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A Visit to a Town Under Fire in Eastern Ukraine |  WBUR NewsFrontline report: Ukraine tries to defend heights around Bohdanivka in fierce fighting  Euromaidan PressA mayor in Ukraine aids his town’s few remaining people, as Russia closes in |  WBUR News

WordPress block-based themes allow you to build and customize your website visually, removing the need for code-based tailoring. Fully integrated with the Site Editor, block themes give an unprecedented level of visual control over the layout and style of your site.  

In this “Build and Beyond” video, Jamie Marsland walks you through everything you need to know about editing, customizing, and designing every element of your WordPress site using blocks in just 250 seconds. You’ll also get a few sneak peeks of some theme-related features coming in WordPress 6.5 (which will be released March 26, 2024!).

Ready to build on WordPress.com? Start a free trial today:

Bob Dunn loved designing, but didn’t fancy himself a coder. In the early 2000s, while struggling to create a website for his business, he thought to himself, “There’s got to be something better.” When Bob discovered WordPress in 2006, he realized he had discovered that better solution. With WordPress, he could build great-looking sites from scratch without needing to hand-code the entire thing.

In 2010, Bob dove headfirst into the world of WordPress, officially putting his print design business on the backburner and branding himself as “BobWP.” What started as site designing, consulting, and community building would eventually turn into podcasting. But it wasn’t until he discovered WooCommerce that he felt he’d really found his niche. 

Bob had used WooCommerce as a product since its launch and saw a need within the larger WordPress community for a Woo-dedicated space to bring developers, builders, and agencies together. Do the Woo was born, and Bob began his journey to create a podcast voiced by and for the vibrant WooCommerce and WordPress communities. 

As Do the Woo has grown to fourteen unique shows with dozens of co-hosts and countless guests over the years, Bob has been looking for the right online space to call home. He needed a website host that would allow him to easily maintain and market his podcast, allowing him to focus on the community-centered content that makes his podcast so valuable. He found that home at WordPress.com, where he’s been able to utilize a variety of back-end tools to help create a simple and welcoming front-end user experience. 

The teams here at WordPress.com, Woo, and Jetpack are proud to partner with Bob. Do the Woo is providing an essential resource to the Woo and WordPress communities. Not only is he creating a unique space for these conversations to happen, but he’s amplifying the voices of those who want to give podcasting a shot. And take heed, velvet-voiced folks out there: he’s always looking for co-hosts!

Are you ready for your own entrepreneurial journey to begin? Use coupon code dothewoo15 at checkout for 15% off any WordPress.com plan. Click below to take advantage of this special offer:

Say goodbye to the hassle of manual file uploads and tedious deployments, and say hello to WordPress.com’s new GitHub Deployments.

With GitHub Deployments, you can seamlessly connect your repository to your WordPress.com site in just a few clicks. Now you can focus on what you do best: writing outstanding code. Each time you push a change to your GitHub repository, it will be deployed to your WordPress.com site automatically or upon request. 

Check out this video overview from Paulo Trentin, one of the developers who worked on this feature:

Here are three reasons why we know you’re going to love GitHub Deployments on WordPress.com:

1. A streamlined workflow

GitHub Deployments help you manage your site’s code in a reliable, predictable, and automated way using version control instead of older or manual mechanisms, such as FTP or SSH tools. In its simplest form, it doesn’t require a workflow file like our previous GitHub integration, which relied on a GitHub action; instead, you can connect and deploy in just a few clicks, all within your WordPress.com dashboard.

This is a welcome change for developers who want to simplify their code deployment process and migrate away from the manual operations and error-prone nature of SFTP and SSH transfers. 

GitHub Deployments also allows you to connect multiple repositories to a single site, encouraging code reusability between the sites you manage. Want to deploy a plugin or theme to multiple sites with a single branch push? Have at it! Want to manage your entire site’s code from a GitHub repository? We’ve got you covered!

2. Run checks and tasks

GitHub Deployments also gives you the power to process files and run tasks before transferring the files to your WordPress.com site through GitHub workflows. This helps ensure that all team members publish code following your chosen patterns and expectations, for example. 

If that’s your thing, you can install Composer dependencies and run any command supported by GitHub actions prior to sending any code updates to your site. Find a few of our favorite workflow recipes here.

Three cheers for unified, well-written code!

3. Deploy the way you want

You can adjust the deployment settings for each repository, giving you complete control over how your code is shipped.

