Once again if you're just joining us in zoom, welcome, we're about five minutes out from getting started. I'm getting our caption step set up, and I'll be right back with you in just a minute as soon as all of that happens
seems like we only have trouble with these during the news roundup and login roundup apparently having an issue today Ah, here we go. Just about ready to get this all connected now finally it is starting to work
all right again welcome if you're just joining us in zoom I am getting our transcript set up here
all right, are you guys seeing the captions once again, I think our chat is disabled. Oh good. Well, we are just having all sorts of trouble today, aren't we? I wonder why. Chat is disabled me one minute. And I do not know if there's actually anything I can do to re enable the chat for this webinar now that we've actually started it.
So are you can you folks see the chat message that I just sent a minute ago?
Of course you can't. Okay, you can see the chat link that I sent but that's it was fantastic. Okay, it doesn't appear that I can do anything about that. Today. Now that we've launched the meeting already. So ah
I'm still looking folks, if you're just joining us, sorry we're having an issue with for some reason the chat isn't working. In zoom. So that's no good at all.
Ah, now see if that works. Yay. Okay, awesome. Okay. It's gonna be a great webinar. So if you're just joining us, sorry, we're having issues not only with the live transcript but also with the chat but the chat now seems to be working
okay, and now I think we should be seeing the live transcription occurring as well. Sorry, I'm seeing it is everybody seeing that now? Okay. Hallelujah. We're ready to start. Okay, so with that, let me close all the windows that I had open to try to figure this issue out. And we're going to dismiss all 18,000 questions that came in about the chat not working. And as soon as that's done, I'm going to start the webinar officially. So let me just real quick once again, or if one of the folks that was here from the beginning would mind scrolling up in the chat and pasting in the slide link. That would be awesome. Thank you, Stacey. So they're that Google Drive link there for everybody. That is the the slides
Okay, so they're the slides if you're just coming in late, you haven't missed anything. We've had some technical issues and we're just about ready to start. I'm going to start our recording and we will get started officially. Well, good afternoon, everybody and welcome to the WordPress news roundup for July 2022. My name is Nathan Ingram. I am the host here at iThemes Training and despite various technical challenges as we are getting things underway here, we're ready to talk about WordPress news. So it is the summer and as is typical during the summer months. The WordPress news slows down just a little bit but there are still some interesting little tidbits that I think that you'll find helpful over the next hour or so. So if you are just joining us in zoom, make sure you have the chat window open. Say hi there. Tell us where you're logging in from several folks there already today and the slide link is also there. I'm going to paste that one more time before we get started here.
And that let's get started, shall we and we always begin our news roundup with a look at core WordPress and what's going on there. So you may have noticed that last week your WordPress websites updated automatically to WordPress six dot O dot one. The first minor release since the drop of WordPress six Dotto, not a lot going on there just 30 a few bug fixes. In core and in the block editor nothing significant really just little small things as tends to happen with any release at all. So as long as you have the default behavior of WordPress set, which is automatically apply all of these little small maintenance releases. It should have just happened no problems. I haven't heard of any issues at all from anybody with WordPress upgrading on this one. And I do hope that you do keep your WordPress that with that default setting to automatically apply these core maintenance releases. There's really not a reason not to do that. Another little bit of interesting information from core is a proposal from the WordPress performance team about making web p image is the default. Now if you don't know what web P images are, this is a next generation image format that basically gives you the same quality image as a similar JPEG or ping image, but at a much smaller file size sometimes 40% less and in some cases more. So nonetheless, it just depends on the image, of course. But it's a better compression algorithm that to deal with images on the web. And so web P has had a slow adoption rate because a lot of older browsers haven't said they didn't support Web P. But these days kind of Scotch that like the browser support is just virtually across the board. So it was way back in March of 2022 that the WordPress core performance team said maybe we should add web p by default as part of core. So they proposed that several months ago. And then the next month they withdrew that proposal because there was a there's some a bit of community uproar. They said, Look, web P is incompatible with some web browsers and some email clients. And if you make web P the default, then in other words, when you upload a JPEG into WordPress, WordPress itself would convert that JPEG or ping into a web P format. And if you do that, then you got both of those images sitting on the server and that could potentially double the size of your media library. So those were the objections to this proposal. And so they went back to the drawing board and they've come back with a new proposal that addresses these concerns. So as far as the incompatibility with browsers and email clients, they say look, this is really an unfounded concern. 97 plus percent of browsers are compatible with web p 97. plus percent of email clients are compatible with web p. So you know what, the ones that aren't. It's like Internet Explorer two, or you know, some crazy added date you know, just upgrade your browser, upgrade your email client. So that's really they've said in an unfounded concern. I really agree with that. I also they said, Look, we're going to add a JavaScript to detect if you're using one of these ancient browsers, and switch the image back to the original format the JPEG pink, whatever, so interesting. But there's a great question in the chat just now that I will address as part of this. And really in this next bit here. So a lot of you probably are already using web P. Some image. photo editing apps will generate a web p image, save as a web P also, probably more commonly, you might be using an image optimization plugin, like tiny ping or smush, or tiny pixel or short pixel or E dub that will generate those web P images for you. And you're probably if you're doing that you're already familiar with the disk space requirements, right? So you have the original image, and you have your web P. That's just kind of the way it goes.
