WP Builds Weekly WordPress News #123 – WordPress 5.5 goodness, major security breach and redesigned Gmail

Hello there. Good morning. And welcome to this the WP Builds weekly WordPress news. This is number 123 one two three. Very nice. It covers the WordPress news for the week. Commencing the 13th of July, 2020. And it was published on Monday the 20th of July, 2020, my name's Nathan Wrigley, and a few bits and pieces before we begin.
If I could encourage you to share the word about WP Builds, it really does help each and every time you post a link or share something on Twitter, it does grow our audience a little bit, and that really does help us out. So if you can think of an imaginative way of sharing WP Builds, we'd be most grateful suggestions would be retweeting, things that we tweet or just sharing things on Facebook or whatever social network you're into.
Another good thing to do is to go to your favorite. Podcast player and figure out how to rate WP Builds. Primarily. I think Apple is the, the big, the big target in this, and it would be very nice if you felt that you could go over and give us a star rating and a review over at Apple podcasts, that would be lovely.
Other things to do head over to WP Builds.com the website, and browse around. Look at all the WordPress content that we produce, and then head over to the menu at the top and click on the subscribe link that will enable you to keep in touch with all that we do. There's a couple of lists on there that you can join up to one, to keep you updated with WordPress content that we produce.
And the other one to inform you about deals as, and when we hear about them popping up there's options on that page to subscribe to us on a podcast player. And may I suggest this one join our Facebook group of 2,700 for now. Really friendly word presses. Very very polite group and I'd encourage you to get involved and there's things like our Twitter feed as well.
The other ones is to go to WP Builds.com forward slash deals. If you would like to avail yourself of a deal, there's a searchable filterable list of deals on that page. They're available 365 days a year. Yeah, we've never taken one of them down so far. Very generous plugin and theme developers have reached out and given us coupon codes for significant amounts off.
So that's WP Builds.com forward slash deals. Another thing that I've launched this week is the job section. Now each and every week in the news that you're about to listen to. We sometimes have some jobs and we sometimes don't and that's because sometimes I just can't anything. And I thought, wouldn't it be nice if I could offer a freeway to list jobs.
So if you go to the menu, you at the top it's WP Builds.com forward slash jobs, or just click on the jobs link. There's a whole list of jobs. Now at the moment. Because I haven't found any, they're just dummy text, but if on that page, you want to go over there and click the post a job button. You'll find it in the filter area then.
Yeah. Please feel free to do that again. Spread the word about it. It'd be nice if we could provide our community with a free jobs listing area so that people, people can share those. And I would have something to add to that section of the podcast each and every week. Another thing to mention is that.
Each week we do a live version of the news. That is to say at 2:00 PM, UK time this week on Monday. So that's today. If you're listening to this on a Monday, I'm going to be chatting with Paul later, Bernard granola and Leo Mindell. We'll be talking about this news and probably covering a whole bunch of other stuff as well.
It's great fun. We've got quite a lot of people joining us each week and making comments and well, it's just jolly. Good fun. So that's WP Builds.com forward slash live or in the Facebook group at 2:00 PM. UK time. We'll also be going live the following day, which is a Tuesday because Sabrina's a Dan and I have got a little series called plugin startup zero to 10 K installs the idea of this, I think we're on week six now, already.
Gosh, where did that go? The idea of this is that we are trying to. Educate ourselves into how to launch a plugin so that it becomes successful. In my case, I'm helping promote the AB split test plugin and Sabrina has got her speed guard plugin. And so it's just an exploratory journey of what we found out along the way.
And quite a few comments, people joining and saying it's been really helpful. So that's 2:00 PM UK time on a Tuesday, same URL as the line it's forward slash live. So yeah, join us for that. Or. You can join us in the Facebook group. Now we'll stop droning on. And just a moment after I've mentioned that advertise page that's forward slash advertise.
If you would like to get your product or service in front of a wordpress specific audience, a bit like Kinsta. Are you tired of unreliable or slow hosting? If so, check out Kinsta who takes managed WordPress hosting to the next level powered by the Google cloud platform. All their plans include PHP seven, SSH 24 seven expert support.
