Again, glad you're here everybody as you're coming into zoom, open up the chat and say hi, tell us where you're logging in from. I'm gonna drop today's slide link in the chat again. And we are just about to get captions connected and working
all right captions should not be working for everyone so again welcome glad you're here
Yeah, Ben got that set up this weekend. been coming for a long time now just haven't had the time to get it done. But it is now working still need to be dialed in just a little bit, but it's all right for today. All right, just about three minutes ago. If you're just joining us in zoom, open up the chat and say hi, tell us where you're logging in from. I'm once again dropping in the link bundle for today. That has today's slides as well as the replay link. We'll be getting started here in just about three minutes from now. Hey, Kenna Jean, welcome. Glad you're all here and open up that chat and say hi, I'd love to greet you folks logging in from around the world already. Hey, Tina. Welcome from South Africa. Awesome.
Hey, Phoebe, Shauna, Jochen, Joe. Jeffrey, welcome Auxilium. Hello zelalem. I'll be there in DC next week for WordCamp. Us. Looking forward to that. It's been a while since I've been back in DC.
Welcome, John. All right, folks. We're just about two minutes away from getting started. Sue Correct. What Marilyn Yes. Right across the river. Hey, Sally. All right. Glad you're all here. Two minutes to go. Before we get started with this month news roundup. Let me drop the slide link. Once again in the chat. There it is. Soon, no kidding. Hey, Vern. Hey, Eddie, welcome. Glad you're all here. Just a minute and a half to go before we get started. Lots of news. Lots of news to talk about. We will be highlighting WordPress 6.3. We did the release party last week for that really great live stream with Timothy Jacobs. We'll be hitting the high points of that today as well as lots of other kinds of news some really interesting developments as far as AI is concerned.
I'm actually going to need to redo my sharing here one second. Here we go. Welcome class. 45 seconds to go. Y'all hope your weekend started. Well, glad you've chosen to take a few minutes out today and spend them with me learning about what's going on in the WordPress News World. Slide link is in the chat. Nice Sally. That sounds great. Ah, yeah, Vern zoom has been having a lot of updates lately. Yeah. Zoom actually occupies the story. In this month's news roundup, which is interesting, to say the least. Just a few privacy policy updates on the Zoom side. Hey, Ben, welcome. Glad you're here. Tammy. No kidding. Yeah, exactly. Just about ready to start y'all. Alright, it's three minutes after let's get things going. Well, good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to the WordPress news roundup for August 2023. Whether it's afternoon or evening or morning, wherever you happen to be logging in from I'm really glad you've chosen to take a few minutes out of your day and spend them with me looking at the WordPress news for this month. So many things to cover this month that we're going to be pushing right at the end of the hour, I believe, to fit all these things in once a month we do look across the landscape of the WordPress community and pick out the news items. that we think are important for particularly for those of us that are building and managing websites for clients using WordPress and we have a lot of things to talk about today. If you are just joining us in the chat, let me invite her in zoom let me invite you to open up the chat. And in there you will find the link bundle for today which includes the slide download if you're watching this on the replay, you can click the Download handout button that's right below the video and you'll have the slides. These slides are particularly important because if you want to read more about any of the stories, there's a nice little link in the footer of every slide that will give you more information on the sources where we got the news stories from. So let's get started shall we? And we begin as we always do with news from WordPress core. We had the release event last week for WordPress 6.3 Lionel, that was last Tuesday released August the eighth as scheduled and the WordPress 6.3 release. It kind of reaches that landmark because it closes the book on phase two of Project Gutenberg, which is that phase two was focused on bringing the block editor which was developed in phase one into other areas of the website like headers and footers and sidebars and templates and things like that. And so phase two is now officially complete. So this release in six three was mostly focused on refining those site editor improvements to where they're really very usable now. And it's quite an interesting addition to WordPress core. We'll be highlighting some of those things in just a moment. Phase three will begin in the new release of WordPress 6.4, phase three of Project Gutenberg to do in November 2023. And it's going to be focused on collaboration which is really interesting, and bringing some really cool multi user features into WordPress. Like for example, being able to edit the same page or post at the same time which is kind of neat. Well, let's look at some of the highlights of WordPress six three. My favorite perhaps is this command palette which is nestled right into the top of the screen and lets you do a live search for all sorts of things. But the most interesting thing about the command palette is that it's extensible, meaning that you can developers can tap into the command palette with whatever they want to do. So this will be probably a good spot for AI plugins to a tap into the admin area and do some things with AI and other things. You'll I think you'll start to see the command palette being used by lots of different plugin developers and theme developers as we go. Something else we began to see is a lots of updates to the site editor in particular, seeing an editing patterns