WP Builds Newsletter #86 – WordPress 5.3 RC2, AHrefs SEO and satellite WiFi coming soon

Hello there. Good morning. And welcome to this the WP Builds weekly WordPress newsletter. This is number 86. It covers the WordPress news for the week commencing the 21st of October 2019 and it was published on Monday the 28th, October 20. My name is Nathan Wrigley from picture and word dot co dot uk - a small web development agency based in the north of England and a couple of things to share with you a bit of housekeeping before we begin if I can get you to go over to WP Builds.com.
There's a couple of subscribe forms there. The one that's gray is going to enable you to keep up to date with what we produce on a Monday you're listening to it. Now the WordPress news and also the podcast that we put out every Thursday. But perhaps more importantly in the run-up to Black Friday.
We've got a blue form on there and it's called the WP Builds deals update form. And if you subscribe to that I'm going to send you a very very short plain text email every time I hear about a WordPress deal that comes out. You can look at the title very quickly and decide this is not for me and Ben it without even bothering to open it on that page.
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If you're thinking of buying something because you never know it might already have a coupon code on there. WP Builds.com forward slash win if you would like to take part, we've got a competition which is actually running out today. So if you're listening to this on the day, it came out we've got three growth licenses for the rafflepress plug-in.
It's really good. I'm using raffle press on that page and you can go and see what it does. It's like a viral marketing thing. So the three licenses up for grabs, so why not going into that competition and see if you can win it? At last but by no means least WP Builds.com forward slash advertise if you would like to advertise on the podcast and get your product or service in front of a WordPress specific audience a bit like these guys did the wp builds news was brought to you today by Page Builder Cloud work faster in your page builder of Choice by reusing your Cloud save templates Import and Export any layout to any of your WordPress website.
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Now, I don't know if you know that but every single week, we do a live version of this news. We have several people on a live call-in our Facebook group. And on our YouTube channel, you can find that over it WP builds.com /live do that to p.m. UK time. So it's probably early morning in the US and this week sadly.
I'm not going to be there, but it will be happening. Paul Lacey who is a frequent visitor to the live show as decided to take the reins and he's going to be joined by a couple of other WordPress has Anchen La Roux and Piccia Neri. So yeah go and join them at 2 p.m. UK time on Monday the day that this podcast comes out and give them your support because Paul's not done it before and he's got to be able to work out how to press all the buttons and so on and so forth.
So, yeah, I hope that goes well. Right. Let's get to this week's WordPress news. We always divide our WordPress news up into various different sections. And the first section is always WordPress core this week over on wordpress.org. We have an article entitled WordPress 5.3 release candidate to it's exactly what it says on the tin.
We are now at release candidate to so we're very very close to the official release date of the 12th of November, but there's a few things which have been fixed. For example, three bugs contained in release candidate one with the block editor been fixed a bug has been fixed where links. Common, sorry within comments did not get the correct Rel attribute.
The scaled - string has been added to the file names when images are downsize if they're determined to be big the bottom group layout has been fixed in IE 11 and a couple more minor things. So very nice indeed. If you want to test that please go to the link in the show notes and you can test it so that hopefully all of those things are cemented ready for the 12th of November.
And also on WP Tavern this week, we have an article entitled Guttenberg 6.7 introduces storybook and gradient backgrounds just in tadlock writes an article about the fact that the first implementation of gradient backgrounds has been on the bottom element. So now you can add gradients of all manner and there's a picture in the wp Tavern post with a suitably.
Garish looking button. Justin thinks that this in the future will be a really nice feature. So for example, it might go to the background of the whole blocks itself, but at the moment the testbed is buttons. And he also makes the point that he feels that it's the process of getting these things out and gotten Burgers a bit back to front because theme unplugging authors are kind of left to catch up.
These things are released by The Gutenberg Team theme and plug-in authors have to sort of like then adapt everything and then things sort of settle down after a period of time and he makes the point that it would be better if this kind of development could go on in tandem nevertheless. It will be a nice feature in the future but at now or simply testing it out on buttons and there's something called storybook for developers.
