WP Builds Weekly WordPress News #133 – New Twenty Twenty One Theme, WordPress dual license and Facebook quitting Europe

Nathan Wrigley: [00:00:00] Hello there. Good morning. And welcome to this. The WP Builds a weekly WordPress news. This is episode number 133. It covers the WordPress news for the week commencing the 21st of September, 2020. And it was published on Monday the 28th of September, 2020. Just a few bits of housekeeping, if that's all right, we always do [email protected] over there.
You'll find all of the WordPress related content that we produce each and every week. And we do produce rather a lot. We produce a podcast. Every Thursday, we produce also the WP Builds a weekly WordPress news, which you're listening to right now. This comes out as you probably know, on a Monday, but also live every Monday.
2:00 PM UK time, I'm joined by some notes. WordPress guests, as we discussed the weekly WordPress news in a live video format, you can head over to WP Builds.com forward slash LA. You have to check that out. Or our WP Builds Facebook group. Both of those locations, we'll be showing them video live, come in, join the conversation.
It's always a lot of fun this week. I'll be joined as usual by Paul Lacey, but also by Anshan LaRue and James Kemp. If you want to find out more about WP Builds, then head over to WP Buildss.com forward slash subscribe over there. There's a couple of forms. One to allow us to post to you when we produce content.
And one to alert you whenever we find a WordPress deal, there's also ways on that page to subscribe to us on your favorite podcast player. And as I mentioned, join our Facebook. Book group of over 2,700, very polite and friendly word pressers. Okay. What else have we got for you this week? WP Builds.com forward slash deals as always is a bit like black Friday, but every day of the week, it's a page stacked full of WordPress deals with significant amounts off with coupon codes.
So that's WP build stock on forward slash deals. Also, we've got a competition you can win one of three week, lot licenses, head over to WP Builds.com forward slash win. And enter the competition, share it on social and you'll increase your chances of winning one of three. We got it. Licenses also promoting the page builder summit at the moment.
You've probably heard me talk about this in the past, but it's a summit that I'm running with. Ancient LaRue it's happening between the fifth and the 9th of October. So that's coming up very soon. in fact, next week, kickoff, next week on Monday, please join. It's completely free. The URL for it is summit.camp.
I'm going to say that again, summit.camp, and you can sign up there for free. If you wish to avail yourself of the all access pass, which we're calling the power pack, there is a fee for that, but basically if you show up. On the day, you'll get everything absolutely for free. So why not do that? We've got a laundry list of the great and the good in WordPress page.
Building space, lots of founders of plugins and themes all to do with WordPress page builders, talking about it. And honestly, I'm tremendously excited and humble about the whole thing. WP Builds.com forward slash advertise. If you would like to have your product or service put in front of a WordPress specific audience a bit like Kinsta.
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 PHP seven SSH and 24 seven expert support. You can try a free 60 day demo out Kinsta dot com. And the aforementioned page builder summit.
Do you use a page builder to create your WordPress websites or perhaps you're curious about what they can do, whether it's element or Beaver builder Guttenberg breezy oxygen or any of the other page builders. The page builder summit will have something for you. It's running from the fifth to the 9th of October, and you can check out the amazing speaker list and get your free [email protected].
Okay. I think that's it for the housekeeping for this week. I don't think I've forgotten anything. So let's get on with the main WordPress new showy. Each week we divide our WordPress news up into different sections. And each week we start with WordPress core. The first piece I've got for you. In fact, the only piece I've got for you in this section this week is just in Tagalog on WordPress seven, a piece entitled first look at 2021.
WordPress is upcoming default theme. Now I don't know about you, but I don't really make too much use of the default themes, but they are a great place for inspiration. Yeah. And they're also a great place for trying out new features that for example, might be rolled into core, and this is no different.
There's quite a lot under the hood here and just in takes it all to pieces and explains it very nicely. But what I'm taking with right off the bat is the really interesting use of color palettes. I find the Automall color palette to be massively appealing in life. In general, I'm always drawn to this and this 2021 theme uses it in spades.
It's got a really nice take on the way that the block patterns have been used. That is to say the way that the page has been laid out. Mostly it consists of. Imagery with boxes off to the right or the left containing text. And it's very minimal. They've gotten rid of all of the usual font mess. So they're just sticking with the default fonts that ship with browsers and so on.
