you're all here. We're about four minutes away from getting started. I'm finishing up the last little bit for the transcripts All right transcript should now be working correctly for everybody.
Glad you're all here. If you haven't had a chance
to look at it yet, check out the new solid Academy site at Academy dot solid wp.com. We'll be talking about that. A little bit during our live stream today.
Maybe just a few things to show you there.
So let me hear from you in the chat. How many of you have had some time to take a look around the new solid Academy site? I play around and find some things like actually find some things now. Since the search is so much better.
Yeah, take the time to do it. Now if you'd like we are now just about three minutes away. Slide link is there in the chat along with other things.
Glad you're all with us. So
many things to talk about today. In this news roundup. There are like 127 slides. So there's a couple of things to look at today.
Many, many, many things. All right. So
about three minutes to go. Yes, Stacy. That's awesome. That's exactly what we wanted to hear. That's what we were after in this redesign. There may be some things are a little different, but everything should be at least slightly better than it was on the old ancient I iThemes Training site.
Alright folks, welcome
if you're just joining us in zoom, open up the chat and say hello. We're about two minutes away from getting store started. Vern the YouTube move, I don't know. That is likely going to happen for all of our free and open events that will generally be plugging around up news, round up other free events that we have all of the solid Academy premium events like office hours, the courses, those will continue to be in zoom. So that yeah, we have we need to leverage the broader platform that YouTube offers and YouTube honors content that is live stream to its platform over than just say uploading a video later after the fact. But the office hours and premium courses will continue to be here on Zoom. So far as I know, that's the plan anyway, just about a minute to go before we get started. Welcome Welcome everybody. If you're just joining us in zoom, open up the chat and say hello, I'm going to drop in the slide link once again. You can download all the slides for today. The replay link is there. Links to check out the new solid Academy site and the new solid WP site as well. If you haven't done that yet, check it out. Lots of neat things have been published on those two sites here in the last week. So we're just about a week and a day ago is when we went live with solid WP. We'll be talking about that. As you can imagine. During that segment of the news roundup today.
Welcome everybody. Glad you are here. Good to see folks checking in there in the chat.
Just about just about ready to get started here.
If you are just now joining us the link bundle is there in the chat for you to download the slides. particularly helpful here in office hours, office hours, goodness, particularly helpful here during the news roundup because we give you all the links in the footer, in case you want to read the whole story.
A Sadie
last been let's see Beth, John Stacy Paul, Vern.
Yeah, welcome everybody, Ken. All right.
Yeah, good to see everybody. All right. It is now three minutes after I'm going to start the recording officially and we
will get started.
Well, Happy Wednesday everybody. Welcome to solid Academy and our monthly WordPress news roundup. glad you've joined us here for the next hour or so as we take a look across the landscape. Of the WordPress world and bring you the news we think matters to people like us who build and manage WordPress sites for clients. If you're just now joining us in the chat welcome. If you haven't joined us in the chat yet pop up in the chat there in zoom say hello. Tell us we're logging in from the link bundle is there if you'd like to follow along with the slides. If you're watching this on the replay just below the video, you'll see the little area to download the slides and you can get everything that you see on the screen. particularly helpful a news roundup because we always put the reference links down in the footer for each news story. So it's always good you know, there's usually a few of these that probably you want to take a look at. So we're gonna get started as we usually do with news from core probably as you are aware WordPress six dot 3.2 dropped last Thursday. This was a short cycle security and maintenance release. Like these little incremental updates tend to be your WordPress site should have automatically updated to this minor release. There were 19 bug fixes and core 22 bug fixes in the block editor and eight security patches over all the full details are available in the RC one that's the release candidate one announcement that's in the footer link. So not a lot to see here. Just a quick bug fix should have just updated your site's Why did they use the term dropped? That's a great question. They drop it out for it to update on your site. Great question. I'm not ever considered the etymology of that phrase. But
there you go.
All right. Another big piece of news as we are on the road for WordPress 6.4 coming in November the seventh they one of the things that I was most excited about in WordPress 6.4 has been pushed to WordPress 6.5. And that is the font library. So we talked about this last time during news roundup, the font library you can think of it like the media library but for fonts So an easy way for you to upload and manage and keep track of fonts that are being used on your site, whether you upload those individually manually or you tap into Google fonts and have those fonts pulled in and loaded locally from your WordPress site. This feature is still coming, but it just wouldn't be quite ready for the November release in WordPress six dot for the maintainers of core found some major gaps in the WordPress fonts API's that just can't be fixed in time in order for the six top four release the need a little more work so that they feel intuitive and that's fine. It's just kind of push to the next release. Changing the release date for WordPress six four was considered but they didn't want to change the release schedule. The WordPress team has been really good about sticking to the schedules because a lot of companies in the WordPress space rely on that schedule in order to do their testing and updates for their own themes and plugins. So moving the release date is really not something you're gonna see them doing unless it's absolutely necessary. So it's a disappointment. I really liked the idea of font library, but the delay is certainly going to make it better when it actually does drop.