there in the site editor and you can see how that works right here kind of a neat, new interface. It's a lot easier to see what you're editing and how it all works. So you get a nice grid view of those patterns. Right there, where you can manage, add, edit, delete, those sorts of things. Also, there's the ability to edit pages and templates more easily in the site editor before it was kind of hard to see what if you're editing a page content or a template, and in this case, it makes it very easy to jump back and forth between those things. And it's pretty clear, especially once you use it for just a little bit. What it is you're editing is the page. Is it the template, what is it? And so very good interface improvements to the site editor in that regard. We've also got the ability to have revisions to your site styling so this the revisions area much like page and post revision allows you to roll back the changes that you've made in the styling of your site. So using the style book, which was a new edition couple of last version, I believe 6.2 introduced the style book. This lets you roll back which is kind of nice. Another big change in six, three was the advent of synced patterns. This is the new name for reusable blocks. So we're really focused now on calling all of these things patterns. And there are unsynched patterns which just live in one spot. There are synced patterns, which if you update them at updates globally across your website, and then they'll also be in future versions of WordPress released partially sync patterns, which might for example, let you have part of the pattern that stays the same but maybe a little bit that's different that you can update throughout the site. So that development is coming but sync patterns are now a thing. There's also a new block couple of new blocks that have been added to WordPress in the block editor. The first is a footnote block which is really very usable and nice to use. It updates write down the page and just put your footnote citations at the bottom and keeps all the numbers in order for you just add a footnote and there it is and it works so really great for the types of content and WordPress that would need footnoting we also have added to the image block, the ability to change aspect ratio right there in core. So the core image block now has the ability to change the aspect, you know square portrait, you know, so forth oval round, which is really nice. A lot of block plugins like Kadence blocks have had this feature for a while but now this is in the core image block which is cool. There's also now a details block which is sort of a like kind of like a mini accordion in such like you can have this text here and you click on it and it reveals what's below it. So it's nice and different applications you might want to have a spoiler alert or something in content where you don't want to show something until you click on the thing. And that's what the details block does. There also have been improvements to the cover block. So now you have the ability to change a lot of text and layouts and adding duotone and so that the cover block has continued to be iterated ever since it was released several versions ago. And it's even more powerful now than it ever has been. Something else that's really nice are improvements in the list view it makes it a lot easier to drag and drop things in less ListView than it was before. Sometimes it was hard to get things to go exactly where you wanted them to go. And so some nice user interface improvements there. And last of all, there's the top the top toolbar, which something like that toolbar kind of gets in the way sometimes if you're using it in content. And so now there's the ability to push that toolbar up to the very top of the screen where you can show and hide it with these double arrows or bring it back down into text. You can do that but this gets it completely out of the way. And I think if especially if you're editing a large page, it's very helpful to you know, easier see what you're working with.
Alright, I've mentioned this before, but one of the big improvements there and WordPress six three is this transition to synced patterns with reusable blocks. You can now arrange blocks any way you want. Save them for patterns for reuse patterns were four they've been around for a while in core WordPress, but they were really off in somebody else's cloud or you had to download them from wordpress.org. But now you can create your own patterns that live right there. In your own WordPress. So that's kind of nice. And they have lots of different options for syncing and applying changes across the whole site if you change one thing, they're really powerful and if you haven't investigated this feature yet, it's a really strong and capable addition to core WordPress. And you might see this in use. For example, if you have a client like us that might have a call to action button like schedule an appointment or whatever, you can pull those things in as a pattern within, you know, a series of blocks or whatever. So you have that nice call to action that can just drop in wherever they want it and it's a really powerful addition to core WordPress that is going to continue to be iterated on as partially sync patterns will be we'll be evolving over the next several months as well. Something else you may have noticed are there are some core performance improvements with the release of WordPress six, three. So it's been quite a while now there has been a core performance team group of individuals and all they're focused on is improving the speed of core WordPress. So WordPress 6.3 loads 27% faster if you're on a block theme, and 18% faster if you're on a classic theme. So significant speed increases. A lot of this has to do with script loading strategies and database strategies. Really metadata retrieval, these sorts of things. They've really done some under the hood, Geek gear geek level improvements to make WordPress run faster out of the