WP Builds Newsletter #46 – Automattic announces Newspack, WordPress 5.1 feature and Gutenberg layouts

This weeks WordPress news – Covering The Week Commencing 14th January 2019:

Automattic announces Newspack to help news organizations publish and monetize
“Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, is announcing a new project called Newspack. While details are still thin, the company wants to help news organizations with an all-in-one solution to publish and monetize their content…”
See also:
Newspack: Automattic, Google and the SaaSification of WordPress
and
WordPress.com Secures $2.4 Million in Funding from Google and Partners to Build a Publishing Platform for News Organizations

WordPress 5.1 to Introduce New White Screen Protection Feature, Beta 1 Now Available for Testing
“WordPress 5.0.3 was released this week with more than a dozen fixes related to the block editor. The automatic background update has gone out and 23.2% of sites are currently running on 5.0+, with 47.2% hanging back at 4.9. Meanwhile, work on WordPress 5.1 charges forward and Beta 1 is now available…”

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and

Gutenberg Phase 2 Friday Design Update
“This is Friday’s summary of the week’s work regarding Phase 2 design. If this was a short distance race, everyone would bust out of the gate at full speed, but it’s a marathon here, so out of the gate, setting a comfortable pace is necessary…”

Cron Improvements with PHP-FPM in WordPress 5.1
“A new change in 5.1 Beta 1 introduces a change in behaviour for cron spawning on servers running fastcgi and PHP 7.0.16+. When available, requests to wp-cron.php will now return a repsonse immediately, before processing lengthy cron jobs, allowing the request that spawned the cron process to end without blocking regardless of the transport method used to trigger it…”

WPCampus Selects Tenon LLC for Gutenberg Accessibility Audit, Completed Report Expected in February
“WPCampus announced that Tenon LLC, a leading accessibility firm founded by Karl Groves, has been selected to perform its Gutenberg accessibility audit. More than $10,000 has come in through WPCamps’ crowdfunding campaign. Shortly before WordCamp US 2018, Automattic pledged to fund the remainder of the audit. The final cost for the chosen vendor is $31,200…”

CoBlocks Adds Row and Columns Page Building Blocks for Gutenberg
“CoBlocks, one of the earliest block collections for Gutenberg, has added new page building blocks and tools in the latest 1.6 release. ThemeBeans founder Rich Tabor and plugin developer Jeffrey Carandang partnered together on this iteration of CoBlocks to bring users new Row and Columns blocks and a Typography Control Panel…”

Building Forms on Your WordPress Site with WS Form PRO
“From being in the WordPress space quite some time now, I have discovered that there is always room for a new plugin, even if it seems that a niche is already well-filled. That is certainly the case with form builders. Of the many that have come along, I have found each has its own unique strengths. The interface of WS Form PRO and the features it comes with will catch some users’ attention…”

Introducing Genesis 2.8 – The best way to future-proof WordPress themes
“When WP Engine acquired StudioPress in June 2018, a vision we jointly shared was the desire to invest additional resources in the Genesis Framework and help it evolve. For those new to WordPress, Genesis is the most popular WordPress theme framework among web developers and digital marketers today. More than 1 million WordPress sites use Genesis as their foundation and thousands of designers and agencies rely on it as the way to build beautiful, secure, and future-proof WordPress themes…”

A CSS-Overload Proposal from Nathan Rice
“Studio Press lead developer Nathan Rice makes an interesting point about the block-derived performance issues that may come from having lots of Gutenberg blocks and lots of CSS rules to style them in WordPress after 5.0. I don’t know how serious the performance degradation will be over time — I don’t know if anyone does. But I do know that it’s worth some consideration that as you load more styles it does indeed impact the waterfall of the site, as Nathan highlights…”

Corey Miller – Embarking On My Next Adventure
“After 11 years leading iThemes, the WordPress software company I started in 2008 in my home and which was acquired in January 2018, I officially turned in my notice earlier this month and will be departing Jan. 30, 2019…”

Non WordPress, but useful anyway…

Cern plans even larger hadron collider for physics search
“Cern has published its ideas for a £20bn successor to the Large Hadron Collider, given the working name of Future Circular Collider (FCC). The Geneva based particle physics research centre is proposing an accelerator that is almost four times longer and ten times more powerful. The aim is to have the FCC hunting for new sub-atomic particles by 2050…”

2FA codes can be phished by new pentest tool
“With every new hack, it’s becoming clearer that older forms of two-factor authentication (2FA) are no longer the reassuring security protection they once were. The latest and perhaps most significant is that researcher Piotr Duszyński has published a tool called Modlishka (Polish: “Mantis”) capable of automating the phishing of one-time passcodes (OTPs) sent by SMS or generated using authentication apps…”