Well, good afternoon, everybody and welcome to the June 2022 WordPress news roundup here on I iThemes Training. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at iThemes Training and each month we take a look across the landscape of WordPress. News. And I bring you a few things that I think deserve our attention, particularly for those of us who are building and managing WordPress sites for clients. And we have a lot to talk about today. Brand new release a WordPress a bunch of at least one interesting acquisition I think is worth watching, and lots of things so if you are just joining us in the chat, I'm going to drop in one last time here the slide link this gives you the link to everything you have on the screen here. Also, it will if you're watching this on the replay, just click the Download handout button which is just below and to the right of the video. And this gives you all the links because there's some things you might want to click and read more about yourself. And there they go. So let us know where you're logging in from today over in the chat room. Just click a pop out the chat window and you can communicate with me and everybody else. All right. Well let's get started shall we? A lot to talk about today. Beginning with news from core. We had a major release of WordPress a few weeks ago. This is WordPress 6.0. Arturo. And by the way, some time ago WordPress departed from the standard the way that they had the WordPress has been doing version numbers. So every major release now like 6.0, that sounds like it's a major release, but actually WordPress 5.9 and 5.8 had more in it really 5.8 was the big full site editing release, and 6.0 was really a minor bump to core WordPress. So just because it's 6.0 you might look at that version and think wow, this is there's a lot more going on here than maybe 5.9. But really, it's just the next number up. So WordPress now if it gets to the dot nine, it's gonna go to the next number. So yeah, it's so it's a generally positive response. It was
pretty simple. And so there's a comment in the chat it did not update no because it is a major WordPress version number that the second.by default will update automatically on your WordPress site. So like 5.9 point two to five point 9.3 will automatically update but any any of the dots like five eight to five nine or five, nine dot whatever to six does not auto update unless you specifically enable that in WordPress. So when I say it's a minor update, I'm just talking about the feature set, but it would not have automatically updated right. So very few issues. To report we updated all our sites last week. I usually press pause on that for a little while a week or two after a major version release. no issues at all. Just really, this was an incremental update to full site editing along with a few other things that we've talked about in the past. So there are some who are reporting measurable speed improvements. A little bit here a little bit there and that's because of the work of the new core performance team that is working on making WordPress faster, which is something we've talked about over the last several months here on the news roundup. All right, so let's just take a look at some of the stats related to WordPress six dot O R to row 36% of WordPress. sites around the world have updated to 6.0 20% Holding fast at 2.9 but really that's you know 56% are running within the last version or so of WordPress. That's pretty good. Of course we still have some of those really old holdouts here even almost five actually let's see that's yeah, about 5%. It looks like still, no, that's a five, seven, so it's whatever this little sliver here is anyway, little bit still holding on to way back to four, not seven, so a lot of old releases in here, security issues and so forth. But the vast majority of sites are healthy and working on the latest couple of versions of WordPress. Some response from the advanced WordPress group. By the way, if you are a WordPress professional probably makes sense to join the advanced WordPress Users group on Facebook. It's been around for a long time. It's where a lot of advanced discussion about WordPress occurs and founded by Matt Cromwell, who was also the co founder of give WP it's a great group of folks to be involved with. There's a pretty pretty well acceptance across the board that Gutenberg still isn't really ready yet, particularly with full site editing. If you're like me, you've maybe maybe you've rolled it out on some portions of the website or if you are you may have started building simple website to the block editor. But still, it's kind of hard to build complicated websites. With the block editor. It continues to get incrementally better though, over time, and we still you know it's just yours above where it was when it was first released. There are some some some experts in the group are saying that they're going to wait a few more releases until Gutenberg is more robust and stable before adopting it as the platform for their clients. Matt Cromwell. Again, the co founder of gift WP and one of the founders of this advanced WordPress group and one of the active moderators talks about House WordPress six the main goal was to enhance full site editing to make it more available and attractive to WordPress implementers. It is the future of WordPress but only if it gains traction. So we'll have to see there's a lot of things that still have to be figured out and worked out in order for full site editing to really take hold in the WordPress community. So we'll see what happens it's going to be something to watch. Something else that's going on that is just kind of looking at WordPress and PHP. PHP 7.4 is recommended still for WordPress, WordPress still only supports 8.0 and beta. So you might still find some weirdness for lack of a better term with implementation of PHP eight on your sites. You just kind of have to test and see a lot of plugins don't fully support PHP eight still. This is something we'll definitely be watching over the next few months because the end of life for word PHP 7.4 is later this year. In the fall I Stacy saying in the chat is November yet so it's later this year. Definitely something to be watching and I would fully expect WordPress to recommend eight as the preferred PHP version before that. Time. But currently seven four is recommended.
