WP Builds Newsletter #59 – WordPress 5.2 beta 3, community news and folding phones

Nathan Wrigley: 00:00 Hello there. Good morning and welcome to this, the WP Builds weekly WordPress newsletter number 59 this newsletter covers the WordPress news for the week, commencing the 15th of April, 2019 and it was published on the 22nd of April, 2019 just a few very quick things before we begin a few URLs to point in your direction. Go to forward slash subscribe, get on our mailing lists, join us on iTunes and Google podcasts and you know all of the things that we offer. So for example, you can join our Facebook group and find us on youtube forward slash deals if you'd like to reclaim some money from your product purchases. You can go there and find a whole bunch of coupon codes for notable WordPress products. So if you're in the market, WP Builds.com forward slash deals forward slash contribute. If you'd like to come on the podcast with me and record a short screen cast about something that you are excited that you've achieved recently and we'll share it with the rest of the world, that'd be nice.

Nathan Wrigley: 01:03 And finally forward slash advertise if you would like to promote to your product or services on the WP builds podcast. Speaking of which WP builds is brought to you today by Kinsta. Are you tired of unreliable or slow hosting? If so, check out Kinsta who takes managed WordPress hosting to the next level powered by the Google cloud platform. All their plans include PHP seven ssh and 24 seven experts support. You can migrate today for free at Kinsta Dot Com and we thank Kinsta for their support of WP builds. Okay. To be fairly honest with you, it's a little bit of a slow week this week for WordPress news, but regardless of that, we're going to do our very best to bring you everything that we've managed to scrape together this week in the WordPress world. Okay. We'll start with a couple of news items that go under the banner of WordPress core.

Nathan Wrigley: 02:04 Somebody in the Facebook group this week pointed out that I missed this one last week and you, you're absolutely right. I did because WordPress 5.2 Beta three did actually roll around last week, but because of the fact that it came later after I'd recorded the episode, I didn't manage to get it in, so I'm doing it this week. Um, okay, so it's a new update to the Beta release of WordPress 5.2 which is mooted to roll out on the 30th of April. We have the new site health feature. Uh, it has been refined plugins no longer updated for site is running an unsupported version of PHP. It's now more apparent when a site is running in recovery mode. The distraction free button, no longer breaks, keyboard navigation and the classic editor. Assistive technologies do a better job job of announcing admin bar sub menus. Subject lines in WordPress emails are now more consistent and a couple of other things, but you can find all that stuff at WordPress.org or simply click on the links in the show notes.

Nathan Wrigley: 03:04 The next one is all about Gutenberg 5.5 you can find this article on WP Tavern. Gutenberg 5.5 has been released and we've got this new thing called the group of block. It was previously called the section block, but it was decided that going forwards, that name might conflict with other various bits and pieces. It seems like it's the very, very beginnings of how the the, you're going to be able to group of blocks within a block and from the words of the developers, it's kind of a bit Janky at the moment and not really ready to use, but it feels like the first steps towards taking Gutenberg two to replace widgets and possibly even themes in the future. They've also added an image fill option and vertical alignments. I think really at this point it's to be played with rather than deployed are in on your client's sites and there's a couple of other things.

Nathan Wrigley: 04:01 So for example, if you've got an email address and you highlight it and then click the link button, it will automatically detect that it's a link. So some nice developments, but really I think just laying the groundwork for the future when Gutenberg takes over the role of themes and so on and so forth. Okay. The next three or four should I say, comes under the banner of community. This first one on WP Tavern is entitled, WordCamp Europe Publishes 2019 Speaker lineup contribute today. Registration is now open WordCamp Europe, which is being held in Berlin from the dates of the 20th of June to the 22nd of June. It's going to be huge. 2000 roughly 300 tickets have been sold so far, which is a little bit what it's about. Where they were last year. All 59 speakers have now been announced and the schedule for them has now been announced as well.

