Welcome, welcome everybody if you're in the states Happy Thanksgiving week. Hopefully you have a short week plan for yourself and your work.
I am getting our captions all set up
looks like zoom change the caption thing again, which is just delightful. Let's try this again
all right, that should be working you should folks should be seeing captions somewhere. can't quite find where they're appearing on my screen yet, but they should be working. Welcome, welcome, everybody. We're about three minutes out for getting started with the November 2022. WordPress news roundup here on iThemes Training. glad you've joined us today. We're just a few minutes from starting. The slides are there in the chat if you are just joining us. Let me re add those. The link to download those. There you are, you can follow along with us. These slides are also very important because they have the links and links are good, especially this week. A lot of things to click this week or this month. Let me just remind those of you did arrive iThemes Training or toolkit members that the office hours is tomorrow because of the Thanksgiving holiday here in the States. So make sure you are prepared for that regular time but tomorrow
we're just about two and a half minutes from getting started. If you're just joining us in zoom pop up in the chat say hi, tell us where you're logging in from. Good to see everybody Heather class, Doug Billy welcome everybody. British Columbia rainforest nice.
If you're just joining us, make sure you have the slides. Hey Ben from Sweden. The slides are there in the chat waiting on you if you'd like to download those and follow along you may do so.
got several interesting stories to talk about this month. Yeah, belly really welcome John. Good to see you welcome Stacy. John. I was just down in Orlando last week. Fairly near you know, near ish. And it was cold. It was like in the 50s in Orlando. I couldn't believe it. I grossly under did not pack appropriately. Yes winter 50 degree winter down in sunny Florida. Alright folks for about a minute and some change away from starting. If you're just joining us in zoom, pop up in that chat. Say hi tell us where you're logging in from the the slide link is there. Welcome Louis from French Riviera Peter from Connecticut. Good to see everybody got a lot of fun things to cover today.
Everybody gearing up for Black Friday. Hopefully if you have an E commerce clients, you've got those folks squared away and ready to go. We got a few Black Friday. things to talk about. Welcome Deb from Texas. Just about 30 seconds to go folks. glad you joined us. The link to the slide is in the chat if you'd like to grab those and follow along we are just about ready to begin all right. I've got three minutes after someone to start the recording officially and we'll get this underway. Well good afternoon everybody and welcome to the November 2022 WordPress news roundup here on iThemes Training. My name is Nathan Ingram. I am the host here at I iThemes Training and once a month we take a look across all the things that are happening in the WordPress world and bring you the news that we think is important for particularly for those of us who are building and managing websites. So we have a lot to talk about today because since last time we were together in a news roundup, we have had a major core release of WordPress. So let's start out with news from core shall we? i If you're just joining us in zoom make sure you've downloaded today's slides the link to which is there in the chat waiting on you if you're watching this on the replay, just click the Download handout button. And you'll have these slides are important on the news roundup, especially because all the links to all the things if you want to read more are right there and clickable in those slides. So we did just have a core WordPress major release on November the first that was WordPress 6.1. Misha, named for the Ukrainian born jazz pianist McHale Misha alperin. This was the third and final major release of WordPress in 2020. To 800 People from 60 countries and 179 identified companies contributed to WordPress 6.1, which is awesome. And the really neat statistic especially about this release is that about 35% of those people who contributed were first time contributors to WordPress which is awesome. And that has a much higher ratio than previous releases. So this is this is really great and what it means is more people are getting involved in the WordPress project and contributing their code magic to the core of WordPress to make it work better for all of us and that's really great. So currently WordPress powers 43% of websites worldwide pretty awesome. So one of the major things that was a big change here in WordPress 6.1 are notable performance improvements on 19 different core components, especially the WP query caching, which I'll talk about in just a minute. One thing that was pulled from WordPress six one was the web p by default, I converting images to the web P that the more economical size wise and speed wise web P format that's gonna be pushed to a feature plug in. We'll see that happening sometime next year. There were also lots of improvements that the big deal about WordPress 6.1 was continued improvements on the side editor and full side editing and the block editor. So you had a lot of new blocks like the Table of Contents block and upgrades to existing blocks for usability. All those had been added to the Gutenberg plugin over the last couple of months since the last major release of WordPress and that those are merged into core at each major release. So all the things you've seen us talking about on news roundup over the last several months, happening in the Gutenberg plugin. All those were merged into core in WordPress 6.1. Big improvements in the full site editing suite with more templates and block patterns and some