You can choose to automatically deploy changes to your WordPress.com site as soon as code is committed to your repository, or you can request deployments manually. Manual deployments give you the most control over when your code changes are pushed live, as you’ll use the GitHub Deployments interface to trigger a deployment. We recommend manual deployments if you don’t want to use a staging site.

In general, automatic deployments are not recommended for live production sites, as any changes to the code in the repository are automatically deployed from GitHub to the live site. Instead, you may decide to automatically deploy first to a staging site and then sync the staging site to production once you’re ready.

That said, choose your own adventure and deploy on your own terms.

Do your thing, and we’ll handle the rest

Development on WordPress.com has never been easier. Say goodbye to manual deployments and hello to more efficient collaboration, streamlined version control, and the peace of mind that comes with knowing your project data is secure.

Get instant access to our new GitHub Deployments with a Creator or Entrepreneur plan (did you know we have a 14-day refund policy?).

Ready to try GitHub Deployments out for yourself? Click here to start deploying, and learn more by reading our developer documentation.

Major kudos to the GitHub Deployments team on this launch! Paulo Trentin, Jeroen Pfeil, Kenroy Mcleish, Mike Kelly, Javier Arce, Jeff Sanquist, Alexa Peduzzi, Jeremy Anderberg, and our beta testers.

In this “Build and Beyond” video, Jamie Marsland re-creates The New York Times’ website in less than 30 minutes using WordPress.com. By utilizing mega menus, master layouts, typography controls, and post grids, Jamie shows us what’s possible with the limitless customizations available with WordPress.

When it comes to mega menus, specifically, it’s worth noting that this is a highly complex customization that should only be attempted by WordPress pros and is mainly shown here as a demo of what’s possible. Please read this blog post on the WordPress.org developer blog before embarking on your own mega menu.

To learn more and get started on your own site today, click below:

This year’s WordCamp Asia was held in Taipei, the vibrant capital city of Taiwan. Members from WordPress.com joined other Automatticians, as well as around 2,000 other attendees from across 70 countries to connect, learn, build, and give back to the platform that powers millions of top websites across the internet.

The event kicked off with Contributor Day, an opportunity for anyone in the WordPress community, from newcomers to seasoned experts, to get involved and contribute to WordPress. Contributing can mean contributing to code, but it can also mean sharing your expertise in design, offering support in forums, translating content, and much much more. This year’s Contributor Day had a fantastic turnout and it was amazing to see so many folks show up and participate! 

As always, there was a variety of informative and inspiring talks. Some of our favorites included talks about the future of WordPress, the multifaceted nature of design, building and maintaining WordPress sites with AI, achieving efficient workflows with the site editor, and the importance of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in the tech and WordPress communities. If any of these topics pique your interest, you can take a look at the livestream recordings for these and all other WordCamp Asia 2024 talks here. 

While our colleagues from the WordPress Project, Woo, and Jetpack participated in the event, folks from WordPress.com were also present, contributing, networking, and engaging with the community.

This year we were particularly interested in connecting with developers so that we could better understand their experiences with WordPress.com. Our hosting infrastructure, powered by WP Cloud, is best-in-class, yet the benefits aren’t as well-known in the developer community. To help get the word out about all of our developer-focused features, we’ve recently relaunched our developer site at developer.wordpress.com. Check it out to learn about staging sites, WP-CLI access, and Studio, our upcoming local development environment. 

During the anticipated closing Q&A session at WordCamp Asia 2024, Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, opened up about his dreams for a web that’s both open and accessible to everyone. He shared how the core principles of open source are not just shaping WordPress but also knitting together a worldwide community of contributors.

That sense of community is something you can definitely feel at WordCamps. Thirty-six percent of attendees at this WordCamp were first-time participants—a testament to the event’s growing appeal and the ever-expanding WordPress community.

During the closing remarks, Matt revealed that State of the Word 2024 will be held in Tokyo, Japan. The lead organizers also revealed the next WordCamp Asia location: Manila, Philippines, in February 2025. With Manila’s rich tapestry of Spanish, European, American, and Asian influences, we’re in for a vibrant mix of culture, cuisine, and community!

But you don’t have to wait until 2025 to start getting involved. There’s a huge number of local and regional WordCamps happening year-round. Head over to https://central.wordcamp.org/ to find one near you. Whether you’re looking to develop your skills, learn something new, network with the community, there’s something for everyone. We hope to see you out there!