One new feature in WordPress 4.8 will be a variable width of the customizer sidebar. The sidebar width will grow up to 600 pixels on larger viewports, instead of remaining on 300 pixels.
Accessibility
State of WP Accessibility
In celebration of the Global Accessibility Awareness Day on May 18, the WordPress accessibility team presented the current state of Accessibility in WordPress 2017. The ongoing projects are the tag cloud widget and improvements of the settings API.
Plans for the future are the rework of the media system — in special the library — and the customizer. You can find more details on this in the post »State of WP Accessibility« by Adam Soucie.
Misc
Core
Variable customizer sidebar width in 4.8
WordPress 4.8 comes with a variable width of the customizer sidebar. Until now, the sidebar was 300 pixels wide, no matter the viewport width. From 4.8 on, the width will grow until 600 pixels on larger viewports. Often asked is the possibility to let the user resize the sidebar, but for now, the scope was reduced to the variable width depending on the viewport (there is a feature plugin for the user resizing).
More information about that in the post »Customizer sidebar width is now variable« by Weston Ruter.
4.8 brings cleaner headings for the backend
Before 4.8, multiple heading elements in the backend contained additional content to the headline’s text, for example, the Add new in the post list view. That is far from optimal from an accessibility point of view, so 4.8 is going to change that. If you developed a theme or plugin that uses this pattern, the best would be to update it — 4.8 brings CSS which handles it. If your theme or plugin adds content beside the headline, check if it works with the modifications in 4.8
More about that can be found in the article »Cleaner headings in the admin screens« by Andrea Fercia.
Preferred languages plugin prototype
Pascal Birchler introduced the first version of his language fallback plugin in the post »Preferred Languages: The Prototype«. The plugin makes it possible to specify languages, which WordPress will try before falling back to English for a string which is not translated in the default language.
Misc
- »WordPress 4.7.5 Security and Maintenance Release«.
- »JavaScript Chat Summary for May 16th«.
- »Dev Chat Summary: May 17th (4.8 week 3)«.
- »Editor API changes in 4.8«.
Polyglots
Misc
Themes
Misc
Plugins
Misc
- There were more issues with SVN syncing last week, but they seem to be solved since May 16.