WP Builds Weekly WordPress News #112 – WordPress 5.4.1, WordCamp Europe online open and more deals

Hello there. Good morning and welcome to this. The WP Builds weekly WordPress news. This is number 112 it covers the WordPress news for the week, commencing the 27th of April, 2020 and it was published on Monday the 4th of May, 2020. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and if I could just take a couple of minutes out of the podcast to introduce you to WP Builds and all that we do.
We're a largely WordPress specific network delivering lots of content in the WordPress space. You can find all of that over at our website. WP build stock. Calm and I'd like to draw attention to a few links as I normally do. The first one is WP Builds.com forward slash. Subscribe. You'll find that in the main menu, and if you head over to that page, you're going to be confronted with lots of ways that we can stay in touch with you.
An example would be, join our Facebook group of over two and a half thousand WordPress's or subscribe to us on your favorite podcast player. Have a look at our YouTube channel, and then there's also a couple of forms that you might wish to fill out. The first one, which is gray in color. Allows you to receive updates from us when we've produced content.
So for example, it would let you know that we've just released this, the WP built weekly WordPress news and the podcast that we do on Thursday as well, and the blue form will enable you to receive updates about a WordPress deals as and when they come out. I've subscribed to just about every list imaginable, and when I hear about them.
Cherry pick them and put the best ones into an email, which I send out as soon as I hear about them. So that's WP Builds.com forward. Slash. Subscribe. The other one to mention is WP Builds.com forward slash deals. That's a bit like black Friday, but every day of the week. Tons of WordPress products on offer coupon codes.
Some of them are very generous indeed. It's searchable and filterable, and we added a new one this week. We added a was pro because Michael Short, who is the founder of that plugin, came onto the podcast and offered users 20% off. So go and check that page. If you think you're in the market for something this week, the chances are you might find something on there that you need.
Speaking of was pro as I was just a moment ago. We've got a competition on this week. If you head over to WP Builds.com forward slash win Michael shorts has kindly offered five or West pro premium licenses. There's a competition. It's the usual thing. You've give us your email address and you post it on your social networks and so on and so forth, and you increase your chances of winning.
So that's WP Builds.com. Forward slash win. Go and see if you can win one of those five licenses. Very nice. And the last one, WP Builds.com forward. Slash. Advertise. Perhaps you have a product or service in the WordPress space that you would like to put in front of a WordPress specific audience. Well, we can help you with that.
And somebody who we've helped with that is Kinsta. Are you tired of unreliable or slow hosting? If so, check out Kinsta who take managed WordPress hosting to the next level, powered by the Google cloud platform. All their plans include PHB seven SSH and 24 seven expert support. Try a demo free for 60 days at Kinsta dot com.
And we thank Kinsta for their support of the WP Builds podcast, and specifically the WP Builds weekly WordPress news. Speaking of which, let's get stuck into it. We always chunk our news up into different sections. On the first section, if there is any, is always entitled WordPress core, and there is some this week there's a couple of bits, but they're basically about the same thing.
Just coming at it from different angles. First one [email protected] it's entitled WordPress 5.4 0.1 and it's basically letting you know that this is now available. Hopefully if you have core updates enabled automatically, which I would recommend that you do, you should have received some sort of email notification to say that this has already happened, if not, go and get them updated right away because it's marked as a security release because there were various different problems, which we'll come onto in just a moment.
All versions, since WordPress 3.7 have also been updated, so essentially. Seven different security releases. The post on the wordpress.org website just goes into this in a very small amount of detail, basically just saying what the problem was and who identified it and gives props to those people. That's very nice.
But there is another article which I've linked to in the show notes from the Wordfence website, which gives you a bit more detail. So for example, as opposed to just a few lines, you've got a paragraph for each one and I'll just run through them very quickly. It is to say that the. Security releases can be categorized as follows.
There was a password reset token failed to be properly invalidated. Certain private posts can be viewed by unauthenticated users to XSS issues in the customizer and access use issue, sorry. In the search block and XSS issue in WP dash object dash cash, another X S S issue in file uploads and an authenticated.
X S S issue in the block editor. So basically go and get it all updated. And if you've got interest in all of that, go and read it. And I must say it's quite hard saying X S S that many times, it's such a short space of time. The next section is entitled community, and we'll begin with a piece over on WP Tavern just in Tagalog rights.
