WP Builds Weekly WordPress News #130 – WordPress 5.5.1, The Page Builder Summit and Linux is 29

Hello there. And good morning to this. The WP Builds weekly WordPress news. This is number 130. It covers the WordPress news for the week commencing the 31st of August, 2020. And it was published on Monday the 7th of September, 2020. My name's Nathan Wrigley and a slightly longer than usual bit of housekeeping at the beginning, because I've got something I'd like to announce.
The first thing to say is as always head over to WP Builds.com over there, you'll find everything that we produce. There's lots of WordPress content podcasts. Come out on a Thursday. We've got this, the WordPress news every Monday, the live version of the WordPress news. Is it 2:00 PM UK time? Yeah. and you can find that in our Facebook group, WP Builds.com forward slash Facebook WP Bell's dot com forward slash live.
If you choose to go that way instead this week, I'll be joined by Paul Lacey Anshan LaRue and Leo Mindell. So that's 2:00 PM UK time also. 2:00 PM UK time on Tuesday at those same URLs, I'll be joined by Sabrina Zeidan because we'll be talking about part seven of our plugins startup, zero to 10 K installs.
We've had a bit of a hiatus for summer, and I actually had to cancel last week because of various things. So hopefully we'll be back on track this Tuesday, 2:00 PM. WP belts.com forward slash subscribe. If you'd like to keep up to date with everything that we do, there are forms on that page. There are ways to find our Facebook group, Twitter channel, basically everything we'd very much appreciate it.
If you shared WP Builds with the Twitter at WP Builds, if you're on the Twitter, but any which way that you choose to share, it would be most grateful. We do actually have a competition on at the moment. So that's at WP Builds.com forward slash win. It's. Three pro annual premium yeah. Licenses for the translation plugin.
We gloss. So WP bells.com forward slash, or when you can find that you've got to enter one of those viral contests, the more that you share it, the more chances you have of winning, but yeah, three pro licenses for week, lot for a year. The next thing to say is if you're looking for a deal this week on WordPress products, look no further than WP Builds.com forward slash deals.
It's a page rammed full of WordPress deals, creators of products, founders, and so on have reached out to me and given me significant coupon code. So it's searchable filterable, WP Builds.com forward slash. Deals, you might be able to find something if you're in the market this week. And the final piece that I wanted to announce this week is that I've launched something with Anshan LaRue, who was on the news.
As I said on Monday called the page builder summit, I'm going to direct you to summit.camp. Yes, that is a URL. So HTTPS colon forward slash summit dots camp. And over there, you'll be able to see what. I consider to be a pretty amazing speaker list. If you're into using page builders, if you've got one that you particularly like, or if you're just curious about what they can do, that could be Beaver builder element or divvy, breezy, oxygen or Gothenburg, we've got loads of speakers from all over the WordPress page, builder, community expert.
Shall we say, speaking about what it is that they do and how they're going to, how they're going to increase your speed of website building, possibly teach you some tricks along the way. It's a completely free event. So head over to that URL, once more it's summit to.camp and you can sign up for free. I'm really pleased with the way it's turning out.
I honestly didn't expect the speaker list to be quite as Epic as it is. I'm sure once you've had a look at it on that page, you will agree. Like I say, sign up. It should be good fun. I'm hoping that Anshan and I will be able to pull off a nice event, but your support would be greatly appreciated. The WP Builds weekly.
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You'll get 60 days at Kinsta dot com. And by the aforementioned page builder summit, do you use a page builder to create your WordPress sites or perhaps you're curious about what they can do, whether it's element or I have a builder Gutenberg, breezy oxygen, or any of the other page builders, the page? the summit we'll have something for you.
It's running from the fifth to the 9th of October, 2020, and you can check out the amazing speakers list and get your free place at HTTPS. Colon forward slash summit.camp. Okay. Sorry for the extended housekeeping, but I did want to tell you about the summit. I'm really quite chuffed about the way it's turned out.
So forgive me for that intrusion. Let's get on with the new showy. Each week we divide our news up into different sections. And every week we start with a WordPress core, two pieces covering the exact same subject. The first one is [email protected]. It's a piece entitled WordPress 5.5 0.1 maintenance release schedule.
And this is now old news because hopefully by now, if you've updated to five, Point five. You're now on 5.5 0.1. And this one was just simply highlighting the fact that this will be a short release schedule, meaning it will happen very quickly because of the nature of the problems that arose with the 5.5 release.
