WP Builds Newsletter #85 – WordPress 5.3 RC, Automattic wealth and new Google products

Nathan Wrigley: [00:00:00] Hello there. Good morning. And welcome to this the WP Builds weekly WordPress newsletter. This is number 85. It covers the WordPress news for the week commencing the 14th of October 2019 and it was published on Monday the 21st of October 20 19. Just a few things before. We begin the usual housekeeping if I could get you to go over to a few links WP Builds.com forward slash subscribe over there.
You're going to find a whole heap of ways of us keeping in touch with you. I think this is probably quite important especially in light of the fact that we've got Black Friday around the corner that would be quite useful because on that page we have got a couple of subscribe forms. The first one will get you notified about podcast updates.
So this the mundane use and the Thursday. But also it's going to allow you to sign up for a different newsletter, which is a plain text simple newsletter, which will alert you when I hear of Wordpress deals and I think over the coming weeks they will be coming in thick and fast and it will enable you to hear about them.
As soon as I hear about them, which hopefully will be will be. Almost immediately other pages is WP Builds.com forward slash deals over there. You're going to find a whole heap of deals. It is a bit like Black Friday every day of the week. So if you're actually buying something at the moment go and check that page out.
We've added a few recently WP Builds.com forward slash advertised as well. It's very helpful if people advertise on the podcast because it enables me to. Keep doing it week after week. So yeah WP Builds.com forward slash advertised and you could get your product or service in front of a WordPress specific audience a bit like instead of done.
The WP Builds podcast is brought to you today by Kinsta. Are you tired of unreliable or slow hosting? If so, check out Kinsta. Kinsta 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.
I should also mention the fact that every Monday we do a live version of this news. Basically we take what I'm about to say as the basis for a live episode and three or four word pressures go on screen and we put it out at 2 p.m. UK time is completely live and unscripted. And be very very nice if you wanted to join us for that.
So the probably the best way is to join our Facebook group. You can do that by going to WP Builds.com forward slash Facebook or WP Builds.com /live that's a page which just hosts the the live video feed and also it has the live chat. So that's a nice way of doing it too. Okay, let's get on with this week's news.
Each week we Group the news into various sections in the first section is always entitled WordPress core and I've got three things for you today. The first one is over on WP Tavern just in tadlock writes an article entitled WordPress five point two point four release addresses several security issues.
If you haven't got automatic updates to Wordpress core enabled. I think it's probably a good thing to do. But if you haven't you should probably go out and. Get all of your WordPress site updated to five point two point four because there are six and vulnerabilities which were patched the article says the six were stored cross-site scripting could be added from the customizer screen an issue that allowed store.
Xs/s to inject JavaScript into style tags a bug that allowed on authenticated posts to be viewed a method to use the very origin header to poison the cache of Json get request a server-side request forgery and issues with referral validation. So they've all been fixed. Hopefully you have got those all automatically updated and receive the appropriate emails.
But if you haven't go and check that out, so that's five point two point four and. We are also now moving towards 5.3. I don't if you follow this too closely, but WordPress once it's reached a sort of stable State a state where the the team feel that it's basically ready to go though. You put it into release candidate mode and then they go through a cycle of release candidates.
I believe it's four iterations on that and we're hoping that in early November you will be able to get your hands on WordPress 5.3 well over on the wordpress.org. Page entitled WordPress 5.3 release candidate it explains how you can go about testing it to make sure that it does actually make it through that cycle on time obviously in lot of eyeballs.
There's going to be millions of sites updated and they are basically saying we think it's ready, but we would like you to just check it out and with that in mind consider this week. Produced a fabulous article entitled. What's new in WordPress 5.3 new blocks new apis and improved admin UI and although I keep a close eye on all the WordPress news.
There was an awful lot that I'd obviously missed because if you read this article, it's tremendously long goes into all of the things that have been added into. The release candidate for 5.3 and what you're going to be expecting and although I like I said, I've been talking about improvements to Guttenberg.
I'd kind of Forgotten a lot of them. They are they've been rolled up these improvements have been made and they're all just going to be put out with version 5.3 of Wordpress as absolutely tons of them. So there's loads of improvements to the block editor. So there's a block appender. It's basically a UI change to make sure that people know that you can.