Try a free demo. It's 60 days Kinsta.com and buy AB split test. Do you want to set up your AB split test 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 is that it works with element or BeaverBuilder and the WordPress block editor.
You can check it [email protected] and get a free demo too. And we'd like to thank our sponsors for helping us put on this news. It really, really does help. Okay. Speaking of the news, let's get stuck right into it. Each and every week we divide our news up into different sections and WordPress core is always at the start.
And I've got three items for you under that banner this week, the first one over on wordpress.org, entitled WordPress at 5.5 and beta two. So it's exactly that we have hopefully a launch of WordPress 5.5 on the 11th of August this year. But obviously we need beta testing to happen. First, do not install this on a production site instead.
Why don't you try out the WordPress Bita test or plugin, or you can download this? Is it a file of the actual install itself from the link in the show notes? There have been a few little things fixed since B to one. Well, I say a few 48. Bugs have been fixed. 19 additional banks have been fixed in the block editor.
The dash icons fonts has been updated, broken widgets stemming from changes in beater. One have been fixed query handling when counting revisions has been improved and alternate expanded views added for WP list table, and some other adjustments for the handling of default terms for custom taxonomies as well.
So if you want to beater. Two to become Bita three and ultimately 5.5, then please go and help out with this important endeavor. We've spoken recently about the emergence of block patterns in WordPress as a thing. Um, and essentially block patterns are collections of blocks configured in certain helpful ways.
So it might be a block pattern for testimonials or a block pattern for contact forms or something like that. Some nice way of displaying blocks so that they packaged together in an easy to use way. Well, I've got two pieces for you today. The first one is over on make.wordpress.org, and it's entitled block patterns in WordPress 5.5.
And it's just to say that, although it's a new concept, it explains that the goal is to allow users to build and share predefined block layouts, ready to in certain tweak, more easily. And it goes to explain to them. Plugin and I guess, theme developers more how in WordPress 5.5, you're going to be able to register these block patterns.
And also if your theme doesn't wish to include the default block patterns, you can actually unmet register those as well. You can remove them from your theme. So if you are interested in this click on the link in the show notes to find out more. The next one is over on WordPress Tavern. It's by Justin Tagalog and it's called call for block plugins.
The WordPress block directory is open for business. And so very soon you're going to be able to access a whole range of blocks from your pages and posts. You're able to click a button and you'll be able to install blocks, which you would like to have now just in fields that we've basically missed a trick here.
The implication being that. There's not enough interest in this. Although the WordPress plugin repository is incredibly full on the same would be true for themes. We've had a little bit of a runway for getting blocks to be inside of the new plugin store. If you like for want of a better word, I'm not really sure that I liked the name directory.
I think I like store mom just used to it with app stores and so on. Anyway, he feels that. These have been kind of missed that lots of people haven't really had the opportunity to get into this and to put their blocks in there. And he talks about the, it's been a bit of, a bit of a difficult process trying to get your things in.
And he thinks that really considering that this is going to be happening fairly soon, we need more people to be putting their blocks in there so that we can all make use of them. When 5.5 rolls around, he talks quite exclusively about Nick Hamza, who is a plugin developer, and he's built a whole range of.
Blocks, but he's been told to sort of throttle it back as the, the team, which is authorizing these really hasn't got the manpower to do it. So it feels like it's the 11th hour. We need a ton of these things to be in. I'm sure that over time they will be, but perhaps it's a bit of a missed opportunity.
Obviously it would be lovely to start with hundreds and hundreds. And as it stands, there's only a few, possibly as few as 16 and very few installs at the moment. So it'll change. You have a time I'm sure, but Justin's making the point that maybe we missed a PR opportunity to launch this block directory with a bit of a bang.
Maybe it's going to be a bit of a damp squid for a while, but anyway, it's a very nice development coming in. WordPress 5.5. The next section is entitled community. And I've got several pieces for you this week. Kicking off with europe.wordcamp.org. Very simple post it's about four lines in length, and it's entitled WordCamp Europe, 2021 will be online.
