WP Builds Weekly WordPress News #125 – WordPress 5.5 RC, WordCamp US cancelled and heaps of plugin news

Hello there. Good morning. And welcome to this. The WP Builds weekly WordPress you use this is number 125. It covers the WordPress news for the week. Commencing the 27th of July, 2020. And it was published on Monday, the 3rd of August, 2020 minor Nathan Wrigley and the usual house just before we begin, if you wouldn't mind going over to our website, WP Builds.com.
You'll find a whole ton of WordPress related content. We produce a podcast episode every single year. Thursday. We also produce this news episode that you're listening to comes out on a Monday very early in the morning. 7:00 AM, okay. Time so that people who possibly might be commuting have a chance of listening to it.
We also do a live version of the show at 2:00 PM. You can find that in our Facebook group I'll and that in a moment, but also at wpbuilds.com forward slash live. This week, we've also got to the seventh episode of Sabrina's Zeidan and I's journey. We're calling it plugin startup zero to 10,000 installs.
It's our exploration of what it's like to launch and promote a WordPress plugin. We're coming from the point of view of naivety. It's not us preaching, it's us learning along the way. And hopefully getting some comments from you guys in the audience. You can find that [email protected] forward slash live or in the Facebook group.
That's going to be happening on Tuesday at 2:00 PM. Also another lawyer, if crikey 3:30 PM, this Wednesday, I'll be chatting with peach and airy. We do our monthly, you are UX session. If you would like, I'd like to submit your site and get some free, really credible advice from Peacher about what might need tweaking to make it well.
As UI UX friendly as possible, then head over to WP Builds.com forward slash UI and submit the form. And we can see you in the same place. WP Builds.com forward slash live or in the Facebook group, three 30. This coming Wednesday all in UK time. Another couple of things to mention WP Builds.com forward slash subscribe over there.
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Okay. Thanks for bearing with us during our bits of housekeeping. Now let's get stuck into the news. Shall we? Just to say that each week we put a show notes together, you can find that possibly if you've got an email, all of links will be in that email. But if you go over to the WP Builds.com website, you can find at the various top of the webpage, shouldn't called archives and go to news archive.
And you'll find this post in there as number 125 and all the links for everything that we talk about can be found in there. The first section as always is WordPress core. And [email protected], we have news that WordPress 5.5 has a release candidate. This is the first release candidate. There should be a few in very rapid succession because WordPress 5.5 is slated for August the 11th.
This does seem actually to be a bit, a bit of a Titanic update. That is to say 5.5 is not this release candidate, but the intention here is to get the. Current version of WordPress in front of as many eyeballs as possible. Just a very final stage to see if there's any things which might have gone astray, something got missed, something broke, who knows, but if you'd like to become a WordPress beta tester, please go and check the page out.
It's the first link in the show notes. Now I've got a little bit more about 5.5 because over on WordPress Tavern, just in Tadlock has penned an article entitled upcoming in WordPress 5.5 features and changes theme authors should know about. And it's exactly that if you are a theme author or a plugin author, Should we say, you may want to look at this.
It is also a bit of a, the good read. If you're just curious about what's coming in 5.5, because it lays out all of that in a really easy to read way. It's probably going to take you about three or four minutes to get from top to bottom, but the big features are that WordPress 5.5 will finally introduce.
Automatic updates for plugins and themes. This is good news, I think for the security of the platform, but also, I suppose there's a few gotchas in here. If you are a theme author and you are not really aware that from now. Well, very soon in a couple of weeks, WordPress 5.5 will enable themes to automatically update.
You might want to take extra steps to make sure that upon your theme being. Dated things are actually going to be working correctly. So there's also HTML changes for custom logos. Justin writes as part of an accessory ability related tickets for WordPress 5.5. The core gets it's a custom logo and the custom logo functions.
Yeah. Will no longer output a link around the logo image. So theme authors, you may need to do something about that to make the, the logo appear. Also block patterns have arrived. If you're familiar with page builders, you'll know that it's possible to drag in pre-configured layouts. So for example, it might be.
Let's say a testimonial layout, or it might be a hero with a button on the right and some bold text on the left, for example. Well, all of that is going to be rolling out in WordPress 5.5, it's called block patterns. And it is the ability for these preconfigured blocks to come into WordPress. And this is going to be absolutely fascinating.