changes to the way that whole system works. There's a new default block theme which is the 2023 theme. And of course additional ongoing accessibility improvements. As always, full details are in the official core Field Guide, which is available here at this link. Or if you'd like you can watch the WordPress 6.1 launch event which we did a couple of weeks ago with our own Timothy Jacobs who is the lead developer of I iThemes Security. He's also a core contributor and one of the maintainers of the REST API for WordPress core. That was a fantastic training event which you can rewatch at that link right there. Let's talk a little bit more about those improvements to the WP query. The performance team has done an incredible job to make all everything perform faster and WordPress 6.1. So the the real issue here is the caching of database query. So as you know probably WordPress stores all the text and all the you know all the data for arranging your pages and posts and custom posts and all that stuff in the database. Which means by default whenever a page or post is loaded, WordPress goes out to the database pulls that information back in and then displays it on the screen for the browser. database queries take time and especially on some pages, you can have many database query so the menu is a query the page is a query if you have multiple loops on the page, that's going to be a query as well. And so by caching those queries, and putting that information in the cache, it avoids WordPress having to go out to the database each time. So it's bypassing that whole slower database calls. And that really, really good WordPress site should run faster, especially when paired with an object cache like most WordPress caching plugins offer. Johnny Harris tweeted in WordPress 6.1 a massive improvement in database performance. database queries and WP query are now cached. A ticket I've been working on for five plus years now has been merged into core. This should result in billions of less repeated database queries. That is awesome. Now, if you watch the WordPress 6.1 launch event with Timothy Jacobs a couple weeks ago, you'll note you may remember actually that he said there's a few little bugs that have happened in WordPress six one and it might be best to wait until the first minor release behind 6.1 which actually happened a week ago today. That was WordPress six dot 1.1. Very minor patch fix 29 bug fixes 21 bug fixes in the block editor, no known widespread issues with this update. This is the time to go ahead and update your sites to six dot 1.1. And I've had no issues that some of you were mentioning there in the chat as well. I pretty safe to update now if you've been putting off like I usually do until the first minor release following a major release. The WordPress 6.2 roadmap is still a bit of a mystery. Most of the dates are still to be determined. The Alpha trunk was opened last month and there's some work being done towards 6.2 There is no other information we would probably expect to February March ish release for WordPress six two will fill you in on that as soon as those dates become available.
Let's see. Let's talk a little bit about something else that happened in core we mentioned this last month in that the executive director of the WordPress project Josepha Hayden jump OSI talked about let's maybe rename full site editing to something else because that term was beginning a little confusing. And after some feedback and discussion in the core forums, the term full site editing has been replaced by site editor. So that's a very clear and simple description to users with a wide range of technical skills. It's easily translatable into multiple languages. And so what you've seen is the maybe the template editor or the full site editing suite that allows you to edit templates and menus and headers and footers and all that stuff. In core WordPress, it's a work in progress that is now have there's a new banner to describe all of that, and it is the site editor so that the post here says this should be considered an official update to WordPress is shared lexicon. So now when you see the term site editor, that's what it's talking about. The full site editor where in the block editor is used to edit headers and footers and to page templates and those sorts of things. So and something else that's coming in chorus fairly interesting is a new feature plug in has been made available by WordPress developer, Andy fragance, who is also a practicing surgeon and he is a is a really interesting person in the WordPress community. If you've ever had a chance to hear him speak, he is very engaging again a practicing surgeon who does WordPress development as a hobby and he's brilliant. So he has a new plugin called plugin dependencies that seeks to deal with a problem that maybe you've experienced with that particular add on plugins and WordPress. So sometimes it's an add on plugin. And by that I mean here's a little feature that we're going to add on to a very popular plugin that a lot of people are using. And so maybe it's another set of developers who are using, you know, maybe adding on to something of a bigger, more widely used plugin. Sometimes if you just install that little add on plugin it can break your site because it's expecting the major mother plugin per se to be present. And if it's not there, then things break. So this new plugin called plugin dependency, it's a feature plugin. Feature plugin is a technical term inside the WordPress universe which means we are developing this plugin with a view to have it merged into core, take this core code and merge it into core and that's really good. It just simply allows a way for plugin developers to say this plugin must be active in order for this add on to function. It's fairly simple, but I think that's going to really help a lot of folks. You know, especially novice