WordPress Tech Roundup for the Week of September 19, 2022

WordPress Design & Development Around the Web

Here’s a glimpse of what’s going on in the world of design and development in the WordPress space this past week: WP Tests from the Abstract Agency, ACF 6.0, and Simple Social Images. Cool Tool of the week Warp goes into plaid.

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

Use WP Tests Provides Better Theme and Block Testing

The Abstract Agency has clarified Theme Unit and Block Unit testing in WordPress with WP Tests. They’re enhancing and building on the WordPress Core’s Theme Unit Test and Rich Tabor’s Block Unit Test. The new tools they’ve created focus specifically on the block-based editor and all the possible configurations without building them all. On their blog, Post Status member Victor Ramirez succinctly describes the frustration many of us face: “The blessing and the curse of the block-based editor is the near limitless layouts, patterns, & blocks. We realized it was near impossible to track all the possible configurations the client could create.” Indeed! WP Tests is a great new tool to add to your theme and block development process.

Advanced Custom Fields Debuts Major Release 6.0

This is the first major release for ACF since it changed hands from Delicious Brains to WPEngine. I might even say it’s the first major one since Elliot Condon sold ACF to Delicious Brains. Regardless, this is a huge update with a fresh new user interface, a switch to make ACF Blocks closer to the native block experience, better accessibility, improved saving features like being able to toggle to “show in rest API,” and several other golden nuggets. This update is also “designed to be fully compatible with ACF 5.x and the vast majority of users will be able to upgrade without changing any code.” I’m looking forward to playing with all these improvements in the weeks to come!

Automate Your Sites with Better Social Sharing Images

Getting good social sharing previews to work can be a hassle, that’s why Mark Wilkinson and team have created Simple Social Images for WordPress. This plugin automates the creation of branded images for social media. So instead of a normal featured image or the first photo on the page, it can have a logo or text right on the image. The current version costs $49 but they’ve also submitted a free version to the WordPress.org repository and are awaiting approval.

Cool Tool

Each week we feature one cool tool that can help make your life easier as a WordPress builder.

You Deserve a Terminal That Goes at Warp Speed

This week I stumbled onto Warp, a new terminal for Mac, Windows, and Linux that uses “GPT-3 powered AI search will convert natural language into executable shell commands.” They had me at AI! They tout that “It’s like Github Copilot but for the terminal.” If that isn’t enough, Warp also takes a different approach to the command line user experience by making it act more like a text editor than your traditional terminal application. It has a nicer visual history with commands separated into “blocks” of content for easier viewing, and there’s some more advanced theming than iTerm or Hyper have. They also have an upcoming feature to share a permalink of your session with your team. That’s gonna be so awesome it’s sure to go plaid!

This article was published at Post Status — the community for WordPress professionals.