It puts WordPress firmly in the kind of page builder space as far as I'm concerned. And I'm sure there'll be a massive. Proliferation of theme developers and designers getting on board this and building out lots and lots of interesting stuff in the near future. We've also got some information about line Heights and custom units.
The block editor has two new tools just in says for end users to take advantage of them. Custom line Heights and custom units, theme authors can opt into allowing to edit the line height of paragraphs and the headings with custom line height, theme support flag. They can also allow users to switch between various units, such as when defining the blocks, cover height with the custom units flag.
There's also so information about an accessible widgets navigation option and also template function updates as well. So it's all in the article link in the show notes. Staying with Justin over on WordPress Tavern, we have a peace Gothenburg, 8.6 ads, cover block, video positioning and updates, block patterns, Gothenburg 8.6 landed as Justin says quietly last week.
And only because really the whole purpose of this release was to. Squash bugs for the aforementioned release of WordPress 5.5 on August the 11th, just over a week and a half from now. So what have we got? That's new. Well, we have the option now to add a focal point selector for video covers. That is to say in previous iterations, there's been this little option rag, a circle around, um, an image so that you can decide which bits of the image should kind of be in the viewport.
So you might have a very large image, but you really want to focus on the, the piece that's in the bottom left of that image. Well, you can do that. You haven't yet, and able to do that with videos, however, and now you can exactly the same process. Use the focal point picker. And that's located under the media settings tab when you're in Gothenburg and you can drag around in that way.
Also, as we just mentioned, he goes in a bit more detail about the updated block patterns that we spoke about. There's also now the site icon used in full screen mode. Previously, we had the WordPress logo did find it a little bit confusing it's purpose, and now you'll get your own site icon in there as well.
So that's, that's just a nice little UI tweak. So yeah. Big news in WordPress core this week, there's an awful lot coming down the road. As I said at the top, I think this is one of the biggest updates to WordPress with C changes, uh, since I've been speaking about it. So it's very, very exciting, indeed. Okay, moving on now to the community 80 section, I've got two pieces for you this week.
The first is all about big orange heart. Sarah Gooding writes on WordPress Tavern, big orange heart opens 2020 remote worker wellbeing and mental health survey. So big orange chart, which was formerly WP and up has now opened its survey. I think this is a really, really good thing to do. It'll take you no more than about five minutes.
I have already completed it. And the community in big orange chart is designed to help people just like you, who are listening to this podcast. To help each other, support themselves in their mental health needs, their business needs and so on. And they need information about exactly where that support should be aimed at last year.
So, yeah, the 2019 version did bring up some really interesting data. Some of it a little bit on the alarming side. So for example, 8% of WordPress of the WordPress community have had suicidal thoughts in the last 12 months, 47% stated their workplace makes them feel anxious. And 56% of the WordPress community works alone.
So they want to have some more data about whether these statistics still remain true and how they can target their support. As I said, it's very simple to, well, a very simple survey to fill out. It's got a really nice UI. You actually, it's almost like talking to a chat bot it's really intuitive, very easy to do.
And it takes just a couple of minutes and it will help this charity, which I firmly believe is well worth having around. Next up, we have the sad news that word camp U S has been canceled. Sarah Gooding on WordPress Tavern, writing WordPress, a us 2020 canceled due to pandemic stress and online event fatigue.
So as with word camp Europe, which has decided to cancel for well, the in person event for next year. It's the same. Now with WordCamp us, they've decided to cancel entirely the October 27 to the 29th event. But when I say entirely, I mean, also the online version of the event they've cited. The that's people are getting a little bit fatigued.
A lot of their lives are now in these kinds of events. People doing zoom calls and working from home and staring at the screen, perhaps more than ever. So they've decided that this is the best decision and they wrote it is with heavy hearts that we have made. Yeah. The decision to cancel this year's WordCamp us event in light of the continued pandemic online event, fatigue for attendees, organizers, and volunteers, and the desire for word camping, a camp experiences to be traditional word camp experiences.
We have made the difficult decision to stop this year's planning and counsel at word camp us 2020. Now it's brought a mixed reaction. According to this article, some of the organizers people who've invested their time are a little bit frustrated that they've put so much time into it only to have that pulled from under their feet.
