Steve Burge, Author at PublishPress

PublishPress Makes it Easy to Find Reusable Blocks

Written by Steve Burge on January 23, 2023.

The latest version of PublishPress Blocks now has a submenu for “Reusable Blocks” that is enabled by default. This submenu allows you to reach the “Reusable blocks” page screen that is normally difficult to find in WordPress.

Reusable blocks are an incredibly useful feature in the Gutenberg block editor. They allow you to create content once and use it multiple times inside different posts and pages. In future updates for PublishPress Blocks, we're going to add more features to help you manage reusable blocks.

PublishPress 2022 Review and Thank You

Written by Steve Burge on January 18, 2023.

Welcome to the fourth annual review from PublishPress. You can read our previous reviews for 2019, 2020, and 2021.

We write these annual reviews for at least three reasons:

These reviews are for our customers. Thank you for all your investment in our work. I hope the reviews help you get a better understanding of our vision for these plugins.
The reviews are for business owners. We try to be honest about the ups-and-downs in the hope that you can avoid some of the mistakes we've made!
And finally, the reviews are for us. We pour many hours of our lives into building these plugins. It's easy to forget key incidents as you do the daily work. And as the years go by, it's great to look back on these reviews and remember the rollercoaster ride.

Here's our recap of key events for PublishPress in 2022.

PublishPress Authors Now Supports Schema Data

Written by Steve Burge on January 17, 2023.

The PublishPress Authors plugin can now provide schema data to help search engines find your author information. This is possible if you're using the Yoast SEO or Rank Math SEO plugins.

If you have the PublishPress Authors plugin installed, plus either Yoast or Rank Math, the schema data will be available automatically. No configuration is required.

PublishPress Blocks Has Day, Time, Page Controls for Gutenberg

Written by Steve Burge on January 10, 2023.

Using the PublishPress Blocks plugin, you can control how and when blocks appear on your site.

The “Block Controls” feature gives you a wide range of options, including these:

Schedule control: schedule when to start showing and/or stop showing a block.
User roles control: choose which users can see your blocks.
Term archives control: choose on which taxonomies and terms archive pages your blocks can be displayed.
Pages control: choose in which pages this block can be displayed.

In version 3.1.2 of PublishPress Blocks, these controls are improved and expanded. Here's what's new in this release.

The End of PublishPress Support for PHP 5.6

Written by Steve Burge on January 6, 2023.

Starting in March 2023, we will start dropping support for PHP 5.6. After that date, when we update PublishPress plugins, they may no longer be fully compatible with PHP 5.6.

If your site is using PHP 5.6, please plan to update to at least PHP 7.2 in the next few months. During 2023, it will increasingly become difficult for WordPress users to continue using 5.6. This is because the WordPress and PHP community is moving away from 5.6.

The PublishPress Plugin is Now Called PublishPress Planner

Written by Steve Burge on December 7, 2022.

Back in 2017, our team was just starting to focus on WordPress development.

The first plugin we launched was simply called “PublishPress”. We never expected to end up with at least eight other plugins. Over the last five years, we've added more plugins all with variations on the “PublishPress” name. So it is definitely time that first plugin got a name of its own!

“PublishPress” is now called “PublishPress Planner”.

We chose this name because this plugin is the key tool to help you plan, manage, and schedule content in WordPress.

Using Poedit to Translate PublishPress Plugins

Written by Steve Burge on November 30, 2022.

As started to get more and more requests for translations of PublishPress plugins.

As a team, we speak English, Spanish, Bulgarian, Croatian, Russian and Brazilian Portuguese.

That's a pretty good list, but it only goes so far. What about French, German and the other popular languages that our users want? No matter how big we grow, we'll never be able to cover every language, so we need to allow PublishPress users to translate our plugins.

There are several ways for users to translate plugins. In this guide, we'll recommend an excellent tool called Poedit.

PublishPress Authors 4 is Available Now

Written by Steve Burge on November 30, 2022.

We're really happy to say that the PublishPress Authors plugin is now at version 4.0.

Previously, the main selling point of PublishPress Authors was that you could add multiple authors to one post. That's not possible with the WordPress core.

But thanks to user feedback, we've been able to expand the plugin. With version 4.0, PublishPress Authors is now a complete platform for managing and displaying authors.

The New User Testing Feature in PublishPress Capabilities

Written by Steve Burge on October 28, 2022.

If you run a WordPress website which allows users to log in, you probably spend a lot of time answering account questions or solving website bugs for your users.

Here at PublishPress, we often have to browse our site and see exactly what the user sees. We need to test the user's account without resetting their password.

To solve this problem, we've built a new “User Testing” feature in the PublishPress Capabilities plugin. This is available in Capabilities version 2.6.

PublishPress Blocks Has User Role Controls for Gutenberg

Written by Steve Burge on October 27, 2022.

PublishPress Blocks 3.1 is available now and allows you to control which users can see a specific Gutenberg block.

The PublishPress Blocks plugin has a new “User Role Controls feature”. This makes it possible to add the following restrictions to any Gutenberg block:

Show a block to logged in users only.
Show a block to logged out users only.
Show a block to selected user roles.
Hide a block from selected user roles.

You can add these controls to almost any block, including blocks from the WordPress core and third party plugins.

Author: Steve Burge