box and that is good news. If you want to learn more about WordPress 6.3 There's the official release on the WordPress blog. And if you missed this event last week, I would highly recommend that you take a look at the event. Our live stream last week where Timothy Jacobs, the lead developer for solid WP and he's also a core contributor and one of the maintainers of the WordPress REST API. Timothy did a great job as he always does of walking us through a granularly all the features of WordPress six three and demonstrating how those work on the screen. Here's the link to the field guide as well as the documentation page. So all those helpful links are there. If you want to drill down into WordPress six three and learn even more. WordPress six four is moving right along the coke the core team is working hard on this with a general release date set for November the seventh. So thankfully, no Thanksgiving releases again this year if you're in the US. That has been a real complication for a lot of us in the US who it seems like several core releases for two or three Thanksgivings right in a row. Where they were right around that time. So that was a challenge and I'm grateful that it's not happening that way this time. So November 7, will be the general release with the next one not planned probably. I'm gonna guess February ish of 2024. All right, let's take a look at the continuing advancements in the world of Gutenberg, Gutenberg 16.3 dropped on July the 26th. It's largely a maintenance release, lot of bug fixes, maintenance type, just bug fixes and iterations in the UI to typically tend to happen. And by the way, this is the way the Gutenberg release has always worked. There's been a bug fix release and then a features release and sometimes there'd be features in a bug fix release, but they tend to be one or the other and every other one is more of a fix while the next one tends to be features. So, focus mode has been added for editing your patterns. So when you're editing a template part, the interface goes in focus mode, this was not previously available. So it looks to kind of let you see only exactly what you're working on. So it slides in and as you're editing a pattern, you can see you know, responsiveness and so forth. Really a good iteration to the blog, the Pattern Editor there in core WordPress. Also there has been added a sticky header bar on patterns page. It would scroll like you would scroll this out of view very easily before So now, this is it stays in place here at the top, which I think is a nicer UI, to be honest, kind of cool. You can also now more easily rename, duplicate and edit patterns from right within the drop down menu. You can see how that works. Right over here. Rename Boom there it is. You can change the name right there. Really nice user interface improvement. Pretty cool. Gutenberg 16.4 dropped on August the ninth and this is an interesting little addition. I haven't had time to play with this yet. But they've added this feature called Auto inserting blocks which means you can pre set blocks to automatically add themselves in a particular location. So the idea is just to make make it easier to develop themes and for us as developers to build sites. So for example, it's kind of hard really to see what's going on here. I expect we'll see some more iteration on this. But let's just say down here, we've got this block. So this like block, you know where people could maybe like a comment. This is okay, we've changed it to we can moving it up and down. It will it's going to automatically insert that block in that spot. Every time it Yeah. So the idea is you can pre program a block to show up in a certain spot every time and again a little hard to see from that video exactly what's going on. But I think we'll see this feature iterated more and more going forward. There's now a new Progress Bar component. So this this progress bar allows allows you well let me just show you the video. What it's going to allow you to do is jump into your site editor and it's going to give you your loading bar basically. Again, this is a maintenance release. So there's also some new commands available in the command palette, which you can see some additional things happening here. Videos not working, but just additional things are being added with every release of Gutenberg to further increase the abilities of the command tool, the command bar tool, and hopefully we'll start to see some developers and plugin developers adding more functionality into it as well. More support for the footnote block and finally the minimum version for Gutenberg as of 16.4 has been bumped to seven dados that's really good. Seven Dotto is now the the lowest version of PHP that will be supported officially by WordPress with this latest release of WordPress six three as well. All right, let's move on into some security news. As always, lots of things to talk about in the word of world of WordPress security. Over the course of the last month since last we had a news roundup there were 292 plugin vulnerabilities that have been patched 128 are still active or the plugin has been closed. And there were 58 theme vulnerabilities. We live in a vulnerable world that's just the way it is. And as always, we tell you, you can mitigate much of this by keeping your site secure with I think security pro twice a day I think security pro looks at the themes and plugins that you have installed on your WordPress site takes a look to see if any of those match any of the patch stack vulnerabilities that had been recorded. And that will let you know if you have a vulnerable theme or plugin on your site. If you have the Pro version, you can also use the version management tool of I think security Pro to automatically patch that theme or plugin if the fix has been released. So with this, you know a lot of times you don't have to deal with these vulnerabilities at all. They're just automatically fixed for you if the theme developer has released a patch for it.
