Welcome, everybody. Glad you're here. If you're just joining us, hop on over to the chat say hello, tell us where you're logging in from today and you can grab the slide link it is there waiting on you in the chat. I'm getting our captioning set up
all right, that should all be working for everyone now. In welcome everybody. I just see everyone here this afternoon this evening. whatever time of day it happens to be for you. Or if you're down under welcome or in the early early morning all right, we are about four minutes away from getting started with the June news roundup here on I iThemes Training. Many things to talk about including the WordPress 20th birthday anniversary that was just about a month ago today. Three weeks ago today something like that. Glad you're all here. Thanks for joining me for this little foray into the world of WordPress news. You're just joining us in the chat let me drop in the link bundle once again for you.
Oh, Shawn, I read your note quickly just then Birmingham, Michigan. Welcome. I'm in the other Birmingham down in the southeast Birmingham, Alabama. Are you we're in the Birmingham here for a moment there. Glad you're all here. Welcome. We're gonna get started in about three minutes from now. glad you've all joined us. The links are in the chat to download today's slides. And I also want to draw your attention to the last thing in that link bundle, which is tomorrow's town hall meeting with me and Matt Cromwell will be talking all about the progress that's been made in the rebrand of solid WP as I themes is becoming solid WP a lot of thought has been given now into the solid Academy which is the new evolution of AI iThemes Training. That'll be launching in a few months. New Website lots of new good things. Links are there in the chat if you're missing those. Hey Jeffrey from Guatemala. Welcome lots of folks in here class from Little Rock Stacey from Colorado. Shauna from Michigan Barney from Virginia Ben from Sweden. jokin from Austria Rick from Ohio Ed from Switzerland. My new from doesn't say I forgot where you from money. California, California right money. Yeah, welcome, everybody. Glad you're here. Welcome. Joan from Uganda. Glad you're here. Awesome. Deb from Texas. SAS right Manu from San Jose heater from Connecticut. Welcome. About a minute and a half to go before we get started. If you're just now joining us on Zoom, pop up in the chat and say hello, tell us where you're logging in from you will find in the chat the links to all the things for today. Welcome John from Hawaii, perhaps Sherry from British Columbia. Elizabeth from Atlanta. Hey, Elizabeth.
All right, y'all about a minute to go. Glad you're all here. Awesome. Paul from Parts Unknown. Hope everybody had a good weekend. And the week has gotten off to a good start for you. We are just a minute away from getting started.
If you're just joining us in zoom, I'm going to drop in the links for today in the chat
All right, y'all just about ready to start. Very many things to talk about today.
All right. We are about to take over three minutes after so it is time to start let me get the recording going. I'll be right back. Good afternoon everybody and welcome to News RoundUp here on iThemes Training. It is June 2023. My name is Nathan Ingram. I am the host here at I iThemes Training and every month we take a look across the WordPress world and we digest the news especially for those of you who are building and managing WordPress sites for clients. So we have a lot to talk about today. If you are just joining us in zoom pop up in the chat and you will find there in the link to today's slides which are looking at all the reference links are down in the footer of each slide. If you want to go back and reread those whole stories, you can do that and they are there for your viewing pleasure. One thing I do want to mention is we're just getting started the link is there in the chat and we'll be talking about it again briefly and that is the town hall meeting that's coming tomorrow at one o'clock Central with me and Matt Cromwell will be talking about the rebrand of I iThemes to solid WP and the progress that's been made since the last town hall that we had, especially about all the things that are going to be happening with the solid Academy, which is the new evolution of AI iThemes Training so if you've not yet registered for that webinar, make sure you do that the link is there for you in the chat. If you're watching this on the replay, click the Download handout button just below the video and you will get the slides right there on your computer as well. All right, let's go forward and start as we always do with news from core. WordPress is now 20 years old on May the 27th. WordPress celebrated its 20th birthday. WordPress is a year older than Facebook four years older than the first iPhone even. And there's a few 20th anniversary posts to check out but I thought it might be fun to take a little trip down memory lane and just remind ourselves of how this beautiful thing we call WordPress came into being how many of you know where it started? It started with a blog post. Let's rewind, shall we? And go back into our memories back to January 24 2003. When some kid in Houston named Matt Mullenweg. I had a blog at that time called a web blog where he liked to share photos. And though back in those days he was using an open source piece of software called B to cafe log. And he was frustrated about the lack of functionality that this open source logging software. It was just not working for what he needed. And there's this wonderful statement right here. My logging software hasn't been updated for months and the main developer has disappeared. And I can only hope that he's okay. Well. You know, what should it do? He goes on to talk in the post about it'd be nice if it had the flexibility of movable type which was a content management system back in those early days. It would be nice if it had the parsing of textpattern and the hack ability of b two in the easy setup of blogger Sunday right. So Scrolling on down into the comments of that section you find an interesting little comment from somebody named Mike. He's a developer from the UK name Mike little. And Mike says Hey Matt, if you're serious about forking v2, I would be interested in contributing I'm sure there are one or two others in the community that would be to perhaps a post to the v2 forum, suggesting a fork is a good starting point. You gotta love this maybe there's just there might be a couple of people who would be interested in transforming this little blog software into something different. So that was January 25 2003. And about a month later, WordPress 1.0 Miles was born. Amazing. It had a new SEO friendly URL structure and even offered multiple categories which was revolutionary in the day. You are looking at a screenshot of the create post interface in WordPress 1.0. Isn't that something? Now a few months later, WordPress 1.2 Mangus added this new thing called plugins. Now this is what really revolutionized WordPress beyond a lot of the platforms that were out there and you might even say, this is the thing that caused WordPress to grow. Because no longer were you simply relying on the core developers to build