WP Builds Weekly WordPress News #121 – jQuery updating, community news and nice Chrome CSS feature

Hello there. Good morning. And welcome to this. The WP Builds weekly WordPress news. This is number 121. It covers the WordPress news the week commencing the 29th of June, 2020. And it was published on Monday the 6th of July. 2020, my name's Nathan Wrigley. And as usual, a little bit of housekeeping before we begin, please share WP Builds wherever you feel you can.
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They never go away. They're always the same. So if you find one this week, hopefully it'll be at the same a year from now. So that's WP belts.com forward slash deals. Couple of other things I'd like to mention. We do a week, the version of this lie, you've 2:00 PM UK time. you can get to [email protected] forward slash live.
Or if you're in our Facebook group, you can find us there. 2:00 PM UK time. This week I will be joined by Paul Lacy Bernard Greno Michelle Frechette and Yan cock. And we'll be talking about the news. It gets a little bit off message, but it's always good fun. So that's 2:00 PM Monday. 2:00 PM Tuesday live.
I'm going to be joined by Sabrina's sedan because we're talking about plugin startup zero to 10 K installs. We're on. I think we're probably on week four by now. It could be wrong. Perhaps it's week three. Nevertheless, we are talking about out our endeavors to launch a plugin, all the things. Different things that we're doing week by week, we're coming from a point of ignorance.
We're not trying to teach you what we already know. We're just trying to explain the pitfalls, the things that we did, right. And the things that we did wrong. So that's going to be 2:00 PM UK time on Tuesday. So join us for that. And also crikey, it's busy this week. We've also got a session on the 8th of July.
So that's Wednesday again, live and that's going to be our regular monthly UI UX session with Piccia Neri. If you would like to have your website, while I say your website, it could be a client's website. Anything if you'd like to have it looked at by a real expert, Piccia for free, then go to WP Builds.com forward slash.
You are, and over there, you'll be able to submit your site and you never know, there might be some useful tidbits of information. I always learn something. So that's really nice. The WP Builds weekly. WordPress news was brought to you today by Kinsta. Are you tired of unreliable or slow hosting? If so, check out.
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We always divide our WordPress news up into different sections. And if there is any, we always start with WordPress core and I've got a couple of bits for you this week. The first is by Andrew all's on make.wordpress.org. It's a piece in title. Well, updating jQuery version shipped with WordPress. This has been in the making for a while time.
There's a track ticket, which stretches back several years, but the idea. Is following the recommendations of the jQuery team to update jQuery. It's going to be done in three stages. The first one is to remove jQuery migrate one . This is planned for WordPress 5.5, then update the latest version of jQuery and the latest version of jQuery migrate it's planned for WordPress 5.6 and then in 5.7 or later, remove jQuery migrate.
Now, if you wish to test this, there is a plugin which was released to make this testing a little bit more straightforward. You can see how to do that on the page, click on the link in the show notes. Now, if you're just a, an infrequent user of WordPress, or you're not doing anything technical, I don't suspect this will affect you in any way, but perhaps if you're involved in plugin or theme creation, this might be something that you need to be mindful of.
There may be things which are different in the future with jQuery. The next one is over on WordPress tab. And this is just in tablet, writing a piece called decision time. What block patterns should ship with WordPress 5.5. We're very close to the beta version of 5.5. It's just going to be a few days away.
And the idea is to ship some at block patterns. Now block patterns, think about if you've used a pickup each builder before often you've got modules or elements that you can drag in and they combine various things. So it might be an image over here and a headline over here with this weight and some text onto here and a button over there.
And you just drag all of that in, in one. Click now the idea is that Gothenburg will have these patterns. So what we're trying, trying to do here is make it much more straightforward for users to create slightly more complicated websites without having to do it one block at a time, you'll be able to build a block pattern.
So configurations of blocks and just kind of drag them in and everything will be set up and ready to go. Obviously, this will be a great solution for people coming to WordPress. If they don't want to use a page builder, if there are pre-configured blocks now. Justin was very excited about this. He thought the testimonials block in particular was very good, but he's been a little bit disappointed by the fact that it hasn't really moved on and he doesn't feel that there's great excitement or engagements with these block patterns at the moment.