So
something else that just happened as far as WordPress 6.4 attachment pages for new WordPress installations are going to be disabled by default. Now you may be aware that WordPress by default creates attachment pages for every media item that's uploaded and you may have seen these there really been content pages, maybe a thumbnail of the image or just some they're really not used by folks anymore. And I disable those by default in my base site. So these are now going to be disabled by default in WordPress 6.4 and forward now, this will not change any existing sites. So it only is going to apply for installations like fresh installations of WordPress 6.4 And going forward so it's not going to automatically turn off attachment pages. If you're using those you don't have to worry if you're doing something that's currently disabling attachment pages, that thing will need to stay in place because this is only going to apply to new installations of WordPress 6.4 and following. So there's a if you want to get into the code there's this new constant WP attachment pages. That's how all this works. So you can read all the geeky details there on the make that WordPress blog post and this is something actually that Yoast has pushed out and Yoast personally, like the actual Yoast has been involved with and was instrumental in bringing that to core. I think it's a good idea. All right, something else in 6.4 are some changes in the way WordPress is going to handle JavaScript. So the WordPress performance team continued to do continues to do their work and they are changing some of the strategies by which WordPress loads JavaScript. So deferring or asynchronously loading scripts is going to be now part of core to help improve performance and load times. So it's going to move scripts from the header to the footer, and it's going to allow folks to it's gonna do a lot of things more automatically that used to have to be done manually. This is a good thing all the way around. So if you, for example, are dealing with old if you've hacked like manually hack some scripts to make them load differently, this could affect you. Probably that's not anybody here we're not talking about using plugins that automatically differ scripts and that sort of thing. We're talking about maybe you've you know, you or some developer you hired have gone in and actually hacked the script to make it load a different spot or hack the PHP to make it low differently. This new default behavior could possibly break that but I'm gonna guess probably not many folks here are in that camp. So yeah, this is good, the more we can do to improve the performance of core WordPress, the better. So all these things are heading out in WordPress. 6.4 release candidate. Let's see release candidate one for WordPress six, four dropped yesterday. And so we're right here waiting on two and three to drop the dry run November 7, six with the launch on November the seventh and we're on track for that that should actually happen. All right, this was a little bit of hubbub WordPress drama that occurred because earlier this month, the WordPress playground team added a live preview button on plugins in the WordPress plugin directory now, WordPress plugin you may or may not be aware it's a really cool in browser instance of WordPress that can be spun up almost immediately and allow you to test WordPress testings and plugins do really cool stuff right there in the browser. And it's a it's a, you know, you close your browser tab unless you've changed some settings. It's just gonna go away. So it's a really great spin up sandbox playground. So it's a cool tool. I really like it. But the playground team kind of jumped the gun on this. So what you ended up having was a button added right here on each individual plugin. Now the problem was, a lot of folks liked this because you could click Live Preview and it would spin up playground in your browser with that plugin installed. Right, what could possibly be the problem? Some plugins do not work in the playground. environment. They work perfectly fine in real WordPress. But there are some things about playground that caused some plugins not to operate correctly. And so really, with no warning, the playground team added this live preview button and a lot of plugins stopped didn't work there. And so plugging off it was like hey, wait a minute, you know, people are gonna not use our plugin because they think it's broken or doesn't work. So there was really no communication about this. It was a whole big thing you know, WordPress drama happens from time to time. There's even a hashtag WP drama that you can search for on Twitter X or whatever they're calling it today. So anyway, it was added prematurely, not enough testing, it's been removed until they can sort out all the things ultimately, I think it's gonna be a good feature, because I like the idea of being able to click a button and spin up a plugin test. That's pretty darn cool. That's going to be kind of helpful. To us in a webinars that live streams like plugin Roundup. I kind of liked that. But it needs to be tested first, and that didn't happen in this case. All right, let's turn the page to some news from everybody's favorite project. And that is Gutenberg Gutenberg 67 dropped on September the 27th. It adds lots of enhancements and bug fixes. This is the last Gutenberg release before the merge into core. So WordPress, six 6.4 will contain everything up to this release Gutenberg 16.7 331 Pull Requests for add contributors and seven new contributors so folks continue to contribute to Gutenberg that's always cool. If you want to test out that really neat font management feature with the font library, you can do so with Gutenberg 16.7 just it's a beta plugin. The Gutenberg plugin is beta. So I wouldn't put this on a live site, but you can spin up for example, a WordPress playground site and install the Gutenberg plug in and play with this new font library feature that is coming. Now again, it's still in development. It might change a little bit but it's really kind of cool. So fonts are going to be installed in wp content slash fonts, which makes sense. I just like the media library. Fonts can be added manually by actually uploading those files. Or you can choose from the Google Fonts list and it will pull the fonts from Google and load them locally. So you don't have any of those privacy issues that are inherent with serving Google fonts from the Google servers. So here's kind of what it's going to look like. When you you see your typography and fonts you'll be able to click on a button there and the modal will pop up where you can install fonts or allow access to Google fonts. So it's a very WordPress the looking interface kind of like it it's gonna be a good addition to WordPress altogether. I think