new features into core. Now anybody could add little bits of code called a plug in to extend the functionality of the open source core software. So that was May of 2004. Fast forwarding several months to February 2005, WordPress 1.5, stray horn was released. And now we have this new thing of pages and posts. absolutely unbelievable. So there's a tabbed interface here as you can see, write a post, write a page to WordPress begins to evolve into more of a content management software, not just a logging, web logging or blogging platform. So December 2005. WordPress 2.0 was released an overhaul to the backend interface much faster to operate because they incorporated some Ajax calls to perform certain tasks. And you start to see hey, look, there's the beginnings of the sidebar that even today is still roughly similar in structure little meta boxes that open and close. Isn't that something fast forwarding to WordPress 2.3 in September 2007. WordPress is chugging along, not many super new improvements, but WordPress 2.3 added these little things called tags that are in another just an additional taxonomy to categories to help further help you further organize your posts. Moving forward to March of 2008. WordPress 2.5 comes along it's a major upgrade. The WordPress team collaborated with a design firm to totally overhaul the user interface and add a dashboard feature. So that's where the WordPress Dashboard came into existence way back in March 2008. This really became the foundation of how we use WordPress today. This familiar interface of dashboard which is still very similar. And something else that was brought in was a one click upgrade for plugins. So plugins being able to release updates and you could click and it would update the plugin that's pretty cool. And that was revolutionary to the world at that point. Moving forward to March of 2008 WordPress 2.5. Now we have we have added the tiny MCE editor right here and the page and post editor that was a big change. It's been around since 2008, y'all and still some of us use that today in the form of the classic editor. Fast forwarding to WordPress 3.8. In December 2013, five and a half years later, a lot of things have changed in WordPress under the hood. But the editor interface here is virtually the same as what we see today, isn't it? The 3.8 interface was designed for mobile so things started stacking it didn't do that before. And it's roughly I mean, it's very similar like you could step right back into this thing out. It's kind of what I'm using today. Moving forward to November 2017. WordPress 4.9 was released fast forwarding for more years. The interface is cleaned up but again virtually the same and for the 14 years of WordPress, there's one major thing that never changed. This this box that we type in our content was the same for the past 14 years. Even right there at WordPress 4.9. Still the same they all box and if you're using the classic editor the same today, and all that was true until December 2018 and WordPress five dot o Bebo came along and introduced the block editor which you either love it or you hate it. There's very few interstitial opinions about the block editor. And a whole new editing experience the new WordPress block editor project codenamed Gutenberg ushered in that new age of WordPress that we currently enjoying. We're enjoying today so happy 20th Birthday WordPress. I'm personally grateful for all of the things that WordPress has brought into my life connecting me with lots of great people. Over the years, as I've said from the very beginning, the best thing about WordPress is not the software, it's the community and you guys are all a part of that as well. WordPress has come a long, long way. All right. Speaking of coming a long way. Let's talk about WordPress. 6.3 Shaolin, we have a new release of WordPress that is scheduled for August the eighth of this year. It's mostly going to be about the site editor, the full site editing suite of tools that has been added. Improvements to the site editor are going to make it easier to edit pages and manage navigation and adjust your styles. There will also be improvements to the two block templates including the ability to preview block templates, and as well as the addition of curated patterns and font management options and a few new blocks. But one of the really cool things is going to be this command center that we talked about last month. That's sort of a if you if you love keyboard shortcuts you're gonna love this because it lets you quick filter everything in the site editor and get to where you want to be a little quicker. Here's a little short video of how that works.
Well, some of the things Alright, there it is. There's the that was fast. There was the command bar, which you can bring up and just type things and it jumps you right around to the place that you're looking for. Videos rolling a little fast there. But pretty cool. I can see that. That command bar being extended significantly as we move WordPress forward. I think that's pretty cool like that. Pretty neat stuff. Now WordPress 6.3 is also going to expand the use of patterns in the site editor. There are going to be some curated default patterns that can be set up to go with your theme of choice that are going to be more deeply integrated into your whole site experience. You'll be able to create and save patterns just the same way today you can create and save reusable blocks. Here is what that might look like. This is definitely a just a concept at this point. But here's like what these patterns might look like. And these can all be programmatically created by a theme developer and available for you right inside your theme and you can just choose the one that you want. Pretty cool WordPress 6.3 is also going to prioritize usability, which is pretty cool. There's the new top toolbar and the list view is going to be improved there in the site editor. This is one thing I really like. Even in the block editor or for the site editor you're gonna in the list view you'll be able to change the names of those blocks. So for example, if you are editing a site that has a lot of rows stacked up when you open that ListView right now all you see is row layout. Now you'll actually be able to go in and rename those Oh, this is the hero Oh, this is the call to action area. Oh this is an opt in or whatever. And just for your view in the editor, you'll be able to have those names of the items there in ListView, which I think is just great. They have also optimized the unlinked padding and margin controls to make them a little they don't take up quite as much space and they've also unified the way links and the UI of linking works, which is good. They're also working on library management with reusable blocks and template parts. Here's what that might look like. Again, this is just a concept at this point. But it's very similar as the previous view we saw they put a lot of work, I think into this user interface and making things pretty consistent throughout the site editor. So if you've played with the site editor before, you know it's not quite there yet, these new changes, continue to iterate on it. And just like the block editor at the very beginning, yeah not not not awesome, and