Okay, maybe now that works. And that's probably why the transcript wasn't working. Ah, yes. Another symptom of my Wi Fi issues earlier today. Yes, a lot of my smart plugs lost their connection to the world. And the one that powers on the whole audio system here was one of them. Don't you love that? All right. Welcome, everybody. Welcome. Welcome. Glad you're here. Over in the chat. You will find the link bundle for today soon as I get it over there. All right. There we go. There are the slides as well as the link for the replay which will be up about three o'clock Central. And also if you haven't registered for it yet we have a great free live stream tomorrow with Timothy Jacobs, the lead developer for solid WP talking all about the security threats that come up those ratings of security threats that come up from patch stack in solid security, so he'll be talking about those and what to make of them and what to do about them. So that's gonna be really good. That's a free live stream tomorrow, one o'clock Central. The link is there waiting for you in the chat. If you've not yet registered for that one. It's going to be a good one.
Welcome, everybody, glad you're here. Hey, Eddie, welcome from Switzerland. Glad you're here. Hey, Barb. Alright, folks, we're about a little over three minutes from getting started. With WordPress news roundup for June January 2024. glad everybody is joining us today. If you're just joining us in zoom, open up the chat, say hello. And they're in you will find the link bundle for today which includes the slides with all the links and so forth, as well as the replay link. Hey, Louis, it's been a while Good to see you there from the French Riviera, Canada from Orlando. Welcome, Dave. Welcome welcome. i Yes, it is voting day in New Hampshire today. Is in that chilly North Carolina. Yeah, so for those of it's been a little chilly down here in the Southland. But this week, we went from, like 15 degrees on Sunday. It's going to be high 60s. Like Thursday here. It's just insane. I don't know what to make of that. Hey, Heather. Jeffrey, welcome. From South Georgia. Not too far from me. That two and a half minutes to go folks if you're just joining us in zoom once again, open up that chat. Say hello. Links are there waiting on you if you'd like to grab the slides that has all the the links for all of the stories if you want to read more. Hey Vern from West Virginia.
Yamana we don't carry questions over from one live stream to the next. That's the level of complication that we just don't get involved in but you'll have plenty of time to ask your questions tomorrow about security. Folks also there in the link bundle. If you are I mentioned it just a little bit earlier as we get started today, but there's a free live stream tomorrow with Timothy Jacobs from the lead developer for solid WP talking about how to interpret those security threats that we get, especially with those numbers and the rating from patch stack and what to do about those sorts of things. That is coming up tomorrow one o'clock Central free live stream if you want to click that link if you've not registered for it yet. I would invite you to do so it's always a good one. Make anything with Timothy is always good. He's gonna Yeah, really, really brilliant person just like Suez saying there in the chat and just a wonderful human being in general. Alright folks, just about ready to get started about a minute to go if you're just joining us in zoom, open up the chat say hello. Tell us where you're logging in from today. I have officially finished my coffee so it's ready to come to start. Lots of talk about today in the world of WordPress news, Chris. Oh my. Hey, Elizabeth, welcome. I think Atlanta is going to be getting a dose of the warm weather we're going to see later this week as well. High 60s just about warm enough to put the top down on the convertible. Yeah, should be nice. For those of you still in frigid parts of the world my apologies. Hey Billy from Canada welcome. Alright, once again in the chat, I'm going to drop in the link bundle that has the slides and the replay link as well as the link to register for tomorrow's free live stream with Timothy Jacobs all about security vulnerabilities. Make sure you're with us on that one. Hey, Peter from Denmark. Welcome. Wow. Yeah, probably chilly. We're sure. All right, I've got three minutes after let's get the recording. started and we will dive right in. Good afternoon. Good evening. Good morning wherever you happen to be around the world. Welcome to another solid Academy livestream. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at solid Academy and it is time for our news round up. Once a month we take a look at the news in the WordPress world and bring you the top things we think you ought to be concerned about if you are doing WordPress things with clients. So glad you decided to join us for this one. If you're just joining us in zoom, open up the chat. Say hello, tell us where you're logging in from and you will find there in the bundle of links that are pertinent for today. There are the slides which contain have it's especially important to download the slides for this event because at the bottom of each story there is the attribution link so you can go and read more if you'd like and there's also some good resources in there as well. So grab those slides if you're watching on the replay. Just scroll down below the video you'll see the slides linked there as well. Alright, let's get started with that, as we always do with news from core WordPress, see what's going on in the world of core it is January, and there was of course a holiday break over the last month. So the amount of work that's been done across the core communities is lower than it would be in a typical month. But I there's a great post that we wanted to draw your attention to, and it focuses on all the work that's been done in the WordPress site editor. So if you've not really taken a look and seen the you know, some of the work