In interesting stats about those who contributed to WordPress six 519 People from 53 countries and 134 different companies contributed to WordPress six a lot of contributors. It's great to see the open ness of the open source nests of WordPress happening 129 people contribute to WordPress core for the very first time so about a quarter of all the contract the contributions to WordPress six were from first time contributors. So that's awesome. That just shows how much the platform continues to grow. And people are joining the WordPress world either as existing users who started to contribute or as folks who are new to the platform have started adding so it's a good thing. Interesting, funky little graph here just kind of showing the trends of the number of contributors for release two pretty well pretty average. Kind of an aberration here is WordPress five, three, but pretty average on the number of contributors new and experienced contributors shown here. So if you're a graph person, you'll sink your teeth into that the USA is still the number one that can come nation of contributors to the WordPress project. Russia is next with 373 which still led by Sergey of Yoast, Australia follows with 308 and France Poland UK, Greece Georgia, Spain, Sweden, but the number of contributions from the US is declining relatively as more contributors from other countries are increasing their participation. So that's a good thing. Here's a bubble graph that shows all the different countries and who's been contributing so it's pretty cool to see all that as well as the companies by far the lion's share coming from automatic which runs wordpress.com And then number of WordPress plugins. And you have also a number of well known companies in the WordPress space, who are sponsoring contributions to the project so if you want to learn more about WordPress six, we had a great event with Timothy Jacobs, who was the lead developer of I think security couple weeks ago. Timothy is also a core contributor as well as the maintainer of the WordPress REST API component. So he's neck deep, basically in the WordPress ecosystem. And Tim, if he did a great walkthrough of WordPress six and some of the new full site editing features, including full site editing, as well as some of the new patterns and so forth and how those work, really great webinar. If you missed that. You can watch the replay at the link on this slide. So looking forward to what's going on are potentially going to happen in WordPress 6.1. These are some of the things that are out there maybe making site navigation a smoother experience. I think that's needed. The navigation I experienced in WordPress could definitely stand some improvement. This will let folks zoom in and out while working. Also expect some focus on patterns block patterns pattern library all this is part of the future of WordPress it's being laid out. 6.1 will likely bring better support for patterns and custom post types block types and a better experience locking patterns so that if you don't have the right user role, you won't be able to edit that part of the page. That's a good thing and managing saved patterns across that WordPress install. Also, they're looking at this new aerial view which is kind of cool. I really, really liked this UI and other ways to make it easier to interact with patterns. So pretty nice, really slick editing experience. This is not rolled out even in the Gutenberg plugin yet but it's something that's being talked about significantly. There's a great article on WP tavern as expected on WordPress six, one and what might be included and I would encourage you to take a look at that. We can probably also look at improvements in global style interfaces, design tools updated to support responsive typography and managing web fonts. The Web Fonts API was a big addition to WordPress six one allowing you to in a standard way bring in Web Fonts to WordPress. There hasn't been that up until now which is I think kind of a glaring omission in core WordPress.
Yeah, so as we look at the Project Gutenberg itself they're looking to phase out phase three of Gutenberg, which are part of the phase two of Gutenberg, which is the customization phase, and beginning the collaboration phase. That's phase three of Project Gutenberg in 2023. Multilingual phase probably sometime in 2025 that's going to be a big deal bringing multilingual support into core WordPress, which is wonderful. Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress says he thinks that multilingual is probably going to be one of the most complex things we bring into core, even more so than blocks and when you really start thinking about what it takes to get multilingual into core, yeah, that's gonna be quite a job. There is no date for the 6.1 release of WordPress yet. Matter of fact, there's really nothing on the official WordPress roadmap at the link I've given you on the screen here. It just says 6.1 date to be determined. So there's not even any minor like, you know, no, no minor releases scheduled that we're even aware of at this point on that roadmaps page. So let's move into what's happening in Project Gutenberg. Again, that's been a while since I've mentioned this, but really important to understand what Project Gutenberg is. Project Gutenberg Gutenberg is not the block editor Gutenberg is bigger than the block editor. It is the project in which all this new development to revolutionize the WordPress platform is occurring. So Gutenberg is a plugin, the feature plugin and all these new features that were rolled into core and WordPress six were developed over the last several months in the Gutenberg plugin. So you can install the Gutenberg plugin to get the latest version of the block editor and full site editing and all of this. So if you have Gutenberg and the Gutenberg plugin installed, likely will have additional features that is included in the core WordPress block editor in the core WordPress site editor. Now, you probably do not know want to be running the Gutenberg plugin on a live site. It is a beta plugin. It's updated every two weeks, but things are rolled in and rolled out and unless it's a site that's really not a high value site, likely you don't want to be running the Gutenberg plugin on that site. So let's look at some of the latest updates in the Gutenberg plugin and what's happening in the block editor development and site editor development. So Gutenberg 13.3 rolled out on May the 25th adding to the block editor, a new table of contents block, which is super cool. Post terms block variations, a query block that now has a parent filter and a bunch of other smaller bug fixes. So here's that table of contents block. Watch this. It's a dynamic table of contents that just appears in that cool. Now you can convert it to a static list if you want. But in the default dynamic mode as you add a heading in your poster page, it automatically updates that table of contents, right in order and so you click it it'll scroll down to the appropriate spot there on the page. So that's a lot of you are using I know Table of Contents plugins and so forth. This is brings it into the block editor itself as a core block with a table of contents, either dynamic or static. Pretty cool stuff. Also, when you use the post terms block, it's actually now going to show the custom taxonomy terms that have been defined in that area, which is kind of nice, pretty cool. Elizabeth asking, Does each of the sections for the Table of Contents need to be an H tag? Yeah. So over here in that area, what you would see are all of your like your H TOS would show up as Table of Contents entries on that page. So there's now this parent filter on the query Loop block. So you can now say, just show me posts that are or pages that are under this particular parent or subcategory those sorts of things are really cool. Of course you get a live preview in the block editor which is nice. That makes a lot more usable there. We also now have a font family control in the heading blocks so you can actually change your font from heading to heading if you so desire which is really nice.