it's gradually gotten better and better and better. Until now it's really easy to use. The site editor is going to be the same way. 6.3 is also going to focus on enhancing some design tools that are available. It'll be easier to add new features the focus is simplifying the experience of editing and creating a site work is being done to improve the style book which is a super cool feature. This is what something like that might look like. So if we go into styles, you have this you know where you can select the style but here in the book we click that and look now it shows you all of the styles of headings and galleries and lists and audio and buttons. All right. They're in the style book, which I really, really like. So that's pretty cool. Now again, it may not exactly look like this, but this is kind of this is a concept. WordPress 6.3 is also going to focus on ratcheting up the API's that WordPress offers specifically the Fonts API and the block API to make those more extendable for developers, which is a good thing. They're also going to focus on performance and the core performance team will have some additions hopefully into WordPress 6.3. That's the plan. Especially like with the way the WP scripts API loads at scripts, they're going to focus on making those scripts load faster, as well as overall LCP improvements that are going to help to ratchet up your page speed scores. Again, this is just a first glimpse of these features that the core team has made it very clear it may not actually look like this when it's actually released, but it's at least a good starting place. And I love what they're thinking about something else. Just as a note, WordPress 6.3 will conclude it's expected to conclude phase two of Project Gutenberg. So phase one was the block editor in the content area. Phase two was moving the block editor out of the content area and into the other sections of the site, like headers and footers and sidebars and those sorts of things. Phase three will begin. Likely it's expected to begin after WordPress six three, which is the multi author collaboration additions that they're going to bring into core and then phase four will be the multilingual website support so that's pretty cool. 6.3 beta will be released toward the end of this month and middle of next month. The release candidates heading toward the end of July the dry run on August the seventh with the general release being planned for August the eighth of this year. They've also released the 6.4 schedule, the betas at the end of September and October release candidates through the end of October and then the final release there on November the seventh 2023 I'm grateful it's not Thanksgiving weekend, like they've done in the past. So 6.4 is upcoming as well. All right, here's another bit of news from core the WordPress core performance team has published a summary of core performance analysis to prioritize area for improvement now what they've decided to focus on is how page templates load for classic themes and block themes. So they tested the classic themes of 2021 and the block theme of 2023 in different scenarios of content and they found that very few sites are actually using block themes now and so they're gonna make sure that whatever performance they do, they're going to make sure that classic themes are brought into the mix as well. A lot of the server response time in rendering a WordPress page when it's requested by a user is spent going through the file system and rendering widget blocks and things like that. And so the core performance team is looking at how do we improve that to make that whole process go faster, which is good. The end result of this is all WordPress site should load a little bit quicker after 6.2 or 6.3. With these performance tweaks that are continuing to be added. Other priorities include improving translation, loading, block registration, block templates, block widgets, all those things. Something else that's been going on in the world of core is there are now new commercial and community tags in themes and plugins in the directory. Maybe you've seen this. If you've taken a look at the WordPress plug in directory lately. The goal is to help users sort easily between free community extensions and commercial upgrades. Only a small percentage of theme and plugin authors have added these new taxonomies to their projects so far. But that should continue to grow. It's unclear if having to specify a taxonomy is going to be a requirement. Hopefully it will be I think it's helpful. So this these filters are also going to be in the WordPress admin when you add a plug in or add a theme, but here's how it looks in the directory themselves. There's now a link for community themes and commercial plugins. So that just lets you know hey, this is a really absolute actually free plugin, or it's a commercial plugin that might have a crippled free version with a lot of the features disabled that sort of thing. So it'll help you sort through those plugins a little bit easier. So I think that's a good thing all around for everybody. All righty, let's move into some news from Gutenberg and take a look at what's been happening in the block editor. We have three Gutenberg releases since our last news roundup. The first happened back on May the 20th. One month ago today, Gutenberg 15.8 dropped their improvements to the existing user interface and user experience for content creators site owners working on their own site or even for developers. There were small changes and workflows, they've streamlined some things they fix some bugs, they fix some responsiveness. They have added the Pages menu to the site editor. Now this is good. It was the first shot at this. Currently in the site editor only templates were accessible. And now they've added the ability to edit pages there as well. And so in 15.8, the last 10 most recently updated pages were exposed there in a list. So you could jump into editing them. That was just a first step. The versions of Gutenberg we'll talk about in just a moment. I've actually extended that just a bit. So in the site editor, you now have pages and you can just go to them right there to edit which is kind of nice. Gutenberg 15 Eight also added a revisions user interface to the global styles. So if you change the style, it's going to keep revision, so you can roll back if you want to change anything, which is really good. So you can roll back and browse how the site looked at any point in time that revisions are being tracked. Save Changes gets shown in that timeline. Here's kind of what this looks like. Kind of nice here. And that nice, shows you all of your changes right there. You can roll back to any of those that you want. And it even shows a visual of what those things look like and the cool. They've also added theme previews for block themes. There's a new theme preview parameter that will show how your site will look inside the site editor. So inside the site editor, if you want to, you can switch to a new theme in the site editor and you'll get this rendering of how it will look without ever having to change theme. So it lets you kind of test some things that you have installed to see if you like how they look which is pretty nice. I like that a lot.