And we really do need to get the community excited because honestly it's. Probably going to be the biggest thing that's happening to WordPress in the next few months. So if we can get these right and get some good options in there that people are willing to use and get excited about because they, they look great and they've got all sorts of options for styling and so on.
That would be wonderful. So this piece is about that, trying to get people excited. So go and see what's Justin's talking about with block patterns and what should come out in 5.5. Maybe you could commit your voice to this and decide which things should be shipped and which things shouldn't. The next section is entitled community.
And we've got quite a lot for you this week. The first one is to say that the JavaScript for WordPress online conference is taking place very soon from the 8th of July to the 10th of July. Registration is free. If you click on the link in the show notes, you'll be able to. Have a look at the schedule.
It's quite a few people on that schedule and some of them have been on this podcast. So for example, Miriam Schwab is going to be talking about a static first approach to WordPress and various other people. Obviously it's all about JavaScript. That's the intention of the conference, but as I say, completely free and happening very soon.
So go and register for that. The next one is Sarah Gooding writing on WordPress Tavern about the fact that word camp Tulsa 2020 has been canceled. You can imagine the reasons it's all to do with the fact that we're in the pandemic at the moment. And so the team over there have decided that the event which was shed to take place in late August this year has been canceled.
They decided not to. Just to go down the route of doing a hybrid event. So some of it live and some of it's streamed because they felt that this would be a little bit difficult to manage the idea of juggling sponsorships and having to hire additional people to do all the filming and so on and so forth, made it just too problematic.
So yeah, we'll see if this can manage to resurrect itself next year. Yeah, hopefully that will be the case. That's at least the intention yeah. From the organizers, but, nevertheless it has been, has been canceled for this year. So if you were planning to go, you'll need to revise your itinerary. The next piece is a fairly long one over on the yoast.com website.
It's entitled learn about the three core web vitals, LCP, FID, and C L S. And this points to the fact that Google has been updating and probably will do forever into the future it's algorithm. And they're trying to make it. So that everybody on the web has the best experience possible. And so they've updated their web vitals with a new subset called core web vitals.
And it feels to me as if you ought to go and read this article, I'm going to brush very quickly over the top. You'll see. There's. Tom more detail in this article. So you can find out what that means, but essentially the three pillars of page experience that Google are pushing our loading performance, responsiveness and visual stability.
And in order to measure these essentials, Google is now going to have three corresponding metrics. Called the core web vitals LCP stands for largest content, full paint, and this measures how long it takes for the largest piece of content to appear on the screen. And obviously that could be something like a image or block kind and speed here matters.
The next one is F I S or first input delay. And this is a measure of how long it takes for the site to react for the first user interaction. Again, this could be something like a button press or something like that, and obviously slow response leads to frustration. And the last one CLS. Content layout shift is a measure of how state the site is visually as it's like.
So probably we've all been to websites where you get to a button and you're just about to press it. And then something loads up higher in the, in the viewport and the book button is pushed out of the reach of your finger and it disappears to somewhere where you don't even see it. So these are going to be the new metrics that Google is using into the future.
I've just briefly touched on them. There's an. Awful lot more detail in the yoast.com post and you can find out exactly what it means, but I'm sure if you're into SEO and you want to stay ahead of the curve on that, you'll need to know all this stuff going forward. Next up, we have a story about blocks.
This one is written by Justin Tadlock over on WP Tavern, entitled build static or dynamic blocks with the WP block script builder. And this is to say that Jeffrey, Karen dang, who seems to be really a hot figure in the blog building space. He's got lots of projects, editors care. He's also got iceberg going on and various other things.
He has created the WP block builder, which is now freely available to use. This is for those of you who have the desire to build blocks, but I've been frustrated perhaps by the, just the tools that you've needed to set up and the things that you'll have to get in place before you can really get started.
