I hope this week has gotten started well for everybody what do you think of the news the new colors here we have our new solid WP branded news round up rather like the color scheme
welcome everybody. Glad you're here. Just about to have captions finished going all right captions should be working. Welcome, everybody. I'm going to drop in our slide link once again in the chat if you are just joining us, right there in the chat you'll find the link to all the things Lena that is a good question if you within I think security pro pardon me within I think security pro if you sign up for the if you get an API key to connect, I think security that should automatically add you to the vulnerability list. That should send it out. Now if you've done that and you're not getting it then it may be that you've unsubscribed from emails from iThemes.
Lina, yeah, yeah. Let's see. It's a good question. I'm not part of the marketing team in that regard. So I'm not quite sure. Here's what I would do. I would suggest Lina email sales at i ithemes.com. That's just sort of a catch all address. Just explain what's going on. And I'm sure they can get you fixed up there. Just email sales at i ithemes.com. Link, the email is there in the chat
no problem. All right. We are two minutes out from getting started with news roundup. Ah, Christina see you're having some problems is anybody else having problems downloading the slides? It's the link is the normal kind of link we usually create so I'm not quite sure what would be causing a problem there. Yeah, Christine, I'm not quite sure what's going on. Yeah, something on your end, Christine. All right, just about a minute. and a half to go before we get started news roundup here on iThemes Training. Got a lot to talk about many, many things, including multiple versions of WordPress released in the last couple of weeks. All right, welcome. Everybody. Glad you're here. Just about a minute to go before we get started. Oh, Heather. Yeah, the Elementor quite a mess. And honestly, when you say the Elementor hack, it's like which one right it's been so so many lately.
All right. So that was didn't mean to disparage but it is the case. Lots. They've had lots of issues with Elementor lately. Alright folks, 30 seconds to go. If you're just joining us in zoom pop up in the chat say hello. There in you will find the link to download all the things as well as the link for the replay and chat log and transcript and all that stuff. So yeah, what do you think about the new slides? This is using the new solid WP branding. I'm kind of happy about these. I really liked the way they look. It's an upgrade I think. Yeah.
Elementor purple I'm going to pretend like you didn't say that Billy. It's solid purple. All right. It's three minutes after let me start the recording. And we'll dive right in.
Well, good afternoon, everybody. Happy Tuesday and welcome to the WordPress news roundup here on I iThemes Training. This is the first webinar in which we're featuring our new solid WP brand here on iThemes Training. At some point this month we'll be converting to the solid Academy as the I iThemes brand is being replaced by solid WP. So we're looking forward to announcing all those things and as soon as I have something to show you with the logo, I'll have that out here. Really excited about the new things that are happening with solid WP. i Yes. So we are now with news roundup. Live Stream. Hope Glad you're here. It's May 2003. If you're just joining us in the chat, I'm going to share the link to today's slides. You can download everything that you see on the screen. And I would recommend that because we have links to all the articles down there in the footer of each slide. And so that's always helpful. Yeah, I'm hoping also to get some solid WP swag right now I'm currently wearing our WordCamp Birmingham t shirt today. I know actually some of you who are on the live stream today might indeed have this very same T shirt because I saw you there. Let's get started shall we as we begin as we begin today, we start as always with our news from core WordPress a lot of things have been going on in the last month with core starting with the release of WordPress six dot 2.1 which perhaps we should preface with the ill fated WordPress six dot 2.1 That was released on May the 16th as a maintenance and security update. This should have happened automatically with your WordPress site five security vulnerabilities were addressed pretty important vulnerabilities they were back ported as well, all the way back to WordPress 4.1. It fixed 20 Bug bugs in in core itself many in the block editor 10 of those in the block editor. However, WordPress six dot 2.1 created a problem in that if you were using block a block theme or using block templates to build your site, it broke shortcodes inside of block templates. So an errant piece of code caused any shortcodes that were living in block templates not to render what those shortcodes should render. So it affected a lot of folks that were using block templates. It you wouldn't have noticed anything if you were using a theme that is not using full site editing, so or the site editor. So if using Kadence for example, this wouldn't have affected you. It only would affect the latest version of block themes that are out there. So for example, a lot of folks were using blog templates to drop in breadcrumbs at the top of their layout and Newsletter Signup forms, those sorts of things. And those things just weren't displaying and that happened with an automatic WordPress Core update. So that was a bit of a problem as you can imagine. Some users reported broken functionality on hundreds of pages that rely on short codes. That prompted a quick release of WordPress six to two about four days later, I believe. In in the meantime, people just had to work around by either swapping out their blog templates, the template parts or downgrading the WordPress six two, although at that point you were vulnerable to the security fixes that six to one fixed it was a bit of a mess. And there's a lot of conversation going on about now we're a little concerned about these core automatic minor updates that shouldn't break things like this one did. So there's some discussion happening about that and we'll have to see where that all lands. Once the dust settles. WordPress 622 was released May the 28th just three days ago and address those shortcode errors