Dozens of other enhancements in global styles post editor and more at Gutenberg 15.9 dropped on May the 31st. They've done a lot of things to the site editor, including a new command tool with a pending name. That's that little command bar that we looked at. There was a quick bug fix that dropped that. I love the way developers say a regression in functions that is developer speak for it broke something. So they quickly rolled out a 15 dot 9.1 That's very uncommon. They normally just push through, but they pay fixing things there. And they did add this new command tool the file name is yet to be determined. If you want to play around with this you can go into the site editor and use the keyboard shortcut Command or Ctrl K Mac command PC control and that will pop open that little command bar interface. It's going to give you quick access to commands to navigate to create content, et cetera. You can even add your own commands. So this is it's extendable meaning we're gonna see plugins developed that will tap into that feature and I bet you anything. There will be some AI tools that will link right into that interface as well. So it's going to be a lot of fun to see how that little bit evolves. And here's what it looks like we saw a preview of that in the video earlier. Pretty nice. We've done some plugins and years past and the plugin roundup maybe some of you remember this, where you could do a keyboard shortcut or click something and it popped open a command bar like this that was like a magic filter of all the things in the admin area. This is similar to that have more functionality and it's built into WordPress core. Pretty neat. There are also some enhancements to the overall site editor experience. It allows the site editor and as you now allows you to preview what you're looking at in any size for smaller screens so you can actually drag the width of your screen to see how it's going to perform as the screen size changes. It also has a better drag and drop interface which is welcome by me especially I it gives you a visual cue of where those blocks are going to drop as you drag and drop them and they've given you some better site view as well with so you can see style variations and nav menus. Here's what this looks like where you can actually grab the preview window and size it right there. Which is really neat. The very intuitive right there in the site editor. I think that's pretty cool. You can make it very large or very small. Gutenberg 16.0 dropped. Just last week, I had focused on page management in the site editor two versions ago we mentioned that they added the last 10 pages that was just to get things started. Now they have added all the pages you can create new pages you can view all pages. One of the challenges it can be a little difficult to know right now what is actually being edited. Am I editing the template or am I editing the page content? They're working on that 16 dot o starts down that road by adding the ability to focus on either the page content or the page template. Here's how that looks. We go to pages, there's a page there's where you can edit the various pieces of the page and if you want to you can then go into the page and edit the actual page content. Now we click down there and we're editing the template with the powered by WordPress area. So it gives you the little snack bar message at the bottom of what you're actually editing. Is it page content or is it template? So I don't know if that's the best way to do it. It's what they're doing now want to see if that sticks. I think they may iterate on that just a little bit. But they're continuing to make these improvements to make the site editor better and better to use. Kinda cool. Gutenberg 16 Oh also has added some refined dimension controls the block spacing and layout controls have been added to the post template block which is part of the query block. These dimension controls that's padding and margin. Those sorts of things have been redesigned to optimize how they look and not take up as much space. They look kind of like this now. So you can choose which side of the padding or which sides you want like just top and bottom padding, and scroll that in and out. And now here's just the left and right padding like that. It's kind of nice. I like that it's a good interface. And Gutenberg 16 That details block is now also stable. We talked about this in the last news roundup, this is kind of like the show more, that kind of an accordion more or less that is accessible which is nice. It was added in Gutenberg 15 Six as an experiment. And they've now stabilized that block it uses a details and summary HTML elements which are helpful for screen readers to hide content until the reader is ready to view it. You can also set it to be visible by default. And there's what it looks like. There's a little arrow and you click on that and it'll open up close kind of cool to hide and show various content. And again, there's the setting you can have it open by default if you want. So that's a new core block that Gutenberg 16 has added. It's not in core WordPress yet. That will happen in 6.3. When it releases in August. They'll take all this development and Gutenberg and drop it over into core as they've done. All right, let's move forward into some security news, shall we? I was a very active month in vulnerabilities once again. 163 plugins patched 124 plugins remain vulnerable. They have active vulnerabilities or they have been closed and 17 theme vulnerabilities have been patched. So big deal the number of vulnerabilities continued to increase. And if you missed our discussion about this last month, the question is why? You know for months, we've been doing this news roundup for years now. And we typically have 30, maybe 3040 real vulnerabilities and suddenly they increased dramatically. And the reason for this is it's bug bounties. To be honest. There more people doing research to find WordPress vulnerabilities because now there's a monetary incentive. So groups like patch stack, for example. Are you know, they incentivize researchers reporting bugs, security issues in WordPress themes and plugins. And so it's a job now you can go out and make money, finding security problems and plugins. And so that's a good thing. Paul is asking do the numbers roll over now these are new this month, right? There's a lot of things going on. So how do you deal with these security things if you're managing sites for clients absolutely use I think security Pro. I think security even the free version has a site scan that twice a day scans your site for any noted vulnerabilities and themes and plugins. Using patch stack will use their database for theme and plugin vulnerabilities. And if a vulnerability is discovered, if you have the iThemes Pro, I think security pro version. If a vulnerability is discovered and a patch exists, you don't have to do anything. I think security automatically patches that vulnerable theme or plugin for you without even having to do thing so it's wonderful, but even in the free version, you get the site scan, which is very, very helpful. If you want to dig into all the plugins that were vulnerable. All the links to the last four vulnerability reports, which we covered in these numbers are there in the footer if you'd like to read those. By the way, if there are high profile vulnerabilities we're going to talk about those separately. But it's just it's not possible to read 124 plugin vulnerabilities and all the names like we used to. So if there's something big, that really that we've noticed a significant, we'll mention that there in a separate slide. All right. One big vulnerability this month was the WooCommerce stripe gateway. This is the official WooCommerce stripe gateway plugin version 7.4 and older. Now have they had a security vulnerability, but this is actually not what this is not this is unclear. So anything if you have 7.4 or earlier, it's vulnerable 7.4 dot one patches the issue. So just make sure you're up to date with your WooCommerce stripe plugin, because this is a high severity vulnerability so it will allow unauthenticated Users to View Order data like email username and their full address. Big deal. Now over 55% of people using that plugin are using a vulnerable version. Now there are no currently known active exploits, but there sure will be pretty soon I can imagine. So just make sure that all of your sites are up to date, particularly on this plugin, because this one is a big deal. talking to clients about security
