WP Builds Newsletter #49 – New Gutenberg blocks, Wordfence Central and DuckDuckGo rising

This weeks WordPress news – Covering The Week Commencing 4th February 2019:

Gutenberg 5.0 Adds New RSS Block, Amazon Kindle Embed Block, and FocalPointPicker Component
“Version 5.0 of the Gutenberg plugin was released yesterday with a new RSS block. Riad Benguella, the project’s technical lead for phase 2, published a demo of the block and its settings. Users can set the number of items displayed and also toggle on/off the author, date, and excerpt…”

Introducing WP Acceptance
“WP Acceptance—a team-centric tool we’ve built for writing reliable, scalable acceptance tests—is now available in beta. Part of our pursuit of finely crafted web experiences, we think that WP Acceptance will help ensure stable releases and fewer regressions for WordPress applications…”

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Introducing Wordfence Central
“Over the last several months, we have been focused on making Wordfence a better option for organizations with a large number of WordPress sites to protect. To start, we added the ability to secure your staging and development environments with a single Wordfence premium license, something you should take advantage of if you haven’t already…”

YoastCon Overshadowed by Twitter Storm: Joost de Valk, SEO Industry Leaders Called Out for Objectifying Women
“The third edition of YoastCon kicked off today in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, but for those following remotely the conference has been overshadowed by a discussion that erupted on the #yoastcon hashtag prior to the event. Several parties began circulating tweets and unsavory videos involving Joost de Valk, for which he has since publicly apologized…”

Are WordPress ‘small d’ developers getting left behind by ‘modern best practices’?”
“After years of being derided as not being with the times, WordPress’ code and community is experiencing a cultural shift in adopting “modern best practices.” Examples of this are the emphasis on Javascript (and especially the React framework), introducing a build process, and increasing the required minimum version of PHP…”

Announcing WPForms 1.5.1 – Form Builder Education, Translations, and Payment Checkboxes
“WPForms 1.5.1 has just been released and we know you’re going to love it. There are several features packed into this release that make form creation even easier than it already is. Plus, it’s going to help you increase form conversions and make more money, which is what every small business owner wants right? So, let’s see what WPForms 1.5.1 has in store for you…”

Nominate your favorite plugins for plugin madness 2019
“Is there a WordPress plugin you can’t live without? An awesome tool that helps you promote your site or optimize images? Perhaps there’s an administrative plugin that’s saved you hours of work? Now is the time to say thanks! Torque’s Plugin Madness 2018 is taking nominations from now until March 1st. Nominate your favorite plugins by going to PluginMadness.com…”

15,000 Hours Closer to Democratizing WordPress Hosting
“I generally think of retrospection as a healthy exercise; however hurtful it might be for us to deter from the daily, always-on-the-move activities or new initiatives calling for our attention, an analysis is necessary. Thus, we took a short break from the development of the 4th version of our infrastructure to reflect on what we’ve seen on the horizon of WordPress hosting in 2018…”

Is Josepha Haden Rocking WP Leadership?
“I’m not a WordPress core contributor. I don’t write the code, and I don’t make it a priority in my life to be contributing to the Marketting, Accessibility, WP-CLI, Support, Themes, or any other of the volunteer teams that keep WordPress a healthy ecosystem. And I don’t know enough of the people who do that work to claim to have my finger on the pulse of what’s going on for them…”

WP Builds podcast – Introducing Split Hero for split testing with Adam Lacey
“Adam has been on the podcast before, but on that occasion he was talking about his life as a freelancer, not as the owner of a SaaS app! He’s founded a company called ‘Split Hero’ which is laser focussed upon one thing – split testing your WordPress website pages and gain meaningful data back about which one wins! Hang on a minute though… what is a ‘split test’? Well, I’m glad you asked…”

Integrated Video Tutorials Joins the WordPress Gutenberg Party
“The Integrated Video Tutorials plugin now has four new white label how-to videos for helping your clients quickly get up-to-speed with Gutenberg, the new block editor for WordPress…”

Non WordPress, but useful anyway…

DuckDuckGo Warns that Google Does Not Respect ‘Do Not Track’ Browser Setting
“DuckDuckGo cautions internet users that companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, do not respect the “Do Not Track” setting on web browsers. According to DuckDuckGo’s research, over 77% of US adults are not aware of that fact. The “Do Not Track” (DNT) setting on browsers sends signals to web services to stop tracking a user’s activity…”

DuckDuckGo Hits a Record 1 Billion Monthly Searches in January 2019
“DuckDuckGo hit a new record in January of over 1 billion searches served throughout the month. That represents a 78% year-over-year increase from the 654 million searches served in January 2018…”