WP Builds Weekly WordPress News #126 – WordPress 5.5 RC2, WordCamps cancelled and TikTok buyers wanted

Nathan Wrigley: [00:00:00] Hello there. Good morning. And welcome to this. The WP Builds weekly WordPress news. This is number 126. It was published on Monday the 10th, August, 2020, my name's Nathan Wrigley, and just a few bits and pieces before we begin the usual housekeeping. If you like, if you get any value out of these podcast episodes, I'd very much appreciate a share.
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Some of the content that we're producing this week. Well, we produce a podcast every Thursday, this the WordPress news that you're listening to on a Monday. And we also go live every Monday. This week, 2:00 PM. UK time. I'll be with Paul Lacey, Tom finale, and burns. Granola, you can find that in our Facebook group [email protected] forward slash live, and also on Tuesday, we'll try again.
We had to cancel last week because of problems that I was having, but 2:00 PM on Tuesday, same URLs. You can find me and Sabrina Sudan in our plugin startup, zero to 10 K installs. We've been going on a journey, seeing how it is to launch a WordPress plugin and trying to get some tips and tricks along the way.
The other URL. The last one is WP Builds.com/advertise. If you would like to get your product or service in front of a WordPress specific audience, a bit like these guys have done. 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 PHB seven SSH and 24 seven expert support. Try a demo for free. You'll get 60 days over at Kinsta dot com. And 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, anything, and the best part it works with element or BeaverBuilder and the word press or block editor.
You can check it out and get a free [email protected]. Okay, housekeeping over. Shall we get into the news?
We always begin our WordPress news. If there is any a with a section entitled a WordPress core, and there's something very brief this week, it is [email protected] and article entitled at WordPress 5.5 release candidate two. Well, WordPress 5.5 is slated for release on August the 11th. So that's Tuesday of this week.
So it may be possible that by the time you're listening to this news, WordPress 5.5 has been released. If it's not a new feel that you found a bug, please go to the link in the show notes, click on that, where you can join the beta tester program. This is obviously something that you could carry on right up into WordPress, 5.6, seven and so on.
Yes, we're very, very close. Now, 2.5 seems like a giant leap forward. There are so many different things happening. I'm really pleased, but yes, if you found a bug go and report it, you've only got. Probably less than 24 hours left. The next section is all about the WordPress community. And I've got three pieces for you this week.
The first one over at WordPress Tavern. Sarah Gooding writing a piece entitled WordPress cancels, all in-person flagship events until 2022 too. Now you probably know you're in the WordPress community. That whole variety of events have been canceled this year due to the spread of COVID throughout the world.
And it has been decided that really to consider the people's time and efforts when. An event is organized. It's very, very likely in the foreseeable future, certainly for the duration of next year, that that event will be canceled because of covert restrictions. So the decision has been made well, let's just counsel them all.
They're actually going to keep some of the ones that have already been booked in going there, obviously online events. So this includes a word case Europe, U S Asia and central America. The article says, so if you are thinking. Of creating an event this year. It will have to be done without the auspices of the official.
If you like WordPress community, it's interesting at the bottom, they've said, well, the article says as online events continue to evolve to reflect community needs, the community team strongly encourages these flagship organizing teams to be creative in their approach. This is a challenge and it forces organizers to proceed only if they can knock it out of the park in terms of creativity.
Otherwise it's simply hosting another online conference in a time of, well, the same tired tradition. So yeah. Interesting stuff. Obviously, anybody having any pretensions of going to unreal event this year? Well, you're going to have to wait. The next one is over at WP Tavern. Again, this one called automatic updates, press page to clarify distinction between wordpress.org and wordpress.com.
Should you be new to WordPress? You may have no conception that there is a difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org. What press.com is a hosted version of the open source WordPress software with added features for security, speed and support. So that's when you see.com any other reference is probably the WordPress project, which is otherwise known as wordpress.org.
