Welcome everybody. Happy Tuesday. It is news roundup today here on solid Academy
hope everybody's doing well
welcome welcome everybody. Slides are now in the chat waiting on you if you'd like to download the slides today to follow along and the replay link is there also we are about five minutes away from getting started officially. Glad to see everybody here. Hey Bonnie, Chris Heather Melanie, welcome welcome a lot of interesting things to talk about today as we look at the WordPress news from the last month. Again, if you're just joining us in zoom pop up in the chat and say hello, glad to see everybody here. Hey Stacy. News RoundUp today you are in the right spot. Hey Melanie. Hey Sue. Yeah, it is it was really cold here in Birmingham as well suit this morning. The link bundle is there in the chat. Once again, if you're just joining us, you can grab today's slides as well as the replay link. If you want to share that out with somebody later. As usual, that'll be available about an hour or so after we finish up today. Lots of things to talk about in solid do's and WordPress news. Lots of things going on.
Again, welcome Glad you're here. If you're just joining us in zoom, open up the chat and say hello. We've got about a little less than four minutes before we get started here is Sue stated the word was yesterday. We'll talk about we'll give a little overview there. Do I have a cold? No. I did think I'm just about over it. Actually, I'm pretty sure I came back from the recurring revenue retreat last month with COVID Pretty sure didn't get tested because it was pretty much over they just kind of lingered. So I either had COVID Or a really really nasty something. But I think I'm over that now hopefully. Alright y'all about three minutes to go. If you're just joining us in zoom, I'm going to add the links again in the chat. That's the link to download today's slides. These slides are always particularly helpful because they have all the links if you want to read more there at the bottom of each slide. That PDF is waiting on you in the chat as well as the replay link. Of course as usual, we'll have that up about an hour after we finished today. Hey, Vern, Hey Jeffrey, welcome from Guatemala. Glad everybody's here. We're about two and a half minutes away from kicking off with this month's WordPress news. Round up here on the solid Academy. Lots to talk about this month. Hey Rick, welcome
Ben Yes, this is the last news roundup of 2023. A class welcome from Little Rock. We'll have another one in January Ben Don't worry. Then I know you you just live for these news roundups. Right Hey Beth, welcome. Hey, Sally. Good to see everybody. We're a little bit less than two minutes from getting started here with the final news roundup of 2023. The slide link is there in the chat once again. If you're just joining us, you can download today's slides. Also the replay link is there. Hey Kevin. Hey, Deb. Deborah. Yeah. Hey, Deborah from Texas. Welcome everybody. Just about ready to get started. Lots of things to talk about today in WordPress news. A lot to share with you. Many things, many things.
All right. All right. So Did anybody catch the state of the word yesterday? It was the first state of the word that was delivered outside the United States. Matt had a lot to talk about. Some others were on stage. Talking about some other cool things. We'll have a summary of that for you in just a bit as part of our news roundup today, Hey, John from Chicago. Ben, I don't know that we have many folks from the Portland area is anybody here from the Pacific Northwest?
Yeah, I love that part of the country. It's beautiful and I fully intend to be at WordCamp us next year. 30 seconds to go. If you're just joining us in zoom, open up the chat and say hello we are just about ready to get started. There in the chat. You'll find today's link bundle that includes the slides for today as well as the replay link. Yes, Stacy's in. Close ish. Close ish to Portland in Spokane. Hey, Ben, welcome. Alright, folks, I've got three minutes after so let's get this show on the road. Let me get the recording started and we will jump right into news. Well, good afternoon, everybody. Good morning. Good evening, wherever you happen to be around the world today. So glad that you decided to join us here for this live stream of the WordPress news round. Up here on solid Academy. It is December 2023, the final news roundup of this year, and I'm glad that you've joined us if you are just now joining us in zoom I said the attendee number is ticking up quite a bit in just the last few seconds so I'm going to drop in one more time. The link bundle today that has all of our slides and the replay link as well. If you're watching this on the replay down below the video, you'll see the download slides link and you can have all the slides. These are particularly important because you got all the links to all the stories if you want to read more about anything we talked about. We give you the URL there to find out more for yourself. So let's get started shall we, as we always do with news from core, see what's happening in the world of core WordPress. And as you probably noticed, with many emails hitting your inbox, WordPress six dot 4.2 has released and included 23 bug fixes. Seven security issues were patched. The release also included some improvements for the site health tool and the XML sitemaps that are built in the WordPress. It fixes some issues with widgets and the block editor and the REST API and addresses a potential data exposure vulnerability that was kind of an edge case but still important to patch. This is an update that should have been applied automatically to your sites unless you've done something specifically to turn off automatic updates. So 642 is out I'm not sure if a 643 is planned but perhaps the WordPress design team has certainly been busy. The WordPress design team is the group that provides user experience user interface and visual design expertise for all areas of the WordPress project. These