that's been happening in the WordPress editor, not only in the block editor used on pages, but also in the site editor that's used in block themes to manage the site. This is a really great overview. We're going to hit the high points over here for you. Lots of good video demonstrations of all the work that's kind of bundled up and into one spot and to show you everything that was done over the last several months. The site editor itself is how block themes it's the future of WordPress. It's how block themes are going to control the look and feel of WordPress sites going forward. It's a replacement for the customizer and several other parts of the WordPress CMS that we're used to. It's going to replace it has replaced all of the like PHP templates for different custom post types and things like that. You can do all right in the editor, one of the really neat additions, even if you're not using the site editor itself if you enjoy the block editor, the command palette is really coming along. It's it's a keyboard shortcut to Command K or Ctrl K on PC that brings up a little bar that allows you to make certain commands like guy right here list view, you can just click List View and it'll pop it right open. If you're a keyboard shortcut person, you really ought to experiment with this. Now this is a Mac user that's recorded this video so it's a Command K, but Ctrl K if you're on a PC, gives you access to lots of different things within the editor and they're continuing to add more and more command palette compatible commands. It's just it's becoming really a great tool to jump around in the block editor. Something else that's really interesting in the improvements in the block editor and the start of the site editor is the style book. This is something that was added in the last version of WordPress. And if you've not really paid attention to this, it is a wonderful way to get a cohesive look at the style of your site. So here for example, we can click this link that opens up the Style Editor or the style book there with that little eyeball link and you get an at a glance, look at how text and media and the overall design of your sites and widgets are all controlled with the theme, the style book for every site in WordPress, so you can do things like I want to make all of my images duotone you can do that right here. And it takes effect sitewide as really really cool. You can change for example also here, your overall styling of the site with the different built in styles in the theme. You can see all of the see there all your typography examples right there in one spot. It's really really neat. So if you've not yet played with this, you can do this in WordPress playground, by the way, just spin up a playground instance with the 20/24 theme and this is all right there ready to go. So take a look at this. Very, very powerful. Yes, Manu it's active in WordPress. Now if you're using a block theme, so it's a 2024 or some of the other free block themes that are available, really, really neat little tool. There's also some improvements in shortcuts for styling so you can now copy and paste styles and even apply them globally. So right here, for example, we're looking at this h2 block that's in the Playfair display and the one below it's in a DM Sans, but we can click here to copy styles jump down to the next block and paste styles and it just pops the styles right there in really, really cool So Eddie, some of this applies to Kadence like this block, the copying of styles, but some of the larger features require a block theme. So the Kadence folks are they're working towards becoming compatible with the work that the core team has done in block themes. And we'll see some more of that happening later this year. So there you can apply the style globally to say for all buttons right there and which is super helpful. There's also this new distraction free mode, which is really helpful again, doesn't require block theme for this feature. But the distraction free mode was something that was in the classic editor for some time. They pulled it out when the block editor came just they have other development to do but now you can get rid of all the menus and all of the things to be able to edit the site and distraction free mode. So watch how this is going to work. I think they're going to click here. See here this may be the wrong video. There we go distraction free mode. So that pulls it out. lets you see the menu and everything in your designing live on a page just as it appears on the front end of the site. So very, very helpful. As you're building and designing sites. They're in the block editor that does not require a block theme either. Patterns another feature that doesn't require the block theme patterns are built into the block editor for some time now. And patterns have really come a long way. So for example, here's a block with a team grid. And so from an existing block on a page, you can create a pattern from that collection of blocks. In this case, we're going to call it the team give it a team category. And then when we go over to the pattern area, the pattern Explorer, you see all the patterns defined for the site. You can click the team category and boom there's the one we just created. You can go in and edit that block and it would update throughout the site if it's a synced pattern. Really pretty neat. List View is also the go to tool for getting around in the block editor as well. So right here in this team block, for example, there's the group, you can rename elements there in the list view so that group we're going to call the team and it'll stick.
