WP Builds Weekly WordPress News #132 – Gutenberg 9.0, SkyVerge joins GoDaddy and The Ig-Nobel prize

Hello there. Good morning. And welcome to this. The WP Builds weekly WordPress news. This is number 132. It covers the WordPress news for the week commencing the 14th of September, 2020. And it was published on Monday the 21st of September, 2020, my name's Nathan Wrigley, and a few bits of housekeeping just before we begin head over to WP Builds.com.
That's our main website where we publish most of our WordPress related stuff. We do a podcast every Thursday, which is always about plugins and themes and WordPress. And we do this news, which you're listening to. Now that comes out on a Monday later on today, 2:00 PM UK time. You'll be able to find us we've in the WP Builds Facebook group, or you could go to WP Builds.com forward slash live.
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Absolutely loads over there and seemingly they never really expire. So that's WP Builds.com forward slash deals. Also I'd encourage you to join the summit that I'm putting on with Anchen le Roux. That's over at summit.camp. Yes. That is a URL summit.camp. It's called the page builder summit and it's starting on the 5th of October.
So not long now we've got a slew of the great and the good in the WordPress community. All talking about page builders. And ways in which you might be able to leverage page builders to increase your productivity. That's summit to.com. Please go and sign up. It's going to be a really great event. Got over 35 speakers speaking over five days and we would sincerely love to have you there.
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It's running from the fifth to the 9th of October, and you can check out the amazing speaker list and get your free place at summit dot Kemp. Okie dokie. Let's get on with a WordPress new, shall we. Each week we divide our WordPress news up into different sections. And as always, the first section is WordPress core.
This is a nice one. It's Sarah Gooding writing in WP Tavern, an article entitled Guttenberg 9.0 brings major improvements to navigation screen and query block. This looks really nice. if you haven't played too much, you're going to have to enable, the option to see experiments in Guttenberg. But if you do that, you're going to be able to fiddle with the new navigation block.
And this is a way of creating well menus navigations for your WordPress website. It's all done in the block editor. It looks really nice. You've got drag and drop option. So the takeaways are new headphones, toolbar components manage locations has been rewritten and is now a pop-over. Add new form has been rewritten and now appears in line in the tool bar.
And you can automatically add pages with a checkbox and a delete menu. Button has been rewritten and now appears in the blocking specter all in all. It looks really nice. It's very intuitive. It's still. As we say in the experimental stage, but it really is starting to take shape. And very soon you'll be able to do all of this inside a very intuitive interface.
The other thing which is also being included is the query block. This is another main focus for this release of Guttenberg 9.0. And it's taking a really big leap forward. You can search, you can filter by author there's support for order by date or title and there's support for tags as well. Test it locally.
I have to enable the experimental enable full site editing flag since it requires that in order to be displayed, but it looks really nice. A really, again, intuitive. Block-based way of having people order and search and filter through your WordPress posts. In this case, another thing to say is that the there's been included in the UI, the little, the bar that you invoke when you go into a block, the option to drag that block has now been included.
Previously. We only had little up and down arrow. It was actually possible to move there by dragging, but there was no indication in the UI. Now there's. Six little dots, which you can drag. It's the same sort of a UI component that you've seen all over the place for dragging. And that's, it's really nice.
So really good. The release also removes the Facebook and Instagram blocks from the inserter. Facebook will be dropping on authenticated. Oh, embed support, but we'll find out more about that later. The second and final piece in the WordPress core section is still on WP Tavern, just in Tadlock with a piece Gutenberg's custom spacing should be theme controlled.
And again, this is related to Gothenburg 9.0, which we just talked about. So this is to say that really just in his advocating for the fact that although he. Probably didn't think so at some points in the past, he thinks the option to add in custom spacing should be allowed within the block editor. And the reason for that is that if the block editor, as it currently exists is adding in.
In line styles, let's say as having some spacing of 20 pixels or something, and that's added in an inline way, then really we need the ability to modify this. And as WordPress is moving away from simply a platform for creating content, you set the theme up, stop worrying about it, and then just create content if it's going to be more of a design tool.
So you'll be able to create designs with the new theme features, which are coming down the road. Then it just makes sense to surface these somewhere in a visible and customizable UI. I completely agree. There's a lot more to this than meets the eye. Go and read Justin's article because he talks about the different thoughts that are at play here and why these permutations need to be given some consideration.
But it's a really nice piece. It'll only take you a minute or two to read. My next section is called WordPress community. And we're back with Sarah Gooding on WP Tavern, WordPress themes, directory adds a new dealer status for noncompliant themes. So this is an important step forward, and it just goes to show how the WordPress community can respond to things that happen and respond fairly quickly a few weeks ago while.