It is I believe a fork of the WordPress core version of things, but it adds some extra features in as well, just in seems to think it's pretty good. And that's fine by me to set it up. Developers mainly need to run the NPX. WP dash block dash builder command to kickstart the process upon that command being executed, you asked a series of questions to set up the following fields blocks, blog, namespace block title description, author, named plugin license and version number.
And after that you have two versions of the blocks ready for experimentation, more details in the piece. From Justin, but I would recommend if you're into building blocks. And like I said, you've been frustrated by this in the past. It seems like a cracking place to start. This next one is entitled.
WordPress contributors seek a sponsorship for improving Guttenberg developer docs. Very much tied to what we spoke about just a few moments ago. And this is to say that WordPress developers, Milana cap and Jonathan Bassinger are starting a fundraiser in order to hopefully improve. Gothenburg developer documentation.
They obviously feel that there is a big gap, but between what's out there at the moment and what people require yeah. To get started. And so they've decided to launch this fundraiser, they're going to look into areas where the documentation is currently a really feature poor and not up to scratch and probably hit those first.
There's some interesting things. Push back in the comments on this piece with. People sort of saying that this isn't something that they could contribute to and so on and so forth, perhaps because it's only in English and a few other things alongside that. But I see this is a really important thing.
Obviously, if we want to democratize publishing and we want people to be able to build new blocks, having documentation is significant. And it does feel at the moment that we're working so much on what we can do, not really necessarily helping with the docs and allowing new people to come and having to learn things over and over again, it seems a bit.
Pointless. So weld on to Jonathan and Milana for this nice initiative. If you like to develop things locally on your machine, you may have played with a variety of different ways of doing that. One of them may well have been local by flywheel. Well, that has subsequently just been renamed as local Flywell was bought by WP engine a little while ago now.
And the tool recently had an update, which we mentioned to become local. In inverted commas lightning. Now I have to say that ever since that process happened, I found it to be unbelievably fast. I mean really performance of switch it on. Launched the site and within a second or two, everything's ready to go.
Whereas it was much more time consuming process before they now have made a bit of a relaunch of local pro, which is the commercial operation, right. And the intention in an article by Sarah Gooding entitled the flywheel relaunches local pro with a revamped line, save links and a new host agnostic prelaunch tool kind of sums it up.
They've got new options, they're retooling so that they don't have to use there. Current and grok set up and she goes into how that works and what's in it in the future, more cloud based services coming in 2021. But also they're hoping to have a more host agnostic approach that is to say it won't necessarily only sync things to and from flywheel or WP engine in the future.
But for my parts, just using it on my local Mac works really, really well. And I would definitely recommend it to anybody. If you've been using WPM, you devs hosting. One of the drawbacks of that was that there really wasn't a way to interact locally with the files and now an article. Entitled a web file management comes to WPM.
You Def hosting. We find out that they've now got a simple looking tool. It looks like something that possibly they didn't build themselves to have a file manager within their suite of tools. And so it does exactly what you'd expect to kind of an IDE to do. You can open and close files and upload files and delete and so on and so forth.
So anyway, it's just to say it's there and if you are using WPM and your Deb's hosting, you've now got it. Our next section is entitled plugins, themes and blocks, and two pieces for you this week. The first one over at give WP who are announcing a major update, 2.7, give WP 2.7 brings donation form templates and performs Stripe.
Accounts. So they have exactly this. They've made a sizable update to the way that you create the forms. It's a, it's really nice. There's loads and loads of templates. There's a little video at the top of the piece. It's about a minute and a half long in which you can see all this in action, but they've, they've given you the ability with a.
Whizzywig editor. If you'd like to be able to modify all the texts, add images, fiddle with the button colors and so on and so forth. In other words, you'll be able to customize your forms without any need for reaching into any code at all. So that's really nice. They've also added the ability for you to add multiple Stripe accounts.
So let's say for example, that you have a donation campaign for a particular charity and that particular charity has different chapters. Shall we say different? Branches of the organization that would like to use a different Stripe account in previous iterations. You had to just use one, whereas now you can select as many as you like, add the license keys and you're off to go.
