WP Builds Weekly WordPress News #109 – WordPress 5.5 tickets, deals and GoDaddy buys domain registries

Nathan Wrigley: [00:00:00] Hello there. Good morning and welcome to this the WP Builds weekly WordPress news. This is number 109 it covers the WordPress news for the week. Commencing the 6th of April, 2020 and it was published on Monday the 13th of April, 2020. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and a little bit of housekeeping, just before we begin, please help spread the word about WP Builds.
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Speaking of which, let's get on with it. We always divide our WordPress news up into different sections, and if there isn't either, first section is always WordPress core. I've got two pieces for you this week. The first one [email protected] Josepha Haden writing an article entitled WordPress 5.5 call for tickets.
It feels like just yesterday, in fact. Almost was where WordPress 5.4 finally shipped. The only issues I had on any of my sites was just the favicon reverting to the WordPress icon, which was easy to fix. I hope you migrated successfully and didn't have too many problems. Anyway, 5.5 is just around the corner and all ready.
They're wanting you to submit tickets for what it is that you would like to be included in WordPress 5.5 so she writes, share your feedback. What do you want to see included in 5.5 what are your current UX pain points? What features can we add or iterate on? And then component maintainers. What tickets of yours do you think we'll be ready to ship in 5.5 so if you have any suggestions for WordPress, 5.5 something that you'd like to see and click on that link and get yourself involved.
The next one is over on WordPress Tavern. Just in tug. Locke writes a piece entitled proposal to add a concent API to WordPress feature plugin available. This seems like something which is an ingenious idea. Apparently on Wednesday, a chap called Garrett Heider, he announced a feature proposal for a WordPress consent API, and the proposal is to really assist with the privacy roadmap for WordPress core.
Now, if this got. Merged into core, it would provide a standard method for core plugins and themes to obtain consent for various privacy related things. So hider, um, he identified several areas in which an API for handling consent could help in bringing a site into compliance with various privacy laws in different jurisdictions.
And the following four points. Consent management plugins cannot prevent other plugins from placing a PHP cookie. Plugins that iterate tracking code on a client site could break the site if blocked by a consent management plugin. Minified URLs in JavaScript files may not be detected by automatic blocking scripts.
And using a blocking approach to handle privacy requires a list of all types of URLs when dealing with cookies and other types of tracking. Essentially, this API provides kind of like an end point for people to hook into, to provide compliance. And I just can't see this being a bad idea. So for example, it might provide a compliance in a situation where you are living in a certain.
Geographical location and need particular types of things to be abated. This just seems like such a sensible idea of the comments. That's only seven or eight comments, but most of them are saying this absolutely should be folded into and on. I can't see why not. Uh, hopefully it would make things much more easy and it would provide one unified place rather than each plugin or theme or whatever.
How's having their own approach to privacy, then this would essentially keep everything in one spot and it seems like such a good idea. There's a consent APA API demo, um, linked to on the page as well if you want to go and look at it, but seems like it seems like a really nice project to, uh, to get involved with.
The next section is always entitled community. And I've got four pieces for you today. The first one is [email protected] and the article is entitled the month in WordPress, March, 2020 and really, mostly this news is all about looking into the future and things that have very much just this minute happened and what's happening in the next week and so on.
But this piece is looking back over the last month. So it's a nice summation of everything. And some. Some good bits in case you haven't been listening to our news, you might have missed some bits. So for example, it mentions the release of WordPress 5.4 the releases of Gothenburg, 7.7 and eight WordCamp cancellations, and a whole bunch of other things as well.
But it's a nice summation, very quick, two minute read of what's happened in WordPress over the last month. But of course, if you pay attention to this podcast and you'll know all of that anyway, if you're stuck at home at the moment because of lockdown. And especially if you've got children, you might be thinking of different things that it is that you would like to do with them, and one of them perhaps is teaching them to learn.
WordPress and WP engine have an article this week in title WP engine donate services to help. Geek pack, teach kids WordPress at home for free, and it's exactly that. There's a service called geek pack, create and code camp. Um, it's completely free as far as I understand, and it will enable your children to sit down in a safe environment.
It says it's a three week virtual course geared towards helping kids stuck at home, learning about creating WordPress websites. In addition to learning about scratch computer. I did design. Canva or PicMonkey, G suite, video editing, audio editing, mobile app development and creative writing. Good grief.
