WP Builds Newsletter #13 – WordPress major update? Hacking / Cryptomining and Google warnings

This weeks WordPress news – Covering The Week Commencing 14th May 2018:

Warning: WordPress 4.9.6 Really is a Major Update
“This is no minor release. If releasing Gutenberg, the new website editor, is a statement for WordPress version 5.0, this next update is for GDPR and really should be using a different version number such as 4.10… even if WordPress never went past “.9” in previous versions…”

Plugin Review Team to Close Unused Plugins
“The thousands of plugins in the repository are what make WordPress so powerful. With these plugins, you can mold the CMS into anything you need; finding and downloading any capability you might need to make your site work for you. However, not all of these plugins are being used…”

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Introducing Discounted Hacked Site Cleanings
“We think that demand driven pricing should work both ways and our customers should benefit during times of low demand. If we’re going to regulate demand in one direction, why not do it in the other? So starting last Friday, we introduced discounted pricing…”

Overview of Beaver Builder Theme 1.7 alpha
Version 1.7-alpha of the Beaver Builder Theme contains heaps of new and enhanced features; too many to list here!

Preparing WordPress for a JavaScript Future Part #1: Build Step and Folder Reorganization
“In the past couple of months, I have been working on a patch to make WordPress fit with modern modular JavaScript programming practices. We’ve figured out what the concerns are with regard to JS code organization in WordPress and how to be future compatible, so we can easily allow modern JS practices and inclusion of projects like Gutenberg in WordPress…”

Tracking Emerging Cryptomining Threats
People are naughty sometimes! Increasingly the bad guys of the internet are moving over to stealing your CPU cycles to mine Monero (cryptocurrency) instead of defacing your site. Whilst this is (in some ways) better, it’s still a pain to track down and eradicate as we find out in this article.

WP 4.9.6, Privacy, Hooks, and You
“WordPress 4.9.6 has been released. This was a focused release, a little different than other minor releases, in that it adds a system for a privacy policy to WordPress. While the only change to plugins has been our requirement that you not claim (or imply) 100% compliance in anything, the changes to privacy awareness are far reaching…”

Create Your Beautiful 404 Page
“You can now create a custom 404 error page instantly & automatically. It’s fast, easy, and code free. In this post we’ll show you how to get it done in minutes…”

WordCamp Europe by the Numbers
“The WordCamp Europe organizing team was very nice to share the numbers from the past editions with us, so we’ve put them all together into this single infographic. We know you guys love visuals, so we hope you will enjoy our work..”

Non WordPress, but useful anyway…

Google Chrome Issues Final Warning on HTTPS
“Google Chrome announced that it will show a prominent “Not Secure” message in the browser bar starting in October 2018. Consider this your final warning. After October 2018 Chrome and likely all other Chrome based browsers like Vivaldi will display enhanced security warnings that may create higher bounce rates for your site and concomitantly lower sales and conversions…”

Google’s New Algorithm Creates Original Articles From Your Content
“Google has published research of a new algorithm that can take yours and your competitor’s webpages and generate “coherent” articles. By creating original content, Google’s new algorithm can answer a user’s question without having to send them to another webpage…”