One of the commentators in this piece that they'd spent probably something in the region of a hundred hours and they felt that they weren't given enough. Warning was on the other hand are saying the opposite, you know, at least now we know we've got clarity, we can move forward and we can think about what will be in the future.
Yeah. Now, interestingly, the state of the word. Address which Matt Mullenweg does at WordCamp us each year is going to have a different focus. It may well be that it is a dedicated event, presumably just mats recording something and then broadcasting out. And it may also be tied into a 24 hour contributor event, which is really interesting.
Anyway, from my perspective, it is interesting that we're obviously. The, the, the leading proponents of this kind of thing. the people in this community fully understand it. We know how to implement it. Yeah. It's easy. And yet there's just not the audience there at the moment. People appear to be struggling to, to get attendance to these events.
There's obviously the dichotomy of having to watch this stuff whilst you're at home and the distractions that that brings so interesting stuff, but so sadly, no WordCamp us for 2020. Our next section is plugins themes and blocks. And we've got quite a bit for you this week. I'll keep it brief in each case, but fluent forms, 3.6 0.4, lots of new improvements and surprise goodies.
So this is a forms plugin I've started using it myself. I rather like it. They have a new integration or Tirmizi, which is an email marketing automation software. Well, it's now configured to work with that. They've also got the ability to retry API calls and give some insight into what the failure was.
If they were unsuccessful. They've also got conditional text blocks. So for example, you might now be able to show a message when a form successfully completed with a conditional piece of logic. So for example, if this particular field was filled in. You might like to display that back to them. If not, you might like to ignore that altogether in your response message.
They've replaced select two with choices dot JS library. There's also the option to validate uniqueness of text inputs. You can also have options too. Look at all the entries in a much more configurable way. So for example, you might. Read only the ones that are on red or the ones that you have read or all of them.
So they've got sort of filtering options in there and they've squashed a few bugs, added a new tool, tip style, and various other things. So yeah, really rather nice. I do like fluent forms, so I hope that you guys check it out. Possible users or users of the Brizzy page builder. You'll be delighted that they've announced 2.0, they kinda missed out version 1.0.
Because they felt that they'd kind of got there a long time ago. There's a video on the homepage, but there's an awful lot of stuff that's coming in this release. The piece is entitled theme builder, mega menu, builder, Brizzy sink, Lottie tables, and more. And there really is a lot in this. So for example, they've basically got themselves a full functional.
Theme builder. Now with global block conditions, you can sync your blocks. If you're using their cloud infrastructure, you can sync your cloud blocks with your WordPress plugin blocks. They've got a really nice, easy to use Megaman. You build it, essentially. You build it on the page in front of your eyes.
Yeah. Columns and putting maps and menu items and whatever else you'd like in there. They've got a nice option for tables. Now, Lottie elements, you can work in draft. That is to say, you can take a page from being published to into draft. So you could say, for example, make a slight amendment to a site and rather than publish it, you can just keep the, the little modification that you made as a draft and keep the page published.
You've also got the option to save and clear layouts with one click. So if you've built a page out, you think, Oh, I just want to start over. You can just do that with one click, rather than having to re delete each of the modules. One at a time absolute and fixed positions are in there as well. Images can now be addressed by pixel as well as
And there's a whole bunch of other stuff I would urge you. Yeah. If you're a breezy user, go check this out. They really have got an awful lot into this update. So congratulations to them. Click on the link in the show notes to find out more. The next one is over on the Malka website and they say our most anticipated feature one click cleanups.
So this is the idea that if you're using Malka as your provider of choice for security on your WordPress website, they're making the claim that you can now do this with one click. The idea being that you don't need to go around searching for a bunch of credentials, run separate scams and FTP things here, there, and everywhere.
You simply click one button and you'll be okay. Notified of the progress of how things are going. I confess that I have not used it, but you know, if they can live up to this, this would certainly be interesting. They make the claim that the benefits of one click cleanup are that you can be hack free.
Yeah, half the time you can minimize website downtime, retain traffic and sales. It's as real time as it gets no credentials required and no technical knowledge needed. So maybe click on the link in the show notes and check it out. Okay. Couple of things related to tool set tool set types, 3.4 includes a redesign for the database tables, which allows for greater performance and much better support for multi-lingual sites.