That's an awful lot in such a short space of time. It sounds like WP engine are a sponsor of this and yeah, it's a nice little project and something that you might wish to reach for. The next one is all about WordCamp Europe. We found out, sadly, a little while ago, that word come Europe 2020 has been postponed.
I say postponed, not canceled because it's going to be taking place in the exact same location next year. Portugal, Porto on the thirds to the 5th of June next year. Well, they've decided this week that they're going to, as far as possible, take this year's event online. And so it says WordCamp Europe 2020 online will take place over the fourth to the 6th of June with a virtual contributor day on the 4th of June, followed by two and a half days of live streamed talks and workshops.
So that's really nice. So hopefully every single one of the contributors will still be available and everything will go online. Um, hopefully if you've bought a ticket, they've reached out to you already because they are issuing refunds, whether you're a, an attendee or indeed a sponsor, everything is being refunded.
So keep an eye out for that email. Should you have bought a ticket. The last one in the community section is over on WPM U dev. It's an article entitled how to reduce your TT FB and boost WordPress page B. Now, TTF B means time to first bite, and it's that very first bit of information which comes back from your server.
To alert the user that actually something is up and running and this site exists. It seems to be something which people are talking about rather a lot these days. I believe that Google's algorithm does include a heavy proportion of this kind of data in its rankings, but the understanding of it, I think sometimes is a little bit off and so WPM you'd have thrown this article together.
Talks about the difference with load time, page load time as opposed to TTF B and so on and so forth. So it could be something that you're interested in reading. It doesn't go into anything particularly fresh and new. This really would be an article if you haven't come across this before and you've almost no understanding, but for those of you that don't, you might find this very useful.
It's quite a long read. I would probably put about 10 minutes aside for this. I should tell you that in the WordPress weekly live news that we have this week, we're going to be joined by some good colleagues, one of which is Sabrina Zayden, who has a bit of a specialism in speeding up your WordPress website.
So maybe she'll have something to say about this. You can join us live 2:00 PM UK time, uh, WP Builds.com forward slash live. Right. Let's move swiftly along to our next section. Plugins, themes, and blocks. It does appear that over the last few weeks, for obvious reasons, the the procedure for updating plugins seems to have slowed down a little bit.
Obviously worked has been distributed and teams are figuring out how to make everything happen, so a little bit less than usual this week, but I've got two pieces for you. The first one is from the Yoast website. It says Yoast SEO 14.0 check the upcoming changes. Now this seems like a fairly sizable change in the way that Yoast are working.
It says this, release Yoast SEO 14.0 internally has code named indexable this release, while fully backwards compatible, we'll change some of our known integration API APIs says what's changing? We're moving all of our metadata from WP post Metta to custom tables so that it'll be quicker. We're moving to using an ORM and are completely bypassing WP DB.
Our front end architecture now uses dependency injection from symphony schemer. API is changing and there's also a new set of API surfaces to make integration with the a lot easier. So take a deep breath. That seems like quite a lot. That doesn't, there isn't actually any detail in here of how this will affect people.
I think. Really, they're just saying, wow, there's a lot going on. They say they're going to be writing blog posts in the near future, but you can expect a lot of speed improvements and perhaps even user interface improvements. I'm not sure over the next period anyway, big changes afoot at Yoast by the sounds of it.
Speaking of big changes, this is quite an interesting one. If you're using Jetpack, search. An article written by Justin on WordPress Tavern entitled Jetpack relaunches search feature, a standalone service. Well, the jet pack team announced today that it's new, that it's search services now available at a separate package.
It used to be available only in the professional bundle, so now you can pay a different amount. Previously you would pay for Jetpack professional, and that was 29. Dollars per month, and the price was irrespective of how big your site was. So if you had a site with a thousand posts or a million posts, you'd be paying the same amounts.
And so Greg Brown search Wrangler automatic says this seemed a little bit unfair. Now there's a tiered pricing up to a hundred records, and I'll go into records in a moment, is $5 thousand records, $10 right? Up to a million records is $200 per month. So obviously if you're a big site. Your fees are going to go up.
And if you're a small sites, there's a very big chance that your fees will go down. So it says that records are posts pages and custom post types, but that might change in the future. For example, they might want to index comments as their own record type. Um, but yeah, now hopefully everything will be speeded up.