is very, very important. And that's one of the reasons I think this continues to develop content about security. There's a great article here on the i iThemes blog, you can grab the link there in the footer of the slide, that if you serve small businesses, nonprofits, any type of organization, I would strongly encourage you having a conversation with your clients about cybersecurity. It's a bigger deal than just you protecting their website sometimes it can be very helpful for a small business person, a small nonprofit, smaller, you know, firms like lawyers or architects or whatever. They may not really you they might think oh, we're just a small firm, nobody's gonna care about us or try to attack us. And that's not the case. Especially with these new spear phishing attacks that are targeted social engineering attacks against specific users in the organization. With all the information about people that's available out there on social media that can be crawled and assembled into a profile. The bad guys do this, and they can target individuals and really do a an effective job of getting from them their username and password. Small businesses are a huge target. global cyber attacks Rose 38% and 2022. Small businesses are 64% of that increase. They fail small businesses employees face 350% more social engineering attacks than larger companies. Now for the WordPress side, it's the same story. It's outdated plugins and themes and weak user security practices. So we need to do our job on that end, but it can be helpful for you to come in to your client and help them think about their security risk as a whole and that might even be able to be a service that you offer to them. It's a great article there on the things blog, I would strongly recommend that you read it. Alright, speaking of I think let's turn the page to news from solid WP This is the new name for AI themes. If you missed it, I think this is rebranding the solid WP let me drop in our links. Again quickly in the chat. I can type correctly. There's some great links there to solid wp.com and the YouTube channel. YouTube is the primary means with which information is being communicated about our rebrand and public. A lot of cool things going on. There is as I've mentioned a number of times in our broadcast today, a town hall tomorrow that I would love if you could participate. I joined Matt Cromwell and me tomorrow at one from one to 2pm Central as we talk about this new direction for solid Academy and the rebrand progress for solid WP. A lot of things have happened since the last time we talked and as always, it's an open forum. We'll talk about some things but we'll answer your questions as candidly as possible. And you may note if you were part of the first town hall meeting, the solid team there were a number of questions we couldn't have we didn't have the answers to during the town hall. But within a day or two those answers a q&a fac was added to the solid wp.com website and those questions were addressed. So the solid team is very, very thorough about making sure your questions are answered. And so I would just invite you to be part of that town hall meeting tomorrow. All right, I'm looking forward to next week. Our June premium event here on I iThemes Training is our Google Local boot camp with Google local expert, my friend Tricia Clements of your biz watchdog. This is all Tricia does she's been doing it for a long time. She is the expert I would turn to if I have a client that has Google Business Profile issues at the two day event as usual from one to 3pm Central time each day. That's next Tuesday and Wednesday. The first day we're going to talk about setting up local SEO for success. What are the key ranking factors, what makes conversions, measuring your efforts and then how to avoid being suspended in your profile. Day two, Trisha is going to focus on okay now that we understand some things about local SEO, how can we make money on it? How can we increase our monthly recurring revenue? What is the must have website content that you need? How to get Google reviews and troubleshoot them? What makes local SEO different than regular SEO and how the Google business profile is not something that you can just set it and forget it. It does require some maintenance and all of that can build into a service that you offer to clients. So Trisha has got a lot to share with us next week. I am looking forward to that because I don't know a whole lot about Google Local, but I want to All right, it is SEO time of the year, our July and August premium events here on iThemes Training. We'll have Lindsey Halsey, our friend from Pathfinder SEO. Lindsay is a phenomenal instructor about all things but specifically in SEO. She's really easy to listen to. She's an excellent teacher. She has great answers to questions. And we'll be taking the same approach to SEO training as we did last year with an SEO basics workshop in July the 25th 26th and our SEO masterclass on August 29, and 30th these are a member only events so if you would like to join I iThemes Training you can do so there at i ithemes.com/training Or you can just click here and click the link and there's a link to join. Alright, some other events I iThemes Training the solid townhall coming up office hours of course for members on Thursday, the local SEO workshop next week and our plugin roundup July the fifth. We did move that by the way some folks were mentioning, I had that schedule on July the fourth which is of course Independence Day here in the United States. And yes, we move that back so it is an odd Wednesday for the plugin round. Up. We're usually the first Tuesday of each month but we have switched that webinar back one day to Wednesday, July the fifth. And then of course our fly for the month of July is systems which is always a lot of fun. Alright, let's move into Plugins. We have some things to talk about in the plugins world specifically, a new version of WooCommerce that was released. Version 7.8 over 500 commits from 61 contributors to one and four commits around WooCommerce blocks. This release does continue to support PHP 7.3 But listen, big changes coming to WooCommerce if you have WooCommerce sites that are still on PHP 7.4 I have one because it has other problems with PHP eight. They have announced a plan the core WooCommerce team will require PHP eight dot O for WooCommerce to operate in October 2023. So if you like me might have a lingering old site that is running WooCommerce and still running on 7.4 php, the clock is ticking and that upgrade needs to be done. So just be aware of that that is coming. Big additions to WooCommerce 7.8 or theme level global styles. So if you're building your site with WooCommerce and the WooCommerce blocks, there's some changes to the way the blocks operate which are pretty cool. They also have changed up the way the filter by Attribute product counter works. So before those numbers didn't update, as you'd make selections, but now they do and here's what I mean by that. So you can check that filter and you'll notice that everything down below it will update as well. There you can see, you know changing a price for example, it's going to reload those areas kind of slow right now I imagine they're going to do some tuning on that. But now it actually shows you the number of matches which is kind of nice. They've also added a number of new patterns and WooCommerce 7.8. They've been adding more and more of these in WooCommerce blocks. All these are out of the box patterns that you can just build right into your site. They've also improved the product block with the the ability to hand select the items that will occur in a WooCommerce product loop. Here's how that looks. So over here on the side you can select handpicked products, and then directly pick what products are going to be in this loop of WooCommerce products, the grid that is being produced there. So that's kind of cool. I like that a lot. All right, another big change that's coming to WooCommerce we've been talking about this for a little while and that is H P. O 's high performance order storage for WooCommerce. Now, one of the things about WooCommerce. That's a little frustrating is that it can get a little bit slow. That's being generous, particularly when a site is old and has a lot of orders or if it's on a site that has a lot of other things going on. And that's because WooCommerce when it was started way back when as anybody remember what it was called in the beginning WooCommerce started life anybody remember? Let somebody Google that then it didn't start out as WooCommerce it was a fork of something else. Anyway, it stores all that stuff in post meta. So if