that was created in 61. And it fixed one other security issue that wasn't included in six to one. It was a rapid response, release to the issues and six to one. So you want to have six to two on all your sites. Now that should have happened automatically. And unless you've specifically said don't apply minor core updates. All right. WordPress six three is in the planning phases. The beta one will be released in about a month on June 27, with beta two on the third and July 11, with beta three moving into the release candidates in mid and late July. The dry run for release will be August the seventh with a general release of WordPress six, three on August the eighth. So just a couple months out really not too long at all before WordPress six three starts to land out there in the wild. You can follow all of that the planning and the roadmap are linked here on this slide if you want to follow the progress there. WordPress six three looks like it's going to be primarily block editor although we might see some other improvements and as those were announced, we'll of course mention them here on the news roundup. Something else that's going on is interesting little little tool that core the core theme team has created it's a it's a new theme called stacks. Now, we actually showed a plugin in a plugin roundup a long time ago. It's been a few years that allowed you to use the block editor to create slides like a PowerPoint slide deck like this. And stacks is a block theme that enables that so if you do presentations, this might be something kind of fun to play around with. You can just go to wordpress.org/themes and search for stacks. It is one of these new community themes from the initiative that we talked about a few months back, we're community themes. We'll be getting a little bit of love from the WordPress core team and there'll be a little more reliable than perhaps some of the other free themes that are out there. It's a theme that was designed by sax and Fletcher and Ben Dwyer. It's the flow for creating slides is pretty straightforward. So play around with it if you do, you know talks that meet up so that sort of thing. Just download this and play around with it because you might find that it's an interesting little tool. Certainly not as capable as an as an app like PowerPoint or something like that but could be something fun to show at a meet up if you're doing that. Stax supports mobile and desktop viewing. So if you're, you know, presenting from your phone, it'll work like that. You can really see how the block editor is used in unique ways using this theme. All right, so here's what it looks like. By the way. This is the site editor. It is a block theme. And so yeah, it does some interesting things, uses templates and template parts and all of those things and it edits in the block editor just like you would expect it to all right a new proposal has also been floated in the core channels to retire older WordPress default themes. So if you like me might have a couple of lingering old 2012 themed WordPress sites out there. The very first website I ever built was on the 28th with the 2012 theme that those older themes are being retired or there's a proposal to retire them. But currently there are 13 of the 20 themes that are Act have to be there had to be actively maintained. By developers and it's quite a bit of work. It's quite a bit of work to do that, as you can imagine. So the proposal says, If a theme has less than 1% usage, and it's more than five per five years old, it's going to be sunset and retired. So under this proposal, the themes from 2010 through 2016 would only get security updates going forward so they won't become a security problem, but there won't be any fixes to keep it compatible with core going forward as well. So this is a proposal that has been met with positive feedback. I mean, it's taking developer time to maintain these old themes that only have a very fraction of usage. So yeah, it's gonna let folks focus on more important things. It does, however, affect 730,000 users. So that's a lot and I wonder though, and I wasn't able to kind of dug into this a little bit I wasn't able to figure out is that people who have just the themes installed on their site but not active, or is that accurate? I'm not quite sure. But a lot of folks will be affected by this. But probably it's a good move for the core team. Yeah. Let's let's really put developer hours in other places. All right, let's turn the page to some news from Gutenberg and see what's going on in the block editor world Gutenberg 5.6, was released on April the 19th, just a little over a month ago. It adds something pretty interesting which is called the details block. It's an experimental block that allows you to hide content. So you know, you can accomplish something like this with a tab or an accordion. But this is a simple block. That until you click it, it hides whatever it contains. So a use case might be spoilers. That you don't want to show on the page or hiding a transcript unless the block was clicked or a video. So it basically reveals content inside of it that is hidden until something is clicked. It looks like this. Boom, there it is, like show and hide. Very simple, but probably a very useful
tool for page design. So I can think of a lot of ways that I might use this. Again, this is in the Gutenberg plugin. So it's not going to be in the block editor probably until 6.3 of WordPress in core, but it is being worked on and developed it is currently an experiment that install the Gutenberg plugin and you can play with it. Also in Gutenberg 5.6, the spacer block has got that spacer block has gotten a little bit of love and it's got some presets that are set as well as the ability to control the spacing in a fluid way. So you can grab this little dot and increase live by the way, much like you can in Kadence now, so this is part of Gutenberg, not in the core block editor yet. You can also move the height forward with a slider that's preset at certain intervals. It's a great UI and again, very similar to what Kadence is already doing. Also in Gutenberg 15 Six there are style variations that you can apply and edit while you're in browse mode so you'll be able to see all of different the different style variations of the page from within the site editor. And again, this is assuming you have a block theme. It will make it easier to access and edit those