something else that's really neat that happened in Gutenberg 16 Seven was the ability to import and export patterns. So you can create a pattern and then export it as a JSON file, which is basically a like a text file with lots of lots of notation in there that's readable by another instance of WordPress. So here's what that looks like. You can click and export as a JSON. Pretty neat. There's also a new my patterns category that has been reinstated. It was taken out in a previous version of Gutenberg put back in because people liked it. And here's kind of what that looks like. As you're here in the pattern library. You now have my patterns where you can categorize things that you really like, where it's kind of like a favorites for your patterns, which is neat. There's also some new pattern filtering functionality that's been added. The filters have been refactored a little bit. They're now in a drop down at the top and there's a sticky header for navigation in the patterns view kind of looks like this, and it makes it easier to find. They've also pushed forward with something Kadence has supported for some time now. And that is the ability to name blocks natively in the block editor or group blocks anyway, in the block editor. So this is a very important feature because if you've ever looked at your page, especially a long complicated page, in the block editor here in the list view, it is like it's easy to get lost if what's what so you can now actually rename those group blocks right there in the block editor itself. That's pretty cool. A few other things that were added they've now updated the Twitter icon to an X icon, which we're having to do on some sites too, and you probably are too and oh my gosh, I mean, pleased with the icon. Updates. They've also added the ability to toggle a nofollow setting for your inline links in the rich text block. And then adding aspect ratio to an image placeholder which is small but interesting. Alright, Gutenberg 16 Eight dropped one week ago today. Very minor release bug fixes mostly. It's really laying some groundwork for the future of phase three of Project Gutenberg. There's some real there's a really neat thing that was added to the cover block though. The cover block is really cool. If you've never played with it. It's kind of neat to set some things up but they're they've added some magic code that if you have a background image in the cover block, which is kind of the point it will suggest automatically a color for the color block overlay to be so it goes in with magic and looks at the image colors and decides this would be a good color to overlay on that image. So here's how this actually works. So here's that cover block. Let's grab that image. And look it picked that color. Magically neat. Let's look at a different image. Here's another one. Look at that. Look at that one. That works.
Yep, maybe one more.
Yeah, look at that one. See it just the code magic picks a with some, I don't know. Magic, decides what color it makes sense. It's kind of cool. So the idea here is again to put it over the top of the image so that the text that you put on top actually does stand out without really affecting the the image itself so it's a pretty good addition. Alright, something else they've done here is they have added a show template toggle as your editing pages. So a new toggle is available for templates when you're editing pages. That lets you easily switch back and forth between I'm editing a page, or I'm editing the template that's been applied to this page. I and that's going to be really helpful. So as you're switching back and forth in the site editor, here's what it looks like. There's my page and I'm looking at it and oh look, there's my template toggle. So I can edit the template and preview the template or I can go back to editing the page. That kind of makes sense. It's a good UI, I think.
Yeah, I like that.
In the in 16.8 of Gutenberg, they've also added the Upload tab to the font library. So they're continuing to improve that. They've also made error messages work a little better. So here's what that looks like. You want to see the font library in action. There it goes. Look at that. There's some Google fonts we can upload our font right there from local and it does all the format's you'd expect OTF, TTF, WOFF and WOFF to and it's there and now you can grab it, boom, now it's used on the site. It's really kind of cool. It just kind of makes sense. And this is something honestly core WordPress. Probably should have supported a long time ago. Lots of plugins have done it but yeah, now it's part of core. So a few experiments have been added to Gutenberg 16 Eight to lay that groundwork like I mentioned earlier for phase three of Project Gutenberg. They have added the first shot at the All Pages List in the site editor. So again, the site editor, y'all ultimately is going to be taking over the admin area. It's going to the UI is going to be everywhere. And so the All Pages List is going to be here in the site editors here. Here's how it works. So we go to pages are this is their first shot at it, manage all pages. And there's a really nice list there of all the pages that I have, you know how many, you can set the rows per page here. There's pagination if you want that you can search with an AJAX filter there you can view in different ways. Yeah, it looks good. It's a really nice UI, I think. Yeah, they're doing some really good work there. Few other improvements, no follow settings to the to the button block. And just a lot of other things under the hood, small changes to the block editor. Alright, let's start talking about some WordPress security because a lot or just security in general here at first really, a lot has happened this month that you need to be aware of perhaps you saw this report on various places on social media. This is in the category of the sky is falling seriously, because there is a flaw in the HTTP two protocol. Now that is the protocol that's used by most websites and browsers to access websites and servers across the internet. And there is a fundamental flaw in HTTP two, that makes practically every website now vulnerable to denial of service attacks. Cloudflare said that they blocked an attack that was using this vulnerability that was 300% larger than any DDoS attack previously on record. This is a big deal. So using this recently discovered request limit vulnerability, even small botnets can launch unprecedented level of attacks. So it's a very low bar of entry to start attacking sites using this vulnerability. Another reason to use Cloudflare folks because Cloudflare clients are currently protected and patches are coming from other server companies. I'm not sure if cPanel is patched it yet, but this is something you'll want to talk to your host about. Worst case scenario if you're getting killed, downgrade to HTTP one is a temporary fix you want to read more about this Cloudflare and Google both have really great docs about it is not good. Not good at all. All right, pivoting to some WordPress security issues this month, or actual since the last news roundup more exactly. We found 145 plugin vulnerabilities 116 are either actively still vulnerable or the plugin has been closed. No theme vulnerabilities this time, so that's pretty good. As always, you can continue to use solid security Pro to keep your site safe with our site scan version management and the patch stack firewall. The patch stack firewall is live and working with all versions of solid security pro if you are one of the new solid security Pro users, so the twice daily vulnerability scan and the auto update if the fix exists, works really well. We're going to talk about a vulnerability in the WooCommerce stripe plugin and the minute that I think that solid security just updated for us we didn't have to touch it. Also if you have access to the new virtual patching by patch stack, then even if the vulnerability hasn't been fixed, the patch stack layer sits above your website and virtually patches, those vulnerabilities for you at bringing your site risk down to almost zero. Pretty cool.