You can see on the article a screenshot of how the new search will work. And it looks really nice. I mean, it's nothing revolutionary, but it looks how you'd expect a modern search to look. Um, but you have to be on the new plan for this to work with. The previous search is still available on the pro plan, but if you want to update to the new one, it will, it will need an update on your parts.
Then Justin goes into the architecture of all, listen how it works. It says the old system was an elastic search wrapper around the standard WordPress search feature. Whilst it was quicker than normal, it was still slower than it needed to be. The new system uses the same sync technology behind Jetpack features such like such as related post, publicize and stats.
It then builds a search index using elastic search engine from a cash. Um, it will also kind of query everything so that it's pre-processed and the data is ready so that it's available the moment somebody types in a search. So, okay, everything will be nice and snappy anyway. Jet pack users. If you've been paying a lot for search and feeling you are not getting value for money, maybe now that will change.
The next section is always deals for this week. I've got a couple of links. Firstly, I'm linking to the subscribe form where you can subscribe to our email list. As I said at the top of the show, we will send out emails as soon as we hear about WordPress deals, and if you want to subscribe to that, I will spend be sending those out multiple times a week.
And there's also a link to the WP Builds deals page where we've got permanent deals for a whole ton of work. Press products, but this week the offers are 30% off I themes products. There's a new deal called cloud image, which imagine something like WPM you devs smush or shorts pixel or WP, compress those kinds of services.
There's a new offer, $49 for life for a certain amount, and then you can stack the deal up and up and up. Anyway, that looks quite interesting if you're into squashing your images and improving the speed of your, your website. Also, there's another new one called elf site, which has a whole suite of widgets.
I can't say that I've used it, but. You know, if you wanted to put Facebook logins on your website or YouTube video embeds or pretty much anything you can think of this, this system purports to do it all. I have to say, some of them look quite nice. I can't comment on the quality of the code, but they look quite nice and also carried on from previous weeks.
We've got male poet, which is a way of, it's a bit like mail Chimp, it embedded into your WordPress website, so it builds emails and sends them out and tracks, clicks and all of that kind of thing. Male poet. Happy forms is a forms plugin, and also WP from a Phi, which is a plugin to kind of put those little popups in the corner saying, you know, such and such a person bought the yard, bought the deal this week.
So there we go. A few deals this week. I've only got one very brief thing to say about WordPress security this week, and that is an article in Wordfence entitled critical vulnerabilities in the WP lead plus X WordPress plugin. Apparently this plugin has 70,000 installs, and it's designed to allow site owners to create landing and squeeze pages on their websites.
Well, there was a vulnerability, which appeared this week, and this is has been investigated by Wordfence. So perhaps go and take a look at that. The next bit is the WP Builds entirely self-promotional section, and it is to say that David warms the, and I had a chat episode number 174 of the WP Builds podcast.
We talked about WordPress page builders versus SAP. SAS page builders. So we're talking about Beaver builder, oxygen, DV breezy element, or in the like against rivals like Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, and so on. Whether there is a benefit in any particular situation of choosing one over another, and honestly. I think there is, there are certain situations in which I reckon WordPress is a slam dunk winner.
In fact, I'd go as far as to say in most situations, but as you'll find out, we also discover some situations where potentially you might be well off looking at these other more well shall we say basic solutions and uh, yeah, so we discussed that a great length on episode number 174 of the podcast this week.
Links in the show notes. The next section is jobs, and I don't have anything for you this week, but I also would imagine that in this climate, the job market is going to be a little bit more fraught anyway. I would urge anybody who's got a WordPress related job who would like me to post it for them. Um, it is entirely without costs.
I'll just post it on the WP build weekly WordPress and use it on the website for you. Should you have one, just reach out to me on the contact forms on the website, but as I say, I have no job information for you this week. The last section is always not WordPress, but useful anyway, and I've got four pieces for you.
The first one is quite interesting, especially if you're using a.to us. Dotbiz dot. I N or dot C O. Um, domain because they have all been acquired by go daddy. There is another one as well. Dot. N Y C go daddy is now completely in charge of those domains. They've got up a new business, which they've set up called go daddy registry and they've pledged to keep their domain name registration business separate from their other kind of.
Domain name registration businesses, and they say as part of the transaction, go, daddy will strictly adhere to a governance model that maintains independence between GoDaddy registry and the registrar businesses. The intention is for the registry side to operate as a relatively autonomous, independent business.