styles. So here's how this kind of looks. So here's just a very basic styling so in the slide editor, clicking styles you can quickly apply styles that's nothing new. Although the UI is a little bit different, but if you want to edit the style, you can do it just like this. Let's change our primary font to something else. Boom, there it is, and save it. And now that becomes the style pretty cool. thing that I'm really excited about in Gutenberg 15. Six is this new command center. Now the command center it's part of the site editor. This is something I think that could be very interesting, as the core block editor grows so this is, by the way, we've had plugins like this on the plugin roundup in the past, where it's kind of like a control bar where you can just type stuff and it happens, you know, like pages and it opens pages, that sort of thing. This is that sort of thing. But it's going to be integrated within core WordPress. So it can be a quick search to jump to pages or other sections or other templates. And think how easy that will be if especially if you're using the site editor, for example, just to jump back and forth between templates and sections and a pretty interesting this is going to be it's very experimental at this point. They're just starting to do work on it. But it's going to be the basis of an extensible command component, which means you could tap into it like for example later and we'll see a slide on this later. The news round up with like aI commands would be where they would execute in the block editor. We're really seeing I think, with this component. It's it's really kind of a step, a step to get us to where we'll eventually be with integrating AI and other features into WordPress and how we build things. So right now you can use it for finding your way around running commands. Here's how it works. If you just take a second to start, alright, so we're gonna click there, boom. Okay, there's our command bar. And it gives just a few things that you've seen before. Quick Links, or you can search for add something or just click right there and it takes you to add a new page, for example. So really cool. It's just again, it's experimental in the very beginnings, but this is something that as it works its way into core and more things tap into it. This is going to be a central part of the way we use WordPress going forward. So a lot happened in Gutenberg 15. Six Gutenburg 15. Seven, was released a couple of weeks ago. One of the main things that you'll see different in 15 Seven is the site logo can now be replaced from within the sidebar itself. And this is a pretty good move because you want to be able to update the branding on the site pretty easily. So this will be in the site editor and if you click on the logo in the nav block, it lets you from right here in the sidebar, I change that site logo. I couldn't do that before and that's a nice UI. Again, just they're iterating slowly but surely these things every two weeks the block editor is getting better and better and better. They've also added duotone filter controls in the block sidebar. I mean the core team loves duo tones and they are pretty cool. And they're making those even more available than they were before so they were previously sort of hidden yet nowhere to go to get to them. Now they're available right there in the style settings in the sidebar. So you have all those built in duotone effects that you can apply to any image. Something else they did in 15.7 is the addition of fluid typography. Now this is really helpful because have you ever designed the page the way you want it? To be in whatever it is that you're designing in it and then you make your screen smaller for a tablet or phone view. And the fonts just stay really gigantic right? And you get to go in there and tweak them and it's really annoying. So the fluid typography basically senses the width of the screen the size of the screen, and dynamically smartly sizes down your fonts to look really good on those sizes. Now they get into how they did this. I'm going to read this and see if you're as confused as I am when they finished out but it basically refined refines the handling of fluid typography using the logarithmic scale factor to calculate the minimum font size for smaller screens. I'm just gonna say it uses magic and it makes everything look good. So that's basically what happens here. And this fluid typography is a really beautiful thing. All right, so a lot of work. has gone on in court in the last couple of weeks and kudos to all those fine folks. They're doing this great work. All right, let's take a look at news on security. My goodness, the number of vulnerabilities just keep getting bigger 162 plugins last month, have been have had active vulnerabilities or they are closed 168 have been patched and no I am not going to read them all we have. We are no longer listing the plugins with vulnerabilities in the news roundup, it's just not possible anymore. So many, many many problems. And by the way, you may be wondering why is it that there is a sharp increase in these number of vulnerabilities if you've been watching the news roundup for several months you will have noted that just after the first of the year, the vulnerabilities went up from maybe 30 on a big month, maybe 40 vulnerabilities up to at 100 100 and 160 this month. So what's going on and here's what's happening, and we're going to talk about this a little bit later. But there are more people doing research, security research on things and plugins. And it's not that they're it's not that vulnerabilities are increasing. It's that they're being more readily identified, which is both good and bad meaning there were problems all along we're just now pointing them out. So patch stack and others are at the front lines of bug bounties and things like that to find these vulnerabilities. It's good for all of us because these are things that you know, it makes WordPress more secure. So this is a good thing. And of course if you're using theme security pro, you get twice daily site scans for your vulnerabilities that emails you if your site has a vulnerable theme or plugin. And if you have I think security Pro, it will actually automatically apply and update if it exists. If your theme or plugin is vulnerable and all that's powered by patch stack. And patch stack is a phenomenal platform, which we'll be talking about in just a moment.