So they addressed this issue this way that this disk space requirement issue, they said, Look, we're only going to generate web P versions. For the core image sizes. So if there are, let's say, you have WooCommerce setup, and WooCommerce you know, generates like six different image sizes on its own. So there would be probably an option then and WooCommerce to ask you, if you want to use web p for the WooCommerce images. Also, any other custom image sizes, like I defined a set of custom image sizes, usually in with my base stack unless I take that out. So the custom image function would have the ability to opt in or out of making web P. Also, look we're only going to keep the web P images if they're smaller than the original. That just makes sense. So if a jpg is for some reason smaller than the web P, there's no sense in making the web p right. Also, we're only going to generate web P for image sizes intended for use on the front end of the website. That's also good. And then finally introducing a filter that will allow developers to exclude certain image sizes. So let's say we don't want for some reason to make web UI images for the medium size in WordPress. Well, we'd be able to do that. So they're addressing all these concerns. And I think a pretty good way and I think I mean Good grief. It's 2022 it's time for web P to just be the thing. There's really not a good compelling reason not to use web p. So there you go. Moving on to another little bit of core news. There is now a call for testing in a new feature a plugin that is called the rollback update failure feature plugin. Now let me just pause for a minute and from time to time when this feature plugin term comes up. I like to explain it so if you've been around news roundups for a while just, you know, bear with me just a moment if you're not familiar with the term feature plugin, let me just take 30 seconds to explain it. Feature plugin is a technical term in the WordPress world. A feature plugin is a plugin that's been designated by the community as we're going to develop this feature in a plugin and when it's ready, we're going to merge that into core WordPress. This is how new large features get added to core WordPress. So for example, with the web P, they would create that as a feature plugin and then it would get merged into core at some point in the future. So this is a new potential core feature called the rollback update failure. And basically, if an update an automatic update in WordPress fails an automatic theme or plugin update, for example, if it fails, currently, there's not a way to roll it back without some sort of manual intervention on our part. That's one of the reasons that many of us have shied away from automatic updates of themes and plugins for sites that we manage if you're doing client work. So this plugin will actually when if an update is applied, and the update fails, it will automatically roll it back. So this is great. It's thumbs up on this this is this is good for everybody. So the auto updates team needs broad testing. So if you're interested in being a beta tester for this, do it this is not something you want to do on a live site obviously because this feature plugin requires the Bleeding Edge version of WordPress, so you'd have to install the WordPress beta tester plugin. And that gives you the the nightly builds. So as things are added on a daily basis to WordPress, and they're dropped overnight, that WordPress is going to be updating every single day to this new beta version of WordPress. So you do have to be using this. I wouldn't use it on you know any sort of critical live live site other than maybe your own testing site or whatever. But if you'd like to take part in this or just test out this, this update failure feature plugin you can do so the links to the feature plug in are here in the in the footer, as well as the WordPress beta tester plugin to get you those bleeding edge nightly builds of WordPress. So that's a cool thing. I would see that coming to WordPress potentially in the next version of 6.1. If everything is ready and tested, that's a good thing. And I think it's should be helpful for all of us. All right next up and core WordPress is hey, they have released a WordPress six one roadmap this wasn't available last month. I just been made available. So we look at the next drop for a core version of WordPress is October 25 of 2022 to the alpha will is already out actually the beta one and the feature freeze will happen in September. So feature feature freeze means that that's when all there will be no more new features added past this point. So as they're looking at features to add into
the next version that's all happening in this alpha that's currently being used. And when we hit September 20 No more new features. The beta one is out. So we're going to test the beta beta two drops on the 27th release candidate 123 And finally the dry run the 24th with the release on the 25th so you can look forward to that happening. Right there toward the end of October. That's really it from core. Not much this over the summertime teams are working but it's not nearly at the pace they typically keep. Well let's move on into some news from Gutenberg. The Gutenberg team is obviously at work there they stay staying on there. Every two weeks drop of the Gutenberg plugin. The last one let's see we left off last month with Gutenberg 13 Four so let's talk about Gutenberg 13 Five which was released just after maybe a day or the same day as news roundup last month, I think anyway, it was right around that same time but we missed it in the last round up with several different features. There's new improved user experience with feature images. There's some stuff with full site editing in the post nav link. The date picker has gotten a little better. It's pretty cool. And stripping out the HTML from serialized data that sounds really high tech and complex but it's not and I'll show you that in just a minute. So the new UX improvement with featured images is pretty helpful. I think when you use a featured image and a cover block, it gives you a placeholder so we drop that in and we have this this nice little drop down to add the media and you get a cover image here. A placeholder image instead also, it gives you using a featured image in the cover block is where you'd expect it to be. So adding the media, it's like right here use featured image before you couldn't hardly find that like it was it was really hard to find the place to add the feature the defined featured image of the post to the cover blog. Now they fix that so that's you know, I think a long time coming. They've also improved the, the way the full site editing works for post navigation links, which unless you're really playing with full site editing doesn't really help you very much but they're continuing to iterate and make advances there. The date picker is a lot better. This is they changed the state picker out a couple versions ago and Gutenberg and it's really a lot slicker and nicer one of the things they've added in this simple but helpful is adding today's date. Isn't that not like it's funny how that one little gray circle really helps when you're trying to find today's date on the calendar as they've made that small adjustment and that's pretty nice. The next feature here is helpful because whenever for example in the block editor, if you were copying just like this shows, copying the blocks to the clipboard and pasting it, you get all the Gutenberg markup code. So if you like if you look at a Gutenberg layout, a block editor layout in the Code view you see all the HTML tags, all the comment tags that are wrapped around the bits of information, a lot of that would paste over if you did this. So they've now taken that away so you can copy directly out of the the page here across blocks and everything if you watch what they're doing we're just going to copy all this content and 19 blocks were copied and we can just paste and it just pulls the text over. So that's pretty nice for getting the information out of your poster page and into some text. It's going to make it easier to carry that information from platform to platform.