So you can rearrange and change things around. This is the way I use the block editor. They're in the ListView. So he's wondering if those patterns are dynamic they could be if you if it's a synced block or a sync pattern, then if you update it once it's updated globally, or it can be an unsynched pattern, or you can just drop it in and edit it in the instance where it lives right there on a particular page. So lots of things going on there in the site editor lots of improvements. If you had been resisting getting into the block editor, I'd encourage you to take a look. It's become much much easier to use particularly if you're using Kadence blocks which especially if you're used to working with page builders, the Kadence block set is the closest thing to a page builder your experience you're going to get using the core WordPress block editor. It is quite good. Alright something else that was mentioned during the last state of the word we touched on it briefly in the last news round up. Matt Mullenweg dropped this in the state of the word it was a bit of an unexpected addition. And that is the 2024 Data Liberation initiative for WordPress. The goal here is to enable one click Site migration to and from WordPress, both from one WordPress install to another and also from other platforms into WordPress. Their goal is to make the WordPress export format the standard for all content management system migrations. They're encouraging the sharing of migration resources like scripts and plugins within our community and then hopefully broader into other CMS communities. The idea is providing portability and proving portability of content through from social networks from page builders from the classic editor and then in the block editor. There's a new contribution network that's been created. They've got a new wordpress.org landing page for the Data Liberation initiative. There's forums and Slack channel there, and they've got moderators working in this so folks are talking about this, and this is good for all concerned. I think something else to be aware of is a great podcast with the executive director of the WordPress project. Josepha Hayden Shambo see. She was interviewed earlier this month talking about what's on the table for WordPress in 2024. So this is worth a listen. And she's going to talk about phase three of Gutenberg, which will mention in just a moment, the Data Liberation initiative, new meetups happening and a lot more so take a look at that episode 70 of the WordPress podcast a look ahead to WordPress and hear what Josepha has to say, here's what we're going as far as the roadmap for this year. We've we're now in phase three of Gutenberg. We've gone through the block editor creation, the site editor creation, and now we're into the collaboration phase and this is going to be a very interesting year because collaboration is coming to core WordPress. And what that's gonna look like is two people can have the same page open at the same time and you'll see each other's mouse pointers moving around perhaps you'll it's like working in a Google doc together, advanced collaboration coming to core and that's going to be exciting. The phase four is of course, multilingual WordPress, some of the foundation for that is being laid even today. Here's where we are on a version release word map for the rest of the year. WordPress 6.5 is due in March 6, not six in July and 6.7 in November. None of these thankfully around major holidays that I've been able to see. So we'll see. All right, let's turn the page and talk about development in Project Gutenberg. Gutenberg 17.3 was released on December the 20th. This update had a lot of enhancements and bug fixes as they usually do an ongoing development of the foundation for phase three, collaboration. One of the neat things that they've added is a revision history in the in the style book. So revisions have gotten a lot of improvement in the past several versions of Gutenberg, where not only do you see a revision was made, but also the the content of that revision. So even here, that same sort of revision history has now come into the style book. So let's just say for here we have an edit on November 28. And it shows exactly what was changed in your global styling. So that's pretty cool. didn't used to have that it used to just look like this where somebody changed it on this day at this time. I don't know what they changed. Exactly. But now we can see some granular details. That's pretty cool. There's also now an updated Preferences panel and the idea here they're they're changing up the editor experiences, so that the page editor, the block editor for posts and pages has. It's using the same components as the site editor. Currently, they're kind of on different islands. They're merging those together, which is the plan all along. It's going to make it a lot easier for collaboration and for development. But there's a new Preferences pane that has been created. It's beautiful. It's a simple modal, and that works really, really well really nice, slick experience. I also in Gutenberg 17 Three they integrated the gravatar service for social icons, we talked about this last month and news roundup how Gravatar has really come along in its usability, it used to just be you upload your picture and that's what showed up everywhere. Now Gravatar has kind of evolved to become like your just a simple landing page about you where you have a bio and different social links and those sorts of things. And now Gravatar is available as an icon for the core social link block, which is kind of cool. Gutenberg 17 Four released on January the third, several different milestones and key areas they've continued to do work in the site editor and make this list of global templates a lot nicer where you can filter by author you can search and you can see things in a lot nicer of a format that was wasn't quite as easy to use before. They've also done some revisions in the style book and the pagination that's involved in there kind of granular changes but all of this is working together to make this style book even more usable. Every time a Gutenberg release comes out. They've also added background images for group blocks, which is a really interesting addition. So if you are using the group block that now you can add a background image and also choose if it's covered container fixed, which is kind of cool. They've also given us