users not breaking their sites accidentally. So that's out there and working. If you want to play around with it, you can do so there's the link to the plugin and here on the call for testing post. In the core blog. There's a few things that Andy and team are asking for folks to help him check out so this is a great way to contribute to the WordPress project. You can be one of the beta testers of this plugin, which will ultimately be merged into core, take five minutes and do it pretty cool. All right, let's move into news from Gutenberg and everybody's favorite additions to the WordPress platform Gutenberg 14.4 was released back on October the 26th. It added a new navigation interface and larger previous of patterns right from the inserters look how this looks. It's pretty cool right here from the Insert or you click the plus and you have this nice list of patterns. So here's the header, I can just drag it right there into the editor. And there it is. So that's pretty cool. It's a whole new way. Like you've got the ability to do blocks there as well where you can drag and drop that right there. You see all these predefined block patterns that go with a theme and it makes it really easy just to pull that down. Find what you're looking for. Preview, drag and drop. Very, very nice. They've also added a distraction free writing interface. This was something that was in the classic editor and has been missing a bit from the block editor and I actually really liked this. I take a look here so we click the kebab menu we clicked distraction free. And look. It's just your text on the page. I really really liked this. I use an app for distraction free writing frequently on the desktop. And this is a really nice application I think of a distraction free writing mode for the block editor. Really easy to use. Just click it distraction free and boom, everything else goes away and you can just focus on writing pretty nifty. Also, there's the addition of the addition of the ability to better access image captions right from the block editor. See how this works when you mouse over an image look, there's now a new icon for captions and you can it just takes you right there to type in the caption. That's pretty nice. I like that a lot. Very intuitive for especially basic users. One addition to the site editor is now the ability to lock the navigation block. So we've seen block locking as one of the things that was added in WordPress 6.1 where you can lock whole groups of blocks at a time not just individual block by block. Now you have the ability to lock the nav blocks of like a client came in there and met in this next I mess that up. You have the ability to lock each of those blocks as well, from the site editor pretty cool. They've also given us the ability to access the new fluid typography options that have been added recently. Pretty nice. And then also some of the performance enhancements as usual. So that was Gutenberg 14 Four released a few weeks ago. The next version of Gutenberg was released back on November the ninth and that was 14.5. And there's a really interesting addition to this version of Gutenberg that I really like so they've changed a little bit up at the top, that nice list view that drops down and shows you the kind of in a well, it's a list view of all the blocks on a page and you can real easily get around to things right there. They've changed that a little bit down at the bottom now you see some word count and characters those sorts of things are down toward the bottom of the list module. But look at this. They've given us a new document outline panel, which is super cool. It basically pulls all the H tags out of your content and puts them right there in outline view where you can at a glance spot oh wait, I've got an h four after an h2 I need to change that around and you can click that it takes you right to the spot of the page where you can deal with that. It's really nice, especially if you have like a really long form content. It's an easy way to just navigate through that by the H tags. And if you like in the ListView it just says heading. It doesn't tell you which h tag that's there. The outline will actually tell you if it's h1, h2 and whatnot. Yeah, this is pretty cool. I like this a lot. There is also some new block spacing controls with real time preview, which is pretty nice. You can see the padding go in here. Those sorts of things they've been added to adding two blocks a bit at a time but this is here within a a whole column a whole group of of items. That's pretty cool. Of course other minor bug fixes enhancements in that Gutenberg 14 Five release. That's the latest one back on November the ninth. There's a great little story here on WP tavern about Gutenberg contributors exploring what they're calling a new browse mode. If you have played around with the site editor. It's kind of frustrating. I'm gonna be honest. We were our word camp Birmingham website. We used the new 2023 theme bought theme and decided we're just going to do the whole full site editing thing. What could possibly go wrong? Right and the answer is a lot. It was really complicated to use. It is not the easiest thing to get around in and the Gutenberg contributors that really smart developers are thinking a lot about how we can make that better. So this is a proof of concept. It's not even rolled in anywhere near rolling into the plugin yet but look here at the top. They're suggesting Oh, we can have a list of recently viewed pages or we could search here like for recipe and pull that right up and just jump straight to that page right there at the top. So that's I think would help a lot when it comes to navigating. Around in the site editor because it is not terribly intuitive right now. And I'll just leave it at that. So glad to see some work is being done on that interface because it really, I think needs it.
