WP Builds Weekly WordPress News #122 – Image manipulation, community news and hosting on a Raspberry Pi

Hello there. Good morning. And welcome to this. The WP Builds weekly WordPress news. This is episode number 122. It covers the WordPress news for the week commencing the 6th of July, 2020. And it was published on Monday the 13th of July, 2020. Before we get stuck into the news, the usual bits of housekeeping, I'm encouraging you to go over to WP Builds.com.
And over there you'll find everything that we produce. We produce a podcast every Thursday. So look out for that, but we also produce this news that you're listening to now. And at 2:00 PM UK time. On a Monday, we do a live version of this news. And this week I will be joined by Paul Lacey Bernard Grano and Swahili M from the blog volt team.
So that's live 2:00 PM UK [email protected] forward slash live. Or just join us in our Facebook [email protected] forward slash Facebook. It's a really nice pleasant place to be. You can join that group, though, if you want to find a link to it, by going to WP Builds.com forward slash subscribe, you'll also be able to sign up to some newsletters, which alert you to deals and the content that we produce.
And it's also got things like how to subscribe to us on your favorite. Podcast player, Twitter feed and all of that good stuff. Also, I'd encourage you to go to WP Builds.com forward slash deals. That's as I say each week, a bit like black Friday, but every day of the week, it's a ton of WordPress steals, plugging authors and theme authors have reached out to us and given us coupon code.
So go and check it out. If you're in the market, you never know, you might find something you can search and filter and see what's there. The other one is to say that this Tuesday, as I've been doing for the last few weeks and I'll be doing for the next few weeks, I'm speaking live with Sabrina's a Dan, we're talking about how to take your plugin from zero to 10 K installs.
It's a really interesting series. We're going through piece by piece, kind of making it up as we go along, see what things tripped us up and see what things were successful. As we try to launch our respective plugins in my case, AB split test and in Sabrina's case speed guard. So that's alive. On Tuesday, 2:00 PM, UK time.
Keep your eyes on the WP Builds Facebook group, and there'll be posts in there. If you want to share about that, I'd be really appreciative. If you want to just share about the podcast in general or WP bills in general, I would really appreciate that as well. Use the hashtag WP built or at WP Builds as well.
The WP Builds podcast was brought to you today by step. Are you tired of unreliable or slow hosting? If so, check out Ken Stowe 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. You can try a demo for free it's 60 days at dot com.
And by AB split test, do you want to set up your AB split tests in record time? Like in a couple of minutes, use your existing pages and test anything against anything else? Buttons, images, headers rows, really anything the best part. It works with element or Beaver builder on the WordPress block editor.
You can check it out and get a free, easy [email protected]. And we do thank our sponsors for helping us to put on the WP Builds podcast. It really, really does help. Okay. Let's get on with the news for this week. Shall we. Each and every week we divide our news up into different sections. And the first section is always WordPress core.
And we certainly do have a lot for you this week. There is WordPress 5.5 beater one, which is being announced on the wordpress.org website. This is obviously beta software. And if you're interested in testing the bleeding edge of versions, then go and check this post out, click on the link in the show notes, and you will find a whole.
Ton of things. We're about five weeks away from 5.5, actually officially rolling out. So this is just to kind of iron out all the kinks. Don't use these beta versions for your production websites, please. These are probably got problems in them. And the purpose of beta testing is to find those problems and make them go away.
There's a whole ton of things that have been added, especially around Guttenberg. And if you've been listening to this news each week, you'll have heard them come up each week. We've got. Inline editing of images, block patterns, device previews, end block overwhelmed, discover, install, and insert, third party blocks and a whole ton more.
And that's just inside of Guttenberg, but we've also got the introduction of XML site maps into core auto updates for plugins and themes, lazy loading of images, and really a whole ton more. Especially around accessibility. So there is an awful lot to possibly go wrong. And I suppose, so if you want to help the WordPress project out, go and check out the posts, which is linked in the show notes, and maybe you could lend your support and make sure it's a smooth transition over to WordPress 5.5.
This next piece, very much related to what we've just been talking about. Peace by Sarah Gooding over on WordPress Tavern, entitled new block based navigation and widget screens sidelined for WordPress 5.5. So this is just to say that a feature which was hopefully going to be added in WordPress 5.5 has not been added, but as we've just heard, there's a ton more going in.