It says the Guttenberg team introduced storybook support for gottenberg developers can test story book via the Guttenberg story book page and there's a link in the article storybook is a development and testing environment for user interfaces. It allows developers to create test and shows case components in an isolated environment apart from.
Primary platform or application the is this essentially allows developers to build components without the dependencies of the platform before porting them over a story within the story book system represents the visual state of a component story books are collections of story. So this is very much a.
Developer developer friendly piece of news and there's a video which has been put together by Marcus Kazmir cats. I probably pronounce that really badly. But anyway, thank you Marcus. We're putting that video together and it shows you how that could be used. Let's move along to our next section, which is the community section.
And the first piece this week is over on the 2020 Europe dot wordcamp dot org website. It's a call for speakers It Feels Like Only Yesterday that we were in a wordcamp Europe in Berlin but times are moved on with thinking about next year's wordcamp Europe, which of course is going to be held in Porto.
In Portugal it's taking place towards the middle of next year and already they're looking for speakers. If you go to the link in the show notes, you'll find out that you can apply now they're looking for a whole range of topics because as you may know about half the people who attend word camps are nothing to do with development.
So they're looking for topics like accessible design advanced. Business strategy copywriting Frameworks project management storytelling success stories typography working remotely and a whole bunch of others. So if any of that interests you and you would like to put yourself in front of well and enormous crowd of people the talks come take a anything up to 40 minutes or an hour and you out 40 minutes over an hour.
I should say which leaves 20 minutes for session questions at the end and things like that. Well anyway, if that if that seems like you. Go and check out the link is a really interesting and possibly quite contentious piece over on the pixel grade.com website entitled media coverage in WordPress should take another route.
This article has been written by somebody who although I don't know of her she goes on to express that she's written professionally in all sorts of spheres. Both governmental non-governmental financial and so on and so forth for years and she's writing in the WordPress space and she is finding a lot of the things that she reads to be fairly disingenuous what I mean by that is she feels that there's been a move in recent years where.
People are publishing content. So let's say for example that I'm a theme developer and I ask people to promote my theme and the people who publish those promoted pieces. She is claiming often are doing this simply just for the affiliate linking model. So they're making money out of writing reviews and she points to the fact that a lot of the the writing itself is is of absolutely no.
Well, there's no thoughts been put into it. It's just a series of nouns and adjectives if you like just one after the other and she gives a really interesting paragraph. She said how familiars does this sound the insert name theme is a modern yet simple efficient yet flexible theme for bloggers and for Publishers, it could work for magazines and lifestyle websites and it's full of customization options, which can help you create several layouts out of one.
The multiple demos guide you through an ocean of possibilities, but no worries. You can handle them by yourself and it goes on and on and on like that and she's basically saying that any any publisher who's producing that stuff would really needs to be a bit more mindful about the audience. But any theme author or Plugin Ortho is allowing these articles to.
Published simply for the affiliate Revenue that can be generated is probably in the long term shooting themselves in the foot is a very long piece. It's much more nuanced and complicated than I've just explained. But if that if that if that topic piques your interest go and check out the pixel grade website by clicking on the link in the show notes.
An article on WP taverns website entitled GoDaddy launches e-commerce hosting plan in partnership with woocommerce a couple of days ago the 22nd of October the company GoDaddy launched an e-commerce tear for their managed hosting plans. This allows you to essentially. Point and click and go through a wizard and have woocommerce setup and the configuration that you receive will be based upon the options that you've chose during that post process.
You will also assuming you're on the correct tier get a free SSL certificate and obviously with WordPress. And specifically woocommerce powering so much of the internet woocommerce, of course preparing about thirty percent of online shops. This makes sense for both companies automatic and Go Daddy they have got an official relationship in order for this to happen, but there's no.
Public information available about what that official relationship is yet. The list of bundled woocommerce extension includes this probably about 20 of them. It's things like Advanced and notifications woocommerce Brands check out editor. Sorry check out field editor. Follow-ups woocommerce points and rewards and a whole bunch more you can see that on the post itself and but there's a whole bunch left out as well.