All right on to Gutenberg 60 13.6, which was released on July the sixth several things I pattern selections from any post type, creating more template types in the editor, clear layout controls, more keyboard shortcuts, a better post scheduler and some work on that theme dot JSON in JSON. So now there's the ability to see patterns from any post type. So when you're creating a new page, a modal can pop up to say you know, choose a pattern for this page. And it will work with custom post types as well if you enable that that's pretty cool. The new add the editor, the full site editor also gives you the ability to choose template types more easily. So if you're doing anything with FSC this is kind of cool. And by the way, full site editing is not going anywhere. Like we're not ready to really use it deeply because it's still being developed. But it's getting better and better. It's like the block editor did hear you know, years ago it's it was really hard to use at the beginning, but it keeps getting better and better and better. And this is a neat thing to see. We've also got some better layout controls and giving some explanatory text underneath. So here in the layout area of the sidebar, there's a new setting for inner blocks use full width, and they give you a little explanation there. So it's not just given without context at all. And so that's helpful both for new users as well as for those of us who might possibly be stumbling around the block editor just a bit okay. So also we talked last time about the addition of keyboard shortcuts and Gutenburg. They've they're really working on that and that they've now added a better. There's a pop up now that shows you what those are and they've added some additional keyboard shortcuts that weren't there before. So that just makes things easier for everybody. Alright, so there is now also some simplification that has been added to the post scheduler, it now uses the terms today and tomorrow if it's appropriate, just to make it a little friendlier. So that's kind of nice. It's these little small iterations that just continue to make the block editor better. We've been talking about the theme dot JSON function that was a new feature of one of the previous versions of WordPress, and it's basically a standardization format so that themes can interact with each other better, and switching from one theme to another becomes easier and now you have the ability to set style for all the buttons in the theme right there in the customizer, and it all just uses that theme Stott JSON engine to keep all those changes together. There is now continued use of Gutenberg we talked about this last month of the month before have the Gutenberg editor, which is an open source project. It actually stands alone from WordPress. It's used in WordPress, but the Gutenberg code can be picked up and used in many different platforms. And we talked about how that's being used and things like Drupal, Gutenberg and Laura Berg, which is they're using it as an editor in the Laravel. PHP framework. Tumblr also has adopted Gutenberg as the editor. And so it continues to be used in Tumblr and and now in the day one, a diary at Matt Mullenweg at WordCamp. Europe this year said I believe that Gutenberg can be a bigger contribution to the world than WordPress itself. That's a pretty strong statement. And but it's interesting it this editor really could find itself showing up in lots of different places. You see it in Tumblr, now. Tumblr users Hey, there's a new shiny post editor check it out. And there it is. Here in here's the way Gutenberg looks inside of Tumblr. All the core engine behind all this is still Gutenberg. And here it is in the day one web app. So yeah, it's all the Gutenberg things.