Alrighty, let's roll forward into some security news. Here's some stats from this month's vulnerability reports. 78 plugin vulnerabilities had been patched 31 plugin vulnerabilities are either currently active or the plugin has been closed. And there are two themed vulnerabilities this month that have been patched a relatively low month all things considered. And I've been changing if you've been in the news roundups lately, you've noticed a change in the way I'm doing these vulnerability reports because I didn't want to read 800 different plug in names anymore. But what we decided to do is just bring to your attention. This list right here, ones that are have an active vulnerability or they've been closed because these are the ones you really need to pay attention to. And those are these are ones that you need to remove from your site's right. Simply deactivating the plugin is not enough. And that plugin really needs to be completely removed because the the vulnerable code still exists on your site as long as the plugin is present. So if you have any of these plugins I would strongly recommend that you remove them now. By the way, for the lion's share of these the 78 vulnerabilities that were patched if you're using I theme security pro you would have gotten noticed that there was a vulnerability in your twice a day scan. But also using the version management feature and I think security Pro you can have I think security automatically apply a patch if it exists. So for the 78 You wouldn't have had to do anything at all, but these 31 You definitely need to know about so let's have a look here 3d print AB press optimizer add comments. Advanced WP columns agent easy properties the affiliate manager for publishers analytics for WP the clerk plugin evaluate fancier author box finding your place all follow me plugin font awesome four menus grid kit premium Hello print, image hover effects CSS three login block IPS long form reCAPTCHA photo space gallery postman iThemes demo showing URL and QR code interesting simple video and better testimonial slider transponder a lot of folks used to use this a long time ago. Ug countdown video thumbnails and this is not the there's a video thumbnails plugin by web dev studios. That's not this one. This is a different one WP best quiz, the Page Builder then PB show core, they PG forum and AP upper Share button. So if you have any of those on your sites, you want to get rid of those. remove them completely so that this vulnerable code is not on your site. Make sure you've signed up to the i iThemes blog so that you get notifications whenever these vulnerability reports drops once a week. All right, let's turn the page to some news from I themes. The I think is 2020 to start again, the I think it was 2022 Black Friday deals are now available 40% off of I think products and bundles at ithemes.com/black Friday Kadence WP also 40% off of all new subscriptions 25% off for existing customers that want to renew early so there's the special link for that stellar WP also up to 40% off of all the brands in the stellar verse. That's a new term we're using apparently the stellar verse that kind of like that. You can take a look at all the stellar WP goodness there. All right, really happy to say that this month's customer spotlight is on my friend Dave run. Dave's been a longtime member of the iThemes community and there's a great write up of Dave there on the customer spotlights page. So if you haven't read that do that. Those of you that know Dave know Hey, he really deserves that great write up. Glad to see him there. All right, something else that you might want to know about is how to increase your sales using Kadence conversions. So we've done a lot of training on Kadence conversions in the past it's been in several of our webinars. Here's a great blog post if you'd like to understand how Kadence conversions works. It's part of the Kadence pro package. It's a thorough blog post about what to do, what not to do and how to track conversions using the very powerful Kadence conversions add ons. Also, there was a really nice webinar that the Kadence team did. It's available on YouTube right there to get better ecommerce conversions. It was a teardown of a site with the Kadence team and the and the team from the good. So watch that if you didn't have a lot of really great insight into converting well on an E commerce site. All right. So this month's premium event here on I iThemes Training is our annual creating a Starter Site Training Series. This is a really in depth webinar on building a Starter Site that serves as the basis for all your future development several new things this year. The first day we're going to be installing WordPress a deep dive into WP config and then creating a plugin stack for our future website builds. Day two is all about customizing with a custom functions plug in customizing the Kadence theme setting plugin defaults and creating basic page layouts. That is coming up next week. That is next Tuesday Wednesday, from one to 3pm each day November 29 and 30th. December is the second part of our Starter Site which is optimizing our Starter Site that's going to be coming up December 20 and 21st so a bit earlier in December because of the holidays. I would use that way every year. So day one Foundation's about spinning up a Starter Site, and then speed optimizations, which is always a very popular topic. Day two is customizations, preparing a site for client and the website launch process. Those are ready to register for now. If you'd like to go out and do that, all right, it's right there on the training site once you have logged in. All right coming up on I think is training these events in yellow are highlighted. I do want to make a note for members that office hours this week is tomorrow because Thursday is Thanksgiving here in the States. So make sure you are with us tomorrow at one o'clock Central for office hours. Get your questions in if you have them. Also, we did have to bump this back a week but we do have scheduled the upgrading your WordPress websites to PHP eight on November 28. So that is a that is next Monday. So it's an odd day. It is a Monday webinar, which we don't usually do. But because of holidays. We're kind of making some changes here. That is a Monday webinar one o'clock Central on November 28, which also just happens to be the date that PHP 7.4 hits end of life. So it's the not the birthday, but whatever the opposite of that is I guess the death day. Yeah. Anyway, for PHP 7.4. So come and learn with us next Monday about upgrading to PHP eight Starter Site webinars coming up that week as well. Office hours plugin Roundup is