There was a problem in that really? It seems like the experimental nature of it kind of stalled and the development didn't go as planned. So hopefully it'll be in 5.6, click on the link in the show notes to find out more. This next one is the final piece. In our core section, it is again on WordPress staff and just in Tadlock with a piece entitled Gutenburg 8.5, add single gallery image.
Editing allows image uploads from external sources and improves drag and drop. So hopefully you'll be able to get your hands on these features really soon. This is a nice one. The first one is you can upload external images. That is to say that if you were to copy and paste a URL for an image previously, that.
Image would remain on the, the websites or the hosting environment that you've taken it from. So if they removed it, you would face a sort of blank area on your website. Now, what you can do is you can paste in a URL and then click a little upload, external image button, and it will then go and upload it into your media library.
So in effect it's there. Permanently for you, no matter what the external site do with it. So that's quite a nice feature. You have to actually click the button. There is no man it's completely manual. I should say. There's no automatic process of doing that. There's also been some improvements to the drag and drop capabilities it's been improved.
The editor now allows dragging and dropping the multi block sections and so on. However, Justin. In this piece does make the point that it would be nice to have some kind of visual cue that you were dragging because of the minute you get a hand icon, which isn't entirely in keeping with dragging things around, perhaps a little crosshair or something like that with arrows on it might be a little bit more obvious.
You can also edit single gallery images. Again, he likes this feature. He's most excited about this. One of all the things coming around this time. Yeah. But he does think that there are a couple of problems. In other words, backing out of image edits is a little bit difficult because the X icon, which you would imagine would just sort of cancel what you're doing is in fact, removing that image from the gallery.
And he's recommending a dustbin is added as an icon instead. So little, few, little tweaks there, and also there's the reusable blocks tab. So now when you search for a block, you're going to have the. Capability with a tabbed interface to just search for blocks, search for block patterns and search for anything which you've decided ought to be reusable.
So essentially it's surfaces in the UI, much more clearly, one of the three options. So as I say, blocks patterns and reusable, it's going to be very, very, very useful in the future. Having those there, because I know for one, I reuse blocks all the time. Moving swiftly on, we've got our community section and the first one is literally a screenshot.
I took a screenshot of something, which I saw the other day in a WordPress install, and it is a duplicate post kind of, almost like an advert. And it very much seems to come from Yoast and they've just recently acquired duplicate posts and it's now called Yoast duplicate post. And so the reason I've posted this image, which is a screenshot of the inverted commerce.
Ad is because it seems only six months ago or so that we had this controversy where Yost put in an ad and in our WP admin area. And they were very quick to sort of wind this back and say, I'm sorry, this should not have happened on, although this isn't really an ad. It is actually asking for an email address.
It was asking you to subscribe to updates. It does feel like they're straying into this territory again. So essentially I'm just starting the conversation here. I did start the same conversation in our Facebook group and we had a lot of people primarily. I think it's fair to say saying that this was not a good development.
What if every plugin took the approach that they could use up a sizeable proportion of the real estate in the admin area, then we would be, we would be completely unable to use the admin area because we'd have. I don't know, three, four, five, eight different adverts, all vying for attention at the top, which we'd have to dismiss.
And obviously this is a little bit interesting because of the fact that they did walk back last time and apologize for putting an app in. And like I say, trying to start a debate. What do you think. I feel like I've mentioned this before, but it came to my attention again this week. This is a thing called 93 digital.co.uk history, hyphen of hyphen WordPress.
And it's just a lovely visual representation of what WordPress looks like over the years. So you can go right back to version 1.0, and look at the look at the super minimal interface. And obviously you can go right up, you click a button and it shows you. What the admin interface looks like and what a default hello world post would look like in all of the versions.
It's just a really lovely way back in time to see what it was like. And it's just a bit of fun, but nice that somebody bothered to put this together. And I, for one have been clicking around, getting a bit nostalgic. This next piece is just about as community as it comes, just in Tadlock again on WordPress Tavern piece, entitled word camp attendance badges could be a good thing, but that's the wrong discussion.