are volunteers from the community who do a lot of work to make WordPress better for all of us. And they've released a few little previews of some of the design work they've been doing to make things better. And so here's just a little overview. They had begun to implement sticky table implemented elements which reminded me of when my kids were little we always had sticky tables around our house. But this is a different thing altogether. Basically making the header columns and the pagination visible as you scroll. So in a large table that can be helpful. So here's how that might actually look here in the site editor. As you begin to scroll down the page, you see that the header area stays put. And of course the sidebar is static. But this is just a nice little element and it's hard to see because the play bar there we go. The play bar was in the way but down at the bottom you can see the pagination staying in place as well. This is a beautiful visual and they've done some nice work on this. Also, they have given us a new URL hop over for dealing with the web. You know what happens when you click on a URL in the block editor and there's a nice little pop over that they have designed. This is a very simple sketch, just to slim down the current URL pop over to a little more cleaner, simpler design. I kind of liked that a lot. They've also changed up the way or proposing the change up of how some of the the audio components will look inside. of WordPress, not only in the styling, but also in some of the ways they interact as you mouse over and so forth. The global included audio player in WordPress has getting getting some attention to make it feel a little better and more consistent. So here's how some of that might look so we'll click on one of these audio ops and looking at it's really nice audio player I like this a lot so nice interaction as you scrolls kind of scrub through the play the waveform there yeah really nice. Are they've also added a new range date picker. So here's this is really an initial sketch of how this might look. But if we take a look at the date picker here, now we have the options that of course the drop down doesn't appear in the video but you can change week to date or do a custom date range. It's a really nice component. And this will be available in core WordPress. Once it gets approved, the proper channels and plugins will be able to tap into this. So it's a really, really nice UI here like that a lot. There's also a redesign for the events section of the wordpress.org website. So the design, it's moving from kind of the old design of wordpress.org to the new design, and it's just it's a nice visual upgrade. Here's kind of what we look at look like and now it's a much more clean design so not only are they working on UI components for core WordPress, they of course also deal with the design of a lot of the wordpress.org website pages. You can follow the WordPress design team and see what they're up to in the WordPress Slack channel. In the in the Design channel of the make WordPress slack group. If you're not in the make WordPress slack group you ought to be and you can join for free right here at that link. All you have to have his wordpress.org log in and you can see what's going on and all the core teams because everybody's got their channel and you can participate in the discussion and just kind of see how WordPress is being made. All right, let's look forward at what's going on with WordPress 6.5. A great post has been published in less than a week ago was late last week on the make WordPress Core blog about this new roadmap to 6.5 So we're scheduled for the next major release of WordPress on March the 26th of next year. This release is going to focus on improving block capabilities and begin the start of the new WordPress admin area refresh that is long overdue. Add the font library is also supposed to be included in WordPress six, five they had hoped to include it in six, four, but some issues came up so they pushed it to the next release. So here's what the WordPress font library might look like. Really, basically what this does, it's kind of like the media library, but for fonts on your site, so you can bring in Google fonts or upload your own fonts as you just saw there in this will again, many themes do this they they tap into Google Fonts. But this is going to be now part of core WordPress. And if you select a Google Font, it will download it to your site. So you're not having to deal with connecting to Google fonts and the potential privacy issues that can cause it'll all be right there inside of core WordPress. So that's really great. And I'm happy to see this coming to core. There's some improvements continuing in the site editor that's going to allow it the ability to filter your site templates based on certain criteria. So here is a sample site editor. We can go to manage all templates, and many of them are here. But now look, you can filter by author or filter by the theme. This is a really nice user experience. And yeah, that's going to be coming to the site editor. So that's pretty darn cool. I think you can filter by list or grid. You have all these options. Kind of nice. WordPress revisions are also on the slate to get some improvements. This is a part of core WordPress that really hasn't been touched. since I can remember. They're going to be visualized differently with more detail provided. And revisions are also now going to be available not only for posting custom post types and pages, but also for templates and template parts. So here's how that might look. This is how it currently looks. Right here. Just you know when it happened and who did it now. Oh, look at some typography changes made color and an image block was added. And you can see actually in the revisions, what happened. So that's kind of neat. I like that a lot. They're also going to be adding some new API's into the core of WordPress. The interactivity API is now a standardized way for developers to add interaction on front end blocks like parting a post or causing a WooCommerce cart to load without or adding to like the menu cart without having to force a whole page reload. This is there a lot of ways that's being done by developers. But this is going to standardize now with an API, those kinds of front end interactions, and that's really good. There's going to be a new custom fields API that is added to core that's a simple way of connecting block attributes and custom fields with post metadata. There's a simplified version will be included in six five with it, and it'll be improved in later releases. Another API, this is very developer focused, but there's a new block binding API that's going to be coming and where we might see this show up is maybe there's a block that includes not only