All right. Another big vulnerability that happened this month was with ACF. So if you're an ACF user, hopefully you've already dealt with this. This is in both the free and the Pro versions. of advanced custom fields. It affects they say over 2 million sites. The WP tavern article said it affects over four and a half million sites globally. The way this thing works is that users with privileges like an editor user or an admin user, for example, could accidentally compromise sensitive information. On the site by visiting a URL that was crafted by a hacker to give all the correct you know, query strings and so forth after to allow this vulnerability to be exploited. The vulnerability was fixed in plugin versions five dot 12.6 and the free and six dot six in the pro and it's been given a CVE. So this is a big deal. If you're an ACF user, you absolutely need to make sure this is up to date. Super important because the ACF vulnerability was already being exploited within 24 hours of its announcement. By patch stack. So a patch that published this vulnerability on May the fourth, and within a day, hackers were actively exploiting Now you may wonder, Well, why do they publish these things if the hackers are going to exploit them? Well, you gotta let users know and there's this really fine balance between, you know, how much do we talk about and how much do we, you know, keep secret and the way patch that you know, they patch that will notify the developer ahead of time and you know, with Hey, we're going to have we're going to, you know, start talking about this publicly on this date. So you've got, you know, this window of time to fix it before the announcement. goes live. So, you know, it's as responsible as it can possibly be, I think, on patch stack side. But even now, only 31 and a half percent of ACF users have updated to the patched version. So that's a lot of vulnerability out there. But if you are an ICF user, make sure once again that you are updated. If you update it, you're safe. But this is an actively exploited vulnerability. Something else going on here is if you use the Header Footer plugin from WP code, this is a plugin it's been around forever and ever. It has millions of installed users. For the second time this year that plugin the insert header and footer plugin from WP code has a vulnerability. This is a cross site forgery request, which basically you know, if you're a logged in user and you click on a link, then that can cause some problems. If that if you get this you know hijacked link that a hacker would provide over a million users are affected and that's bad deal. It could allow actually deletion of files on the site. So if you're using the WP code Header Footer plugin, make sure you are up to date it is patched in the latest version. All right, let's talk a little bit about patch stack. I think security started using patch stack several months ago to power our vulnerability scan. It is I think much better than what we were using before. And patch stack has now opened a vulnerability reporting program for plugins. This is an opt in pro program that plugin and theme developers can join and basically what they're doing, they're offering a minimum viable disclosure program for developers making it easier for folks to report vulnerabilities so developers can join the program the program for free, and they as a result can you know display a logo or you know, whatever, we're committed to security. And if they developers who are participating can they're going to be given help as they're identifying and fixing issues more efficiently. It's a really good program for everybody involved. Plugins with us patch that badge that says hey, we're part of this program is more attractive, more trustworthy to users, and security researchers, people who are just you know, doing research and trying to find those vulnerabilities can be incentivized through a bounty pool. So if you find a vulnerability, you get paid for it. So that's a really good thing to increase, increase security and WordPress, but also we see those numbers ticking up every month of the number of vulnerabilities that are being found. And that's because they're being incentivized, and ultimately that is a good thing. So again, free to join and they can choose to offer additional bounty to security researchers. And this is the platform that we're using for our theme security Pro. So good stuff. All right. Let's talk about a very, very good subject next, and that is what Google is calling the beginning of the end of the password. So this month, Google began rolling out pass keys as a more secure alternative to passwords. Now, we've been talking about this here on iThemes Training since last year, when I think security pro began it became the very first WordPress security plugin to offer pass keys. It was a little clunky at the beginning. It's gotten better and better. And just like Timothy said in that webinar back the end of last summer. This is a brand new technology it's going to be especially around summer of 2023. We're there now. You're going to see this rolled out by major players like Google and Apple and your bank. And all these other institutions. And it's going to become more and more commonplace. So within the next several months, we'll start to see past keys becoming more and more popular. So this is something if you're not familiar with the subject of past keys, do some reading about this because it's finally going to like they say here, it's the beginning of the end of the password passwords are just horrible. You know, somebody mentioned the chat a minute ago talking about LastPass. Like it's just it's so hard to get non technical users to use a unique complex, a complex unique password on every site. It's just people don't do it. Pass keys are a solution to that. It's a customized login that once you authenticate once it matches your device and user it makes it where it's much easier to log in. So passkey they're supported by Chrome and Android. It's working on iOS as well as services like DocuSign and Pay Pal are already using it. So maybe it actually maybe you've seen that if you've had a DocuSign process go through or if you're using PayPal, you've already seen probably how passkey is not necessarily called that. But this whole process of now we're linking you with your device. And here's the unique thing and it just sort of passes through. That's your past keys and they're starting to work. So if you're a Google account user, you can try out pass keys at g.co/past keys. I just give it a try. I pass keys are set as currently as an additional option for sign in as traditional passwords and two FA do continue to work. But yes, they will eventually replace two factor authentication in the future at some point. Now this is probably a years long process to transition from passwords in the past keys but it's happening and that's a really good thing. And yes, Apple software Apple was one of the has been an early supporter of past keys. works great on iOS and Mac. Here's how this is Google's little video here of how it works. So signing in. Do I want you to pass key Yep, and I'm gonna verify biometrically if you're on a phone it's really cool. And you're logged in. It works really well. Works really well. And Beth is asking about public computers. That's a little more complicated. But yeah, you'd have to go through additional steps. Now, just when you're happy with Google for rolling out past keys to you know a Gmail users are going to get used to using these it's going to start to really bring people into this new this new world of password less logins and how great is that going to be? Before you start liking Google too much. Here's our next story, which is these new top level domains that Google has introduced. So Google has introduced eight new TLDs. Two of them are dot zip and dot mov. That's a problem. The zip and mov top level domains are frequently used to designate files right? And security professionals are worried that these new TLDs might cause confusion like you, somebody sends you a spam email and it's like, go to your photos dot zip or whatever. And that's actually it's not a file. It's actually a website that can start to exploit so this just sounds like a terrible idea to me. I don't even I don't know. Chris and I were talking about this the other day as I get there, I guess it's just the money. They want the 10 bucks a year for the domain or something, but it's just, this just does not seem like a good idea. But it's out there and this is something you might want to let your clients know about.