and this is something that I'm really happy to see. A right click access to the block settings in the ListView. Why does this matter? Well, because used to be when you're using the list view in order to get to this context menu, you had to click the Options icon or what I like to call the kebab menu. You would click that and you get this little drop down now in a much more natural way. You can right click that item in the menu drops down. I like that one. Now, just a note. This is in the Gutenberg plugin. These are changes that have not yet been merged into core. They will be merged into core when the next version releases in March. But in order to see these features you do have to have the Gutenberg plugin installed. And that's not really advisable for live sites. It is a beta plugin. They're moving code in and out of that thing a lot. So you maybe use that on your own personal site. But I wouldn't use this on a client site just yet. But these are all changes that have happened in the Gutenberg plugin and will soon be merged into core. We actually had three releases of Gutenberg since the last news roundup the last one just being a week ago, Gutenberg 17, five dropped on January the 17th. A minor update, but some of well a lot of work has been done. As I mentioned earlier of unifying the two editors, the site editor and the page block editor and bringing those things into one and now they have a unified Preferences panel. We mentioned this a bit earlier in a previous Gutenberg release. But it's a really nice, simple, unified Preferences panel that's used both in the site editor and the block editor in pages and posts. So pretty good. They've also added a little extra setting for the core block or gallery block to let you change the order to random. If you like random galleries, here you go. There is now a new toggle for random and it makes them random about that. We've also added a little bit of code called use first image from posts that I think is a really good little addition so that if you just have an image in the post, then it's going to automatically use that as the featured image and they're continuing to iterate on what I think is going to be the great feature in the next version of WordPress. And that is the font library. They're going to bring a media library like approach to the fonts that are used on your site. So being able to have your fonts and their own library handled in core WordPress is a great thing and that should be coming to the next version of WordPress. All right, let's turn the page and take a look at some security news in our WordPress vulnerability reports the last several weeks 101 plugin vulnerabilities patched 79 remain active no theme vulnerabilities this time and of course we recommend to keep your site secure with solid security pro using solid security with its site scan and version management and the patch stack firewall. You can reduce your site's risk to nearly zero pretty cool. All right. This month Thomas Wraith our friend and founder of we watched your website released an interesting
post that gave his findings based on the analysis of over 850 billion billion with a B log entries from more than 4 million websites that they manage their at we watch your website. The vulnerability sources are the things we'd expect like compromised login credentials, theme and plugin vulnerabilities of course, but those things that are usually talked about as far as the source of WordPress attacks we're not responsible for the majority of attacks. In fact, 60% of WordPress hacks in 2023 were caused by stolen session cookies. Now this is a big deal and if you're not aware of it, you need to be particularly in alerting your clients to these risks. A stolen session cookie happens when someone's computer like an end users computer is it gets infected by malware. Maybe they clicked a phishing link or they visited some site or they didn't have good up to date software on their computer or whatever. But if malware gets on someone's computer, some of this new malware is watching for session cookies. Now a session cookie is you know when you log into WordPress, it starts a session. WordPress actually drops a cookie on that computer that's logged in. And what this malware does is grab that cookie shoot it up to the hacker and now they can log in just like they're you because they have your session cookie. It doesn't matter if you're using two factor authentication or pass keys or a VPN. None of that matters because they have your session cookie. This is not good. So protecting against this attack, which again 60% of WordPress compromises last year involve this kind of attack. It means you got to keep the computer malware free and really something as simple as logging out. After you log into WordPress when you're done that terminates the cookie and it can prevent that hacker from staying connected if there's if they're already connected, or prevent them from using that cookie later because it's been nullified. For more information on this we did a live stream with Thomas Rafe a couple of weeks ago. I highly recommend you watch the live stream there at that link. This is definitely something we need to keep our eyes on and Stacy is right there in the chat. This is not just a WordPress thing. This is any place you log in, generally speaking, it's an industry practice to use that login session cookie to show that you're logged in. So this is any site Amazon you know your Facebook or whatever, any site that you're logging into. They could steal those credentials and act as you so really, really important to be aware of big vulnerability in the WordPress world that just last week, January 16. ACF released version six dot 2.5, which patches a cross site scripting vulnerability that could allow hackers to inject malicious code via custom fields. This is affecting more than 2 million sites. It does require the bad actor to be logged in with contributor or higher access. Patch stack has reported that vulnerabilities of 6.5 but it's not