He's talking about the fact that a recent resurgence of a Metta ticket, which is two years old, um, has brought to the attention. Again, the idea of earning badges now have to confess. It's just not something I've strayed into too much. So I don't really know. About how the badges are awarded at the moment, but the, the.
The whole point of it was should we start awarding participation badges for people who do things like attend word camps. And Justin in this piece talks about the fact that he entered a kind of writing competition is the wrong word, but he entered a writing. A process last year where he had to finish 50,000 words in a one month period.
And in that system, the national novel writing month, or now no remote, I think it's pronounced, encourages you to write and they have a game of gamified budge system. And he's saying maybe this is the way that we should go, instead of just issuing them in the way that. They are at the moment or talking about issuing them for attendance.
Maybe we should kind of game-ify it have things like get to the first word camp, get a badge, do four more. So five in total. Get a badge. What if you attend one in multiple continents, maybe there should be a badge for that. In other words, we're trying to, we're trying to. Pull the community forward, push the people who are kind of Irving on the side of not doing things to do things.
And I just think it's a really nice conversation, elicited, quite a few comments, lots of people agreeing the discussion should be open. So please go to that post and air your voices. I think this next one's really interesting. It's a piece entitled experimental stackable WordPress mode, and it's on the anchor.host website.
And the idea here is something really, really unique. So we've got standalone WordPress installs, and we've got multisite WordPress installs. And so the guy that wrote this article, Austin Gunder I presume is the way to pronounce it has decided maybe we should have something in between something that's not.
Quite a standalone install, but is not quite a multisite install. In other words, a normal version of WordPress, which can host multiple sites. Now he goes into explaining why you might like to do this as also the, the downsides of doing it and also how he's managed to do it so far. It looks like he's in the process of creating a plugin, stackable w p.com.
And I can't go into all of the stuff because it's simply a load of screenshots of code that you've got to sort of jump through and things that you need to do with databases and so on and so forth. But just really interesting. Please, please take this with a grain of salt. It's clearly not ready for production yet.
And it may be that you need a more expensive host if you suddenly decide, Oh, my one site could be 12 sites. You might not be able to manage that. But yeah, it's certainly a new and thoroughly interesting development. Again, something quite innovative, but apparently has been on the cars for a very long time, just in Tatlock, WordPress having, again it, after 11 years, users will be able to update themes and plugins via a zip file.
Apparently this has been requested more than 11 years ago. The idea being that you would be able to, instead of clicking an update button, you would be able to just bring along a zip file of the updated, let's say plugin or theme, and you'll be able to upload that in the process. That looks exactly like the process of when you initially install a plugin.
So you drag in the zip file or upload the zip file. Uh, but instead of uploading a new thing, you're actually simply updating, uh, an older thing. And this might be really useful. For example, if you don't have access to let's say FTP or SFTP or something like that, it's obviously a bit of an edge case. I, I'm not sure since we've got one click off.
Dates, whether this is going to be tremendously useful to a lot of people, but Justin makes the point that there's quite a lot of third party plugins that have got many, many, many installs. So maybe this is actually something I can certainly see a time when it might be useful, but anyway, it's now going to be possible.
This next one is just a really interesting and uplifting story. It's over on the lifter, LMS or website, it's entitled balloon artist. Ziv Raviv used lifter LMS to build a 277 K a year business in a micro niche. It's just lovely. So this guy Ziv. Has a balloon business. And that is to say he makes things out of tiny little balloons.
So there's images, for example, of all sorts of things that he's created, including dresses and pictures of like human beings, fashioned out of balloons, but he's used lifter LMS to, to create this world extraordinarily profitable business. He's in such a tiny niche. And so the, the, the idea of this article really is to paint a picture of what he did, how he did it, and perhaps.
Maybe that's something that you might replicate, but lovely. That WordPress was involved in this extraordinary journey. All right. Let's move on to plugins, themes and blocks. And I've got four things for you today. The first one is over on the oxygen builder.com website. It's all about the fact that oxygen has updated to 3.4 and there are three highlighted releases here.
The first one is to say that they've introduced a proper undo, redo previously an oxygen. If you made. Two amendments. You could only undo one of them. So you could undo the, the last thing that you did beyond that you were out of luck. Now they've got the option in the UI to undo basically everything so long as you're in the same session, or you don't clear out the, the undo redo history, which is a possibility you can get rid of it.