And the second URL relating to the exact same subject is Sarah Gooding writing on WP Tavern, WordPress 5.5 0.1 release with backfill for deprecated JavaScript, script globals. And so there were 34 fixes for enhancements and a five. Fixes specifically for the block editor, 19 legacy Java script localization objects were removed in favor of new functions in utilities found in the aisle eight and package introduced in WordPress 5.0.
It seems that a lot of, themes and popular plugins were impacted. And the following list is what Sarah Gooding mentions Astra storefront. Hastia were some popular themes, but also some popular plugins which included, ACF advanced custom fields site origins, widget bundle amp for WP WooCommerce services, oceans, extra and rank math, SEO combined.
It was an awful lot of people that were affected. And so hopefully this fix has sorted all of that out. Three weeks after WordPress 5.5 was released. The enabled jQuery migrate helper plugin has received 100,000 plus installs. This is something that hopefully we can remove in time. Anyway, this is needless to say, Something that had to be rushed through because of the problems that people are experiencing.
And I'm basically just saying, if you're on WordPress 5.5, why not just immediately update them to 5.5 0.1 to mitigate the problems found thus far failed to mention that the site maps, XML, pagination incorrectly has been fixed as well. That's at the bottom of Sarah Gooding's article. The next section is the community section.
And I've got quite a few pieces for you today. I don't quite know how many times I can bang this gong, but I'm going to put it in one more time. Anyway, I have launched with Anshan LaRue, the page builders summit. If you head over to summit.camp, which yes is a URL, you can find a sign up form. It's a completely free event.
There will obviously be some additional options to pay for content, but we'll. We'll come to that in due course, but I would urge you to just go and look at the list of speakers. We, I feel have covered the bases really well. We've got speakers from all over the WordPress page, building community, many of the names that you'll recognize, I'm sure some of them may be new to you, but we've got a lot of the page builders covered.
It's an event entirely focused on page builders. So if you're curious about tips and tricks, what other page builders can do, how you can implement. Quicker processes in your WordPress page, builder website, building business. Then why not sign up completely for free and attend live? It's the fifth to the 9th of October.
I shall not mention this again until the ads, the end. Actually that last sentence was a complete lie because it's a curse to me that the next piece has a tangential relationship. This is lovely. This is WP a year in review, or should I say WordPress a year in review? You can find [email protected].
And this is Joe Casabona. No, who is actually in the page builder summit doing a talk. He is hoping to put out a project called the year in review and it's going to be really interesting. Now the idea is that yeah. it will be a project with all sorts of different threads and it will help you understand what has happened during the previous year in WordPress.
Now, Joe always innovative, always creating content is astonishing to me. I follow his stuff mostly, and he puts out major things really frequently. And this is another one. And this page is him trying to. To get some help pulling this whole project off. Now, hopefully if he does pull it off, you'll have tons of really cool WordPress content about the whole of the previous year.
But in order to make it worthwhile, he's funding it. And that's what this page is for. You can show your support for $2. You can gain early access to the whole thing for $5 and you can get an actual physical book for $19. So just a lovely little project. And at the moment he's managed to raise $1,123, which is fabulous.
Hopefully with this, we can bump that up a little bit more, but anyway, the point is it's there. It's going to be a very useful resource. And so go check out the URL link in the show notes. With great regularity. These days, we seem to be talking about one word, press, company, or company buying up another word press company.
And we have something about that. This time around two pieces. One of them is from the sand Hills dev.com website, a piece entitled to a long, bright future for restrict content pro with our themes and liquid web. And the other one is from the ICMs website simply called restrict content pro is joining the themes family.
And this is to say that Pippin over at Sandhills development has decided to sell restrict content. I know that a lot of you are using it, this product. And so there will be great interest about what's going to happen in the future and how it's going to be maintained. But the Pippin piece really talks about the fact that.
Go back about a year. He had no intention of selling this, but he's always built his business based upon the fact that one of three things can happen to a business one. Yeah. For them is that it fades away and dies. One is that you just keep it going. And the other one is that you sell it off and somebody else takes it over.
And so he's always. Built his businesses with that in mind. So for example, having separate accounts for, things like payments and so on, and he's decided after an email in October, 2019 from liquid web, that he's going to sell it to them. He put a great deal of thought into this, but he feels that it's.