So if you do go into this, you have to be aware that a few options may not be available and you might have to Pony up for some other additional plugins and they're also talking about the fact that maybe in the in the future. They'll be premium storefront child themes available to customers as well.
So. If you're after a really simple way to setup woocommerce without the headache of having to configure it all yourself. This is going to be quite a powerful offer. I would imagine especially with godaddy's clout. Right, then moving on to Wordpress plugins and themes first piece I've got for you is on the a ahrefs website.
Aah ref stopped calm and it's called WordPress meet a ahrefs be the first to get access to a ahrefs upcoming WordPress SEO plugin. It's basically a subscribe form. If you are in a ahrefs user, you will probably know exactly what the service does and this. Piqued your interest no doubt what it says is let's face it.
There are already tons of Wordpress SEO plugins, but we think there's room for one more. So we're working on a plug-in to help boost your WordPress SEO and pull a ahrefs key metrics into your dashboard. So the plug-in will pull those metrics and data into the WordPress dashboard so that you can do keyword and content research.
Without having to basically leave the WordPress website. They're saying that it's basically for customers of theirs at the moment, but it may have functionality in the future so that it can be used by non-customers and they're saying it's not a replacement for other SEO type tools. It is in fact something to bolster those and it's going to be available.
Hopefully in December 2019. So maybe go check that out get on their mailing list. On the toolset.com website this week. We have an article entitled design great archive Pages using the new views beta and we are posted on the 24th of October about the latest Beta release of views brings you the power of creating WordPress archive Pages using the block editor.
There's a 15-minute video by one of their employees Agnes and she shows off of use 3.0 beta 2 and how you can create archive Pages basically with a point-and-click interface. It's really straightforward had the pleasure of trying this out in previous Beta release of use. It was a little bit more difficult and they've managed to iron out an awful lot of The Kinks and now it looks as if it's.
Basically ready for production use so you you can drag in any kind of custom post type and Fields use the Guttenberg block editor interface with their container block which adds a whole load of styling options and make really nice designs for your archive pages. The container block allows you to do things like alter the overlay opacity for backgrounds.
You can add Parallax effects to images me minimum height settings for containers vertical alignment of elements inside a container transparency. Transparency values for colors and containers are now reusable blocks. You've also got the capacity to see who sorry to change who can amend these views.
So in the usual case you want to set up the website and you really don't want anybody to alter the views. So in this case, you could just for example lock it down by default at the admin role. But then if you use tool sets Access Control page, You can change the roles and let anybody access it whole load of other improvements as well.
You can decide if the custom search is going to distribute results on the flyer. If you can have to press the return key styling options for hover actions and a whole load more. So, yeah, go and check that out. This is going to be a really straightforward way of creating archives in Guttenberg for toolset users looks really nice.
Uses of the page builder framework will be pleased to know that there's yet another released only a week after the last one. We're now in version 2.1 1.1. I believe it is now there's new options to add a custom mobile logo SEO press integration breadcrumbs new added edit icon to the logos in the customizer new WPBF underscore entry underscore content on the score open and various other hooks.
And a whole load of other things. So yeah, really nice. Thank you David for keeping us up-to-date. Quite a few things released this week by power pack for Beaver Builder. They have an article entitled new modules sitemap a bread crumbs and category grid which explains about their three new modules the category grid does as you would imagine it displays a grid or Carousel of categories tags, and other taxonomy is on the website.
You can set a custom featured image. It's got whoa. Commerce compatibility griddle Carousel layouts you can display an item count and various other things looks really nice. There's also a breadcrumb module said ever wanted to add breadcrumbs with custom styling and got stock meet the new bread crumbs module several.
SEO plugins have been made compatible. So for example yoast SEO rank math and nav XT breadcrumbs plug-in is also compatible. And last but by no means least they've got the sitemap module which kind of gives you the capability of something akin to I guess Windows Explorer or something. You can have collapsible and on collapsible menu items and yeah, it looks looks really nice.