known to have yet been exploited. Here's what we have to be careful of here and pay attention if you're an ICF user. If you apply this patch they released last week, they say this is a breaking fix, meaning that it could break your implementation of ACF, depending on how you use it. It breaks particularly if you're using the ACF shortcode to display information on the front end of your site. If you're not doing it that way. If you're just pushing everything out with templates that don't use the shortcode shouldn't be an issue. But if you're using the shortcode it's a big deal because in the fix to get this fix out and to get ACF secure, they, they took a shortcut did get the fix done to escape HTML markup out of the shortcode what that means is, if for example, you're using an ACF field to display HTML on the front end of the site, that's not going to work anymore, because all the HTML is stripped out of the rendering of that field on the front end. They had to do this to get the fix out. Now they are promising a more complete fix that might deal with that situation next month. But until then, this is a real issue. What do you do? There are some workarounds it is a very technical fix. So if you're using ACF with HTML and the shortcode you need to pay attention to this details are in their blog linked, and again, it's a technical fix that's involved. All right. Let's see. Let's turn the page and talk about some things going on here at solid WP here on solid Academy. We have several great live streams coming up links in this one already. Tomorrow. We have Timothy Jacobs, the lead developer for solid WP coming on to talk with us about WordPress security, understanding and managing threats and vulnerabilities. Like when you get those notices that there's a security issue on your site. What do you do with those? What do you make of the numerical value that patch stack assigns to a vulnerability What do you do with these things? Timothy is going to unpack all that for us tomorrow. And of course he'll be there to answer any of your security related questions as always, and Timothy is a brilliant, brilliant presenter, who has great answers for us as well. Of course our plugin roundup coming back on February the sixth that's monthly, usually the first Tuesday. Something also to be aware of there's a new story later on today about this. There we have a really important webinar coming up on February the seventh it's a free one. With Matt Pritchett from sin WP talking about email authentication, maybe you saw the news that Google and Yahoo are going to require SPF DK I M and D mark for certain users. We're going to unpack that with with Matt there on February the seventh. And our own Chris Malone is going to be talking about how to fix the internet or how to break the internet maybe both lessons from the support desk. So Chris will be doing his webinar here first time on solid Academy on February the 13th. That's going to be a lot of fun. We have several premium events that are on the calendar as well next week WooCommerce boot camp with Zack stepback is coming this assumes a basic knowledge of WooCommerce. In other words, this is not a WooCommerce 101 But we're going to walk you through all the individual things. We will be assuming that you know what WooCommerce is and you can create a product and some basic WooCommerce things, but we'll be getting into the details of WooCommerce with some fundamentals advanced WooCommerce speeding up WooCommerce and lastly implementing WooCommerce with Kadence. This is going to be a great live stream series with Zack who is a WooCommerce guru. Also in February our premium courses Maddie Azzaman talking about website content. This is going to build on the course she did for us last year and bring in some AI elements. She's going to talk about some AI content tools for a content workflow, writing great chat DBT prompts and building your own GPT how web design supports content effectiveness. And lastly, how to conduct a UX audit based on content for your site. Maddie is a real pro. She's a great presenter and she will be with us in February it's going to be great stuff. One more thing on the calendar but not yet able to register for is the fact that Amber Hines from equalised digital will be with us at the end of March for our WordPress accessibility workshop. And of course as a member you get me office hours every week, every Thursday Ask whatever you want. That's every Thursday, one to two central solid Academy premium is free with any solid suite membership, which starts as low as $199 a year. Take advantage of that. All right, let's talk about some plugins big news. In the plugin world is that Kadence AI is finally released. If you've not yet seen Kadence AI It is a game changer. Last week, January the 16th Kadence team launched their new AI powered starter templates. It's instant content creation with Smart Keyboard integration for SEO optimized engaging websites Kadence say I touches over 600 customized pages and patterns that are that's in the Kadence design library. They're all pre built with AI generated text and royalty free images tailored to your brand they've also added API to the Kadence text advanced block. To use Kadence API for a starter site. You need the Kadence theme the free or pro version Kadence blocks the free or Pro and the Kadence starter templates. When you have those three things in there. You can use Kadence API and generate a site right there with several prompts pretty cool. There's an AI content generation wizard that prompts you to get going. You just add some details about your business or organization helpful prompts to create clear about information, you add some keywords to some images and it goes to work so it's a beautiful design here. This is just a few screenshots of how that looks