Time to let it go. Now, the questions around this will be many, I'm sure people will be worried about what the future is and why I themes are to be a trusted custodian of this. And for that, then I would direct you to the other link from our themes and why they believe they're a good fit. And also, what does it mean?
In terms of how it's going to be going forward, as you might expect that hoping that there'll be very little change and that everything will carry on as normal, but, and have a look at those two pieces. I would definitely urge you to do that. If you've been using restrict content pro. Now there's a heavy caveat on the next one, because I can't say I've watched any of the tutorials or any of the videos involved in this, but I just came across it.
And I just thought it was such a lovely initiative, which on the face of it, as far as I can see, appears to be completely free. It's [email protected] and I've actually linked to a particular lesson called introduction to block patterns, just because that's something that's of interest to me at the moment.
But this is a whole suite of maybe, I don't know, 10, 15 videos, something like that. Explaining how the Gutenberg editor can be used. Hopefully to enable us all in the future to have full control over our WordPress websites in the block editor. Like I say, I've linked to the block patterns. One. I do the delivery.
It's very calm and easy to follow, but it's just a, what appears to be a wonderful resource. As I said, I've only watched this one video. So maybe if you've gone through it and found it to be useful, you could leave a comment in the post or perhaps in the Facebook group, that would be helpful, but certainly worth checking out if you're into Guttenberg and want to see what the future looks like.
This next one is quirky and a lot of fun. It is over on WP Tavern. Sarah Gooding, writing WordCamp, Austin opens call for musicians. So WordCamp Boston, which is an online event is taking place in 2020. But Austin being a city famed for its live music has decided that they're going to well sprinkle some music.
In between the sessions, which I just think is absolutely great. So you can apply for this. If you succeed, you can either try to perform your songs live. I don't quite know if I would dare to do that. Where I, in abandoned case of the technical gremlins came out or you can pre-record it and send it over.
You've got a chance of. Performing two to five songs and it will, as I said, be between sessions. It's just such a nice idea. And in this case, it just sets it out, sets this event apart and just makes it just that little bit more interesting and certainly a bit more of a reason to hang on in between sessions.
Well done word camp Boston. A few weeks ago on the WordPress podcast, we had Sebastian on from word proof.io. Now word proof is a blockchain technology to enable you to prove categorically, that things that you published were in fact published in the exact form in which you are claiming they are published.
So this might be really useful. So for example, for legal documentation published on your WordPress website, anyway, they won an EDU award for a million. Euros, to advance this technology and it has ramifications for SEO in the future. Allegedly, I'm not quite sure how that pans out, but because of that, the guys over at Yoast have decided to take a stake in.
Word proof. And so I've got an article entitled founders, Yoast SEO, take a stake in WordPress to push timestamp relevance for SEO results. You can find a link in the show notes, and if this kind of stuff really does appeal to you, I feel in the future, the way that. we constantly seem to be bombarded in the news with fake news, fake this deep fake this and that may be something like this technology is going to be incredibly important in the future.
And whether it's word proof to running that or something else in the future. I don't know, but this kind of proof, unequivocal proof seems really interesting and obviously Yost from an SEO point of view, want to jump on board? So a nice amalgamation, very well done, Sebastian. Let's talk about WPM you devs hosting just for a moment or two very briefly.
I'm going to say that they have a hosting platform. And their bronze accounts, which is their sort of starter version. They've increased the storage by 50%. They've got an article [email protected] in titled Brahms hosting. Now with 50% more SSD storage, and they say we have dramatically increased the hosting storage available for our bronze starter plan previously, it was 10 gigabytes, and now it's a healthy 25 gigabytes.
To me, it feels like 150% more storage rather than 50%, but I could be wrong. Maybe my master's is misguided there. Anyway, the point is, if you're on WPM, you'd have storage. You have suddenly gained a chunk more data for free. And if you're not, then maybe this is something you want to look at. Now I suspect the next one will be a bit of an edge case right now, but in the future, this may be something that blows up.
It's a piece on WP Tavern, just in Tadlock writing WordPress plugin authors should avoid confusing users when naming blocks. Now, this story comes from the fact that Genesis had bought atomic blocks and they had a B AKA, atomic. Yeah, good blocks at the beginning of their buttons and various other blocks.
So it said a B. Button AEB accordion and so on. they decided that they would remove the AEB from the beginning of this, because it just seemed to be extraneous, something that wasn't really used. So they did this, but they didn't put it in their public change log. They merely added some information in the GitHub code commits.
