WP Builds Weekly WordPress News #127 – WordPress 5.5 released, Astra upset and Fortnite blocked

This weeks WordPress news – Covering The Week Commencing 10th August 2020:

WordPress Core

WordPress 5.5 “Eckstine”
and
WordPress 5.5 “Eckstine” Introduces Block Directory, Block Patterns, and Automatic Updates for Themes and Plugins

Gutenberg 8.7 Adds Minor Changes, Updates Block Pattern Designs, and Continues Full-Site Editing Work

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Major jQuery Changes on the Way for WordPress 5.5 and Beyond


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Community

A Non-Technical Release Lead’s Journey to Becoming a Mentor for WordPress Core Development

Astra Theme Suspended and Reinstated, Themes Team Works Toward Delisting Strategy for Guideline Violations

New WordPress Plugins Disable Unsplash CDN
and
Pexels: Free, Unrestricted-Use Images

Page Speed: What We Learned By Analyzing 1,500 Agency Websites

WP Engine Pledges Five for the Future

Struggles of Remote Work Half a Year Into the Pandemic

Plugins / Themes / Blocks

Convert Reusable Blocks to Block Patterns with 1-Click

An Improved Server Side Render Component for Dynamic WordPress Blocks

Content Ticker for Beaver Builder – PowerPack for Beaver Builder

Elementor Pro v3.0 Beta 2 Release

Deals from this week

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Security

Critical Vulnerabilities Patched in Quiz and Survey Master Plugin

WordPress Vulnerability News, August 2020

WP Builds

192 – WordPress V other blogging platforms

WordPress Podcasts to Help Grow your Agency (2020)

Jobs

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Not WordPress, but useful anyway…

Apple boots Fortnite from the App Store after Epic adds direct payments


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Transcript (if available)