App things where once sort of user to usability testing showed that new people to Wordpress didn't know that they could add things by clicking the plus button. You'll also be able to group blocks which will be rather nice you'll be able to choose custom widths for your blocks. You'll be able to do that in the inspector.
But hopefully a support will be added to just drag and drop those in the future. They'll be a layout picker four columns blocks, which is quite nice that you could pick for example, left sidebar layout or three columns layout and so on and improvements to tables also improvements to block the block navigation and a whole laundry list to be honest.
I could probably go on for five minutes, but this article really really shows that. The improvements that we're going to see in version 5.3 of Wordpress is particularly with gotten bugger going to be considerable. So go and check that out because no doubt should be able to make use of an awful lot of them.
There's a whole load more in that article that I simply haven't got time to mention. Okay, the next section is entitled community and I've got quite a lot of news this week about that. The first one is all about Dave feuilles no-stress WordPress course, he's actually somebody that I know in the real world.
He doesn't live too far away from me as it happens. Made him quite a lot of times and to be honest. I think his content in his courses are absolutely fabulous. He released the first version of No Stress WordPress. I think it was in 2017 and it got really really good reviews. Well, he's decided to completely refactor it and he's going to be releasing no stress WordPress 2.0 but as I sort of.
As a preliminary step. He's running a master class alive master class, which is basically a webinar. It's happening on the I think it's the 29th of October. That's right, Tuesday the 29th of October and so I'm pointing you in his direction to be honest. I don't know anybody who puts as much thought into his courses as he does and his new no stress WordPress course is intended really to take people from zero right up to.
The capability to do very complicated websites. He stressed to me that it's not actually just for beginners. He's really spent a long time thinking about how he might make some more advanced features available in his course is so what I would say is don't don't have the approach that why no WordPress.
This couldn't be for me because I think that that. Might be the wrong approach go and check it out. So go and go and sign up for this webinar. I think that you'll you'll be you know be interested to see what's what happens on that on that event. Also, I'm going to be having a live event within the following day, which is Wednesday October 30th, and in the show notes, there's links for that as well.
Essentially if you've been to his live webinar, but you have any questions that you didn't get answered you can come under and ask them of Dave in person. So, there you go. Talk mag this week have an article entitled WP and up to bike to wordcamp Europe 2020 you may or may not know if you've listened to this before myself and Carol Olinger and Dan maybe the founder of the.
Nonprofit wpn up. We're going to be cycling from the Estrel in Berlin, which was the location of this year's wordcamp. Europe were going to be cycling all the way to the location of next year's wordcamp Europe, which is in Porto. It's about through which just over 3,000 kilometers. And so this article is explaining what we're doing why were doing it and you know that well if the purpose really is to raise awareness about mental health issues and raise some some support cash, so.
Yeah, go check that article out and see why we're doing it. I'm sure that you've heard of the company automatic. But if you haven't they are the company behind wordpress.com woocommerce and various other things. Well this week they have decided they're going to have a new Chief Financial Officer.
He's called Mark Davis and on the wp tavern website. We have an article entitled Mark Davis joins automatic as Chief Financial Officer. He's got a wealth of experience and really the article is just explaining that where he's worked in the past. The the major Milestones of various companies that he's he's achieved and Matt mullenweg has indicated that he would like to take the the company automatic much much further than it is at the moment.
Currently we're sort of getting zooming in on about 1,100 employees in over 70 countries and he wants to obviously grow WordPress from 34% of the web. He's got this kind of anecdotal goal of having 85% of the web being built. On top of Wordpress. He sees it as the operating system of the web and he's talking about taking automatic to possibly multiple billions of dollars in Revenue.
So this is this is quite a quite an interesting higher. He's obviously got a lot of experience dealing with these kind of numbers and it would appear that Matt mullenweg is excited to be working with him it is. It is interesting. You know that more lowly people like myself find these numbers utterly utterly bemusing.