Very nice simple styling options. So if you're a user of that Plug-In or thinking about buying it go and check that out, but finally they've got another article because they really something else this week. This is the coupon module for Beaver Builder. And it's basically sets you up with a distinct module for putting a product that you want to offer a coupon code on and then there's a whole load of option.
So for example, you can add the photo you can show the discount you can have a discount displayed prominently. Click a button to copy the code and obviously the coupon code itself. So that might be quite interesting if you're trying to set up something for I don't know Black Friday or something like that.
So yeah nice work from power pack this week. Not to be left behind the guys at brainstorm Force have released two new products this week. They're both the same basic product, but for their different platform, so for example, ultimate add-ons for Beaver Builder, we now have the table of contents module which does exactly as you would imagine.
It creates a clean and very nice easy to read table of contents option which you could put at the top of a piece of long form content and then it provides you with. Things like, you know, you can add headings in the content. You can drag and drop the content module ordering and you can customize the look and the feel of it.
You can alter the bullet point styling select different headings and enable smooth scroll essentially. It's what you'd expect from a table of contents, but now done inside of a beaver Builder module and it I'd say the the ones that I've seen on the website look really nice very simple, you click scroll to the content that you want and so on and.
So because they've released this for Beaver Builder, they've also released it for Elementor and there's a separate Link in the show notes for this. This is adding a table of contents for element or basically the exact same product only on the elemental side of things drag and drop customize the table exactly the same stuff really, but so nobody's left out if you've got ultimate add-ons for Elemental or Beaver Builder.
Hey final piece of news in the plug-in and theme section is all about wpm. You devs hustle plug-in, which is a plug-in which allows you to gather things like email addresses with pop-ups and things like that. It's the the WordPress opt-in plug-in in on their platform. Their article is entitled the best WordPress pop-up plug in now with Security Options.
So obviously with Gathering content from people such as their email address and so on. We get under the we get under the problem of GDP our compliance. And so wpm you'd ever have tried to tackle this in a whole bunch of ways. So for example, they've integrated their GDP our compliance with a bunch of the.
Email delivery platforms that they integrate with. So for example, they integrate with a self hosted platform called sendy and now they will fire off the GDP are the Tag basically which in sendy says, yes, this person has subscribed and double opt-in and so on and so forth. They're also going to be doing exactly the same thing with MailChimp.
They're going to integrate the list in such a way that MailChimp is aware. The GDP are options that have been given permission and the same is true for active campaign as well. They've also got a whole new range of privacy options and settings. So this is things like you can periodically anonymize all of the GDP our data which is stored in the system and they also have options with how you can expunge the data for example by completely resetting the plug into its vanilla status.
Or deleting data upon install. So all of this seems like a very sensible thing for a plug-in such as this to be doing. A few deals that I've spotted this week just a few this week firstly you can get 25% off blog Volt or mal care. You can click on the links in the show notes. There's one for blog vault and one for malcare that lasts until the third of November.
So the code will be automatically applied if you click the link. So 25% off either of those blog volt is a kind of backup and restore utility Mal care a kind of like firewall antivirus solution. If you like manycam which is a Windows and Mac desktop app for doing things like live streaming and all of that good stuff streaming all over the place and having many cameras.
Joining that stream. They've got a premium license, which is only $20. Normally. It's a hundred and ninety nine. So that's a really good saving get a lifetime license to their premium platform for just $20 click on the link and as a couple of things on appsumo that I thought might be were useful for people in the WordPress space.
One of them is. Something called similar content I can't vouch for it. I don't really know. But anyway, there it is and there's another one called live webinar, which is a webinar platform, which they've got on offer lifetime deal and those kind of pieces of software and normally charge fairly Hefty fees so that that could be a good one.
As always a very very light touch on the security news this week, but two things to mention over on the wordfence blog. Both of those come from Once is entitled open redirect vulnerability patched in the bridge theme. So if you've ever used or heard of that one might be worth checking things out and that there is a stored xss.
Patched in syntax highlighter evolved plug-in have to say I've not heard of the bridge theme or the syntax highlighter revolved plug-in, but if you have or have them deployed anywhere, I would certainly go and get them updated and read on the wordfence website about what the vulnerabilities entail or what they might have done the self-promotional bit WP Builds.
