WP Builds Newsletter #6 – It’s all numbers – PHP 7, WordPress 4.9.5, BuddyPress 10, Elementor 2

This weeks WordPress news:

In WordPress 4.9.5, Users Will Be Two Clicks Away From Installing and Activating Gutenberg From the Dashboard
In the next release of WordPress (4.9.5) you’re going to have to click a button 2 times to get Gutenberg up and running according to WP Tavern. I think that this is very cool indeed.

Noteworthy Changes Coming in WordPress 4.9.5
WordPress 4.9.5 Beta 1 is available for testing and brings with it 23 bug fixes and improvements. A release candidate is scheduled for release on March 20th and a final release on April 3rd. Here are some notable changes you can expect in the release.

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Watch My FREE WordPress User Security Talk
David Hayes over at WP Shout shows us some of the basics that you might want to consider if you’ve just starting out with WordPress Security. It’s a video of some 43mins and I really enjoyed it!

UX In Contact Forms: Essentials To Turn Leads Into Conversions
Do you like filling out forms? I thought not. It’s not what we want from a service. All the user wants is to buy a ticket, book a hotel room, make a purchase and so on. Filling in a form is a necessary evil they have to deal with. Does this describe you? So, what actually affects a person’s attitude to submitting a form?

10 Years of BuddyPress
In 2008 (just 10 short years ago) Andy Peatling made the very first code-commit to the newly adopted BuddyPress project, joining bbPress, GlotPress, and BackPress at the time. As most of you can probably imagine, BuddyPress was a different piece of software back then, trying to solve a completely different decade’s worth of problems for a completely different version of WordPress.

Introducing Blocks for Elementor – The Fastest Way to Build Websites
Think of Blocks like Lego bricks. You pick the relevant blocks – start with the hero, services, a testimonial and the other parts of your page, then customize each one to make it fit your website. Working with a full page template is great, but sometimes you don’t want the entire page to be preset for you. With Blocks, you get the convenience of pre-designed layouts and the flexibility of picking and choosing each section.

No Fear Funnels – The Sales Funnel Course for Non-Marketers
Elementor 2.0 is finally here! In celebration, I want to include you in an exclusive offer for a HUGE pre-sale discount on my upcoming course, No Fear Funnels. This brand new course will be the world’s first premium training to feature Elementor 2.0. Jump on this limited-time presale offer, and take advantage of a massive discount—just $197. No Fear Funnels will teach you how to take tools like WordPress and Elementor (the tools you’re already using everyday) to create high-converting sales funnels for you and your clients.

Caldera Forms Becomes First Major Plugin to Drop Support for Legacy PHP
There’s been some hubbub around PHP version support in WordPress world lately. Most prominently, Iain Poulson of Delicious Brain (makers of WP Migrate DB Pro) published a post telling plugin developers to stop supporting old versions of PHP. The developer has made up his mind: Caldera Forms is dropping support for PHP versions 5.5 and below. WordPress itself is still written to (and proud to) run on PHP 5.2, although they’ve formally recommended more modern versions for a few years.

Non WordPress, but useful anyway…

GoDaddy to move most of its infrastructure to AWS, not including domain management for its 75M domains
It really is Go Time for GoDaddy . Amazon’s cloud services provider AWS and GoDaddy, the domain registration and management giant, may have competed in the past when it comes to working with small businesses to provide them with web services, but today the two took a step closer together. AWS said that GoDaddy is now migrating “the majority” of its infrastructure to AWS in a multi-year deal that will also see AWS becoming a partner in selling on some products of GoDaddy’s — namely Managed WordPress and GoCentral for managing domains and building and running websites.

How to Find Out Everything Facebook Knows About You
If you can’t bring yourself to delete your Facebook account entirely, you’re probably thinking about sharing a lot less private information on the site. The company actually makes it pretty easy to find out how much data it’s collected from you, but the results might be a little scary.

Google launches a Chrome OS tablet for schools ahead of Apple’s iPad education event
Chrome OS has been a pretty ideal spot for Google  to stake its various plays for the education market. The cheap, bare-bones Chromebook laptops have been light on complexity and heavy on connectivity. The company hasn’t had much in the way of options when it comes to touch screen devices, however. Today, Google announced its first education tablet designed with Chrome OS. The Acer Chromebook Tab 10 will be the first such Chrome OS tablet for schools to land in kids’ hands. The device itself is a pretty standard 9.7 inch 2048×1536 tablet that will retail for $329, the same price as Apple’s entry-level iPad.

The web will soon be a little safer with the approval of this new security standard
Hear that? It’s almost as if thousands of spooks and hackers suddenly cried out at once… The Internet Engineers Task Force has just unanimously approved a security framework that will make encrypted connections on the web faster and more resistant to snooping. It’s called Transport Layer Security version 1.3, and while it’s not a big flashy event, it very much is the kind of iterative improvement that keeps the web working in the face of malicious actors everywhere. The IETF is a body of engineers from all over the world who collaborate on standards like this — and their approval of TLS 1.3 has been long in coming, more than four years and 28 drafts.