But now yeah, you can do an infinite mountain. Basically so long as you're in the same session, they've also introduced the option to add a ton of shape dividers you can actually use. I think it's 30 or more that are included with oxygen, or you can download ones from third party services. It's not blowed those, and you can change things like the Zed index, so you can push things forwards and backwards.
And they've also got a whole new design set as well. They're calling them new at design sets and there are, I think, three of them. There's one called fancy freelancer. One called Proteus and one called wedding. And the idea is that these are kind of made for you design library so that you can just put together a consistent website without having to think too hard.
The next one is over on well it's guitar, but it's all about element or 3.0, they've made, they're making a really, really big release. It sounds like it was well April in 2018, that element or 2.0 came about. So this is a really big one. And it's all about the design system. It feels like element or 3.0 is all about getting teams to be able to work on a consistent design design.
For example, they're going to have. Global colors, global topography, global settings, including site identity, Lightbox settings, and so on, and a site editor. And this is the guitar version. So in other words, they want beta testers to hammer this, to see if it's okay. There are version one of this, and they're going to release another version in a few weeks time.
But there's an absolute boatload of information about what this release includes and how they want you to go about testing, what flow they want you to go through and so on, but some very exciting developments for teams of people using elements or that's for sure. So go and check out the link in the show notes, and you'll be able to sign up for the, the beater of that.
And we've also got something. This is on YouTube it's body boss. They had a lifetime deal. And so I feel maybe some people jumped on board and it's their showcase. It's a video showcasing what's happened during the last month. They've got a zoom tutorial. You can now link up zoom to your body boss.
Install. There's also information about buddy boss platform pro they, they stopped their lifetime deal, but they're keen to say we might do something like that again. And so they've got a registration form. If you want to sign up for that, they've got Groundhog integration. They've got gamey, press, body boss integration as well.
So that's all highlighted in that one video. It's about five minutes long. So it's pretty easy to consume if you're a body boss user and the last one gravity forms. You mentioned recently that they've taken a, quite an aggressive approach. Recently, I F I feel it's possibly to do with the competition, maybe not, but, um, they're going to be launching 2.5, which is a big update and they want, well, they want people to test the beater a bit like element or so you can install that from now on, they're making big improvements to accessibility.
They've got a new form editor, which really looks very slick. Indeed. It looks exactly as you would expect a modern UI of a plugin. In fact, in many ways, It feels almost like it feels almost like Guttenberg, but everything's over on the right hand side, including all the bits and pieces that you drag in, but it's certainly a great improvement.
They've got new form markup and styles and a whole bunch of other things. So for example, they've got a new settings, API added security enhancements and new, new conditional logic options as well. So again, as I said, click on that link in the show notes and you'll be able to figure out how to become a beta tester.
Deals for this week. As I do every week, I include the link to the WP Builds.com deals page as well as a link to sign up, to get emails about deals delivered into your inbox. I've signed up to just about every list on the planet. And so whenever I see a list, um, sending me something about, uh, a WordPress deal, I tend to send an email out there very, very short and concise.
We have a few deals carrying over from previous weeks, but there are, there is at least one new one quibbling blocks, which was on a lifetime deal in November last year for black Friday, they've got a new lifetime deal. It's a suite of blocks that you have possibly heard about that. It looks. I really liked the look at it.
In all honesty, it seems to be one of the leading contenders in the block suite space, click on the link in the show. Notes is $49 for life and you can take it and stack it beyond there. There's also 25% off ocean WP Carello and image editing tool, which I have personally used. And I can highly recommend is there.
You can get 50% off. James roses, Zapier mastery course breezy 15% off with the code. WP Builds 15 continually alive chats, widgets quotas for creating proposals and happy forms, which is a lifetime deal on a forms. Plugin click on the link in the show notes. We have a security section, but it's always a fairly light touch, but it is to say that Wordfence have got two pieces this week.
One to say, if you've got an install of King composer, you might want to go and check that out and get it updated because 100,000 sites needs to be patched because there is an X S S floor. So this was discovered this week and you can find about. That by clicking on the link in the show notes, they have another one as well.
