WP Builds Newsletter #84 – WordPress 5.3 beta 3, accessibility and oasis on Mars

Nathan Wrigley: [00:00:00] Hello there. Good morning. And welcome to this the WP Builds weekly WordPress newsletter. This newsletter covers the WordPress news for the week commencing the 7th of October 2019 and we published it on Monday the 14th of October 2019 if you things before we get stock right into the news. Your mind going over to the wp bills.com website if you find the Subscribe Link at the top, that's WP Builds.com forward slash subscribe.
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I would like to say that every Monday we do a live version of the news join us at WP Builds.com /live and you'll be able to you know, check out what we're doing this week. Hopefully, we'll have Matt Medeiros Paul Lacey and Vito Peleg. Let's see if all of them managed to make it or not, but that's it.
We've got lined up. So that's Monday every Monday. To p.m. UK time. We've also got a competition on at the moment which I've forgotten to mention on several occasions. If you go to WP Builds.com forward slash win, we're giving away some raffle press licenses. Those raffle press licenses can be used by using the raffle press widgets.
You'll be able to see it on that page raffle presses a way of kind of creating viral giveaways and you can use it to try and win it, which is very peculiar. The WP Builds podcast was brought to you today by Kinsta. Are you tired of unreliable or slow hosting? If so, check out consider who takes managed WordPress hosting to the next level powered by the Google Cloud platform all their plans include PHP 7 SSH and 24/7 expert support and you can migrate today for free at Kinsta.com, and we really do thank and stuff for helping us put on the WordPress Weekly News.
Okay, let's get stuck into that new. Shall we? We always Chunk on use into different sections. And the first one is always WordPress core and over on wordpress.org. We have an article entitled WordPress 5.3 beta 3 just under a month now until we get our hands on 5.3 without at the beetle able and I'll read out the highlights where apparently we have fixes and enhancements in the admin interface.
I'm which well the problems that were introduced in previous beta releases. There's some wording changes in the login screens accessibility in the media upload modal has been improved changes in the way new error handling with images works and media element dot JS has been updated to the latest version of the script is now able to load in the footer again.
This fix is a regression that happened two years ago. So it might be worth noting. And there's also an update to the rest API so it's minus stuff but nevertheless if you're a beta tester, you should probably go and check that out. They've closed over 60 tickets since the last Beta release. The next piece is over on WP Tavern.
It's entitled WordPress 5.3 improves large image handling just heard a little bit about that Sarah Gooding tells us that what she gives us some more details about this in the future because nowadays we are creating images in such large quantities and the fact that those images Just Produce for a smartphone can.
Be enormous. There's now going to be a new function. It's called Big underscore image underscore size underscore threshold, and it's going to enable developers to. Create like a ceiling if you like for the maximum width and maximum height of an image. It's going to default to 2560 pixels. So that's going to be available.
The original image will still be saved on the on your website. So it's not trying to save you space on your hard disk and you'll also be able to get to that original image with a new function which has a what you can see that on the website. I won't go into that nevertheless. It's not trying to do the job of.
Plugins like insanity smush and so on and so forth because it's not trying to kind of do bulk image updates is just trying to do them as and when they come in so I suppose for new WordPress websites. This might be quite useful. But if you're using things like Smosh, it's not really going to be interfering with those because you can't do a whole load at once.
Staying on WP Tavern. I'm not quite sure this room belongs in the WordPress core section, but nevertheless wordpress.org bumps PHP you maximum for plug-in directory to version 7.2 and it says the wordpress.org SVN system received. Version pump 27.2 on October the third this change means that plug-in authors can now use newest PHP syntax in the plugins.
They submitted to the official repository and hopefully in the future the versions will match what's on wordpress.org. The article goes on to say that this should be great news for plug-in developers that were using newer PHP syntax because previously authors were able to submit code using newer PHP functions, but only if they had a compatibility check file.
In the same file, however, noose newest in tax wasn't allowed Mika Epstein apparently has been looking to get this change for a very very long time. So, yeah, if you're a plug-in or theme author this might be important to you go. Check it out on WP. The next section that we always do is WordPress community.
And the first piece today is WP Tavern again match. Oh themes modular parent company acquires three Gallery plugins. I confess. I have not heard of any of these but nevertheless match. Oh themes, which is behind the modular Gallery plugin has acquired three. Gallery plugins they are the final tiles Gallery grid light photo blocks grid gallery and they've also acquired a third plug-in called ever liked box.
The the amount of money disclosed has not been revealed, but it's said to be somewhere in the region of five figures. And the idea is the first two that I just mentioned are going to be rolled into their existing products and the Evergreen lightbox will remain as a standalone project. They're working at the moment on having a script which can migrate you from the old version to the new version when it's all rolled into this one.
Product and if you've ever come across these in a using these you will need to be mindful of that because in the future they want to be updating the older versions. It'll just be as I said rolled into their new their new product. So it may be worth checking out some 34 thousand users apparently will be affected by this change.
So if you have any of those names ring a bell, maybe this is an article that you need to read. I couldn't really decide whether this belongs in the community section either. But anyway, here it is WP Tavern again US Supreme Court denies. Domino's appeal to determine whether websites must be accessible.