And last week automatics marketing team made. Positive steps. This article says curbing the perennial branding confusion between wordpress.org and wordpress.com. It's a minor change, but over on the press page, it's now been made much more clear what.com is and what.org is, or just to be clear what WordPress is.
And the reason that this has been done is because some of the people who contribute and you can find their names in this article, link in the show notes, feel a little bit. Irritated when they see mentions of a WordPress and clearly the intention there to write to wordpress.com, but it was unclear to the writer of that particular piece.
And they mentioned tech crunch specifically. It's, it's unclear to them. WordPress, not common WordPress. It is in any way, shape or form different. And so they, they miss name it. So it's now hopefully a bit clearer. Hopefully news outlets will be able to, you pointed to this press page and they'll have that clear understanding of what it is that they're writing.
And the last one over in the community section is over a published press. Publish press has acquired the advanced Gutenberg plugin and theme. Well, it's just that the guys over at published press who have plugins concentrating on the publishing experience have decided that they're going to invest in the Guttenberg experience.
They've bought. I guess it's fair to say, but I'm not entirely sure what the details were, but they've acquired it. Let's say that from joom United, they were contacted earlier in the year and they saw this was a good fit. Obviously Guttenberg is going to be the default way for John. Just about everybody.
One might imagine in a year or two. Publishing on a WordPress platform. And so they've decided to acquire this and concentrate on doing some new things. They are going to be adding some new blocks specific around the, the publishing area. And there's links in the show notes about what it is that they're going to be adding.
So another acquisition. So if you're using advanced. Gothenburg, which has 20,000 installs. I have to say it looks really good. It's got very favorable reviews, a hundred of them, four and a half stars roughly over on wordpress.org. Well, it's now got a new owner who can hopefully carry it forward. The next section is entitled plugins themes and blocks.
We've got three things for you this week. The first one [email protected]. It's the Beaver builder update. They're now moving over to version 2.4 and the article is entitled summit update BB 2.4, new doc site feature request site, and more. The first thing that they mentioned though, is that there seems to have been some sort of fake email address set up nothing to do with Beaver builder, but seemingly promoting some product that has nothing to do with BeaverBuilder.
So just be careful if you open up Beaver builder, email coming from ad to Beaver, builder dot. X or Y Zed then probably just Chuck it straight in the bin. So moving on BeaverBuilder 2.4. O'Shaughnessy I'm going to say O'Shaughnessy. I hope that's right. It's named after the O'Shaughnessy dam in Yosemite park, there's an awful lot going on here.
I do like the fact that Beaver builder mentioned the fact that they, they like to keep their product updates and roadmap. A little bit on the quiet side and they call it Apple's playbook. I think it's cool. Nice approach. And it obviously gets things done very good quietly, and then they release articles like this.
So let's see what we've got. We've got some new things. We've got a new lists, module, new search module, new login module, new button, group module, new integration with their assistant plugin. More on that in the moment. New templates available in all paid versions. And there's been updates to the WooCommerce module, the video module, row backgrounds, subscribe module, and a whole bunch more in all this, probably about 20 different things, updates and new things.
So an awful lot of stuff. So if you're using Beaver builder, you'll no doubt be enjoying this update. They've also decided it's time to move on with their base and docks area. And they've got new interfaces for those. So there is now a new Beaver builder knowledge-based site, and there's also a new Beaver builder documentation site.
I think the old version was on help scout and they've decided to move over to this. I'm not sure what the software is that they're using. But I do like the look of it. There's also things in here all about how you can submit feature requests and their roadmap board as well. I mentioned earlier that they are got to their assistant plugin.
Well there's information about exactly what they said, what that is. The idea is it's a free plugin to enable you to. Perform common WordPress tasks like updating featured images and titles of posts and things like that. All in an interface, which is just sort of gets out of your way. It removes the need to go to WP admin quite as much.