Alright, right. Speaking of critical vulnerabilities, if you're a Kadence user you probably saw this note that Kadence Blocks Three 111 which is the free version of Kadence blocks had a critical vulnerability in regard to the advanced form block. This is a this is a major vulnerability and you need to make sure that your Kadence blocks plugins across any sites you have are updated to the latest version. The exploit requires insecure server level settings. So it really showed up if you have a budget hosting provider that's a kind way of saying el cheapo hosting. There's no known instances of exploitation that were detected but it is a critical vulnerability. I've been released a statement saying immediately upon learning of this vulnerability, our team pushed out a fix we take the security of our customer site seriously and we make security fixes a priority. We're thankful to the responsible security researchers that responsibly disclosed good disclosed security vulnerabilities for the common good of all WordPress and Kadence users. And if you'd like to see the policy that the Kadence team follows with responsible security disclosures, you can read more about that at Kadence wp.com/security. Bin as a good question. Is that an issue of if you're not using the form and I don't have an answer to that, but since the code lives in the plugin I would you want to make sure you update it anyway. So I'm not sure if the vulnerability requires a form to be on a page or not. But just make sure your blocks are up today. Amazon security is something else that we're seeing a lot of these days is the continued reports of hackers attacking Amazon account holders. Lots of social engineering exploits are happening to convince people more and more to give away their Amazon credentials. Kathy Zant has a great article on her blog@zant.com about some very practical ways that you can protect your Amazon account. This is a great article to give to clients for example, who are Amazon users and need a good simple explanation of how to secure your Amazon account talks about things like making sure your account recovery information is correct. Not sharing your login information with anybody and of course, regularly changing your password. All right, if the world of security was not scary enough this story made me want to go just go lock myself into a dark room because there is now an exploit that hackers are using to steal your passwords by listening to what you type. They can actually with this exploit they record. They record what you're typing on your keyboard, and based on the way different keys sound and slightly different from each other in the frequency of sound. They can't tell what you're typing with 95% accuracy This is crazy. But this is actually happening in the wild today. This attack does not rely on any specific type or brand of keyboard. But mechanical keyboards and membrane keyboards are more susceptible. I mean you can hear when you type different keys have a slightly different sound than others. And hackers have figured out a way how to exploit that really, really crazy. The attack can be mitigated using silent keyboards, virtual keyboards are noise cancellation techniques. I don't know what to say about this. This is just you know, it's 2023 We've got all these AI things coming out that we all love but wow the hackers are getting even more advanced. So if you want to just be completely terrified, read this article on bleeping computer. And yeah, learn more. Okay. Another WordPress plugin that had a high severity vulnerability this month was ninja forms. This was a couple of weeks ago, they released an update to patch multiple high severity security vulnerabilities. They were patched back on July the fourth ninja forum users had been urged to patch immediately and the vulnerability is not known to have been exploited. Just make sure you keep your plugins up to date right. All right, let's move on and just some news from solid WP lots of things happening here with us. The Kadence blocks 3.1 beta has been released Intrada featuring that new advanced form block and other improvements. Also the ability to rename your blocks and ListView which is by far my favorite addition to the Kadence Blocks Three one you can rename the actual block here, which I really liked. You can our products value adds that I really liked that very helpful. Kadence blocks Pro two dot o includes some additional structural updates and performance improvements that further make things more stable, really good stuff. If you've not played around with this yet, and you're a Kadence user just spend a little time because the blocks are getting better. Upcoming products in the Kadence pipeline include Kadence AI, which is going to be amazing integration with Pexels for a free stock art library as well as a repeater block for those of you who are using ACF along with Kadence. As always, we have a lot of premium events coming up here on iThemes Training every month we do a premium training event. Which is a two day event for four hours, two hours each day around some topic that is helpful if you build and manage WordPress sites for others. This month is the second part of our SEO focus with Lindsay Halsey from Pathfinder SEO. It is the SEO masterclass. And Lindsay is going to be talking about more advanced SEO information as well as using AI in your SEO service for your clients. Pretty cool stuff. On next month, September 26 27th. We have the Google Analytics bootcamp with David Zimmerman from curious ants. David's going to walk us through all the new Google Analytics for stuff as well as I believe we're even going to get into some Google Tag Manager and Looker studio work as well. They're in the Google Analytics bootcamp. If you want to learn more about these in the details, just go right here to this link to the premium courses link on I iThemes Training. Again, this does require an iThemes Training membership which I think is a great value. So take a look at that if you haven't already. Here's where we're heading for the rest of the year, October, November, December. You're stuck with me for these premium events. In October it's going to be the WordPress AI workshop. None of these by the way, have a registration page open yet we'll get those up as time goes forward. The WordPress AI workshop I'm starting to collect a really cool outline of how we're using AI technology in our agency to do some really fun things. And looking forward to sharing all that with you in October and then November December as has been our habit for several years. It's all about the Starter Site. So November is creating your starter site, December optimizing that Starter Site. So you have a good standard theme and plugin stack from which you can build all of your client projects going forward. So that's where we're headed for the rest of the year in premium events. Some additional events coming up here for members fly 2023 talking about problem clients is tomorrow. Office hours on Thursday as usual. the only the only live stream next week will be office hours on August 24 Because I'll be away at WordCamp us then we have our SEO masterclass and then the plugin Roundup is our next free webinar which is on September the fifth. Yeah, so a lot of good stuff coming up in the fall here on I iThemes Training.