I can't quite get a handle on what hundreds of billions of dollars even represents. But clearly Matt mullenweg has got a handle on that and has hired somebody who he hopes will develop strategies for automatic to cope with this kind of growth. The SEO plug-in Yost have released an article this week entitled celebrating 10 years of Yost Yost con 2020.
So they run this annual event. It's a conference and in the past. They've said that yeah, potentially it might have been quite an expensive event. It's a your live event. So this year they've decided to give away some free tickets. I'm you can apply for those free tickets presumably you will have to meet certain criteria.
But also they're giving away two VIP packages as they're calling them to tickets which will include your accommodation. You'll stay in the Yost apartments and meet all of the staff. But also they'll pay for your flights. So that's great really cool. They talk about their list of speakers that they've lined up and so on and so forth.
But yeah if you are an SEO. Person and you really really want to be there but the finances were preventing it certainly go and check that page out because there might be an opportunity for you to to get yourself there for free. If you use meetup.com to organize your me tops, you may be interested by a WP Tavern article this week entitled meetup.com introduces RSVP fees for members WordPress meetup groups on affected by pricing changes.
So meet up which is a subsidiary of we work is going to introduce a membership fee of two dollars in order to RSVP to events. This is to sort of offset. The the financial burden on people who are actually organizing these meetings. So let's say for example that you have a meeting and a thousand people decide that they're going to RSVP it the host.
Therefore would incur a bill of $2,000 will now that will be spread out of you know to the to the attendees as well as the person organizing it. Obviously a lot of word camps and WordPress meetups and so on and so forth are organized through meet up, but you're in luck you are not going to be having to pay these fees because it says the new pricing does not apply to nonprofit groups or Pro networks WordPress Community.
Organizer. Andrea. Middleton has confirmed that meetups pricing changes will not affect groups that are part of the official WordPress chapter. So that's good news. If you're hosting your website on kin stir or thinking about going over to them, this will be quite interesting to you because on their blog this week.
It says doing the unimaginable consider is boosting performance for Everyone by up to 200%. Okay. So Ken Starr is obviously a fairly large player in the WordPress hosting space. They used in Google's Cloud platform, exclusively. They everything is done on their their Google's infrastructure. Well, they've decided to use some new infrastructure.
They're going to be moving to Google Cloud platforms Next Generation. Optimized virtual machines in Brackets see to they're going to be putting absolutely everybody over to this. It doesn't matter whether you are on their base pricing or if you're a Fortune 500 company, they're going to be pushing you on to this new architecture and according to their tests, which they're carried out for the past few months most sites are experiencing performance improvements somewhere in the region of 30 percent right up to 200% I'm sure the the two hundred percent is far less common.
But anyway nevertheless. Um if you were thinking about using them, maybe this is a good time and if you are already using them, well, it's just it's just something for free. The Smashing Magazine.com website has an article entitled post-mortem of Gutenberg the launch so we can Embrace Guttenberg the product and it is a very very long article.
That was do these long-form pieces, which I thoroughly get into and essentially it's kind of like carrying out a post-mortem of the last year of gottenberg what went wrong. What were the problems that experienced when it was first released. So it was things like. The accessibility problems and so on and so forth and the fact that many people in the community didn't want it to be the default editor and all of that stuff.
We've been over this a thousand times but also talking about the fact that it's actually a really good platform. You know that I think a lot of people are now coming to the understanding of what it might be capable of in the future. I spoke a moment ago about some of the recent improvements. I'm certainly.
Getting into it more and more things like accessibility are being tackled and so on and so forth. So this article is not only saying yeah, there were mistakes made but also saying maybe take a look at it see what it's like now and judge for yourself again with a fresh pair of eyes, but yeah, really really long piece well worth digging into in a spare 20 minutes.
Frequent visitor on the wp builds live news veto power leg is the founder of WP feedback. Well, they've collaborated this week. They've announced a collaboration with GoDaddy Pro what this basically means is if you're a GoDaddy Pro user they're trying to line up a whole Suite of tools that they believe.
Significant and worthy and WP feedback has been selected as the first one of this list and essentially GoDaddy promo members will now be able to access a 50% reduction on WP feedback fees. You can do this by logging into your GoDaddy Pro account. And yeah, so there you go. No doubt. We'll be seeing veto on the Monday news more and he can explain more about this.