So there's a, there's a little bit about that as well, but yeah, there we go. Beaver builder 2.4. Very nice update. Indeed. Next stop. We have just in Tagalog writing a fairly lengthy piece over on WordPress Tavern. It's entitled of redox framework, relaunches focuses efforts on Guttenberg templates. This seems like a very timely piece, largely because of the fact that last week.
We had the developer of redox Kovi on the WP Builds live news. You can actually find that over at WP Builds.com/live-news-archive. And you want to find number 125, which at the time of creating this was the most recent one. You'll find it at the top left and right. He explained all about what redox does.
And so I would urge you, if you are interested in this, perhaps two to pause this podcast and go and check that out. But it is to say that he's relaunching and focusing on Guttenberg this, this system, this framework has enabled plugin developers and so on to just kind of create setting screens for their plugins.
Has a staggering amount of people using it. I think the figure is 900,000 websites in some way are being powered by redox. And yet it's something which is largely in the background because it's something that developers deploy in order to make their theme. Have settings and so on. So he's decided to change this largely because he wants to turn a profit from, it seems that in the past theme, developers have made vast amounts of money and built on top of his product.
Whereas he's really making a very small amount of money from donations and so on. So he's decided that it's now going to be focused entirely on Guttenberg. And the idea is that you will be able to as an end user. So this is not something focused on developers. As an end user, you will be able to examine a blocks that you think you might like to put on your WordPress website.
And when I say examine, you'll have full, full insight into what this block will do, how it will look, what the, what the fonts will look like, what the images will look like, what, what everything will look like, and then you can just choose to download it. So it's a bit like an interface based for finding other blocks.
Um, he's decided that he's going to have a pricing model this time. And because it's, end-users, hopefully they'll be able to delve into their pockets on a, on a more widespread basis and make it profitable for him. It's a fabulous initiative. And I have to say that when we saw it on the live news, it was breathtaking, the amount of things that were available, so many different options, and it was really clear how it could be used.
So go check out the article and I say, go and check out our news piece about it as well. The final one in our plugins themes and block section again, WordPress Tavern, just in Tatlock, disable comments, plugin looking for new owner, highest bid goes to charity. So this is the disabled comments plugin written by Samia sharp.
It was created quite a few years ago. I think it was first created in 2000 and then 11. And the intention of the plugin is to simply remove, well, let's say all traces of comments from your WordPress install. It says when this mode is enabled the plugin hides comment links from all menus removes comment, widgets hides the discussion setting, screen disables, outgoing, ping backs, and more.
In other words, Pretty much obliterates comments. Now, Shaw who created this plugin back in 2011 has pretty much stopped using PHP and WordPress. I think the last time you said he used WordPress was 2016. So he's become a little bit unfamiliar with the recent adaptations to WordPress core and PHP. And so he's finding it a burden to keep this place in going, but he has been doing it out of the goodness of his heart.
It's very popular. It's got a solid 225 star reviews out of 229, but he said he wants to get rid of it. And rather than just schedule reading it. Yeah. Get rid of it for some sort of profit he's decided he's going to donate to whatever is made to the charity of his choice. It's going to be donated to the effective altruism funds or charitable organization for ownership.
You can contact him on his Twitter account, which is linked to in Justin's article, but I just think this is really nice, really nice altruistic gesture in order to generate some, some hard earned money, uh, for a charity. And, uh, yeah. Getting rid of his plugin along the way in order to do that. Next stop is the deal section.
Most of these I think are recycled from previous weeks, but I'll just mention them. But first off I would mention two links in the post. The first one is to our deals email. And if you click on the link, you'll be asked to subscribe to an email. And if you do that, you will receive regular updates. When we hear about a WordPress deal, I don't do every single one.
But I tried to keep on top of them as, and when I hear about them, so enables you to hear about deals without subscribing to all of those email channels. And there's also our WP Builds deals page where you can find the links to the coupon codes that I mentioned at the top of the show. Right? What have we got?
