WP Builds Newsletter #3 – Covering The Week Commencing 5th March 2018

This weeks WordPress news:

30% of the web is now powered by WordPress
The days when WordPress was used primarily for blogging are over. Today it’s the dominant CMS that powers 30% of the web. What was once a blogger’s CMS is now used to create digital experiences by 37% of Alexa’s top 100 sites. Consider this. It is believed that there are nearly 2 billion websites online today. Given that the world’s population is approximately 8 million, that’s one website for every 4 people. No other CMS is as immense and all-encompassing; WordPress is responsible for nearly 60% of the CMS market…

New Plugin Makes WordPress Core Updates More Secure by Requiring Cryptographic Signature Verification
In 2016, WordFence published their findings of a vulnerability that could have compromised the servers that are used to send out WordPress updates. It turned out to be a complex, obscure vulnerability that ignited a conversation surrounding the security of api.wordpress.org and what could happen if the servers were compromised. One idea that was brought forth is to digitally sign WordPress core, theme, and plugin updates. For at least five years, a trac ticket has laid semi-dormant with this idea in mind…

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Conceptual Ideas on How the Customizer Could Integrate With Gutenberg
While the initial focus of Gutenberg is the editor, the second focus is the Customization experience in WordPress. Mel Choyce, Product Designer at Automattic, recently spoke at LoopConf, on the past, present, and future of the customizer. Choyce begins the presentation by describing when and how the customizer was added to WordPress. Fun fact, the customizer or what was known as the Theme Customizer at the time, was added to WordPress 3.4 “Green” in June 2012…

Preparing Toolset plugins for Gutenberg. New documentation is online
Gutenberg is a new WordPress editor that will ship with WordPress 5.0. When this happens, we want to ensure that Toolset plugins are fully compatible with Gutenberg. Our new documentation gives you a preview of what to expect, how to test the new features, and what will be available in the near feature…

A Big Collection Of Gutenberg Editor Resources For Developers And Casual Users Alike
Every time the clock ticks past midnight, the Gutenberg editor gets one day closer to becoming part of the core. WordPress 5.0 is the next major release. And with WordPress 5.0, we’re going to get the brand new Gutenberg editor (I guess it will just be the “WordPress editor” when that happens). To help get you ready for the impending Gutenberg editor release, we’ve collected some of the best Gutenberg editor resources out there…

Speed up website deployment with Template Builder
Have you ever created a 15th instance of the same old type of site, wishing all the while you were doing something more exciting, like entering the Watching Paint Dry Championship? If that’s the case, we have a cool new toy for you. Template Builder will make your life easier by a ton. Well, not by a ton, as you can’t actually measure it, but you get the picture…

Save Designs in Cloud And use anywhere
Would you like to save your own pages and templates in the cloud; and access them across any other websites – in just a click? This plugin does exactly that…

Automatically Set the WordPress Image Title, Alt-Text & Other Meta
When you upload a new image into the WordPress media library, it automatically generates a Title for your new image based on the underlying file name. Unfortunately, WordPress isn’t too sophisticated when it generates the image Title: it removes extraneous spaces in the file name and that’s about it. It won’t remove dashes or underscores, nor will it ensure that words are properly capitalized. So by default your image ends up with a Title that’s literally whatever you used for the file name, minus extra spaces. Which can be pretty crappy, depending on how you name your files…

Customizer Search
Using a theme powered by the WordPress Customizer? Then you will love this plugin. Save the time and frustration finding options. Simply search for the setting you’re looking for and get there instantly. Works with all WordPress themes…

Non WordPress, but useful anyway…

Malware from Space
Since you don’t have enough to worry about, here’s a paper postulating that space aliens could send us malware capable of destroying humanity. Abstract: A complex message from space may require the use of computers to display, analyze and understand. Such a message cannot be decontaminated with certainty, and technical risks remain which can pose an existential threat. Complex messages would need to be destroyed in the risk averse case…

Cellebrite Unlocks iPhones for the US Government
Cellebrite, a Petah Tikva, Israel-based vendor that’s become the U.S. government’s company of choice when it comes to unlocking mobile devices, is this month telling customers its engineers currently have the ability to get around the security of devices running iOS 11. That includes the iPhone X, a model that Forbes has learned was successfully raided for data by the Department for Homeland Security back in November 2017, most likely with Cellebrite technology…

Voice shopping estimated to hit $40+ billion across U.S. and U.K. by 2022
The growing popularity of smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Home will lead to an explosion in voice-based shopping, according to a new market research report from OC&C Strategy Consultants out this week. The firm is bullishly predicting that voice shopping will grow to a whopping $40 billion-plus in 2022, up from $2 billion today across the U.S. and the U.K…