scheduled for December the sixth, the final version of fly 2022 for this year. And then our best off plugin Roundup is December 13, where we take all of the top votes from the last six months of plugin round ups and remind you of all those great plugins you forgot about in the meantime. All right, if you are not a member by iThemes Training, you can join get a month free take advantage that Black Friday deal as well and get 40% off if you want to buy the year. I believe training is included in that as well. I think it's worth it. You get Office Hours you get all the premium training all year long. All right, let's turn the page and talk about some plugins. We got some things going on in the plugin world most specifically, the fact that Kadence blocks now supports pods. Isn't that cool? So those of you that are pods users, you can now add connect directly into pods content so that also pods now supports not only pods but also ACF Megabox toolset and more. So pods users can connect right to Kadence elements and do some really cool things. I would imagine you might see some training about that coming up sometime in the near future. All right, got some theme news to talk about. The WordPress themes directory is adding style and variation previews, which is kind of cool. As you're looking at things in the theme directory, that's what you're seeing right here. So you can actually right there as you're looking at the theme details in the theme directory switch between all the variations and see that's kind of cool. For those of us that are building sites for clients, maybe not something we use very much because we kind of have our own theme. But you can imagine, especially for people that are doing their own site. This is pretty cool. Being able to see all these new theme variations if they have more variations and what fits in the space you'll get a carousel of all the variations which is on this just kind of nice like that. Users will also be able to see a selected style variation loaded right there into the preview window pretty nice. So the meta team is continuing to work on this and you'll see continued continued work on this who is asking who came up with those colors? I have I guess the theme author
did. There you go. All right. Let's talk about ecommerce Shall we Black Friday is about to come up. And just in time for that WooCommerce 7.1 released a couple of weeks ago on November the eighth 185 commits to WooCommerce core from 37 different contributors 162 commits to WooCommerce blocks from 22 contributors. This is even though it's looks like a major release WooCommerce doesn't do things like that anymore. They just use the next number, whether it's a major changes or minor changes, and you just have to read the developer blog which is you know, it is what it is developer.woocommerce.com You want to sign up for that and get updates if you manage WooCommerce sites. But this is a 7.1 which sounds like a major release but actually it's pretty minor it should be they say it should be fully backward compatible with earlier versions. We've had no issues in the agency side, upgrading to WooCommerce 7.1. No problems whatsoever. Some of the things that have happened new in WooCommerce seven one is a new product spotlight tour. So first time you install WooCommerce you get a little tour spotlighting the different aspects of a product to kind of help people guide through the process like a wizard of setting up their first product. They've also added a cross sell to the cart block. I think we actually mentioned this in the last news roundup so you now have the ability in the cart block to turn on and off cross sells. So cross sells are what shows up as linked products. So if you go into products and you go down to link products, this is where you can add cross sells and upsells to you know sell something in addition to what the person is using. And so it looks something like this. Here's our editor. And right there, there's a cross it's kind of small to see but a cross sells block you may be interested in and there they are right there. You know you have these in your cart, you might like these other things that go with it. So it's a great way to order bump with some additional sales, and that's now part of core WooCommerce. Now, here's the big news when it comes to WooCommerce How many of you have been affected by some of these order? Fraudulent orders that are happening a lot in WooCommerce? Basically what's going on is people buy a list of compromised credit cards, and they're getting hit, you know, they'll just go onto a WooCommerce store and hit hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of transactions, testing different cards to see if they're good. So this is something that's being talked about at the WooCommerce core level. That John Brown is a developer open this topic after seeing these fraudulent charges on five different websites that he apparently manages about 1200 successful transactions for $2.99 with 100,000 blocks so the blocking was working well but the problem is when you go make all those refunds stripe still charges you the processing fees, right? I can get really expensive 1200 times you know whatever it is it's pretty darn expensive. So stripe didn't recognize and Brock blocked the fraudulent charges, even though they all follow a similar pattern and some random Gmail address. So they actually had to resolve dispute transactions at $15 apiece. Holy cow. The undisputed refund cost was 40 cents. So that equated to loss revenue in this case. $3,600 in fraud cost the site owner $1,940 To test this person's credit card really, really, really frustrating. So here's the deal. What do you do to prevent these kinds of card testing attacks? Add a reCAPTCHA to your checkout process. Now there is a paid WooCommerce official add on for reCAPTCHA. And I've said this multiple times on these webinars. I just have a moral objection to WooCommerce charging $50 $30 or whatever it is to add reCAPTCHA to the checkout process. That's just that shouldn't be a checkbox, but they do it but there's a there's a free version. There's a free reCAPTCHA plugin down here at the bottom, which you can use there's also a plugin called limit orders that limits repeated orders that a person can make might want to look at both of those. You can also use stripes radar fraud protection that cost a little extra but it might help you avoid these things. Avoid pay what you want donation products those sorts of products attract card testing, and quickly refund a refund those fraudulent sales to avoid disputes. So if you're managing ecommerce sites, this is probably something you want to proactively let your clients