All right, while on the subject of hackers and scammers, if you're a key pass user, the KeePass Password Manager has a problem that all users of KeePass right now are at risk of having their master password stolen unless you specifically update it to the beta version. So a security researcher has discovered the vulnerability and created a proof of concept tool that extracts almost your entire master password even when key paths is locked or closed. Now that would have to be that you do would have to have physical access to your machine like through a malware infection. But let's say you know you get some malware you have KeePass installed that malware can snatch almost your entire password where there's only a few additional digits that a password cracker would have to guess and that would happen very very quickly. So this is not good. KeePass is working on rolling out the fix the full fix that probably that won't happen until June or July of this year. There is a beta version available that you can download from the KeePass website but you do have to know about it, go get it go download it and realize it's beta. So things might be a little sketchy. KeePass in the meantime is advising users to avoid downloading apps or opening files from unknown sources, visiting only trustworthy websites and using antivirus software to protect their systems. So if you are a key past user, be aware. All right, let's move into some news from solid WP. That's us that typings will be again if you're just joining us i iThemes of course is becoming solid WP will be making that transition over the next several months. I iThemes Training will become solid Academy and we're really excited about that. One of the first things I'd like to talk about this month under the solid banner is a new user verification option. And I think security pro so as past keys are rolling out. We've mentioned earlier that I think security pro the first WordPress security plugins implement pass keys. The way browsers are handling past keys has changed a little bit and so our settings have changed. So the new version of I themes security 7.3 dot four offers more control over how past keys work with your WordPress login. And so because all platforms don't support past keys in the same way that could create some confusion for people. So I think security has added a new option. In the password list login section underpass keys to let you decide how you want this to work. So right here in this area, you can say pass keys are preferred or you're going to require pass keys on the website. And then you have the option of you know how do you want this to, you know, fall down like you can create a number of different password list options like the magic link or you know, just just as it has before. So this is a great little feature that we'll get Timothy on pretty soon to explain and walk us through how this all works. So good stuff. All right, the June premium event for I iThemes Training is now on the calendar. This is our Google Local boot camp with my friend Trisha Clements. Trisha all she does in your your biz watchdog her business is Google Local. She is a pro on this. She's been doing it for years, and I forgot to update the titles on this on this as well all of the details about the event. So completely missed that but we'll be talking about Google Local for two days. Sorry about that. And if you want to take a look, let me just pull up the event page here on the on the training site. Here's the actual event link. Yeah, miss this one. I'm going to drop the link in the chat. Sorry about that, folks. And here is the Google local events where we'll be talking two days on setting up your local SEO for success. How does it all work basically, and then day two, how to increase your recurring revenue with local SEO. So Trisha is going to show us not only how local SEO works, but how to leverage it as a service for clients. And that's gonna be four hours of excellent training. And that is again June 27, and 28th of 2023. That's gonna be a lot of fun coming up. Some other things happening on I iThemes Training. Tomorrow we have a webinar with a couple of folks from LearnDash. So if you're a LearnDash user, they've just added on some really cool features with course notes Gradebook groups. So if you're a LearnDash user or you want to start offering LMS services to your clients, check out that webinar tomorrow, one o'clock central office hours on Thursday as usual for members. There will be no live streams the week of May 29. I'm gonna be on vacation, but I'll be back on June the sixth for plugin roundup and of course office hours that week as well. All right, let's get on to some news from plugins. several interesting things have happened. So celebrate the 20th anniversary of the WordPress core. Pascale Bircher, who was a WordPress Core committer has created the periodic table of WordPress plugins. Now he's done something like this in the past and he's updated it now for the 20th celebrated 20th anniversary celebration. It's a periodic table that showcases the 108 most popular free plugins on wordpress.org. So he's updated the chart from 10 years ago. It's interactive so you can click on the plugin elements and get some more information about each one. Over half the plugins have a million installs pardon me the lowest number on the on the chart 100 600,000 installs so here's what it looks like. It's a periodic table. And you can click on one of the elements a look there's redirection from John Godley, one of our favorite plugins here on iThemes Training. kind of poke around. It's pretty interesting, fun little tool and you can actually if you notice you can actually buy a poster for your wall with this on there. Isn't that fun? Yoast is right up here it is the number one plugin the most installed with Jetpack number two, a Kismet three elements or four and on down the list pretty interesting. Right? So that is available at plugin table.com. You can go check that out right now. Plugin table.com WooCommerce 7.7 was released a couple of weeks ago. It brings the multi channel marketing feature out of beta. There's a new marketing dashboard that lets you connect your WooCommerce site to additional sales channels like Google shop Amazon and eBay. Inventory Management from within your WooCommerce site is supported on every channel through which you sell which really makes WooCommerce competitive now with Shopify Plus, which does the same thing. They've also done some additional styling so that shopper notices can be made more consistent across your site pretty good stuff. Here's the new marketing dashboard you can see where all you can add Google Pinterest Tiktok Amazon, eBay Walmart integration so lots of different channels that you now have access to in the marketing dashboard of WooCommerce. Some of the things WooCommerce