WP Builds Newsletter #92 – Gutenberg 7.0, Yoast ads and still the deals come!

Hello there. Good morning and welcome to this. The WP Builds weekly WordPress news. This is news number 92 it covers the WordPress news for the week, commencing the 2nd of December, 2019 and it was published on Monday the 9th of December, 2019 my name is Nathan Wrigley and a few bits of housekeeping before we begin. Although black Friday is. Basically over there is still a few deals looking about, and you can find those [email protected] forward slash. Black if you'd like to keep in touch with all that we do on the podcast, that's WP Builds forward. Slash. Subscribe over there. You can join some mailing lists and find out how to put us on your favorite. Yeah. Podcast player join our Facebook group of 2,300 word pressers and there's our YouTube channel and so on and so forth. The other one is WP Builds.com forward slash advertise if you would like to have your product or service puts in front of a specifically WordPress related audience. A little bit like Kinstler have done. Are you tired of unreliable or slow hosting? If so, check out kin 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 expert support, and you can migrate today for free at dot com. I should say that every week we put out various bits of content. We put our podcasts on a Thursday, and you can get that by going to, like I said, WP Builds.com forward slash subscribe and subscribing on your favorite podcast player. You're listening to the weekly WordPress news, but then at 2:00 PM every Monday, following on from the release of this news, we have some word pressers. On a live call, so it's a video call. You can find it in the Facebook group topic, WP Builds dot com forward slash Facebook or on the live page, which is WP Builds.com forward slash live and we just have a nice little chat through the news that you're about to listen to and highlight some of the things that we think are important. Anyway, another thing that's happening this week is on Wednesdays, so that's Wednesday, the 11th of December at one o'clock UK time. I'm going to be on a live call with Pictionary as we do our. Monthly UI, UX review. If you go to WP, build.com forward slash UI you can submit a website and Peacher will go and have a look at it and tell you what she thinks. Some good points, some bad points and points to consider. So it was very informative. I learned a whole heap of stuff, and you can find that in our Facebook groups. So yeah, that's Wednesday at 1:00 PM on the 11th of December. Okay. I think that's everything I've got to say this week. So let's crack on with the weekly WordPress news. Each week we divide our news up into distinct little sections and the first section should there be some is always WordPress core, and I've got a couple of things for you this week. The first one is over on WP Tavern. It's an article by Justin Tadlock entitled Gutenberg 7.0 launches, stable navigation block post blocks and template parts. We actually did cover this last week, but Justin has subsequently released an article which kind of covers in. Probably no more than a five minute read all of the important features in Gothenburg seven and he encapsulates them all in the headline. Really. We've got the navigation block, which is now has gone into us or stable state, so hopefully it'll be quite useful. Yeah. We've got a post title and content blocks. They've been added. We've also got blocked template parts for themes and they are really the main releases. As I said, we did discuss this, but it's, it's just a nice, easy read. So if you have updated, to Gothenburg seven, which presumably you will have done, if you've updated your WordPress install recently, then these features will become available and you can go and learn exactly how to use them. with Justin's article on WP Tavern. Staying on WP Tavern, but this time, an article written by Chris Hughes, who is a very frequent visitor to the WP Bill's Facebook group. It's an article entitled Gutenberg one that year later, and it's an opinion piece in which he espouses, he's kind of new found love for Gothenburg starts a year ago when it was first released. Since. You'd like. Many of us were saying, Oh my goodness, this is awful. What's happening? Leave it alone. We're happy with the way things are. And then his familiarity over the last year and his, his adoption of it and his love for it puts a photo up about what it would look like to post something in the classic editor and how complicated and janky it looks now and, and how he's making use of the, the new block editor. But it's not just about his love for it. He talks about it in relation to. Page builders. It also talks about the numbers and how the classic editor plugin, whilst it still has a very large installed base and people saying very definitively, they're not going to use Gutenberg. That seems to be on the decline. Almost a sort of straight line, although it is a bit of a wiggly curve and the the Gutenberg block editor is on the increase. So you never know at some point when the classic editor, I'm no longer received support. I think