There's also the ability to transform a cover block into just media and text if you want it so you can go back and forth with that which is pretty helpful. That was Gutenberg 13, three, Gutenberg 13. Four released a little over a week ago on June the eighth. So a number of features were added there, including continued development of the theme dot JSON, which is a new standardization that's under the hood and WordPress that allows theme developers to communicate how the theme is supposed to look and feel in a standard way. So it's bringing a lot of standardization into the way theme developers and even our plugin developers can talk to each other. And that particularly with block libraries, and so forth, they can inherit theme styling a lot easier. It's a great addition to WordPress that is sorely needed. So here you can just kind of see how that works out. If you're not a developer, this isn't super helpful for you, other than just know what's out there and that it's going this is a big help to standardization and WordPress as a whole. They've also added axial spacing in the gallery block just kind of bringing spacing into all the elements you can kind of watch this. You know, you can click on you know what part of the margin you want to use. And increase just in various incremental ways. Top and bottom margin left and right margin if you want. That's kind of a nice visual display of how that will work. They've also changed up the UI and the date picker in the sidebar, which is just a little sleeker. I kind of like that looks really really nice. Something else interesting that's going on is the adoption of the Gutenberg code on various web apps. So the Gutenberg editor is now being used on the Tumblr platform which was acquired by automatic couple of years ago, I believe so Tumblr is is owned by automatic now. And so you would think it's going to use the block editor. That just makes sense. But also the day One day one is a journaling app that has a lot of blogging features in it. It's been around a long time and the latest iteration which I think they rewrote that whole thing a couple of years ago. It's really a lot more robust. And they're actually using the Gutenberg editor in that app. Gutenberg is open source, they can do that. And it's good. It just there's a wider adoption of this editing platform across the web. Pretty interesting. So Gutenberg is finding a home and lots of spots outside of WordPress. Drupal has already begun using Gutenberg is where as well as a project called Lera Burg, which is an editor for the Laravel PHP framework. Pretty cool. Tumblr has deployed a beta version and its integration it looks kinda like this, which is interesting. In day one, it looks kind of like this. So it's a lot cleaner and different but the core of the Gutenberg plugin is being used underneath. This helps everybody so I think about this maybe seven 810 years up the road. As Gutenberg is used on various web platforms and becomes more ubiquitous, people will be used to using that sort of interface and the way content blocks work together. And it will simply make WordPress natural to us. And so this is a good thing for everybody, especially for those of us who are developing things on WordPress. So Tumblr users who want to gain access to that new editor have that you know, a really annoying little pop up will let them convert from the older editor into the new what they're calling guten blur, which is a mashup of Gutenberg and Tumblr, which is, I mean, it is what it is, I guess,
guten blur. They could do that right now. So Matthias Ventura who is a core committer says, I'm personally looking forward to when you could just copy and paste blocks between platforms like you do with patterns. Now think about that for a minute. How about copying something out of a Tumblr blog, for example, and just pasting it right on a WordPress site? We talked a little bit about this a few months ago and the the blocks API, which is not a WordPress project, kind of a web as a whole project. about making content blocks, lists, for example, quotes, for example. So like between platforms, even if there was some sort of standard of how blocks ought to operate. How cool would it be just to copy and paste? Like if you ever copied something off of one web page and you drop it in WordPress and it's all goofed up? What if all of the formatting just kind of worked? That's kind of cool, right? So with the broader adoption of Gutenberg and maybe working hand in hand with that wax API, we might start to see some of that happening in the coming years. That's a trend that will be interesting to watch. So that's all that's going on in Gutenberg let's turn our attention over to some security news. Lots of vulnerabilities this month. Hopefully you're signed up for the the I think security email that gives you the list of vulnerabilities every week. We also post these weekly on the blog. You have links to each of the four weeks of the roundup that were posted over the since the last news roundup and there are many, many, many vulnerabilities that have no fix. So any of these on the next several slides, which I'm going to I don't know if I'm going to read all these or not, I may just read a few that maybe look a little familiar, maybe we've seen, but there's lots of plugins that do not have a fix. They are currently vulnerable. And you really need to delete these completely from your site. Because even deactivating a vulnerable plugin that the code is still there on your site needs to be that plugin needs to be deleted. Completely. So just having a look here this will take me a long time to read all these I think there's five or six pages of these. The semi header Rotator is one that we've seen before I think on a plug in around up. Let's see here. Having trouble advancing take a look through all of these here. Google Authenticator I think some folks have seen using HTML to WP I believe we actually did that on a plugin roundup a long time ago. latest tweets widget li that male press member hero, couple of many orange plugins. These by the way, no known fix at the time our blog was published. You want to verify that they may have been updated since then. Let's see here. Lots of lots of plugins this time. RB internal links I think we've seen once or twice, quotes llama which looks just That's a fun name. Let's see ultimate importer, WordPress security. So many, many, many plugins this time. It's hard to stay it's hard to keep on top of these right so this is why it's super important to use I theme security because twice a day. Now even in the free version. I think security will scan your website and let you know if any of these vulnerable plugins exist. It'll even send you an email if you set that up in the Notification Center to let you know that you have a vulnerable plugin on your site. So this is even in the free version of I themes security Pro. Now the pardon me the free version of I think security. One of the great add on features and I think security pro is that when you're if a vulnerability is discovered and if a patch exists in I think security pro it will actually in the in the version management setting. You can have it automatically update your website if a vulnerability exists. So you don't have to stay on top of these things. You can just trust that I think security is going to be scanning for these vulnerabilities. It'll let you know if one occurs and if that fix is available, it is automatically applied that plugin is automatically updated and vulnerable themes and plugins are the number one reason that WordPress websites get hacked. And so I think security just takes that problem right off of your plate and handles everything for you. It's a great, great solution.