SEVEN, SEVEN included were in expanded styling of options for product SKU product price product image, new product reviews blog if you're designing your product page with blocks, and a new expanded mini cart block in customizations, pretty good stuff there and WooCommerce seven seven it was a non breaking release, as most of them lately have been meaning it should be fully backwards compatible with everything that happened before. All right here's another fun little project that came up and it's called the WP builders Fight Club. Now those of you that are longtime I themes people probably recognize the name Sridhar kata calm. Sridhar was a tech support guru and I themes back in the olden days back in the early early days of AI iThemes he's a really great guy, brilliant WordPress implementer. Very, very helpful as well. Anyway, Sridhar and some folks have gotten together to put together the WordPress builders Fight Club. And it's the basic idea is this let's build the same page on multiple page builder platforms and see what they do, like see how they measure up against each other. And yeah, here's what it looks like. So it's out there now here's the first round you'll see. There's the Beaver Builder and you can see what the page weight is, and that sort of thing for each of the options. Pretty cool. Loops. Of course, the first rule of the repeat builders Fight Club as you don't talk about fight club. Also advanced this slide too quickly, but you can see how it's writing these things. With Tom sighs page size, GT metrics, score and so forth and get the rankings of your favorite builder pretty cool stuff. So this is at WP builders fight club.org So check that out. That's a fun little project to follow. I think all right, let's move into some AI news. Wow, there's some AI news this month. This is going to continue to be a growing section of the news roundup and probably if I'm honest, my favorite section. So WordPress contributors are doing a lot of research right now to ensure that WordPress as a platform is ready for AI powered extensions. Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress advised that we should be spending time leveraging AI for productivity and capability improvements in 2023. We're going to just like we mentioned earlier there you're going to see developers plugging in API, plugging in AI API's into their plugins to make things more usable.
Matt says that open source and AI are two mega trends of the future that will complement each other certainly some WordPress contributors. Like our own Matt Cromwell from stellar WP suggests that AI really ought to be done at the plugin level. I think I agree with him on that. Rather than adding it to core WordPress. You'd have to really convince me that it should go into core that's really more of a plug in feature but one of the core leads and McCarthy shared a video of how AI integrated into Gutenberg command center that we talked about before might be able to work with AI and some suggested design. So as you remember, back in the Gutenberg section, we talked about that new command center that's been added. And I mentioned at that point, this could be a way to get AI working better with WordPress. And here is a proof of concept of what that could look like. Wait until you see this. So here's a page on the website called What makes a pizza Neapolitan. Show me some design options for this page. So it's a contextual command. Boom. It's basic, but this is the kind of thing that AI could do inside of WordPress. Is that not just amazing? We're on just the the very tippy tip of the this whole AI explosion into WordPress and it is going to make things very, very interesting for the months to come. All right, open AI is going to release an open source model this year. So Matt said open source and AI are two very compatible technology that's really going to pave the way of the future. And open AI is open sourcing which is really, really interesting. So later this year open ai ai is going to release this open source model that comes amidst pressure from meta the company behind Facebook, which released several open source models earlier this year. This will be the first open source model from open AI since 2019. Probably won't be nearly as sophisticated of a large language model as the GPT is, but it will be open source nonetheless. Something else interesting that open AI is doing chat GPT now has an iPhone app, so you can open it. If you have an iPhone, open it up right now in your app store. You can download the chat GPT app, it's right there. It's free. The free version is built on 3.5. And if you have chat GPT Plus, you can get access to GPT four just like you can in the browser. So if you log in with your same user ID, it's going to sync your chat history back and forth. But one of the really cool things about it is that the app allows you to talk using open AI speech recognition system which is called whisper so right now it only works with iOS 16.1 and later and I phone eight and newer and Android app is planned but not yet available. Yeah, it's it's gonna be pretty interesting. So they are by the way, and there's some stories about this how Be careful because they are listening to what you say. So they are using your input to better train the AI we've known that really about open AI from the beginning there. They're making the AI better based on the input that we give it. So pretty cool. Not to be outdone, Microsoft is also rolling out new features for Bing chat. This is the GPT integration with Microsoft Bing and with the Edge browser from Microsoft. Microsoft has introduced several new features to Bing chat, including chat history, a new mobile widget conversations across platforms, multilingual SwiftKey and Bing edge, a big edge updates. This is going to help make Bing chat a lot more search friendly. And user friendly and give you better answers. The Microsoft Edge browser by the way, if you haven't played with this yet, just download edge either for Mac or PC and use the little chat feature. It's kind of slow but it's getting better. And it really gives pretty good results based on the context that you're browsing in right there. works on desktop and mobile, and you no longer now have to be logged into a Microsoft account. But if you're not logged in, you only get five chats per session. But pretty cool. This is what it looks like. This might be a little bit of visual overwhelm. But here this is a voice command right a joke for my five year old about an octopus. So what do you call an octopus? It likes to bake and octopi but a bump. But there it is, right? It's voice command. Here's another one, what wine pairs well with this recipe so there's a great example of a contextual search. We've got this recipe up for this tofu, whatever it was, and you put a give me a wine that pairs with this. And