And that kind of says it all. The global leads of WCU 2021, along with the Porto local team lead. And our mentors from WordCamp central have decided to hold WordCamp Europe 2021 as an online event, obviously. Yeah, this will be of great disappointment to those people who were hoping for a return to normal as quick, clear as possible, but it does make a great deal of sense.
I think, I think to ensure that. Money is not wasted the time and resources and that people are kept safe and sound. This seems like a good decision. I think a lot of events are making the decision going forward to do this during next year, just in case who knows where we'll be. But anyway, if you were hoping to attend WordCamp Europe, 2021, it has now gone online.
I'm not sure if you already bought a ticket as I have what that will mean. Perhaps it will be a refund at some point in the future. We'll have to wait and see. The next piece is [email protected]. It's a piece entitled introducing Guttenberg blocks library and more, this is a piece produced by Minea Kemal and this is such a lovely initiative.
So he's got a block library and you can go over and look at a whole range of. Blocks and you pick the ones that you would like it's over on his website, Guttenberg hub. And once you've decided that you would like to use a certain block. You copy some code, literally you, you put your cursor into a box and copy the code from there, and then using his editor plus plugin on your own websites, you then paste in the code, simple as that.
Then you will be able to leverage all of the sophisticated and. Added things that he's built on top of core WordPress blocks to make your site look a little bit more exciting. Interesting. So this is the important distinction here. It's not a, a suite of third party blocks, which you will obviously hope the developer keeps up.
All of this is built on top of core WordPress blocks, right? But his changing of styling and custom CSS and so on has enabled this to, to, to be a different proposition. So it's a little bit more convoluted. You have to go to the site, find it, copy the code, paste the code, but honestly it's a matter of seconds and you'll have the you'll.
Well, you'll have the insurance of knowing that the core WordPress blocks are being used. And so hopefully there'll be maintained going forward. So lovely initiative, Manea. Congratulations. I hope this grows and grows. As a bit of an addendum to that article, I have actually found a WordPress Tevin piece in titled copy and paste editor blocks via Gothenburg hub blocks library.
So if you want to read just in Tatlock, take on all of this, you can over on WordPress Tavern as well, links as always in the show notes. If you like to customize your WordPress admin area, possibly for the benefit of clients, then this will be of interest to you. Sarah Gooding in WordPress Tavern has a post called admin 2020 reimagines WordPress admin, and media library.
So this is a. Really radically different take on how your WordPress admin area might look. It's created by WordPress developer, Mark Ashton, who built this out as a bit of a personal project, but he built it. And I really liked the way it looks. Now this may be something and you simply don't want to do you, you don't want to hide WordPress or you don't want to customize the way the admin area looks, but it's worth having a look.
There's a demo linked in the WordPress, an article and. He says that it's built on top of UI kit, which is a light work UI framework. There's a light on a dark mode that you can toggle between. And it looks really nice. It's got soft edges rounded corners. One notable feature is the way that the WordPress media library looks it's considerably different from how the current about the.
The default WordPress media library looks, and you've got the ability, ability to filter things. So for example, you can add filters, um, and so on and so forth to, to just get to things that you want to see that are a certain age that are of a certain type and so on. There's an awful lot in there in terms of filtering and he makes the claim that it's 50% faster.
Then the, the default media library. So it's lovely. We'll have to see yeah. How this goes. It's been tested and works with some, some of the more popular things in the WordPress ecosystem, Jetpack will commerce element or Yoast and Vivi page builder, but he does make the point that he hasn't tested it with anything much beyond those.
So we'll just have to see what your, what your mileage is like, but definitely worth a look, possibly worth a look for those people who like to do their own or website as a service business. Very nice. These next two are not strictly brand new news. One of them comes from March very late March this year.
And one of them comes from mid April this year. And they're both about static. And the reason I'm including them is because I just hadn't seen them before. And I thought it was interesting if you're into hosting in a headless way and having your word site. WordPress websites. Speed it up a little bit.
Then you might have looked at static the company and these articles. Just point to how it's now possible to use gravity form and poly Lang and WPML translation plugins over on their plus form. So as I say, not exactly fresh, but I thought I'd mentioned it because somehow I missed both of those announcements.