know about, hey, this is a thing that's happening and so if you start seeing a bunch of sales like this, let me know immediately and let's let's do something about it. Yeah. All right, I guess Okay, that's a great question. I'll just take for a second in the chat don't usually do a lot of questions during news roundup, but the question is Would that reCAPTCHA in the checkout process interfere with other reCAPTCHA is running on the site? It can if you're using different versions of reCAPTCHA. So the rule of thumb is that for a whole site, it should use one version of reCAPTCHA. Now various plugins can implement that version, but you can just set it up once in reCAPTCHA. Get that one site and secret key and set that up in multiple plugins. So you don't want for example, I think security running version three to protect the login page, and WooCommerce adding version two to the checkout process that's going to cause problems as long as it's the same reCAPTCHA you should be fine, though. All right, let's talk about SEO, shall we? Google has pushed maybe you saw this headline. Google has pushed Universal Analytics 360 to sunset in 2024. And everybody read that and probably thought, oh, you know, it's all pushed back. And this is not the Google Analytics you're probably using. This is Google you a 360, which is an enterprise level Google analytics solution. So that's the one they pushed back an extra year, not the free version that most of us use. Standard Universal Analytics properties are still set to sunset on July the first of next year. So only if you're using ua 360. Does this extra year apply? The rest of us who get it for free? Still are set on this July 120 23. Deadline when it's gonna go away. So Google caution, that's enterprise customers, that performance will likely degrade on you a 360 pick the same tactic of the way Apple makes you put buy a new phone by now maybe they slow things down. Who knows right? Now they're probably gonna slow things down a little bit to get enterprise clients to push to the new new GA four. But one thing they will be doing and we'll see how this works, the migration features. We'll see if that's just going to be in the enterprise level or if that'll be in standard level Google Analytics if they'll be able to migrate some things, behavior modeling custom channel grouping. We'll see how all that flushes out and we'll keep you apprised of those changes. great blog post I ran across from a plugin that we actually saw, I think it was in our last plugin roundup called independent analytics. How many of you remember that if you're with us a few weeks ago for this month plugin Roundup, I think that's what it was, or it was. It was either October or November of the plugin Roundup, we talked about this new WordPress based analytics opportunity called independent analytics. Now caveat, this is a comparison post on the independent Analytics blog, so they might be biased. Okay, but it's a good overview of the options. It compares Google Analytics, Fathom Analytics, which is a very popular Google Analytics replacement. It's a paid option. That is privacy focused, and this new independent analytics. So the summary basically is Google Analytics is feature rich and is the most feature rich of all these offerings. It is free, but it can cause speed issues, and of course, it has those very well known privacy issues. Fathom is fast. It is cookieless it is privacy focus, but it costs $14 a month, whereas independent analytics is fast and cookieless and privacy focused and free. So take a look at it. You know, read this blog post learn a little bit more. Again, take this with a grain of salt because it is their blog post comparing their product that gets their competitors, you know, but just give it a look. I think it's very, very interesting. Sherry, can you run both Google Analytics and independent together? I would imagine so yeah. Yeah. So just give that a look. I think it's worth considering.
Alright, let's talk about some other news. The 2022 web almanac final chapters have come together. The almanac has a 729 page report and an ebook format. So they were the final bit was just added which had to do with performance data. And in by the way, if you want to look at the wet the eight the web Almanac, there's the link down there. It's pretty good reading. There's a lot of interesting stuff here. Like you can really geek out and go super deep on some stuff. I had 729 pages after all, but it's kind of interesting stuff. But this performance data, which is really this story is saying they the authors of the report raise some concerns about the use of lazy loading in WordPress. So you might think, Oh, it's just great to lazy load everything but that can actually be a problem, because WordPress sites may be overusing lazy loading and when you do that, it can negatively impact the LCP metric for your speed metrics. So back it when lazy loading was first introduced in WordPress and 5.5. Every single image and media asset was lazy loaded, that was improved and 5.9 which only loads and lazy loads images that are in the viewport. That but the problem is a lot of plugins and themes are going around core behavior on this and some things are not working right it correcting this could cause hundreds or 1000s of themes and plugins to have to update it's, it could be a thing. So this is something we're watching. This is just reported. I'm going to keep my eye on this and it's just interesting. And if the web Almanac is something at least you should be aware of, and maybe take some time to peruse over the next few weeks if you have some downtime. Let's talk about the open verse, shall we? We announced oh gosh, it's probably been a year ago. That automatic acquired the Creative Commons search. So Creative Commons search was a spot where people would just upload free to use media, from audio video photos, mostly photos into a search engine. It was just free for anybody to use Creative Commons license you can just use it. Oftentimes no attribution required whatsoever. Automatic acquired that and renamed the open verse. So now, open verse has passed over 800 the audio catalog alone has passed 800,000 audio files. So open verse visitors can now search for audio files for use in their videos, podcasts, other creative projects that are available for free. Search results can be filtered by usage, license, audio category, etc. Really, really cool stuff. So this is an idea that's still under development, and likely you're gonna see a deeper integration with WordPress core that is on the roadmap. So imagine, for example, what it would be what it would look like if in your media library. There's a little