All right, welcome, everybody. Glad you're here. As you're coming on in, pop open the chat say hello, tell us where you're logging in from today. The link to the slides is there. Just about to get captions connected and set up. Many things are spinning around as they should hear.
Right captions should be working now. Glad you're all here. Welcome, everybody. If you're just joining us, we've got about three minutes to go. It is news roundup today here on iThemes. Training. Good to see class from Arkansas, Dave from New Hampshire Ed from Sweden. Or Edie? Is it Edie or Ed Vern from West Virginia Doug from Toronto. Welcome, welcome. Hey, Stacey from Washington. Alright folks, just about two minutes to go. If you're just joining us, pop open the chat say hi, slide link is there waiting on you for all the things you'll see on your screen? Hey, Joe from Colorado. Edie or Edie? The first or the second option? That way? I'll remember it. First option, Eddie awesome. Glad everybody's here. We're just a couple of minutes out from getting started with this month's news roundup here on I iThemes. Training. Lots of news to talk about today. More slides than we've had in a while. Many, many things. If you're just joining us in zoom, pop up in the chat, say hi, tell us where you're logging in from today. We're gonna get started here in just a moment. Got a minute and a half to go
I hope it's not death by PowerPoint. Hopefully that's not the case. There's just lots to talk about right now. The release of WordPress six two is imminent. Hey, Shauna, welcome from Michigan. I'm from the other Birmingham down south here in Alabama. Welcome came from Sweden. Let's see Eddie. Yes. The replay link is correct. me just drop that link in once again. There it is. And as always, you can go back to the full library. If you're logged in. The full library is available where you can go back and rewatch anything. If you are not a member, I think you get the last 10 or 12 links that you can view something like that. Again, welcome everybody. We're about 30 seconds out from getting started. Welcome Ben from Sweden. If you're just joining us in zoom, open up the Zoom chat say hi, tell us where you're logging in from and you will also find the link to today's slides and the replay. Link will is there as well. If you want to share this or go back and rewatch. Yeah, yeah. And if you want your law if you're a member and you're logged into the training site, you the full library link is in the top and there's over 1000 webinars there. Yeah, lots of things. Lots of things. Cheerful i Well, I've had I had one extra cup of coffee this morning. So there you go. Alright, folks, it's time to start. Let me get the recording going and we will start news roundup Well, good afternoon, everybody and welcome to the March 2023 WordPress news roundup here on iThemes Training. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at iThemes Training and while we have a lot of news coming up this month, these news roundups happen once a month usually around the third Tuesday of the month, and we take a look at the news that's happened in the last 30 days in the WordPress world, particularly from the viewpoint of those of us that build and manage sites for clients. And we have a lot to talk about today. So let's just dive right in. If you are just joining us in zoom, I'm going to drop in the link to today's slides. That's everything that you see on the screen. Particularly important for this webinar because we have a lot of links in this slide deck. Everything we talked about is linked at the bottom. If you want to go and read the full story read more about all these things. Also the link is there for the replay, which you can share with others it's publicly available it will also have today's transcript and the chat log. Anything that happens there in the chat will show up there on the replay page as well. So with that, let's get started shall we with news from core, the release of WordPress 6.2 is imminent. It is one week from today. The the final beta drops today. And yeah, we're well underway. So full release is next Wednesday. The beta includes 292 enhancements, three and a 54. Bug fixes for the editor and more than 195 tickets. For WordPress core. Most of the changes in WordPress six to you are related to the block editor and the site editor formerly known as full site editing. And here's some of the top changes that you'll notice in WordPress 6.21 of the things if you are using a block theme then you will see that the site editor now is out of beta. So they have rolled this into it's a real live thing now. But again, this is for a block based theme. So if you're using for example Kadence you don't see the editor under Appearance, because Kadence is taking a different approach to full site editing been written or and the team had been very transparent about the fact that they've chosen not to follow core because for the moment because the core full site editing experience has been very much in the air over the last year. And Kadence has you know we've moved forward so we'll see how the Kadence team begins to integrate more with the way core is doing things. I think it'd be very simple for them going forward to do that. But you'll see if you're using a block based theme, the side editor is now out of beta. Something else you'll notice is that the whole template editing flow for block based themes has a much nicer flow than it did before. There's some interactions that make things look pretty cool, nice sliding interactions that you'll see something like this with their went. So things kind of move around and it's a nice editing experience. It feels very modern and powerful, which is pretty cool. Also, there are now colored blocks that denote which template parts you are editing if you're editing a block based theme template. You know we dealt with a block based theme for our word camp Birmingham site for that event that was last month here in Birmingham, Alabama. And it was kind of a hot mess. And a lot of these changes that are dropping in WordPress six to will are they're going to help a lot of the difficulties