WP Builds Newsletter #43 – Updates to WordPress 5 already, PHP updates and social media is news

This weeks WordPress news – Covering The Week Commencing 10th December 2018:

WordPress 5.0.1 Security Release – Immediate Update Recommended
“WordPress 5.0.1 was released Wednesday night, less than a week after the much anticipated release of WordPress 5.0. This security release fixes seven security vulnerabilities, a few of which are quite serious. Sites running versions in the 4.x branch of WordPress core are also impacted by some of the issues. WordPress 4.9.9 was released along with 5.0.1 to address the issues for those users…”

WordPress 5.0.2 to Bring Major Performance Improvements, Scheduled for December 19
“WordPress 5.0.1 was released yesterday as a security release with fixes for seven vulnerabilities that were privately disclosed. It includes a few breaks in backwards compatibility that plugin developers will want to review. WordPress 5.0.2 will be the first planned followup release to 5.0 and is now scheduled to be released December 19, 2018…”

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How To Convert Existing WordPress Posts to Gutenberg Blocks
“In this post, we cover how to convert existing WordPress posts to Gutenberg blocks. Not sure how the process works? We’ll walk through the steps of migrating your previous post and page content to WordPress 5.0 and the new blocks in the Gutenberg WordPress Editor…”

What WordPress 5.0 Taught Me About Stress
“2018 has certainly been an exciting year for WordPress. The CMS celebrated its 15th birthday and released its revolutionary version 5.0, featuring the new Gutenberg block editor. It seemed like there was something new to discuss on a daily basis. A lot of it was controversial. As someone who uses WordPress and cares about its future, I followed the process to develop and release version 5.0 closely…”

WordPress Plugin Directory Now Features a Curated Section for Block-Enabled Plugins
“If you visit the plugin directory, you will notice a new section at the top featuring block-enabled plugins. WordPress 5.0 has been downloaded more than 8 million times, just one week after its release, and users are looking for blocks to extend the new editing experience. WordPress.org is highlighting plugins to push the block ecosystem forward and will soon be doing the same for themes…”

Updating the Minimum PHP Version
“For the millions of sites already running WordPress 5.0, 85% are using PHP 5.6 or above. We’ve also recently observed that showing notifications to encourage users to upgrade their PHP version has been very effective. Yoast SEO experimented with this last year, and found that site owners upgraded their PHP version at twice the rate than before they were showed the notification…”

The Definitive PHP 5.6, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2 & 7.3 Benchmarks (2019)
“PHP is an open-source, server-side scripting and programming language that’s primarily used for web development. The bulk of the core WordPress software is written in PHP, which makes PHP a very important language for the WordPress community. Although the new block editor in WordPress 5.0 has introduced more JavaScript with React…”

BigCommerce and WP Engine join forces to bring scalable commerce experiences to WordPress Community
“BigCommerce and WP Engine today announced a collaboration focused on scaling ecommerce on WordPress to address the needs of mid-market and enterprise merchants looking for a way to seamlessly blend content and commerce. This collaboration highlights the complementary solutions of BigCommerce for WordPress, a full-featured integration that combines the flexibility of WordPress with BigCommerce’s robust ecommerce engine, and WP Engine’s Digital Experience Platform…”

Interview with Rachel Cherry: Automattic Pledges to Fund WPCampus’ Accessibility Audit of Gutenberg
“While at WordCamp US, I had the opportunity to catch up with WPCampus director Rachel Cherry, who is coordinating an audit on Gutenberg for the organization she leads. WPCampus launched its crowdfunding campaign at the end of November and more than $10K has come in towards the $30K goal…”

WordCamp US 2019 to be Held November 1-3 in St. Louis
“Dates for WordCamp US 2019 were announced today, less than a week after wrapping up a successful camp in Nashville. Unlike all previous years held in December, next year’s event will take place November 1-3 in St. Louis, Missouri…”

Non WordPress, but useful anyway…

Social Media Surpasses Traditional Newspapers as a Primary News Source
“For the first time, more US adults are saying they regularly get news from social media compared to newspapers. In a study from Pew Research Center, 20 percent of US adults say they often get their news from social media, while 16 percent turn to newspapers. That means social media is now the fourth most popular source of news…”

Podcast industry aims to better track listeners through new analytics tech called RAD
“Internet users are already being tracked to death, with ads that follow us around, search histories that are collected and stored, emails that report back to senders when they’ve been read, websites that know where you scrolled and what you clicked and much more. So naturally, the growing podcast industry wanted to find a way to collect more data of its own, too…”

Wix launches a new suite of products for support, sales and marketing
“Wix is taking a big step beyond website building today with the launch of a suite of products called Ascend…”