Anyway, I don't know what you make of this, but certainly if you are a user of one of those, you need to be aware that from this moment on, you'll be paying go daddy for those domains to exist. The last three things that I've got for you this week are related to Covina, 19 now, the first one is just really quite an ingenious service.
I don't suppose many of you will be making use of it, but I do think it's illustrative of how some companies are kind of stepping in and trying to fill in gaps where they and their business can do something to help. So this is on integrity. Now, integrity matters a bit like a service like Zapier or. If this, then that you connect your other services, Google docs, Gmail, base camp, whatever it might be, and they can interact with each other.
So just think of Zapier basically. Well, what they've done is they've created a new, um. Channel, if you like a new service called Covin 19 the Cove in 19 app, and this is going to pull data from region specific services. So for example, it will give data about recoveries, deaths, growth rates, and more. And then you can pull that out and display it in whatever it is that you are wishing to display it in.
So, for example, you might, yes. Want to display that data on a WordPress website. If you are an app owner, you might wish to display that in some way inside your app. To be honest with you, I haven't really grappled with the use cases of it and I'm sure that you can. But anyway, this is to say that this service exists at the top of the link that I provide.
There is information about how it works, some possible use cases and so on and so forth. So just of interest, I think to us in the tech space. Continuing with the theme of Covin 19 over on the search engine journal this week we have an article entitled the impact of Cove in 19 on e-commerce. For ways to adapt your digital strategy have to say, I'm slightly alarmed by the amount of.
Internet marketers who appear to be jumping into my Facebook feed, offering a kind of silver bullets for your business during this time. I'm sure that doesn't exist. And um, do find it a little bit irritating that people try to try to gain a foothold during this time. Not so much if it's an authentic business, but some of it just seems a little bit like snake oil.
Anyway, I liked this article because it talks about some of the things which you've actually seen a spike in demand and there. Probably things that you might've expected. So, as an example, anything to do with homeschooling, any equipment, for example, or services that has seen a bit of a spike garden furniture in the Northern hemisphere, we're heading into warmer times.
And so garden furniture is on the up, uh, anything to do with arts and crafts. So you trying to get those supplies for your, you know. During the day when your kids are having to do things well, that has taken a spike as well. Anything to do with X-Box and net Netflix subscriptions, that kind of thing has gone up.
This article then tries to increase your efficiency in the business that you'll have at the moment. So for example, it talks about how you can manage your ad PPC budget more efficiently. How you can try to retain your organic visibility, how you could. How you could and should share experiences through digital PR and also how being useful at the moment on social media is probably more important than ever.
Anyway, search engine journal, click on the link in the show notes to check this out. The very last piece I've got for you today is actually from a bank which I use now. This genuinely probably won't be of any interest to you and yes, unless you're using this bank, and I don't know if this is an innovation just of the bank that I use or whether this is happening more broadly, but the bank is in question, is a UK startup bank called Starling and they've invented a new card.
Essentially you ordered this card. And then you allocate a certain amount of your personal finance in something called a space. So you set up a space and you put a certain amount of your money in it. Let's say I set up a space and put 200 pounds in it, the card that I received through the post, which is just the same as all the other cards, has a unique pin.
And the idea is that you give that card to somebody else who you trust. So in my case, I might give it to my parents or they might. Give one to me and then I can only spend money for on behalf of my parents up to the value of the what's in that little space. So 200 pounds, for example. And the idea is that you give it to one trusted person, share the pin number with them.
The pin is. Different from your regular pin, and if you keep adding to that little space, then money will be available. If not, it will be unavailable. And I'm thinking at this particular point in time, we obviously have lots of people shopping on behalf of others and it gets a little bit difficult trying to figure out who owes who what.
But if you could give somebody a card and say, here's the pin number, uh, just by the shopping and then return the car to me at the end, that would work beautifully. So just another lovely little innovation on, I'm definitely going to be making use of it. Right? That's all we've got for you this week. I hope that you managed to find something useful and interesting in that.
Please let me know if you did. I always appreciate it. Go to WP Builds.com forward slash contact and fill out the form. As I said at the top of the show, anytime you want to share this, do feel free. We understand that Apple podcast gets a significant amount of podcast traffic, so a five star review on there would be most welcome and really appreciate it.
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