and begins to generate some content around your business gives you some thought starters. Pretty neat helps you choose some key words for the business then you can select some royalty free images and bounce right out to start building a website. Now there are and you've probably seen other AI WordPress site creation tools. Here's where Kadence AI is different. What you get to do here is look at this. Here's our Kadence starter templates. Now, you've probably seen Kadence starter templates, though, what this view now does is take all the stuff that you've put into the wizard and now you can view all the starter template library with your text with your selected images. So you can see what it's actually going to look like on the site. Pretty cool. You can do your starter styles here as well and preview all of those and see how they look across different templates. You can decide whether you want to pull in some example blog posts, or import some WooCommerce products if you have those. It gives some plugin suggestions based on the kind of site that it is really, really neat stuff. It also pulls into the patterns that come along with Kadence so not only the the starter theme template, but also even the patterns that go along here you get access to see your text in those patterns to be able to drop those right in really, really cool stuff. So take a look at that, as I mentioned a minute ago, even if you're not using the Kadence AI to create a site you still have access to AI tools in the Kadence text advanced block that occurs right there. So if you have the latest version of Kadence blocks or Kadence blocks Pro, you'll see this new AI magic sparkles right there in the text advanced block and that prompts the AI flow to start working so you have access to a lot of things right there's no play around with that if you haven't already. It is free. Kadence AI is free. Even if you don't have a Kadence license they give you 250 Free AI credits. They say it takes around 70 credits to create a full website. But then depending on the bundle that you have, you get a certain number of credits. If you have Kadence essentials or the full bundle. Those reset every year if you have a Kadence lifetime deal. 16,000 ai credits for the lifetime but look 70 credits for a site is going to take you a while to get to 16,000 I see some folks were asking in the chat about a webinar on this. We won't be doing one but you can watch the live stream on the Kadence channel. The link is right there on the slide. Ben and Hannah and the team at Kadence did a great overview of Kadence AI on their launch party on Friday. WooCommerce 8.4 has also been released December 12. It dropped a little over a month ago pretty pretty backwards compatible haven't seen any issues on the sites we manage with WooCommerce and this latest release. One of the things they've added is a nice Featured Products Block. So as you are using the product block you can say I want to show products that I've marked as featured that's really helpful in the Featured Products giving it a star right there in the list of clients like to do that. Make it really easy to change out which products are featured on the site, something that they've also added that is long overdue, in my opinion, is that they now give you access to your WooCommerce extensions from right there on the site within WooCommerce. So go into WooCommerce and then the extension submenu and my subscriptions gives you this new interface where you can see all the subscriptions you currently have for that site. Really, really good stuff there. Let's see they've also given the whole shipping settings area a refresh. There's new flows for adding shipping zones and shipping methods. It's a lot cleaner and nicer than it used to be. So if you haven't played around with this jump into WooCommerce and take a look. It's much updated and much improved over the way it used to be. They've also changed up a little bit of the way that virtual and downloadable products are supported and created. It's much nicer all the way around. So good job to the folks there at Whoo. Let's talk about some AI news. Lots of things going on in the world of AI today if you follow AI news, there's some legal issues happening around open AI. This case that came up last year where a Georgia radio talk show host has sued open AI because the chat GPT gave some incorrect information, a fact that he was accused of embezzlement, which was completely untrue that was picked up by a news outlet and run with he is now suing open AI because of the false information it provided about him. And so it's gonna be a test for open AI in the courts around. How How does the court rule on these AI hallucinations? That's all going to be tested in this case. It's raises concerns about legal risks for relying on chat GPT outputs without careful verification. Hopefully none of you are doing that. Especially regarding individuals. Don't use chat GPT as a search engine, it's not good for that it's helpful for creative generation of thoughts and content and code and those sorts of things. But don't use chat GPT as a search engine, that's not what it's for. So we'll see what's going to happen. This is definitely an important case to watch another another lawsuit happening right now against open AI. This is a big one. The New York Times has sued open AI and Microsoft for copyright infringement. It alleges the unauthorized use of millions of articles to train the AI models used by open AI. The Times claims that AI chat bots, including chat GPT are built using its content without its permission. So the times claims that AI tools threatened journalism, and they demand an unspecified monetary damages but also that all of these AI models be destroyed. Okay, that should be interesting. They argue that AI products are not transformative, and thus not not exempt from copyright law. We'll see again if they're anytime a new technology is advanced. Or you know if you've been around the tech world for a while you've seen this over and over again. A new technology comes on the scene. And then some enterprising lawyer figures out a way to test the law around that technology. And that is what's happening here. We shall see 2023 