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Nathan Wrigley: Hello, and good morning. Welcome to this. The WP Builds weekly WordPress news. This is number 127. It covers the WordPress news for the week commencing the 10th of August, 2020. And it was published on Monday the 17th of August, 2020, my name's Nathan Wrigley. And just before we begin the usual housekeeping, if you wouldn't mind heading over to.
WP Builds.com over there. You'll discover that we produce quite a lot of content in the WordPress space. We produce a podcast episode on a Thursday. You're listening to the Monday weekly WordPress news, and then every Monday at 2:00 PM UK time, you can find us in our Facebook group or over at wpbuilds.com forward slash alive.
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Let's get on with the new show shall we. Each and every week we divide our WordPress news up into different sections. And we begin as always with WordPress core. This week is a significant week because every so often we get a major release of WordPress. And this feels like one of those we've rolled onto WordPress 5.5, which is code named Eckstein after the jazz musician, Billy Eckstine, it does have an awful lot.
Packed into it. And we'll unpack that in a moment, just to say that in the show notes, I've linked to two articles, one by Matt Mullenweg [email protected], which is a slightly slower, the smaller version and one by Sarah Gooding over at work, WordPress Tavern, but they both cover. Yeah. The exact same thing.
And so, yeah, very major release. There's an awful lot going on here. It seems out in Twitter land and in the Facebook groups, a few people are experiencing some, some issues perhaps with things like JavaScript and so on, but maybe have a cautious approach to updating. I know quite a lot of my friends decided to wait a little while and see how it goes and possibly even wait for.
WordPress 5.5 0.1, but you decide for yourself, maybe get it on a testing environment and see, but the notable takeaways this time around in 5.5 are speed posts and pages feel faster, thanks to lazy loaded images. So in the past, you've always had to have some sort of JavaScript solution and now images will become lazy loading in or itself, which is really nice.
Also, you've got a new. Site map, which is part of WordPress core. Previously, you would have had to implement some kind of third party solution, perhaps an SEO plugin or a sitemap plugin. But now you have your XML site map in case did as part of core, it may be that there's some Fiddler to do. So if you've been using a site map, perhaps you need to go and switch that one off or indeed switch the WordPress.
One off. I noticed that there's a few plugins already. Coming around the corner, which, uh, the intention of which is simply to switch off the WordPress version so that you don't get a conflict. You might've put a lot of time into getting your, your plugin working your XML site map really well. Also some security things.
This is a really major thing. Probably the, one of the biggest things I think in this release. And that is to say that you can now auto update to plugins and themes. Now it's set to. Off by default, that is to say nothing will be updated automatically unless you instruct it to, which seems like, okay.
Sensible position to be in, who knows what will break in the next few days. And so what you have to do is go to, well, let's take plugins as an example, go to the plugin section of your WordPress menu. And then over on the right hand side, you've got automatic updates, which is a new, a new column in your table there.
And you just click through one at a time. There is also the option to, to go to the bulk actions section and just decide by ticking boxes or indeed ticking them all that you want to update them all. So that's really nice. It's done off WordPress chrom. So this I believe is going to happen twice a day. So it's not completely Bulletproof.
If there is some major security floor in something you may still need to go in and fix things ASAP, but twice a day is far better than nothing. Just be mindful of the fact that you will have to keep monitoring the sites possibly more. If you choose to implement this option, but going forward, hopefully it will.
Well, it will encourage plugin developers to be extra specially careful when they release their plugins because obviously many, many sites will now just automatically get those updates within a 24 hour period. There's also some things that have happened inside the block editor. And this is again, another supremely major thing.
We now have block patterns inside of the block editor. And that is to say that you can have. Preconfigured layouts. So I've made the example before it might be a testimonials block or something like that, where several blocks have been put together to, to create something that you desire to have. So testimonials or a hero section at the top of the website, this is just the very beginning.
I can only imagine what people are going to do with this in the days, weeks, and months to come, it feels like this really opens up the possibility for Guttenberg to become a page builder. And you never know. Yeah from now, we may see this as a page builder of choice for many people. Also, we've talked about it before.
There's a new blocks directory. The, the article says, now it's even easier to find blocks. You need the new block directory is built right inside the block editor. So if you're missing something and you know the name of it, you can just, just go and search for it. Perhaps you can search for a key word.
Perhaps you need a hero section or a testimonials block. You can search and install it. Right inside the block editor that, so there's no need to go anywhere else. So the idea of Gothenburg very much just to keep everybody on that page and use that page for the whole process, really as much as possible.