So the Gutenberg lead architect Matthias Ventura said, I'm personally looking forward to when you could just copy and paste blocks between platforms like you do with patterns. Wouldn't that be nice? We talked about this in the block API several months ago, this proposal to make similar types of content like ordered lists and, you know, block quotes and things like that be a similar format from site to site. And the way Gutenberg is working very well could be sort of the standard for that sort of thing. Would it be nice to just copy something from you know, one app and it paste and retain all the formatting as expected another app instead of it being all janky and goofed up? That would be pretty cool. So Gutenberg is going to continue, I think, to play a role in that world. Well, let's move on into some WordPress. Security news. especially focusing in on our weekly vulnerability reports. If you're not getting those, you can sign up for email updates at i think.com. We do publish a weekly WordPress vulnerability report of themes and plugins that are vulnerable currently. We've had five of those have gone out since the last news roundup. So at the time of the report, these that are in red for the next couple of pages have no fix. So you'll want to validate that maybe a fix hasn't been added since this report dropped. We're actually going back about a month June the 15th. So some of these might have gotten fixed, but many of them still probably will not have been fixed. So just be very careful with these. If a plugin has a vulnerability, simply deactivating the plugin is not enough. I've said this multiple times. And I mentioned it every time you know, every every so often, but anyway, it's not enough. Just to deactivate the plugin or disable the plug in the code is still on your website. At that point, it should be removed altogether. So here's our list. Allow SVG files any mind widget the a wind data feed, best contact management software button widget comment license, Shopify copyright proof custom pop up builder event timeline, Flexi quote rotator free live chat support free mind that EP browser, gallery bank gallery for social image slider Import CSV files, invitation based registrations, LinkedIn company updates login with phone number page bar pop ups pricing deals for WooCommerce progressive license rename the up login Request a Quote share bars shortcode for current date, shortcodes macro toolbar to share travel management, very simple breadcrumb WooCommerce product importer, pop up WordPress pop up WordPress project source code download that's a mouthful and a WordPress team manager. I'm really not familiar with any of those plugins, but just be careful in case you might be using one of those very, very, could be vulnerability still on that just make sure you're taking care of. Now we also have quite a few vulnerabilities in larger plugins we stopped listing plugins with below 10,000 installs because our list just got too long every month but these are plugins with over 10,000 installs that have had vulnerabilities. All of these have been patched in their latest version. So just make sure you have the latest version of this plugin on your site. The 404 to 301 Except strike redirect advanced database cleaner advanced WordPress reset booster for WooCommerce breezy page builder capture checkout fields manager from WooCommerce clearify cache Contact Form seven capture custom product tabs for woo a data table generator download manager that's a big plugin easy testimonials the core Elementor plugin had another vulnerability this month. Featured Image from URL flexible shipping the gift WP core plugin had an issue gravity PDF header footer code manager insights from Google PageSpeed I've researched jQuery validation for Contact Form seven LearnPress loading page with loading screen. Many orange Google Authenticator Modula next scripts ninja forms this is a big one we're going to talk about in just a minute. Photo gallery by soups stick stick Okay, pop up anything Shareaholic shortpixel decor plugin simple membership Unison visualizer whoo discount rules WooCommerce menu cart mini Woo's this month WooCommerce PDF witty code snippets WordPress popular post WordPress real cookie they'd be all export and I'll import the AP context slider that if you paginate dopey video lightbox and the Yup, poll I've been waiting all our to say that Yup, poll. All right. So all those have been patched by the way if you're using our theme security Pro, it has the version management feature where I think security even the free version of I think security now scans your site twice a day to let you know if any themes or plugins exist on your site that are in the WP scan vulnerability database that's even in the free version now. So that's great. You have the Pro version, we had that version management feature that will automatically apply the patch if the patch exists. So you don't have to worry about anything on these lists. That's a good thing.
All right, let's talk about that. Ninja forms vulnerability. This was a big one. It was a high rated vulnerability it's a remote a remote execution vulnerability that it will allow someone to actually post content on your site without having been authenticated correctly, with a critical vulnerability. In other words, a really big deal. In other words, also 9.8 10 That's what I'm trying to say here on the CVSS the common vulnerability scoring system. So this was a major, big deal on a major plugin in the WordPress ecosystem 680,000 sites now, what happened here was that this was deemed to be such a critical vulnerability that the WordPress WordPress plugin team said we're pushing an update to this. So it happened automatically. It was a forced security update that applied this patch to sites without any intervention from the site owner. Now, this action we might think look at that and say yeah, that just makes sense. And I think it does. But this is always a conversation in the WordPress world because WordPress is open source, no higher authority should be pushing anything on me that sort of thing, that that sentiment is out there, but particularly in a situation like this where you've got almost 700,000 sites that are very vulnerable to a, a, a critical vulnerability like this one that could allow a bad actor to publish content on your site. Just just like that very quickly, in that forced updates are a big deal and the team is careful. They don't just force update everything, as you've just seen with the list of plugins that we've given that are still not patched so I but in this case, it certainly warranted that that critical quick update, and that's what they did all right. So I ran across this post that was on the admin bar website, which is one of my favorite Facebook groups made up of people who build and manage WordPress sites just like me. And this was a It looks like a gravity forums post. This is a new form of spam perhaps. And this is something I think you might want to warn your clients about. So hey, good job on the new site, go ahead and submit it to our free directory and there's a bitly link that led to a site that was pretty sketchy. Yeah, potentially a phishing link it was shown as a threat site in Chrome when this person went there. So it's a big deal. And so if you're in communication with your clients, you might want to let them know that this sort of, you know, this sort of forum entry could appear and just ignore it and because this got around typical Gravity Forms, spam, countermeasures, it was likely this was an actual person, you know, submitting this and that's becoming more and more of the way the spammers are working. It's not automated with bots that can be filtered out by CAPTCHA or one of the other anti spam methods that form plugins use. This is probably a person, you know, they're just sitting there, copy, paste, copy, paste, copy, paste. And yeah, so just let your clients know this sort of thing is out there. A couple of really good replies to this one, Andrew Palmer said or gave this resource called weirdos.com. I've never heard of this it's a great resource. You can drop in a forwarded link, like a bitly link or any other link shortener, and it will actually show you on the website there, where it's going and make sure it's legitimate. And then Kyle, who's the one of the admins of admin bar said, hey, look, on the bright side, at least they liked the new site. You gotta love it. Okay, let's move forward into some news from my things. We have a lot going on here at AI themes and first of all, beginning with this month's customer spotlight our very own awesome Paul Taubman. So congratulations, Paul on being this month's customer spotlight. Make sure you guys go take a look at Paul's article there and ithemes.com/customer-spotlights and read all about Paul. He's a really good guy yo, and so read his story. If you would like to be proud to be participating, if you would like to participate in a customer spotlight, we're still looking for more participants. Kristin is actively interviewing members of our community takes about 45 minutes you get a backlink to your site from i think.com. It's a very high value backlink with the page ranking that I think has and that will also give you a coupon for $100 in swag from the I think Swag Shop you can just go online order and it magically appears at your house. And as some of you have gotten really cool I themes blankets and coffee cups and shirts and all kinds of things. So it takes about 45 minutes if you're interested right here I think.com/customer Spotlight slash interview questionnaire. If you have the slides, you can just click on the link in the PDF.