Alright, we did have a number of other plugin vulnerabilities. Now this list is only plugins that have 10,000 or more installs. These have been patched in their latest releases. So you'll want to make sure that either you are using I think security Pro that will have done this for you already or you are updating your websites on a regular basis. So our appointment booking better finding a place co authors plus custom share buttons database backup for WordPress download manager which is a popular plugin easy pricing tables easy SVG support which has a good plugin export any WordPress data fiber search Google Tag Manager for WordPress that's used a lot the Google XML Sitemaps that has a huge install base. That whatever that is ice cream Juniper X mailer light big plug in minimal Coming Soon page many orange Google Authenticator my private site big plugin we use that one nested pages new user approved newsletter ocean extra photo gallery print PDF email by print friendly simple membership Themify throws spam away okay, ultimate member big plugin under construction very simple contact form which I guess is different than the very complicated contact form that if he statistic that maybe a typo and ultimate CSV importer. So all of those are patched in their latest releases. Few other theme vulnerabilities again patched in their latest releases the ask me theme dischi and Jupiter and Jupiter X. All right, so let's move on to some news from I themes. First thing I want to talk about this month is our customer spotlight Deon Campbell of D hive design and marketing agency. Seon Are you here today? I believe so. So go read Dion's profile. We do these at least once a month. New Customer spotlight from our I iThemes. Family. We give you a backlink to your website and $100 in swag from Ai themes things called takes about 45 minutes if you'd like to join in. We've had a number of our regular I iThemes Training attendees who participated in this and if you'd like to do that, just click on this link and scheduled Kristin. She'd love to spend about 45 minutes with you ask you some questions, get your feedback on products and just kind of learn what you and your business is all about. Big news this month. Now this is an event that I've been looking forward to for some time. Two weeks from today we will begin the WordPress accessibility bootcamp. So about this time in two weeks we'll be about halfway through the first hour of the WordPress accessibility bootcamp with Amber Hines of equalised digital. Amber is an expert in the WordPress space on accessibility. This is all they do at equalised digital and they know what they're doing and so accessibility is one of those things that really honestly create some stress for those of us who are managing websites for clients. Day one we're going to talk about understanding accessibility in general, the guidelines and legal requirements we need to be aware of so we're sort of setting the stage and day two we're going to be talking about actually identifying and fixing accessibility problems that show up when we're using WordPress. So this is a free event for members of I iThemes Training as well as I iThemes toolkit members. That happens on June 28 and 29th one to 3pm Central time each day so make sure you're signed up for that event. The next couple of months are already planned as well for our premium events here on iThemes. Training July 26 and 27th Ben Meredith of gift WP who is a just one of the nicest people you'll ever meet is his whole world revolves around customer support. He's written an open source customer support manual, which I'm sure he'll talk about. And he'll be spending a couple of days talking to us and giving us great insight on how to better support our customers that we serve as we're doing WordPress things. August 2022. The Google Analytics bootcamp is also planned. With David Zimmerman of curious ants. Those dates are there and in place. You can't register for any of these either of these events yet. We'll have those landing pages up here in the next couple of weeks.
