WP Builds Newsletter #48 – WordPress 5.1 Beta 3, Plugin updates and Google dominates

This weeks WordPress news – Covering The Week Commencing 28th January 2019:

WordPress 5.1 Beta 3
“One of the features originally slated for WordPress 5.1—the PHP error protection handler – will target WordPress 5.2 instead. Some potential security issues were discovered in the implementation: rather than risk releasing insecure code, the team decided to pull it out of WordPress 5.1. The work in #46130 is showing good progress towards addressing the security concerns, if you’d like to follow development progress on this feature…”

Concerns raised about WordPress’ new ‘White Screen Of Death’ protection feature
“Security researchers warn that a new feature that will ship with the next version of the WordPress CMS can be abused to disable security plugins and put WordPress sites and blogs at risk. The feature, which has a very cool name in “WSOD (white-screen-of-death) Protection” and is considered the equivalent of a WordPress Safe Mode, is scheduled to make its debut with the release of WordPress 5.1, expected this spring…”

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WooCommerce 3.5.4 security/fix release
“WooCommerce 3.5.4 is now available. This is a security release for all previous versions and we strongly encourage you to update your sites as soon as possible…”

Spam Injector Disguised as License Key in WordPress Website
“There are various types of common malware, but when we stumble upon a different scenario, our research team likes to dig deeper and conduct a complete investigation. A license key is a place where a webmaster might not expect to find an infection, however, in this particular case, this is where we found one…”

Feature Plugin: WP Ultimo Blocks
“Since version 5.0, WordPress has a new editor experience: Gutenberg (now simply called the Block Editor). It completely replaces the old post edit screen and adds a new block-based interface. I’m sure you all have seen it, but just in case you were living under a rock over the past few months, here’s what it looks like…”

Hustle Adds Hot New Marketing Opt-ins and reCAPTCHA for WordPress Blocks
“Your favorite WordPress marketing plugin got another upgrade! Hustle’s new Gutenberg and reCAPTCHA integrations make it easier and less spammy to grab new users with pop-ups…”

WP Builds podcast – Should we give our clients telephone support?
“Should we be available on the phone to deal with client issues for our WordPress website business? I have had this conversation so many times in the past with so many people! We all know that, in the right hands, a phone can be one of the best ways to engage with your clients. But, in the wrong hands, the phone can be a scary thing that wastes your time and causes you stress and anxiety. See what we think…”

CMS market share: a numbers analysis
“As I’m getting into my new role as Marketing Lead for WordPress, I was doing an analysis of the CMS market share numbers. The first thing I noticed was that, according to W3Techs, WordPress’s market share had yet again grown, to now have 33% of the top 10 million sites. As I was diving deeper, the numbers in the W3Techs research show some very interesting trends. I thought I’d share what I’m seeing…”

White Label CMS 2.0 Release Adds Child Theme Support and Faster Setup
“The popular plugin, White Label CMS, has just released version 2.0 with tons of new features. If you haven’t heard of the plugin, basically it allows you to customise the entire client experience including the login URL, login screen, dashboard and admin menus in a matter of minutes…”

Non WordPress, but useful anyway…

Google Chrome will warn you of lookalike URLs
“We’ve all had a finger slip and ended up mistyping a URL. Google Chrome will soon provide a warning for you when that happens so you don’t get fooled by a lookalike site and will redirect you to the site you were trying to visit…”

Google takes its first steps towards killing the URL
“Google’s Chrome security team has put forth a radical proposal: Kill off URLs as we know them. The researchers aren’t actually advocating a change to the web’s underlying infrastructure. They do, though, want to rework how browsers convey what website you’re looking at, so that you don’t have to contend with increasingly long and unintelligible URLs—and the fraud that has sprung up around them…”

Google Produced 96% of US Mobile Search Visits in Q4 2018
“Google accounted for 96% of all US mobile organic search visits in the fourth quarter of 2018. Organic search, in general, produced just under 26% of all site visits in Q4 2018, which is a half-point decline from Q3 2018. This data was revealed in Merkle’s Q4 2018 Digital Marketing Report, which also includes statistics about paid search, social, and Amazon ads…”