tab there that says open verse and you just click on that and now you can search right from core WordPress, all these free images pretty, pretty cool stuff right now there's plugins that allow you to do these sorts of things with various image libraries. We've shown some of those in the plugin Roundup, but this could be you know, just another automatic property working together with core WordPress to just give you access to all those free images, pretty cool stuff. So they're saying here WordPress, users could soon whatever that means have access within the editor to over 600 million free creative works that are available in the open verse. Pretty cool stuff. All right. Speaking of open here's another open news story. This is open press. So I don't know if you've seen anything about Twitter happening lately, but Twitter is a dumpster fire right now. A lot of things happening. A lot of folks are fleeing the platform for other spaces. And there's been a number of posts from the WordPress community about where are you going, I want to I don't want to be on Twitter anymore, et cetera, et cetera. So whatever you think about that, just be aware that there are a lot of folks in the WordPress community that are fleeing Twitter and looking for somewhere else. So this is a really interesting post from the folks at Ollie WP asking the question, what if we use WordPress to power a community like this? So what would that look like? And that's what open press is actually about? What if your website and the content that you're publishing could be connected to a network of other websites, a network powered by individuals, but connected as a community? So instead of going to a platform like Twitter to share valuable content, you do it directly from your website? Interesting, right? So your content remains yours. It can be shared and consumed within the WordPress community of open press. Users is just an idea for now. But there's a sign up if you want to stay up to date on this project. You know, who knows if it's gonna gain traction or not? I have no idea. But I sign up on this mailing list and I'll wait and see what they decide they're going to do with it. It may be absolutely nothing. Who knows? But I find it to be a very interesting concept. I John says, who monitors it, I don't know if anybody would monitor it. It just be a network. Like you kind of subscribe to a blog and you would get connected to everyone in some sort of larger interface. So you monitor your own feed, basically. Yeah, I don't know. Again, this is all right. Read about it on here on OpenVR. Pardon me open press dot social. See what they have to say. All right, another bit of big other news is WordPress. 7.4. As we mentioned earlier, reaches end of life on November the 28th. It will stop receiving any security updates from the PHP team. It was sunsetted quite a while ago, actually, I think it was a year ago that they stopped doing active development on seven for now. It's not going to receive any security updates either. Over 60% of all websites written in PHP are still using PHP seven in some flavors. So that's a lot. WordPress powers 40% plus of all web websites worldwide, which makes moving to PHP of paramount importance for all website owners. Staying on PHP for past the end of life, major security risk potentially could result in bigger global malware attacks. So I would recommend that you watch the webinar coming up on Monday about how to do that effectively. We do have a great blog post about that here as well. Most of the WordPress plugins and themes are yet to ensure compatibility with PHP eight. So unfortunately, this is going to be kind of tested and see what happens right. Yep, so the seven steps for a safe upgrade to PHP eight are here. And of course you can join us with Tiffany bridge of nexcess here on November 28. As we step through that whole process, all right, while also speaking about PHP, the PHP 8.2 release has been delayed as they were rolling through their testing process. So they got to the release team discovered some bugs, some bugs and said we're gonna hit pause on this. They've pushed back the release candidate seven to November the 24th. And the release to December the eighth of 2022. Yep. All right. Hey, it's Black Friday coming up. We talked a little bit about the I iThemes deals coming up right there. I think it's 40% off Cal Kadence. 40%. Off stellar at 20% off of the brands. There are also a number of other Black Friday deal lists. Here are several of them. And I'm noticing I did not put app sumo on this list. But I know there are many app sumo lovers on the call today. So of course check out app sumo and their black friday stuff. Here's the thing. You can real quick spend many hundreds and hundreds of hundreds of dollars on things that you won't use, right? So maybe just a suggestion from your buddy Nathan. Okay. Maybe don't buy something unless you have specific plans on how you're going to use it in the next 90 days. How does that sound? That's a pretty good little rule of thumb there. Take advantage of the deals but don't spend money that doesn't need to be spent right. Okay, moving along to news that is worth a look. So these are things that we ran into as we were preparing the rest of the things. They weren't really news items, but I thought you might really like these so great blog post on the i iThemes. Blog about how to fix that your connection is not private warning which pops up quite a bit. Here's 10 tips to prepare your website for the holidays. Also, by the way, if you're not following the I think blog, they're really the I think his blog has always had good content. They're really doing a great job right now. So take a look at some of that. The new content that's out there on the iThemes blog. I found this to be a really interesting article from a an agency owner named Tom Lach, who has had large and small agencies and he says look big growth isn't for everyone. It's just a reflection about his history of agency ownership on post status.com Really good stuff. There's a great article also on post status about the future of give WP and the block editor Matt Cromwell, who's also now part of the iThemes leadership team talks to post status about that good stuff there. If you want to know about redirects, there's an excellent guide on Search Engine Journal about how to do SEO redirects correctly. So take a look at that if you have questions about that. Good blog post on the core blog about the accessibility improvements if you're following accessibility news, you can take a look at these 500 Plus fixes and enhancements for accessibility purposes that were rolled into core and WordPress 6.1.