All right, I am super excited about this month's premium events. Which is Ben Meredith my friend from give WP Ben is the lead the customer support lead ad gift web he's been in the customer support world for ever and is a has a lot of brilliance in that area. And so we're going to be talking about how to up our support game with our clients even as a solopreneur small agency. So how to blow your clients minds without losing yours. That should be a good one that's next Tuesday and Wednesday from one to three central. You can see the course overview there. If you're a member, you can sign up right there. This is a premium event. So it's only for iThemes Training and toolkit members. It's going to be a good one. He's going to give us some practical things to take away and that really helped to level up in customer support. The August event coming up August 30/31 is with my friend David Zimmerman of curious ants. David is an SEO and Google Analytics expert. He's an excellent teacher. I'm really excited about having him with us in August. We're going to be talking especially about the change of Google Analytics for that is coming next year. You've heard a lot about it. We've talked a lot about it here on the news roundup, and David's going to give us a boot camp of getting to know Google Analytics for and what we need to do both to add it to client websites as well as how to use it and how to set things up. And where is this in GA four than it used to be in Universal Analytics and so forth. So that is coming up. So if you want to sign up you can do so right here at this link. Stacey, you're saying it's you know what, there may not be a regular webinar created for this but it's always better to if you want to see the webinars that are premium. Just go right here to premium events once you're logged in. And you'll see the upcoming courses right here. So you can view those details right there. And of course the replays are underneath once you're logged in. All right. I do by the way, this week, we have finalized our premium event schedule for the fall. So here's what's coming up for the rest of the year. As far as premium events. I think y'all are gonna like this September we're going to have Hans and DiNardo from term again, talking about WordPress privacy. So we may adjust this title just a little bit, but I just confirmed with them yesterday that we can get them on and give us some really in depth training on building websites privacy first, and how to deal with a lot of the issues that we just don't understand as web developers when it comes to privacy, and WordPress. Also in October, we're going to do a Kadence Developer course. So this is going to be an under the hood code snippet, magic snippet. You know, I I've said here, the Kadence team will probably get been written or in here from most if not all of that, but I don't want to say that publicly. You didn't hear that here. That's just between you and me. But I think Ben Ratner is going to be our presenter there.
Probably. So yeah, it should be great. And this will be not just here some blocks and let's build a page. It's going to be a lot more in depth under the hood. Things that you might not get elsewhere. It should be a lot of fun. In November in December, we're back with our Starter Site courses so creating a Starter Site with yours truly in November. This is building a common theme and plugin stack that you can then replicate for future projects. We always have a lot of fun with this. A lot of under the hood WordPress and how WordPress works. Getting into the WP config file, getting everything customized and ready to go. Then in December, it's optimizing our Starter Site dealing with speed and some of those things are always a lot of fun. And yeah, so that's coming up for the rest of the year and looking forward to each of these events. If also, here's some of the things coming up on I iThemes Training. We just scheduled this one last week. And I mentioned I think on office hours but Kathy Zant is going to be with us tomorrow. Speaking of Kadence and she's got some really great use cases of how people are using Kadence cloud to create revenue streams and sell their blocks that they've built blocks and patterns and all sorts of really cool things. So that's coming up tomorrow at one o'clock if you haven't registered for that you may do so at training that I ithemes.com Where Thursday is Office Hours next week is the customer support webinar with Ben Meredith we talked about plugging Roundup is coming up August the second and this one just got this added writing for humans and robots The New Rules of content style with Mattie Osman Maddie just published a book on this subject. She's a fantastic presenter. We've had her on multiple times in the past and she always brings it when she talks about content. So make sure you sign up for Matty's webinar there on August the third. So all that's coming up with I iThemes Training also added a few new events just today for the month of August. So if you haven't, I'm sure you haven't signed up for these because they've literally only been on the site for like two hours. But we have a great webinar coming up with my friend Elizabeth pampelonne about usability so she's gonna give you a process for doing usability testing on your website to reveal some things about maybe how you're not thinking about how some people might be looking for things or can't find something or don't know how to do something on your website. So that's a free webinar coming up August 9. This is what we've been talking about for a while I think security is now making use of the web often protocol to bring biometric logins and pass keys for WordPress. So this is a sneak peek. That will be August the 10th at 1pm. And basically here's the thing. This is the ability to use like face ID and thumbprint ID and browser based paths keys to log in and just bypass the standard username password sequence of WordPress altogether. Now there are some WordPress security plugins one I think that it started to use something like this, but it's like as a two factor. It's an addition to the username and password. So for those of us who always have trouble with your client uses the same password on every site or you can't get them to use a password manager like LastPass or, you know they they won't ever use two factor like they're just not going to do it. This is a way to keep them securely logging into the site and not have to deal with any of those issues. It's going to be awesome. And Timothy Jacobs, the lead developer for I think security will be presenting on that on August the 10th. We've got to learn dash 101 webinar coming up