sorry about that, not only the post title but also the post author. So you can bind a heading block and the post author block together into one block. So that that's going to be something you'll start to see appearing in core WordPress. PHP compatibility is also very much in focus. The team is working on making sure that WordPress six five works well with PHP 8.3, which was just released recently. We'll talk about that in later slides a few other things that are interesting to me about WordPress six five is that a rollback for automatic updates is planned. So if you update a theme or a plug in that causes a fatal error, WordPress by default now will roll back to the previous version of that plug in or theme so that's pretty cool. We've had to have external services for that up until now, so I'm happy to see that coming to core. Also there there's going to be work done to formalize plugin dependency so maybe you've seen how some plugins are created as add ons for other plugins. This is going to be a formal way for developers to specify in a consistent manner, that in order to activate my plugin, the parent plugin has to be installed and activated. So that's a good thing. It's just going to make the world easier for developers and ultimately for us as well. And of course there'll be lots of performance improvements, bug fixes, and UX iterations. If you want to learn more about WordPress six, five, there is an event planned through the core team. Right here. You can click that link. It's going to be a hallway hangout looking at WordPress six, five, after the first of the year, January 16. Put that on your calendar and there'll be a walkthrough and discussions of many of the things coming to WordPress 6.5. All right, let's fast forward into some news from Gutenberg and see what developments been happening there with this team. There are some new improvements to accessibility within Gutenberg which is always a good thing and for the writing flow. So the image and media text blocks are now properly show the pressed state for the Link button. So if there's a link, it's going to show up. The button block now mimics LIS behavior. So if you go into the button block, it bounces down to press ENTER twice and actually goes into the next line instead of going out of the block like it did before. There's also a new keyboard shortcut in the list view which is my very favorite, Command A on Mac CTRL A on Windows select all the blocks there in the list. So here's how some of this looks. We'll go down here to this image block for example. And notice the link block is now highlighted since the link exists. So and but that look at that you also were able now to select the immediate file or attachment page, or they did some adjustments with attachment pages in previous versions. button here we can we can click and when we hit enter it adds a new button, which is good. We're working out that concept. Here again is our list block. Now we can control well. Let's see. There we go. CTRL A command a selects either the sub blocks within a parent block or all the blocks depending on where you've clicked. What's kind of nice, small improvements but continuing pressing forward for the block editor. Also, there are some improvements to block spacing in the quote block now we have some a draggable option there to get our spacing Correct. That's coming to all the blocks and the quote block was one of the last that they haven't touched on that yet. Some other notable highlights in this release of Gutenberg pressing Escape on the block toolbar goes to the editor Canvas in the side editor, and they've just continued some polishing and some other improvements with iThemes dot JSON. So Gutenberg continues to press along the block editor continues to get better. Also with this release of Gutenberg 17 to back last week, there is now the addition of dragging and dropping to the beginning. And ends of documents with blocks. So this dragging and dropping a blocks hasn't been awesome. I mean, let's just be realistic. It's got it's getting better. And this is one of the improvements that's going to help. So dragging and dropping onto the top or bottom was very difficult and now that's fixed where you can actually pull a block out of a pattern and just drop it very easily at the very top of the document. They've also added some improvements with the sticky headers and pagination of tables, like we saw earlier. So here is the page list there and you'll see how the the headers are sticky in the the core UI there. This is a nice improvement. I'm a fan of distraction free mode in the block editor. I like it a lot both for design and just for writing. The block toolbar now slides in when you move your mouse up to the top of the screen in distraction free mode. So here we are in distraction free. We're typing we're typing, we're editing and now when we move up to the top, the toolbar pops in. That's an again, it's an incremental improvement, but every little thing makes this a much better experience to use as you're building content. Really liked that. One. All right, let's pivot to some news on security in our roundups this month 255 plugin vulnerabilities patched 226 still are active or the plugin is closed and one theme vulnerability was patched