WP Builds Newsletter #28 – Long live the Classic Editor, Gutenberg updates and AI taking our jobs

This weeks WordPress news – Covering The Week Commencing 27th August 2018:

Gutenberg 3.7 Released, Introduces Spotlight Mode
"Gutenberg 3.7 is available for download and contains a number of changes. The Fixed Toolbar has been renamed Unified Toolbar. This is an optional mode that fixes all of the toolbar icons to the top of the editor, similar to the Classic editor…"
Also here.

WordPress to Support Classic Editor for “Many Years to Come,” Plugin and Theme Markets Expected to Drive Gutenberg Adoption
"I love that people are using the Classic Editor plugin!” Mullenweg said in comment on a recent post. “There is an infinite number of ways that WP can be used and not all will be ready for Gutenberg when 5.0 is released, Classic allows people to still be able to update core and stay current with releases, and with the click of a button try out Gutenberg again in the future if they want to. It’s also trivial to maintain because Gutenberg also uses TinyMCE, so Classic Editor users will still get improvements and updates to TinyMCE — I won’t say ‘forever’ but I don’t see any reason why we can’t maintain classic for the edit screen for many years to come…"

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Gutenberg Block Library Provides a Searchable Index of Individual Blocks
"An avalanche of blocks is pouring into the WordPress ecosystem ahead of Gutenberg’s inclusion in core. A few block collections, such as Atomic Blocks, Stackable, and CoBlocks, can be found on WordPress.org, but it’s not easy to search the individual blocks they contain. Other collections and standalone blocks are spread across the web. WordPress theme developer Danny Cooper has built a centralized library of Gutenberg blocks that are currently available to extend the new editor…"

How to enable Inner Blocks in your Gutenberg Block
"Inner Blocks are Gutenberg Blocks that allow inserting additional blocks within your own block. To understand it even better, imagine a shortcode that wraps the content. This content can then be shown or hidden. You can achieve that inside Gutenberg with Inner Blocks…"

TranslatePress Launch – From concept to product
"When you launch a new project there’s always a buzz of excitement, hope, relief, but also fear of failure and disappointment. This is something I’ve experienced for all the projects I’ve been part of in the past 9 years, to the point that I’m actively looking forward to the first failed launch. Nothing is more telling of the above then the feedback we’ve received from the users currently using our new TranslatePress plugin…"

Distributor Plugin Now Publicly Available, Adds Gutenberg Support
"10up’s Distributor plugin has exited beta and is now publicly available. The free plugin syndicates content across WordPress multisite networks and the web. It went into beta last year and 10up reports that more than 100 organizations and developers participated in the beta program…"
More here.

Announcing the WPForms Gutenberg Block, Conditional Form Confirmations, and More
"There are tons of exciting new features in this release, and it also lays the groundwork for our next big feature that a lot of you have asked for. I’ll share more on that later, but first let’s take a look at what’s new in WPForms 1.4.8…"

Introducing Navigator: Manage Your Entire Layout From One Place
"Navigator is a navigation tree window that provides easy access to every element in the editor. It enables the user to drag elements throughout the page and edit them, quickly and easily. Navigator is particularly useful for long pages or pages with complex multi-layered designs, as well as for elements combining Z-Index, negative margin, position absolute, etc. It enables you to gain full control over the entire editing process…"

Speed Comparison of 100+ WordPress Themes – Not all Themes are Built the Same!
"Site speed is important. It always was and always will be. More and more site owners have become aware of this after Google stated on several occasions that speed does affect search-engine rankings. Site owners should strive to make sites as comfortable for use as possible (whether Google tells them to do so or not) which includes making them faster. Doing so involves making a lot of components work together, and one of those components (in a WordPress site) is the WordPress theme…"

Genesis Framework and StudioPress themes now available for WP Engine customers
"It’s official! Beginning today, access to the Genesis Framework and 35 premium, WordPress StudioPress Themes are included in your plan for free when you sign up for a WP Engine account. Both the themes and theme framework, which WP Engine began adding to its platform after acquiring StudioPress in June, are also available to existing customers, who can access them through their User Portal. If you’re on one of our Personal, Professional or Business plans, you can convert to one of to one of our new Startup, Growth or Scale plans for immediate access…"

Gutenberg, meet the Yoast SEO snippet preview
"Yoast SEO 8.0, unfortunately, had to make do without a snippet preview inside Gutenberg. There were still some kinks to iron out before we could add that snippet preview to our WordPress plugin. The code for that new modal — the pop-up screen — had to be written from the ground up, exclusively for Gutenberg. That code has now been added to Gutenberg’s core so every WordPress developer can make use of the modal inside the new editor. How awesome is that…"

Non WordPress, but useful anyway…

Artificial Intelligence – All Set To Transform The Internet (And WordPress)
"AI (Artificial Intelligence) and machine learning have become a hot potato in the corporate world. As a futuristic technology, artificial intelligence is capable of bringing disruptive changes in our lives more than any other technologies. This is because AI touches every aspect of our life and can take part in every activity…"

Fake Font Dropper
"Every day we see different website infections. When we receive unusual or interesting cases, our researcher instincts are triggered to investigate the unusual website behavior in order to understand how new infections work. In this case, the odd behavior was the website’s pop-up window claiming there was a missing font…"

‘Google Go’ Browser Will Read Web Pages Out Loud, Even on Slow Connections
"Lightweight browser ‘Google Go’ received an update this week which will allow it to read any web page out loud. Google Go was introduced last year as a web browsing solution for people in areas with slower internet connections. In an announcement, Google says the Go browser now has millions of users…"