you have a lot of post types and custom post types and whatever going on WooCommerce also stores its order data in the post meta database field now what does that mean? Well as your site operates and is trying to find things related to posts, now all cluttered inside of that table with all the post meta is all this WooCommerce order data as well. And so let's say you have a site that's many years old, there's tons of order data in there, and it just makes things harder to find. It takes longer for every single query in the database. It's just not a great solution. So WooCommerce has begun to address this and this y'all this is a big deal. Imagine all the technical debt from all these versions of WooCommerce from years and years and years ago. changing that and putting things in new tables is a big deal with potential problems that you might encounter, especially on sites that might not be in the best hosting environment. So anyway, the Wu team is working on an approach to solve this that moves WooCommerce data out of standard WordPress tables and into dedicated WooCommerce tables. This is a great solution for the future of WooCommerce but I can't imagine it's going to be a painless upgrade. This is definitely something we're gonna want to pay attention to you and likely will have some training on this when the time comes. They started working on this in January and they've scheduled to end this to be introduced in August. We'll see if that actually happens. This is definitely something we're going to want to watch and make sure that you have lots of backups and a good process to deal with these older sites. Now the good news here is that on the other side of this scary sort of upgrade, H POS provides faster order creation up to 1.5 times faster, and a 40 times faster order search performance because it doesn't have to go through all the clutter in the in the post meta database table. So it's really good. It's a great approach but wow it's there's a lot to get from here to there. So all new WooCommerce stores will start with H POS so if you just installed WooCommerce the first time after they released this update in August or potentially in August. It'll start out with H POS fantastic. existing stores can turn H POS on or off for a while. So you can do the upgrade without having to toggle on h POS. But at some point they're saying, look at some point it's going to become mandatory, so it can be tested and enabled or disabled. Starting now. WooCommerce is working with third party developers to make sure all the extensions are ready. I mean, good grief, the ecosystem of WooCommerce extensions, those add on plugins for WooCommerce is enormous and trying to make sure all those things work together. This is going to be a big job for us. So if you have a WooCommerce store, there's lots of add ons doing lots of things. You got to make sure it's fully tested because who knows if you know this plugin hasn't been updated in the year or six months or whatever. How's it going to work with these new tables I it's going to be a challenge. We do know that not all extensions are currently compatible with H TLS H pls. Now at some point WooCommerce has said that non compatible extensions are going to be removed from the WordPress marketplace. And that's the official WooCommerce marketplace. You still have all these other WordPress marketplaces that have WooCommerce plugins even the WordPress plugin directory. I don't think this is talking about that. It certainly isn't talking about places like Code Canyon. So just be aware of this change is coming. If you support WooCommerce stores, make sure all those extensions you have in place are going to be compatible with HP POS the great thing it's a great change, but it's it's gonna be a little bit of a hill to get there. All right, moving forward into another bit of plugin news and that is the new Maria health checks plugin that we talked about a few months ago. Or maybe it was in the plugin Roundup. This is a really cool tool that was developed earlier this year at the 2023 cloudfest hackathon in Germany. It is now available on wordpress.org. Now if you're not familiar with Maria dB, it is a flavor of MySQL that's just better. Like you ought to be using Maria dB. Rather than MySQL. If you have a WordPress site, there's really no reason that you wouldn't use Maria. And if you're not using Maria, your host can help you upgrade to that. It's a pretty simple, pretty painless process. It's one of you want to make sure you have a backup schedule it overnight because it's a you know might take 10 minutes or so for the upgrade to happen, that sort of thing. So this plugin though, looks at the essential information about Maria and logs and connections and character sets and all those things. It integrates that information into the WordPress site health feature, and it gives some other graphs and things it's really helpful for high traffic sites where you're trying to diagnose a performance issue. Here's what some of the tables look like. Like here's our execution time, how many queries we're getting. It's really, really helpful. There's some other things that reveal information about the system that is there. So pretty cool. It's a really good work. It's a free plugin, and that's worth taking a look at. All right, something else that popped out this month was Gravity Forms. Last month, we talked about how gravity forms has now made all of the plugins that were previously not available to legacy license holders. All those new plugins they developed are now available for legacy license holders. They've now also introduced a nonprofit license so if you're doing work for a nonprofit, and they need to buy their own license for Gravity Forms, for whatever reason, it's $129 a year which is much less than the standard cost and that gives access to all of the add ons for up to three sites. That's pretty good. The good for Gravity Forms for offering a really nice nonprofit discount. Alright, let's move forward into some AI news shall we? It was bound to happen sooner or later and now it's happened WordPress. That should not say WordPress. Interesting, open. I preview these slides over and over and I miss this open AI This has nothing to do with WordPress. Open AI has been sued for defamation. Open AI, the company behind chat GPT generated false information about a Georgia based radio host they Mark Walters chat GPT returned some information that said Walters had been accused of defrauding and embezzling funds from a nonprofit organization in response to a research request from a journalist. Okay, first of all, if you're a journalist, and you're relying on chat GPT to be your source. There's a problem like you need that's it. But anyway, this did happen. Chat GPT did give incorrect information about this person. Now, open AI presents chat GBT as a source of reliable data. But there's a teeny tiny little disclaimer that it might occasionally sometimes perhaps generate incorrect information. And it certainly did. But this legal case will test whether a company can be held responsible for its AI systems generating false or defamatory information. Now there is the section 230 of the US Code that she'll this has been law for a long time that shields internet firms from legal liability for information produced by a third party and hosted on their platform. So example for example, liquid web can't be sued because you put something stupid on your blog that they host right? That just makes sense. It's unknown if section 230 extends into AI systems or not this will be interesting to follow. And we will certainly update you as this case proceeds. All right, moving into another Wow mind blown type AI experience to just see this. Dora AI now I have kids and when they were growing up Dora meant a little girl wandering around with a backpack and a monkey getting lost following a map. But this door AI is quite different. It is really something it can apparently apparently design a website from a text prompt Now I will tell you this. This is a demo video not a live demo. And you can do anything in a demo video. But the functionality they're showing is pretty impressive. Door AI is an alpha testing might soon be available to create websites with 3d animation and interactions from simple text prompts. Take a look at this. Here's the video. Design a website for SpaceX starship. Okay, here are a few different design options. Let's choose this one. Okay, boom. There it is. Right now let's do something else. Ai button. Replace with 3d model. Oh, what do you want to replace is the next question here. That okay. Oh, now it's a 3d scrolling thing. Interesting. Let's do something else. Let's add a scroll animation. To that feature. What do you want to add the scroll animation to? Right I want to add it to the rocket. And now we get a little dialog to show our animation sequence. Now let's publish it shall we? Scrolling and they get the scroll interaction. That's really cool. Remember, this is a demo video. Not a live product been been wins the plugin or I've been wins the news roundup comment war, because the client is going to say can you make the spaceship bigger that's funny Ben. Thank you for that. Yeah, this is quite something so we'll have to see how this one shakes out Dora AI very very interesting.