as always we recommend taking a look at solid security Pro that will allow you to reduce your website's risk to nearly zero with a site scan version management and of course the patch stack firewall with virtual patching. Paul was asking if this is a record this is about this has been about normal this year. We've seen that the number of vulnerabilities escalate dramatically due in part to groups like patch stack that are rewarding developers for going out and finding these vulnerabilities. There are bug bounties out there that if you find a vulnerability, you are rewarded for that. And so that's caused more developers to take this on the oftentimes as you know, like a side gig to go out and find vulnerabilities and create fixes for them. And those those vulnerabilities are then reported to companies like patch stack, which can then report to the plugin developer and make everything better. So it's a good thing it's a good thing. If you're an elementary user, you definitely need to be aware that there was a critical vulnerability that's bad. It was fully patched last week patch that reported this critical vulnerability in the element or page builder that would allow users who have the ability to edit posts that's authors on up to it actually allows anyone then with that privilege to upload files to WordPress that can lead to remote code execution. Really bad, really bad vulnerability Elementor initially released a patch on December the sixth, it was incomplete and did not fix the problem. And they finally fully patched it a couple of days later, December the eighth last week. So if you are an elementary person, make sure you are 100% up to date or just make sure you have I think our solid security Pro running on your site that would have automatically applied those updates and if you're running patch stack, they would have virtually patched that from the very beginning as soon as it was revealed. Alright, another thing you need to be aware of is that there are emails floating around purporting to be from the WordPress security team so scammers are impersonating the WordPress security team and phishing emails. The scam emails request that users install a malicious plugin that contains malware. That's awesome. Legitimate WordPress emails always come from wordpress.org or wordpress.net. But the security team never emails anybody. Their communication happens in the make WordPress slack group. Yeah, not good. So here's a sample of that email. There's a few telling things First of all, we're struggling to. Let's see the word wealth. Well, first of all, we're struggling to get a capital P in the word WordPress. We're also struggling to spell execution correctly. That happens a lot of times in these phishing emails. They're just major misspellings and things that are easy for folks that know what to look for to catch. Like, if you don't capitalize the P and WordPress that for whatever reason, I'm locked in on that. That's just a thing. Right? So this is out there. Let's see Tammy saying you're getting a lot of these scam attempts in meta messenger. Yep. So it can look a number of different ways. Be aware of this and this might be something to let your clients know about as well.
All right, let's pivot to some news from solid wp super excited to announce that Kadence AI is now out in a pre release version that you can install and play with. It is pretty darn cool. This will allow you to make a Kadence website in minutes with customized copy and images it can give you a jumpstart on your content aligning with your current brand message. It gives the ability for some inline suggestions. So right in the content editor, you can bounce in and out of AI. And this link right here gives you an overview of all the cool things in Kadence AI and the link to download the pre release version. Again, this is maybe beta maybe alpha beta. It's definitely pre release. Don't put this on live sites but it's certainly something really cool to fool around with. Here's a quick example. Of the design library. With some AI suggestions built in you have the ability to go by design or with AI suggestions. This is an example of a text block where you can make it shorter. Fix the spelling right there with AI. Also you have the ability to generate text update the tone Taylor text all right there from within the Kadence interface. Here's a quick overview of the whole thing at work. And this video is on the page if you want to watch it a little slower rewind it, so we give it a little bit of information I'm a business about called Botanica Haven. We're going to generate some text based on that content. Ah look, we go AI and it changes to plant images. Okay, cool. We'll drop in a pattern and we have the ability then to fine tune some of the wording we'll click on that right and engaging headline Boom there it is kind of cool. Yeah, so Katie, so yeah, it's been a long time coming. They're still ironing out some bugs but I would encourage you to download it and play with it. Really, really neat. Parts Yeah, parts of this are available in the free version. I'm not an expert on Kadence AI, I've not had time to play with it yet. I would encourage you to go to the link on the previous slide. Read all about it. It'll tell you how it works and what you can do, the credits that are available and how you might purchase some. All right, something else that has come to Kadence is this new advanced query Loop block. And this is pretty amazing. So the advanced query loop is an enhanced version of the core where he Loop block so basically what this is it's blocks within a block. Okay, blocks within a block that use a similar function to the way it's kind of like the way the advanced form block works. If you played with Kadence. There's like a form block that has all the blocks inside of it. This query loop works like that as well. So the parent query loop lets you decide okay, what's going to display in this query, loop in this in this grid that we're going to create, and then you can customize how it's