that we experienced in that using that block based theme for our word camp site. This little template box is going to help quite a bit. Also you see that some settings and styles are now in sub panels. So you have this sort of tabbed approach over in that right sidebar so that rather than having lots of different blocks, they're sort of nested within these these tabs and sub panels, which is really nice. Now they've also added custom CSS to the sidebar menu. So custom CSS used to be part of the customizer. And if you're using a block base theme with the site editor, the customizer of course goes away. So there wasn't an easy way to get custom CSS into your site. Now that's actually come back in a sidebar panel within the editor, so you can drop in that additional CSS which is a very welcome change. Also, navigation menus are much easier to create and manage many of these changes if you've been watching the news roundup for the last several months. These are the changes in Gutenberg, right. So in the Gutenberg plugin, we've been covering all these little additions. And of course, when the next major core release comes, they take all of this development that's happened in the Gutenberg plugin, and roll that into core. So it's going to be nice to see these very powerful and welcome changes that have previously been only available in the Gutenberg plugin. Come right on into the core block editor going forward. There's also now the style book. So clicking that style icon at the top allows all these style changes that you could do globally. Now again, Kadence has had something very similar to this for quite a while. This is an implementation similar to the way you know when you change the Kadence global color theme. It affects all of your blocks which is super cool. This is a core feature that is similar to that and it's called style book. Something else we actually covered this last month as part of the Gutenberg change, the ability to copy and paste styles between blocks. So right there in that context menu or kebab menu as some people like to call it. You can copy right there copy and paste styles. from block to block which is really nice, very helpful. If you want to you know it saves you a bunch of clicks and having to replicate the styles. Something else that's nice that's been added is that classic widgets. Of course widgets have gone away and they are now moved into blocks block based widgets. But if you have classic widgets, they are now usable as template parts within block themes. So again, this is a really nice way to move forward into get some of the the older features of WordPress are still able to be used with newer versions and block themes. That's kind of nice. They've also added a distraction free mode for content creation, which is nice as something else a small change but one that you might actually use quite a bit is that there's now a download link right there in the media library in the list view. There'll be the link to download the file directly so it's kinda curious why this hasn't been added in WordPress core before now. But it hasn't. It's just one of those features that once you see you're thinking, wow, that's a great idea. I wish we had that before but this will let you immediately download that file straight from the media library. Right down to your local computer.
Something else that's really nice and WordPress six two we've been we've talked about this a little bit in previous news roundups and that is the integration with open verse. Now it was back in 2021 that automatic acquired the Creative Commons search and that kind of took over management of the Creative Commons search. Now this is 100 hundreds of millions of photos, audio bits, video bits that are out there they are, they are free to use. Some might require attribution but they're out there free mediate Library Search, and that is now with WordPress six two going to be integrated within core WordPress right within the media library itself. You'll be able to search all of the open verse assets now that is really cool because frequently we'll add a plugin to client sites to attach them to open source libraries like Pixabay or pixels or something like that. This attaches open verse directly within core WordPress. Now, earlier versions you may have seen this new story the past few weeks. Earlier versions of this open verse integration only hotlinked the image which was a little crazy. In other words, if you selected this image in the open verse search, it wouldn't actually pull the image into your media library, it would only link it to the external asset. And that's problematic for a number of reasons like what if that asset goes away or whatever. Now the version that will be included in WordPress six to actually does bring that media asset into your media library. Here's how it looks. Here's a an image block. We're going to add right there and now we go to Open verse and look there's our items. We can click it, boom, there it is. And this just demonstrates that it does actually live right there in the media library once it's downloaded. So that's pretty cool. But going to be a nice feature for folks going forward, I think. So we are right on track with the WordPress 60 roadmap. The release candidate three drops today with a dry run March 27. And then the final release on March 28. One week from today pretty cool. Now, we aren't as we've had the last several releases of WordPress we will have our WordPress six to launch event here on iThemes Training. It'll be presented by our own Timothy Jacobs. Who is the lead developer for I think security. He's also a WordPress Core committer and he is on the team that maintains the WordPress REST API. All that to say Timothy is very well connected in the core community and one of these unicorn type people who is both a Timothy is both a brilliant developer and has the really unique ability to explain things in a way that anybody can understand. So he's a great teacher and Timothy will be presenting our WordPress six.to launch event that is going to be April the fifth at 1pm Central time, you can sign up at this link right below