I don't know if you'll be interested, particularly in the content of this next piece, but you might be interested in the notion of what this company is doing. This is over on pixel gray.com and it's their transparency report. This is number 11. And if you have an agency or a plugin business or a theme business, this may be something you want to look at.
It's just a really detailed breakdown of all the things that have happened since the last transparency report and this transparency report. And it really is. It's kind of. Opening up their company for public inspection in every single way. And this, this just smacks me over a really nice way of approaching your business.
Nothing is hidden. Everything is explained. They explain all about their, their team. They explain all about their revenue, how many, how much they have in terms of expenses, what their roadmap is, how their plugin businesses going. And everything it's all laid bare. I would imagine that was probably took about 10 minutes for me to read.
So it's not something that you can start very, very quickly and be finished within a couple of moments, but just may be, this is food for thought. If you have a company and you would like to open up what it is that you do to the wider community, it just strikes me as really nice, especially in a false world.
This kind of feels like a good thing to do in the WordPress ecosystem. The next section is plugins themes and blocks. And a real milestone has been achieved by the Astra theme. This week, Astra is now celebrating 1 million active installs, which they claim is the highest number of any WordPress theme outside of the default themes.
So. To celebrate this, they're actually offering a coupon code. They're offering 25% off. I'm not entirely sure how long that lasts, but there is a link in the show notes, which explains how you can, it chief that I suspect you've got maybe a day or two at most to get that. But if you click on the link in the show notes, you can get to the article and then break down how this happened when it was that they launched and, and how quickly it became kind of almost a viral thing.
Theme it just spread and spread and it continues on its upward trend. It really is curving upwards rather than sort of flatlining so well, yeah, on to brainstorm for Sue J power and the team over there for getting to 1 million installs, it'd be really interesting to see how long it takes them to double that.
Staying with themes. We're now talking about the page builder framework. This is David Von Greece, the founder of that particular theme, talking about CSS variables, global colors and global color palette. Well, it's exactly what you'd imagine. They've got a new global color settings option, the customizer where you can go and tweak things like that.
Base color based, secondary color, brand color, accent, color, and all the things that you might imagine. There's a lot. So a global color palette, it's where you can set up to eight different custom colors for the theme settings page that will appear in the color picker of all of your favorite tools. So that'll be really handy.
I figure that will speed things up. It says that you can also divide, define your project brand colors in one place and keep everything organized. By the launch, the global color palette feature integrates with the following editors. That would be the WordPress customizer element or Beaver builder, DV and Gothenburg.
So they've got many bases covered there. They've also launched a feature requests area. And I think they're probably using the same plugin that I'm using over on AB split test. It's really nice, simple feature requests, and they've also got some other improvements linked to at the bottom in version 2.5 of the premium add on.
So for example, new shrink effect for sticky navigations. New font size control for off canvas hamburger, icon new we've added a post slug class to custom sections wrapper so that they can be targeted individually by a fire CSS. And they fixed four different bugs as well. So nice. Well done. David looks like you're forging ahead as always.
If you write long form content, you may have in the past, been really keen to get a table of contents on your posts or pages so that you can make it easy for people to navigate and understand the general tenor of what it is that you're trying to write. Well, the guys over at power pack for Beaver builder have decided this week, they're going to launch a table of contents.
Module, which you can add into your Beaver builder rows and so on. Now it looks really nice. It's got the ability to add your content to this effortlessly there's options to add scroll to top hierarchical view, add anchors by tag, and you can also add your custom icons. They make the claim, as you would hope.
If you'd included a table of contents that this will improve your ability to, to be. To be categorized in terms of SEO. So it optimizes things, readability for search engines and so on. There's obviously a ton of customization options, which you can see on the website, click on that link in the show notes, and you'll get to that post.
You can make it sticky so that the table of contents just stays in place at the top of the page, whilst you scroll on desktop. And there's a whole bunch of. Different options in terms of adding, um, list styles. So you can use bullet number, but also select any icon from font, awesome icons and so on and so forth.
So it looks really nice. Another feature if you're using Beaver builder and you've got power pack for Beaver builder. Well, you've now got this for free as well, but as I say, click on the link in the show notes and you can find out more. This next one is all about short pixel, which is an image optimization plugin.