And so that's now that obviously caveat emptor, don't go installing a billion different blocks just because you're trying to do one thing, perhaps be a little bit more thoughtful. Maybe do a little bit of searching before you put them all in, but nevertheless, it's there and it's a fantasy I stick out on, less clicking, less moving from.
One menu to another. And probably from the point of we have clients just a little bit more functional. So you've got inline image editing. So you have the ability now to crop rotate, zoom and position images just as you like them. Something, which I'm sure a lot of people do. So you'll upload an image into the editor and then just sort of move it around and zoom in.
It's very intuitive using the controls on the right hand side, really like. That, um, also accessibility improvements. You can now copy links in media screens and modal dialogues with a button, instead of trying to find them with highlighting text, you can also move meta boxes with the keyboard and edit images in WordPress, if your assistive device, which is really nice.
And there's quite a few things for developers as well. Service side, registered blocks in the rest API. You'll be able to define your environment, be that staging production or so on with get, sorry. WP gets environments type and execute only the appropriate code. When you're fiddling with a WordPress website, the dash rock icons library has received them.
Date, it's gone too. I don't know the version actually, but we've now got 39 icons available, which is really nice. And you can also pass data to template files. There's a whole bunch more stuff. That's all listed on mats mats article and at the bottom, he mentions well and lists by name the 805 contributors who have pulled.
1,660 requests on get hub and worked on over 523 track tickets. Sarah Gooding over in her article mentions that 38% of those 805 people. Yeah. We're actually new contributors. So almost 40%, a huge amount just contributing first time. There's a little bit more detail and certainly more screenshots of what all this looks like on the WP Tavern article.
So it's honestly, it's worth checking out both of them. Yeah. Um, but they, they cover broadly the same content, but like I say, screenshots in the top of ups have an article. This is a fabulous update, long awaited. We've been talking about this for ages and really getting into the features. I'm really hoping that everybody embraces it.
It's utterly brilliant. We continue along a similar vein this time, just talking about Guttenberg just in Tatlock again on WordPress Tavern. Guttenberg 8.7 adds a minor changes, updates, block patterns, design, and continues full site editing work. So I don't know if you're aware, but you can install the Gutenberg.
Plugin. And although Gothenburg comes rolled inside of WordPress core, if you install the plugin, you'll be on the, well, the more bleeding edge shall we say, you'll be able to get the releases and updates and be able to see the kind of stuff that in this article, Justin is talking about there having. Been about 30 bugs bug fixes, should I say around a third of them were accessibility related.
There's going to be a whole lot more coming in the near future, but the things that Justin focuses on are the block pattern updates that he now feels that the block patterns are really usable. He was a bit of a. Well, a skeptical, should we say he wasn't entirely sure that it was going to be as good as it is largely that's because the fact that it exists, the designs that we're shipping, weren't really up to scratch, but he's, um, he just then has sort of backup tracks a little bit.
And he said, well, he's very happy that the things have been updated. He calls them a Bismal designs that were originally going to ship with 5.5. And it seems that with a little bit of fiddling. We, um, we have some Don Quixote type images pushed in there, which seems to have, seems to have alleviated his concerns.
So he's happy with those. There's also some experimental features, updates, much of the work has been done in the experimental areas towards post related blocks. However, Um, the, the post related blocks feature at the moment is basically on usable. He says that he goes in once a month and just checks to see, but sadly not there yet.
The intention is to push out a lot of full site editing capabilities within the next four months. Are you either now next word, press release. And it seems that Justin is not convinced that's going to happen. It just seemed like a very small amount of time. It would, would be Justin's opinion that we should wait until 20, 21.
Possibly I may be misreading that, but he's thinking it will be 20, 21 until we're really the existing features rival something like, I don't know, a page builder, like Beaver builder, a mentor or so on. We'll have to wait and see, but anyway, there you go. A few minutes, a few additions to Guttenberg 8.7 for you to look at.
The last piece in the core section I have for you is just in Tadlock. Again, a major jQuery changes on the way for WordPress 5.5 and beyond. So this is to say that well, we appear to be Luddites. We appear to be stuck in the past. J query is on a significantly older version than the version, which while I suppose is out here, the wild available for people to use, we're using a 2016 version, which believe it or not still offer support for internet Explorer, six, seven, and eight.
The reason for this is, well, I guess, compatibility with older things. There's also some kind of dependency in terms of themes as well, but the, the reason to keep this is becoming more and more tenuous. So the intention is over time is to get people up to the latest version of jQuery. And then hopefully at some distant point in the future, perhaps 2020.
Nine or something like that is to get jQuery removed together and have native, uh, native Java script code for WordPress. But that's a very, very big job. Same. So this article outlines the plan over the next few releases of work. Press for plugin and theme developers, to be able to, to migrate optimum or modern versions and test their plugins and their themes against these releases.
