and I will share the slides in just a moment. I know Sue right the live captioners from white coat are absolutely amazing. Really, really incredible folks
All right, everybody captioning should be working for everybody. Glad you're all here I'm going to drop in the slides into the chat
the slides are there to download. If you'd like to follow along as we go that also has of course, all of the links. They're really helpful for this particular webinar. Especially.
So again, welcome, everybody. Glad you're here. We're about five minutes out from getting started with the February 2023. News RoundUp here on iThemes Training getting all choked up excited about this webinar. This is actually going to be a great one because while we have a lot to talk about there's about 20% More than normal. I'm not quite sure what to say about that other than there was a lot of things to talk about this month. We added a whole new section on AI. Some AI news happening so yeah, we have a lot to talk about here in the next hour. I might talk really quickly. We'll see how it goes. So welcome. Glad you're here. As you jump in to zoom, open up the chat, say hi, tell us where you're logging in from. We're just about four or five minutes out from getting started. I'm gonna drop in the slide link again into the chat. If you'd like to download those. It's got all the links if you want to read full articles, it's really helpful. So captioning is up and working. You should be able to follow along there. Yeah, welcome everybody. Welcome, Geoffrey from Guatemala. Welcome Heather from California. Hey Devin from Canada. Happy Valentine's Day, Paul. Glad everybody's here. Yeah, Paul, you can sell those on eBay. There'll be I had a friend that was, well he is still he's an author but when he would talk about he'd be like at a live event. giving away books that were signed. And he'd say, Yeah, this this is a signed copy of this book, which means in a garage sale, you can get a quarter for it instead of 10 cents. So there you go. You would probably get about that on eBay if even that. Welcome Ben from Sweden holds for just about three minutes away from getting started with the February 2023 news round up here on AI iThemes Training. Jeffrey that notes were not proof read by chat GPT however, I will say a few of the slides were summarized by chat GPT Yeah, did you know you can give it a link and say hey, go summarize this article and eight bullet points or less. You can and that's what we did on some of these. So just about three minutes to go. Glad everybody's here. We'll get started here in just a moment. As you jump in to zoom, open the chat say hi and tell us where you're logging in from today.
Many things happening in the word world of WordPress that we had to talk about this week we usually end up right around in the 90s on a slide number there are 119 today so a lot to talk about. Lots to talk about today. Lots of interesting news that has happened in the last month. Several fun things from I themes we're going to talk about Yeah.
So again, welcome everybody. Glad you're here. We're a couple of minutes out from getting started here with the February 2023 News RoundUp here on iThemes Training. Welcome Melanie from Canada. See, I don't think you'll have to do much updating with these changes we're going to talk about not too bad. Just interesting things that are happening with iThemes.
The cat by the way the Kadence blocks release is imminent. Probably you'll all be able to use it this time next week. We'll talk about that. Paul, that is not the case. At all, like even a little bit Nope. Not even close
yeah, the new Kadence blocks is it's a game changer. It is a game changer. We are using it on WP Nathan and it is pretty cool. Alright folks down to just about a minute to go before we get started. If you're just joining us in zoom, pop up in the chat, say hi, tell us where you're logging in from. I'm going to share the slide link again there in the chat. We'll also with the replay link, you want to download the slides and follow along it has the links to all the things are there some pretty important links throughout this things you might want to download and read in full yourself. So make sure you download these slides so you can do that all the links should be clickable in the PDF that is linked there. Welcome classroom Little Rock Ronnie from North Carolina. Welcome everybody. Glad you're here. We're just about ready to start about 40 seconds. 40 seconds to go for the February 2023 News RoundUp many things happening in the word of world of WordPress over the last month that we're going to talk about
oh, Chris is the number wrong? We may have reduced the number y'all way wrong. So Oh, Chris is chatting directly to me. So give me the number and we'll update it in real time. Folks, is what you get when you come early. The sausage is being made here. Now all right, we're just about ready to start. Chris, if you find that number just let me know when we get to that slide and I'll correct it in real time. Okay, folks, let me okay, I won't remember that. Tell me that. Like later. Okay, let's get the recording started and we will begin the news roundup. Well, good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to the February 2023 WordPress news roundup here on iThemes Training. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host your die iThemes Training and every month we take a look across the WordPress world. And we pick several of the things that we felt like it was talking about. We have a lot to talk about this month. We all the news that we talk about is generally from the perspective of people who are building and managing WordPress sites for clients. And so we kind of filter out some things based on that but while we have a lot this month, we typically have somewhere between 90 and 100 slides in this month, there's 119. So there's a lot and we're probably going to run a little bit long today if I had to guess. So let's get started right away. By the way, if you're just joining us in zoom, I'm going to drop in the link to today's slides. If you're watching this on the replay there down below in the download handout button. The link to the replay is also there in the chat if you want to go back and look at the transcript or slide notes or the any of that stuff. It'll be there about an hour after we wrap up today. So let's get started no further delay with some news from core that the release of WordPress 6.2 is pressing right along. Beta one has been released and it is ready for testing. You can actually download that from wordpress.org. The upcoming major release is going to roll in the last nine Gutenberg plugin releases, which includes 292 editor enhancements and 354 bug fixes. They finally do take the beta label away from the site editor for the full site editing experience as of now the open issues that required resolution to remove the beta label remain. So I just decided to remove the label. That's okay. contributors have created a detailed testing guide. You can read all about that there just to make sure it's going to work with all of your things. Let's look at some of the highlights coming from the six.to release. Some of these things, by the way are Gutenberg focused which means we've covered those in the last several weeks of the news roundup with these new features of the Gutenberg plugin. So there is this new distraction free mode that we talked about several weeks ago. It's pretty cool. distraction free has been something that's been in core WordPress until Gutenberg but now it is back. So you have that really nice clean layout if you just want to write a blog post, you can do that and swap in and out pretty easily. We also have a new improvements to the nav block, figuring out how to do how to arrange and deal with the navigation block in the full side editing world has been complicated, and they've done a pretty good job of solving it. So now over in the ListView you can grab your navigation block you have the menu items over on the right, you can drag and drop and move those around. You can lock those blocks as well I think there that's about to do that yet. We can lock this block in place to disable movement or disabled deletion all of that. So pretty cool stuff. It's It's relatively simple once you see how it works to get your hands around this full side editing. So the schedule is on track. Beta two beta one dropped last week beta two drops today. I'm not sure if it is out at the time of this broadcast, but it will be later today if it's not already, either in beta three and four on the next couple of weeks. Then you see the release candidate drops coming up in March with the dry run on March 27. And the final WordPress 6.2 release is scheduled for March 28. About six weeks from today. I Josepha Hayden Chung fossa he was the executive director of the WordPress project has laid out some big picture goals for core in 2023. Of course, there's a big focus on the WordPress CMS itself, completing the main tasks for phase two of the Gutenberg Project and beginning the exploratory work for phase three of Gutenberg when it comes to the WordPress community a focus on re engaging our community through learning events, celebrating our 20th year as a project. How many of you knew that WordPress turns 20 this year? Indeed. It does. And also updating the distribution methods and mechanisms for core in the WordPress ecosystem. So some of the big focuses here within the CMS are a lot of work on API's to let WordPress talk better to other things. I bring an open verse search to core we're going to have another slide about that in a minute. Open verse you may know is the old Creative Commons library, which was acquired by automatic last year I believe at some point and has been relabeled open verse and is now available to search in core. It's pretty cool. So the navigation block is there working on that we just saw some slides about that. And improvement in the media management. That's a long time coming, simplifying the process of making releases focusing on PHP 8.2 for both core and Gutenberg, block theme development tools and focusing on custom css, and so forth. So a lot of work yet to be done this year on the WordPress CMS itself. As far as community goes more focused on Community Summit planning and coordination. This is an event that precedes WordCamp. Us in August of this year in Washington, DC. There's a lot of other things that the community is going to be focusing on including refinement of polyglot, the multiple language tools. It's part of the one of the future stages of Gutenberg, as well as this development of a canonical plugin program that we talked about last month. In other words, a way to set apart a plugin that is community supported. It's sort of a it's a feature that you might want to be part of core WordPress, but it doesn't quite rise to that level. So it is like a canonical plugin. For example, the one we talked about last month was The Web p by default. So instead of including that in core, it's not going to be a canonical plugin that is supported by the community itself. Within the WordPress ecosystem, there's more work being devoted to the WordPress playground, which is that in browser without the single browser, no database WordPress experience pretty cool stuff, and then continuing to work on some of the others as well. So a lot of interesting goals. I'd encourage you to read Joseph as blog post there at the link below. Now, we had a couple of interesting releases of the Gutenberg plugin over the last couple of weeks Gutenberg 15 dot o dropped January 18. The block inspector tabs experiment has been stabilized. So this was something that was released last month as I recall, taking a look at changing the way the right hand column of the block editor works with some sort of tab, a tab type interface. So you can turn off the turn off or pardon me, turn on the off Canvas navigation editor and you'll see a view tab. Now this is within the Gutenberg plugin. It's not yet in core, but you can turn off that experiment under the Gutenberg icon and you'll see a