All right, some WordPress AI news jetpack has now added open AI powered content generator. This is only for wordpress.com right now likely it's going to come into open source WordPress we shall see. But this brings in open AI right into the WordPress editor and it does it pretty well. I think it's pretty intuitive. It's called the jetpack AI assistant. Gives a chat like interface like chat. GPT. And it lets you change the tone of the text that you want to write. Again, only available on wordpress.com. And it's available for free right now. But they say it's an experimental feature and pricing may change meaning Yeah, they're gonna start charging for it at some point, I'm sure key features in the plugin it's gonna help you generate titles and summaries multilingual and content, translations, spelling, grammar, all that plus just basic generation. Here's a little quick video here. Zooming in right a couple of paragraphs on how healthy eating is beneficial to dogs. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Pretty nice. Rewrite that using less paragraphs and include a list of short benefits. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. That's pretty good. This is the way AI inside of WordPress ought to work. Here's another example. Clicking the bar there, give me the tone that you want this to be done. Let's change it. To passionate and rewrite that paragraph with a passionate tone. Pretty neat. Yeah, this is likely using GPT 3.5. Because it's that fast. GPT four is just not that fast. Interesting. But that's that is currently on wordpress.com and likely will see something like this and wordpress.org pretty soon. Pretty cool. All right. Did you see this AI news Wendy's which is the fast food chain here in the States, hamburgers, french fries, that sort of thing. Wendy's has started this month replacing drive thru staff with AI chatbots. So this they've given their menu to a Google based AI tool so that it can understand the menu and including the way people order with slang and with you know similar set of synonyms and different things. So the AI can now answer questions and follow company protocol and its answers that is happening this month and Columbus, Ohio. Amazing. When these expect some customers won't even realize that they're dealing with a chatbot rather than a human. Supposedly it will deliver a faster and frictionless experience for customers. We'll see a few other bits of AI news that we wanted to give you some links to can chat GBT build a useful WordPress plugin that actually works great article there on the DPM u dot Dev 11 ways chat GPT can help you as a WordPress developer. Another good article there. And 25 Must try WordPress AI plugins and services. So there's just a few things if you want to do some Doom scrolling in the AI world There you go. A few interesting articles. Alright, let's pivot to some other news. Shall we? This was an interesting article automatic which is the company behind wordpress.com Automatic has donated 20,000 euro to the Drupal Gutenberg Project. Now this investment was to fund an in person workshop that brings together members from the WordPress core team, the Drupal core team and the Drupal Gutenberg team. Now the Drupal Gutenberg module is used on more than 3000 Drupal websites today and automatic wants to increase that so it's interesting I think, good Project Gutenberg is used on a number of different platforms, even day one, which is a journaling app. Maybe you're familiar with day one automatic actually acquired. Day one some time back, it uses Gutenberg as the editor. Tumblr has started to use the Gutenberg editor and automatic wants to see the editor used across the internet which I think is interesting. The aim is to create here a Gutenberg starter theme and the starter pack as well as better integration with of Gutenberg within the Drupal core. cooperation across open source projects will help make Drupal a more user friendly enterprise CMS. Here's what it looks like in Gutenberg looks very similar in Drupal doesn't it? Looks just like WordPress because it's Gutenberg. So there you go, even though that's Drupal. Here's a bit of news that you might have been shocked by just last week. Google has sold Google domains to Squarespace. Google is getting out of the domain business, and they have agreed to sell all those assets over to Squarespace. Now. Something I learned in this process was that for quite a while within the Google, the Google AI workspace area if you want to create a website, it sends you to Squarespace. So there's been an existing partnership between Google and Squarespace for some time. But now, Google has sold their entire domain business to Squarespace Google domain customers will receive the same renewal prices for the next 12 months as part of the deal. And Squarespace will offer incentives to use its web building platform. If you haven't purchased your domain at Google, you can still link those back into Google workspace like you do. Now. That's not going to be a problem. Squarespace, though. will become the exclusive domain provider for Google workspace customers over the next three years. So if you want to buy a domain through Google workspace, it's going to go through Squarespace $180 million deal that includes more than 10 million domains at Google Domains should close in the third quarter of this year pending regulatory approval. Transferring domains is going to happen in 2024 and beyond. Not quite there isn't that process hasn't been lined out yet. So if you are a Google Domains person, I'm sorry. Yeah, that's gonna be a mess. I think perhaps. All right, another little bit of news. It's actually old news, but has just kind of popped its head up in the WordPress world this week in various Facebook groups, and on post status liquidweb our parent company has taken a new private equity investment. Now we've known about this internally for a long time. It was back in April that liquidweb replaced its previous private equity investment partner, Madison Dearborn with a new investor called one Equity Partners. If you know anything about private equity investment, this is a very normal thing. Most private equity companies will invest in another company and hold it for three to five years. That's typical for Madison Dearborn. They held their investment in liquid web for since 2015. So it's been eight years. This is just a normal cycle of moving into they sold their stake to another private equity firm. It's their you know, this is not an issue liquid web hasn't really been bought per se like you would think of it. It's just the private equity investment has been replaced by a different company. With this one Equity Partners investment a new Holding Company was formed, which is called cloud when digital you may have seen links about this. It's a pretty flat website that just talks about liquid web and its brands and cloud one digital is it's a holding company. It's all it is right now, with some of the other assets from one equity partners will be shown on there as well. Just a new way for them to think about future growth opportunities in the cloud computing space. Talking to the folks at liquid web they say our focus remains the same nothing changes. We want to help small and medium sized businesses make more money online. Now I will say this one really great change and I am thrilled about personally has taken place in this change and that is Carrie Wheeler has been elevated to President of the liquidweb Family of Brands now I got to know Carrie, number of years ago. She is awesome. Y'all. I would love to have her on a webinar here at some point, a live stream here to talk about just for you to meet her because she is she's just an extraordinary person. She is full of energy. She is brilliant, and has been a leader in the liquidweb executive group for quite a while and I look forward to see where she's going to take the company and this is a great change for liquidweb All right, one other bit of acquisition watch that has happened here. rankmath has been acquired by group one. If you are a rank math user, take a look at that. Oh Elizabeth, her previous role. She was the chief operations officer. I believe she's limited in operations. Yeah. She gets things done. I mean seriously, she is a she's a machine and a really cool person too. All righty. Let's move into some news that is worth a look running a bit long today.
