It’s impossible to miss them: Podcasts are more popular than ever. They’re a great communication tool, a smart way to grow your audience, and now you can embed them directly on your site. This month, we also made some improvements to Jetpack Search, AMP, and some other blocks.
Introducing the podcast player block
Whether you’re sharing your favorite podcast or promoting your own, the new podcast player block allows your site visitors to browse and play episodes directly on your site. This block comes with a number of customization options and it’s been optimized for accessibility.
Search
After a big launch last month, we’ve made a few improvements and fixed some bugs:
- Added a custom filter so you can exclude content from search results
- Fixed a bug to improve performance of search in 28 non-English languages
- Increased the maximum number of comments we index per post from 100 to 200 to improve search results. 99.98% of all posts will now have all comments indexed, making 99.55% of all sites fully indexed.
- Improved the onboarding flow and our initial configuration to make launching Search even easier
Block improvements
We’re also continuously improving our other blocks.
As of December 14, 2022, the Revue service announced they are shutting down. You can learn more at Revue’s official site.
If you’ve added the Revue block to your site, you will see a notice in the editor letting you know that the block is no longer available. Your site visitors, however, won’t see anything.
The info below about the Revue block remains here for posterity.
- We added more options to the Revue block. You can now customize the look of the subscription fields to fit your needs.
- We fixed layout issues with the Slideshow, OpenTable, and email subscription blocks.
AMP
AMP remains one of our areas of focus, as it can be a great tool to improve our site’s performance on mobile devices. In this release, we’ve made more of our widgets and embed tools fully compatible with the AMP plugin.
And more
A big thank you to everyone who contributed to this release:
Aaron Robertshaw, Addison Stavlo, Ajay Kumar Jain, Andy Peatling, Anna Magdalena Kedzierska, Bart Kalisz, Ben Dwyer, Biser Perchinkov, Brandon Kraft, Cameron Voell, Christopher Finke, Dan Roundhill, Derek Smart, Echo Gregor, Elio Rivero, Enej Bajgoric, Filipe Varela, Glen Davies, Greg Ichneumon Brown, Igor Zinovyev, Jacopo Tomasone, Jaroslav Polakovič, Jason Moon, Jeremy Herve, Jerry Jones, Jon Desrosiers, Julian Vidal, Kim Brown, kitchin, Konstantin Obenland, Leo Germani, Matt Geri, Matthew Denton, Michael P. Pfeiffer, Miguel Lezama, Niranjan Uma Shankar, Noah Allen, Omkar Bhagat, Rastislav Lamos, Robert Franklin, Rua Haszard, Ryan Kienstra, Sergey Mitroshin, Sérgio Gomes, Yaroslav Kukharuk.
Jetpack 