPress version 5.6, so you’ll want to upgrade.
You can download WordPress 5.6.1 directly, or visit the Dashboard → Updates screen and click Update Now. If your sites support automatic background updates, they’ve already started the update process.
WordPress 5.6.1 is a short-cycle maintenance release. The next major release will be version 5.7.
For WordPress, 2021 started on a high note. Read on to learn about updates from last month.
WordPress release updates
WordPress project executive director — Josepha Haden (@chanthaboune) shared big picture goals for WordPress in 2021. Highlights include shipping Full Site Editing — first on the Gutenberg plugin in April 2021 and later in core (with WordPress 5.8), improved learning opportunities on learn.wordpress.org, and better tooling for contributors. As per the updated WordPress roadmap, WordPress version 5.7 is planned to launch in March 2021 and WordPress 5.8 in June 2021. Some related updates:
Proposal to return to in-person WordPress events in safe locations
The Community team is discussing an updated proposal to create a decision-making checklist for meetup organizers. The proposal is aimed at locations that have more effectively contained COVID-19 (such as New Zealand and Taiwan, for instance) so that local meetup groups in these areas can organize safe, in-person events. According to the proposal, in-person meetup organizers should review local/global health instructions based on resources and complete a checklist — which recommends whether to organize an event or not based on the organizer’s inputs and other factors. Compulsory safety precautions should be taken for any in-person meetup, and participants/organizers can share event feedback with WordCamp Central. The proposal is still being discussed, so if you have any thoughts, please share them in the comments. Please note: WordPress meetups and WordCamps are still online at this time and will continue to remain online until further notice.
Contributor teams released Gutenberg Version 9.7 on January 6th and Version 9.8 on January 20th. Version 9.7 allows users to drag block patterns from the inserter right into a desired position within the editor. It also has a new block variations feature and several improvements to reusable blocks. Version 9.6 makes the spacer block semi-transparent, adds a variation icon to the block switcher, adds site editor content to an iframe, and stabilizes Full Site Editing (FSE) by removing the auto drafts feature.
Want to contribute to the Training team? Follow the Training team blog, or join them in the #training channel in the Make WordPress Slack.
Further Reading
Round 1 of the Full Site Editing (FSE) outreach program has wrapped up. As a result, gaps were identified in the Gutenberg 9.6 template-switching experience – you can follow the issues in GitHub. You can follow issues in GitHub and submit questions to the team. The program identified gaps in the current template-switching experience that shipped with Gutenberg 9.6. You can follow the issues reported in GitHub. Do you have questions about the FSE program? You can now submit it to the Test team.
People of WordPress — A cross-team initiative led by the Marketing team to highlight WordPress contributors is back with a post featuring Thelma Muelte of Zimbabwe. If you are an active contributor to a WordPress.org team or a local WordCamp, contact the Marketing Team with the #ContributorStory tag to be featured in the series.
Joseph Haden (@chanthaboune) launched a podcast titled WP Briefing which is aimed at WordPress users, builders, and contributors of all levels. The podcast – which is available on all major platforms, will include overviews of WordPress philosophy, community success stories, and major updates.
WordPress 5.7 Beta 1 is now available for testing!
This software is still in development, so it’s not recommended to run this version on a production site. Consider setting up a test site to play with the new version.
You can test the WordPress 5.7 Beta 1 in two ways:
Install/activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (select the Bleeding edge channel and the Beta/RC Only stream)
The current target for final release is March 9, 2021. That’s just five weeks away, so your help is vital to making sure that the final release is as good as it can be.
So what’s new?
Improvements in Core
Lazy-load iframes Now you can enable lazy-loading of iframes by adding the loading="lazy" attribute to iframe tags on the front-end.
Migrating from HTTP to HTTPS is streamlined Switching a WordPress site from HTTP to HTTPS has proven to be a pain for all involved. While on the surface, the Site Address and WordPress Address have to be updated, content with embedded HTTP URLs remains unchanged in the database. With this release, migrating a site to HTTPS is now a one-click interaction. URLs in the database are automatically replaced when the Site and WordPress Address are both using HTTPS. Also, Site Health now includes an HTTPS status check.