Automatic has released WP now I'm excited about this and I want to play around with this. We might do a training on this depending on how it goes. But we've talked about this in the past just the IN BROWSER WordPress install. So WP now is the name for the WordPress playground and how it's going to actually be implemented. So WordPress playground is what is the single in browser install of WordPress that uses an SQL lite database which is a simple text file. And you can just quickly spin up a WordPress install right inside your browser without having to set up a MySQL database or any of that. It's going to be a really great way to spin up a test environment to test whatever you want. It's really cool. So if this is interesting to you, then take a quick look at some of these articles and get into them because this is gonna be a great tool for just spinning up a quick WordPress site to show things there's a great article there on the WordPress developer blog about what's happening in the world of for WordPress developers in June. Take a look at that. It's a great article. Also WordPress and Drupal co founders are discussing open source AI and the future of the web. So Matt Mullenweg and Mike Liddell, who you saw in that comment at the beginning of the news roundup, join Drupal founder Drees. Mr. Drees together on a stage at a private event in May 17. And they're talking so WordPress and Drupal are talking. I wonder what something may be happening there. We'll see. I have no inside information, but there's a lot of discussion happening on those two open source platforms. A critical decision making for WordPress accessibility great article from Corey Miller and post status an excellent overview of the issues involved in accessibility and what tools to use. If you're just getting your feet wet and accessibility. This is a great article that you should read just to understand the factors involved and accessibility. This article is terrifying if you don't read any other articles in the worst look section. Read this one because this is a web designers story about how their Stripe account was hacked. And their key the stripe keys were stolen and used on a fraudulent site and the account holder is now liable for $70,000 of fraud purchases. This is terrifying to me and it's something I'm looking even more into. Yeah. All right. Last article here that is really worth a look is an interesting article that appeared on the H refs blog. Is this debate, you know, why should we remove 301 redirects Ever After a year, whatever. So there's an actual test that's been done, and some answers there. And the results are a bit inconclusive. But the thought process is important. If you do any kind of SEO or redirects, it's a good article to read. Alright, let's wrap up today with news from the WordPress community. We have a number of us word camps upcoming. We're Kent Montclair, New Jersey is just this weekend. So hopefully those folks are going to have a great time together. The WordPress Community Summit in Washington DC is August 22 and 23rd with WordCamp us on the 24th the 26th that's all in Washington DC and a newly announced word camp in Omaha, Nebraska. October 14 through 15. There's just the Coming Soon page up there right now. No more details available yet. But good to see another US based word camp coming. Several global word camps are planned word camp in the Philippines July the eighth. We're camping Uganda September 4 And fifth a little bit of a discussion will say has happened with some folks have gotten a little fussy about the q&a at WordCamp. Eu a couple of weeks ago, apparently especially during Matt's presentation. People use the q&a time as a platform for self promotion and telling long stories and things like that. And if you've ever been in an event like this where somebody just given an open mic there there was let me let's just say it this way. Some people do not possess the program attic filter in their brain that tells them it's time for them to stop talking. Right. And it's just I don't think anybody wasn't being malicious about it. It just is what it is. But some suggestions to improve the way that q&a is handled had been floated, and I really liked like the direction this conversation is going. They proposed Hey, you should submit questions in writing or maybe it could be like a Twitter thing or something, you know, and it could also especially help if there's a language barrier involved between the question asker and the presenter. written questions could be helpful. So there's a discussion happening. I think it's gonna improve the q&a format throughout and I'll be honest, I've had people in my word camp presentations, one WordCamp Atlanta presentation, notably in my mind, who have stood up and just monopolized like this guy stood up and filibustered for like three or four minutes straight, which when you're in a q&a, that is a really long time for somebody just to filibuster and he was talking about this, you know, the local freelancers guild made out whatever you know, which is a paid membership is it was a promotion, it was just inappropriate. something should happen here at some guidelines should be good and so hopefully some good will come from this. One other bit of Community News, my friend, Marcus Burnett has created a cool site called the WP world if you haven't seen this yet, go there to the WP world and add yourself so this is just a glimpse of people where people in our area and industry live. And you can see the map is filling up with folks there's plenty more WordPress users than this. So go on there and add yourself I think it's kind of a cool thing. Last but certainly not least, WordPress accessibility Day is coming on September 27 and 28th. It's a 24 hour global event. That was started back in 2020 by the WordPress Core accessibility team. It's now managed by volunteers from the wider community all about accessibility. It is a it is free but registration is required. So check that out at 2023 dot x WP accessibility dot day. The link is there in the chat. Well, that brings us to the end of the WordPress news roundup for this month. Hopefully you found a few things that tickled your mind and got you thinking a little bit. I'll be back tomorrow for the solid WP townhall with Matt Cromwell that's at one o'clock Central here. Hope you have a great rest of the day and I'll see you back here tomorrow for that event on I iThemes Training where we go further together.