WP Builds Newsletter #17 – State of the Word Address, Gutenberg Ramp and a spying football app

This weeks WordPress news – Covering The Week Commencing 11th June 2018:

Jumpstart your Testing and Transition Plans with Gutenberg Ramp 
“Introducing Gutenberg Ramp, a plugin to help you complete your testing plans ahead of time and transition smoothly to the new editor, code named Gutenberg, coming to WordPress 5.0…”

Plugin Detective Wins WordCamp Orange County’s 2018 Plugin-a-Palooza
“WordCamp Orange County, CA, took place this past weekend and the winners of the Plugin-a-Palooza have been crowned. Nathan Tyler and Natalie MacLees took the first place prize of $3,000 with their submission, Plugin Detective…”

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An Introduction to the WordPress Trusted Authors Program
“If you want your theme to show up in the WordPress.org Theme Directory, it needs to go through a stringent review process. This way, people only get to see themes meeting certain standards. However, the review process can take a long time depending on how many other submissions are waiting for approval. That’s where the Trusted Authors program comes in…”

Query Wrangler
“This plugin lets you create new WP queries as widgets and use shortcodes for queries on your pages. It also allows you to override the way category and tag pages display. Query Wrangler’s interface is highly intuitive way to create queries and will be second nature for any Drupal Views user…”

Tools, Processes, and More for The Independent WordPress Developer
“One of the things that the Internet has made possible that we couldn’t have seen even a decade ago is the proliferation of self-publishing that would happen. And in this instance, I’m not talking about blogging. I’m talking about self-publishing in the form of eBooks and the like. I mean, looking at anyone with a Kindle that has targeted advertisements (I had a previous version like this), you can see offers for books that are being published by those who have no publisher other than themselves…”

GDPR Compliant Form Builder for WordPress
“General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is everywhere these days. For a lot of WordPress folks, that topic came at a bad timing. Getting your WordPress form GDPR compliant is just the very first step…”

The All-New EDD Bookings Plugin Is In Beta
“EDD Bookings is the appointment bookings add-on for Easy Digital Downloads. Around twenty months ago, I began researching the idea of taking the existing EDD Bookings a step further. Today, I can safely say that we have taken it many steps further. The feature-set is not very different after all this time, but under the hood, it is a completely different beast…”

Matt Mullenweg delivers keynote speech at WCEU 2018
“Co-founder of WordPress Matt Mullenweg took the stage in Belgrade to give a mid-year update on where the CMS has been and where it is going. He referred to this as a “summertime update.” Over the past six years, Mullenweg has held a Town Hall during WordCamp Europe, but this year he decided to present what has been happening since WordCamp US in December, and what will happen in the coming months…”

Protect WordPress from Compromised Passwords with iThemes Security Pro
“The latest version of iThemes Security Pro, our WordPress security plugin, includes a new update to the Passwords Requirements settings module. You can now refuse compromised passwords and force users to use passwords which do not appear in any password breaches tracked by the Have I Been Pwned API…”

Free eBooks from Flywheel
What is there to say! Loads of free eBooks if you give then your email address! Some of them look great though.

Non WordPress, but useful anyway…

Smashing Book 6 Excerpt: Bringing Personality Back To The Web
“We’re pleased to announce that the brand new Smashing Book 6 is now available for pre-order. To give you a taste of what the book offers, here’s a sneak peek of a chapter written by Vitaly Friedman. Let’s explore a strategic guide for bringing back personality to the web, in regular real-life projects…”

Squarespace expands its website-building platform with email marketing
“CEO Anthony Casalena  and Director of Product Natalie Gibralter both told me that the Squarespace  platform has been gradually expanding beyond a simple website builder by adding things like e-commerce and analytics. Gibralter said the goal is to turn Squarespace into an “all-in-one platform” for businesses, with email as “the first segue into a broader suite of marketing tools.”…”

Rallying Cry of the Week: makefrontendshitagain.party
“This website, which we stubbornly insist on reading as “Make Frontends Hit Again,” is about something we can really get behind: returning to making completely useless stuff on the web because it’s cool and fun. As it says toward the bottom (just past the flashing GIF diamond wall): We used to make websites because it was fun and at a point we lost the way, We need to make dumb shit! Make useless stuff; make the web fun again! Totally!..”

Spanish soccer app caught using microphone and GPS to snoop
“If you’ve ever found yourself wondering why an app is requesting microphone access when there doesn’t seem to be any logical reason why it should need to snoop on the sounds from your surroundings, hold that thought — and take a closer look at the T&Cs. Because it might turn out that spying is exactly what the app makers have in mind…”