or just go to the iThemes Training site. And you'll find that webinar they're ready to register for that's coming up April the fifth one o'clock central time. We just got that on the calendar this morning. All right. There's a proposal that has come out to change the process for merging Gutenberg features into core now basically the way that the core process works, let's just go back to the roadmap here. When we get to beta one, it's a feature freeze, meaning that no more features are going to be added into the core release after that point. So you can see it's about I mean nearly two months, like at least six weeks, to six to eight weeks after the feature freeze is when the actual release is is dropped. Now the reason for that is that things have full testing. The problem with that is that my goodness, there have been lots of really nice additions to the Gutenberg plugin that have happened in the last two months. And right now they're frozen out because the the last version that will be incorporated into core was whatever was present at or before February the seventh. So the new proposal says Gutenberg is special. It's, you know, it is developed by people that are well integrated with the WordPress community. So we're gonna give Gutenberg a pass on you know, we're going to add features of Gutenberg past the feature freeze. So the feature branch will be merged into core during the second beta instead of related waiting until the next major core release. So beta two that's going to give it you know, an extra week or two after we extra week or two after the feature free so that gets more Gutenberg features into core at the time. It's received mostly positive feedback. We'll see what actually shakes out there. All right. There's another proposal that has come out from the WordPress themes team. And that is a desire to create a community themes initiative. In other words, there was a goal last year that there would be 500 block based themes in the WordPress theme directory and they hit 247. So they got about half as many block based themes last year as they wanted. So the goal of this proposal from Maggie Cabrera who was an automatic sponsored core contributor, is hey, let's put together a group of people who are going to build block themes all year long. Just like the way the default themes are built, so there'll be a new community themes section added to the theme directory to highlight a curated list of block themes. Great, so that get more block things out. That's good for everybody. Ah, something else that has happened is that the WordPress default themes, I have been updated to serve Google Fonts locally. So default themes later have or that had been dropped after 2017. I think 2019 was the next one. Is that right? Yeah, I don't think there's a 2018 theme. I could be wrong about that. Anyway. The bottom line here is, is that the default themes from 2012 to 2017. We're still grabbing Google fonts from the Google CDN. And of course, that's problematic if you are in a geographic area that has legislated privacy restrictions, like GDPR. So this was a move that was made because of that German court case in which a website owner was fined for violating GDPR because they were using Google fonts. And a group of contributors has said, Okay, we're gonna go back and update all the default themes from 2012 to 2017. That we're pulling in Google Fonts. Now those themes, bundle those fonts locally, which that's a good thing. This, by the way, could create some issues with you've done something weird with the stylesheet and there's dev notes about that on wordpress.org. So if you have or you support any sites that are based on one of these default themes, make sure before you update it next, that you that your fonts are okay, and that you may have to make some stylesheet changes as a result.
All right. Let's turn the page and talk about the latest releases of Gutenberg Gutenberg 15.2 dropped back on February 22. This was a feature that focused on editing templates and template parts. It's really good. So they've added the ability to add revisions to templates. Before like you change it. It's forever there wasn't a way to rollback unless you rolled back a database backup. Now the core WordPress feature of revisions, which is super helpful has been added to templates and template parts. That is a really, really good thing. You'll find that here in the sidebar. There's now a revisions area where you can roll back changes if you're editing templates in the site editor. They've also made some enhancements to the navigation in the site editor itself. So just the easier to get around and you see some things happening over here. Now it's pretty cool. Templates and then you can look at all your templates. It's a very intuitive menu. And if I want to edit I just click the button and I can edit that template. Really nice and easy to use. All that's full site editing, changes. Alright, Gutenberg 15.3, was released on March the 13th. They focused on tightening up that site editing experience. It's gotten a number of enhancements, redesigning the whole site editor to bring it more centerstage and so there's just it's been cleaned up a bit and some additional animation has been added pretty nice. They've also added a new time to read block that is available in the site editor to drop in something like this here based on the average reading speed of a particular user. So that's kinda nice. They've also added a global duotone filter now WordPress Core is in love with do towns for whatever reason, you know, it's a design. It's a very popular design trend these days. It is not going to be available globally. And so they're not locked to a particular theme or a variation of a theme. All this stuff moves into the global WordPress. There you have it. So that's the last release of Gutenberg, a lot of focus has been on making sure that all the previous features of Gutenberg are ready for court merge. So not a ton of updates in the Gutenberg plugin over the last two releases. Let's turn the page and start talking about security. We have a lot of security news this month. Wow, the numbers