And, and I like it. It's based on a fault of automatic seedlets, which was a project that Justin wrote about in the past. But this is a really great starting point. Justin says it gives an ideal insight into where thing development is heading. It makes sense as the foundation for the new default, few other themes would make a good starting point.
Now with WordPress theme development in flux seedlets is simply ahead of the pack in terms of foundational elements. And so this is really going to be pushing. Boundaries exploring what's possible with the block editor going forward, hopefully by 20th of October, which is not that far away, this will go into the main branch of WordPress and you'll be able to play with it.
But I have to say it's really refreshing. It's incredibly minimal. It's very stylish. Indeed. I rather like it may not be to everybody's taste. I can certainly see many situations where use of it out of the box would be inappropriate, but I can also see that. How stylish and nice it is. And the fact that it's using the capabilities of Gothenburg as they coming out is really nice.
Go and read the article to find out more. The next section for you is community. You've got five pieces for you this week. Starting back at WP Tavern. Sarah Gooding writes WordPress mobile engineers, proposed Juul, a licensing Gothenburg on the GPL 2.0 and MPL 2.0. So this all goes back to Matt Mullenweg in online word camp Europe 2020, when he mentioned that it would be nice to have Guttenberg contributors.
Being able to dual license Gothenburg so that it could be used in mobile apps. this seems to have been taken up by WordPress mobile engineer, Maxine BS, apologies if I've massacred your name. and there's been a proposal for this where you can join in the discussion. If you click on the link in the show notes, you'll get to the page and you'll find the link there.
But essentially the problem is that. It would appear that there's no decent, what is what you get or rich text editor available for mobile apps. And I'm quite surprised by that, but there you go. That's how it is. And people are reluctant to use Guttenberg because the license that comes along with it currently is the GPL.
And that would mean that essentially they would have to make their entire app GPL compatible. that's a bit of a deal breaker over on the Android and iOS side of things. there's often proprietary stuff over there. And so the idea is to it since in a slightly more business friendly MPL license, now I confess I am no expert on this and I don't understand the machinations of it, but it allows for them to.
Essentially bundle Guttenberg into their app and have the license of MPL only apply to that so that they can then move forward with the sort of proprietary stuff from their end, which just seems like a really a common sense idea. It would be really nice if we could have a CMS. Agnostic, interface and Guttenberg seems to be the leading contender for that.
But obviously at the moment, if there's an impediment to app developers and there's one guy mentioned in the article who has stepped away from trying to develop his own, freely available. What is what you get interface, because it was just too difficult to maintain. Now, if we've got the weights of something like WordPress behind it, and it can be licensed in two different ways and people can use it.
I could see this being adopted massively, especially areas like that. I don't know. Email creation apps like MailChimp. Which Sarah mentions just seems like a supremely sensible thing to use. And the fact that there's nothing equivalent in iOS or Android at the moment, it means that this has, I think, a real chance of taking off.
It would appear that the conversation is moving in the direction of. being adopted that is to say, it's going to move forward. we're not quite, I'm not sure yet how the license might need to be rewritten because obviously everybody that was part of that license agreement would need to agree to it.
But really interesting proposal. I, for one would like to see Gothenburg being used on my mobile device. I can really see it working very well, but this obviously will have to be taken forward. Again, with Sarah Gooding on WordPress Tavern and article entitled WordPress contributors debate dashboard notice for upcoming Facebook.
Oh, embed provider removal. So this is going back a couple of weeks. It was decided by Facebook and Instagram. Who are both owned by the same company, Facebook that they would drop on authenticated. Oh, embed support from the 24th of October. Now this caused a flurry of news in the WordPress sphere because it was possible entirely possible that content that you'd created via O embed would simply break.
it seems to be a little bit more complicated than that. And just dealing with the main point of this article, it has been mooted that it would be a good idea to give. Users of WordPress. I kind of nag warning, the traditional boring, the pops up in the admin area to alert you to the fact that this may be happening.
Now, some people say, yes, let's do it. I can't see a reason why not to do that. Other people are saying, we've had similar situations to this in the past, and we haven't mentioned it. So I'm not sure where I sit. Personally, I think if things were breaking on my site, it would be nice to not blame WordPress for something that simply isn't their fault.
And so alerting users with a one off dismissible warning seems like a good idea. Yeah. There also seems to be a bit of debate about whether or not the embeds will actually break. And the article goes into all about the way that the OEM beds are cashed. The fact that these caches are not really flushed that often.