Nathan Wrigley: 04:52 It's quite interesting, the breakdown of male to female. Uh, we've got 34% female, 65% male. This is attendance figures and the breakdown for speakers interestingly is 43.4% female and 56.6% male. So that's getting towards equilibrium. Uh, even if the attendance figures or not and contribute to daycare tickets have now been released. They're limited batch. I think there's something like 150 remaining at this point and they go quite quickly. So if you're into going to the contributor day at WordCamp Europe in Berlin, you probably should head over to the link and, and get your ticket. Now they're completely free and uh, I should be there so that will be rather nice. Okay. The next one is entitled WordCamp for publishers is coming to Columbus, Ohio. August 7th to ninth call for speakers is now open. So this is a different kind of WordCamp. It's simply for publishers.

Nathan Wrigley: 05:52 So it's not really develop a related, if you go to a WordCamp, an awful lot of the talks are fairly technical and they've got lots of technical details. This really is designed for people like journalists, content creators, writers, editors, that kind of thing, designers and so on. And we now have a call for speakers. The idea is that there are 45 minute presentations and 90 minute workshops and five minute lightning talks. And so if that feels like you and you're going to be able to get to Columbus, Ohio, then maybe you should take a look at that. The intention of these word camps, these WordCamp for publishers is that they go to locations, which typically might not a receiver, a regular word camp. And I think it's been decided for various reasons that Columbus, Ohio fits the bill for that. So certainly very interesting. Okay.

Nathan Wrigley: 06:40 Ithemes, a couple of years ago, late 2017 announced a product called ithemes sales accelerator, and it was a way of giving you more information about reporting in your WooCommerce store. Well, it would seem that Ithemes have not received the traction that they wanted and they've announced that from this moment on they're going to stop development of it. They're going to keep, you know, keep it up to date so that you don't have security vulnerabilities and so on until March, 2020 the 1st of March, 2020 but from this moment on, there'll be no further development. So if that's something that you're relying on to get your WooCommerce data out, you should probably make, make other arrangements and start looking around. You've got roughly a year to complete that task. Okay, and the last one falling under the banner of community is on the WP engine site. It's entitled WP engine partners with WP forms to bring easy lead capture to studio press themes.

Nathan Wrigley: 07:39 You may recall that WP engine a few years ago, bought studio press, which powers the sort of genesis platform will now if you install one of their genesis powered studio theme sites, so you've got to have a a WP engine subscription and you can install with a couple of clicks, a studio press theme. You can now also install WP forms, which is a fantastic forms a creator, similar I suppose to things like formidable and gravity forms, but now you get this bolted on for free. It feels like WordPress is coalescing, the big players are getting bigger and bigger and buying up all of these different properties and this just seems like a another step. It isn't a buyout. It's simply an arrangement where whereby you can install without purchasing your own license, but obviously they're trying to capture more of the audience. Okay. One item of Security News, I'm not sure what I feel about this.

Nathan Wrigley: 08:34 I can see it from both sides, but this article on WP Tavern is entitled plugins vulnerabilities dot com is protesting WordPress.org support for a moderator's by publishing zero day vulnerabilities, so there's a website plugin vulnerabilities.com which has kind of taken the law into their own hands. The process, if you find a vulnerability in a plugin is you contact the developer and say, I found this. This is how it works. Please patch it and I'm going to start the 90 day clock after 90 days. I'm going to release it so that everybody knows about it. He got plenty of time to fix it and get your, get your clients and customers updated. Well, it's been decided by the guys over pluginrealvulnerabilities.com that they're not going to do this. They're in fact going to just release any zero day exploits, exploits, release details about how it's done, released the exact code that's vulnerable and so on.

Nathan Wrigley: 09:27 And this is in protest at the, the stance in the WordPress support forums and their lack of getting things done as far as they see it. They, they have the, the position that in the wp.org forums, things are either getting covered up or just brushed under the carpet or not being done correctly. Um, so they've protested by doing this. Now I can't quite see the justification for doing it and yes, maybe it's not working perfectly, but it is an open source project as, as the guys at the support forums point out, we can't force people to do things and there's an awful lot of plugins and awful lot of legacy code. So I'm not sure. Essentially this feels like they're just putting a gun to the support forums head. Maybe it will get some results, but maybe it'll cause a lot of pain for WordPress website users in the process.