So you can then link a particular form to a particular Stripe account, which is a really nice update. So there's a ton more in here. Actually, if you scroll to the bottom of that post, that you can see that there's some more. Improvements and fixes, which are mentioned. I won't go into those here, but the two main features are the ability to add to these templates and the new Stripe account features.
The next one is all about woo commerce. Sarah Gooding writes WooCommerce 4.3 to introduce a new home screen. Well, it's exactly that lots of we've seen an upturn in demand for their products and services since we've all been locked down. And so the guys that will commerce have decided that maybe it's time to also have a look at the dashboard if you like the home screen.
So we're going to get a new one. The intention is to be able to put everything on this homepage and to be able to have some kind of level of interaction with it. So for example, it says version 4.3, which is expected to be released on July the seventh. We'll include a new homescreen featuring an inbox.
Quick access to store management links and an overview of stats on sales orders and visitors. There's also planning for the ability to be able to carry out basic tasks such as fulfilling orders or tweaking settings without actually having to leave that screen. And obviously. If you've used WooCommerce in the parts, you'll know that there are menus within menus, within menus, as I've surfacing.
Some of those onto this new home screen seems like a great idea. It's not going to be switched on by default. You'll actually have to go into advanced features the settings there and enable it yourself. Each week we link to deals in our deals from this week section couple of links at the top of that section lead you to our WP Builds deals page, which I mentioned at the top of the show.
And there's an, also a link on that to get you signed up, to find out about deals as, and when I hear about them, which is quite often, I sent out probably three emails this week. I think. So here we go. Here's the list body. Last lifetime deal is still on. There's a new WP, rocket 25% off code. There's a new Astra theme code.
Again, 25% off ocean WP. It seems to be all the rage. There's 25% off as well. And then we've got 15% off. Breezy the plugin and the cloud version. And then we've got some other deals, zap mastery course with James Rose. That's 50% off and there's some other things over on AppSumo Creflo image, editing, continually live chat quotas for proposals and happy forms.
Lifetime deal. They're all on there. Air as well. Click on the link in the show notes to find out more. The next section, I've only got one piece. It's the security section. And this is a new feature from themes. That is to say, they're going to using these posts called feature spotlight in which they talk about the features of their security products while maybe it's their I theme suite of products.
But in this case, it's theme security pro and they are this week. They're talking about magic links and passwordless logins. Now. I'm not sure what I think about this. And I think really I'm. Mentioning this piece too, to start a debate, to see whether this is something you would ever use the idea with these magic links and passwordless logins is ways of circumventing the need for you to log in with the typical username and password.
If, for example, their suite of products has locked you out because of a brute force attack. Let's say somebody figures out your username and then tries to brute force it. In theory, the security. Layer that they've added would then disable that. Being able to log in for a period of time, which is, which is a bit disconcerting.
If you then actually want to log in, you could have crossed disabled, the plugin veer, FTP, but non tech, well, users would find this difficult and then there would be thinking, well, why am I locked out? What's going on? So the idea is that the plugin offers and additional features to send passwordless logins.
With these magic links where you basically click a Lincoln, you circumvent the entire security model. They go to pains to point out that, you know, it would be better if we could all have security without inconvenience, but we can't. So if you add convenience, you remove security. So. No, I'm just interested.
It's not a feature I've ever enabled. I don't think I ever will enable it. I think I'd rather just sort it out for my clients, even if they were phoning up sort of panicking. I'd rather do that, that then add this layer of insecurity I feel, but yeah, maybe just reach out and contact me and see what you think.
Thank you. Next section is the blatantly promotional WP Builds bit. And I've got three things for you this week. The first one is to say that David Walmsley and I had one of our debates where we take opposing positions on a particular subject. And this week it was all about whether or not you should get insurance for your WordPress website, building business.
Should you have some kind of. Business liability insurance, or is this just scare tactics on the part of insurers? We talk about what we think, the fact that we have never, nor do we, in fact, seem to know anybody who's fallen foul of a lawsuit, but maybe you have, maybe your agency requires this and there's big money involved and you really, really do need to protect yourselves against things.