August the Astro theme was suspended for violations, which we covered in previous news episodes. But the problem was the theme team at that time, didn't really have, it didn't really have the correct tools to make a theme D listed and there is a difference here. They only have the option really to take it out of the thing directory.
And the problem with that is that with a theme such as Astro, which I was over 1 million installs, that means that you can no longer supply. Updates. And so for example, if there was a security problem, then that security problem would have existed in all of those installs until such times as it was restored in the wordpress.org theme repository.
Now we have an option simply to Remove it to D surface it from being listed. So it'll still be there. If you have an install of it, it will still be able to receive updates, but you won't be able to go out and find it through the theme directory. I'm guessing that if you've got the URL to hand, You will still be able to find it, but the way it works is this D list is only a factor available from a published state.
So a theme has to be already published. Realist will set it back to being published and delisted themes are excluded from site search. So like I say, it can't be found the guys over at the mile fell fail of this. They had a. Five months suspension. And it really, according to the article hit their revenue hard.
I think they took a 63% decline in the company's revenue for that particular theme. I'm guessing they had some sort of premium option on top, but so seems like a good way of telling off themes that disobey the rules, but without completely ruining it for all of the people who are using those themes.
So a nice piece. The next piece I've got for you. There are actually two links. There's one to the main article and there's one to a WP Tavern article. You can find those in the show notes, but it is to say that GoDaddy has acquired sky verge. Now sky verge is a company which works in the WooCommerce plugin space.
They've got an email marketing platform called Jilt and they've gone in cahoots with GoDaddy. They say on their piece, which is the main link in the website. That they've made a commitment that they're going to make the software so that you can still depend on it. They see that there's a lot of similarity between what go down.
Yeah. They see as the future of e-commerce and what they see is the future of e-commerce. And there'll be buildings out some new ones stuff, but they're committed to the support of their existing software lineup. just in Todd luck on his article on WP Tavern, it makes the point that's the. The company, as of the end of 2019, we're bringing in $350,000 per month.
So enormously successful product line. And we'll just have to see where this goes, but, yeah, sky verge, if you're using any of their products, the most notable being the WooCommerce stuff and Jilt, then you will have a new custodian for that, but hopefully things will stay pretty much as they are. For fear of getting involved in a controversy, I'm going to drop this piece and then firmly walk away from it.
It is an article on WP Tavern. Sarah Gooding has two pieces. One is a rebuttal from Milan wagon. One is the original one. First this one, Matt Mullenweg and jumps that community square off, making longterm bets on the predominant architecture for the web. And then in the show notes, you can find it. Matt Mullenweg clarifies jump stack remarks.
So both articles written by Sarah Gooding. So it is to say that over the past two weeks, Matt Mullenweg and the jumpstart community have seemingly come out in all out rivalry against each other. Milan wag said to the usability and functionality of JAMstack is actually lower even rebuilding sites in jumpstart, Harkins backs to the.
Back to the movable type days where the bigger your site gets, the slower it is to rebuild or update templates. His idea is you have to get a bunch of rival services and pin them together, and it costs lots of money. Whereas he's saying that you could stick a WordPress install onto some cheap hosting and basically get something which is much more resilient.
Clearly the people who are involved in jump stack, think this is not the case. They feel that they're in that. Moment where WordPress was maybe 12 years ago or something where it was in the ascendancy, but nobody kind of knew it at the time. It was just one of many options. And that's where they feel JAMstack is at the moment there, they feel that it's growing and people can rely on it.
Yeah. It's got a, an architecture, which is strong resilient, and people are laughing at it at the moment, but yeah, just means that there are bounds to win in the future. Anyway, you can decide if you know anything about gem stack, you'll probably have an opinion on this. Go and read the article. It's quite a long read.
It's probably gonna take you about 20 minutes to go through it all, but it's definitely worth a look. Many opinions expressed from both sides. I know that there are WordPress meetups all over the place happening, but I just thought I'd lend my support to my local one. WordPress leads online. If you want to click on the link in the show notes, you'll be able to join people it's happening tomorrow.
So Tuesday the 22nd of September 5:30 PM, UK time to 6:30 PM. It's about support automation and the talk is going to be given by. David RTS, who is a support engineer. Yeah. And hiring lead for WordPress VIP team at automatic. So certainly one worth promoting, so shame that we can't go there in real life and hang out in the real world.