on August 23 with our sister company LearnDash and one of their fine folks, as well as a give WP webinar preparing nonprofit websites for the giving season be served nonprofits this is going to be tips and tricks on how to optimize the website for marketing getting Tuesdays specifically that's coming up the day after Cyber Monday in November. So lots of cool stuff just added if you're not a member of iThemes Training yet, you can join for a 30 day free trial get that free. And yeah should be great. Alright, let's pivot to some news on plugins. The WordPress performance team has proposed at developing a new plugin Checker tool. They are kickstarting a proposal that basically standardizes the way plugin development should happen in WordPress, it would red flag any violations of the plug in development, and suggest best practices or give warnings on why this isn't a good idea. This has also it's coming out of the performance team because a lot of less experienced developers write code that takes way longer to execute than they then it should because they're not familiar enough with the way WordPress works. And so this plugin will help the plugin review team but also it will help to identify some of these performance issues and deal with those ahead of time. So this is they're requesting feedback from the community and plugin developers and reviewers and everybody to get this ultimately what this means for us is that once this gets into place, it's going to be better. It's going to help plugin developers code better and help the plugin review team identify issues better so this is good for everybody a
couple of bits of news for Gravity Forms users if you're a gravity form lover like I am, I Gravity Forms has a new stripe app Perhaps you've seen that. There's a lot of plugins I'm noticing a lot of WordPress and even other SAS products that are making use of these new stripe apps. This is a relatively new thing within stripe that allows an app to come in and like you can side load some information inside the stripe interface. And a lot of companies are making use of this Gravity Forms being one of the first that I've seen in the WordPress space. So basically it's gonna let you view your gravity form entries right there in your stripe dashboard and add notes. So you'll be able to view you know the full form that was submitted for example, so have you ever like if you're using Gravity Forms for payment, you see that? That information comes in but maybe some of the meta details didn't get put into the to the stripe entry correctly? Well, you can just open up right there the Gravity Forms app and you'll see the full form entry. So it's really a good thing. Here's how kind of it looks that the stripe app sort of slide in from a tray on the right hand side. Pretty nifty stuff. You can add entry notes and so forth. Yeah, so really, really neat stuff. This does require I'm not sure if this requires the elite license or not. I see that question. No, you know what, it's just it's in the this is in the stripe app marketplace. I think it's available for anybody using Gravity Forms. Yeah, Gravity Forms has also been fairly busy. They have also created a new add on for Google Analytics. So this is a really great tool that's going to let you track form events more efficiently in from gravity forums in Google Analytics. So for example, you could previously you know, attach an event to clicking on the submit button for the form but now you can even do pagination events. So if you have a multiple page form, you can track Oh, people are really falling off here. At page five, maybe we need to look at that and maybe shorten the form or do whatever. So it gives you a lot more granular data easier inside of Google Analytics from your Gravity Forms. This is pretty cool. This does require the Gravity Forms elite license it works with Universal Analytics or Google Analytics for pretty cool. Another little bit of plugin news here is you may have seen this Elementor is laid off 15% of its workforce. They cite to inflation and the threat of a 2023 recession they've laid off about 60 employees, mostly the marketing department, apparently not the engineering or development staff. This does not acquire this does not affect Stradic, which is a headless WordPress hosting company that Elementor acquired last month. So as a big big bit of news in the WordPress space about three four weeks ago. All right, let's move on into some news about WordPress themes. And I had a little bit of WP drama about this. Yeah, some other things too. This month we'll get to so there was a track ticket attract by the way is the vehicle through which requests are submitted to be included in some form of core WordPress or in the WordPress plugin directory steam directories those track is the tool to track these things. So this this suggestion was we should really give block themes priority in the directory. These are things that are specifically tagged with full site editing support. There's currently only 86 themes that support the full range of WordPress site editing capabilities with FS e. And if you want to see the list of full site editing compatible themes, you have to really go three levels deep in the WordPress theme list. So they say look, these are the themes that support the latest, greatest version, the theme features of WordPress, they really ought to be listed where they're easier to find now that just really it costs them issues. This is kind of what they want a list of block themes here. And one out of 10 of the 10 of the popular themes should be blocked themes. So it's what they suggested. So this is what they wanted. And it was like the world came to an end. A lot of community pushback happened on this. Many developers not happy about this. This one developer in particular said this goes against everything we've talked about for the last 10 years. Whenever theme authors heard the same song it's not the role of.org to promote or market any product and yet we seem to be doing that. So when there's new shiny toy, it's really not even ready or wanted by the general public and suddenly people with a direct interest in having a spotlight on their themes or pushing this new idea wow yeah, there's there's always some drama happening and I'm gonna we'll see what lands here ah, there is a new
