WP Builds Newsletter #35 – Twenty Nineteen close, accessibility concerns and a super fast camera

This weeks WordPress news – Covering The Week Commencing 15th October 2018:

Introducing Twenty Nineteen
"Gutenberg grants users an unprecedented level of freedom to customize their site’s layout and design. In order to fully achieve their vision, users will need a new generation of flexible themes, built to take advantage of the creative freedom that Gutenberg offers. With that in mind, WordPress 5.0 will launch with a brand new default theme: Twenty Nineteen. The theme will be led by @allancole, supported by @kjellr as a design coach…"

Gutenberg Accessibility Audit Postponed Indefinitely
"Discussion surrounding Gutenberg’s independent accessibility audit is heating up. Two weeks ago, Matthew MacPherson, who was named WordPress 5.0’s new accessibility lead, proposed the audit and agreed to it being performed by an independent third party. The audit had gained strong support among accessibility contributors and others following the ticket…"

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Gutenberg Team Addresses Accessibility Concerns, Highlights Tools and Features that Surpass the Classic Editor
"The Gutenberg team has officially responded to recent concerns about the new editor’s accessibility. Matias Ventura, the project’s technical lead, published a post with examples of the accessibility efforts the team has made, many which may not be easy to discover. These include features such as keyboard shortcuts, slash command and insertion, high-contrast mode, and mechanisms for navigating regions and blocks with the keyboard…"

ACF 5.8 Beta 1 Introduces Blocks Feature, Release Slated for November
"Advanced Custom Fields is now actively testing its new block creation feature in ACF 5.8 beta 1, released this week. ACF Blocks is a feature aimed at PHP developers who have not taken the deep dive into JavaScript yet. It essentially offers a shortcut to creating custom blocks using PHP and HTML instead of JavaScript…"

Does Serverless WordPress Make Sense? Shifter vs HardyPress – Top “Headless WordPress Hosting” Options Compared
"When I first saw the terms, “headless WordPress hosting” and “WordPress to static,” I didn’t know what to make of it. I was like those poor Westworld hosts saying, “doesn’t look like anything to me.” Nevertheless, the idea – also known as serverless WordPress – is quickly catching on, and we now have two exciting companies aiming to bring serverless WordPress to the masses…"

Announcing NorthStack Serverless
"Pagely, the flexible managed hosting service for business-critical WordPress projects, today announced NorthStack™, its new managed serverless application platform built on the AWS stack. In an unprecedented first, WordPress users can now build and run dynamic, interactive websites with plugins in a serverless, pay-as-you-go environment…"

WordPress Privacy Contributors Begin Work on V2 Roadmap, Form Cross-Platform Working Group
"Contributors to WordPress’ core Privacy component are collaborating on a V2 roadmap to address broader privacy and data protection issues that fall outside of legal requirements. The group organized at the beginning of the year to work on GDPR-specific objectives but has since expanded its scope to tackle concerns that are not attached to any specific piece of legislation…"

Defender 2.0, Forced 2FA, New Tweaks And “We’ll Clean Up Your Site!”
"Defender 2.0 is now available including forced Two-Factor Authentication by user role and a new XML-RPC disabler. Big news, I know…but the real stunner comes as a new, members-only, service upgrade. WPMU DEV security experts will now restore and clean up your site after it’s been hacked…!"

WooCommerce 3.4.6 security/fix release notes
"WooCommerce 3.4.6 is now available. This is a security release for all previous versions and we strongly encourage you to update your sites as soon as possible. Versions 3.4.5 and earlier are affected by a handful of issues that allow Shop Managers to exceed their capabilities and perform malicious actions. These issues can be exploited by users with Shop Manager capabilities or greater, and we recommend all users running WooCommerce 3.x upgrade to 3.4.6 to mitigate them. Thanks to Simon Scannell, Karim, and Slavco for reporting the issues…"

The New Woo Adopts Gutenberg Components, User Interface Driven by React
"WooSesh, the free virtual conference devoted to WooCommerce kicked off earlier today. Todd Wilkins, Head of eCommerce at Automattic, Kelly Hoffman, Head of Design for eCommerce at Automattic, and Aviva Pinchas, Product Lead of the WooCommerce Marketplace at Automattic got things started with the keynote presentation…"

Gutenberg Live Show
"Every other week, Zac Gordon and Joe Casabona get together and talk about the latest developments in Gutenberg and WordPress 5.0/ Submit your questions using the hashtag #AskGBL on Twitter…"

ELU Hide Admin Menu
"The ELU Hide Admin Menu plugin helps you hide admin menu and admin bar items in WordPress admin area based on user role. Simply select the checkboxes corresponding to menu items and user role and Save. You’ll have a simplified menu for your clients and users. That will help you hide some important menu items that you don’t want them to access, like settings page, account detail page, etc…"

How We Built an Email Queue that Can Send 100 Emails Per Second Through Amazon SES
"It’s no secret that I’ve been plugging away at WP Offload SES, a new plugin that we’re hoping to launch soon that will make it easier to send your site emails over Amazon SES. While I’ve mentioned it before on this blog, one thing that I haven’t mentioned is the performance you can expect to get out of it. In this week’s article I decided to step back for a second and review the queueing system we put in place, and how we managed to squeeze every last ounce of performance out of it…"

The GeneratePress and Elementor Design Course
"Some websites look polished, cohesive, captivating, flawlessly beautiful, and were evidently built by a professional. Other websites, well, let’s just say that they look unbranded, underwhelmingly cluttered, unattractive, messy, difficult to navigate and seem to have been patched together by an inexperienced amateur…"

WordCamp for Publishers Seeks Host City for 2019
"WordCamp For Publishers’ distributed organizing team is looking for a new host city in 2019. The industry-focused camp gathers together professionals who use WordPress to manage publications. This year’s successful event hosted speakers who highlighted important topics, such as ethics in journalism, the open web, AMP, Gutenberg, and communication between tech and editorial teams…"

Non WordPress, but useful anyway…

At 10 trillion frames per second, this camera captures light in slow motion
"Light is the fastest thing in the universe, so trying to catch it on the move is necessarily something of a challenge. We’ve had some success, but a new rig built by Caltech scientists pulls down a mind-boggling 10 trillion frames per second, meaning it can capture light as it travels along — and they have plans to make it a hundred times faster…"

Exceptional Time Tracking Software for Remote Teams and Individuals
What more is there to say… a free time tracking app!