Should the block editor have a grid system, and this is a really interesting article. If you've been involved in laying out pages before and you've used some sort of CSS grid framework. Now granted that with things like Flexbox and grid systems in the CSS language, he says. Such frameworks are becoming slightly unnecessary, but he's talking about whether or not the Guttenberg page builder, which obviously at some point it will become, it's not quite there yet, but it will at some point take over the role of a fully fledged page builder, being able to do headers and footers and the, the whole gamut of things that you want to do to build your website.
Should we have some sort of grid system in place? Well, this article is about that. There's a plugin. Block experiments project, which is called layout grid block plugin. And this enables you to sort of experiment with this a little bit. And Justin then goes on to talk about whether or not this should be implemented in core.
I'm not sure that the time is right for this yet, but maybe in the very near future, something like this doesn't need to be considered. I got an email this week from Emily over at go WP go WP are a company who take over the maintenance of your website. While they're going a little step further, they've got a URL which you can click on in the show notes, which takes you to their site and builds page, and it says, are you an agency owner?
Spending too much time and money building your websites? And basically what they're offering to do for a monthly fee is build an unlimited number of. Websites for you. They've got a pricing, which at the moment is one to nine $9 per month. So it's not, this is not sort of chump change, it's not the kind of thing that you have falling out of your pocket, but they will build you any number of sites for that monthly fee.
It's quite interesting. It says now you can hire a team to build on limited projects for a flat monthly fee, get daily progress reports and not be in the dark during website build outs. Have an account manager ensuring your specifications are being followed. There's a whole bunch of other stuff included.
So dedicated account manager. I've mentioned at least two hours of dev time, daily, daily reports, dev tools, and so on and so forth. Anyway, just a really interesting idea that you could have a website business where you pay somebody else to do it for you and you can give them an unlimited amount, so you've simply got to concentrate on getting the new work in your business.
If you're interested in JavaScript, you've probably been following JS for WP, which is a project set up by Zach Gordon, who's been on the podcast. Well, this is just an email that I received and I'm sending you over to the email itself, and over there you're going to be able to find out about speaker applications, which have been opened up for the JavaScript for WordPress conference, which is due to take place July 8th to the 10th 2020 the focus is on.
Gothenburg on day one and all headless WordPress on day two. It seems to be all the rage at the moment. So he says, we're looking for specific topics that are, that relates to Guttenberg and headless. If you have learned something cool or built something interesting, we would love to hear from you. So click on the link and go and get yourself signed up if you wish to participate.
What would the current lockdown that we're all experiencing at the moment, all the events, the word camps and so on, have obviously been canceled. WordCamp Europe have taken the decision that they're going to postpone their event until next year. So with the event and everything stays exactly the same, just one year later, but they've decided that this year they're going to go on.
Online routes and tickets are now available. It's from the fourth to the 6th of June, and because it's online, you don't have to actually travel anywhere. You can be anywhere in the world and you can go and get them, click on the link in the show notes if you would like to take one of those tickets.
Quite interestingly, for an online event, they are actually limiting the number of tickets available. So I would urge you to do this quicker rather than slower if you wish to be involved. This next one is a piece over on WP Tavern. Sarah Gooding writes, tectonic shifts in retail industry are creating unprecedented opportunities for independent stores.
So it would seem that most of us have decided that we're going to reallocate the money that we've been spending in the past on things like that. Going out and entertainment and restaurants and so on. We're going to reallocate that in other ways rather than saving it up. Lots of us have decided that we're going to spend it in places like Walmart, if you're in the U S or Amazon, if you're in the rest of the world, and so we have booming retail, Amazon and Walmart have.
Got huge spikes in their online trading and delivery networks. And so this is interesting. Now the article talks about how this work might be, what the numbers look like for online stores, and then right at the end it goes on to talk about how independent WooCommerce stores are booming. I'm sure that you've been contacted by some of your clients wishing to move online, but over here we have a whole load of interesting data about exactly what's happening, how supplying.
Your customers is becoming increasingly difficult because there's just too many orders coming in, how sales are up and so on and so forth. So really interesting time. And obviously if you've got any clients who are struggling suggesting to them that they might like to move their business online, seems like a great opportunity for both them and you as a website builder.
The next piece is from Tom Fanelli over on the convince ceo.com website. The piece entitled on the future of WordPress, and it's one of these pieces which speculates about what will happen in the future based upon things that have happened in the past and so on. And also based upon Tom's wide experience of moving in the tech space over many, many years.