it's 2022 maybe that maybe that in fact will be the moment. Which, it's reaches more or less zero. Anyway. and then he goes on to talk about all the little, all the little features that are available, all the kind of Adam's that you can find, for example, a stackable or editor's kit and a whole bunch of other ones and how Gutenberg is becoming really feature rich. So, yeah. Lovely piece. Thanks Chris for writing it. The last piece in the WordPress core section sees us returning for a third time to WP Tavern. And again, Justin Tadlock writing about the initial documentation for block-based WordPress themes proposed. we have a pull request on the Gutenberg repository, which was on the 3rd of December. Riyadh, Benguela created initial document that outlines how block-based WordPress themes might work well. The idea, I suppose you may know this or not, is that the block editor will become the way of creating a entire sites. So things like headers and footers, and basically anything. And a lot of this work so far has been done with themes, and up until now, we've had no real insight into how that's going to be handled by the block editor. but we've kind of known that everything is going to be a block, but that's about. It. So we have some insight now because of this document and it looks really intriguing. The proposed structure, isn't really all that different from current WordPress themes. The only major differences that temp theme templates would become block templates and also block template parts. And these will actually be HTML files rather than PHP files. And if you go. Onto the article. You can see, for example, the proposal is that the theme will have a style dot CSS functions dot PHP, and there'll be a directory blocked dash templates with an index dot HTML, single dime, HTML, archive dot, HTML, and also a directory called block dash template dash parts again with header dot, HTML footer dot HTML, sidebar dot HTML, and and of course into those directors. You can. I guess throw whatever you wanted. So this is really interesting. It does give us some insight and it really, it doesn't feel as if anything is all that different. Obviously if everything is a block, there's a whole lot that will change. And I presume the idea is that those, those blocks can go into those HTML files, but it remains to be seen maybe, As time goes on, the the idea of having kind of exportable themes where there could be a repository of parts of themes, but also entire themes because it would appear from this article that you're going to be able to easily export them should you have the user permissions to do so. Maybe we'll just see, you know, a real massive sharing of different parts of, of themes and entire themes. It's just really interesting. So. It's obviously just the discussion at this point. It's all in flux, but if you go right to the bottom of Justin's article, there's a section called join the discussion. And there you can find a link to open the discussion on the future of themes and you'll be able to join the theme review team. And you know. Give your, give your voice, your ideas, some volume and see if you can contribute to how this moves forward. But it doesn't seem all that different or the moment, if anything, it just seems like it's a lot more straightforward and a little bit easier. But, I don't think everything, everything is going to be entirely different. The next section is always entitled community, and we've got quite a few articles for you in this section this week. The first is all about WordCamp Europe because they're looking already for the venue for 2021 they basically need a location. They need a host city. it was in Berlin this year. It will be in Porto, Portugal next year and the year after that. Well, we still don't know. There are three possible dates. Third to the 5th of June. 10th to the 12th of June or the 17th the 19th of June, but they need a European location. Essentially. If you ha you or your team have ever organized one or more successful WordCamps in a European city, you are eligible to apply. And what they've said is if there are, if there are two kind of winning bids, if you'd like to that. Equal, in their merits, then they'll go to the place where it's never happened before. So what they say is, to quote, we encourage everyone to apply, even if we're visiting your country in the previous WCU additions, if we receive two equally strong applications, one from a new country and one from an country we've already been to, we'll select the new countries. So that's very clear. So if this is your thing, if you're into organizing WordCamps and you want. WordCamp EU to come to your city. now is the time to get your, your ideas together and submit them. So that was WordCamp Europe. Now WordCamp Asia, if you are planning to go, it's on February the 21st to the 23rd it's the inaugural WordCamp Asia. It's being held in Bangkok, Thailand, and this article is just to say that the first round of speakers have been announced. There's some familiar faces on there, and there's some new faces, people I've not seen before. But, yeah, there's about a dozen