It says critical vulnerabilities patched in adding advertising plugin. I confess I've not heard about this, but apparently 8,000 people have installed it. So go and check that out because we don't like the words critical and vulnerabilities combined. And the third one in the security section is just the usual usual themes piece, which they use.
Well, they create at least twice a month and show us a list of all the things that they've come across. So just click on the link and just scroll through. Do you know that plugin? Do you know that one? And if so, click on some more detail and find out what's going on. They blatantly promotional WP Builds a bit.
The first piece that I've got is to say that I released it. Podcast episode number 187. It was with Sebastian wonderlands and we were talking about his project word proof. Now this is really interesting because it's a plugin which allows you to verifiably prove that certain things happened under that.
You created things on a certain date, or at least that it hasn't changed since a certain date. It uses blockchain technology. And clearly this is all the rage because the European commission. Given them granted them a million euros to take this project forward. So there's a link in the show notes to the podcast episode, but also under the word of this, there's also a link to a WP Tavern article about the exact same thing, but go and listen to go and listen to a version because it's audio and you can listen to it while striving also to say that we did part four of the zero to 10 K installs me and Sabrina's I dunno, I mentioned it at the top of the show.
I've linked here to the. YouTube playlist, which has all of the episodes so far, we'll be doing part five this week, 2:00 PM. UK time. So anyway, this is pass one, two, three, and four, all in one handy, little playlist. Job sphere this week, I've managed to find one, two, three, four, five, well, five different companies, but there's several different jobs.
So I themes liquid web or looking for a software development engineer and a WordPress technician. Wholegrain digital are looking for a WordPress developer. Gravity forms wants a senior developer. In fact, they want multiple senior developers possibly in line with their, their update that we were talking about earlier.
What funds need a senior PHP, developer and human made need a senior sales manager. So if any of those sound like they could be for you, make sure to click on the link in the show notes and you'll travel through to their, their process to get you updated. That's all the WordPress news that I've got for you this week, but don't go away.
I've got the tiny little bit at the end. Usually I have three or four pieces, but this week I've only got one. It's not WordPress, but useful. Anyway, this is for Linux and raspberry pie buffs. It is to say that well, it's on the raspberry PI blog, the articles entitled website hosting on raspberry PI four with mythic beast.
And it's exactly this. How do you set up some hosting? With raspberry pie. Is it even possible? Could you host a website? Can it be done with WordPress? I don't know. It doesn't really go into that, but it's all about the fact that they decided to put the raspberry PI website itself onto a little cluster of 14.
I think it was 18 in total raspberry pies, all joined together. There's lots of, lots of incredibly nerdy pictures of wires and cables and raspberry pies all joined together. And it's just lovely. Just the idea that this is even possible. $30 piece of kit could possibly serve up a website. Well, if you've got the traffic that they do, which is considerable, you'll probably need more than one, but amazing that it would even be possible to serve up our website.
Okay. That's all the news I've got for you this week. I hope that you found it useful, please. I'm asking you very sincerely. Please spread the word about this, even if it's just to your friends and colleagues. If you send out an email to somebody tweet about it, just to say this happens each and every week, we'd be most grateful.
Very, very grateful. Indeed. The WP Builds weekly. WordPress news was brought to you by Ken stir. Ken stir 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 such as PHP seven, SSH and staging environments, and the best parts their expert team of WordPress engineers are available 24 seven.
If you need help, try a demo for free 60 days. You'll get at Kinston. Dot com and AB split test. Do you want to set up your AB split tests in record time than you 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.
It could be buttons, images, headers, rows, anything the best part. It works with element or Beaver builder and the WordPress block editor. So check it out and get a free [email protected]. Okay. Like I said, we'll be back this time next week for a new news episode, we'll be back every Thursday for a podcast episode every Monday at 2:00 PM.
UK time at forward slash LA EUV. That will, yeah, this week you'll find us with some notable WordPress people. I mentioned them at the beginning talking about the WordPress weekly news and Tuesday, same URL forward slash live for Sabrina's Dan and I talking about trying to get our plugins noticed well, Have a good week.
Hopefully we'll see you at some point. Bye bye for now.