The first link takes you to the wordpress.org repo of the plugin. And the second one is their blog post entitled short pixel adaptive images. 2.0 has arrived, onboarding wizard, image, checker, performance improvements, and more so now when you install the plugin, you will be onboarded with their new wizard, which in four simple steps gets you set up and gets everything integrated in the way it should do.
There's also going to be an image checkout added to the WP admin bar at the top. And with that, you'll be able to interact with the specific images on a particular page that you're looking at now. So if you were to click on that little icon, you will then be able to exclude images that you've clicked on it, particular page from their CDN and from their process of smushing, squashing images down, you'll be able to exclude images like that one.
I'm not entirely sure what that means, but they make that claim. You'll be. Be able to prevent resizing images, liked the click, one, prevent lazy loading of images, like to click one. They'll also be able to refresh images in their CDs. In other words, it's a bit like flushing the cache. There's also going to be an account status box in their settings page, where you can see how much of there, how much of your, an annual or monthly resources you've used because it's a paid for service.
And you have to, you have to pay number of, of image squashes per. Per month or per year or whatever, you'll also be able to use native browser, lazy loading as well. Well, and they've also added a ton of integrations and improvements, which are linked to at the bottom of this piece. So if you're using short pixel, then this might be something you want to check out because they've really looks like they've stepped up their game quite a lot.
Now we mentioned static a little while ago. It's a way of flattening your WordPress websites in their hosting environment. I've come across a website this week called a flat site.com and they say, accelerate your WordPress static sites, simply convert your WordPress sites to flat static sites, manage the fastest and most secured WordPress sites from a single dashboard.
That's what they say on their website. There's an opportunity on their website to watch a demo or to try out a demo. And the website also goes into explain how they do this and what the purposes are. So it's a different approach. It obviously is something that you might like to look at. If you want to improve the speed.
I know that a lot of people are getting into this. There's a lot of controversy and a lot of people saying it's not worth it whilst a lot of people saying it really is worth it. Only you will be able to decide, but they answer the question. Why do you need a flat site? And they've got lots and lots of different resource articles on that page as well.
So really this is just me saying this thing exists, maybe go and check it out and we'll see. Yeah. How this develops over time. Each week. I like to link to deals that I find many of them are repeated from previous weeks because they're still carrying on. But I also linked to the WP Builds deals page where you can go and find a filterable searchable list of deals each week.
And also if you are a plugin or theme developer in deep. Doing anything in the WordPress space. And you'd like to offer a deal, click on the button in that page, and you'll be able to pop up a form and tell me all about the deal. I've added a few to that page over the last couple of weeks, lots of this week, as I mentioned, the Astro theme has got 25 sent off probably only for the next few days.
Yeah. Give WP a plugin to enable you to take donations on your WordPress website, 20% off. No, I apologize. 27% off because they've reached version 2.7. There's also quibbling blocks or cubes. So I think I should pronounce it, which is on a lifetime deal at the moment. Breezy 15% off ocean WP, 25% off Creflo image editing.
$49 lifetime deal. And there's a whole bunch more go and check it out in the show notes. I really would go and check them out because some of them are really incredible value for money. And some of them are limited in time. The next section is all about security and. I always have a bit of a light touch.
I don't think this is the right place to go too much in depth. Yeah. But there's a couple of pieces from the security news this week. The first one is over at Wordfence. Now this may get you to print your raise up a bit. Yeah. Because it's about the all in one SEO pack, which is installed on over 2 million websites, according to this article, and there is a vulnerability.
Inside that plugin and you might want to go yeah. Checkout exactly what it is, but it says this floor allowed on, sorry. This floor allowed authenticated users with contributor level access or above the ability to inject malicious scripts that would be executed. If a victim access to the WP admins panels.
All postpaid. So quite a quirky bug, but nevertheless, it's there, obviously check it out. If that plugin name rings a bell and on the security website, fake WordPress plugin, sitespeed serves malicious ads and backdoors nothing much more to say about that. If you've got this sitespeed plugin. Yeah. Then it's obviously decided that it's going to be the conduit for putting adverts on your WordPress website, perhaps without you noticing it, just the lengths.