Quote types, 3.4 will allow you to create entries in any language until now you could only create entries in the site's default language and translate them into other languages. Now you can create entries in any language and translate to any other language that you choose. So that's quite nice. Tool sets are also on the lookout for some beta testers.
They have a piece entitled tool set blocks, 1.3 beta tests, the post relationships improvements. So that's exactly what they want. They have this blocks functionality and they want to see if they can offer better translation world work flows for toolset powered websites. There's some information on how you can get involved in the beta version, but if you are a user of toolset, you wish to help them out.
Click on the link in the show notes. If you're in a team that creates content with a WordPress install, you may be interested in published press. Now they've been around for a while, but they've made a bit of an update this week. Their article is entitled public publish press checklists. Now supports Yoast SEO, internal links, and more, the idea of this plugin is that you set a bunch of criteria that your team must pass in order for a post to be publishable.
So they've added the ability to have a. Particular number of characters in the title. So you can set a maximum or minimum. So in other words, if the title is too short or too long, and that would affect SEO, you can prevent it being published. You can also change it so that there must be some internal links, which is obviously again good for SEO.
And if they don't occur in the. The particular piece than the, again, the article could be unpublishable. And finally they've linked with SEO, which is obviously a very popular yeah. SEO plugin for WordPress. And unless you pass the usability check, which if you've used Yossi you'll know what that looks like.
You basically need it. on the, the different settings that Yost has. And unless that is passed, you won't be able to publish it. So, yeah. For teams. Perfect. If you're an individual, you can probably do all this all by yourself manually, but obviously if you're saving stuff in draft and getting other people to finish it off and you need to know that it's done correctly, published, press worth, checking out.
This next one is really interesting. I think it's over on WordPress Tavern, it's by Sarah Gooding entitled being launches, URL, submission, plugin for WordPress. So to paraphrase, essentially, you've now got the option to install a WordPress plugin. And as soon as you amend any content, it immediately notifies being the search engine that there is something which has changed.
And the idea then is that. They don't have to have their bots crawling around the internet for content on your site. If you've got the plugin installed, we'll know for sure when. Content has been updated and therefore reduced latency just seems like a really interesting idea. You've got to generate an API key in order to configure the plugin, but bar that that's pretty much all that you need to do.
The plugin introduces a few other options for managing URL submissions. You can toggle the automatic submission submission feature on or off. You can manually submit a URL to being index. You can view a list of recent URL submissions from the plugin retry, any failed submissions or. Look at recent submission lists and download recent URL submissions for analysis.
It just seems like such a sensible idea. Yeah. That when I click update everything everywhere gets notified, fascinating stuff. Couple of pieces now about WPM you devs for Mineta plugin, which is a plugin to get WordPress forms on your website. The first one is all about an integration with fortress DB.
The article is entitled new form formulator integration, fortress DB for data privacy, security, and speed. They mentioned in the article that in the past, your. Data would have been stored in a WordPress database, which is really designed for the public web. Well, instead of using that database, this integration allows you to store fortress DB data on secure Google cloud servers.
You've got the option of choosing from Europe, the USA and the UK. And then the article goes on to explain why you might wish to use this and how it all works. And. You know, a fairly technical illustration of how you can secure your form data. So if you have any concerns around this, or you've got information in your WordPress database that is seriously in need of security, this might well be worth looking at and also something similar.
I suppose, they've now added an easy sign here. Option says e-sign here, the new a 1.13 now e-signature and more. And it's exactly what you'd expect. You can now add a field into your forms where people can with their finger, right. To their signature, or there's the option. Should they not be able to do that?
To upload a pre-prepared signature as well? Again, the article shows you line by line, how you need to set this up. Moving on to deals for this week. As always before I list the deals, I'd like to re mention the fact that we will email you. If you go over to WP belts.com forward slash subscribe, there's a list over there that you can subscribe to.
And we will email you a simple, plain text email. When we hear about a WordPress deal, there's quite a few people on the list and quite a few people benefiting from it. I've subscribed to just about everything to do with WordPress. And so it may well. Get you out of that little hole of receiving multiple well emails from multiple companies.