But yeah. If your GoDaddy promo member you're going to get 50% off WP feedback. A nice little bit of collaboration news for you. Now over on WP Tavern we have this article it's called kuryakin blocks partners with guttin slider plugin. So the guys over at cotton blocks who created a suite of blocks have joined forces with the guys over at guttin slider.
I'm and although they say that maybe in the future they will combine their efforts under the same name. That's not the plan. The short-term plan is simply to help each other out with their with their differing plug-in. So they're going to work on each other's plug-ins for a while and and they feel that the the two developers Behind These plugins feel that they've got strengths which the other one doesn't have and so by sort of swapping roles and one works on the other company and vice versa.
They will improve their combined offerings. I just think this is a really nice example of cooperation in the WordPress space. I suspect that if you're listening to this, you are probably listening to it on some kind of podcast player. That seems to be the main way that it is consumed. Well, if you are doing that, you're probably a fan of podcasts and this week over on mint WP we have an article entitled ten best podcast for Freelancers and agencies.
I won't spoil the list for you. I will just say that the list is a good one. And if you are into WordPress particularly, there's a nice little list there and and cough we do feature. So that's quite nice. But yeah, thank you to Chris use for putting this nice list together and featuring Us in it.
Our next category of news is plugins and themes and the first one I've got for you. This week is from David Von Greece who is behind the page builder framework. He has written a post entitled free Integrations and post layout settings. If you are a user of beaver thema and Elemental Pro, these features have actually been available to you.
If you have had the premium add-on, but what David's decided to do is he's essentially said, okay, let's just put these over to the free version which is rather nice. So there is actually nothing new that you've been able to use them with beaver thema and element or Pro for quite a. Period of time but he's basically put them into the free version.
So that's really nice. But the main feature is post layout options and he said inspired by the blog layout options. We recently added there are now more post layer options available in the page builder framework and these include box layout which could be responsive padding controls option to stretch the featured image background color control.
You've also got title font size control and just font size control as well. And he believes that I like probably agree with him that this is just the right balance of options. Not too many. And yeah, so that's really nice. He's he said that he's made a real effort to make the code clean and tidy it up with lots of comments for developers.
So page builder framework uses go get yourself updated. Users of beaver Builder may very well have come across a plug-in called Wallace in line, which enables you to do inline editing of your content and set permissions. So that clients can edit certain things but not other things. It's really useful.
Well Wallace in line 2.2 was recently released and it includes initial support for the elemental page builder, which is really nice. It also includes integration with Beaver thema ACF and pod image field connections. Which is also really nice and I even linked to the changelog. I would say that at the moment you're able to get 20% off and you can click on the link in the show notes to Avail yourself of that that code by the way runs out on the 23rd of.
Main WP users that is a plug-in which enables you to have a sort of central dashboard for managing all of your WordPress websites updating plugins and so on and so forth. They have got a new backup option for you with WP Vivid. There's now a new free plug-in which allows you to do all of your backups with WP Vivid backup.
A solution and it says the features are create backups for a specific child site download backups of a specific style child site to local set backup schedules for all child sites connect with your remote storage for all child sites and set WP Vivid backup plug-in settings for Charles site. So it's pretty comprehensive looks really nice.
Again with Beaver Builder this time with a compatible plugin called Beaver team Beaver team is a plug-in which enables you to kind of plug some gaps with Beaver Builders functionality. Well, they've got some new options for you. So for example, they are offering now a free. Beaver Builder conditional rows and modules time condition.
So what you can basically do is say I would like to display this row or module only between certain dates. That's now going to be freely available. They've also added some updates to their A/B Testing options. So now it's possible to have autocomplete and by that what I mean is you set some conditions and then the.
Beaver team module will figure out which is the winner of the A/B split test and then automatically apply the winner so that you don't have to go back and decide for yourself. They've also made options so you can Define what element the user can click on to trigger a conversion. And also they made some updates to their Pro offering.