Standardize colors used in WP-Admin CSS to a single palette This change collapses all colors used in the CSS to one of the available shades of blue, green, red, yellow, grey, black, and white. The palette makes it simpler than ever to build components your users can read, because half the range gives you great contrast with white type and a half with black, according to current accessibility guidelines.
Ongoing cleanup after update to jQuery 3.5.1 jQuery deprecations in WordPress Core and bundled themes show up a lot less often, and the notifications make more sense to the user.
New Robots API The new Robots API allows the filter directives to be included in the ‘robots’ meta tag. Also, the directive max-image-preview:large is now included by default to allow large image previews to be displayed in search engines (unless the blog is marked as not being public).
Improvements in the Editor
Buttons block: Overhaul alignment and justification controls
Buttons block: Adds variations for vertical layout
Buttons block: Adds width selector
Code block: Adds support for font sizes
Cover block: Full Height Alignment control
List block: Adds font size support
Social Icons block: Adds Patreon, Telegram, and Tiktok icons
Social Icons block: Adds the ability to change social icon sizes
Spacer block: Use a semi-transparent background
Adds block variations transformations
Allow dragging blocks & block patterns from the inserter into the canvas
To see all of the features for each release in detail check out the Gutenberg release posts: 9.3, 9.4, 9.5, 9.6, 9.7, 9.8, and 9.9 (link forthcoming).
How You Can Help
Watch the Make WordPress Core blog for 5.7-related developer notes in the coming weeks, which will break down these and other changes in greater detail.
Testing for bugs is a vital part of polishing the release during the beta stage and a great way to contribute.
If you think you’ve found a bug, please post to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. We would love to hear from you! If you’re comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, file one on WordPress Trac. That’s also where you can find a list of known bugs.
WordPress.com supports a wide range of features for building your online presence: blogs, online stores, newsletter signup forms, and more. These tools are invaluable for many customers, but they can seem excessive for folks who are just looking to create a straightforward single-page website. If that’s you, read on for examples of how you can also create one-page websites here on WordPress.com.
Both examples use WordPress.com’s freshly-launched Blank Canvas theme, which is optimized for single-page websites. It comes with no header, navigation menus, or widgets, so the page you design in the WordPress editor is the same page you’ll see on the front end. The theme also comes with a handful of ready-made Block Patterns to help kick start your site.
About Me
By using the “About Me” block pattern, your website can be a special, concise introduction to who you are and what you do.
Start with the new Blank Canvas theme. Once that’s installed and activated, open your homepage in the WordPress Editor. If you have homepage content already, feel free to select it all and delete it.
With a blank slate in place, you’ll want to open the block selector, and switch over to the Patterns tab. By default, this will show you the single-page patterns that are included with the Blank Canvas theme. Selecting the “About Me” pattern will provide you with a beautiful starting point to begin customizing.
With just a few clicks, you can personalize the images, text, and social media links to make your site your own.
Collections of Links
Sending your followers to a single link is increasingly important. A handful of social media services only allow you to link to one single webpage (I’m looking at you, Instagram). Or maybe you’re a musician, and you want to point folks to your new album on their music service of choice — Spotify, Apple Music, Bandcamp, or Tidal. Having a single page full of links is becoming a necessity — and Block Patterns provide a simple path to creating a standalone page full of links on WordPress.com.
Again, let’s start with the new Blank Canvas theme. Open the homepage, and delete existing homepage content, if you have any. From there, you’ll want to open the Block Patterns panel again, but this time, select the “Links” pattern.
This will provide you with a template you can use to begin your list of links. Customize or delete the user photo, add your name, links, and a description if you’d like. Each sample button can be customized or removed, and you can add as many links as you’d like.
Once you have this the way you like it, copy your site’s address and paste it into social media!
If you have an existing site that you’d like to convert into a single-page site, we have you covered too. We’ve added a new setting to 20 of our most popular themes that will let you hide the header and footer elements on the homepage. This will provide you with a blank slate for customizing your homepage.
What other types of websites (single-page or otherwise) would you like to see more resources for? Share in the comments below!
WordPress is open source software, maintained by a global network of contributors. There are many examples of how WordPress has changed people’s lives for the better. In this monthly series, we share some of those lesser-known, amazing stories.