All right, here's another little bit of things coming up on iThemes Training. If it's highlighted in yellow, it is a premium event. For I iThemes Training and toolkit members. Tomorrow is our fly 2022 for talking about finances in our businesses. Got a lot of fun things to share tomorrow office hours of course every Thursday at 1pm big event coming up a one week from today the part two of how to clean up a hacked WordPress site with Kathy Zant that's gonna be a great webinar that's a free one as well as just scheduled on nev Harris who is the WordPress small business financial guru nav is talking about secrets to profitably pricing recurring revenue. Now we had nav on for a premium event a couple of years ago. He's just one of my favorite people in WordPress. I love the guy. He is engaging as a speaker he is just fun to listen to. And he has a lot of knowledge about revenue in your business. So if you are wanting to grow recurring revenue, you do not want to miss this free event which is next Wednesday at one o'clock central time with Neff Harris secrets to profitably pricing recurring revenue. There's that web accessibility bootcamp and of course office hours every Thursday with yours truly. If you're not a member of I iThemes Training and you like all these premium events we've been talking about you can get one month free right there, I think.com/training. Sign up for a 30 day trial. You can join us right away if even if you're not a member of iThemes Training yet, or toolkit member and you want to get that web accessibility bootcamp, sign up for a free 30 day trial right there and you'll get access to all the premium events for 30 days. So that's pretty good offer. All right, this is big
news. So you folks are the first to hear about this and I got permission now yesterday to talk about this today. Because something big is happening and I think security pro behind the scenes Timothy and the IP security team have been working on support for a protocol called Web offin. Now, you may never have heard of web auth. And I hadn't until we started talking about this internally. So web auth by the way, you're actually probably using web off and you don't even know it. It's the underlying thing that lets things like face ID or touch ID work on various devices. And I think security Pro is going to be building in support for webauthn in a in a coming version that's coming very soon. Okay, that's all I can say about it. We'll be having a full training on this as the date gets closer, but this is big news for I think security Pro. Now the what's the end result of this? How many of you have clients who use the same password on every site, and it's like pushing a car uphill to get those folks to use a unique, complicated password for every site, right. And last pass may have just also announced some web authoring support. They are one of the core supporters of the webauthn project. It's really hard to get our clients to use web to even use a password manager, right? So this is all about we're going to be integrating that functionality into IBM Security with the goal of making it easier than ever for folks to log into their WordPress site with a unique password to use. It's a great thing so I don't have any more details about it yet but that is coming and really really cool stuff. All right. Another bit of news from a sister company to I themes under the stellar WP brand. Part of the liquidweb family give WP is a by the way if you're not familiar with give WP it is the leading donations management platform for WordPress. It is fantastic if you work with any nonprofit that does fundraising you want to know about gift WP it's it's just a fantastic tool. They are launching a fundraising Academy whether you are a gift WP customer or not. They are giving away their expertise in the fundraising world and it is this new academy so it's going to be courses that are focused on nonprofit fundraising. So the first three will be rolling out later this month. How to Create a fundraising website basically best practices, how to do onboarding with the gift WP product and how to do recurring donations and actually a certification on their way of doing recurring donations. They are also going to be now these are all more more or less give WP related courses, but they're going to be incorporating courses just about fundraising marketing in general, nonprofit SEO how to do donation matching and create interest in that sort of thing. Peer to Peer fundraising, and they're going to be allowed. They're partnering with double your donation which is another organization that helps nonprofits grow their revenue, it to bring in additional courses and training into this new give WP fundraising Academy so if you work with nonprofits, you want to learn more about this. So there is a launch event on June the 22nd 12pm. Pacific Time note that time not central all of our times are central. This is a noon pacific time on June the 22nd. You can grab that link and join free and learn all about the give that up fundraising Academy they're giving away a bunch of stuff, it's gonna be a lot of fun. Another sister company too, with iThemes is LearnDash. Again, part of the stellar WP family of products owned by liquid web LearnDash in their latest version has rolled out some pretty cool features if you are a LearnDash user already, these are features that I think you're gonna find super helpful. They now have the ability to bulk update to bulk edit courses, which is super, super helpful, like bulk editing lessons or groups. And moving things around in bulk rather than having to do things singly like it's been at this point. They have also added the ability to clone a course which is fantastic. If you get all your settings in there now you can just clone the course. The latest version also adds drip content for all post types and a new visual editor for purchase emails great stuff in the latest version of one LearnDash. All right, let's talk about a little bit of news in the plugin world and this is pretty cool. If you are interested in comparing plugins How many of you have been looking for a particular solution for a plugin and can we just all agree that searching in the WordPress plugin directory is less than awesome. It is.
It is poor let's put it it's just not great. Right? And everybody knows that. It's it is what it is. There is now a new project called the WordPress plugin compare project that the company Artie camp has created. So this is going to let you search for plugins to compare to one another. So it's super helpful. Here's an example comparing various e commerce plugins for WordPress. So just like on other sites where you can set up a product comparison, this does the same thing and it's pulling in data right from the WordPress plug in directory. It's refreshed twice every day. So it's very fresh content. And it lets you quickly compare so this is out there already and you can take a look at this. The arty camp plug in compare project. The chart will allow you to display the age of the plugin tested version last updated date, the ratings the author the total downloads all these other things to see side by side how these plugins compare with one another. Again, refreshed twice a day. And they're going to be adding additional function soon, like supported languages and even performance data and code quality, which is great. So this will allow you eventually to see oh this is really bad. Code according to their rating system versus this other plugin that does the same thing. There might be better code so that's a good thing. So let's take a look at the arty camp WordPress plugin compare project and give it a look. Here's something else to be aware of. Jetpack is one of those things that a lot of folks just roll their eyes that it's been a plugin that is heavily promoted by automatic the company behind wordpress.com as bloated feature heavy because basically here's a new feature we think ought to be in WordPress. We're just going to throw it into jetpack for a lot of years jetpack was just slow it absolutely would slow down your site simply by being activated. They've made performance increases and improvements over the last few years. It's not quite as bad as it used to be. It's actually pretty decent as an all in one plugin. And they've made it modular where you can toggle off and on various features. Now they've just decided that we're gonna break this thing up into standalone plugins, which honestly just make sense. So all the core big features of the Jetpack plugin and the all in one are now being broken out into separate plugin so jetpack backup, Jetpack, protect jetpack boost, social search and the new jetpack CRM are all broken out now into individual plugins. So yeah, it's been criticized for being bloated. Now jetpack users can only installed what they need. Instead of that all in one plugin. Now as of now, jetpack all in one users will not be affected. We'll see what the roadmap looks like for if they're going to sunset the Elementor plugin. I don't know. We'll see what happens with that. I can't imagine they're going to continue to support that all in one plugin, you know forever. So at some point, there's probably an off ramp so that all in one plugin, we'll see what happens.