In other words, yeah. Technically it's entirely possible that they will continue working. The problem, is that if you've got some kind of third party solution, which cleans your database, that might upset things. But also if you go in and edit that content that also might upset things. Certainly on the face of it right now, it appears that there's a good chance that if you don't edit anything, things will continue to work. But we rely on Facebook too, that, and we don't know what they're going to do anyway. Where do you sit on this? I'm not entirely sure, but to me it seems sensible to get out of the kind of blame game, if you like, and at least put a warning on those WP admin areas, just to say, look.
please don't come knocking on our door. This is just something that's happened. And we're alerting you that you may need to update things. If you see things breaking, goodness, me, the difficulty in this kind of thing is incredible. And the way that it's going to impact sites hopefully will be mitigated by actions like this.
Going to deal with this one very briefly. It's again, Sarah Gooding, WP Tavern, W3C drops WordPress for consideration for redesign that narrow CMS shortlist to statter Mick and craft. And this is to say that the worldwide web consortium otherwise known as w three C has decided to drop a WordPress from its consideration for its site redesign.
Initially, it seems that WordPress was in the mix with static and craft CMS, the organization responsible for this redesign, which is a company called studio 24. I've decided that WordPress probably isn't a suitable candidate and it's all to do with Gothenburg and the accessibility concerns surrounding Guttenberg and the fact that they seem to have a workflow which relies on the classic editor and the classic editor has only got support guaranteed for a few more years.
Yeah. And obviously if their workflow is entirely dependent upon that and they launch a project, then they've got to know that it's going to be supported going forward. The accessibility concerns around Guttenberg have a long history. And we've talked about those many times in the past, but just interesting to notice that, when a company, no, he has to do excessive or not.
Accessive a complete. Do you diligence, especially concerning accessibility than in this particular. Okay. They've decided to step away from WordPress and not feature it in their list of shortlists. It's interesting that over the last few months we've had a slew of WordPress companies being bought up by other companies.
Most often it would seem by hosting companies who want to bulk out their offering to their clients. this is an interesting piece over on talk mag.io. It's John Howard with a piece called where to buy and sell a WordPress business website or side gig. And it's literally a list of, I think it's nine places.
Where should you be in the position? That you wish to buy something or perhaps you're in a position that you wish to sell something. There are some marketplaces available for this exact kind of thing. Many of them I have to confess I had never heard of before. So it's quite interesting, but, as WordPress move forward, it seems that we're having large companies, coalescing, vast amounts of plugins and themes onto their banners.
I wonder if they're using some of these places and I wonder if some of you guys might make use of them. This next piece is about web stories. I'm just in Tatlock, WP Tavern, Google officially releases its web stories, plugin for WordPress. So this is really interesting. I don't know if you've come across this, but web stories is a Google project.
The idea I suppose, is best described as a series of photos, overlayed with texts that consumed the full screen on a mobile phone, it feels like that's primarily where this technology is landing and it is. Something that you view and it then scrolls to the next full screen. Yeah. And so the idea is almost imagine like the cover of a magazine.
Yeah. You would have one cover and then you display the next cover. And in this way, you'd be able to tell stories now that we'll know from childhood days, that storytelling is a way that humans have interacted for. Thousands of years and it's incredibly powerful. And so Google this project and by all accounts, it's a complete dragon drop into face.
In other words, you position a photo, you position some text and save it. And that's the first page of your story, Don. And then you go on to create the next page and so on. And by all accounts, it's receiving quite good reviews, 10,000 installs. So far, a lot of five star reviews. and the founders of the project make the point that well, Stories are the way that we communicate, but WordPress doesn't fit that too.
Now the writer of this piece just intends to disagree. He feels that Gothenburg is the ideal positioning for WordPress. To be able to tell stories, if you're creative with the way that you do your layouts, you should be able to achieve a storytelling effect. Albeit not this scroll from page to page effect.
I have to say, this feels a little bit light. Because the kind of thing that it may be in five years, time will have been forgotten. It's quite an interesting project. It feels a bit like a fad. I firmly stand corrected if in two years time, anybody happens to be listening to this. And the world has clearly adopted the stories as the way of reading their content.
the fact that there's limited options for texts. Makes it troublesome, but again, it's not intended for text-based content. It's literally where you're trying to present images and minimal amounts of texts. But yeah, we'll see how this goes, but needless to say, it's now an official plugin it's come out of beta.