So that's the paid tier. So for example, they've got some Z index options. You can set the settings index of module row or column and they've got some conditional elements updates as we said this time condition as I mentioned earlier. A few weeks ago we talked about a plug-in called edit flow which was created by automatic to give users the ability to set some kind of flow before things could be published.
So for example, you might set it up so that certain things have to be achieved certain tasks have to be performed before it's possible to have a particular. Piece of content published and it would appear that that plug-in was going away will now it would appear that that's not quite the case because the guys over at automatic have basically said we're not going to be dropping support for it.
Basically, they're just going to be sort of putting it on ice. They're not going to be doing huge updates in the future, but they will be supporting it presumably for things like security fixes and so on they have however said that. Because the demand for WordPress on the VIP level is growing maybe in the future resources can be diverted to improving it.
But the fact that it's kind of not really received a great deal of attention may make you look elsewhere and that's what this article on WP Tavern is all about it said edit flow future in flocks here are five alternative plugins for you. And so we've got five listed out Sarah Gooding talks about publish press Oasis workflow.
Nelio, content editorial calendar and WP scheduled posts as possible Alternatives if edit flows sort of status and stasis is worrying you. The next section is deals. We've got some deals for you this week. Three Deals. The first one is James roses zapier course now, I'd like to say zapier, but I know the lot of people call it zapier.
He's been talking for the longest time about how much. How is business he oughta mates with zapier? And so he's decided to put a course together and the get zapier Mastery course is now available. If you go and click on the link in the show notes, you should be able to get yourself signed up. I have to say that.
Um, I dunno James and I know that he really has put a lot of work into this course and also he really has spent a lot of time with zapier making his business much more streamlined automating all the boring things that can be automated. So yeah, go and check out his zapier Mastery course. A new forms plug-in came to my attention this week.
It's called WP fluent forms. And right now it's on a lifetime deal price. You can get 50% off their regular plan. If you click on the link, you'll be able to see that now. I'm not entirely sure when the steel drums out. I have to apologize. If by the time you listen to this it has already run out, but my understanding is that it's going to have a few more days to run but you can get what looks to be a pretty decent form plug-in solution and infinite number of installs for $149 or.
Twenty five domains for significantly less you can get 25 domains. I forget what the pricing is, but I think it might be just fifty dollars or something like that but a hundred and forty nine dollars should you want the the agency plan? And yeah, there's some fairly favorable comments in Facebook groups that I frequent about what the other plugins capabilities are.
The last day of that I've got for you this week is for a plug-in called. If so, I actually link to a video that I made about this plug-in several months ago. Now if so is a plug-in which allows you to customize what people see and personalize what they see based upon some conditions you set. So for example, you might say if you click on a particular Link in an email, then the home page will have a different header.
Of something like that or you could change some text. So it actually has their name on the website and so on and so forth absolutely loads and loads of options and capabilities and right at the moment until the 21st of October. So basically until hopefully you're listening to this on the 21st, you can get 50% off.
So it takes for example the agency plan down to a hundred dollars instead of 200 dollars and there are cheaper offers and more expensive offers, but it really is a good solution. Like I said go check out my video. Had to see what it's capable of. The next section is entitled security. This is a very light touch.
I don't really think that this is the place to go deep diving into security. So I'll just mention very briefly wordfence have highlighted a medium severity vulnerability which has been now patched in the fast velocity Minify plugin. So if that name rings a bell, you should perhaps read that also on the security blog.
We've got an article entitled fake. Updraftplus plugins. So this is all about the malicious plug-ins being sourced from updraftplus again millions of users of that. You should perhaps go and read that. Then there's an article on The Talk mag dot IO website entitled protecting WordPress with the security team.
And this is them meeting the the guy who has been tasked with security on the WordPress platform. He's called the Securities are and his name is Aaron Campbell and it's really talking to him about what his approaches with. Security on WordPress and they talked about the relationship we have with hacker one, which is a platform.
Whereby you can receive payment if you identify vulnerabilities in WordPress, so it's an actual way of getting money for Beat from being honest as opposed to getting money from being dishonest, which is quite nice and then he goes on to. What they're planning to do in the future on WordPress. So it's not about a particular plugin.