So that was it. We were just chatting this through and it's a lovely discussion. And maybe you could add something in the comments with your opinions. The next one to say is that I mentioned it at the top. Sabrina's iden and I are going to be having part three of our zero to 10,000 installs series.
That's going to be at Tuesday 2:00 PM. UK [email protected] forward slash live. So if you'd like to find out where we're at with that. Join us then. And as I said at the top WP Builds UI UX session with peach and airy is the following day. That will be on the 8th of July, which is a Wednesday at two 30.
So hopefully we'll see you at some of those. The next section is jobs, and I've got one company this week and two jobs. The company is century hosting and they have two jobs available at the moment. They have a WordPress front end engineer or developer job. you can find out about it, but essentially you will need the traditional suite of skills.
If you are hoping to be a front end developer. Click on the link in the show notes, slightly less technical position available as well. A customer support position is also available. I believe, although I could be wrong, you need to be available in a us time zone for that one. So maybe that suits you, maybe it doesn't.
But anyway, click on that link and you'll be taken to the century website where you can find out more. That's all the WordPress news I've got for you this week, but don't go away. We've got always a few little bits at the end. It titled not WordPress, but useful anyway, and this first one certainly is useful.
This is to say that Chrome has a new CSS overview. It's not enabled by default. You'll have to open dev tools and then go to the experiments menu and then enable the button to CSS overview. Yeah. You'll then have to probably refresh the page that you're on. And it appears as one of the options along the top of the dev tools, you can click on the CSS overview and it gives all sorts of really interesting information.
Probably the most interesting one for my point of view is the colors section where it's lists every single color that appears on the webpage. It also lists every detail about fonts. It lists all the media queries in use on that particular page. How many elements, how many external style sheets, and essentially it just boils down a whole.
Ton of that stuff into a nice, easy to read menu, the, the colors aren't just listed by hacks, you can actually see the color so you could match up the ones. So it's a nice way if you, you know, just making it, you know, redesign of something, you can just find everything all in one place. So I think that's really, really nice.
I've switched it on and I certainly won't be switching it off again. The last one that I've got for you today is on the next web.com website. It's an article entitled Macko S security. Bob could allow a bogus version of Safari to steal your data. I just find this interesting simply because it's very rare that we hear about it.
Mac OSX bloats, but this one apparently is six months old, a security researcher developed a version of Safari, which if you could get it onto your system would bypass the usual, security boundary, shall we say? And it enables the, the. The fake browser to access files in library, Safari, which, you know, should not be allowed.
So it's working still on the latest version of makeover S big Sur. It was supposed to be fixed in spring. And so I think this is why it's now being announced because Apple have had their usual three months in order to fix this and haven't quite managed to do it. So anyway, I think it's a bit of an education, but always interesting when something goes awry with Apple security, because it's well, it's.
It's pretty rare to hear about them. Thank you for listening again this week. I hope there was some content in there. Please, please, please. If you feel like sharing it, share it out on Twitter on Facebook, you can use the at WP Builds handle, if you would. Like, I really would appreciate that. I'm trying to grow the audience in this time and, and it would be nice if you were part of that process.
I'd really, really like that. Thank you very much. The WP bills weekly. WordPress news is brought to you today 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. You get access to the latest software and developer tools like PHP, seven, SSH and staging environments, and the best part, their expert team of WordPress engineers are available 24 seven.
If you need help. Try demo for free 60 days at Kinsta dot com. And AB split test. Do you want to set up your AB split tests in record time? The new AB split test plugin for WordPress. We'll have you up and running in a couple of minutes. Use your existing pages and test anything against anything else. Buttons, images, headers, rows, anything.
And the best part it works with element or Beaver builder and the WordPress block editor. You can check it out and get a free [email protected]. Okay. Hopefully we'll see you again at some point, like I say, Monday for the live version of the news Tuesday for me. And Sabrina's I Dan Wednesday for peach and Ari.
And of course, Thursday for the podcast. What a lot of content we produce. Thanks for listening. Bye bye. For now.