are huge. So if you like me had been seeing more than the number the average number of security vulnerability emails. This is why the number of plugin vulnerabilities is tip is about double what we normally have in the number of vulnerabilities that are still active or the plugin has been closed is about five times more than normal. So we usually have about 30 plugins that are in the red right here. This this month, there's 150 So wow, that is quite a bit. So good news, I think security Pro is on the case. And now using that patch stack integration that we talked about last month, we've replaced the WP scan vulnerability scan with now patch stack integration. That is just a little bit better. And it's going to provide some additional really cool features that we'll roll out in the next few months that I think you're all going to absolutely enjoy. I think security pro of course scans your site twice a day for vulnerabilities. That's even in the free version twice a day it will scan your site for vulnerabilities, any vulnerable themes or plugins that are in the patch stack list. And if you have the Pro version, if that a patch for that vulnerability is available, I think security Pro will automatically apply that patch before you even have to do anything so it keeps you protected without you having to click a single button. Super cool. Now here's the thing. Normally I read through the list of 30 or so plugins that are currently vulnerable and or closed in this month. There's 148 of them so I am not going I will be here for the rest of the hour. If I try to reorder these so what I'm going to do, if you have the slides, this is for you I would suggest that you go through and look at all of these this list and just see if any of these jump out to you as plugins that you currently have on your site. If they're in this red list, they are vulnerable and close they should be deleted from your site, because there is no current fix available and my goodness, there are so many logins this month. They're still coming young. Yeah. So lots of vulnerabilities this month. Make sure you stay on the case when it comes to monitoring your websites for security. Alright, our friends at patch stack have published their state of WordPress security earlier this month. This is a really great read. By the way. This bottom link I would suggest that you take a look at that if you're involved in security and we're securing your WordPress site of your clients WordPress sites. Patch stack has reported three times more security bugs in plugins in 2022 or 328% increase in security bugs reported 4500 confirmed security bugs in the in our database compared to 1382 in 2021. The majority of these bugs are found in plugins. 93% of bugs were found in plugins followed by themes and then just a very small percentage in WordPress Core. And most of them were medium severity, which is both good and bad. I mean medium severity is certainly nothing to play around with. But we did see a drop in the number of high and critical severity, brief risks of vulnerabilities last year. So that is a good thing. All right. I'm following up on this last past story and we've been talking about this issue now for several months here on iThemes Training LastPass has completed its internal investigation into the big 2022 security incident. Yeah, they have they finished that up. This past month. LastPass was hacked due to a keylogger that was installed on an employee's home computer hackers as a result of that were able to gain access to LastPass his password vault, the passwords, though your passwords were encrypted. The hackers were able to use the credentials to access some customers accounts the report said also we got neither incident was caused by any last past product defect they were very clear to say or unauthorized access, but by a vulnerability in third party software that the attacker exploited. So the threat actor stole last pass proprietary data customer data including system configurations API certificate an unencrypted last past customer data. It's a huge deal. We've covered this quite a bit. And if you want to read last passes take on it you can read their actual blog post right here. Or they say they've added new technologies to strengthen security and they're reviewing all their security policies. They said they should have communicated more frequently throughout the process. And they suggest that you enable two factor they've gone through and reset passwords and implemented other security measures. Yeah, all right. So LastPass is not alone. Also, a multi year breach has hijacked GoDaddy customers websites and accounts three serious security incident starting back in 2020, lasting through 2022 were carried out by the same intruder. Attackers gained unauthorized access to the company's managed WordPress hosting environment and that breach allowed them to potentially obtain emails, customer numbers and hashed passwords. The most recent breach was back in December 2022. They may also have access private SSL keys, which means for example, on an ecommerce site, they would be able to see that customer credit card data that was passed. Now GoDaddy has implemented security measures including resetting passwords, revoking SSL certificates and so forth. And they're working with law enforcement and external security incidents, experts to investigate the incident. Y'all this is just going to become more and more common. We're going to continue to see these security breaches. It's just the world we live in. It's so critical that you are implementing good security practices for your own business and encouraging your clients to do the same. I am just waiting for the day when pass keys become more and more prevalent hopefully this time by this time next year, there'll be just a household word for most of these high priority sites. But for the moment, we're still struggling with passwords and it's no fun at all. All right, let's look at some news from my theme, shall we and I have huge news to report. There is huge news from I iThemes. That is coming soon. And that's all I'm gonna say about that. Don't you love it?