We've got, Oh, over on lifetime deals. We've got PWA for, for WP. That's a way of, yeah. Hopefully turning your website into something, akin to a mobile app, give WP, you've got 20% off. QBE blocks have got a lifetime deal. $49 as a base price breezy, you have got 15% off. You can use the code WP. He builds 15 for that essential ad-ons for element or I've got 25% off.
And the pinpoint world booking system has got a code as well. Click on the link in the show notes for 20% off, three free months of a flywheel hosting. And then there's a proposal tool called quotas, happy forms, lifetime deal, $49, and a really fabulous little image editing program called Trello is also available for $49.
The next section is the security section and we take a pretty light touch on this. We don't get into the weeds of this, but usually we just mentioned the names of plugins to assist you. Should you be listening to this and your ears prick up because you, Oh, I've heard of that one. Then this might be of use to you.
So here we go. The first one over at Wordfence is news letter plugin abilities affect over 300 pounds sites. I should say that this plugin is literally called the newsletter plugin. So it's not like some generic. Oh, lots of newsletter plugins. And now the particular plugin is called that 300,000 sites.
It's a reflected cross site, scripting vulnerability, and a PHP object, injection vulnerability as well, but 300,000 sites. Good grief. That's an awful lot, but you thought that was an awful, the next one is even more. This is critical vulnerability exposes over 700,000 sites using Devi extra and Devi builder.
The floor gives authenticated attackers with contributor level or above capabilities. The ability to upload arbitrary files, including PHP files, and achieve remote code execution on our vulnerable sites server. Word funds. Tell us. And Wordfence also tell us about the official Facebook chats. Plugin created vector for social engineering attacks.
It's a, as that this plugin is installed on 80,000 sites and the floor made it possible for low level authenticated attackers to connect to their own Facebook messenger accounts, to any site running the vulnerable plugin and engage in chats with site visitors on defected sites. Good grief. The, imagine the consequences of that that might bring and.
So you a different take on things. This is the themes of vulnerability Roundup, or should I say WordPress plugin? Roundup. This is the article, which has thumbnails of the plugins that you might need to look at. And you can just scroll through this very quickly. There's probably about, I would say there's about 12 things on this and you just scroll through and if you catch sight of the plugin name or the plugin icon that you're familiar with, you can just pause and see what needs to be done.
And the line last one is a piece over at Wordfence. It's not about to particular. Plug in vulnerability, but it's a discussion about what you have to lose. It's called WordPress auto updates. What do you have to lose? And it's all about the upcoming 5.5 WordPress in which automatic updates will happen.
It's Wordfence has taken that from a security point. Yeah. It's pretty long. It'll probably take you about 10 minutes to read, but it's a nice summation of, uh, well, whether this is a good idea or not, and certainly from a security point of view, it does change the game slightly. The blatantly promotional WP Builds a bit.
Now, first one is to say that I did an episode number 191 with a very nice chap called Robert harm from a plugin called maps. Marker. I confess this was not a plugin that I'd heard before or heard of before, I should say, but upon further inspection, this is a full on solution. So we talk about what maps marker can do while you might like to implement it and so on.
And really if you've got the. The need to put any Google maps on anything. Robert is a real expert on this and he goes absolutely soup to nuts. So if you can imagine almost any possibility of things that you might like to achieve on a map, this plugin may very well handle it. And he also has a very ethical position in terms of your data and the free open source software nature of the products that he's producing.
So I would urge you to go and have a listen to that also to say that we were gifted a. Stensul unlimited lifetime license. Now, stencil is an in-browser tool. They have a WordPress plugin, which means that you can create little featured images on your WordPress website, inside your WordPress dashboard.
And one of the WP Builds listeners, Florian. He had an extra copy and he said, would you like to give it away? So I said, well, you should probably contact stencil and make sure that's okay. And, and he did. And they were. And so I'm giving it away. You have to click on the link in the show notes, fill out form.