or so who've already, who've already had their speeches and contributions accepted. And, if you are planning to go, I know that the clock is ticking you. You've at least got some insight now into who's going to be talking and about what, no doubt. We'll get the second round very, very soon. This next one very briefly is on our themes.com and it's called announcing 12 days of giving. So they've decided that over the next 12 days or so, they're going to be giving away a whole variety of different things. It's their way of, as they say, saying thank you to their loyal community. and so. Essentially it says for 12 days, you and anyone you know can enter the 12 days of giving giveaways. Each day we're going to be showcasing a product or service, either for my themes or one of our friends and from software to books, tech gadgets. Each day you can enter and win, share with your friends, get more chances to win and so on and so forth. So there you go. If you click on this and you fancied winning things like backup, body theme, security, pro themes, hosting plugin builders, and a whole bunch of courses as well. Then click on the link and get yourself in that competition. A story which blew up this week was all about something that Yost did a, it's on probably any channel where there is WordPress news, but I've picked the WP Tavern article, which they've entitled black Friday, banner gone wrong advertising and free plugins, and it's the age old debate. We've all been there in our admin panel and we've seen some kind of colorful, bright, oversized advert for a particular product. Usually it's because we're on the free version of a particular. Product and they want to up sell us onto the, the paid version. Well, this week it was widely felt that Yoast had overstepped the Mark. They put in a quite a large letter box shape animated GIF, which was advertising that you could get 30% off everything over at Yoast during that black Friday sale. And immediately the, the storm of dissatisfaction rolled around Twitter with lots of people exclaiming their annoyance. I think primarily the problem was not only was it animated, and it was very colorful, but also. It may well have appeared to kind of just about every user role. So if you were just a, Oh, I don't know, a subscriber rather than an administrator, this may have been visible to you and a lot of new boobs to WordPress, or sort of worrying that their sites had potentially been hacked because they've never seen anything quite like this before. Well, to say that they've never seen anything quite like that before is not entirely true. I've seen many, many of these things, but it, it just felt that maybe they'd overstepped the Mark. Now. To her credit Maricka van direct immediately, did the, what I consider to be the right thing. And I think she did it on equivocally and very, very well. She apologized profusely. She basically said, let's be clear. This was a mistake. we just didn't think this one through. I don't want that to be the explanation. The explanation is that we made a mistake. She says it was stupid, but that's not good enough. You know, this was a mistake. Pure and simple. I don't know what you think. Lots of people wrote comments. I mean, lots of people wrote comments on the WP Tavern article. Many, many, many people. And most of them, I think it's fair to say, thought that this was overstepping the Mark. But there were very large number of people also who were saying, this is fine. It's free. This is the sort of thing you expect. My takeaway from all of this is really, I think maybe we ought to have a like an advertising space and maybe that should be in the settings for the particular plugin, or maybe we should have a dedicated space inside of the WordPress admin, which is kind of, I don't know, an option that we can tick on and turn off rather like all of the other areas in the app. Minera, you know, in the widgets that you can see on the dashboard, for example, maybe you could have an advertising one and put things in there, or we could just have some sort of standardized WordPress notification where images are out. The question, it's just text with the, the usual WordPress. You know, UI surrounding it. And so I don't really have an answer, but, you know, these companies have got to make money on it on black Friday. This felt like, obviously Yost felt at the beginning that this was a good way to alert their users to the paid version, but it seems to have gone calamitously wrong. And about 101 star reviews rolled in on wordpress.org. So, I guess, I guess maybe they shouldn't be doing this in the future, but as an there's definitely a conversation to be had. About where we put these things because advertising in and of itself is clearly not evil. Just I guess unexpected adverts are a little bit of a shock. We've spoken quite a lot in this news already about Gutenberg. And here's something else. This is on the talk mag.io website, an article entitled how to create a custom WordPress website with Gothenburg block. So this article could equally have been written by the guys at toolset because it is using toolset