Let's talk about a little bit of plugin news. The plugin team has been going through some transitions as long time plugin team member mica Epstein has moved on to other things. They are tackling a backlog of over 900 plugins that have been waiting for approval as the team was being rebuilt. plugins have been facing a waiting period of over 60 days from submission to actually inclusion in the WordPress directory and they're making some progress this is really good. The team has been focused on documenting processes improving tools to provide a preliminary review and then they'll go back and put eyes on it once all the issues that came up in the automated review have been dealt with. The new process has been designed to reduce that backlog. And community members are being encouraged encouraged to volunteer so if this is something you're interested in and you have a more of a Developer Focus and you'd like to spend some time donating some time to the plugin review team. They're asking for assistance. Also, I want to let you know that WooCommerce eight dot o was released with a lot of new features and some fixes. The introduction of jQuery three has been our jQuery three support has been added to WooCommerce eight Dotto as well as additional action hooks and extensibility for developers. They've also continued their work they've been really focused on improving WooCommerce performance with optimized databasing queries optimized caching methods. It's really desperately needed when it comes to WooCommerce. They've added some additional block templates Cart Checkout Order Confirmation all those have been added in WooCommerce blocks as well. As some new patterns or banners, different forms there. So a lot of good stuff there with WooCommerce eight is supposed to be totally backwards compatible, and we've not seen any issues in updating sites to WooCommerce eight. One more thing to mention in the plugin world is that there is a new member in the 1 million download club and that is WP data tables. We really like WP data tables as an agency and they are the newest member of the 1 million download club in the WordPress plugin world so congrats to the folks there at WP data tables. All right, let's move over to some AI news. Wow there's a lot of stuff happening in the AI world. If you're following AI news, then you probably saw that AI leaders have met with White House officials to commit to some basic safeguards around AI technology that includes investing in cybersecurity. Third party vulnerability discovery and flagging social risks by us as in misuse of AI generated content will also bear some sort of watermark, how that's happening is still fleshing out. But just so it'll be easier to detect what content is generated by AI and what content is almost said legitimate. What content is human generated will say that the agreement is currently voluntary, but lawmakers in the US are exploring bills to regulate AI and I think that's a good thing. Here's something else you may have seen and that is a new product called Zip WP This is the combination of work from brainstorm force founder CJ pouvoir, and WordPress content creator Adam priser. WP is an AI tool that says they can create a WordPress site in 60 seconds after you provide some basic information about your business. It's not publicly available yet there's a waitlist, it's wp.com. But my goodness, this thing is really cool. So I've taken this video and really compressed the time down. So we've got this organization called Clean Waters. We're going to paste the name in. Now we're just going to give it a basic overview of what this organization is and paste it there. There's some other information you can add, but they're going to skip this step. And here it goes building the site. We're going to speed this up to just pass the one minute mark. And now we have a site. It took a minute to build this out of AI with content, just a paragraph of content, and it generated all this stuff. This is pretty amazing. I gotta say, you know, it threw in some stats. I mean, that's just all made up. You'd have to go put that in there. But multiple pages of a site, you know, images were generated and dropped in there. This is pretty amazing, y'all and this is the really the first generation of AI technology. So to do this in a minute, pretty, pretty astounding. So if you've not yet seen zip WP take a look at that they even include a sure cart link with a donation page. Yeah, pretty, pretty amazing. So give that a look. Sign up for the preview. Again, it's not publicly available yet but there is a waitlist. All right, moving right along to some news from open AI. They have now filed a trademark application for GPT five that is their latest iteration of the generative language model that powers chat GPT the application covers a wide range of software as you can imagine, additional features that were noted in the trademark application include converting audio to text and voice recognition. It's currently awaiting examination by the US trademark and patent office. There's a new class of well let's see. Open AI is working on a new classifier to indicate that text is generated by AI. On July the 20th, open AI removed the old tool because it was only right about a quarter of the time. I wasn't very good. And they're looking into new techniques to provide more reliable AI detection before they release. A new tool which just make sense. So maybe you've seen that tool out there, but it's only right one in four times. So it will it would flag false positives quite a bit. So