Maybe next month, we can talk seriously about some huge news coming from Ai things. All right, but in the meantime, we can celebrate Kadence blocks. There's some the full Kadence block code base has been rewritten, modernized, cleaned and improved. They have updated build the build structure completely with component libraries. They've updated the React JavaScript structure. They have rebuilt completely how front end CSS is compiled and output. They have changed up the way they do SVG icons and the front end JavaScript to get rid of jQuery sliders. Yes, that's great. There's a completely new interface for block settings that's organized by tools and if you've not yet played with Kadence Blocks Three holy cow is it super cool, much, much easier to use. Lots of updated settings are now available. It is just beautiful and simple to use. I'll tell you I think it's the best take on blocks and the ability to build websites with blocks yet it is well thought through and well implemented. One of the cool things that I really like is the visual padding and margin that pops in as you make these changes. Absolutely love this. Oh my goodness, it is just so nice to use these features. You can also very easily move sections within a row layout now, like the row and layout, you can just flop things around moving. It's so much easier than trying to drag and drop or even using the ListView on the left hand side. It's just really nice to use. There's also a whole new host of row grid layout options that are here that you can also deal with in responsive viewports. So this makes web design at the responsive level. You have a lot more tools to do what you want to do. They also have added typed text in the advanced text blocks. So you have that little text typing animation, which is super cool. They've added more variables for settings based on viewpoint viewports really easy to use. Once you see how that all is set up and working. They've also changed responsive design using CSS clamp, and my goodness, it works really well. The ability to update to copy and paste block styles, view block defaults and it's also fully backwards compatible. They've done a great job with this and if you are a Kadence blocks user, you already know just how great Kadence Blocks Three is. All right, moving into some I iThemes Training news on next week is our March premium event led by yours truly, march 28 and 29th. That is next Tuesday and Wednesday from one to 3pm Central time we'll be doing the web foundations workshop. Day one we'll be talking Oh, these are the four topics that are just foundational to be able to build websites and work on the web. And they're also places where there's a lot of misconception and misunderstanding and things that we just tend to forget. So we're going to be dealing in day one best practices with understanding DNS and redirects day two, we're going to be talking about transactional email and optimizing images. These are four critical topics that you need to know and that we'll be dealing with that next week web foundations workshop, that is for members, the April premium event. We just got this book with Elizabeth pampelonne. Talk to members about this in our office hours. I think last week when we got this all nailed down April 25 and 26th. Again, one to 3pm each day Central Time. Day one is going to be about social media talking about selecting the right platform for profitability developing a social calendar, what and where to post and some tools to use. Day two. The first hour is going to focus on email marketing, building an opt in and a list. How to take a minimalist approach to an email campaign. The second hour is going to be focused on how do I take these things that we just learned in social media and email marketing and roll those up into a package to use with clients. So it's going to be a really good event next month here on I iThemes Training as well. Now those are for members only. And I'll tell you I iThemes Training is one of the best deals out there. You can sign up for a 30 day free trial that includes our for our premium event premium event each month, a weekly office hours with me where you can ask anything you'd like as well as the fly business transformation course training, which is one course each month that we do live here as well. It is $30 a month and you get a deal if you buy the year. It's a great, great deal and you get 30 days free trial as well. Coming up here on iThemes Training tomorrow. Don't miss this one. Paul gilsoul will be with us talking about regex so if you've ever wondered about those hieroglyphics and those regex expressions and you want to know how that all works, come learn for an hour tomorrow, march 22. It's a free webinar, talking about regex. demystifying the hieroglyphics Office Hours Thursday for members web foundations workshop is next week and office hours of course next week as well. Plug in Roundup is coming back April the fourth and then at WordPress 6.2 launch event on April the fifth. We always have it's usually three webinars a week, sometimes two, depending on the week. Well let's switch over to some plugin news, shall we? WooCommerce 7.5 was released one week ago. Three new blocks expand support for global styles. This is a version of WooCommerce that is fully backwards compatible with previous versions. 278 commits from 55 contributors and WooCommerce core and 170 commits from 28 contributors and WooCommerce blocks WooCommerce does a great job of having lots of folks involved in development and that's one of the great strengths of WooCommerce as a product. So here's what that new style book looks like. We talked about style book and WordPress 6.2. And one of those, one of those features that's going to be rolled out WooCommerce is not going to support that directly in from core and so you'll be able to change with a single click the styling within your WooCommerce shop as well which is pretty cool. They've also added a new store breadcrumb block, you see that right there. They've also added a block to show the product results count. So as you're building your pages in the site editor, you'll be able to drop in these blocks and make this look exactly like you want. And then of course the catalog sorting block where you can choose the Sort By criteria right there as well. All those are three separate blocks you can see right there that are now part of core WooCommerce they've also changed the way that the code in blocks work so that rather than there being hard coded CSS and each WooCommerce block, it now pulls in global See I got the global styles from within the site editor. So that's really good future proofing WooCommerce for all those things that are happening in WordPress core. Pretty cool.