blocks. They're, they're plugging to to do it. And essentially it's a walkthrough of how you can create your own blocks using that. Yeah. Plugin, and I've, I've never really done this, but if you were to follow the steps, it's quite long, but every single step of the way, he comes with a screenshot and it just enables you to, if you are a tool set user, it enables you to, to put together your own custom block, relatively straightforward, I think tool set are onto something here. It seems like a really nice, easy implementation. So anyway, if you've got tool set and you want to play with blocks, this seems like a very, very nice tutorial to talk you through it all. The next section is all about plugins and themes. Usually there's quite a bit, but this week it's a little thin on the ground. Largely, I think because of black Friday plugin and theme developers probably concentrating on their marketing efforts this week and not not on updating their software possibly. Anyway, three bits for you today. The first one is about main WP. If you use main WP as your kind of updating software of choice, it's a self hosted version of something like managed WP. You can. Put all of your client websites into this main WP platform. And you can do things like update and, you know, change themes and update plugins and so on. And another thing that you can do is you can send your clients reports. Now, the reports have all been kind of HTML table based. Well, email, shall we say, but they're starting to look for, an option to have . PDF reports. I'm much more, pro version of the reports. And so the article I've linked to today is actually a subscribe form on a MailChimp mailing list. And if you're a main WP user and you want to be part of the beta program for this pro reports, then go and fill out this form. The idea is it will have premade professional templates to get you started HTML reports replaced with always correctly formatted PDF reports. If then built into each every tracking option, and it can be run simultaneously with the original client's report extension. So whatever you've got at the moment can run concurrently. So maybe go and fill that format. By the way, if you're a inter main WP and you want to get some cash off it, you can go to WP bills.com forward slash deals, scroll around on that page and you will find 25% of main WP. So that's, that's pretty good. The next one that I've got for you today. Now I had to copy this into Evernote, so I'm linking to an Evernote version of an email I got, and for some reason it's ended up really, really strangely formatted, so I apologize about that, but I didn't manage to fix it. It's all about the fact. That WP security audit log, and we had those guys on the podcast several months ago has been acquired by WP white hat security. it feels like a, like a match. That was perfect. Really. These two companies doing a very, very well working within a very similar area. But if you've got a knee, you know any concerns, you're using WP security audit log, and you want to know what's going to happen in the future, then there's various links in there and hopefully it will go from strength to strength. Having having been acquired by what I assume is a, is a larger security organization working in the WordPress space. Very interesting piece from Jeffrey. Karen dang, this week and titled block plugging unit test, choosing the perfect Gutenberg plugin for your website and theme. Jeffrey has been involved in creating something called editor's kit, which brings an awful lot of formatting options to the block editor. And so what he's decided is, well, this, this, this, this. Proliferation in different blocks on the wp.org repo, and it's very difficult to know which ones are those are going to be compatible. There's probably dozens and dozens of different blocks within those dozens and dozens of different block packs, if you like. And some of them may be compatible with your themes. Some of them may not. Some of them might have code which breaks your, your theme and so on and so forth. So what he's done is if you install editor's kit, you can then. Upload a Jason file, and then you can test content for the following block collections. You can use atomic blocks, code blocks, cadence blocks, can blocks, auto blocks, stackable and ultimate add on for Gutenberg, and you can test how all of those work you can then with a a setting, you can disable all the ones that you find are not working. You can. DC remove and disable, there's a button to do that. And so it seems like a really nice way to, to be able to test them in one handy place. So, yeah, if you're sort of mulling over which one of these block packs you want to go for, then this seems to be a, a really interesting way of getting, getting all of them in one place and checking them out and then, making decisions based upon that. Okay. We've got a few deals that are worthy of mentioning this week. Obviously we've had a proliferation of these. The first one has got nothing to do with black Friday at all, or any of the sort of WordPress EDLs. This is just something I stumbled across. I have no idea