So let's talk about that. WooCommerce
vulnerability WooCommerce emailed its customers today about an issue with the stripe plugin. Perhaps you got that email. This is a vulnerability that would allow a bad actor to potentially change the stripe API keys that are associated with their store. There are known no known exploits of this vulnerability as of today. However, this is something that now it's been disclosed it's likely some hackers might try to take advantage of it was reported internally through automatics hacker one security program WooCommerce developers immediately dropped an update, but the version that you're looking for is the it's the WooCommerce WooCommerce proper, not the WooCommerce plugin but the WooCommerce stripe plug in 7.6 dot one is the safe version. Just make sure that all your sites are updated again, you're using solid security Pro and you've got the version management feature turned on that says update if patch exists. You're good. I mean you go in and verify that all of our sites as I looked at it today are running 761 And we didn't lift a finger so you gotta love solid security Pro. Just make sure all of your sites are updated if you are using WooCommerce stripe because it's bad news if they can change your stripe API keys, not something you want to have happen. Another big vulnerability this month in the WordPress world was the tag div vulnerability 1000s of WordPress sites have been hacked now tag div in the DAG tagdiv Composer is a mandatory plugin requirement for two popular theme for us themes, the newspaper theme and the news mag theme. Combined they have a total installed base of 150 1000s a lot of sites out there that we know that at least 17,000 WordPress sites have been hacked because of this vulnerability. It's a cross site scripting attack that could inject redirects to spam scam sites. Bad bad news. So if you are using one of these themes, or supporting a site that is newspaper and news mag, you'll definitely want to take a look and make sure that site is clean. And that tagdiv has been updated. One more little bit on WordPress news two factor authentication is now available on wordpress.org. You can now use two FA to secure your wordpress.org login. I would 100% recommend that you go in and do that. It just took me a minute or two it was very simple. You can use your preferred authenticator a cap, your authenticator app or a physical security key like a YubiKey you can add to FA to your wordpress.org account by clicking on the link in your profile under security right there. It's not as obvious as you think it should be like, I don't know. Click that link. And you'll go in and you'll see the two factor option it's kind of weird, but there it is. The standard two FA setup. These are the QR code like you'd expect you get the 10 backup codes. It's just like you would expect it the the interface is still officially in beta but it does work well. And there's no word if or when passkey is you're going to be supported on wordpress.org since it took them this long to add to FA who knows right all right let's turn to some news from solid WP a few things have happened at solid WP over the last month Perhaps you've seen that now. I themes has officially become solid WP I'm really excited about this. The name just makes sense. I iThemes has not really had its own theme now for many years. And the change of the name to solid WP is all about reinforcing our commitment to develop plugins that provide a solid foundation for all of your WordPress site. So the basic things you want to have on every site like great security, great backups a site management tool and Hint Hint Hint, more plugins to come. So that all this happened that the page turned on October the 10th. That was last Tuesday. We had this long rebrand and process in public process for both the solid WP site and the Academy site. And everything went live last Tuesday 1010 at 10am Central time that was pretty cool. So let me just reiterate if you have said this 100 times through this process, but I shall say it again because it needs to be repeated because many WordPress companies have done a name change or an acquisition or whatever. And they stopped honoring lifetime deals and existing deals. That is not going to happen here. So if you have a current plan that you like, if you have a lifetime deal for any of our plugins, you can keep your current plan period with no changes. Solid WP from the very beginning has been very clear that will honor all existing deals and licenses that you may currently have from iframes. If you like your current plan, you can keep it it's there in yellow, so it stands out. It will continue to remind folks of this because unfortunately, this is not always the way that some companies have handled a transition like this. All right, so let's take a look at some of the changes in our plugins. I think security is now officially solid security. Maybe you've made that update on some of your sites already. It has a much improved user interface from going from iThemes Security to solid security, several new features. One change you'll probably notice immediately is the security admin menu now has sub menu items that make it so much easier to navigate instead of the kind of the internal links I had was the best. This UI is really nice. There's a new security dashboard that gives you current bands and lockouts and recent threats all those things right there. at your fingertips. Patch stack is now integrated into solid security pro with virtual patching for vulnerable software. virtual patching basically means there's a layer that sits right above your website and if some of the code is vulnerable if people try to come through that layer to affect that vulnerable code. It's as though that vulnerable code has already been patched. So pack a patch deck handles that at their security layer. It's pretty darn cool. So take a look at the new UI. The new dashboard is beautiful. There's a look at the firewall really cool. So users of the free solid security plugin still get patched at vulnerability scans as part of the free version. But if you want the automatic updates that come if a vulnerable theme or plugin has been found, you'll need the pro version. And if you want patch stack, you'll need the pro version. Stacy has a great question in the chat is packstack a paid option on all new plans have solid security it's included. Now if you're have one of the old legacy plans, it just wasn't possible at the current amount you're paying to add patch stack to those so you'll have the option to add just patch stack if you'd like and that's something we'll be talking about in the town hall. Coming up in a couple of weeks. So if you'd like that you can talk to just email sales at solidarity p.com. They'll give you information about that