there is not a reliable detection tool now for identifying AI generated text. Okay, Apple is also in the game. As you can imagine Apple does not tend to be on the leading edge of technology, they tend to be on the second wave and then apply it in a way that is more usable for the average person. That's been the way Apple has operated for many years. But Apple is now developing an AI chat bot they're calling it's being referred to by some as Apple GPT. That is not the official name from Apple, it would probably be something much more cool than that. Only a few Apple employees have access to it for now. The public release is expected next year. It is likely could reinvent Siri and other AI features on iPhones. Apple may be late to the game but with its ecosystem, Apple GPT or whatever it's going to be called will be out to millions of users in no time. So again, more AI means better stuff for us. The more companies are in the AI game, the better their products are going to get because the competitive marketplace will continue to advance the product product options. Speaking of other AI being chat is now available in Chrome and Safari for some users previously it was only available within Microsoft apps, but there is now a an extension that will allow you to drop into your Chrome. So being chat might have some constraints rather than using it natively and edge and listen, if you've not tried Bing chat, it's pretty darn good. install Microsoft Edge and it'll pop up over in the sidebar. I'd give it a look if I were you because it's pretty, pretty cool. Here's some other AI news. There's always so much AI stories going on. Open AI This is really great. If you are an open AI paid user and you're you're you have discovered the magic of GPT for and you probably realize that they have upped your limit from 25 messages to 50 within a three hour period. So that's really nice. I would I would expect us to see that limit continuing to increase. It's also a great article here from rich Tabor, who's a longtime WordPress developer on how to build a WordPress blog using AI. There's a blog post in the YouTube video all about that and it's really all it's not that hard to do. Take a look at Rich's tutorial, you'll be shocked. All right. This is my favorite story of the news roundup and it comes with the question will AI replace music artists? So maybe you saw a few months ago that we had a story about the the Microsoft AI that could duplicate a voice or make a facsimile of someone's voice after only you know six or eight second sample of that voice? Well, somebody has done something interesting as the internet always, always does. And what they've done is they have created using AI magic. Johnny Cash singing, I'm a Barbie Girl. So if you've not seen this You're welcome.
Hello, I'm not Johnny Cash
Barbie Girl. Barbie leviathans last do is fantastic. You can brush my hair on press undress me everywhere
I'm just gonna like Come on
Barbie Let's go party because I'm in a bar the Can you believe if you want to be my lover you gotta get with my friends. Making less for ever friendship never ends on my hands up to play my song. Unbelievable. butterflies fly your way.
Alright, so YouTube link is right there on the page. Yeah. If you want to stay up with what's happening in AI, there's a great event from human made on September the 14th. That's a free event. This is the second in a series AI the next chapter. It is a free event. So you can register right there at the link on your screen. And there's also if you're an AI genius, you can apply to speak at this next event so check that out from human made coming up in September. All right. Still Still trying to get over Johnny Cash y'all. All right, let's move on to some other news, shall we? Ah, interesting news out of the EU the European Accessibility Act of 2025 might just apply to your website the EU EU has passed new accessibility standards that will take effect in June of 2025. Within the EU Member States, the European Accessibility Act or EA will require websites to comply with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines or W CAG. A level so that is coming to EU in 2025. So if you're in the EU or if you serve customers in the EU, or if you're in the US and your US customer does business in the EU, then you better start brushing up on accessibility because it's going to be required for many businesses, so the EA affects e commerce sites and other online services to make sure that they're accessible for all users, companies based outside the EU but selling to the EU should make sure that their site's are accessible. micro enterprises are exempt but accessibility can increase sales regardless of size of course, and this is just something to get into and find the details of as this law flushes out. So take a look at that. It's an opportunity y'all to do something really good on the web, make sites more accessible and so you can learn accessibility. And you can start applying that to all your builds but also help others make their sites accessible as well. The US Justice Department is also stepping into the accessibility mix. They are clarifying website accessibility standards. They've taken a bold step towards web and app accessibility. New technical standards will be developed to clarify what compliance means here in the US as well. Under the Americans with Disabilities Act. These standards are at first only going to apply to government websites, but they'll signal how private businesses should should comply. This was an announcement by someone