So this is all to do with the United States law, but presumably at some point these kind of things will become International concerns and points of international law. But in the United States apparently chap called Guillermo Robles who is blind went to the Domino's website and app to try to order himself a pizza.
Domino's being a pizza chain, but he was unable to do so and he thought that this warranted some legal action. And so now we have the combination of that and essentially he has been found in the right. And that means that in the future presumably legislation will be passed making it enforceable that all websites must be accessible.
He was unable to place an order because you couldn't figure out how to navigate the menus and so on and so forth. And so I suppose we all need to be mindful of this probably in the days weeks months. Probably years to come this will become much more legislated for and we will all have to be producing websites which are completely accessible.
The next section is entitled plugins and themes and the first piece of news we got for you is over on the Breezy website Breezy being a popular page builder. They have released a breezy design Kit 2.0 and it's a collection of 500 plus blocks, which is a staggeringly large amount and they look really nice.
They've been categorized on the website. But before I get to that I should say that you have light and dark versions of all of them and you can simply. Toggle light or dark and you'll get the version that you want but they are identical apart from their lightness and darkness. They are blocked in two different sections Heroes features contact Gallery call to action text team pricing and testimonials and if you go to the link in the website, you will see them for yourselves and they're really nice and considering.
Such a very large amounts of been given away in this one hit. I think it's commendable and will no doubt. No doubt assist Breezy sails into the future. So yeah, definitely go and check them out. I do think they are remarkably nice. If you're a user of brainstorm forces ultimate add-ons, that could be the beaver Builder or the element or variety you're in for a treat because this week they've released a user registration form Builder.
It's available. Like I say for both platforms Beaver Builder and Elemental you can get the links in the. In the show notes, if you like or in the email that I send out with this and they simply are wonderful that will drag and drop form Builder to make user registration forms a little bit nicer. If you ever use the if you've ever used their convert Pro plugin, it feels like it's a lot like that you can drag form Fields onto the canvas and move them around and resize them and what have you you can add things like.
Capture and Honeypot fields and so on and so forth. But yeah, if you've got those then certainly worth a look. Staying with brainstorm Force they've actually updated their Astra theme there now got Astra 2.1 and on their website, they say Astro 2.1 is out with cleaner HTML and faster loading time and what they mean by that is instead of including things as.
Inline CSS, which they had up to Astra 2.0. They're now going to be creating an additional file. So hopefully it will look a little bit less clumsy. If you were to inspect things there would be less weight in the. HTML that you were looking at. I don't know if that's loaded on a case-by-case basis.
So I'm presuming that it's loaded across the whole site. I don't know if there's any way to enable this said that it just loads on a particular page or what have you. But anyway, there's a new a new item in the Astro options and when you enable it this will happen and they claim that it will speed up there already very fast Theme by eight point four seven percent, which is very very accurate number indeed.
It seems like I've never mentioned visual composer if I'd started this WordPress News 8 years ago. I suppose I would have been talking about it an awful lot. But since then we've got a whole variety of different page battles that have come along and seem to have taken its Crown away. However, they're in the news this week.
Because they have a brand-new version which is actually freely available on the wordpress.org repo. They say brand new visual composer made entirely from scratch. No more shortcodes content locking or performance compromises get the best website builder for your website and there's a little video which sort of fails to show you how they actually compose the pages with the builder.
So I'm not entirely sure how that works. But they're you. Describe it as a true Dragon drop website builder. So maybe somebody who's got experience of this can chime in but I'm guessing that that people will have their opinions on this. It seems almost like their time has passed perhaps I'm wrong.
The next section is entitled to deals from this week. I've got three for you and they're all on appsumo and they're all from the we devs Studio of plugins strange that same company should have three Deals on exactly the same time. However, they are 4 WP project manager Pro. We forms which is something a little bit.
I suppose like gravity forms and WP user front-end Pro which is a way of kind of customizing the way your WordPress. Admin seems to operate any way. All three of those are available by clicking the links in the show notes. The next section is about security. We do a bit of a light touch because I think the problems are a little bit too difficult to explain in a little bulletin like this.
But the first one is all about the fact that we're barks the WordPress firewall solution are now offering Back Ops with their plan. Well, actually they've been offering this for a little while, but they've released a tutorial this week on how it happens. Basically they use Google Drive you have to go into the actual.
Plug-in itself on the site. You can't at the moment go into your dashboard your centralized dashboard for web apps where all of your site's information is kept you have to go to each individual site and connect your Google Drive. And then what it does is it's simply exports on a daily weekly, whatever basis that you set up a file into a directory called Web arcs backups in your Google Drive.
And then you just get a zip of all the files and a MySQL dump, which is just really simple then to restore should you need it and you get a text file as well showing everything that should have been backed up. So I really like that. Everyone Wired Magazine this week. Would they talking about a new DDOS attack?
It's apparently it's getting a lot of bang for our hackers Bach. It's kind of a reflection attack, which means that they can magnify an enormous amount of DDOS. If you like from very small amounts of packets that they send across the internet. So hooray. More problems for us to deal with in the future and I themes security vulnerability has been patched.