From a young age Thelma was encouraged by her father to ‘work hard, and dream big’. In High School, she pursued a career in Computer Science. She said: “I did not know what I would be doing or how I would get there but I just knew that I was going to pursue a career in information technology.”
She wrote her first line of code at the age of 16 living in Zimbabwe, Africa. This was to mark the beginning of her enthusiasm for computer programming.
When she joined the school’s computer class, Thelma thought she would learn Excel and Word. Instead, the assignment was to write her first program in C. She said: “It was not easy, but it was very exciting. l remember writing up simple code for a Video Club – a check-in/out for VHS tapes and CDs. Thus began my fascination with computers.”
Seven years later, she went on to university to study for a Bachelors in Business Management and Information Technology. Her third year internship was at a local web design and hosting company. Though she had hoped her placement would be at a local bank or telecommunications company, the chance to discover website design turned out to be the best thing that could have happened.
In 2017, Thelma went on to work for a company designing websites using HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript and Joomla. She had heard about WordPress but had not used it. She recalls: “People have this misconception that WordPress is not for real developers and it is not secure and at that time I was one of those people.”
Finding a local community
From a discussion with a member of the local WordPress community, Thabo Tswana, about a striking swag gift from a WordCamp, Thelma’s interest was sparked.
She started to find out more about WordPress and WooCommerce, and visited her local WordCamp Harare website. She was delighted to find that she could learn more about WordPress without needing any pre-existing knowledge, and wanted to be involved. So instead of just attending the camp, she volunteered too!
Her response to her first WordPress event mirrors the experience of many others in the community. She said: “I only started using WordPress because of the awesome people that l had met at that WordCamp. Everyone was so welcoming.”
A week later, with help from Thabo, she designed her first website using WordPress.
She soon became more involved with the community and Meetups. Thelma participated in the first-ever ‘Women Who WordPress’ Meetup in 2018, with lots of women getting involved from bloggers to developers.
She said: “We were free to talk and discuss a lot of things. We had more time to discuss the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org, we shared views on how to handle discrimination at work, how to promote your website and a whole lot of other things.”
Establishing roots in WordPress
In 2018, WordCamp Harare had its first-ever female Lead Organizer Tapiwanashe Manhobo. Thelma was part of the organising team that year and was assigned to handle Harare’s first Kids Camp to take place eight months later. You can read more about her experiences of organizing a Kids Camp on her blog.
She said: “After the first Kids Camp, we had several people in the local Zimbabwean WordPress community who were enthusiastic about encouraging young people to embrace ICT. In 2019, we had not planned to have a Kids Camp because of financial constraints but to our surprise, we had some anonymous donations and we managed to have a WordPress Community outreach to a youth centre, Centre for Total Transformation, a week after our WordCamp. It is a non-formal school that caters for underprivileged and vulnerable children. The group were able to share practical skills about using WordPress, computer hardware and software.
Thelma shares that she became hooked on WordPress because of its community. “I enjoy attending WordCamps, meeting new people and just learning new stuff. I have a huge list of WordCamps I would like to attend. Last year I managed to cross WordCamp Johannesburg off my list. When everything is back to normal my plan to travel to WordCamps will proceed (fingers crossed).”
Reaping the fruits of ongoing learning
Thelma is committed to ongoing development training. She said: “Even though I can still cook up code in C and Java, for now, I have also included WordPress PHP functions to the mix. It was not easy to get to this point, daring myself got me to this slightly better stage. I try to do my best where I can and I am happy to say it has paid off so far.”
Thelma has continued her journey working in design and digital marketing last year with Trust Nhokovenzo who works in digital marketing and is active in the WordPress Community. He came across her name as a developer from talking with others involved in WordPress. She went to work with his team at a marketing agency.
Her interest in the development of WordPress continued and she joined the 5.6 Release Squad in the mid 2020. At the end of 2020, she moved to become a Happiness Engineer working with WordPress.com. Thelma’s fascination with the platform and the community continues to grow and her contributor story is ongoing.
Twenty Twenty One is the latest WordPress default theme, which is now available to all WordPress.com sites. Designed by Mel Choyce-Dwan, the muted tones and timeless design will let your work shine.
Twenty Twenty One takes advantage of all the latest features of the Block Editor — the new block patterns allow you to create a beautiful layout in seconds.