going to look with the with the advanced query block. So this is going to allow you to do a filterable post block, either on top or at the top with drop downs for taxonomies or whatever. are in the sidebars. It's really, really neat. Within this block is also this is how jewel post might display within that advanced query loop. So you might have things like this. And the neat thing about this is you can create this loop card and then save it as a reusable block. So you can have similarly styled posts in a grid throughout your site. So it's really really cool. So they've done a few things here they've added some filters be able to filter by taxonomy. Or post meta data date range. They've also the performance is an issue as Tonya is mentioning here, you're dealing with live data and getting data sorted. And so one of the things they've worked on is pulling filter data into a custom table in your WordPress install, so that it doesn't have to make a live query every time so there's some smartness that's going into the performance, and I'm certainly certainly they're going to be continuing to tweak that. They've also made pagination pretty easy in this whole scenario. Here's how it might look. So you've got your query block here with all your filters and then your your cards here. That define how it all shows. Really a cool thing. Really a cool thing. So this was released November 29, back in Kadence, blocks Pro two dot 1.4. You can watch the live stream at that YouTube link, as the Kadence team talks all about that a lot of events coming up three, four here on solid Academy live all these are free to attend. I do want to make this is something that's recently been added in the last few weeks. Really excited about this and that is on Friday. This is out of our normal cadence of live streams. It's a Friday this Friday and just a few days from one to 3pm Central time, I'll be live talking about how to monetize the solid suite to grow recurring revenue. We'll be talking about creating care plans with the solid Suite products, how to package and price those and sell those to your clients is going to be too jam. Packed hours. One of the things we're specifically going to be talking about if you're a legacy I iThemes member and you'd have a toolkit or a solid or an old I themes security package like I think security gold with unlimited licenses. Then how do we add patch stack and the patch deck firewall with virtual patching? How do we add that to our I'm going to show you how to do that and give you some ideas on how you can make some real money by offering another level of care plan that includes the patch stack integration, pretty cool stuff. So I actually just finished that document today I've got a 25 page.to walk through and it should be really helpful and a lot of fun. So if you haven't registered for that yet, go to Academy dot solid wp.com/upcoming and register for that free event that's coming up on Friday. Plugin Roundup is scheduled for January the ninth with news roundup the 16th of January. And we've got our friend Lindsey Halsey from Pathfinder SEO back and she's going to be talking about the customer's hierarchy of needs. Now I heard Lindsey give this talk at the recurring revenue retreat last month and I thought she has got to come and give this talk for our audience as well. It's really good. And so we're happy to have Lindsay back on January the 17th. If you are a member of solid Academy by having an old legacy I iThemes membership or if you have the solid suite, then here's what's coming up for you office hours of course every Thursday, our final fly the last why we're forever here on solid Academy is going to be tomorrow. Now notice this is a Zoom meeting, not a zoom webinar. There's a new link for this, you will need to go you should have gotten it by email. But also if you need to, you can just as long as you're logged in, just click the Join link or the Register link on the page on the Academy site will actually join the webinars. So it's a little bit different, but we wanted the suggestion was to have everybody together in a face wall for our final fly and that's what we're going to do. Finally, the course for this month optimizing your Starter Site. Got a lot to talk about. There. That's next week, December 19 and 20th. All right, let's talk about a little bit of plugin news. Now you may remember last month there was a bit of WP drama a little bit of a kerfuffle that happened when the WordPress playground team rushed ahead a little bit and added a view on playground button to all the plugins in the plugin directory. Now the goal here was to make it easy for you to spin up a WordPress playground instance with that plugin pre installed it was a great idea except for some plugins don't work in the WordPress playground environment because it's a little different than regular WordPress. And so some developers got fussy and it was just it was a whole thing. So now the Preview button is back in the WordPress plugin directory for the plugin developers who opt into it. So that's probably how it should have been handled before. There. I think the plugin to the playground developers were just really excited about this cool thing they could do. It pushed it out maybe a little ahead of the time that they should have. So now for developers that have opted into this in the WordPress plug in directory you'll see preview on by the download button. And you can click that and it'll launch playground with that plugin pre installed. So that's pretty darn cool. I it's using a blueprint file that customizes the playground installed to include that login kind of neat. So this will be enabled. for public use soon. I think there's some out there actually now, this was back in November, this article so I think there's some actually out there now. So give that a look. It's pretty cool. By the way, if you've never played with WordPress playground, I would recommend it it is a super cool tool that we probably should do some training on at some point in the near future.