I won't bore you with all the details, but it's all to do with testing against test query updates, plugin, which has been created. Um, and so really, if you are in the plugin or theme business, this is something that you should read. See if you can push the version of jQuery forwards. And enable the team to, to get us onto a more modern version.
Next stop. The section is the community section and there's an awful lot in this week's community section. Let's start though on WordPress Tavern, Francesca Morano writes a nontechnical release leads journey to becoming a mentor for WordPress core development. Now, this is a very long piece, but it's a very, very worthwhile piece reading.
It's all about Francesca's journey from, well, she begins has a child with. Programming parents right up to when she was asked to be part of the release team for version 5.5, which we've just mentioned, she goes into great detail about how the, the whole release of WordPress is managed. All of the teams that are involved, the different cycles, how the kind of Slack groups and so on work.
It's really revealing. There's an awful lot of stuff in here that I didn't know. She talks about the. The fact that people have often got to do double and triple duty. People are working often as volunteers. Although sometimes as in her case, she has time committed by site ground, but there's an awful lot of volunteer work going on in here.
Um, and how it works, what the cycle looks like, what the release schedule looks like. And so on the fact that Matt, as. Is sometimes often misunderstood is not in fact kind of ultimately in charge of, of all the things that is to say, he's not the only person that gets to say what goes in. It's just a really interesting piece.
She's got a lot of concerns about the future for the project, how certain roles are filled, but those people never stepped down for those, from those roles, even though they are. Perhaps haven't been as interested recently as they once were, and that might put people off because those positions don't appear to be vacant.
Whereas if those positions were vacant, people might apply. She talks about the need for documentation. Basically she covers absolutely everything that you could possibly want to read in an article about the release cycle of WordPress. And she ultimately feels that. WordPress has a very bright future.
Absolutely, really, really vital pieces reading. If you're interested in any way about how WordPress is managed from the backend and how it's updated really good. WordPress news doesn't really have control oversees in it usually, but this week we had a controversy I'm going to have to tread on some eggshells here.
I feel, um, this piece of news could come from just about anywhere this week. That's dealing with WordPress news, but I'm going to pick the WordPress tab, an article by Justin Tadlock, Astra theme suspended and reinstated theme team works towards. D listing strategy for guideline violations. Now, unless you've been living under a rock, you probably, you probably are aware that the Astra theme was suspended.
Now it was suspended for let's just say affiliate links. Now, depending on how you look at this and the fact that they were using, uh, functions to put things into their theme for other popular plugins and, and whether or not they had agreements with those other things, logins, they, these are all moot points.
It's not really something I want to get into whether or not the technique that they used was allowed or not. It's really what the fallback is of this, but also the fact that sometimes these news. Stories take a little bit of a time to mature. What I mean by that is that it's very easy to, to have a, let's go get everybody and let's be, let's be really outraged immediately.
I think that kind of position is, is sometimes the case with WordPress and the community surrounding it. And sometimes I think it just needs a little bit of time. Give it a few days, see what comes out of it. And so on. Anyway, the Astra team for that violations, because as Justin said, yes, It is pretty clear that guide the theme review teams guidelines do ban affiliate links.
And to quote the phrase, themes are not allowed to have affiliate URLs or, or links. But as I mentioned, it was done in a sort of an interesting way. Um, they were banned, they were banned for five weeks. But there was an apology again, controversy around the apology and that the apology seems to have been edited now, whether or not the apology was edited because of the fact that they were then reinstated into the theme directory.
W what was the timing there, or whether or not the timing was just coincidence. And anyway, some of the things that were. Um, promised in the apology was then removed from the apology, but CJ, who we've had on the podcast, he says that all of the things included in that apology. We'll be forthcoming in terms of developer time to the WordPress project and so on and so forth.
But it didn't seem that it was appropriate to put in that apology again, depending on where you sit, you may see this as something a good, you may see this as something slightly unusual, but the point being that the team removed the theme for five weeks and then walked it back. And I think the, the reason for that was genuine concern expressed by the community.
What do we do when a plugin with a million installs, sorry. A theme with a million industry gets delisted, sorry, gets removed. In other words, we can't update that. And what if there was some amazingly sophisticated and really difficult to manage a zero day exploit that somebody had just tucked away? For the Astro theme.
Well, there's a problem because now nobody can update it. So it was reinstated. And then they found a way to, if you like delisted it involved a clever sort of hack of changing the dates and things, and it pushed it down in terms of the listings in the, in the repository. Um, and now we've got this idea that maybe this is maybe this is something that needs, needs more thoughts.