now or Matt Cromwell will be with me in a couple of weeks. We'll be talking through all those upgrade options in the town hall. All right. Let's see. Oh, there's a really neat if you've not seen this yet. This is a great reason just to go take a look at solid, the new solid security site scan panel, because in that panel, they've done a really good job at changing around the wording to be less jargony and more plain, simple, actionable sentences, as we'll take a look at that they've done some really good work there. All right, Backup Buddy has now become solid backups. A good amount of code refactoring has happened with more to come. A total design overhaul to match all of our new branding. It's really a nice, much better experience inside the solid backup plugin. One of the main things that's happened is that solid backups now uses the WordPress action scheduler. So some of the issues that Backup Buddy you've had over the years especially on poor quality hosting related to the work through the cron, the WordPress cron and issues there. Now it's using the WordPress action schedule, which is just a little more reliable. So that should help to reduce crime related issues and help with server load. So that's pretty good. They've also dealt with some of the remote destination code. And so the the reliability of destination delivery to Dropbox, Google Drive s3, all that's been improved. I take a look at the new restore process as well by the developer. Pretty cool. It's a much simplified restore process. So there's a quick little peek at how things look, especially it looks better on mobile. I mean, honestly, I don't do a lot in the backup plugin on mobile, but if you need to, it looks a lot better. Yeah. So I think Central is now becomes I think Sync has now become solid Central. So it's true, like development on I think Sync has slowed recently and but that's all changing when it comes to solid Central. Pardon me,
the first round of development on solid Central is focused on a design, refresh, and ease of use on mobile devices. There were some quirks when you tried to pull up, I think sync on your phone. The reporting feature has also been redesigned and brand new layouts really nice. There's additional integration with solid security and solid backups with a lot more integration on the way. Watch for that it's going to be really good. bulk update actions have also been improved to really help save you some time. There's a quick little peek at that. I would encourage you just to go take a look at the new version.
It's pretty nice.
I'm really excited that I think training has now become solid Academy. We have the same great content to equip WordPress solopreneurs. agency owners and anybody working with clients using WordPress will continue to do two to three live streams every single week. The website for solid Academy is much improved. My goodness, the old iThemes Training site was
it was bad, right? It was just
bad. So more than 10 years of training content is now more easily at your fingertips. Members have access to premium events and favorites. The solid Academy premium is included in the solid suite. So if you would like to have an Academy membership to get access to all the premium training any level of the solid suite includes solid Academy premium in that cost. If you have access to the with the old iThemes Training with any old toolkit plan, you have legacy toolkit or legacy training membership. It's continues to be available because if you like your plan, you can keep it so there's our new solid Academy site I see some questions in the chat about the difference between solid wp.com/academy and solid Academy. Let's just take a quick look there because that is a question that I just I figured that was going to happen so these are two separate websites right? Solid wp.com is a website and the subdomain Academy dot solid wp.com is a separate website right these are two separate websites. Ours is on a subdomain this here if you go to academy. This is you can think of it as an informational e sales page situation for solid Academy. Now if you go any of these buttons, they're going to take you to the actual Academy site so you can link right over. But the best thing you can do is just bookmark Academy dot solid wp.com much like it was before with training that I ithemes.com So it's just like it was before, just a little bit new of a name. So let's just take a quick peek here because we've done a lot of work. My agency actually built the site. We've done a lot of work to make our live streams and all the data in the 1200 or so live streams we had in the archive much more accessible. So we have a super cool live search field. So if you're looking for plug in roundups,
it immediately
returns results and you might see some other things popping up in here and that's because we've actually also made the transcript of live streams that have happened in the last year also searchable. So if you're looking for that the plug in and we talked about it in some live stream somewhere, if it was in the transcript, it will be searchable as well. So that's pretty darn cool. You can also it's live filtering so you can select categories here let's say we want to look at news roundups. There they are. If we want to look at things in a date range we can do that or by a particular presenter. We can do that. And notice how that just worked where if these are, pardon me, these are again live filters. So if it's office hours, I'm the only presenter. So all these things update live so it's a much easier way for you to find things that you're looking for. Also we have a This isn't live events, so we can't add that to the calendar if we look at upcoming live streams. Live Stream Library is where the archives are. It's the library. upcoming live streams are things that are yet to come. So here's our WordPress security roundup that's coming up. You can easily add this to your calendar here as well. If you are logged in you have the ability to add to favorites. So all that's pretty cool. Also, if you're not logged in, you have the ability to ask your office hours questions here under your user icon. And the other thing I'll mention is here in the grid view there's also a calendar view which lets you take a look at everything the way it here on an actual calendar. And you can even subscribe to the calendar as a whole. This is what I'd recommend. Just subscribe to the calendar and as events are added they'll be dropped right into your calendar as well. So a lot of cool stuff here on the new solid Academy site. We're pretty proud of, of how that's turned out. All right, so upcoming premium events. Office hours, of course continues every Thursday, one to two o'clock central time. That's my typo. i This month's premium event is the WordPress AI workshop which I'm