where a, it's actually a Mac app called Q space. Now, if you are a windows user, there's all sorts of things. Fun things that you can do with windows Explorer that the finder simply doesn't allow you to do. So, for example, you can tile them and bash them against the edges of the screen and make them certain sizes. Well, this is just fabulous. It puts two or three or four finder windows into one window on, I know that sounds really uninteresting, but trust me. Yeah. If you install it, you'll be so pleased that you did so you could have one displaying thumbnails and the other quarter displaying, I don't know, a column view and so on. You can drag things from one place to another and just makes the finder a whole lot more easy to use. Now I have to say it's a separate app. It isn't. Actually the finders you need, you know, the finder will still be open and available somewhere tucked away in your system. But I just hide the finder from now on and use Q space instead. It's great. It's 99 cents. But, if you're a, a UK person, like IME actually only costs 49 Pence, so it's a very much recommended, a good improvement to your match. Or we say. We do still have some deals on the WP Builds, black Friday page. Believe it or not, some of these deals are still going, so that's WP Bell's dot com. Forward slash. Black we've got, I don't know, a dozen or more still going. So there's things like peach and Aries UX, a blueprint course, optin monster, tangible plugins, and a few others. they're obviously going to run out fairly soon. in fact, you never know. Maybe a few of them will have gone by the time that you listen to this, but, anyway, worth checking out, cause I can see ones on the 10th of December and, and there you go. If not always return to WP belts.com forward slash deals. and there's a whole load of never ever running out deals on that page. So that's worth looking at. Very light touch on security. I've only got one thing for you this week actually, and it's over on the security blog. It's entitled another fake Google domain fonts dot Google's api.com and this is to say that obfuscated by the is.gd URL shortening service. They've discovered that there's a fake Google domain entitled fonts dot Googles. With an S api.com and I believe that the original would actually be Google api.com so honestly, the, the, the lengths that these, these hackers will go to. So just be on the lookout if you're in any way, shape or form using Google fonts. And, if this fascinates you, go and check out the security article. They blatantly self-promotional. WP Builds bit. We've got two things for you this week. The first one is that David and I released a episode of the podcast number 157 entitled honey traps for website clients. And in this episode we discuss the idea of the sort of things that we can do in order to stop clients leaking away. So if you go into a shop and you want to get some shoes, it's very unlikely that you'll walk in and just kind of. Just say those shoes. I'll take those please. The fact is you're going to try them on. If you want to buy a mobile phone, you're going to give it a play. Hold it in your hand and see what it's like. How do we do that when we're building a website? We can hardly build the website and let them play with it. So are there any other similar try before you buy techniques that we could adopt in order to stop clients leaking away from us? And we discussed that in this episode. The other thing, I've already mentioned it actually, we have a UI and UX review coming up on Wednesday, but peach and Terry joined me last week and we did about 50 minutes of video all about her UX for everyone blueprint course. So the link that I've got in the show notes actually takes you to a YouTube video, and we were live on a chat and various people in the WordPress world. WP Builds, I should say, community joined us and you can see their comments on the right and she just goes through what the course involves, what it is that you can get if you decide to take it on. And she's got a sort of lower pricing at the moment. So if you take it on, in the next, I can't remember how long, the next few days you get this kind of cheaper pricing because she hasn't yet finished it. And she wants to kind of feedback and ideas about how to, how to make the courses useful for everybody as possible. I'm trying to include a jobs section in this word press weekly newsletter, and I'm sort of running dry this week. I have no things for you, but I would make the call that if you're an agency owner or for one reason or another, you have a WordPress job. Please do get in touch [email protected] and I will make sure it goes on the site. There's no charge. It just a, just a nice sort of philanthropic thing. So if you've got a job, please let me know. Now, then we're onto non WordPress, but useful anyway, articles. The first one is to alert you to an update, which has been, which has been applied to content, snare. If you've ever tried to get content from your clients, you know how difficult that can be. It could be text or images or content. Snare is a platform to do that. James Rose has been