All right. Let's talk about some news on the S E O front. We talked about this topic. At some point in the last month I tried to remember when that actually happened. I may have been just briefly last time in the news roundup, but there's a new criteria that's been added to Google's value concept that has for years been known as eat it is now eat. They've added an E so it's eat and what does this new E mean for S E O? Some people pronounce it double eat. I don't know. I'm gonna say eat because it just sounds like it sounds more fun to me. Anyway. This is the concept that's used by the human quality raters to evaluate Google's ranking systems. And yes, there are actually people who look at web pages and give a human quality rating to the web page and they use these four criteria. So for years the Eat criteria has been expertise, authority and trustworthiness. And they're a key factor in Google's search algorithm. So they've now added a new E which stands for experience and the experience refers to the user experience including PageSpeed, mobile friendliness and visual design. So I had somewhat arbitrary some of these things, but it's now all wrapped up into this eat formula to show you know which pages are designed well now, this seems a lot of times this sort of thing makes people nervous, like it's all going to change and maybe I'm going to lose rankings. But remember, the biggest thing about Google is they want to show content that is designed for and helpful to users. So if you are building sites the right way, none of this grey hat black hat SEO tactics, there's just none of that stuff. But you're building nice sites that load quickly and have good content that's always going to be rewarded by Google. Websites that prioritize user experience are likely to perform better than those that don't. And now that user experience is a key factor. We should still prioritize the whole thing, eat. So there you go. To help us evaluate our websites, there's now a new version of Google lighthouse. So you may be using Google lighthouse in their PageSpeed tools or underneath the chrome console where you can hit the lighthouse tab and get that lighthouse test run. There's now a new version of White House that's rolling out in called White House 10. It includes several new audits to help us out. So the old time to interactive metric, the T T I maybe that rings a bell if you've done any this sort of work has been removed, so time to interactive. It's not nearly as helpful anymore. And the 10% Wait that that feature or that that measurement used to hold has been moved to cumulative layout shift. So cumulative layout shift is now 25%. of the overall Lighthouse ranking score. Now I like that because one of the most frustrating things that I encounter, especially on a phone is going to some website that pops up in a search and it's like you start reading and then the whole layout changes. Isn't that frustrating? I hate it when that happens. And that's what this cumulative layout shift. Because I'm at the White House score, so largest Contentful paint, LCP and total blocking time are still the two highest factors. But here's that there's just a new way. What's it like in Lighthouse 10 There is a new performance budget audit, which allows developers to set a budget for their website resources and to track their performance. SEO audits provide developers with actionable insights. And so it will also include improvements to existing audits like Best Practices audit and so forth. So they've also introduced a new accessibility audit. That's a little more granular and helping to reveal some accessibility issues, which is fantastic. It's a new interface, and it's available now if you want to play around with Lighthouse 10. It's available in Google Canary. Now Google canary is like the ultra Bleeding Edge version, the developers version of Google Chrome, which you just download Google, download Google Canary and you'll find it you can download it and play with it. Lighthouse 10 is available there in the dev tools. It will be available in the console of Google the mainstream google chrome at Chrome 112, which is has not yet been released, but it should be in the coming weeks. So take a look at that. Ben is asking about chromium. It is no this is I don't think lighthouse is in Chromium at all. Chromium is the open source piece. Lighthouse is only included in Google's actual chrome product. As I understand it, I could be wrong about that. But it is you can play with it now and Google Canary and it will be available in mainstream chrome when Chrome 112 drops. Alright, let's move into the newest addition to our WordPress news roundup. And that is a I news AI it's all about AI this year. Chat G or pardon me. GPT. Four has just been released and is available for chat GPT Plus users. I've been playing around with it quite a bit. The main differences in GPT four vs. 3.5 more accurate, coherent and context aware responses. It's getting smarter. Basically, it's been designed with safety measures to improve the output. Get rid of the harmful or untruthful outputs. If you're like me and you've played around with chat GPT much you'll realize it kind of mix things up sometimes that are not correct. That's not good. It's also supposed to ultimately be a little faster right now. It's really slow, but they're gradually moving resources over to GPT four GPT four is also better at complex tasks. It will be available for developers to build applications to the API, which means you can probably expect a whole truckload of app sumo AI tools to come in, that are based on this GPT four language model. And of course, it's open for continuous improvement. Another bit of news in the AI front is Microsoft Edge. The latest version now includes that Bing chat bot that we've been talking about. So Microsoft has integrated a new AI chat bot based on open AI into the stable version of its edge browser. You can download it today and play with it. The chat bot is over in the sidebar. It's you can just ask a questions and it gives you answers. It's pretty intelligent does you know does reasonably well with answers. It's designed to understand the context in which the question is asked and to give you relevant information. It natural and conversational just like chat, GPT and Microsoft is going to work on getting it better and better. Here's a quick screenshot that I did have the bot right there click in the sidebar. Now the problem here is when I tested this it was slow as molasses. So watch this. I've asked what are the top features of WordPress, like to it takes seconds to actually start to answer this question. So we're just going to sit here for a little bit and just think, you know, we're just we're thinking, Oh, okay, just acknowledge that the search was made 10 or 15 seconds later. And now you can imagine this is going to get faster and it could also be that this is related to the current chat GPT outage that's been experienced over the last day. Okay, here comes the answer. It when I timed this earlier, it took about 30 seconds to get the question in and the answer provided so that's not great. We'll just say that that is not great. But you can expect this will improve dramatically as the resources become available. So there's a chat bot. It's pretty cool. I like it. And once it gets sped up and refined a bit I think it'll be very helpful and it might actually convince me to use Microsoft Edge more. I don't know I'm scared kind of scared to say that. We'll see a