super excited about. I've been doing a lot of prep for that over the last week and I have got so many cool things to show you all when it comes to using AI and WordPress. And then our November event once again is creating your starter site for 2023. Our upcoming solid Academy live events these are free events on WordPress security roundup coming up on Halloween, October 31. We'll take a look at all the scary things going on inside of WordPress security right now with Tom Wraith from we watch your website. Really good response to all the times Tom has been on with us and we're looking forward to making this a regular feature here on solid Academy. I do also want to invite everybody that we just added this this morning, there will be a solid WP Town Hall on November the first now by the way, you may have previously signed up for the security Roundup, which was on November 1, we had to shuffle these things around because townhall needed to be on November the first for several reasons. And so I'll be joined by Matt Cromwell, and we'll be talking about all the changes that are happening at solid WP answer any questions that you have in that as it's been our commitment to being very public about this transition from I iThemes to solid WP, you'll have your chance again to ask any questions that you would like plug in Roundup, November 7, and of course the news roundup coming up on November the 21st. Few other things in the solid family I want to mention, if you're a Kadence user there's a new feature in Kadence blocks. The advanced form block has now conditional fields, which are super cool. Our form lays out with a series of blocks this way you can use row layouts to build your form. It's really neat. And now you have conditionals as well. Kadence blocks is also now integrated Pexels library so you can search right from within the media library for Pexels images. It downloads not ginormous images. But appropriately sized images and brings in all the important details like alt text right there from Pexels. They've also added and this is kind of cool. There's a new progress bar there's been a progress bar in Kadence spots for a little while. They have now added the shape masks, which I mean Okay, I gotta admit the built in ones are a little cheesy, like you can have a cat progress bar. I don't think I'd ever use that. But the neat thing is the ability to add custom progress bars here so if thing if things are in stages or whatever, you can track that with the progress bar and you can have branded icons like up use your client logo as part of the progress bar. It's pretty neat a lot a lot of options there. You can set as many iterations as you want even add animations.
So yeah. Five stars just like that. And the neat.
All right, let's talk about some news from the plugin world shall we? wordpress.com plugin pages have now added a download link. Now why are we talking about wordpress.com here? Because in yet another episode of WP drama in the last couple of months, there was a backlash to wordpress.com plugin listings when they were out ranking wordpress.org plugin listings. And it was an issue because developers have those plugins listed on wordpress.org. When you see those on wordpress.com, there was a prompt to upgrade to the wordpress.com tier that allows the adding of plugins. It became a kerfluffle. So developers were concerned that those upgrade messages would confuse users into thinking they had to pay to use their free plugin. It was just a mess. There's a lot of confusion between well with a lot of users but especially new users of WordPress, about what's the difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org And how does that all work? I mean, that's confusing. So in response to all of that wordpress.com has added a download link to each of the listings that they have for plugins. I mean, you can make up a decision what you think about this so they actually they removed the backlink to the wordpress.org plugin listing and they added this instead. This plugin is available for download on your WordPress self hosted installation.
I mean, I don't know. I'm not a fan, but that's what they did.
All right. Pods is now 15 years old pod celebrates its 15th birthday this month. The longtime favorite plugin of hear us here on iThemes Training slash solid Academy. It existed before custom post types were ever even part of WordPress. So pods is a great little plugin that lets you create custom post types custom taxonomies and do all sorts of clever things. But it has become user adoption has slipped over the years. For many years automatic had was funding pods with a grant but that funding pulled a few years back. There's still an active plugin relying on volunteer contributions and small donations through the pods foundation. But the future is uncertain. Not quite sure what's going to happen there. But sure do appreciate the original developer of pods. Scott Kingsley Clark because he's just a wonderful human being and has done really great work on this plugin over the years. We use it on a number of sites still to this day. All right. WooCommerce 8.2 has been released several new additions WooCommerce now requires PHP 7.4 We've been talking about that for a couple of months now. They lifted the old 5.6 requirement and now you have to have 7.4 which is really old still but they're bumping up that requirement level which is good. But the most important thing I am WooCommerce 8.2 is finally the introduction of something else we've been talking about for a while here. And that is HP O 's the high performance order storage. We'll talk about that again on a separate slide in just a minute. So the improvements in WooCommerce eight two are focused on speed and scaling. They also add a new product collection block for tailored product listing. So it kind of looks like that looks kind of nice. And this block that allows you to determine exactly what kinds of products you want to show right there in a core product blocks. That's kind of nice. But let's talk about the big news here with WooCommerce eight two and that is this high performance order storage. H POS. This is a much needed change to the WooCommerce database structure. This however, is something that you really need to pay attention to. If you have an existing WooCommerce site. Don't just flip the switch to H POS now. Basically what's going on here is WooCommerce has added some new tables to the WordPress database in which to put all of its orders. If you're familiar with WooCommerce at all at this point WooCommerce has just used the post meta post and post meta database tables. It's just something they've always done, and it would be a big deal to move that and so they've taken a long time to figure out the best way to do that. But the ultimate end of this is now we don't have to