a new plugin that has been released called Create block theme. Now this one I find really interesting. This is something that will allow your own theme using full site editing to with this plugin you can get you can basically set up your theme the way you want it in the in the base theme. Set up your Customizer Settings set up you know any page templates or whatever using full site editing. And then you can export your this this theme that you've created into its own standalone child theme. That's interesting. It would carry forward all your Customizer Settings and all of this into its own prepackaged child theme. So basically all you have to do is install the plugin, make your changes, edit whatever templates in the side editor and export those out into a new theme. So that's pretty cool and it would work with any block aware theme. So I haven't tested this yet but maybe even like with Kadence for example, set up all your things export and you've got a little child theme with all these extra settings for Kadence that are all set up. So pretty interesting. haven't tested this. The example they gave us with the 2022 theme, but interesting. So again, I've not tested this at all I just ran across the news story today. But it's an interesting little addition. And I would encourage you if you're you know if you're interesting, the block editor to dig into this and see how it works. Could be kinda cool. Alright, let's move into some other news. This is News. We couldn't find any place else to put it and we'll just start with WP drama, shall we? Alright, there's nothing like a little WP drama to jazz up the summer months. And you know, Matt Mullenweg got into a little bit of trouble on Twitter back in June, when he called GoDaddy and existential threat to the future. of WordPress. Now, those are strong words, it occurred really completely out of the subject line. It was in a Twitter thread that in which he was discussing with a page lead developer automatics news pack platform in the context of Amazon expanding its proprietary publishing technology so you know some proprietary company versus open source WordPress and within that he said look, if you're not going to donate back to WordPress development, just skip it. news organizations are already in trouble. This is not run for profit. GoDaddy is already an existential threat to WordPress future. That's interesting. I was a little drop and wow, it was like a bomb went off. Matt Mullenweg encouraged GoDaddy employees to examine how many people are contributing to WordPress and WooCommerce versus how much the company invests in proprietary products. He said that all the GoDaddy employees some great people, they are unfortunately overshadowed by massive corporate actions made many levels above them. Now the response was interesting Scott Kingsley Clark, for example, who is the founder of pods, which many of us use, he's also now a GoDaddy employee. Scott Kingsley Clark said those who care about the future of WordPress are actually Matt said, those who care about the future of WordPress should spend their dollars with less parasitic companies. That's Matt Mullenweg. Comment parasitic is a bit of a term isn't it? Scott Kingsley Clark said working for a company where I'm trying to do good and advocate for open source that is actively getting hostility from prominent people in WordPress, who I really respect and if supported with supported me in the past is really hard. Yeah. So a lot of people taking this personally Carl Hancock, who is the founder of gravity forums, speculates that perhaps this is really more likely to the GoDaddy is more likely a threat to automatic and wordpress.com and WooCommerce than just the WordPress open source project itself. There's an interesting quote there, particularly it's around the payment solutions, by the way.
WooCommerce is free. People think its primary revenue stream is premium extensions, and it's not it's it's the payments. It's the stripe affiliate link. It's the new WooCommerce payments. Were GoDaddy pardon me where we're automatic gets WooCommerce and therefore automatic, gets a percentage zero, like it's an affiliate sale on every single site that's running stripe, and that's a lot of money, if you can imagine. And GoDaddy has their own payment processing. So there's a little bit of potential conflict of interest there. You get to make up your own mind there. Oddly many in the WordPress community responded by defending GoDaddy which is interesting. Anytime WordPress community people seem to talk about GoDaddy online, it's always criticism about the performance of GoDaddy hosting or its sales practices or whatever. You know, it's this it's just really interesting how this is all shaken out. Bowling League later told the VP tavern people have contributed some really great work to the WordPress ecosystem over the years. While employed by GoDaddy, I wish the company great success and many happy returns. So think about that. Whatever you want to think about it. Later Go Daddy's Director of Public Relations pointed out that GoDaddy sponsors 34 contributors that total of 217 hours per week given to the project. They also plan to spend hundreds of 1000s of dollars on word camps and other WordPress related events. They said we all have the same goal to make WordPress better each and every day. By the way, if you want the actual numbers, if you compare GoDaddy as contributions to WordPress with other hosting companies, there is a bit of a disparity GoDaddy with 9000 employees gives 217 hours a week Bluehost with far fewer gives almost half that and you can see the rest of the numbers there. So you know this is what Matt is talking about. Mullenweg said failed open source projects usually succumb to the free rider trap. The parasites kill the host which ultimately hurts the parasites as well, but they can't think beyond the short term. successful open source projects escape the free rider problem. As far as work like WordPress has so far largely because awareness of the free rider trap and people voting where to invest their talent and their dollars in organizations that contribute to the shared resource in a way that keeps us sustainable. So interesting. There's some something to be said on both sides. You can make up your own mind what you think. But there's your dial up drama for the last month. It was quite a bit out there. Paul's got a great question in the chat that you all should think about. Okay. Ah, a little bit of a lighter bit of other news, hey, the new WordPress appeared in The New York Times a crossword puzzle. It's working itself into popular culture. Eight down is a popular blogging platform, which bothers me a little bit. WordPress has been a lot more than a blogging platform for a long time. But, you know, whatever it was the New York Times crossword, that's great. Another bit of other news is that Domino's has finally settled that accessibility case it started a while back. It's six years ago, their website and mobile app were