How about this one? If you get confused by the alphabet soup of acronyms that keep your emails from going to spam, like SPF and DK aim and all that other stuff. This is an excellent article probably one of the best. I won't say it short, but it's it is is thorough, but not gigantic. How about that from delicious brains. So folks that really know what they're talking about, about spam filtering and how spam filters work. Take a look at that because it will de mystify the reason your emails, land and spam and how to deal with that. So here's an interesting case made by a plugin developer Alex Denning for why there should only be paid plugins no more free plugins as a business case. It's interesting. Ah, okay, this one I actually love. I think everybody ought to take a minute. And check out specky boy.com at this link, because he has combined or who the author whoever they are, have combined the five or six little overviews that are written in JavaScript and CSS. And it's like the old Commodore 64 screen in a Windows 95 environment that actually there's windows and you can drag it it's it's fun, right? This has no practical purpose whatsoever. But to remind you of days gone by. Here's a great article as you go into the holidays from the grumpy designer called Are you tired? It talks about headspace and energy level and the fact that it's okay not to be okay. And just recognize that and some things to do about it. That's a really great article about mental health and well being. Apple has confirmed that the iPhone is getting the USBC connection in the next version, likely because of EU mandates. They get fined for every phone if they didn't do this. So I think that's a great thing. It's about time actually. And also one last little SEO tidbit is yes, buying backlinks for SEO is still a thing and even good. Professional SEOs buy backlinks Here's an article that explains why and they why they do that and what to do and what not to do. So if you're doing SEO pre you probably ought to read that on Search Engine Journal. Alright, let's turn the page and talk about some community events. WordCamp Asia has announced their speakers the first round of speakers at least has been announced and maybe the second one today. That's coming up February 17 through 19th in Bangkok, Thailand. I would love to go to that event, but yeah, I'm not gonna do that one next year, but that'd be a lot of fun, I think. So take a look at that. There'll be an online version as well. Several upcoming word camps globally. Word camp San Paulo in Brazil is November 25. Word camp Kolkata in West Bengal, India is in the middle of December, and we're camp Cebu in the Philippines is where February 11 of next year. Our word camp my word camp right here in Birmingham, Alabama. WP, y'all is scheduled for February 4 And fifth and I will just take this opportunity to tell you that tickets are now available. And the call for speakers is actually still open. So if you would like to come down to the south, in Birmingham, February 4, and fifth it's really nice generally and we're actually Birmingham at the beginning of February. It could be snow or it can be 80 degrees you just never know. Yeah, it's it's up for grabs. But it's a nice time to visit Birmingham. Check out WP y'all dot com. And yeah, if you'd like to speak there's still accomplished speakers open for the next week or so. We're Kent Phoenix is scheduled toward the end of March. And WordCamp Buffalo New York on May the sixth. One last thing I'll mention is that the 2022 WP awards for the best of WordPress, the vote is still open for the next week or so. If you haven't voted yet. Go to the WP weekly.com/awards 20 That should be 2022 Anyway it's there. Or if you just go here. Oh no, I'm sorry. This is last year's results. Oh, I missed that typo. This is last year's results. This is this year's vote down here at the bottom. So vote for your vote for your favorite in the categories of things and they let everybody know what those results were. So check that out. That is still good through November that 30. Yeah. All right, folks. That brings us to the end of the WordPress news roundup for November 2022. I've just dropped today slides in the chat once again, if you missed those earlier download that for all those links. We're back tomorrow from members for office hours. Here on I iThemes Training one day early. It's Wednesday, this week because of Thanksgiving in the states here on Thursday. So with that, I'm going to wrap it up and say goodbye. Hopefully we'll see you tomorrow members here on office hours on iThemes Training where we go further together.