search through 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of post meta items. To get to our order entries. It just slows down the WordPress site slows down orders on the back end slows down checkouts. So with H POS WooCommerce has they're saying five times faster order creation, and one and a half times faster checkout. So that's pretty cool. So locating doing order searches on the back end can be up to 40 times faster. This is great because they're all in their own little database table so it's less stuff to search through. So H POS is going to be enabled by default on WooCommerce stores that were created after October the 10th when this update dropped so any new WooCommerce installations will be h POS by default. If you have an existing store, you do have to opt in. There's some settings to toggle, but you need to be careful because some plugins might not be compatible with H POS. This is probably one of those things you're going to want to let the dust settle for a while. Let plugin developers catch up. Although they've known about this for a while, it's probably going to you know it's going to be the plugins that are less widely used with less responsive developers small install base, people that don't really have, you know, any vested interest in pushing updates. So just be really careful about the plugins that you're using before you make this change. Now WooCommerce says incompatible extensions will be flagged in the WooCommerce dashboard. Not sure I'd rely on that but they have some flagging that's been developed I would more recommend making an audit of all your WooCommerce add ons. And by the way, any custom code you may be using to make sure that none of this is going to be affected by the database change. That's a lot. There's a lot more of a process there than we can talk about here. But just make sure you're paying careful attention before you just flip the switch and go into h POS ultimately a good thing, but it's gonna you know, we have to kind of get over that
hill. All right,
let's take a look at some news on AI. The first is a really weird story and Microsoft has lobotomize the Bing engine image generation API. So Microsoft, there's been some misuse. I mean, you knew this was going to happen, right? People are going to use these image creation tools for nefarious purposes. So Microsoft has tightened down some of the requirements of the engine generation prompts. So users over time they've learned how to exploit loopholes, and they've created some images that are, shall we say controversial. One of the ones future featured in this article was somebody generated an image of Mickey Mouse holding a gun piloting a plane headed for the World Trade Center. That's just off. But it being created the image, right, so as the being AI has been improved a bit to understand the context and block harmful prompts and so forth. It's just something this is one of those things that as AI progresses, people are going to figure out stupid things to do with it and AI developers are going to you know, it's going to be like this ongoing battle back and forth. It's just the nature of the beast, unfortunately. So we'll probably have more stories like this going forward. Google is working to remove barred chat transcripts from their search. So oh, the Google search index accidentally began to include barred conversations. So people's interaction with the bard AI got indexed in Google, the Google thing it was working, working to scrub those from the search engine results, but it will take some time. Avoid using the share chat feature that will keep conversations private if you're using Bard. And just as always, just be careful about using anything personal or sensitive information in an AI chat. Like who knows what's on the other side of that? Just be careful with that. Google Assistant is now being attached to Bard. This I find very interesting. So Google Assistant, you may be aware of something like Siri.
No, good.
It's Google's personal assistant. Right. So now we're going to attach that to Bard, to help the complete tasks so that it is now available. It can connect with Google services like Gmail to perform tasks. So you can have Bard do some things and it can use Gmail through assistant it's really kind of cool. It's designed for mobile, it aims to streamline all the integration with all the Google things. It's being gradually rolled out to folks, you might have access to it. So you know, if you're brave, give it a try. See what happens. What could possibly go wrong? Like maybe your requests are indexed in Google?
I would still try it though, because it sounds cool to me.
Something else in AI, open AI, the company behind chat GPT has now made a decision to venture into the realm of chip development. So currently, most AI are powered by NVIDIA graphic processing units. So they've taken graphics cards, essentially, and they've hardwired them to run AI because the way that GPUs process information and requests is different than and better than in an AI context, your CPU of your computer. So, GPUs have been used open AI is now looking to start to develop their own chips, which just kind of makes sense. Like Apple did. You know their software is optimized for their chips, and things just work better and smoother. So that was kind of bound to happen. Experts are raising ethical considerations around data privacy since the whole ecosystem would now be controlled by open AI. And this is going to be an ongoing conversation of how do we integrate ethics and advancements in the technology and AI and all the good things but also possibly all the bad things. This is going to be an ongoing discussion for years to come. So
we'll see what happens here.
Stack over StackOverflow layoffs this month may be the first AI casualties. So Stack Overflow is is laying off roughly a third of its workforce. Some believe that the layoffs are a result of requests being made to chat bots like chat GPT rather than visiting sites like Stack Overflow, and as a result, their traffic has tanked. Look at that drop in traffic or stack overflow. So less traffic means less ad revenue which means less money to pay employees. Yeah, I'm afraid that's going to be one of the byproducts we're gonna see they eyes adoption. Want to see how that works out a few more bits of AI news. If you want to take a look at GPT four with the vision. You take a look at that really neat article by on Search Engine Journal. Google has now launched a free and paid generative AI training course you can actually get a Google certification with this, the free level and a paid level pretty neat. Wix now has an AI studio that builds websites with AI completely so this is when I take a look at folks. You can now build your site, right there in Wix using an AI with some prompts.
It's coming.