great article on the WP meu blog about how AI will affect the WordPress industry. It suggests five key areas that we might see AI making an impact. Ai powered chatbot certainly are already in place and on many sites, AI driven content creation tools. We're seeing a lot of those happening, it's probably going to become more mainstream ai ai powered analytics tools. Those are out there as well if you search for them, AI powered security, I think we'll see more and more use of secure AI in dealing with bot attacks and so forth and of course AI integration with other technologies like virtual and augmented reality. Looks pretty interesting. Good, interesting little read there. If you want to go out and read that full article from the VPM you spend some common a couple of social comments I want to mention about AI that have happened over the last month this person right here Genevieve Roque Dexter says Elon Musk says that AI is one of the great biggest risks to civilization that needs to be regulated. he co founded open AI Elon Musk tweeted back in return. Open AI was created as an open source which is why I named it open AI a nonprofit company to serve as a counterweight to Google. But now it has become a closed source maximum profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft, not what I intended at all. So let's that's going to be interesting to see how this works itself out. We've covered how Microsoft has made a significant investment in open AI and you see they're using it in their browser already. Have to follow that. Something else this is probably the best take on counteracting AI fear that I've seen. This is a tweet from CJ Pomar, who is the founder of brainstorm force that brings us the Astra theme and the ultimate add ons pieces that revolve a lot of other plugins. Here's what CJ says, computers did not replace accountants. Instead, the accountants who used computers replaced those who did not. Similarly, AI will not replace anyone. Instead, the person who uses AI will replace those who do not. That is brilliant. I have not seen this thought summarized in such a succinct way. I'm 100% on board with this. I think he's exactly right. Here the little bits of AI news Adam priser has a great YouTube video if you've not seen this yet. I would suggest that you watch it. I didn't expect this when I taught jet chat GPT how to make a WordPress website. Pretty interesting how Adam priser creates a whole content structure for a website with Chet GPT. And here's just an example of how chat GPT can pass the US medical licensing exam and the bar. How about that? So, yeah. AI is everywhere and it will continue to be part of our lives. So we need to learn how to leverage it I suppose. All right, let's move into some other news. Other news, a really great article here from Karl Groves on his blog, understanding the cost of not being accessible if you deal with accessibility and you want some great ammunition for trying to help clients understand it. This is a blog that makes some really good points. Accessibility is not just about compliance with legal standards, but about creating a more inclusive and equitable society. Yeah. All right. There is a continual increase in website accessibility filings. From last year. So 2022 was another record setting year for the number of website accessibility lawsuits filed in federal court. They allege that plaintiffs with a disability could not use the websites because they were not designed to be accessible or work with assistive technologies and 2020 to 3200 plus lawsuits. That's a 12% increase over the last year. And you see this number is continuing to rise. So not many in 2017. It started to become an issue in 2018 and 19. And boom, boom, boom, it's increasing roughly 12% year over year. Since 2020. Most of these cases are being filed in New York because the federal court there is very open to accessibility lawsuits. New York courts have been more favorable towards plaintiffs, especially when the defendant is an online only business. And let's see how these things shake out. Whether online only businesses are covered by the ADEA remains unanswered by the Court of Appeals. We really need some legal guidance on this and it's not really out there. So the court cases that are happening right now are really creating the precedent for how accessibility will be ruled on in the future. By the way, those numbers do not include the many demand letters that are being sent out by law firms, especially in California, nor do they include any lawsuits filed in state courts around the country. Those are just federal numbers. Big Deal alright. Microsoft has bid farewell to Internet Explorer and I say don't let the door hit you in the E on the way out. Microsoft has announced that it's finally retiring its web browser Internet Explorer after 28 years of service. I remember using the first version of Internet Explorer way back when it was awesome. And now it's time for it to go. It was permanently disabled on February the 14th users can no longer access the browser. Microsoft has encouraged them to move over to Microsoft Edge which really y'all is a pretty decent browser All Things Considered. Ie US has continued to decline over the years. less than 2% of users used it in 2021. Part of Microsoft's efforts to focus on newer products and newer technologies. They'll continue to support Internet Explorer for enterprise customers who have like internal applications built on custom code for Internet Explorer. And it's also working to improve compatibility with legacy websites in Edge is an end of an era. Yeah, for sure. A lot of tech layoffs happening right now. GoDaddy has laid off 8% of its workforce and announced this back on February the second part of a wide trend and tech companies that is that experience growth during the pandemic but they're now cutting back the jobs that were gained. GoDaddy previously laid off around 10% of its workforce at the start of the pandemic. Not only GoDaddy, but also Digital Ocean has made a big staff cut 11% they're set to layoff about 200 people following a