Basically I've taken the approach this time. Just tell me why you want it. And the one, the reason that I like the best, which is slightly arbitrary and a bit peculiar, but then he go with that. So what I've decided to do, you can win a lifetime license to stencils, and honestly, having used it many, many times.
It's great. So just go fill that out. There is an opt in box at the bottom. You would like to hear more from us. WP Builds newsletter, but it is unchecked by default. So if you leave it on checked, we won't pass to you anymore. In fact, I firmly promise to just expunge all of these emails and, and anything that you send to me within a few days of finally deciding on the winner and the winner will be decided on the 23rd of August.
Also very nice. Sometimes you open up your social media and discover that somebody has written something nice. And this week it's freemium, they have a blog post all about the top 14 YouTube channels for plugin and theme developers to follow and write. They're fairly near the top below WP elevation. And of course freemiums itself is WP Builds.
So I'd just like to give them a bit of a shout out to say, thank you for mentioning us. Uh, so very much appreciated. And also just to say that WP Builds, we will be having our live news on Monday, but also we'll be having our zero to 10 K installs with Sabrina. Just a little re mention of that as well. So that's upcoming this week.
The next section is the job section. I don't have any jobs for you this week. I haven't been on the prowl for them in all honesty. I've been trying to achieve other things, but as always, I have created a job submission form. And if you are working in the WordPress space in your company, or you hear about a job, please go and fill out that form and I'll make sure to mention it next week.
That's sort of the word prestige stuff I've got for you this week, but don't go away. I've got a couple of things in terms for you that are not WordPress, but useful. Anyway, this one actually feels very WordPress, but I'm going to mention it because it specifically isn't WordPress and we're back at WP Tavern, automatic relaunches P to self hosted version on the roadmap.
So P two is automatics. Internal tools for kind of collaboration and communication between their colleagues and yeah, they've, they've had a bit of an update. They've added some new features and really spruced it up a little bit. But what's interesting about this is that they're mentioning that they're probably going to have a self hosted version coming.
Eventually it says with this launch version behind us, the PT. we'll turn to this, but don't have a timeline yet. So if you need some kind of tool for this, you can get a free version. I understand that you get three gigabytes of storage for that storage is for things like images and files and so on. You can find that [email protected], but if you want to have the self hosted version, you never know it might be coming down the tracks fairly soon.
And the last bit I've got for you this week is just so bizarre. A tick tock has 45 days to sell or get out of the USA. So tick tock, I confess I have no insight into how tick tock works. I feel like a bit of a Luddite when people mentioned things like this. But the, the article over on search engine journal says presidential executive order bands, tick tock within 45 days, American, he has hope a deal with Microsoft will save an important source of traffic.
Now I'm not going to get into the politics, obviously. But it has been decided that unless tickets has been bought by an American company, it's going to shut down the access. Presumably only to American users. Don't quite know how that will work for the VPNs and things. Presumably there'll still be some access, but politics are writ large all over this.
But if you're using tick tock and you're based in America and you're using it for marketing, this might be a point of concern. Right. That's all right. I've got for you this week. I hope you found it useful. As I mentioned at the top of the show, if you did, please go and share it. Use the black buttons on the WP, build stock on website underneath the podcast player, or just use your own initiative at WP Builds.
If you're on Twitter would be most helpful, but just go anywhere and everywhere and, and help us out. That would be most kind. The WP Builds weekly WordPress news. This is brought to you today by Kinsta. Kinsta takes managed WordPress hosting to the next level. Powered by the Google cloud platform site is secured like Fort Knox and runs on speed, obsessive architecture.
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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 parts it works with elemental Beaver builder and the WordPress block editor. Check it out and get a free [email protected]. Okay, that's it.
Thanks for you joining us. Maybe we'll see you at some point during the week, Thursday for the podcast Monday for the news, Monday later, 2:00 PM for the live news and Tuesday where Sabrina and I talk about plugins, have a good week. Stay safe. Bye bye. For now.