We had a. Podcast out on last Thursday. It was number a hundred and fifty one entitled. Are we leaking clients? It was David Walmsley and I having a chat on well, what could we possibly do to stop clients from from leaving us? We talk about a book. Cold water time marketing by briony Thomas and we're going through it week by week over the next few weeks.
And this week was the second part in that. It's a miniseries that were running. And yeah, it's it was really interesting. I do love these chats and it's all about kind of Shoring up the the work which might come from clients that you've already got surely the easiest people to get work from. People who you've already worked with who know trust you and have you as their go-to person.
So it's all about trying to make sure you plug all those leaks and let us view of those those contacts Escape Escape you. I'm pleased to say that we've still got one job on the newsletter thus otic agency, which is run by Leo mindell who's a contributor quite often to the Facebook live that we do on a Monday with the WordPress news.
He's got a job a software engineer vacancy down in Cardiff. So it's a uk-based job. So click on the link. If you are a WordPress software engineer and you would like to be working in or near Cardiff go and click on the link for that. The last section is called not WordPress, but useful. Anyway, I think this post that I'm about to link to is not actually all that new but it kind of relates to something that we talked about recently.
We talked about this new SCA strong customer Authentication. Requirements that is now in effect 14th of September 2019. It became compulsory to have this integrated into your payment system. If you're within the European Union or a believe it's actually the European economic area and I didn't really understand what it was or what it did.
And so this is on the Go cardless website and it basically explains what it is. I have to say I think I'm noticing the effects of all of this. Year ago I was able to transact and do payments with far less friction than I am doing now, and now I'm being asked multiple times each week to kind of Supply additional data just to prove that I am who I say I am.
I mean, it's trivial it takes me a few seconds to do I suppose from the payment. Gateway's point of view it provides some sort of security and certainty that you are who you say you are. Anyway, if you don't know about SC a strong customer authentication and you would like to know more click on that link.
Also, there's a link on the TechCrunch website entitled Millions downloaded dozens of Android apps from the from Google Play that were infected with adware. What can you say? It's such a different approach the Android platform by its very nature is much more open and things like this. Do happen from time to time might be a good idea.
If you have an Android phone and you're using some kind of apps which didn't appear to have too many downloads or in some cases some of them had as many as 500,000 downloads. So that's actually not that small nevertheless. If you're using Android might be worth a quick glance over that 42 apps were found and yeah, you don't want malware on your phone.
And lastly SpaceX intends to offer starlink satellite broadband service starting in 2020. Well space X which is the the brainchild of Elon Musk who's behind Tesla. They're going to launch their starlink service for consumers. Sometime next year. So I presume if you've got the the finance available and you're able to be in the correct part of the world.
It says it's going to start in Northern United States and parts of Canada. 24 launches will provide full Global coverage later on the this might be something interesting. Of course. This is a bit of a dream of technologists because if this happens then they'll be no part of the globe including. You know really remote places like the middle of the Pacific or Antarctica where there is no broadband connection and presumably it will be gigantic companies like SpaceX who will be able to benefit from this certainly if it is conceivable and it works out to be cost efficient and is fast enough.
It's the kind of thing. I can see myself subscribing to because you'll have connectivity wherever you may be. Okay, that's all I've got for you this week. Thank you for joining me. Once again. I really do appreciate it. It does take a little bit of time putting these things together and it's nice when people come over in some way onto a comment system.
Like for example in YouTube or on the Facebook group WP bills.com forward slash Facebook and say that they've listened to it and they appreciate it. It's only makes me feel feel tremendously good. The WP Builds newsletter was brought to you today by Kinsta. Kinsta Takes managed WordPress hosting to the next level powered by the Google Cloud platform.
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I hope that many of you make the effort to go and check them out. That would be great. I'm sure they'd appreciate the audience. And if I don't see you on Thursday for the podcast, maybe I'll catch you back here next Monday for another news episode. Bye. Bye for now.