Now the problem occurred later when somebody who was named in the article, Marcus Timisoara. Started using the AEB button block, but he assumed it was the Guttenberg default button. So he used it liberally. What's worse. Is he on installed atomic blocks? Didn't feel he needed to use it. And then the problem, as you can imagine occurred, he'd been spreading the buttons liberally throughout his site.
Assuming they were core gotten bogged buttons, but they weren't. And so he had a bit of a cleanup job. Now this raises the question in the future. If we have collisions like that, This where particular blocks have exactly the same name. How on earth are we going to know? What's what. One possible solution is to enforce all block authors to perhaps prefect.
Yeah. It's that blocks with something. I feel, it might be a nice idea to group all blocks in a kind of mandatory way underneath some kind of, heading. So for example, atomic blocks, although deprecated would, everything for atomic blocks would only exist under an atomic block heading, but maybe just putting a B or stack for stackable or.
Quigley for QB blocks and so on. Might be a good idea. Anyway, we'll see, there is a, an instance of a prototype of a block and management area, which gives you some sort of indication whether you've used a particular block. It shows whether there is an instance count. So in this case, he would have shown the number of times the AEB button had been deployed.
But that's not quite out yet. Anyway. Just be careful out there. If you're using blocks liberally and you're uninstalling blocks and so on and so forth, you might need to be mindful of exactly what's happening, where, and maybe we need rules about this in the future. Speaking of blocks. The next section is plugins themes and blocks.
And just some quick updates. I'm going to do this very quickly. Oxygen. The page builder has released a version 3.5 and you can find Elijah Mills's video. He's always fabulous at creating videos and Oh goodness, I'm going to do it again. He's also one of the people in the page, but the summit. So apologies for mentioning that one small.
He has. Put together this lovely video, which basically sets out what's new in oxygen 3.5 to summarize, copy to clear for selectors custom attributes for elements, 15 bug fixes and three tweaks. And you can find a very nicely put together article explaining all about that link in the show notes. If you are a user of Eric hams cobalt apps products, you'll be pleased to know that there are some updates, Genesis dev kit, extended pro and Thema pro updates.
The title of the article from Eric, the highlights are extended. The pro and Thema pro now supports new popular WordPress theme, frameworks and Genesis dev kit. Now offers a new tablet view in addition to the already available mobile and desktop use. Also both Genesis dev kit and theme approach. Now include the latest Genesis theme.
Sample theme, I should say version 3.3 0.1. There's a whole heap more over on the change log things that he's added, things that he's changed and bugs that you squashed so well done. Eric, anybody using those products go and check it out. Okay. We'll commerce for a few minutes over on Bob WP, new WooCommerce developer resources portal is live and Bob is simply.
Highlighting the fact that there is the new WooCommerce developer resources section, and he's got a great big screenshot, which just shows that everything is basically being organized and curated better to help them developers find exactly what they need. They're a short cuts and you can, it gives you even tighter accessibility to the resources.
So go and check it out. It's just a demonstration of how it's laid out and sure. A WooCommerce dev probably quite important to know. Any Jetpack users out there, be pleased to know. There's an iteration mentioned by Justin on WP Tavern, Jetpack 8.9 outs donation, block newsletter form unsocial preview. So exactly that we have a new social network.
Preview for posts. We have a new sign up newsletter form, which looks rather nice and a very simple donations block as well. So if you're a Jetpack user, they article probably tell you a couple of minutes to read, and it just announces all of the new releases. There's also support for the amp plugin, which has actually been a collaboration over six months between Google and automatic directly.
So that would hope, but one would hope that would work extremely well. We mentioned Yost just a few minutes ago in terms of word proof, but I'm just going to mention that they've released 14.9 and updates to their plugin, which includes Polish word forms, Hebrew key phrase recognition as well.
Anybody using Yoast SEO will probably have gone to their websites. There is a link in the show notes outlining exactly how these features work and exactly why you might want to use them. The last one in the plugins themes and block section, it's just a video over on YouTube. It's the guys who were behind Ninja tables and fluent forms.
They've got a new product, which as far as I can see is completely free. It's called Ninja sharps. And this video is about two minutes long and it explains how you can do, for example, get data from tables and push them into beautiful charts. You can imagine every conceivable type of chart. So bar charts and pie charts, and all manner of.