Now. This is in I theme sinks product. So it says during a recent routine internal code audit we discovered a security vulnerability in ithemes sync. The vulnerability could allow a significant breach to your WordPress site. So we're asking people to update. So if you are using ithemes sink, please go and update it ASAP.
The astonishingly Brazen WP Builds self-promotional bit now. We released a podcast episode number 149 this week entitled marketing funnels don't exist. It sort of seems to have done its job. It was a deliberately clickbait. Beti title, of course they exist. It's actually just to say that they don't exist perhaps in the form that we think because a funnel siphons water from the top and a hundred percent of it reaches the bottom.
Whereas perhaps these funnels ought to be described more like colanders with a spring leaks all over the place because it's hardly true to say that anybody that you put in the top of your marketing funnel arrived safely at the bottom. That's just not the way it works. So anyway, go and check that out.
It's David and I. Starting on a course of maybe five six seven eight podcasts in a series, so that's nice. Not sure if this belongs in this section, but I'm going to say it anyway, because one of the community members of the wp builds Facebook group in this particular case is Chris Hughes and Chris Hughes has put together a service called mint WP which offers WordPress care 24/7 support night or day.
He says will keep your site to Safe fast and online. And he's offering people a deal there. He's going to offer them 25% off if they want to take him up on his services and the code is WP Builds. So thank you Chris. And thanks for all of your contributions in the Facebook group. The next section is jobs.
I'm going to keep banging away at this. Nobody. Nobody has yet has given me any job to post. But if I just do this everyday, but I'm hoping that some sort of War of Attrition will me that eventually somebody will post a job and then I'll be able to get this one on the way. Right. That's all we've got in terms of Wordpress the last viewer nothing to do with WordPress, but possibly useful.
Anyway, there's a website called accessive be and I don't know how seriously I'm going to take this. Anyway, here it comes. They have an AI powered or web accessibility service, which they say is automatic simple and affordable it starts at. But quite a large amount of money, I think it's four hundred and ninety dollars.
Annually. I have absolutely no idea if it works but it has something which looks a little bit like the customizer in that it floats on the side of your website and you go through it and allegedly it will sort of guide you through some sort of wizard. Tick boxes do move sliders and so on and it makes your website accessible.
We'll see how how that works over on TechCrunch Mars Curiosity Rover finds evidence of an ancient Oasis on Mars. I mean, I just love all this stuff. They're apparently there was an oasis at the base of a hundred and fifty kilometers wide Creator and the Curiosity probe has found evidence that this was once there you can go and check that out on.
Um techcrunch's website and. This is quite a political one. It's on the BBC's website. It's called few convinced by Apple's case for Hong Kong app removal. Apple had a nap and I can't remember the name. It was something like HK map or something like that and it was enabling the the recent wave of protest.
It was enabling the protesters to actually work out where they should or shouldn't go I presume it was crowdsourcing information and telling them where. Potentially police presence was and they then the protesters could avoid that and Tim Cook and his team have removed this saying that essentially it it causes problems for them.
Now the backlash of course happened swiftly people saying things like that. They were putting their profits before human rights and dignity and so on go and read the article on the BBC and you can make your own mind up. WP Tavern have an article entitled expression engine under new ownership will remain open source for now.
That's all I'm going to say about that one. Really you probably if you've been in this game for any length of time remember things like expression engine, which was a proprietary CMS and you had to pay an annual fee. I believe it was well, apparently they've open sourced it. My guess is in the wake of things like.
Facebook's dominance and WordPress has dominance people are using it less and less. The next one is to say that better proposals has 17 new proposal templates. If you are sending our proposals whether you're a WordPress or web developer in any way shape or form, it's not just for that. It's got things like, you know security proposals bathroom meet remodeling construction work and so on and anyway, if you're using that service they have updated.
Their service to include 17 new templates and last but by no means least on the wp Tavern finally Chrome Google Chrome announces rollout plan for blocking mixed content beginning, January 20th. Essentially what this means is that in the very near future if your site is loading resources from an HTTP connection.
That's fine. If it's loading resources from Elsewhere on the internet that's coming over HTTP, that will also be fine. But if you're loading images or style sheets videos and so on and so forth that are coming just over HTTP then this is gradually going to be stopping working in Chrome from chrome 79 on Words.
And then I think making it mandatory in Chrome 80. Basically, they're just going to say no. We're not going to like that content because it's not enabled HTTP. So there you go at the minute. It displays are not secure warning, but it's just going to Simply stop working. So I suppose this is just the way the internet's going and I'm I'm all for it.
Right. Thanks for listening to the WP Builds news this week. I hope that you got something out of it. The WP Builds news was brought to you today by Kinsta. Kinsta takes managed 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 7 SSH and staging environments and the best part their expert team of Wordpress Engineers are available 24/7 if you need help and you can migrate today for free at Kinsta dot-com
Okay come back next week for next week's news. Perhaps see you on Thursday for the next podcast episode. It will be podcast episode number 150. And also hopefully we'll see some of you on Monday to p.m. UK time WP Builds.com /live where we will do our live news. Okay. Bye for now.