on the podcast a couple of times talking about it, and it's a very convenient way of. Solving that problem of getting the content. How have your clients, we all know how hard that can be. Anyway, I've linked to a Vimeo video where he outlines all of the significant updates to the platform. Probably if you're a content now use, you may have seen these already, but if you're not a content snare user or you tried it in the past and didn't, didn't kind of get on with it, you might want to go and check it out again because there's quite a lot that's changed since the last time you used it. Now, how many of you in the past have signed up for something by accident? What I mean by that is, well, in my case, we became Amazon prime users because we were sort of suckered into the free 30 day trial, and then we simply forgot to cancel it up at loads of us . Been on recurring billings for things because they simply forgot to cancel it. Well, this is interesting. PC mag.com have an article entitled MasterCard band's automatic billing after free trials. So MasterCard, which is a gigantic payment processor, are going to do just that. You aren't, they're not going to allow people to take you from a free trial onto automatically. Billing without first alerting you to the fact that it's going to happen. Now, I don't know if that means that you have to agree on something, you know? Do you have to click a link to say, yes, I'm fine with this, or if it just means that they have to reach out to you. But I think this is very, very sensible and welcome. I, I can't see any drawback to this as a consumer. I can see that companies that do this, and sometimes I dare I say it sometimes, I think companies do this in a slightly shady way. maybe there'll be a bit up in arms about it, but from a consumer perspective, I think this is all good. AWS. They have not until recently had a quantum computing service like the, they're rivals. Google, Microsoft, and IBM have, well, that changed this week because AWS has launched a bracket. It's quantum computing service, tech crunch. Tell us now, this is interesting because although you will be able to see. A bracket as a quantum computing solution in your AWS control panel. It's actually not, AWS is infrastructure. Amazon don't actually own the stuff that you'll be using because they're partnering with a company called D-Wave and another one called ion Q and another one called Righetti who were making their systems available through Amazon's. You know, the control panel that I've just mentioned. Now I can't see myself using it. Any of this at any point in the near future behind I bet one or two of you, I'm really intrigued by quantum computing and what it can bring. So I thought I'd mention it. The very last piece of news I've got to you today is over on search engine journal entitled Google cofounders, Larry Page, and Sergei Brin resign. No, they're not resigning out of a falling out or anything like that, but they've decided it's time to move on. So they founded Google many, many years ago in their garage, and ever since that day, Larry Page and Sergei Brin had been right at the top several years ago. They restructured Google so that they had a parent company called alphabet, although I think that was really. Didn't really make too much difference to the operations of Google. Google was then run by a Sundar Pichai. Well, he's now taking over our alphabet. So basically the parent company of Google is now being run by Sundar Pichai, and Sergei and Larry are stepping down. Now, intriguingly though, they're still holding on between them two 51% of the voting block. So they'll still be able to make significant decisions and basically say. Nope, you're not doing that, or yes, you are doing that, but yeah, it kind of feels like a little bit like the end of an era, but they are incredibly wealthy chaps, both multiple, multiple billionaires, and maybe they've just decided, well, let's just enjoy the cash that we've got and have a little bit of an a well-earned rest anyway, like I said, feels a bit like the end of an era. The WP build newsletter was brought to you today by Consta Kinston 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 can access to the latest software and developer tools such as PHB seven SSH and staging environments, and the best part, their expert team of WordPress engineers. They're available 24 seven if you need help. You can migrate today for free at dot com I hope you found that useful. That would be a, that would be my aim at least. Anyway, please let me know if you found it useful. Either send me a, send me a contact form WP, Bill's dot com.com forward slash contact. Or you could email me if you like. Oh, use Facebook, get in touch. I like to hear whether or not people are listening to this. It's very, it's very nice when people say that they are. Please join us on Thursday for the podcast. We'll be back next week for another episode, just like this one and 2:00 PM UK time every Monday for the live news. I'm going to be joined this week by a whole bunch of people and I hope that you can join us too. That's it. Bye bye for now.