it just right away gives you the answer pretty cool. Here's another one. I'm looking at this product and I highlight textured grip and send that to chat. And it gives me some more information. What do you want? To do with that? Explain it. Pretty cool. Ready? Cool. So these are some of the ways that Microsoft is leveraging the GPT AI into its Bing browsing experience. And we're only going to see this getting better across the board. Google is also adding generative searching with its search as well. Access to what they're calling search generative experience. SGA is available on a Google Labs waiting list. The new search displays an AI generated answer above search text results so this is gonna throw another wrench into our SEO options. And we do have the SEO bootcamp that is coming up or two SEO trainings that are coming up with Lindsey Halsey. That's going to be July and August of this year. We'll have that information out pretty soon. I will certainly get Lindsay to weigh in on how AI is affecting search. So with the Google S G Google's can answer follow up questions to refine their query. And Google it's very careful about topics that are what they call the Y and Y l Your Money Your Life topics like health weight loss, recipes, finance, those sorts of things. So interesting. It's gonna here's what it looks like, by the way, Bluetooth speaker for a pool party. There's our results and right here's our AI boom. It just gives some more things, asking a follow up questions. So this is just the first rollout of how this is going to look. And Google will of course refine this as we go. Pretty interesting. The world is changing folks all around us. The WordPress agency human may they're an enterprise WordPress agency, they are organizing the first ever AI for WordPress online conference this Thursday. So two days from now. i It's a free conference. You can just take a look here at this AP tavern article or go to human made.com The conference is going to feature demos of AI projects by human nature and other industry leaders human made has been doing a lot with WordPress AI and they just want to show some of that. So it's going to showcase the practical applications of AI technology. They've got a guide 76 ways AI could transform WordPress that you can download for free at their site as well. Here's what a video that they showed of something they're playing around with here in the block editor. Just like a chat GPT prompt write a poem at WordPress. Yeah. We're gonna stop that and say, Wait, no, I meant to do it in French. And there it goes. Right. So there's a lot of these concepts that are debuting in these sorts of videos of how AI and WordPress could work together. We're gonna see these things happening. They're going to be real time. Just in the next few months, I would imagine we'll start to see these sorts of things directly right there in the block editor. Pretty cool. Few more bits of AI news. Here's five good ways to write for humans using AI tools from the I iThemes. Blog. It's really a good article there. Chat GPT can now control robots from Boston Dynamics. That's a little scary for me, but it's interesting to show how Boston Dynamics team has connected the open AI API. And now, chat GPT can control robots. A great article on Yoast? Are we digging our own hole with generative AI that's is a really good article that I would recommend that you read. And also I'm gonna balance all this out with if you're, if you're nervous about AI and your you know, the work you're doing with clients. This is a great tweet from Dr. Myelin mullite Milanovich. To replace programs with AI clients will need to accurately describe what they want. were safe. Now, you know there's some truth to that, to be honest, AI is all about the prompt, at least today. There you go. Alright, let's move into some other news. This is stuff that didn't fit anywhere else. A great little bit of news from Google. They're gonna start deactivated inactive accounts after two years. They've introduced a policy of after two years of inactivity, they're going to start deleting accounts, that's going to prevent spam cut costs. inactivity is defined as a lack of sign ins or Android check ins or subscriptions. If you have a business account with a monthly fee, that doesn't count, you have to at least sign in once every two years. It's pretty low bar to meet. But certainly you can imagine, I mean, how many Gmail accounts are out there that people created and then never logged into again, right? They're going to clean house. Pretty good idea. That's going to start in December of this year. They're going to send multiple notifications to those email addresses. That people never log into. So here you go.
All right. The WordPress 2022 annual survey results are in they did not get a lot of response to this. The response was way down on the 800 contributors globally. To the survey, only 26% actually completed the survey. Even though they reduced the number of questions down to a third of what it was the year before, so they just didn't get a lot of traction on this one for some reason. It reveals more blocks and new site editor use is as expected with the new default block theme 68% learned about WordPress last year 48% taught others 55% built sites. WordPress users prefer it for being open source 62% flexible, low risk cost effective and reputable. Most respondents rarely use other CMS says we're all WordPress and 21% Don't use are only 21%. We should say don't use the top 20 WordPress plugins. 68% of the respondents say WordPress equals or outperforms others. They like its ease of use flexibility plugins, only 20% find nothing frustrated. I love the way they worded this because what you could say is 80% of people find something about WordPress frustrating, which is true and 30% struggle with site editing Gutenberg. I wonder about that because I think it's probably higher 64% have positive contributor experiences 24% neutral. Anyway, there's more if you want to read the whole thing right there, this link right there. All right. Here's a little interesting tidbit. There's never really been a WordPress certification. Until now. The folks that certified WP have created a WordPress management and design credential. So this is a credential aimed at helping job seekers demonstrate their skills to potential employers cost $250 includes three courses toward mastering front end development. Items in the beginner and intermediate levels describe a WordPress power user basically. So certification also includes skills like navigating the admin panel hosting, web optimization and more. It's 110 questions over three levels as well as a practical component. You don't have to take the courses to be eligible for the exam. If you just want to pay 150 bucks and get certified. You probably do that. So you know maybe good