at the DOJ and there's a 60 day window currently open for the public to provide input. At the end of this the Justice Department will issue some standards for government websites. But again that's going to start at will become the standard for all websites in the US how that's going to apply and who it affects going forward. I'm not sure but currently, this measure is just geared at government websites. Another interesting bit of other news comes out of the Search Engine Journal team, they did an experiment to see how the four day work week would work for them. So they tested that model that focused on operational excellence and maintaining 100% productivity while only working for eight hour days. So this this whole approach is about looking at processes, getting rid of redundancies getting rid of things that just waste time. So they're not going to work any more than four days, 32 hours a week, nor are they going to reduce workload and what they discovered was that by moving to a synchronous meetings, Slack messages, video messaging, scheduling emails, they made it all work. They found that they could get rid of a lot of meetings, and it worked for them to do all the work that they were ready to do in 32 hours a week. Pretty interesting article it's it's kind of an open door on how they adopted this four day workweek strategy, what they learned and look there stuff we can learn even if you're a solopreneur or in micro agency owner. There's some things we can learn from this as well. The WordPress community team is exploring transition from slack which is currently the make WordPress Slack channel where all the WordPress people are in all the discussions about core WordPress take place. They're looking to transition from that tool over to matrix. Now matrix is an open source chat system and they the WordPress team has created a bridge to push content from slack over to matrix. Now the WordPress matrix server is live now@community.wordpress.org And it supports a single sign on using your WordPress login. Direct messages and private chats are not available. Yet. But they've developed a new Gutenberg block to allow matrix client embedding and WordPress. There's no word winner if matrix is fully going to replace slack but that is certainly direction they're heading. You can imagine how much that slack channel costs WordPress with 1000s of users every month and they're paid. You know, it's a paid account. That's a lot of money. So moving over to matrix is interesting. We'll see where they go with that. Ah, let's see, Vern, you wouldn't need a server for matrix. WordPress would have a server if you want to use matrix on your own. You'd have to set it up yourself. Yes. Another WordPress tool that we've talked about here before but now there is a learning tutorial about it is the WordPress playground. So we demonstrated WordPress playground I believe in the June or not the July plugin round up here on iThemes Training plugin is playground is an in browser WordPress experience runs completely in the browser does not require a server or a database server to operate. It makes it very easy to demonstrate WordPress or test plugins spin up an instant test environment. I can run completely in the browser or you can download the instance with a single click to your desktop or some local folder to just drop in plugins and the themes and plugins folders there. It is like it's so fast to learn how to use but they've added a new tutorial it's about 10 minutes long. On how to use WordPress playground there@learn.wordpress.org. And if you haven't played with playground yet, I would advise you to do that. Take a look at it. It's a very powerful tool to quick test a couple of things, couple of plugins, whatever you want in WordPress, literally instantly. Very cool. All right. Here's another bit of S E O News. Google has now changed. Its how they're going to use FAQ and how to schema. So the FAQ and how to schema was something that SEO experts have been using very quietly to help to boost rankings for their clients. Because the these are the answers to questions that appear at the very top when you do a WordPress a Google search about some topic, and there's links back to certain sites. So Google on August the eighth has announced they will only be honoring FAQ schema in their rich search results for authoritative government and health care websites. Which means that no longer will the average business or even small nonprofit for example, be able to see their FAQ schema appear in those rich search results. It just simply will not be displayed. So Google is determining who qualifies this and not and as usual, Google is not very transparent about what it's going to allow to show up there or not. So you don't have to change anything. If you're using the strategy. You don't have to change anything. It's just not going to appear at those top level rich search results anymore. So I mean, the thing is, ultimately, this is a good thing, because we want trustworthy results to show up there. And not just you know somebody's blog that has an opinion about something showing up as an answer to a question. So that's what Google is after in the big picture. I kind of agree with it. But yeah, if you're using this, it's definitely going to affect your SEO strategy. The update is rolling out globally and all languages this week across all of the Google this, Google says this shouldn't be considered a rankings change. Okay. And this, it's not going to be listed in the search status dashboard as you look at your search console.