He. Breaks it up into different sections. He feels that the first ever WordPress a unicorn will emerge, and he says, the world has seen lots of unicorns. Airbnb and Google come to mind, but we expect to see the first WordPress unicorn. When that happens, there will be a market correction for the funding of WordPress businesses, which will give those companies more funding to run with.
So. Let's hope so. I mean, I can think of quite a few different companies which might fit into the bill. There are quite a few large companies and certainly growing companies in all sorts of different spaces. So it'd be interesting if we did get some, some awareness that the WordPress industry was very large and on the move and dynamic, and there was some major unicorn as he describes it, that certainly could change the lay of the land.
He also says that in the future, basic hosting packages won't cut it anymore. I suspect if you're a professional, you've been. Thinking about this for a very long time of dreaming of the days when unreliable, poorly managed, cheap hosting went away. The other points are non-tech orientated users can now design websites.
While I'm sure we know that's true, but I'm also sure that we don't believe that our industry is, is doomed. I think there's an awful lot of expertise that we can bring that isn't necessarily to do with the designing of the website, even though that's becoming more and more straightforward to use templates and page builders and so on.
It also says theme developers may be in trouble. Uh, again, quite interesting what with Gothenburg compatible blocks and themes and the ability to create things with page builders goes along with the point previously, doesn't it? You know that websites can now be designed by nontechnical users. It's an interesting time for theme developers for sure.
Yeah. Maintaining websites will be a breeze. He says, well, obviously we're talking here about the fact that everything's becoming far more streamlined. Hosting providers have got lots of different options for automatically updating things and so on. So I think ultimately Tom is saying that the future is very, very bright for WordPress, but he also, I think he's saying that there's going to be quite a lot of shifts taking place on a lot of new things that we need to consider and not rest on our laurels.
Couple of quick ones just to end it in the community section. These are both from WPM. You'd have, they've got two new things this week. The first one is the first link says you've got mail WPM you'd have hosting now with free email, and it would appear that if you're using their hosting packages, their hosting service, then I'm going to throw in five free email accounts with each of those domains.
I'm not sure what the limitations are in terms of size, number of emails per hour and so on and so forth. But anyway, five free accounts. And you may well be able to make use of use of those right away. And the second one is that they've also updated their software so that they can now accommodate your DNS.
The article is entitled DNS, we've got it, and now we're giving it to you if you already. Don't know how DNS works. The good news is that we now have it as past part of our hosting, and you can now have it too if you're not sure what DNS is and how you need it, do not stress below, you'll find out all you need to know and so you can read about what it is that they've created, what their panel looks like, and how you can manage your DNS on your WPM, your Def hosting account.
The next section is entitled plugins, themes, and blocks. And we've got a very nice update from a friend of the podcast Sebasty in web over at micro Thema. He has now made it possible for you to integrate your oxygen built sites with micro Thema. And what I mean by that is it's possible for you to. Amend your sites with oxygen and at the same time have the micro Thema overlaid on top of it so that you can adjust your styles and so on.
There is a, a nice comprehensive video that Sebastian's put together. It's about 15 minutes or so, and it shows you exactly how these things work in tandem. And I have to say it's very attractive. You know, the capabilities of oxygen are very, very strong. And then aligning that to extend what's possible with micro Thema make this very compelling, obviously a bit of a learning curve to new tools to learn at the same time, but very, very nice indeed.
Well done. Sebastian looks like a really nice addition and especially for those people who are already using it. If you've been looking to manage your website with some third party service, you may have come across WP remote in the past. Their main page on their websites describes it as the Swiss army knife of WordPress website management.
One click update, everything integrated staging the best security. Perfect for backups, beautiful reports, and so on and so forth. Well, they've decided that they're going to give their pro plan away for free for the next three months. Like many companies, they've decided that now is the time to give things away.
Obviously, we're all in a little bit of a crisis, and so they've decided that where they can help, they're going to, and so now you can claim your free three months off. The account. No strings attached, no hidden charges. It says completely free for three months. And I think this is a nice offer as with a lot of companies who are doing this.
Bravo. And if you've been considering it, this may be exactly what you need to get yourself up and running and see for three months, whether it's the right fit for you and your business. One of the most competitive areas in the WordPress space is forms. You've got so many different players in the game looking to sell you their forms.