But online is what we've got for now. This one may very well affect you. It might be worth listening out for this one. Sarah Gooding WP Tavern, upcoming API change will break Facebook and Instagram. Oh, embed links across the web beginning the 24th of October. And I quote in an extraordinarily inconvenient API change.
Facebook and Instagram will be dropping on authenticated. Oh, embed support on the 24th of October breaking content across millions of websites that change will force users to generate app ID with a developer account in order to continue embedding links via O embed. Now, confess this is not something that I've been doing, but I know that a lot of people have posted millions of.
Pieces of content in this manner. And it's all going to basically just disappear. The problem, that many people foresee is that requiring a developer account gives Facebook, some insight into what you're posting in a way that never used to be the case. And it just feels like the walls around the walled garden.
Oh, Facebook and Instagram just get bigger and higher and stronger all the time. So I don't know what you think about this, whether or not you're going to bow to Facebook in this one and go and get the developer account and make it all work. Or whether you're just going to go and try and fix up all the stuff we've broken.
But yeah, it does feel a little bit straight range having to report this. It would be nice if these standards, which were created many years ago, which were for the open web fetching things based upon a URL and not having everything. Behind for want of a better word, a pay wall. That's not the right word, is it?
But you get the point. it just seems that this is a bit of a regression really. Okay, plugins themes and blocks. Next I've only got two pieces for you this week. The first one is a significant update to tool set blocks, 1.3 WooCommerce post relationships WPML and more, it is genuinely going to be impossible for me to iterate through all of the things that or hell's, or from toolset.
She mentions in this article, but there is an awful lot of improvements. The headlines are WooCommerce blocks for tool sets. You can now customize a great deal of what happens in WooCommerce directly through the block editor with tool sets, you've got native styling for WooCommerce. Blocks you can now implement them views for related products, upsells and cross sells.
There's also a lot of work been done on post relationships. So the ability to select related content in views, displaying fields of related content. And they've also, as I said, right at the top, they've got some simple WPML integrations as well. Translating views, templates, and archives, translating forms and multi-lingual sites with post relationships.
I could probably spend. 15 minutes just on this one. There's really a lot in there. There's a lot there I haven't mentioned. And so the best thing I would say is if you're a toolset user and you want to go and check it out, click on the link in the show notes. Theme security has had a band user feature for quite a while.
And this is the ability to ban hosts or IP addresses from using your WordPress website. Perhaps they've been involved in a denial of service attack or something like that, but they've now added a little card to the WordPress dashboard. I've say WordPress dashboard. I mean their own security dashboard, which enables you to see at a glance, all of the information that you want about.
Band users. So for example, you can do things like fin filter, band, IP addresses, search for an IP address that is in the band list. You can look for band Hostplus, you can search for selected IP options, and you can also. Add little notes, which is a new feature. And of course you can add your own ban.
Should you decide that something is not quite right with, let's say for example, an IP address or something like that. So basically this is a new little card that you can surface in their security dashboard, which might make this sort of task a little bit easier. Okay, deals news. Now we've got a few new deals for you this week as always go and check out the deals.
Page WP bills.com forward slash deals. It's a bit like black Friday, but every day of the week, it's a searchable filterable list of deals and they're coupon codes. But we have some new ones for you this week, particularly around cadence theme pro lifetime deal is currently on starting at $129.
You can also get. Cadence membership lifetime. So that gives you access to everything that cadence do. This still seemed like a really compelling offer. It's $389, and it gives you lifetime access to absolutely everything that they do. The previous one was lifetime access to the theme pro also new we've got, teleport to me.
Over on AppSumo and another one called honey stack. You can check those out. Yeah. The rest are repeated from previous weeks. So for example, it's stackable, which is a suite of blocks. another suite of blocks and breezy cloud and plugin, a few others. You can check them out, please check out. Yeah. Links in the show notes.
But yeah, I think the interesting ones for this week are in the Cajuns space. Many of you, I know have been using it and enjoying it rather a lot. Okay. A very light touch on security as always, just to say that over on Wordfence we have an article high severity vulnerabilities, patched in discount rules for WooCommerce.
This is a plugin which has over 40,000 installs and there seems to be some kind of issue over there. So if that name rings a bell, maybe go and check out this post to see what needs to be done and what might have been done on your website. And the other one is the monthly Roundup from a WebEx. It's that easy to scroll through list.
You can just simply glance at the names of all the plugins and see if anything on there is something that you've got installed. So again, it's a nice, simple to read list. You can check that out by clicking on the link in the show notes. WP Builds. Self-promotional bet. Sorry about the blatant self promotion, but a couple of things for you this week, I released an episode with Jason shallow.