Nathan Wrigley: 10:23 Go and check it out and draw your own conclusions. Couple of plugin updates this week. The first one is an elementor update it in the article is entitled Introducing Advanced Query Control related posts, date filter and exclude options. So if you've ever tried to make related posts, you know that this can be a bit of a hassle. You would like to show a post similar to the one that your your visitors are currently looking at. Well, in the past you've had to download an additional plugin and very often these plugins caused all sorts of problems by using up your CPU and so on. Well elemental have built this right into their core product. You can do all sorts of things. So there's related posts, there's options to show date filtering and you can provide exclusion options as well. So you know, quite a nice idea really.

Nathan Wrigley: 11:13 You can exclude things like sticky posts. Like I say, date ranges is in there as well. And it's all bundled into if you're an elementor user, uh, another reason possibly to stick with them and not go looking for third party plugins. And the second one today is about to Yoast, but it's not on the Yoast website because I found this article on the search engine journal to be a little bit more readable. It's entitled Yoast Seo becomes first to WordPress plugin to offer de Fragmented Schema Markup. Now I confess, I didn't really realize that Schema markup was allegedly according to Yoast, done poorly by lots and lots of the solutions out there at the moment. And even though you might not get any errors, the fact that everything is is a flat layer and it's not nested means that Google isn't really able to understand the structure of your site.

Nathan Wrigley: 12:04 So this adaptation to the Yoast plugin nests, everything. So for example, the article goes within a page which goes within a website and it's all nested correctly and allegedly this implementation allows Google to to categorize an index things more correctly and show things better on their search results page. So this is available for free. There is no charge for this. It's in the free plugin. Go and read about it. It certainly seems like a, an interesting step up. I'm not sure exactly how important this is, but, but there you go that this is their claim at least. Anyway. Okay. Wp builds one piece of news from us this week we released an article called how do we put our prices up? It's a talk between David and I. As we grapple with the subject of taking clients from this figure to a slightly higher figure. How do we do it?

Nathan Wrigley: 12:56 Um, what is, what is our process? As always caveats apply. David and I are not very good at getting these things figured out but we have a nice chat about is anyway and finally it's a short one today cause there wasn't a lot of new. So the last one I've got for you today is on the tech crunch website and it's, I don't know about you but I quite following the whole mobile phone arena and what new phones are coming out. While there's quite a few foldable phones coming out. And Samsung was the first to kind of give a release date and the first to put them into journalists hands. And according to tech crunch, it's been a bit of a disaster. Many of the reviewers who got the advanced copies of the phone have noticed that the screen has cracked the, the place where it folds has bulged.

Nathan Wrigley: 13:42 One side of the screen has gone completely dead, so a bit of a PR disaster and for $2,000 per phone seems to me like this stuff should have been figured out first. I don't know if you're going to be getting one of these, but certainly the review so far mean that I'm going to be sticking with the typical flat phone.

Nathan Wrigley: 14:02 Okay. That's it for the WP builds news this week. I hope you manage to find something useful in it. The WP builds newsletter was sponsored today by Kinsta. Kinsta takes manage WordPress hosting to the next level, powered by the Google cloud platform. Your site is secured like Fort Knox and runs on speed obsessive architecture. You get access to the latest software and developer tools such as PHP seven ssh and staging environments, and the best part, their expert team of WordPress engineers are available 24 seven if you need help, you can migrate today for free at Kinsta Dot Com and we thank Kinsta for their support of the WP Builds podcast. Okay, that's it for this week. Come and check us out on Thursday for podcast or come back next Monday for the WordPress weekly news. It's always very short and I do enjoy getting all the comments for people who find it useful. WP Builds dot com forward slash subscribe for anything else, Bye. Bye for now.