WP Builds Newsletter #32 – Gutenberg 4.0, PHP 7.3 and 50m Facebook accounts hacked

This weeks WordPress news – Covering The Week Commencing 24th September 2018:

Gutenberg 4.0 RC 1 Will Be Available in A Few Days
"Matias Ventura, Gutenberg’s technical lead, published an update on the progress of Gutenberg 4.0 and what users can expect. This version will mark the project’s 40th release. Ventura outlined a number of tasks that have been completed up to this point. These include, Full Screen, Unified Toolbar, and Spotlight modes to adapt to a user’s creative preferences, adaptive design, and autosave support…"

WordPress Theme Developers Begin Marketing Themes as Gutenberg Compatible
"WordPress theme developers are starting to advertise their themes as being compatible with Gutenberg, ahead of the new editor’s imminent merge into core. Work on the 5.0 release may be ramping up sooner than expected after yesterday’s announcement that 4.9.9 may be a quick release for PHP 7.3 compatibility or possibly cancelled altogether…"

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10 Awesome Gutenberg-Compatible WordPress Themes 2018
"If you haven’t heard already, the Gutenberg editor will soon become the default WordPress content editor once WordPress 5.0 ships. If you want to get the most from the new editor, you’ll need to use a Gutenberg-compatible WordPress theme…which won’t be every theme, at least not when Gutenberg first ships…"

An Update on Gutenberg Tasks
"Wanted to give a general update on where we are standing with Gutenberg development. Version 4.0-rc should be coming out in the next few days, marking the 40th release since we began distributing the plugin. We are also way past the original goal of 100k active sites with Gutenberg! So let’s look at what has been completed so far, and what remains to be done…"

WordPress 4.9.9 Release May Shift Focus to PHP 7.3 Compatibility, Gutenberg Merge Proposal Timeline TBD
"The plans for WordPress 4.9.9 are currently in limbo after today’s core developers’ chat. Here’s what we know right now: Discussions are underway regarding making it a quick PHP 7.3 compatibility release or cancelling it in favor of moving ahead with the 5.0 release cycle…"

Gutenberg 3.9 Introduces Reusable, Exportable Templates for Multiple Blocks
"Gutenberg 3.9 was released last week with a new feature that allows users to group multiple blocks into reusable templates. The templates can also be exported and imported as a JSON file. The idea of reusable templates is an expansion of the concept of dynamic reusable blocks that Gutenberg technical lead Matias Ventura proposed in June 2017. Reusability is even more powerful when applied to multiple blocks. The import/export capabilities make it possible for templates to be easily shared across WordPress sites…"

WP Offload S3 is now WP Offload Media and Adds Support for DigitalOcean Spaces
"Back in February with our release of version 1.6 of WP Offload S3, we revealed that we’ve been working toward adding support for additional storage providers. We asked you which storage provider you would most like to see supported by WP Offload S3. Even the co-founder of WordPress chimed in with his vote…!"

Maintaining Free WordPress Plugins is Not Free
"Despite the widespread belief that can be distilled from rude comments and reviews on the wp.org plugin repo, maintaining a free plugin is not free. It doesn’t matter whether you charge for a plugin or not, hours still go into it! And while you may argue how bad a plugin is because you found two bugs in it someone invested time and money into it. Due to an overwhelming amount of abandoned plugins in the repository, I decided to clarify a simple premise – how do free plugins get financed and why the lack of money is the number one cause of abandoned plugins…"

Level Up Your WooCommerce Skills at WooSesh 2018
"Putting better eCommerce sites into the world is something that benefits all of us. Building truly remarkable sites is hard work, and we want to make it a little easier. So, we have created an entire virtual conference called WooSesh – taking place this October 18 and 19 – to help you: Improve your WooCommerce skills, Be inspired by new ideas, Forge meaningful connections that will help you build better eCommerce sites…"

Non WordPress, but useful anyway…

50 million Facebook accounts compromised
"On the afternoon of Tuesday, September 25, our engineering team discovered a security issue affecting almost 50 million accounts. We’re taking this incredibly seriously and wanted to let everyone know what’s happened and the immediate action we’ve taken to protect people’s security…"

Google at 20: Journeys, AI-driven results and visual search
"It’s hard to imagine a life without a search engine that knows what it’s doing. I remember the days of AltaVista and co, search engines that just dump random pages on you for every given query. I was so excited to see Google enter the scene and immediately do everything right — the results were great, it was fast and it had no ads. Didn’t take long before I was hooked. But a lot has happened in the past twenty years and a lot will happen in the next. Starting today, Google is looking to change search for the next twenty years…"