WooCommerce 8.3 was released. Let's see couple of weeks ago I believe it was released with cart checkout and order confirmation blocks as the default so WooCommerce is now moving to a blocks first cart and checkout experience. That's a major change. It used to be the shortcode remember, now it's blocks first and existing stores are not impacted. So if you install word WooCommerce on an A new on a site that has not had WooCommerce before it will be blocked. First it doesn't change your existing sites just yet. You can migrate over to blocks with a migration tool that is linked from within WooCommerce they've also done some major compatibility work for PHP 8.3. So here's how that blocks first checkout experience looks like looks like blocks and there you go. You can move things around and do what you'd like to do. Other notable changes in WooCommerce eight three includes some of the some additional themes have been added to the WooCommerce marketplace. marketplace. The search inside of marketplace is also much better. There's a new mobile app onboarding process and then the WooCommerce mobile app perhaps most importantly, no longer requires jetpack to operate and we all give a round of applause. Images are also optimized to reduce the WooCommerce package size. So the way WooCommerce uses images has been tweaked. And that's also a very good thing. All right, let's turn the page to some news on AI. There's always a lot going on in AI. And one of the things that came out this month was a big news story about open AI making a deal with a company called rain and rain is a chip manufacturer. Open AI has done a $51 million chip purchase agreement for rain to create chips that are custom designed to power open a eyes software. So these chips are supposedly inspired by the human brain, whatever that means, and they're designed to replace the current NVIDIA GPUs that are generally used to power most AI models, including chat GPT right now. Now you may remember last month there was the big thing about the CEO of open AI was removed by the board and there was this big fight going on. Well, it turns out that there were some problems at rein, and it all kind of stemmed from the fact that Sam Altman, the open AI CEO, personally invested in rain prior to making this deal so that's the Board of Directors didn't like that which I understand. It's a whole thing. So that's one to follow. Well, we'll see if it if rain is actually going to produce these chips or what happens but if they do, this would allow open AI a significant advantage over other AI is most likely because their hardware is designed for their code and much like the Apple M chips are designed for Apple's code and they're much more efficient and work much better at lets Apple do some great things. Open AI is going to have that issue. Is that that possibility as well. Not to be left out Google has launched the new AI it is calling Gemini. It is a new AI language model designed to compete with chat GBT Gemini comes in three sizes nano Pro and ultra for different uses. And basically the idea is nano lives on your mobile devices. Pro and ultra live on desktop devices. And Ultra is of course much more powerful. Gemini beat GPT four and 30 out of 32 ai benchmark tests run by Google so you knows how it actually these benchmarks work out and a lot of times the benchmarks are tweaked. So that your stuff performs better. You know how that goes. But it's it's pretty cool. Chris has played around with it for a little bit. And I think Chris likes it quite a bit there. He can speak to that in the chat. Yep. So Gemini was designed from the start to handle text images video. And audio. So it's a broader AI from the beginning. Google says that it is more efficient and cheaper to run than its previous AI models. And it's going to power services like Google Search Google ads. It's going to be integrated into the Android operating system. One of the interesting things for us especially is that coding appears to be a real strength for Gemini. The Gemini has integrated into it Google's Alpha code to technology, which allegedly surpasses 85% of human coders and competitions. I don't know might be worth playing around with. We'll see how that works. Now also in related to Gemini news, Google wants to tell your life story. I mean, we all know Google knows everything about us, right? So Google proposal has been floated to use Gemini AI to create life stories from user data. So it suggests using search data, photos, map data to spot life patterns and moments. So this is called Project element and it wants to be a personal life story teller. Google's AI would infer biographical details from metadata and photos and lots of other things. It could summarize a user's eating habits purchases travel and more. It's part of this the big AI industry race to build personalized memory features. What could possibly go wrong here? What could possibly go wrong? The last bullet on this slide is a bit of an understatement. There have been a few privacy concerns about this whole thing. I don't know. We'll have to see what happens. In other news GPT store is set to launch in 2024. This was something that was announced on open AIS Developer Day several weeks ago. It has been postponed until 2024. And there were some unexpected delays there. This is going to allow developers to monetize GPT models that they customize which is going to be kind of cool. There's different models available to developers like one time subscriptions, usage based pricing. So yeah, what's the how that works out should be pretty interesting. Open AI is also announced free chat GPT voice capabilities in the mobile app. This was previously available for paid users only. It's now available to everybody. If you don't have the mobile app, it's really pretty cool. And I just realized, I don't think I attached computer audio to the stream on Zoom. So you're not going to be able to hear the example that's on the next slide. We'll try it and see. But if you've never tried this before, it's like you're talking to chat GPT I like it a lot better than having to type type type. I think it's it's very helpful. So let's see if this works. Can y'all hear that? Is Yeah, okay. It's not going to work? Well, bummer. Basically, what just happened? How many 16 inch pieces do I have to order for 700 people was the verbal query and chat GPT responds back with an answer. It's kind of neat. We all know how powerful chat GBT is and to be able to interact with it by voice is pretty cool. All right. Oh, what was the answer? It basically did the math of if 700 people each eat three slices, then that's 2100 slices and each, blah blah blah. So it just it kind of worked your way back through tight. Yeah, exactly. Alexa would give you that similar answer. But to have that with chat, GBT is kind of nice. All right. We talked about a couple of months ago that Google has offered a way for sites to opt out of its AI bot scans. So now 252 major content sites are blocking Google's AI from using their content to train its models. That's up 180% from just under 90 last month. So major publishers that are now blocking Google's AI scans include New York Times, he see Mad Conde all the Conde Nast properties. Also platforms like Yelp and Mashable are blocking Google's AI. This is going to be interesting, you know, AI is going to be come a part of search, and I don't I understand not wanting your content to be included in the AI model. But also this could have some unintended impact on your SEO. I don't know. We'll see how that works out. Another great AI platform, if you've not played with it yet is Claude from anthropic they have just launched Claude 2.1, which can process 200,000 words of context, and has two times less instances of hallucinating now where this is helpful. Clawd is great. Like you can drop in a PDF or you can drop in a giant text file and then ask it questions about it. It's like you could I in I've been using it like this for some time dropping in a meeting transcript with a client and then asking Claude questions about the transcript. And did we talk about a launch date, that sort of thing. It's super helpful. So Claude to that one increases the amount of text they can deal with at a time. Early support is now available to connect Claude to API's and databases. So you'll start to see the claw 2.1 model rolling into a lot of the AI overlay tools that are out there. So pretty neat.