period of revenue growth. The move comes as they face increased competition from larger cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft and Google. They were exploring the possibility of an IPO but now they're going to focus on a cost reduction strategy to grow and of course DigitalOcean did require acquire cloudways A very popular WordPress host last fall. Beth has given us a link in the chat. Yeah, that Amazon yesterday and we missed that story. Amazon also had a big layoff and you can check that link there in the chat. I saw this story and it made me sad because my friend mica Epstein is gonna retire from the plugin team mica is one of the unsung heroes of WordPress. She is a delightful human being as well as a brilliant developer and her contribution to the WordPress community is one that many WordPress users do not realize. She has been a longtime member of the WordPress plugin team. She and just a handful of others are the ones who validate every plugin that's added to the WordPress plug in directory. She says it was a personal decision not related to the word to WordPress or the community. In her typical sense of humor in the article she says I'm not sick and I'm not dying. It's just time for me to do something else. Personal life stuff a lack of availability on her part and it's led to a delay in some Plugin Reviews as well. So the team the plugin team is working on onboarding documents and training materials to help new members to the team fill in the gaps. Truly if you have contributed as much as Mika has to the WordPress community she's going to be missed. And Shusher wish her luck and whatever she's going to focus on next. Thank you mica for years of great service. This is not WordPress related news but this I read this article this month and it made me laugh so I decided to put it into news roundup, because a man has now sued Buffalo Wild Wings, claiming that boneless wings are simply chicken nuggets. And he's right. I've been saying that for years. Buffalo Wild Wings is serving chicken nuggets and simply calling them boneless wings. The company has yet to issue a public response to the lawsuit. There you go. All right, let's look. Let's Yes, thank you Joe. We should call that lol news. There we go. Moving on to the WordPress acquisitions, watch WP 101 which is a really excellent service that provides WordPress tutorial videos has been acquired by awesome motives which also motive which is the WP beginner family of products. Member mouse a small membership plugin has been acquired by member press. And this is an interesting one that I think we'll see more news on as we go forward.
A plugin called Activity pub for WordPress has been acquired by automatic now activity Pub is something that was a plugin that allowed a WordPress blog to connect to what is known as the fediverse. The fediverse is a group of a websites called the federated websites like Mastodon so a lot of people have left Twitter and gone to Mastodon as a social network. And this plugin allows a WordPress site to join the fediverse so that blog post and so forth can be easily shared between federated websites. So this is something I think we'll see making an impact in the way WordPress sites connect to that whole network over there so it's gonna be interesting. We'll bring you more news on that as it as it materializes. This is a great piece of news I was happy to read equalised digital which is the company owned by our friend Amber Hines who's done our accessibility training here on iThemes Training. equalize digital has received pre seed funding from Aemilia capital, which is investment company owned by Yoast Volca and his wife Maria van racked. So congratulations to equalise digital team this is money that's going to go into the continued development of the accessibility checker plugin, which we recommend 100% for getting WordPress sites more accessible. All right, last little bit here news that is worth a look at things that we found that weren't that didn't really fit in any other place. Organizing WordCamp Asia and the challenges of diversity great little article here on how the event management team accommodated a diverse set of attendees for WordCamp Asia last month, a highlight of Matt Mullenweg q&a at WordCamp Asia David Bisset has given us a good overview of that 20 essential SEO tools for agencies Search Engine Journal has given us an interesting collection of the tools that people are using to do SEO so give that a quick look. There are some on there that you will absolutely recognize and some others that you might want to take a look at. Pretty neat stuff. Five WordPress designed WordPress web design trends for this month from Kadence WP great article on the Kadence blog. Take a look at that if you need some spur raishin Alright, let's press any events in here in the WordPress world. WordCamp Phoenix is this weekend March 24 and 25th I hate that I'm gonna miss that one. It's always a good camp. We're camp buffalo coming up May the sixth word camp Montclair New Jersey June the 24th. The WordPress Community Summit and work camp us is coming in August to Washington DC. And around the world word camp Asia was last month February 17 word camp Madrid there March 11 and 12 WordCamp Kerala in India at March the 25th WordCamp Merton in Switzerland in Merton, Switzerland is the end of March and then WordCamp Europe which will be in Athens is in June, so it's good to see WordCamps coming back. Hopefully by the end of this year, we'll be back to normal ish. Hopefully certainly by next year. We'll be back to a regular Word camp schedule. I can't wait to get back to Word camps. WordPress turns 20 This year, so let's party they say you can celebrate it with your community by organizing an event for WP 20 There's a step by step guide on how to organize a successful event at the WordPress news article that is linked there in the footer. So if you have a local meetup, where you just want to get some folks together, there's some guidelines and some help and ideas at this link to celebrate WordPress turning 20 All right, folks, that does it for this month news roundup here on iThemes Training a lot of things take a look at new version of WordPress on the horizon. I've just dropped once again, today's slides and the replay link there in the chat. We'll have the replay of this up in about an hour. That's gonna do it for us today. We are back tomorrow with that reg X webinar to learn something a stretch your brain just a little bit. I'm looking forward to that. So I've always wanted to understand more about reg X and that's going to be my chance to do so. Of course office hours on Thursday for members. I'll see you back here tomorrow for that reg X webinar one o'clock central time here on I iThemes Training, where we go further together.