It's just what what Aaron Campbell is doing and then there's two pieces which are very similar in nature. It's ithemes usual bimonthly vulnerability Roundup and it shows little icons or. Screen grabs of particular plugins iconography so you can very quickly see if I plug in that you've seen before or use before has got a problem absolutely loads on there and then we're box have done a similar thing this month.
They've got their October 2019 vulnerability vulnerability checklist, and it's laid out in a very very similar way so you can just scroll through and look for the iconography of particular plugins and hopefully identify that nothing that you've got installed anywhere. Has had a problem this month.
Team self-promotional WP builds bit is just to say that we had a we had a podcast episode with Brian Jackson from kin stir this week. It was called consider hosting on Google's cloud with Brian Jackson. We seem to be talking about kids to rather a lot and full disclosure. They are a sponsor of this podcast, but that is purely by accident we've gone for many weeks and not mention them at all, but.
Coincidentally we are talking about them on the podcast Brian goes on to explain how their platform works and why he believes it's the way forward forward presses and jobs. I've been going on about putting jobs into this news article for ages and we've got some sort of thick which is a an agency based in central Cardiff by the University have two jobs available this week Leo mindell got in touch to say that they need a software engineer.
The software engineer is our engineering team working on brand new statistic platforms supporting our existing Tech stack and delivering solutions for some of our largest clients and they also need to Cloud engineer and that will be to work on the platform team working in deploying hosting environment and they work with very large sports sports brands to get their websites online.
So you can click on the links and discover more about those jobs. The last section is all about non WordPress e stuff. It's called not to WordPress. But useful. Anyway, three things for you this week. Google have released a ton of new products. They release them earlier this week. You've got new pixel for phones.
You got new Nest minis, which used to be the Google home mini. It's got better bass. Apparently, you've got a new pixel book go. It's called a new Nest table Max the stadia their gaming platform has been released and they've got their nest Wi-Fi, which also does a secondary job of being a Google home?
Device as well, which is rather nice. So yeah loads are nice new stuff from Google also on the Mozilla. Well, it's Foundation Dot mozilla.org. And by the way, they've got really cool way of scrolling through the website. It takes it takes you down like a timeline. It's a post about really horrible things that people have seen on YouTube, you know, they've been watching a video and very happily kind of get to the end of it and then suddenly they're shown a whole load of other stuff or they might have searched for something and then benignly watched a video and then suddenly they're watching things that they really really find kind of emotionally upsetting or.
Possibly a little bit alarming. So that's quite an interesting article in it Mozilla obviously talking about the fact that maybe there ought to be more kind of oversight by Googling into what they show you and obviously especially if there are children watching this kind of stuff can become important and the last one I've got for you today is on the search engine Journal website entitled Yahoo to shot down all Yahoo!
It's on October the 21st. So if you had a Yahoo group, it's officially been terminated today. I don't know if anybody's still using Yahoo groups clearly not too many because they've decided to get rid of them and all of your files and poles and links and photos and all of that stuff is going to be removed.
Okey-dokey. That is all the news I've got for you this week. The WP Builds podcast is brought to you today by Kinsta. Kinsta takes managed WordPress hosting to the next level Howard by the Google Cloud platform. Your site is secured like Fort Knox and runs on speed obsessive architecture. You can 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.
Should you need help. And you can migrate today for free at Kinsta.com. Okay, come back. Next Monday. We'll do the week which is just about to begin will sum up that Weekly News. Also on Thursday will be releasing a podcast episode and if you happen to be listening today, that is to say Monday the 21st of October at 2 p.m.
The WP Builds live will be happening and we bring on some some notable guests within the WordPress community and talk about the news that you've just been listening to you can chime in with your comments. You can the best way to apply the comments are either to go to the WP Builds Facebook group or actually to go to WP Builds.com /live because then I can actually.
Post them on Facebook doesn't allow platforms to suck comments out of groups, especially private groups because they believe that that probably contravenes your decision to be in a private group. So if we do it on on YouTube go to WP Builds.com /live, and you can see them there right? I hope you have a good week.
Bye. Bye for now.