Here are some very exciting news from the WordPress fronts: WordPress 5 will feature the built-in Gutenberg project. Gutenberg is a complete rebuilt of the WordPress administration and content publishing experience, with much faster and cleaner user interface and a whole array of new features, such as “page builder” functionality.
Here are a couple of links with more information on how to get yourself ready in time:
WordPress Theme Developer Handbook:
The Theme Developer Handbook is a repository for all things WordPress themes. Whether you’re new to WordPress themes, or you’re an experienced theme developer, you should be able to find the answer to many of your theme-related questions right here.
Finally, there is a more organized resources that WordPress Codex!
WPML.org, the web home of the WordPress Multilingual Plugin runs this blog post about the upcoming support for WordPress page builders.  Apart from the good news themselves, there are some insightful results of the survey that the team did, trying to understand who uses page builders and how.  I found the stats on which page builder solutions people use the most interesting:
At work we are primarily using Divi (when we are not building our own themes), but we’ve also done a few sites with Enfold. Â I’ve also seen Avada in the wild. Â But I can’t tell you which ones are better, because when it comes to using page builders, I’m mostly not involved. Â These tools are so awesome these days that they can be easily used by a non-technical person. Â Which is exactly what we do ;)
Many a time I’ve been involved in building a custom WordPress theme, which relied or benefited from some plugins being installed and activated. Â I’ve always had an ad hoc solution to the problem, with my own installation scripts, WP-CLI mockery, etc. “Packaging third-party plugins with your WordPress theme using TGM Plugin Activation library” covers a much more elegant solution. Â I haven’t tried it yet, but it does look very promising for my next WordPress project.
I’ve just discovered some sad sad news.  Alex King, one of the bigger people in the WordPress community for years, is fighting a stage 4 cancer battle.  Alex is well known for a few things, most notably for his design of the Share icon, his contributions to WordPress core, and his work as a founder of Crowd Favorite.
I’ve never met Alex or spoke to him directly, but his work is a constant inspiration. Â From the early days, when I was promoting WordPress as a flexible platform for web application development, I used his work for powerful examples. Â I’ve also built projects using Carrington Core framework. Â This blog ran both Carrington Blog and FavePersonal themes for quite some time. Â I’ve used Capsule for a while to manage my code snippets and project notes, and I’m sure I’ll use it again. Â I’ve used (and still using) quite a few plugins that he was involved with – Social, Twitter Tools, Old Post Alert, Delink Comment Author, and others. Â I’ve been an occasional reader of his blog. Â And, of course, like anyone else using WordPress, I’ve benefited from his work.
The time has come to return a favor. Â Alex is compiling some information about his work and career for his 6 year old daughter to learn more about him. Â So if you met Alex, communicated with him, or benefited from his work – take a couple of minutes to share your experience. Â He well deserves that.
To Alex: thank you for all your work. Â It’s inspirational and educational. Â Stay strong!