These people will go to. It's absolutely awful. Isn't it? Back doors all over the place. So there we go. Two pieces for you to check out this week. The next section is the blatantly self-promotional WP Builds a bit. The first one is to say that David Walmsley and I did a podcast this week, which was entitled headless or not headless.
And we go into the idea that may be, as we were speaking a moment ago, strategy. And flat file and all of those things. Is this something you want to get involved with? Are there actual benefits? Are there just roadblocks? Is it ripe yet? Is it something that you want to leave on the shelf for a few years and come back to it when it's matured?
How could it be deployed? What is the purpose and so on? And so we take contrary positions and we, we come at it from our fairly ignorant angle, but I think there's a genuine, interesting chat in here. So. Go and check that out. The other thing to mention is that Sabrina's iden and I mentioned it at the top of the show.
We are doing our zero to 10 K installs, please go and click on the link in the show notes, and you'll be able to find an archive of all of the episodes that we've released so far. We've done five parts, as I said, we'll have another one this coming Tuesday, 2:00 PM, UK time, then we're having a week off for summer and then we'll.
Be back to it, but we'll be talking more about creating documentation this week. Anyway, the archive is there for you to peruse at your leisure. Okay. The next one is for me to say that we have no jobs listed this week, but I'd like to reiterate. If you go to WP Builds.com forward slash jobs, I will be starting listing WordPress jobs completely for free.
So if you want to add your job over there, please feel free to do so. There are only fake posts at the moment with me just testing things. Obviously, if I get any real jobs, I'll remove them and only have the real ones up there. But that's WP Builds.com forward slash. That's it for the WordPress news, but don't go away.
We've got three pieces, which I always entitled, not WordPress, but useful. Anyway, first one is to say that if you're a Gmail user, Google is about to really upset the Apple cart. They're about to change the UI and add a whole load of extra features into there. So, yeah. They're obviously going to be pushing things like Google, meet, chat drive, and so on.
There's a lovely video, which it should those in about, I don't know about a minute or so. Exactly. What's going to be included and this really is for the mobile phone use, but it's quite a sizable change. I would imagine if you've got lots of plugins installed in your desktop or browser, which integrate.
With Gmail to make it do different things. Those developers of those extensions are going to be up in arms, trying to keep up with exactly what Google have been doing. But for my point of view, it looks really nice. There'll be lots of additional function functionality within easy reach. Now the next one, who doesn't like a good statue of Atlas in the temple of Zeus while I do for sure.
And this is just on the guardian website, huge Atlas statue to guard Sicily's temple of Zeus. One more. And the, what can we say, there's going to be a new colossal statue of Atlas puts back in the ruins of the temple of Zeus on Sicily. If that interests you, then go and click on the link in the show notes.
It's certainly interests me, but I feel. I may be one of a kind and Chrome 84 handles third party cookies differently. How it affects publishers. This is over on search engine journal. Obviously, if you're in the marketing game and you're installing cookies for a whole bunch of different reasons, Chrome 84 coming down the line fairly soon, there's going to be a significant change in the way that things are done.
And it may be something that you would like to keep abreast of. Okay. That's all the WordPress news that I've got for you this week. If you found that useful, if any of it was of use to you, please go and share it far and wide. Pause the podcast right now, go and log into Facebook or Twitter and share it.
Tell people that it's useful to you and that it's happening each and every week. Tell them about WP Builds in general. I'd be really appreciative. The WP Bill's weekly, WordPress news was brought to you by Kinsta. Kinsta takes managed WordPress hosting to the next level powered by the Google cloud platform.
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And by AB split test, do you want to set up your AB split tests in record time or 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 is it works with element or Beaver builder and the WordPress block editor.
You can check it out and get a free [email protected]. Okie doke. That's all I've got for you this week. Join us on Monday. Live 2:00 PM. UK time. WP Builds.com forward slash live for the live version of the news with some notable WordPress guests and the exact same URL. Exactly 24 hours later. Me and Sabrina's ident talking about getting our plugins noticed.
And of course, we'll be back on Thursday for the podcast and back here next week for some more weekly WordPress news. Take care. Stay safe. Bye bye for now.