Maybe we need more guidance, more rules, more clear. Um, Clear compatibility between the different set of rules that the theme team have to follow, and the plugin team have to follow, or at least the different rules that are in existence. So maybe we need a D list idea and the idea being there that's the, the theme just sort of disappears from the directory.
Yeah. But it's still available for, for updates, you know? So basically, unless, you know, the URL of the theme in question, you're not really going to be able to find it. It's just removed, moved from being displayed on the dock. Oh, website. But if you've got it installed, you can still get up, please. Anyway, controversy upon controversy, I hashtag WP drama.
Um, interesting. Like I said, the debate got fairly heated. There were people coming in and from both sides, people saying, well, you know, it seems. It seems like this was something that was done and it was wrong and that the, the, the themes should be punished. Other people saying, well, yeah, you know, maybe it wasn't the best idea, but perhaps, um, a million people suffering as a result of this is not that great.
So we have this sort of halfway house and maybe that's where we need to go in the future. More clarity about the rules, more, um, more transparency on what would happen. Should you break these rules in the future? I'm sure there'll be more of these down the road, but, um, for now this one seems to be subsiding.
Well, goodness grief. I think I might've found a second controversy forest this week. Again, WP Tavern were cribbing a lot from them this week, just because everything seems to be so bundled up over there and terms of the core releases and so on. We've got an article entitled new WordPress plugins, disable Unsplash CDN.
So this story kind of broke. It feels like it was about a week ago now because Matt Mullenweg said, I quote, it's unclear why they. Unsplash want you to use their CDN and make that the default it's probably to support their new advertising business model and get analytics for it. Running a CDN is expensive.
We'll find out more about that in a minute, and if you're not paying for it, then you are the product. I would not be surprised if non splashed hotlinked images broke at some point in the future. Now Matt gave the Unsplash plugin, the official on. Plug in a, a one star rating because he didn't want people to, to feel that they had to use on splash CDN, because there is a business model behind it.
And obviously with data protection and so on, it may be important that you are not in any way, linking back to a CDN and disclosing data about what's happening on your website. Um, it costs. I'm on splashed. Allegedly, according to the article, it cost them somewhere in the region of about 42 and a half thousand dollars a month.
So we're looking at half a million dollars a year to run that CDN. And in response to this, we've got some plugins that have come out. We've got Tom Nowell, a plugin developer who was created a plugin called a disable on splash CDN, which does exactly as you'd expect it, um, downloads the images. I think the plugin automatically does this anyway.
Downloads the images to your media library and then serves them up from there automatically. Yeah. Whereas the plugin, I believe so downloads them, but by default it will serve them from the CDN. Now, obviously on the splash, we'll be gathering some data, but they're, they're doing this hopefully to mitigate the cost data about what's being looked at and so on possibly to, uh, to help their businesses going forwards.
But it also, I suppose, Serves up the correct size, depending on where it's being viewed on your website. So I can see arguments in both cases. Anyway, we have this new plugin, we have another minor controversy, so let's hope no more controller sees this week. Just a very quick mention and sort of related to the previous article, I suspect WP shouts have pushed this out because of the Unsplash thing that happened this week, they're saying Pexels, which is a free unrestricted to use image service.
A is a good option, possibly if you are worried about on splash and all of the things that we've just mentioned, there's probably a ton of different choices. I know that I can probably mention two or three different other ones, but anyway, I'm linking to the WP shout article where they say, well, try pixels instead.
Okay, next, we're going to the Conversio website. They have an article entitled page speed. What we learned by analyzing 1,500 agency websites. And they make the point that what do you do in lockdown, whether you can't go to the gym anymore. So let's examine 1500 websites from agencies in the U S UK and Australia to see which ones load the quickest.
And this is an article, basically all about speed. Touches on points like time to first bite page speed score, um, Dom loading time and all that kind of stuff. And yeah, it's exactly what you'd expect. They draw the conclusion, I suppose, not surprisingly that it would appear that agencies, larger agencies have quick loading websites, medium sized agencies have medium bloating websites and, and small freelance agencies.
Have a slower loading websites, I guess, probably to do with the constraints of time and budget and staff who can be dedicated to this. Anyway, they go through a long list. It's the usual thing of what it is that they did to test. And they declare a winner. The winner of their 1500 websites is lift SEO, which manages to have a fully loaded time of 360 milliseconds.
But wait, go and look at the webpage. It's got all of the impact of well. Absolutely nothing because it's plain text and the whole thing is 13 kilobytes in size. So it's a bit of a misnomer to claim it's the winner. I think they did it just for a year. And, um, and then they go on to it, Sam in some other successful sites and how you can do this on your own WordPress website.
I mentioned this initiative in the past, and I just want to make a nod to it again, because it's maybe something that your company is involved in, or maybe something you would encourage your company to be involved in. So I'm just really mentioning this too, to open some dialogue and it is to say WP engine over on their blog.