All right, moving into some other news. These are things that didn't fit anywhere else. Here's a great article from David beset. By the way anything you happen to see written by David Bissette you should read because he is a brilliant person in the WordPress ecosystem. David now does a lot of work with post status which is a professional when the kind of the professional group within the WordPress community, especially for developers, and WordPress company owners, by the way, if you're not a member of prestack post status, you might want to look into that it's a good investment. It is now owned by Corey Miller, who was the founder of I iThemes many years ago. Anyhow, a little bit of rabbit trail. Here's a great article on post status from David Bissette on some takeaways from WordCamp Europe 2022, which concluded that last week, I believe, or the week before, great takeaways here. The first is that PHP and WordPress might not be tied to each other together. Matt Mullenweg the co founder of WordPress is great about dropping these little nuggets, little breadcrumbs and what he says from time to time. He says look, when a PHP developer asked Mullenweg if WordPress was headed toward JavaScript, he said I believe Gutenberg provides a better interface with JavaScript over PHP where a page refresh is usually required. Interesting. So we might start to see WordPress moving toward more of a JavaScript interface rather than PHP. Who knows that that will be a long time before that actually happens. But you might start to see a trend of a lot more JavaScript in WordPress, rather than PHP. Sustainability is now a major focus with WordPress in the WordPress slack group, the make.wordpress.org Slack channel, a new sustainability channel has been added. For discussion about that, let's a lot of times simply adding a Slack channel where community members can start to talk about things that are related to that topic and sustainability in WordPress begins to create initiatives within the WordPress project. WordPress six is being adopted quickly like we talked about it was 10% faster than the adoption for WordPress 5.9. Number four is there ever going to be a wordpress.org marketplace where people can buy plugs? Nope, nope, not right now. Not a place we're going to spend time since Matt Mullenweg Franta. T was abandoned because of full site editing. So we covered this back last summer just 10 months ago in August of 2021. Automatic acquired. That's interesting. Aqua hire I'm not sure how that happened. Anyway, automatic acquired friend to T which was a company doing a lot of interesting things on front end editing for WordPress. And all that whole project has been sort of absorbed into full site editing, for entity itself as a standalone product. will not continue. A lot of that intellectual capital though likely being rolled into full site editing as a feature. Tumblr, somebody asked in the chat earlier how does Tumblr relate to WordPress, Tumblr and WordPress are going to start really joining hands here. Tumblr is going to add 300,000 domains to WordPress. market share. It's already using Gutenberg that's 10% the size of Twitter as a Tumblr soon adding to the WordPress market share numbers I think you'll start to see a thing of further integrations of the Tumblr platform into WordPress likely the WordPress platform into Tumblr. With plugins and things of that nature, the state of WordPress performance also a big takeaway Wix and Squarespace making big strides and should be regarded as the platform's to beat. There's a big focus now in WordPress Core on performance, indicated by some performance bumps in this latest version that we mentioned earlier. WordPress products need competitors to grow. So there's a lot of talk and discussions in WordCamp EU about partnerships and collaboration in the WordPress ecosystem that's better for everybody. This is interesting we talked about this in the last month news roundup of WordPress market share dropping for the first time, mutton and a lot of these probably are coming from the metrics standard that's being used the W three tech website and their statistics of tracking what platform is powering websites that's that has its ending, right? And so a new metric standard is being adopted. Matt Mullenweg says look, the new metrics are probably going to look bad for WordPress, we'll actually see how the dust settles. So he's preparing us for something we'll see what that begins to look like over the next few months. So interesting article there from David Bissette. It's a good read if you want to get more into any of those things.