It's 20 bucks a month, just like chat GPT and it's, in some ways Claude is better at content summary than chat GBT, we kinda like it better. For that purpose. A couple of other bits of AI news. There is a great post on the admin bar, about AI chatbots and the new potential income stream or digital agency, so check. Check that out if you haven't read it already. And also, here's a link to some of the top AI content detector tools that currently exist. Also an interesting little read. Let's talk about one little bit of SEO news this month Googly, googly. Google has officially dropped mobile usability report. So this was part of Google's search console. This is not the lighthouse results. This is the old mobile usability report. That was really bad. So they've been talking about dropping this since April. It's been available for nearly 10 years and not updated much in 10 years. It was just pretty awful. Google says there's better tools out there you should use lighthouse. And let's just turn the page on this. So there you have it. Oh, all righty. Finish up with a little bit of other news that didn't fit anywhere else. There is now an update on the accessibility legislation that was that was reintroduced in Congress. So we talked about this last year. And now there is a new legislation about web accessibility that's been reintroduced in Congress in the house. It's a bipartisan bill, and it was introduced at the end of September. The legislation is proposed it hasn't become law. There are some amendments from last year's version that include grants and technical assistance to support small businesses. Translation, there might be a real opportunity for you to learn accessibility and have accessibility as a service for clients and have some of that work funded by a federal grant which will probably if I had to guess, I don't know, probably look like a tax credit for small businesses for making their sites more accessible. That's kind of cool. I think honestly. Any that whatever legislation that comes down is good because right now everybody's just kind of guessing. On what accessibility level site should meet. And either way, good or bad. I would just like to know what's expected and what the legal standards are going to be. So that's going to be good if you want to read the bill. For example, if you can't sleep at night, you can click that PDF link and download the bill. There you go. Gravatar has also just introduced a new profile editor. This is pretty nice. Most of us use Gravatar. For one thing or another. The Profile Editor is totally redesigned. You can now customize and preview your profiles a lot better. It's faster, it works on mobile. It's really nice. So take a look at that. It's data privacy aware so you can protect yourself a little easier. There's new fields that have been added like pronunciation, a contact form calendar links to connect with you. So it's kind of like just a profile page that you can link to that's kind of cool, like Link tree that a lot of folks will use on social media. So yeah, there you go. Take a look at that new Gravatar profile editor if you've not done so yet. If you're doing anything with Google ads, you may be already be aware of this, but just before Thanksgiving, what a perfect time of the year for Google to send out accidental notifications to Google Ads customers saying your stuff is broken, basically. So right before Thanksgiving, Google Ads sent erroneous suspension emails. Right before Black Friday. Your ads are broken. You're not You're suspended from Google ads and awful awful. This led to some advertisers quote freaking out over the wording as I could imagine it would. Google quickly said no, no, no, no, no, it's not you it's me. So the counts are still active. Nothing was actually impacted other than many people's blood pressure just prior to the largest shopping season of the year. Goodness. Ah, all right. There is now a new redesigned Developer Resources project underway. wordpress.org team wants to redesign the Developer Resources area of wordpress.org it is definitely needing that redesign. It's still using the old aesthetic of the old wordpress.org and they're looking for a more minimalist content centric approach. There is a redesign homepage currently up the developer blog is also getting a matching minimal look. The goal is to launch sometime this month. Here's kind of what we're going from and what we're going to a much cleaner, nicer Developer Resources area. Here's what the blog posts will look like. Old and new. Yeah, the entire wordpress.org site is slowly getting moved over to this much more minimal readable format. All right, if you
all right. If you are not a developer, you too can still contribute to WordPress. WordPress as a whole. The WordPress project relies not only on developers, but from contributions of folks with all sorts of skill sets, documentation support marketing translation roles are available. Coding is not required most of the teams need non developer help. You can observe meetings all that happens in the make WordPress slack. We gave you that link a little earlier. You'll see issues that are discussed in these slack meetings like they're basically the To Do lists. contributors. If you want to start out you can start with quick straightforward issues to deal with. Take a look at it. This is a great way to give back to WordPress, which we all appreciate. PHP 8.3 has been released. It's a major update of the PHP language. Many new features were added to simplify