in are not accessible. When the suit was filed. On June the sixth Domino's settled for an undisclosed amount and other additional settlement details that were not made public question here's what it had been less expensive and less damaging to the reputation to simply commit to better accessibility from the outset. Instead of fighting through the courts. If you missed our WordPress accessibility bootcamp last month with Amber Hines of equalized digital, highly recommend that you go back and rewatch that if you're a member of iThemes Training. When I think toolkit Member It was a great four hours of training, and I learned a lot with accessibility just through that four hours. Super, super helpful. Yeah, so the typical lawyer speak at the end of parties have amicably resolved this matter. Domino's has confirmed its commitment to the WIC ag to dot O A and double A by utilizing policies set forth in their accessibility policy. There's the lawyer for a few more acquisitions have occurred over the last month that he charitable, which is a donation platform was acquired by awesome motive, which is the company that's behind the beginner, as well as a lot of other WordPress plugins, like All In One SEO and others. RAID boxes, which is a hosting platform was acquired by Team Blue which is a European marketing entity. The IP conference scheduler, which was it's really it's really a nice if you're doing a conference by the way dopey conference scheduler is a great little plugin that does like the conference schedule. Originally by equalised digital when they were previously serving a broader market before they started specializing in SEL they've sold that plugin off to the events calendar and stellar. Gonna be interesting to see what the events calendar does with that beautiful plugin. It works great right out of the box. Cool stuff. You're interested in WordPress acquisitions,
the CEO of Stradic talks about their acquisition by Elementor in this master WP podcast, interesting stuff there. Take a look at that. Few more things that were worth a look. These were just some articles that I would recommend that you read if you have little time, bookmark these and come back to them later. A very thoughtful article by Matt Cromwell. He's the founder of gift WP on the disparities between the WordPress community and core product direction. This is an interesting read folks. He says there seems to be a disparity between what the WordPress core leadership is building and what we as a community want WordPress to be and I forgot to capitalize the P that was not on that. That's me. That should be a capital P sorry about that. Anyway, Matt tweeted some features I'd love to see in WP core user role editing and user switching. Yeah. custom post type creation with FIELDS Yeah. Centralized email notifications. Yes. Global Settings for common API's like maps, Facebook, Stripe and PayPal. Yes. All that makes sense. But we're, you know, it seems like we're focused on building some other things. It's a great article basically talks about the need for a public feedback channel on the direction of WordPress. The need for transparency and leadership and the elephant in the room, which is wordpress.com, which is where a lot of these features seem to be pointing towards, rather than some of the direction that the rest of the community wants. It's an interesting article, highly recommend that you read it. So another bit This is an interesting little post here in the make WordPress blog by one of the leads on the plugin team mica Epstein mica is a terrific human being. Basically there's people you all there's people who are reviewing their own plugin and or creating Sockpuppet accounts which is just fake accounts. Or they are incentivizing you know, good reviews. Don't we just realize that's not right. But make a head write a whole post on this because people are doing that quite a bit. And you know, whatever. Another interesting article wordpress.org urges theme articles to switch to locally hosted Google fonts. So you may have seen the recent ruling out of Germany, where companies are being fined significantly because they are using Google Fonts, which has privacy concerns. user data is passed back to Google when Google Fonts are being used, even if it's just the IP address that is still personally identifiable information. So the question here is should you host your fonts locally, even if your theme doesn't? And the answer to that question is yes, yes, yes. By the way, if you're a Kadence user, all you have to do is go into your general settings under performance and toggle the local fonts on. You don't have to worry about any of this. Your Google fonts will be hosted, hosted locally. It's faster and it removes all privacy concerns. But great are a read they're on the up tavern about this local font issue. If you're on the fence about the block editor, you can learn how reasonable blokes can change the way you create WordPress sites. I love WP. Do we need a WordPress like this is a really interesting discussion. There's both an article and a podcast from post status about what would it be like to have a lite version of WordPress that would allow for some basic customization but was fast to deploy? And they asked the question in the podcast, what would it be like if you could, for example, deploy an E commerce site in just a few minutes from a mobile device? Like all the stuff is there just to make it work? Boom, there it is. So interesting. Little article there on post status. All right, let's start to wrap up with some news about word camps. We have a few word camps coming up that word camp Jinja and Uganda is coming up I hope I pronounced that correctly. September 2 and third word camp us September 9 through 11th. I will be there at WordCamp us who also is going to work camp us Let me hear from you in the chat. I think this team will be there. WordCamp us is coming September 9 through 11 in San Diego. Chris will be there Beth will be there. Yeah, so if you are there make sure you look me up. Also word camp Netherlands is September 14 through the 16th. That does it for this month WordPress news roundup is in the books for July 2022. If you came in late, I'm gonna post one more time. The slides for you. We'll have the replay up here in about an hour. We are back tomorrow with that Kadence webinar talking about the Kadence cloud and some very clever things people have done to monetize the Kadence cloud might give you some good ideas there yourself. And of course, Thursday I'm back with office hours until then have a great rest of the day. See you back here tomorrow on I think training where we go further together.