All right there the controversial giant X logo has been removed from exes headquarters formerly known as Twitter, on Twitter remove that giant flashing logo from their San Francisco headquarters due to safety complaints, just three days after it was erected last month. The notorious logo had this strobe lighting that was incredibly bright. They x twice blocked San Francisco building inspectors from access to the structure which they had installed without a permit. This is what it looked like. It was just very, very bright. Imagine living next door to this thing. Supposedly it was a temporary structure and was only secured by sandbags. At its base, so the giant X is gone and we can all move on with our lives. All right, as we get into some of the next versions of the next phases, the Project Gutenberg which move into translations analysis by the core team has shown that translations significantly slow WordPress sites the WordPress performance team has done a study that shows that WordPress sites that use translations can be up to 50% slower than WordPress sites that do not use translation. About 50% of WordPress sites that use translations are affected by these performance issues. Six solutions were identified to help including different file formats different caching. The performance team plans to test possible solutions like revamping the translations parser in core WordPress, and a new PHP translation file format, the goal being Let's speed this thing up more and we're it's a global community. Multilingual WordPress is a thing. Our testing is happening on a wider scale through the Performance Lab feature plugin. link for that is down in the footer of the slide. The full look at multilingual support in WordPress is the primary focus of phase four of Project Gutenberg. If you're talking to clients and they ask you why WordPress here's a great article from rich Taber. The developer we mentioned who has the great approach to building AI blocks with building blocks with AI earlier, rich Tabor, longtime WordPress developer, he's got a great article here. That is an excellent case for maybe repurposing a bit as you're talking to clients for very important reasons why WordPress is open source plugin library versatile it can be WordPress can be anything, and it's secure with 50 experts focusing on issues that need to be resolved. So good take there. There's a lot more detail in the article and it's a good spot to start for answering client questions about why should I choose WordPress NASA is like they are launching a new website it's currently@beta.nasa.gov but it is built in WordPress yet another reason to choose WordPress NASA did pretty cool. The WP awards 2023 nominations are now open this is the awards presentation from the WP weekly email newsletter which is a great email newsletter if you're not getting that sign up for that at the WP weekly.com. They're set to return with an online event on December the 11th Nominations are open for all kinds of WordPress based products and services. They opened a couple weeks ago and they're open through the middle of September. And then voting once the nominations have come in will be open from October through November. Winners announced December 11 on that livestream event. submissions of course don't guarantee nominations. It just depends on the voting All right. Another bit of news that hit last weekend was yet another zoom privacy controversy. This one revolving around zoom AI. Zoom has updated the terms of service after a controversy erupted earlier this month surrounding recent changes about its AI technology. The terms of use that you agree to when you use Zoom. Give them rights to use customer content for machine learning, artificial intelligence training, testing, and a variety of other product and development purposes. Customer content includes your video of your calls, audio of your calls, and your chat transcripts. So that update, an update was made last week that added a new clause notwithstanding anything that we just said. Zoom will not use any of this without your consent. So you're grading them. It's just this is lawyers got into a room. I mean, if that's the only explanation. We're grant you granting us access to all of your things, but we promise not to use them without asking you. So do what you will with that. Concern still remains over what has been called service generated data, which zoom can still use to train its AI. Zoom has a number of different privacy concerns in the past that privacy watchdogs are just kind of waiting to see where the you know, where things land on this are definitely a story to watch. All right, let's talk about good news that is worth a look. Just a few things that we saw that didn't quite fit any place else. First. Here's great six great examples of using Google Bard, Google's AI with image recognition pretty cool stuff there. Google has released 10 free courses to master AI. Pretty good stuff there as well. A couple of nice Twitter links, seven top tips to become a Google Analytics for pro great article there from Search Engine Journal. Or you can just come in September and learn it straight from the master. And that is David Zimmerman here on the Google Analytics bootcamp. On iThemes Training. And last of all, good article from the iThemes blog about creating a shipping policy if you have an e commerce Store, great blog article on what you might include in a shipping policy. All right, we're gonna wrap up as we usually do with WordPress community news. There's a bunch of upcoming US word camps. The word word camp Community Summit in Washington DC, actually, Maryland right across the river from DC is coming up next week, August 22, and 23rd and WordCamp us August 24. And through the 26th. I'll be there for all that. So make sure you look me up if you're going to be there. Also word camp Omaha, Nebraska is coming October 14 and 15th and WordCamp Atlanta same weekend October 14 and 15th. I'll be there at WordCamp Atlanta. And again if you're going to be there make sure you look me up I'd love to meet you. Upcoming word camps around the world of camp and I webcam webcam. My goodness word camp Nairobi. Discuss this okay happening today. So I hope those folks have a great camp for the next few days there in Jinja. Nairobi. Actually this is these links are inverted Nairobi word link goes here. Ginger goes here. The Uganda word campus coming up September 4, and fifth. And last but not least, we've been talking about this. The WordPress accessibility Day is coming September 27 and 28th. And if you want to learn about accessibility, and making sites more accessible to users with disabilities and WordPress, great event on September 27 and 28th the 24 hour event is free but registration is required. I take a look there at 2020 three.wp accessibility dot day. And that folks wraps us up for the WordPress news roundup of August 2023. Thanks for hanging out with me for the last hour or so hopefully you found some things that are interesting. Click some of those links, learn some more. I'm back tomorrow for members with the fly course talking all about problem clients and then office hours on Thursday. Until then, have a great rest of the day. See you back here tomorrow and I iThemes Training where we go further together.