If this sort of thing interests, you click on the link in the show notes. Okay, next up is plugins themes and block three pieces for you this week. But we'll kick off with project huddle version 4.0, giving design review, a UI and UX redesign project huddle is a WordPress plugin, which enables you to get feedback from your WordPress clients in a visual interface.
They can click on your site. It doesn't have to be your website. It could be PDF assets, things like that, or images, and you can get meaningful feedback and hopefully thereby we have a communication with your clients in order to figure out what it is that they want. And you can supply the bullet points for this are, they've got a refreshed UI.
Improved controls and faster PDF loading, but that really doesn't do it. Justice. You've got to go and click on the link in the show notes where Andre has gone out of his way to create a really nice piece explaining with lots and lots of visuals. Exactly what's happened. So they got a new overview screen, which allows you to see everything.
And it looks remarkably clean and easy to gather what's going on in the whole of your business. They've got a better experience with improving controls. so I quote, navigate your designs with ease. We've made it. Image navigation, more obvious and added UI hints to let users know where to find them.
You can also use track pads or touch screen gestures to smoothly scroll in and out of the images. And there's also keyboard shortcuts included in there as well. and there's also, you can do now the tracking of changes, you can do comparisons between different versions. So for example, if you've changed an image slightly, you can compare it to the old one.
And with the. Probably interfaces, which are familiar to many. Now you can drag from left to right in the old image may be on the left and the new webpage on the right and so on. And they've also got a timeline. So it says mock-up commenting now has an activity for each. So you can see a history of everything that's happened through the project.
Anyway, there's a bunch more stuff linked. In the show notes, really impressive stuff. Well done. Should you have made the move over to Gothenburg? You've probably come across block packs where you can buy a suite of blocks. And one of those packs is called stackable and they've introduced some new options for you this week.
It is entitled introducing global colors and global topography. And it's exactly what you would expect. Clearly, if your theme supports shouldn't have creating global colors or global typography, this may be moot, but it is entirely possible that you've had to go in to the block and change the colors one by one.
So if you've changed a button over here, I'll have to go and find the same kind of button everywhere on the site and change it to this nice new blue that you've decided to use. stackable now makes that possible globally, so you can create a global palette and once you change a color. Of a particular item in that pallet, everywhere it is used on your website, we'll receive that adjustment.
So that's really nice. It's all available in a new settings panel, which you can activate by clicking on there. S logo, which you'll find in the top, Of your Gutenberg editor. But they've gone one step further. They've done basically the same thing with global topography, you can set up a global set of typographical conventions.
And again, wherever that has been deployed across your website, you should be able to receive those updates by changing it in one place. So this is really nice, the things that are being promised years ago that would be available in WordPress, through Gothenburg and now being delivered by these third party solutions.
Very nice. Staying with blocks. I don't know if you've come across Guttenberg hub, but it's a project which enables you to copy and paste and all sorts of really nice designs into your block editor. It's a little bit of a fudge, the way that you've got to do it. You've got to go over to Gothenburg hub, find a design that you like, and then you simply copy some code and you paste it over into your website.
Just in Tadlock has written a piece called Guttenberg hub launches, landing page templates, directory. And it's exactly what you'd imagine. It is a directory of 22 prebuilt landing pages. Now you have to install the founder of this whole project is called Manea Komal. You have to install his editor plus plugin, but once you've done that, you're away to the races.
The idea is that you can. Now get to these 22 templates, pick one that you like, they're in all sorts of areas, fashion, pets, restaurants, and so on, and you can simply drag the whole thing along for them. And it's very convenient just in Tagalog who wrote this peace has been asking him for the longest time, whether or not it might be possible to have a one click.
Insert option. That is to say that you go over on, perhaps even on your WordPress website, you can see these landing pages and see these templates and so on, and then just press a button. And you're all dominance integrated into your WordPress website and it would appear, but that is on the cards being built out right now.
So that's very nice. Also, just in wants to know about monitorization plans. You obviously can't do this kind of thing forever for free, unless you are independently wealthy and it would seem that. It's money has got some ideas, three ideas, creating a pro version of his editor, plus plugin offering premium templates and blocks.
but also using ads specific to Gothenburg users. But, he's not a fan of this one. So perhaps one of the further, the aforementioned too might be the way to go. Anyway, nice project. really nice project from a guy who seems to be absolutely on fire at the moment. Well done mania. This next section is deals from this week and each and every week we start this little section with a link to our deals page.