Donuts and so on and so forth, beautifully styled just looks really nice. And if you are using their products already, there's obviously going to be some synchronicity of getting the data from one to the other. Very nice indeed. Nice little update. And if you need charts, this might be a good place to start, especially as it appears to be free.
WP Bell's dot com forward slash deals is a good place to look for deals. And I've listed a few in the show notes because time is running short. I won't mention them, but just to say, if you are looking for some plugins yeah, deals go and have a look in the show notes, but then go to WP Builds.com forward slash deals to find out more now friends of the podcast, Andre Gagnon and Kyle Vanduzen.
They've got a new product and they're doing a launch giveaway. It's called docket WP. And it's a way that you can add notes into your WordPress install. It's actually incredibly useful. you might want to go and look at it, but what I'm linking to specifically, is there a launch giveaway they're giving away three winners will be chosen at random the day before docket WPS official launch and notified via email to the address provided above.
So basically put your name and your email in, and you've got a chance of winning a free annual license. We're on the home straight. Now the last few things are security and we always do a light touch on this, but this is Wordfence 700,000 WordPress users affected by zero day vulnerability in the file manager plugin.
This was discovered on the 1st of September, 2020. A patch was released on the 1st of September 20, 20 as well, but obviously that's a huge spread of plugins, 700 the thousand, an awful lot of people. So if that name rings a bell, go and get yourself checked out very quickly. WP Builds the amazingly self promotional bits.
We did a podcast this week with Gustin Paul from we gloss, as I said, at the top of the show, we're doing a giveaway with them. Three licenses, WP Builds.com forward slash win. But on the podcast this week, he explains how we got works, why they started, which platforms it works with. And it's not just WordPress.
It works with a surprisingly large amount of other platforms. Do you have any need to translate a word, press websites then we'd lot certainly should be in the mix of plugins or solutions that you're looking for. And listening to this podcast about 45 minutes would be a good introductory one Oh one as to why that plugin is there and how it works.
Okay. The job section, I've got three jobs for you this week. Go WP need a growth manager. It says, go to all your peers, looking for an experienced digital agency professional to join our growing team. In this role, you'll be meaningfully able to contribute to our company culture and growth, and then it goes on more and more about that.
But if you fancy the job of growing go WP, they're looking for somebody full time. Another one available is. LearnDash are looking for a customer support specialist says, do you enjoy it? The satisfaction of helping someone solve a problem? Are you the go to person for tech support for family and friends?
While if so, maybe you could help learn dash as a customer support agent. And the last one is a content lead. This is scale, Matt. And obviously in this job, you'll be looking at creating content to promote their products and services. So that scale, my so three jobs for you this week and the final piece today is the not WordPress, but useful anyway, subject matter.
And it is to say that, happy birthday Linux. The thing that we certainly couldn't live without in the WordPress community has turned 29. It says. 29 years ago on August the 25th, 1991, 21 year old Finnish students, Linus Torvalds made his now famous announcement on the comp dot O S dot mimics newsgroups saying that he was working on a free operating system.
Four three eight, six four eight, six 80 clones, just as a hobby. we know where that hobby went to. It ended up with things like WordPress that we're now able to have for free. Hat tip to Lee Lynn, us, I should say, is it Linus or Lenise? I think is probably Linus. Anyway, thank you. Deep gratitude for all of the things that have been done with Linux over the years.
Righty. Hope that's all I've got for you this week. I hope that you enjoyed it. If you did, please share it. I would be most grateful if you did share it in any which way you like, but if you use Twitter at WP Builds is most helpful. The WP Builds 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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At Kinsta dot com and the page welder summit. Do you use a page builder to create your WordPress sites or perhaps you're curious about what they can do, whether it's elemental, Beaver, builder, Gutenberg brizy oxygen, or any of the other page builders, the page builder summit will have something for you. It's running from October the fifth to October the ninth, and you can check out the amazing speaker list and get your free [email protected].
Okie dokie. Join us at 2:00 PM UK time for the live version of this. As I said at the top of the show, I'm going to be joined by Paul Lacey and Leo Mindel 2:00 PM UK time. Same addresses, WP belts.com forward slash alive, or WP Bill's dot com forward slash Facebook. You can join me in Sabrina's is zit Dan, I should say, talking about plugin.
Installs and trying to get interest in our plugins. that's all I've got for you this week. I hope you enjoyed it. Bye bye. For now.