coding and had security and improved speed, lots of performance enhancements, bug fixes and general cleanup 8.3 is now the latest version of PHP released 19 days or well that was yesterday 20 days ago on November the 23rd 8.1 is now no longer in active support. So if you're just now upgrading to 8.1 like we are okay you still have security support for 11 months 8.1 ages out on 25 November of next year. 8.2 is the current active version with a death read just being released. So there we go. All right, a couple of things that are worth a look. Here's a great checklist on yoast.com to optimize your website within for accessibility. It's a really good overview. Let's take a look at that. And also if you're curious about what in the world is this virtual patching thing that we've been talking about? Using patch stack in solid security pro great blog post on solid obp.com That explains exactly what virtual patching is all about. All right, we'll wrap up today as we always do with news from WordPress community. Yesterday was state of the word with Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, for the first time the state of the word was delivered outside the United States. I just think that's great. Instead of the word was delivered in Madrid, Spain, perhaps as a nod to the fact that the Spanish WordPress community has been incredibly active this year they posted nine word camps in the country of Spain in 2023. That's, that's huge. Also this year, mark the 20th Birthday of WordPress. So that was noted there in the state of the word. A couple of other highlights were the scalability of WordPress. It was pointed out that Taylor Swift's site which is built on WordPress, received 100,000 requests per second when she was announced as time's Person of the Year. So folks who say that WordPress can't scale need to look at that statistic. Now, obviously, hosting is an important part of that, but WordPress is definitely scalable. Can you imagine 100,000 requests per second on your website? That's crazy. They also highlighted the security of WordPress, as both NASA and the White House now run their sites using WordPress. The 2024 theme was showcased as the best way to experience the new WordPress with the site editor. If you've not taken time to play with that you definitely should. And that's a great way to use playground just spin up an instance of playground with the 2024 theme active and just play around with the side editor. Something interesting that was mentioned our playground blueprints will soon be able to create playground instances using natural language with AI. So they're integrating some AI operation with playground to say something like with a with a typing a thing that says Start Me a WordPress playground that includes these plugins. There it goes. So that's actually being worked on. Matt Mullenweg said playground will never cease to amaze me. It's a testament to the spirit of innovation in the community and the closest thing to sci fi we have going on right now in WordPress. Pretty neat. So where's the focus going to be next year patterns, you're going to become more versatile custom fields you're going to become more powerful and significant performance enhancements across the board. new admin customizations coming to the WordPress dashboard are going to help you make WordPress your own a lot easier. And an extended discussion was had on what was referred to as data liberation. Now this is interesting Matt highlighted his desire to have it much more easy to export your things out of WordPress in a generic format that can be imported elsewhere. And interestingly, one of the texts we have on state of the word is linked here on post status. This is from Yoast and Yoast says privately. It's published on a blog post but privately he says he hopes that some of the EU Data laws can be leveraged to force WordPress competitors like Wix and Squarespace to make data exportable just like WordPress is going to do and if you've ever tried to pull data out of Wix or Squarespace, it's not fun. So it would be great to have liberated data across all content management systems. Last but not least in the state of the word WordCamp. Us was mentioned and announced as coming to Portland, Oregon. That's going to be September 17. Through the 24th. This was shared on the WordCamp us Facebook page yesterday. It's going to be at the Oregon Convention Center. No additional details right now. But if you want to look at the post, there is the link to the WordCamp us Facebook group a couple of upcoming word camps in the US are better announced where camp Phoenix is being planned for February 9 and 10th. Also work camp MK Montclair, New Jersey on June the first couple of global word camps as well word camp Asia and Taipei, Taiwan and march and word camp EU and Torino, Italy in the middle of June. So all that's coming up. Who wants to travel travel? Sounds fun. Italy in June. Sounds pretty nice. All right, folks. That brings us to the end of the WordPress news roundup for December 2023. Thanks for hanging out with me for the last hour or so. Hopefully you've learned a couple of things. I will have the replay up in less than an hour. And one more time. I'm going to drop the slide link in the chat if you missed that earlier. You can download all the slides and check out any of those links that you'd like. That's going to do it for us today. I'm back for members for the final fly course of 2023 and forever. You're on solid Academy where we go further together.