Got an article entitled WP engine pledges five for the future. W they've been doing this for a while now they're doubling down on this commitment, but the idea is, is the WordPress project is big. As we talked about with the Francesca Murano article, there's a lot of work to be done, largely done by volunteers.
And WP engine. I have taken the view that they will have 5% of company time given back to the WordPress project. Now, I don't know in what form that takes. So at what level of the company that takes and so on, but they've decided to do this. So this is a pledge five for the future, and it may be something that you.
If you're a, an agency owner would like to commit to clearly the project cannot survive without, uh, contributors and maybe having some sort of firm commitment, 5% kind of feels like an afternoon a week or a morning. A week is a, is a good way to go. Lost in the community section on article again, just in today's struggles of remote work, half a year into the pandemic.
It, this is a piece by Justin, which is on characteristically, very personal. And it talks about the fact that, uh, he has been a proponent of remote work for a long time. In fact, that seems like the pattern that has been established for many, many years in his life. And he was. Obviously quite keen for the, the virtues that he was able to espouse to his friends and relations.
And then more recently, um, he's been struggling I suppose, to understand why people were struggling to become remote workers until a recent episode in which one of his housemates was tested positive to COVID. This led to a situation in which they were continual interruptions and his nice routine was interrupted.
Um, during that two week process. And he's finally, I think, gained an understanding of what this w what the impact of being at home for people who are not familiar with it has been, I know for my parts, um, the. The fact that my children are constantly around her has really been incredibly difficult to accommodate Tinder.
We've got through it, but it has made homeworking, which is absolutely normal for me, a very interesting challenge. So he is saying that in the future, he does want remote work to be, to be the way that many people do it. He's a proponent still, but that his mindset has been changed. He also talks at the bottom about the fact that.
He was sharing this simply to illustrate his struggles with remote work and to open an invitation to people in our community to talk about it. And then, um, quite admirably, he goes on to mention big orange hearts, which many listeners will know I'm a big fan of and a big proponent. And I'm very keen for their work to gain as much notoriety as possible.
So you can go to big orange, heart.org. Should you have issues in this area? And there'll always be somebody there who you can talk to. Sometimes it feels like I work for the WordPress haven't because I'm linking to them again for the final time this week, Sarah Gooding, they've got so much good stuff over there.
That's why I linked to them all the time, convert to reusable blocks, to block patterns with one click. And this is a. Lovely new plugin, uh, created by Zomba T star dress. And the intention is that you can take your reusable blocks and simply convert them into block patterns. Now, the difference with a reusable block is that it's something that you've made and the intention is that you will.
Um, deploy it all over your website and any amendments that you make to it will then appear they live all over the place mandates correctly in the correct answer. It will then be updated all over the website. Yeah. So it might be useful. I don't know, for a, um, an upsale or something like that. But the, the idea of converting them over to block patterns is that you can then have them in the block patterns, interface in Gothenburg, and you can click and put them in and then edit them without having to worry about the, the, the fact that they're used elsewhere.
It's simply an individual instance block pattern, and it's really very useful. So go and check that piece out. I feel this news article is going on a bit it's really long this week because of the 5.5 release I'm going to be very quick from now on WP, go have an article entitled an improved service. I'd rent the component for dynamic WordPress blocks.
So if you're developing dynamic blocks, which have dynamic content and, um, the, the guy who's put this piece together feels that there's a sort of UI glitch the way it reflects it. Refreshes on the page. When you, you, you wish to, for example, the, his illustration is when you change the padding, it has to reload all that dynamic data and it can be a bit jarring.
So he's come up with a solution which just enables this to happen in a much less jarring way with a typical WordPress sort of spinning wheel. And it looks really nice. So very quickly mentioning that the next one is to say that the guy's over it. Power pack for Beaver builder have added a content ticker module.
Well, this is well, exactly what you would expect. It's a content ticket. It allows you to put stuff onto your WordPress website in a really nice UI. Um, and it can display things like recent posts, post images. Um, custom text, custom texts and images, and it just sort of sits probably at the bottom of your screen.
And you can scroll through the latest stuff. It's just, you know, very minimal way of showing the latest content. And the final one in this section is all about the fact that element or on Bita two of their 3.0, they are trying to get people to beat a test. The latest version we've talked about this extensively in the past, there is nothing.
Knew about the, the 3.0 release. It is just to say that they would like some beta testers for the next version. And the article over at GitHub explains how you can get involved. And really what you're trying to test out is their new theme builder. The way that they're hoping to get people to, to build entire WordPress sites in their one interface.