All right, pivot into some other news as we start to wrap things up today. Google has officially stopped its indented results. So this has been confirmed by Google Search liaison Danny Sullivan. Google has stopped indenting duplicate site results. So results that hit the same query from the same site. You may recognize these like this, like it's just it's nested underneath the previous one. Now, that is no longer going to be the case. It's been rolling out it's going to continue to roll out it's unclear how that's going to affect click through rates. If at all but you can start to you will likely start noticing that these indented results are no longer they're not earth shattering but it's a change that is coming. This is a great article on WP tavern that unpacks why NASA chose WordPress for revamping nasa.gov So NASA has recently launched the revamped nasa.gov It took 18 months of development. NASA took a really hard look as you can imagine, at several different CMS options and chose WordPress because of all the resources that are in the WordPress community. The flexibility of the block editor was a major decision. There were over 400 editor contributor users that are actively involved in content creation. So the question is, how in the world you keep that many writers you know keeping their content looking uniform across a website. Well that was a problem that could be solved by WordPress. They created 55 different custom Gutenberg blocks and it really an interesting process. So NASA does plan to open source some of those blocks. And it's just another example of the power of WordPress, even in complex enterprise situations. Anybody that talks about WordPress isn't scalable. WordPress isn't secure. You say NASA chose them. Yeah. In the discussion, a great article, a great video here. If you missed this. I think we talked about it last month or the month before. Great recap present of the presentation at WordCamp us 2023 by a couple of the folks from NASA. Really interesting
All right, the WP
awards for 2023 are out and may I humbly request that you take this poll, click the link here and scroll all the way down to number 23 Where I iThemes Training are now solid Academy is on the is a nominee for the best in WP learning and resources. So if you could take this, take this little loss survey, you can vote for all of your favorite things. I think security is also mentioned on the number nine and Triq invest in security. So take a minute and vote well yeah, we'd appreciate that. I would love to see the work we do here. The listed in the awards that would be pretty cool. Alright, another interesting article is how Tech Crunch spent a million dollars rebuilding their website. So what do you say? Does a million dollar website look like $300,000 for design and visuals and performance $200,000 on infrastructure, or traffic and speed half a million dollars for development and content migration. The block editor was selected to have more control over content. The whole thing was done in an agile approach with constant input from the TechCrunch team.
Believe it or not, the client wanted
scope creep during the project. So yeah, the scope increased, the budget increased. This is a really great listen so watch the interview. There below with the fellow from Google press Jamie, who does a great deep dive into what TechCrunch did pretty cool. All right, open verse wins the open infrastructure Awards, the open verse, which was previously the Creative Commons search, purchased by art or taken over by automatic a few years ago, has now won this 2023 open infrastructure award from Oh II global open vers currently indexes 700 million public domain and Creative Commons licensed works. They integrate API's from different museums and Wikimedia and Flickr and common crawl the goals for open verse include expansion into media types like video and DVD, DVD, my goodness, video and 3d with the ultimate goal of free access for the world to 2.5 billion works that are available in the public domain. That's pretty cool. If you're a Reddit user, they've now changed up a bit their reddit gold program where you can actually cash out for real dollars. They introduced this new contributor program where users can give others gold that are helpful contributors to the Reddit. hive mind, I guess you could say they're trying to incentivize quality content they can if you get gold, you can cash it out, basically. So folks are worried about this and it might change the culture and so forth. We'll see. All right. Couple of few more things. News that is worth a look is HTTP three. The future of the web great article there from delicious brains a really technical look at http three and how it works. Add that one it's pretty good. Tom Wraith on protecting your website. We were really enjoying having Tom rife with us on solid Academy here probably on a monthly basis for at least the next several months going forward. He's on the WP builds episode 342 talking about protecting your website. I like Tom and anything he says about security is worth a listen. Here's a great comparison between Shopify and WooCommerce. If you have clients that are looking at those you probably want to read this and be educated about the differences and the strengths and weaknesses of each. And finally planning for Black Friday. If you have a website that's going to be selling stuff on Black Friday, really good stuff there on the Kadence blog about making those plans. Few things in the WordPress community section. The WordPress 2023 Annual Survey is now available for you take five to 10 minutes to go through this. And your requests can help influence the future of WordPress. They really do consider these results. It's been tweaked again this year to better understand what's going on in the community. It does collect some demographics and usage data, but it's anonymized. So no emails or IPs are associated with your responses. It just talks about priorities and the roadmap and pain points you have with WordPress. This is your opportunity to make your voice heard in the direction of WordPress as we start looking at word camps for next year. WordPress community team has raised the cost to be a global sponsor. Now the way this works is to fund all the word camps that are around there is this thing called the Global sponsorship. So the global sponsorship a company can buy in at a particular level and then automatically be able to spa they are automatic sponsors of word camps globally. So the gold sponsor level is now 145,000 Silver 115 bronze 90,000 And this was just necessary because the cost of events has gone up my goodness post pandemic the cost for events has gone way up. And so this is a reflection of that. in person events in the WordPress community have rebounded 60% Compared to 2020 to 270 dormant meetups have been reactivated with over half a million members globally in WordPress. meetups. 60 or more word camps anticipated for 2023 which is three times as many has happened this year. So I'm looking forward to seeing word camps come back. There are no more US word camps this year but there are several global word camps. Word camp Germany is October 19th through the 21st and WordCamp. Spain in Slovenia, Spain is October same weekend actually. So if you're in the EU, you might want to take a look at one of those work camps. Sounds like a good time. Alright folks, that's going to finish it up for us today with this WordPress news roundup. I'll have the replay up in about an hour. I hopefully picked up a few things that are interesting to you. I'm going to one more time share the slide link there in the chat. So if you want to download the slides and get those links, the link is there waiting on you. All right, I'm back tomorrow for members and office hours here on the solid Academy where we go further together.