Automatic is also invested in instead WP into WP is a live sandboxing tool that will allow you to spin up a quick install of WordPress in less than a second. That's pretty cool. Lots of plugin and theme authors are using it for showcasing their product sandboxes it's also a very quick way for you to just spin up a quick WordPress site to test something that is instant wp.com. Take a look at it. It works really really well. It's been around for about a year. If you haven't seen it yet, give it a quick look more than 23,000 sites by 1600 users have been spun up over that time. It is working on developing native integrations for hosting providers currently working with Ron cloud and GoDaddy likely others in the future. So this is a great little platform to test some things Robin is mentioning in the chat that instant WP is on App Sumo. Interesting. Didn't see that so that might be worth I don't know anything about that but might be worth looking at. Thanks, Robin. If you miss this little bit of news this is interesting to me. Microsoft has launched a new visual website building platform. It is calling power pages. So it existed previously as a component called The Power Apps portals within Microsoft's Power Apps platform. So the one of the VPS for business at Microsoft says the standalone product power pages, lets anyone regardless of their technical background, gives them the ability to build data powered modern insecure websites, which sounds like corporate speak, but it's a new visual page builder. It integrates within the Microsoft ecosystem. Don't see this really as a competitor for WordPress. The reason someone would use this is, you know, if they're already neck deep in the Microsoft ecosystem, then maybe they're using Azure or some of the other tools that Microsoft offers. Just definitely something you should be aware of as a web developer and serving clients. If they're in the Microsoft space, power pages. We'll see how it actually looks. It's got a nice little interface here. Nice little web app, code visual, some things haven't played with it, but it's out there. So that's something just to know about Stacy says front page rises again. Maybe we'll see. They had a front page stage like, right. I mean, I live through front page for a while. It's like my emo goth stage as a teenager, right? I didn't have one of those, but that would be the web equivalent. Okay, anyway, let's move into something else I found interesting. So this actually let me back this up, because I want to start over on this. The next slide is a video you may have seen on social media, which I've taken and sped up a bit of a visual representation of the growth of web browsers over the last 28 years from January 94 through current and I just like this a lot. It's about a minute long, so let's just watch this. Back in the early days. When Netscape came on the scene, I looked the rise of Internet Explorer in the late 90s, gradually pressing out Netscape until Internet Explorer became the dominant browser for many many years. Gosh, look at that go 22,003 os something is happening here. Mozilla file Firefox is popping in Netscape is dwindling out of existence but Firefox, which was the next iteration of that Netscape, Mozilla model is bigger. Bigger bigger. I'll look Chrome as appeared in 2009 2010. Beginning to get bigger forcing Internet Explorer smaller, smaller, smaller Firefox losing market share Safari remaining about the same. I feel like I'm calling a horse race here. But look, Chrome is continuing to grow. 2015 2016 17 chrome continues to dominate Microsoft Edge pops on the scene, and will gradually begin to grow just a little bit. But you still see the main three chrome still huge. Oops. Let's get this to the end. Chrome still by far the largest market share with edge and edge and Firefox and a little bit of Safari as far as still Kenya 4% of platform, mostly mobile. There it is very, very, very interesting. Sue is wondering where is Tor? That's a great maybe here under other point nine. It probably won't identify itself because Tor interesting. This is a fun little thing. If you want the video, you can click that link. All right, has Google become AI sentient this. I saw this article combined. I just had to share it. It is quite interesting because supposedly according to at least one person, the lambda language model for dialogue applications,
which is a Google AI conversational AI has achieved at least in its own mind, sentience. I mean, I don't know whatever. There was an article in the Washington Post about this pretty interesting. He published a post on Medium describing lambda as a person. He said that he has spoken with lambda about religion, consciousness and the laws of robotics. He claimed the model lambda described itself even as sentient. He said lambda wants to prioritize the well being of humanity and be acknowledged as an employee of Google rather than as property. Wow. Okay. Part of his conversation with lambda convinced him that AI is in fact sentient when he said So do you consider yourself a person in the same way you consider me a person? Yeah, that's the idea. How can I tell that you actually understand what you're saying? Well, because you are reading my words and interpreting them and I think we're more or less on the same page. I mean, decent response, whatever. So apparently, number five is alive. I don't know what we do with this. I mean, I really don't know what to do with this. Well, Morgan says when he raised the idea of Landon sentience to higher ups at Google, he was dismissed and a Google spokesperson said basically, there was no evidence and that it was sentient and lots of evidence against it. And Lemoyne was put on administrative leave for violating Google's confidentiality agreements. Oh, boy, who knows? I mean, who knows? I'm gonna sleep fine at night. Interesting story this month. Ah, well, May 27. Is is WordPress, his birthday so happy 19th birthday to WordPress 19 years since Matt Mullenweg partnered with Mike Liddell to release the first version of the WordPress based on the B to cafe log software. All goes back to a blog post on Matt Mullenweg blog from January the 24th 2003. Where they started talking about good grief Cafe B to cafe log has been abandoned by its developer. What should we do about this be nice to have a new platform that had the flexibility of movable type, the parsing of textpattern, the hack ability of v2 and the ease of setup of blogger. Those really formed the the cornerstones of what would become WordPress pretty cool stuff. There's a website WP nineteen.de. You can see various developers and users celebrated the big day. Matt Mullenweg said that WordPress is thriving and doing better than ever. That's a testament to every single person who has ever told a friend about WordPress participated on the forums had a translation or contributed code. So a happy birthday to WordPress was a great post status article about it. You want to go back and read on some of that stuff. We do a lot of articles here on the news roundup from JP tavern. And if you're a writer or if you know a writer, we're dopey Tavern is hiring. We talked last month or the month before about Justin Tadlock moving on from WP Tavern and his presence is certainly missed in the WP tavern writing staff so they're looking for talented writers who want to report on WordPress news if that sounds interesting to you just reach out there'll be Tavern is hiring wide range of topics but not limited to Gutenberg core development, ecommerce community plugin and theme ecosystems events and all of those things. Yeah, it's out there and if you are interested in doing things with the P tavern, it's out there all right, let's move into a new segment that we started adding the last several months called the WP acquisitions watch. Big news this month is that WP Engine has acquired five plugins from delicious brains. Now delicious brains is a one of the OG WordPress plugin shops they've been around for forever. They are focused especially on the WordPress database and complicated plugins that deal with managing the WordPress database and and making WordPress easier to use on the back end. Some time ago, they acquired the advanced custom fields plugin from its original developer and there was a little bit of a kerfuffle surrounding with lifetime licenses be honored and so forth. They really they did due.