Plugins. One of the most recent ones that I've come across is WP fluent forms. They've been adding lots of features. So for example, just a little while ago, they added PayPal and Stripe. Well, they've added. PDF modules as well. Now it says, do you want to save dog IUPY fluent forms entries as a PDF? Well, now you can.
So that's basically what this little update is about. There's a PDF extension, so it's not part of the course. We have to go and download the plugin. They've got a signature plugin as well. Um, and then you are able to. Do things like install different fonts, manage what paper side you wanted to print out on and so on and so forth.
And essentially anything that gets submitted into a WP fluent form, you can then post out as a PDF, which might be very practical. Things like receipts and so on could be really, really useful. A very large player in the WordPress SEO space is of course, a Yoast. I'm sure you've heard of them before. Well, they flipped over to version 14 of their platform this week, and there's an article entitled the exciting new technology that is indexicals, and I quote the upcoming 14.0 release of Yoast SEO marks the beginning of a new age for the Yoast SEO plugin in its, we've rewritten our entire metadata engine, and we've.
Built and obstruction. We call indexable. We believe this rewrite will boost WordPress and Yoast SEO is a great platform for SEO for many years to come. And then they go on to say why they think that search engines are going to like this, how they've altered, and as they put it. Provided better information architecture for WordPress.
They talked about the direct benefits of what this new indexable architecture is. So for example, performance games, they're using the standard WordPress API APIs and so on and so forth. Lower cost of change. Better API APIs through surfaces, and also the ability to have your SEO data modified on a headless install.
And they also talk about how to generate indexicals for your pages and provide a look into the future of what WordPress and Yoast will have. Right. In tandem, so it's a quite a long piece. Probably take about 10 15 minutes to read, but if you're a Yoast SEO user, this is probably very important. I noticed that within 24 hours of releasing Yoast SEO 14 there was a a minor update.
I'm not sure if something had broken, but anyway, it should be Yost 14.0 0.1 I think it is now anyway. WP Builds cohost David Wamsley, who's on the podcast pretty much every other week with me, has released a video. It's a really nice one. It's all about Beaver builders assistant. Now, when I say Beaver builders assistant, what I mean is it's built by the the crew over at Beaver builder.
It's got nothing to do with Beaver builder, although they do offer an integration with. There. Beaver builder page builder. This is just such an interesting little tool. It's a tool which allows you to essentially stop using the WordPress admin. You have this little button, which looks like a pencil, and you click on it and then this little panel opens up and it's got all sorts of ways that you can interact with your WordPress website.
So for example, you could change your images, get into the media library, change the names of posts, create posts, change categories, essentially. Anything, and it really does provide the kind of beautiful UI that your clients might like to look at. So it's not finished. It's still in early release, but it very much seems like a product which I can see using and handing over to my clients.
The best thing I can say is go and watch David's video. It's about 10 minutes long, something like that, and you'll get an idea of how it's used and maybe start deploying it. It is completely and utterly free. Now we move on to the deal section. There's an awful lot in here this week, so the first two links in the show notes, if I could urge you to click on those, the first one will enable you to find your way to our form so that you can subscribe to our deals email.
It's a very. Simple email, which you'll receive whenever I hear about a deal. And the other one is a link to the deals page itself, which I mentioned at the top of the show. Lots and lots of coupon code. So go and check that out. And then there's just a huge list of things which have been well, which are on offer.
This moment, a couple of new ones worth mentioning. WP reset, which is a plugin which enables you to kind of reset your WordPress install, reset the database reset. I don't know, go back to D, getting rid of everything so that you're on a brand new site and it's a little bit more complicated than that, but anyway, it's there.
It's $49 for lifetime access. I think I mentioned last week. If so, the way to customize your WordPress website so that each user sees dynamic and different content. That's $49. Give WP, you've got 40% off a deposit photos, stock image library. That's $40 lifter LMS, 20% off. There's absolutely loads.
Honestly, just look at the show notes. That's the best way. I've got about 20 deals listed on there, and just out of interest, if you're looking at the WP Builds website. I've used Gothenburg to lay it out in two columns because I felt that one column was using up too much space. So just be interested if anybody thinks this is a bit overkill and whether or not I've managed the space badly, basically some some design ideas, please.
The next section is security. We always take a very light touch on security because it's a subject for which really you need to go and read the pieces, so I'm just going to mention them. The first one is over at eye themes. It's their regular kind of throwing together of all the security news since the last one, and this is the April, 2020 part two you can scroll through, look at the icons and see if any of these plugins.