was certainly the year of AI Perhaps 2024 is the year of the lawsuits around AI. See how it works out. Sam Altman, who was the CEO of open AI says that chat GPT does need to evolve in some uncomfortable ways. So open AI is next model they predict will significantly surpass current chat GPT capabilities. AI is evolving significantly faster than other technologies have. And he says that future AI developments will necessitate some quote, uncomfortable decisions. Not sure what he means by that he emphasized the need for substantial individual customization in AI. He also talked about that a breakthrough in energy is necessary for AI's future due to all of the power that all the processors required to make AI work take to run, they're very power intensive. So much like in the early years, PC, personal computer development was limited by the speed and power of the processor. AI is limited by power and how much power can be delivered through chips to create all this output. Interesting. Alban advocates for wider acceptance of nuclear fission as an energy source, he's personally invested 357 mil FMz $5 million in nuclear fusion company called Elian energy. So we shall see another little bit that popped up in AI the Elvis act. So this is an act in Tennessee where the governor has introduced this bill that will protect artists from Ai misuse music. The music industry, of course is a big deal in Tennessee 61,000 jobs $5.8 billion to the GDP is the first legislation in the US to protect against unauthorized AI voice cloning. And just a side note, if you've never played with some of these AI voice cloning tools, it's a little scary, and we actually did this with one of our clients earlier. Trained an AI tool on a little snippet of her voice, and then had it read a paragraph. And I'm going to tell you, it was really hard to tell that it was anybody different than the actual speaker. Really, really amazing. So this is an act that's going to protect artists from cloning, which is probably a good thing. One little bit here AI is coming for the influencers. So there are several brands right now that are running experiments using AI tools to create synthetic virtual influencers for advertising campaigns. So this new approach promises a similar impact at a fraction of the cost and could present a threat to influencers who need to print depend on that branded content deal or their income. Cultivating a real human following still seems essential, at least for now. But like other creative fields, AI could replace basic functions at a lower cost. Success is likely going to encourage more experimentation so we'll see what actually happens there.
Nikon, Sony and Canon all camera manufacturers are fighting AI fakes. With new technology. So these companies are developing embedded digital signatures and images to show that they are legitimate images versus AI generated fakes. They have agreed on a global standard for digital signatures. And this is I think, a good thing all the way around. So keep a watch on that these camera manufacturers are I think doing a good thing to help us to see what is this the real image or something somebody ran through Dali to create. Yes, he was wondering, could you Photoshop those things and this is actually something that's going to be embedded into the file itself. Whether or not it could be removed is a really good question. And I'm sure they're developing it with the end goal that it cannot few other bits of AI news not to be sued Apple is exploring an AI deal with news publishers. So they're actually going to pay the journalism source for use of their articles and its AI approach. Here's a great article on how to prevent AI from taking your content. Just some simple things you can put in your htaccess file that will stop those GPT blot bots from coming your site. Open AI announces chat CBT team memberships for the workplace. It's pretty cool as well. Alright, let's turn the page to some other news. I mentioned this earlier, but there is a big deal happening in the world of email. And that is that Google and Yahoo have stated that this month, or pardon me next month in February they are now going to be requiring SPF and DK I m signatures on any mail that comes into their system. This is Gmail Yahoo accounts all those things Google workspace, though, for a long time, SPF and DKM had been best practices. They are now going to be mandatory requirements if you are emailing Google or Yahoo accounts. Also, any domain that sends more than 5000 emails per day into Google and Yahoo accounts must also require demark or include demark so for example, if you have a customer that has more than 5000, Gmail, Google workspace addresses in their list, you're gonna have to have demark records. So if you don't comply with that, you're gonna see email deliverability drop way off. Either there'll be your email will be rejected completely or sent to spam. So this is something that is happening and will be taking place here in the next few weeks. This is why on February the seventh we have our free live stream with Matt Pritchett from sin WP, what do you need to know about email authentication understanding SPF PKI M demark and the rest of that alphabet soup the link to register is right down there in the footer. I would strongly suggest that you attend this is something we all need to understand. Here's a great article he ran across some surprising WordPress statistics that you should not miss. This is great fodder if you're writing blog posts or having conversations with people who perhaps don't understand the value of WordPress. WordPress still continues to dominate the market 62.9% share in the CMS market. You see that's held pretty steady over the last couple of years. WordPress also continues to dominate in the top 10 million websites on the internet. WordPress is 43% of the top 10 million websites globally, which says yes, WordPress can scale very, very well and we see those stats here. Maintaining just about the same hold for a number of years