As I said at the top of the show, it's a bit like black Friday, but every day of the week, go check it out. Loads of coupon codes and they stay there 365 days of the year. And I've never taken one down so far. So they're reliably there. Okay. But regarding the new deals for this week, we don't have any new ones.
But I've got links to cadence theme pro lifetime cadence membership lifetime. there's some stuff over on. AppSumo teleport me and hockey stack stackable, which I talked about just a moment ago. There's a deal on for that as well. And there's a bunch of other blocks, acutely blocks, as well as some of them, things like breezy, plugin and cloud coming page and maintenance mode, plugin, and a whole bunch more.
I would suggest really the best thing to do is open the show notes and have a look there's about 10 on there that you could click on. Each week we have a pretty light touch on security. I've only got one proper piece for you this week. It's on, Wordfence entitled critical vulnerabilities patched in X cloner, backup and restore plugin.
So this is a plugin on over 30. Thousand websites. And it says, I quote, this floor gave authenticated attackers with subscriber level or above capabilities. The ability to modify arbitrary files, including PHP files. So obviously we realize the danger of that. So if that plugin rings a bell, then go and get yourself updated.
Speaking of ringing a bell, I'm now going to link two themes version of. The monthly reports for WordPress plugin vulnerabilities. I want to say ringing a bell. The idea is that you scroll down quickly, look at the icons and the names of the plugins in question and see if any of them do ring a bell. And if so, you probably need to go and get yourself updated ASAP.
There's quite a few this month. It would seem that the attackers have been extremely busy. last count there was about 40 or so listed on this one page. The blatantly self-promotional WP Builds bit. This week I launched an episode. It was a discussion between David Walmsley and I, it was episode 198.
Goodness. We're fast approaching 200. And it was called value pricing versus fixed rate. And in this. So we talked about exactly that, what is the best way to price? Sure. WordPress offerings. Are you the type of person who likes to offer value pricing in order to get a higher fee? In other words, if I increase your turnover on your eCommerce store by 50%, that's gotta be worth more than an hourly rate, or do you go for just a fixed price?
I'll do that work first. $4,000 or whatever it might be. Is there an easy way into this? Is there a better, and if it's into doing it, does it cause more heartache? Does the pricing make it more difficult to justify? We chat about it all on the podcast this week. Okay. The job section. I've got nothing for you this week.
I'm afraid I didn't find any new ones, but please head over to the link at the top of the page, WP bills.com forward slash jobs, and you can submit a job there. I'd be most appreciative and it's completely free service. So make use of that, but I haven't got anything for you this week. And the last bit, although not WordPress related it's are not WordPress, but useful.
Anyway, this is a piece over on the guardian to say Facebook say's. It may quit Europe over ban on sharing data with the U S We know that the Europeans have a very different take on privacy and where data about their citizens is stored. this week Facebook have come out to essentially say, look, if you don't allow us to store data over on our side of the pond are either U S we may very well I'll have to quit Europe.
My personal take on this is that Europe must be representative of quite a bit of Facebook's profits. And so it seems like a bit of interesting brinksmanship. Yeah. But we'll have to wait and see, I don't know what your thoughts are on this, my guess is that really? Facebook's just going to have to toe the line, but Facebook almost seems like too important to fail.
It seems like those banks during the recent recession who were bailed out with public money, it feels like Facebook may be in that position. do they have enough clout to turn around to the EU and say, you're going to do what we say, not the other way around. Interesting piece. Go check it out.
Okay. That's all I've got for you this week. I really hope that you found it useful if you did, or if you didn't and you can offer some suggestions, please drop some comments into the comment section on the WP Builds.com post, or you can join our Facebook group and make some comments over there. It'd be most grateful for any of those.
Always interested to hear your feedback. Speaking of feedback, you can offer your own feedback on the live version of the news. This week, I shall be joined by. Paul Lacey and shunned LaRue and James Kemp. That's 2:00 PM UK time on Monday. So probably the day that you're listening to this, and you can find that@wpbuildsdotcomforwardslashliveorinthewpbuildsfacebookgroupwpbuilds.com forward slash Facebook.
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If you need help, you can try a free 60 day demo over at Kinsta dot com. And the 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 elemental, Beaver, builder, Guttenberg breezy oxygen, or any of the other page builders, the page builder summit will have something for you.
It's running from the fifth to the 9th of October, and you can check out the amazing speaker list and get your free [email protected]. Okay. That is literally all I've got for you this week. I hope that you enjoyed it. Please stay safe. Join us again at some point next week. Bye bye for now.