So be to, to go check it out. Next section is deals. And there are a couple of, couple of good ones. I think this week, the first one I want to mention is a stackable. Now stackable is a, a suite of WordPress blocks. It's like a premium offering. They've got a. Pricing starting at 69, and this is a lifetime deal that's for one site.
And then it goes up to one nine, nine is the top there's three tiers, but one nine, nine is the top. And that allows you on limited sites. That looks really nice. To be honest, I've got a few friends who are using it and who say it's been updated and what have you. There's also Quigley blocks officers like QB blocks, which is offering a similar thing.
It will it's though at $49 for the cheapest deal. Yeah. Ultimate, add-on sorry, essential ad-ons for element or give WP 20% off. There's a new coming soon and maintenance mode, a plugin that you can, uh, that you can use. Should you not wish to create your own coming soon and maintenance mode, pages, and other things like PWI for WordPress, which allows you to sort of fake.
Yeah, your WordPress website, being an app and having, having a button on your mobile phone, home screen, that kind of thing. So few deals in there, breezy plugin and cloud 15% offer as well. Right. I'm going to have to speed up even more. We're at 34 odd minutes at the moment, one piece of security news. And that is to say that over on the word fence blog, they are talking about quiz and survey, master plugin, a critical security vulnerability has been fixed 30,000 installs.
These floors made it possible for it. On authenticated attackers to upload arbitrary files and achieve remote code execution, as well as delete arbitrary files. Like a site's WP config file. Ouch. Okay. So no, and update, if that means anything to you and the web box WordPress of vulnerability news. August, 2020 Roundup is one of those scrollable ones where you can just find out by looking at the icons what's been, what's been hacked and, you know, from a security point of view is worth looking at this month.
There's only seven or eight on there. So I like to yeah. Security terms, which is nice. The next section is the blatantly promotional WP. You build bit, we did a podcast this week where we talked about whether WordPress was any good versus bad blogging platforms. I'm sure you know how this one turns out, but David and I took adversarial positions and we pitted ourselves against this question.
Should you use WordPress or are there instances where other platforms may be worth looking at? So for example, medium, what about micro blogging or just using Facebook or something like that? Have a listen to the podcast. You'll, you'll probably figure out where, but it was a lovely chat with David. And I would also like to say, thanks because this week we were actually featured on the go WP websites.
There's an article entitled WordPress podcast to help grow your agency. And remarkably, we come quite high up after, after do the Wu podcast by my friend, Bob, Don, who definitely deserves to be above us, I would say. And yes, we are featured on the go WP list of podcasts. So I'm just giving a nod to them and saying, okay, Thank you very much, indeed.
I really do appreciate the mention. WP Builds jobs, nothing for you this week, but as always, please, if you come across a job, please go to the form. .com forward slash jobs, click on the link in the show notes, and we'll put it on our website. Gratis. There is no cost. I'm just trying to be trying to be as helpful as possible, but, but nobody did that this week.
And in fact, nobody seems to be doing it at all. So I'll keep plugging away and hopefully somebody will get the message at some point, updates me with a, with a job offer. That would be nice. The non WordPress, but useful anyway, but right at the end, I'm keeping it short. One thing. Yeah. Apple and Google have fortnight off that app store, Epic the company who make the fortnights.
Well, the phenomenon that it is Fortnite. If you have children, you will know the enormous lengths that they will go to, to remove themselves from just about any social situation and to play Fortnite. Instead, the they've decided that they're going to set up their own store. That store is obviously nothing to do with Apple.
It's nothing to do with Google, but Google and Apple both want their cut. So instead of allowing it to carry on and taking money through their own store, Google and Apple have booted them off. Is this good? Is this healthy? Should they be allowed to do this? It's certainly within their terms and conditions, but fortnight is such a huge player.
You wonder if there might be something in this they're suing anyway. Thank you for listening to the podcast. Once again, I honestly sincerely really do appreciate it. Every lesson is most welcomed. The WP Builds podcast was 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 can access to the latest software and developer tools such as PHB seven SSH and staging environments. And the best part, their expert team of WordPress engineers are available 24 seven. If you need help, try a demo for free 60 days at Kinsta dot com.
And AB split test. Do you want to say it sets up your AB split test in record time, then 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. Buttons, images, headers rows, anything the best part. It works with element or Beaver builder and the WordPress blog editor.
Check it out at AB split. test.com. Okay. Join me and my guests for the live version of this news. 2:00 PM. UK time finders on Thursday for the podcast shares as much as you jolly were like, I would be most grateful for that. And hopefully we'll see you at some point during the next week. Bye bye for now.

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Nathan Wrigley
Nathan Wrigley

Nathan writes posts and creates audio about WordPress on WP Builds and WP Tavern. He can also be found in the WP Builds Facebook group, and on Mastodon at wpbuilds.social. Feel free to donate to WP Builds to keep the lights on as well!

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