I've been used by you, but then we've got three articles over on Wordfence and they're all marked as high severity vulnerabilities. And the first one is Ninja forms, which is used on goodness knows low to sites, 1 million or more. There is a a problem which it has been patched and you need to go and get fixed.
The other ones to mention are. At the real time, find and replace plugin has a vulnerability, which has also been patched and learn. Press as also got a vulnerability which has been patched. So just to just quick Rizzy maintenance your forms, real time, find and replace and learn press have all been patched it, but you know, go and update your sites.
If those names ring a bell. The next section is WP Builds got two pieces for you. The first one is to say that we released the podcast with Michael Short from a was pro websites as a service are a bit of a thing. The idea being that you set up a business where you put together a bunch of templated sites, you.
Pick a particular nice niche, for example, churches or something like that, and then you get clients to join your platform and it's a bit like your own Squarespace or something like that. They use your site to use your page builder. You don't even have to let them know that WordPress is being used anyway.
Michael Short has taken this to the next level. He's got absolutely loads of it. Plugins to enhance this type of website as a service business. And he comes on the podcast this week to talk with me about it. Really interesting. And I would say that if you want to really take it to the next level, Michael's software is certainly worth looking at.
He's been very kind, giving us a a license. Well, in fact, five licenses for his worst pro. If you go on to click on the links, you're able to see what those plugins are. And from there you could click on the link. Below that, which talks about the giveaway and go and enter our competition and see if you can win one of those licenses.
It's the usual thing. Share the, share the competition around, put your Twitter link out there and so on and so forth, and you increase your chances of winning. I don't have any jobs for you this week, so I'll move right along and talk about the, not WordPress, but useful anyway, stuff. First one is over at digital ocean.
They have a article entitled virtual private cloud, easily secure your cloud resources with private isolated networks. This is something I suspect if you're a DigitalOcean user and you want to make sure that everything is locked down, then that process in the past presumably has been a little bit more tricky and they've now.
Got a kind of a consumable offering for you to to use. This article really just talks about the, the basics of it and goes into the pricing, and I'm just talking about it in terms of it's now available and maybe something, if you've got clients with very, very strict security needs, this might be something that they want to look at.
The other one I've got is on the verge. Facebook is adding the option to charge for access to live streams. I'm sure we've all been, you know, over, especially during covert, we've all been interested in staying on Facebook and looking at live streams from. Perhaps our friends and family, perhaps businesses that were interested in coaching calls and so on.
Well, exactly as the title said, Facebook are looking at the possibility. Well, have in fact added the possibility to charge for live streams. If you're a course creator in particular or somebody who has an audience where charging previously has been done on other platforms, this might be something of interest to you.
I don't know if it can be done inside of groups or pages specifically, no idea, but go and have a look at the verge article. And finally Google meet is now free for all users. If you've been using zoom and you've been using that largely because of this sort of gallery display where you can put loads and loads of people on the screen at the same time, well, Google meats now I think can manage about 16 people on the screen at once and they're offering it for free.
It's going to be available for free to G suite customers right. And everybody else. So, you know, I can't see why you wouldn't want to use this. It's available on just about every platform that's possible to get. So there we go. There's Google meet for individuals, Google meet for groups and teams, businesses and organizations, schools and higher education institutes and so on and so forth.
So anyway, just another option. Should you be struggling to cope with zoom. Okay. That's it. That's all I've got for you this week. I hope that you enjoyed it. I hope that you found something beneficial. Please, as always, reach out to us in the comments. Join us in our Facebook group and say something in the thread about this particular news article.
Maybe it's too long. Maybe it's too short. Maybe there's bits that are in the wrong place. Please let me know. I'd be most grateful the WP Builds weekly WordPress podcast is brought to you by Kinsta. Kinsta takes managed WordPress hosting to the next level, powered by the Google cloud platform. Your site is secured like Fort Knox and runs on speed obsessive architecture.
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Okay. We'll be back on Thursday for the podcast. Monday, you'll be able to hear the next. WP Builds a weekly word press news, but also don't forget to join us at 2:00 PM UK time because we do a live version of the news. I don't know if you've seen that, but we, I'm, I'm joined always by two or three other WordPress's.
You can find it. WP Builds.com forward slash live. Or in our Facebook group this week. I'll be joined hopefully by Paul Lacey, Johnny Allbert and Bernard Gronau, so we'll see you there. Bye bye for now.