thing and decide if you want that or not pretty interesting. The WordPress accessibility day call for speakers is open. So if you're doing accessibility things and you'd like to speak, you can do that at 2020 three.wp accessibility dot day or just download the slides and click the link. So they're looking for speakers now that are speaking or focused on specific talks over general overviews. There is a small honorarium involved which is kind of nice. You have until June 11. To submit you'll be notified by the end of the month. Few acquisitions that have happened This is a big one WishList Member one of the OG membership plugins of WordPress has been acquired by member press. Also WC vendors has been acquired by Ryan Mara. And last of all, Amelia capital, which is the investment company run by the founders of Yoast SEO has invested in WP CS, which is a cloud service that specializes in SAS and SAS solutions. So that's kind of interesting to see what Yost and the team and Amelia are going to do with that little hosting platform All right, let's move to news that's worth a look. Some things we ran across that were interesting. Here's a great article at Daily Mail UK website. How weak is your password? You will be surprised how the advancements in processing power and AI have allowed bad actors to guess passwords up to 10 characters almost instantly. This is something I talked about with the LastPass hack earlier or earlier last year, middle of the year whenever that happened last year. It's been a while it seems like anyway you know, great your Master Password is out there. And sure right now it's 20 characters or 15 characters. And as of today, it might take 1000 years to get that password but processing power continues to increase advances in AI. The time it takes to get that master password is low. That's what I was saying way back then. And there's a great article here if you want to dig into that. Here's another great one. We're gonna have a live stream about this pretty soon. How will Kadence AI change the way we build with WordPress so all I can say I haven't even seen it but Kathy Zant is just giddy about Kadence AI and how it's working in the block editor. She is so excited about how this is fleshing out those things that we just didn't know the examples of how AI is working in the block editor that's coming in Kadence AI and if you're a Kadence user you are going to love it. There's a great podcast episode on the official WordPress podcast. The WordPress Executive Director Josepha Hayden chum posts. He looks back at the last 20 years of WordPress and how the open source community has made WordPress what it is today. Also another look back on 20 years of WordPress and the impact of freelancers. That's you and me people do in WordPress with clients on the growth of WordPress on the WP minute podcast. All right, let's wrap up with some words some news from the WordPress community. We got a couple of upcoming US based word camps Buffalo New York is on May the sixth that already happened and then work camp Montclair, New Jersey is next month. So those are a couple of Montclair at least is coming up in June. Also the WordCamp us and the first word count Community Summit, which is the two days prior to WordCamp. US that's in Washington DC on that August 24th and 26 for WordCamp and then 22nd 23rd Where the Community Summit, you're gonna be there make sure you look me up because I'll be at both of those events. A couple of upcoming global work camps as well. We're at Camp Patton and Serbia at the end of an end of May. Where camp EU is coming up June 8 through 10 word camp ah goodness I'm gonna fumble that a Loyola is that right a Loyola city in the Philippines. July the eighth and we're camped Jinja Uganda in September. To help folks get to word camp master WP which is a resource site for WordPress professionals, has unveiled its guest travel grant program. So this is pretty cool to help underrepresented speakers from underrepresented groups get to word camps. So there's over $10,000 that is set aside for this. Each selected recipient will receive at least $1,000 toward travel expenses. Master WP is partnered with access to cart next as paid memberships pro the WP minute and unlimited WP for this grant program if you are from an underrepresented group that includes all sorts of groups that are underrepresented. The race based or if you're a female in tech, you should apply because you might well be get a grant to help you travel pretty cool stuff. Another bit of word camp news which I am interested to see how this develops the word camp central the WordPress community team has announced a significant shift in the purpose of word camps. So word camps now have the stated purpose of promoting innovation and adoption through training and networking for users, builders, designers and extenders of WordPress. Now the way this is going to flesh out is that it's not like work camps used to be come to our city and we're going to have tracks for content and for developers and for business people. It's going to be different now where the event format is going to be come and do this is going to be an event about SEO workshops, or it might be an unconference or a job fair or a networking event. So the whole way word camps are organized is going to they're just it's going to change. So we will see I don't know much more about this. There's not a whole lot of information out there. And it'll be interesting to see how this flushes out. The flagship word camps US Europe and Asia will remain the largest events very similar to the way they've been running. reactions have been mostly positive. A lot of concern over attracting diverse speakers, diverse audiences and keeping our community value. So we'll see how this flushes out. There's certainly been it's been harder for word camps to get going again post pandemic and I think this is an effort to stir the pot a little bit and get some excitement about word camps back happening. We mentioned earlier that WordPress accessibility Day is coming that is a 24 hour global events that is coming and you can register for that at WP accessibility dot day. The link is there in the chat that's going to wrap us up for today and the May 2023 WordPress news roundup. I am going to drop in once again the link to today's slides in the chat. If you came in a little bit late and you missed those. We'll have the replay up with the transcript and chat log after we wrap up today. About an hour from now. Well, thanks for hanging out with me for news roundup. We're back tomorrow with that LearnDash webinar for everybody. That's a free one, check comm check that out as well as the office hours for members on Thursday at one o'clock. Until then have a great rest of the day. We'll see you back here tomorrow on I iThemes Training where we go further together.