Diligence springs really didn't do much with ACF. Other than they owned it for a little while. And they have now sold it and a number of other plugins you might recognize to WP Engine. So now advanced custom fields that'd be migrate. They'd be offload media. They'd be offload SES and the better search replace plugin are now owned by WP engine that's probably good for everybody concerned. These plugins which are active on more than 4 million WordPress websites, greatly expanded API engines have the ability to reach into the developer market. They promised to honor they they're not making the same mistake but delicious brains did with leaving any concern about this. They're not going to change any of the lifetime licenses and so forth. No plans for subscription prices increases etc. They're gonna keep things as is that's been pretty well the standard for other acquisitions that they'd be engineers made. So if you're an ACF person, I think it's good news. I really do feel their acquisition acquisitions Howler box was acquired by groundhog which I called groundhog I'm not quite sure about either one of those. The other one is Stradic was acquired by Elementor. Now this one I want to talk about for a second because putting on my prognosticators hat just for a moment. This one might be interesting. Stradic is one of the leaders in what is called headless WordPress. Headless WordPress is the the technology that allows you to create use the WordPress content management system on the back end, but then it runs through this process or that creates a flat website on the front end, which means there is really less that security profile is much lower, meaning it's would not be quite as easy to hack. Also, it performs faster. Now Elementor you know, one of the big downsides of Elementor over the years has been my gosh, it's slow. It is bloated. It loads a ton of code of JavaScript just on every page. It is ridiculously bloated. And you may remember that the last month of the month before Elementor announced they are going to create a site for building sites with Elementor like basically a Squarespace but using Elementor right as the Page Builder. So this just makes sense that they would bring in Stradic and use their technology to potentially take this new platform of sites using Elementor as a site builder, like Squarespace, but now putting a headless feature on them so that they have a lower security profile and operate a lot faster. This one could be very interesting. So we'll just keep an eye on that and see what happens with the Stradic acquisition by Elementor. Alright, a few other things that we found that were worth a look just a couple of this month. First of all, optimizing crawling for the environment. This is an interesting read if you're interested in sustainability and the greenness of the web on the Yoast blog, how over crawling costs us all and how we can better optimize to reduce unnecessary crawling so this might connect also to the story we talked about last month with the open oh my gosh, I just lost the term. Anybody remember this? It's the open. I've lost it. It's the platform that Microsoft and others have created to allow you to tell search engines that you have an update on your site and I've completely lost the name it's gone out of my head. But anyhow, this is interesting. And just think about it. How many processing seconds are wasted crawling websites that have not changed and how much energy does that represent? Probably a lot with billions and billions of web pages on the internet. It's an interesting read. If you're interested that sort of thing. Google Translate widget has been discontinued. So if you are using that Google widget translate that lets you drop down and choose a language. You might want to make sure if it's going to be the support for that is actually continued on your website. So take a look at that. That is coming. Yep, it has. It's going to be discontinued. So just take a watch on that. Almost at a time for today, but
let's hit a couple of bits of news on word camp. It's great to see in person word camps coming back where camp Montclair New Jersey is happening in a couple of weeks. That's the first US based in person word camp after the pandemic. Great. Great to see that happening. Ben. Thank you index now. Index now is the protocol I was looking for. That we talked about with informing search engines that your site has had a change. Yep. So if you're in the Northeast we're currently working at Montclair is coming. It's a one day event. They're in Montclair, New Jersey. Also WordCamp us is happening September 9 through 11th of 2022. In San Diego, California. I will be at that event. So come on to WordCamp us let's let's hang out I'd love to meet you. Also work camp Netherlands scheduled for September 14 through the 16th and the announcement of the next venue for WordCamp. Europe was made in 2023. The word camp EU will be in Athens, Greece. That sounds like a fun trip to me. Let's see how that goes. All right. That brings us to the end of the WordPress news roundup for June 2022. Hopefully you found some interesting things. Let me drop in. Once again, the slides for anybody that missed those they are in the chat. Again, if you're watching this on the replay, they're down below in the download handout button. That's going to do it for us today. Tomorrow for members is the fly 2022 session on finances. And Thursday I'm back with Office Hours here on I iThemes Training, where we go further together