It was episode number 197. Entitled multiple domains, one WordPress install, new need London kit. If you're an internet marketer, this podcast episode is just gold for you. It's really great because he's invented a plugin whereby instead of setting up a landing page. So what page basically with that. Okay.
Entire WordPress install, which let's be honest. This is a bit faster. You've got to set up the install, maintain it, put all the plugins in and so on. What his plugin does is it allows you to set up one domain, one WordPress install, and then point domains that you buy ward that installed. I have one page available from it, which then is from the domain in question.
So let's say you bought SuperDuper marketing.com. You would go to SuperDuper marketing.com and it would show you a page on your WordPress install. And you would never know that this WordPress install housed multiple. Yeah. Multiple landing pages. So really interesting. And I think a fascinating use of WordPress also to say that on Tuesday, last week I was chatting with Sabrina Sudan.
We were talking about plugins and trying to well trying to get our plugins from zero to 10. installs we're on part eight, as I said, and I've linked in the show notes to the piece and we're going to have another one, hopefully this Tuesday, so you can join us for that. So that's at the same URL as always WP bulbs.com forward slash live.
Okay jobs. I've got one for you this week. This is over at serve bolt. It's a WordPress and WooCommerce support specialist. So if you know your way around WordPress and WooCommerce, they are looking for a job and you should go and click on the link in the show notes to check it out. Okay, we're on the home stretch now, but don't go anywhere because there's always something at the end, entitled, not WordPress, but useful.
Anyway, I really not entirely sure how useful this next piece is, but I love it. Anyway. So over on the BBC alligator on gas snaps up. Ignoble prize. So the ignoble prize is for science. It's a real, an award to scientists. Who've carried out some curious, but probably not that important research. not important.
What I mean by that is it's probably not going to have great mentors fit for the whole of the world. for example, it has been awarded to some researchers in acoustics. Who've managed to induce a female Chinese aligator to bellow in an airtight chamber, filled with helium enriched air. there you go.
I'm in psychology, on award for devising a method to identify narcissists by examining their eyebrows. This is just genius physics, for Spera mentally determining what happens to the shape of a living earthworm. Yeah. When it is vibrated at a high frequency, you can't make this up economics or the team that won it.
We're trying to quantify the relationship between different countries, national income equality, and the average amount of mouth to mouth kissing and topology. Wow. for collecting evidence that many entomologists who are scientists who study insects are afraid of spiders. Which are not insects in medicine.
the diagnosis of the long recognized medical care. In addition, my CFO, mania, I think the distress wearing other people's chewing sounds and the list goes on. So just an utterly, remarkably ridiculous piece. I just loved it. Go and check it out on the BBC website. I would imagine that many of you at one time or another have played with MIT scratch language, it's like a building block approach to learning programming.
very good for younger children. it's been banned from China for reasons that we don't quite know the entire website has been completely unserviceable to Chinese users. which just seems like such a shame. the reason is. Simply because any service district, our quote, to any service distributing information in China must comply with local regulations and scratches website and user forums have been shot down in the country.
What a shame. Last, but by no means least a little while ago. it turns out two years ago on this news, we talked about the fact that micro software putting a data center under the water that is to say literally in the sea, off the coast of Scotland. the experiment lasted for two years and they've.
Gone on, hold it out to see again, it's covered in the assortment of sea life, barnacles and so on, but, it's been a success, apparently that is to say that the completely non contaminated non nonhuman interacting environment has been very economical. The, the failure of the service has been really low and apparently it's, much more green and so on.
It's such a peculiar thing. I just love the idea that you would even bother to do this. a catastrophic failure would have just rendered the whole project obsolete, but the service going, and the failure rates was lower. I think it was about 3% lower of members, which I suppose over the long run is quite good.
Hold it out. And you never know. Maybe they'll put another one back in at some point, but goodness me, if your data was on. The server that went down and there was absolutely no way you could get to two it's. That could be a bit of a crisis. Anyway, what a strange piece of news. Okay. That's all we've got for you for this week.
I hope that you enjoyed it. If you enjoy these episodes, if you think we hit the target, or if you think we missed the target, please let us know. Join the WP, builds Facebook group, make a comment over there or leave a comment on the post. On our website. WP Builds.com as always. If you want to share it on social, I'd be enormously grateful, apt to WP built on Twitter, but obviously feel free to share it wherever you like.
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It's running from the fifth to the 9th of October, and you can check out the amazing speaker list and get a free [email protected]. Okay. See you Thursday for a podcast episode, but we'll be back next week for this. The WP Builds weekly. WordPress news. Have a good week. Stay safe. Bye bye for now.