now. The WordPress plugin directory has almost 60,000 plugins downloaded over 17 billion times lots of use. The WordPress theme repository almost 12,000 themes in the free directory as well as 20,000 themes available including premium options. WooCommerce itself the most widely used e commerce platform 3.9 million online stores, which is 43% of all the E commerce sites out there built with WooCommerce WordPress powering 23% of the top 1 million e commerce sites. So for anybody that says WordPress doesn't scale or it's not for serious business, these statistics don't lie. They're great to have in your back pocket or maybe write a blog post about a great link for you there at the bottom of those slides. Another good discussion is happening over the WP minute can the block editor and page builders co exist. There is no doubt about it. The block editors capacities have greatly improved just as we saw earlier on in this live stream. It is a viable website building options for basic sites. Sometimes though complex designs require page builders or custom code block editor proponents say that sites designing page builders are locked into those tools forever. And some speculate that page builder pricing might increase as the number of users and page builders decline. We'll have to see there's a good discussion I would recommend this article. If you're on the fence between block editor and Page Builder or using one or the other. This is something I think you ought to read it's great article on that same vein and picking back up on the Data Liberation initiative. The question has been raised do WordPress migration guides undermine page builders so WordPress is part of the Data Liberation initiative is creating guidelines for migration from Wix Divi and Elementor to the Gutenberg block editor. This comes as a result of Matt Mullenweg Data Liberation initiative with the goal of making migration to the block editor easier that's a good thing. For everybody. But they also have guides for migrating out of page builders like Divi and Elementor into block editors. So that's that has some people upset. The industry is moving toward a block based future with Gutenberg at the forefront. So we'll have to see what's going to happen here. Can page builders and the block editor coexist and do these migration guides threaten that so good article there at the Search Engine Journal, I would recommend you read the clickbait headline of the month is this one is 2024 is the end for digital agencies. This is clickbait, but it's a good article. And here's why. That it's the term it's not that we're gonna go out of business perhaps but it's the term digital agency. The term has lost its relevance. If you use this term to describe yourself, I would consider changing the name because all marketing is digital today, right? So digital agency doesn't really carry the emphasis that it did several years ago. Skills that were once specialized to the digital agency are really now ubiquitous across the marketing spectrum. So maybe think about a different way to describe yourself if you're using that terminology. forward looking agencies should focus on high level strategy and leadership as things like AI and better tools come along to actually do a lot of the work that we used to do more efficiently. So our role really in providing value to our clients is staying at the top level of strategy and maybe helping with some of the implementation. The implementation is going to become easier and easier as we go toward the future with all the advancements in these tools that are coming along. So great article there in the Wall Street Journal. Take a read if you would like to see more items that are worth a look as we start to wrap up today. These are things that didn't fit anywhere else but I think are worth a read. Here's a good article on what is the difference between TLS and SSL if you are, if you want to know all those things, we really ought to have a general understanding. Great article there. On unlimited WP. This is a super polite post dotnet if you like me have ever written an email to a client and then thought I better not send that. This is a great tool for you. Drop that email in polite post dotnet and it will reward it so that it's not as Oh Prickly, let's say prickly. Take a look at that resource. It's a great one. Last of all scalable AI tools for SEO is a good article here on Search Engine Journal and how to sell WordPress as a solution to a reluctant client a good article they're on WP lifts. All right, last but not least today looking at the WP community several word camps upcoming here in the US. I work in Phoenix in just a couple of weeks February 9 and 10th there in Phoenix I'm gonna miss that one. Then the several word camp Phoenix but I won't be able to get to that one this year. It's always a great event. If you're in the southwest of the US. Go ahead and head over there. It's one of the better word camps that happen. Also we're can't Montclair New Jersey scheduled for June the first up there in New Jersey. Couple of global word camps occurring WordCamp Asia and Taipei, Taiwan in March and WordCamp Europe in the beautiful Torino Italy in June. Alright folks, that wraps up today for the WordPress news roundup for January 2020. For one more time. I'm going to drop in the links for today. The slides are there in the chat if you're watching this on the replay. The slides are just below the video. We'll have this replay posted about three o'clock central time. And one last time. I'll invite you to register for that live stream tomorrow with Timothy Jacobs as we look into how to interpret solid security threat levels and what to do if you have a vulnerable theme or plugin installed on your site. Well that's gonna wrap it up for us today. Thanks for hanging out with me for the last 50 minutes. Hopefully you've gotten a good summary of all the things in the WordPress world. My name is Nathan Ingram and we'll see you next time here on solid Academy where we go further together.