There's also an option on that to go to our WP Builds deals page. As I said, it's a filterable searchable list of WordPress deals, and many of them have been there for well several years now. So go check it out. If you're in the marketplace, nuanced dimension, and this week is AppSumo PWA for WordPress.
This is the idea, right? Behind the plugin that you would like to have a mobile app without having a mobile app, it allows you to do things like have your WordPress website so that you can add an icon onto the home screen. Essentially it mimics the functionality of a app on your iOS or Android device.
So that looks quite nice. And there's also options on the page, other things which I've bought some of them, uh, Quigley blocks looks nice. There's also Trello image editing three months free flywheel hosting. A continually chats, breezy, 15% cloud and the WordPress plugin and 20% off give WP as well. The next section is to do with security, very light touch on this only one piece this week on the word fence website, it's entitled critical arbitrary file upload vulnerability patched in WP, discuss plugin and that's WP D I S C U Zed or Z, depending on where you live.
This plugin, which I confess I've not heard of is installed 80,000 times. And this floor gives unauthenticated attackers. The ability to upload arbitrary files. Including PHP files and achieve remote code execution on vulnerable sites servers. So go and check that out. If that name rings about the next bit is all about WP Builds.
It's the hopelessly self-promotional WP Builds bit. I did a podcast this week with David Walmsley. We had a debate about whether from clients, we should get the content first. Or ask where the content later he takes one side, I take the other, and it's really interesting. There are as always a ton of different options around this, and you may or may not have fallen foul of this problem before.
Should you put the brakes on and say, well, I'm not carrying on with this project because you haven't given me all the stuff. Should you even start the project before the. All of the content has been delivered or can you be more laissez, Faire and a bit more accommodating and allow the process to iterate slowly, check out the podcast to see what we think also to say, as I mentioned at the top, we have this Tuesday, we're going to be talking with Sabrina's or Dan 2:00 PM.
UK [email protected] forward slash live or in the Facebook group. Talking about zero to 10,000 installs of our plugin. This is part seven and on Wednesday, 3:30 PM, same URLs, peach and airy dissecting, some submitted work WordPress websites to decide if there's any improvements that could be made from a year UX point of view, you can submit your own at WP.
He builds.com forward slash UI. Now the job section is here, but I don't have anything in it just yet a reminder that I've integrated jobs into WP Builds and there is a link in the show notes to a form. And if you know about a WordPress job, please submit it. And then I can just pop it into the news like this.
And you never know, it might enable good candidates to hear about jobs that they may or may not otherwise find out about. So yeah, completely free. As I said, link is in the show notes. If you want to submit a job. That's all the WordPress stuff I've got for you this week, but I've got a couple of pieces to do with not WordPress, which we always do at the end.
Only a couple of pieces this week because Oh, you have been on holiday and I didn't dedicate the normal time to researching, but the first one is over on search engine journal called amp and SEO. Everything you need to know took me about 10 minutes to read, but it was very. Interesting and illustrative, I don't really know a lot of about amp.
I haven't really deployed it too many times. And certainly from an SEO perspective, I didn't really realize what the impacts were. So link is in the show notes for that. If you too are interested in this and the final one for this week, Google updates, search console with more structured data support. And this is just to say that in the search console now, There is also support for image, license, structured data, which may be important if some of your websites are heavy, heavily image related.
You may know that the official support for this kind of thing came out in February, but now you can see what's what's in your Google search console, right? That's all we've got for you this week. I hope that you enjoyed it as always, if you found it useful or indeed not useful, any comments at all. Please reach out to me.
I'm available on Twitter at WP Builds, no spaces, no hyphens, but you could shoot me an email. WP Builds.com forward slash contact. Or just go into our Facebook group. WP Builds.com forward slash Facebook. And let me know. It really does keep the, keep the interest going for me when I get, get some interesting comments.
So yeah, please do that. The WP Builds weekly WordPress news, or 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 such as PHP seven, SSH and staging environments, and the best parts their expert team of WordPress engineers are available 24 seven.
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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 [email protected]. Okay. Hopefully you'll join us next Thursday for the podcast next Monday for more news like this and three lives this week, as I mentioned, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.
Good grief. What's going on? Hopefully you'll join us for some of that. Take care. Stay safe. Bye bye. For now.