list tab that looks something like this. So you now have this tabbed approach to the way the information there on the right hand sidebar is laid out. I like it a lot and that's available it's ready to play with now. It's pretty cool. They've also added a paste styles option which is really nice. You can create multiple blocks that are identical styling, a copy of block and then just paste the styling of that block onto another block. And it's available there in the drop down menu. Here's how that looks. So let's say we have we got a couple of paragraph blocks. We're going to make the the background light gray and the text purple. So look we can copy the block and then go down to this next one and just click paste styles and boom, you get the styles moved right into the other block. So that is pretty cool and should make it easier to do all the things block. So there's now some work that's been done on the block style variation from within the global styles. You can have you can change the styles of buttons and images and site logos that only apply to that variation of the particular blocks that actually have variations. So here's a button for example, we can go in to our block, we can change the variation right there. And just change the border of this particular one. So we've had blocked variations, but if you change the style, it would go across all of them. So in this case, we can now just change the block itself that we're looking on pretty cool. They've also added a new sticky position block or support for a sticky position block. And so this is a block that would stay put as you scroll down the screen it works really well. So here for example, and we're going to select this group at the top, click the Settings go down to position and choose sticky. Boom that is now sticky. And as we scroll look, it sticks in place. So that's gonna that's now in this the drop of Gutenberg that released last month so pretty cool stuff.
The sidebar now allows you to resize in the site editor, which is a pretty big deal. Honestly, because sometimes it gets a little squinched over there. And so this seems like a simple thing but they it wasn't supported until now to actually be able to change the width of that sidebar area to make it a little more usable when you have a lot of stuff stacked up over there. Another little fix that's a big deal. In Gutenberg 15 Was that images are now constrained to their container. So you if you've used the block editor, you might have found that if you drag the image and resize it, the image can actually go outside the bounds of the container that it was in. Now that's changed so that it stays inside the container no matter what. Even if you drag it way off the screen it still pops into the the correct size of the container that it is in. There's also now a some changes made to the canvas mode within the site editor itself which are pretty good. Also the copy and cut shortcuts now work in the site editor as well they did so those are some minor things that can really help to use the site editor. The next version of Gutenberg released a week ago on February the eighth that's Gutenberg 15.1. Now this is where it gets fun open verse is now integrated into the inserter. Now the inserter is the little plus icon the place where you can insert things. So you can now write from within core WordPress if you're using Gutenberg. Now again, this will be rolled into the next version of WordPress. But for now it's only in the Gutenberg plugin. You can access open verse search from right there in the block editor. So you can search the huge collection of totally free stock photography. If you click on the image, it'll be inserted as an image block with the proper attribution and license in the caption. That is pretty cool. So here's how this works. You can see a search for stars and a bunch of stuff pops in. And if you were to click one of these images, all the appropriate attribution would bump into the caption so you don't have to do any of that stuff. It just automatically works pretty cool. In Gutenberg 15 The Global styles option now also has some shadow presets natural crisp sharp and soft. You can also define custom shadow presets in the theme dot JSON file. So look, here's how this works. We got a button and we look we have shadow options. Isn't that spiffy? So that's kind of nice. You can imagine that themes will start to use this functionality to build in shadows that work within, you know, for example, the design that you're working in, that would be easy for theme developers to do. This is also a really excellent addition to Gutenberg, where now, custom CSS can be added on a per block basis, meaning that instead of having to just go add something that applies to the entire site, you can go into the settings of a block and look you can add additional CSS just to this block. That is pretty cool. It's been needed for quite a while actually. Some of the things that happened in Gutenberg 15 One navigation has been added to the site editor sidebar, so you can get around right there within the site editor to deal with your navigation menus. They start to appear here and all the Define menus on a site show up here and you can click into those and do what you need to do right from the site editor without having to bounce back and out into the menus area. There are also some new menu options for copying and pasting styles between blocks. This is pretty cool. You can copy the style of a particular block and dump it in another one. Also, featured images in the templates can themselves be resized, and you can set options for cover contained fill just to make all that work really well. So a lot of things are happening. These two releases a Gutenberg have some really important features, and I would encourage you to play around with him. There's a lot to learn a lot to see. And especially with that Metaverse search it's a it's a game changer for WordPress. So again, remember to see these Gutenberg enhancements you do have to have the Gutenberg plugin installed on your site. But beware, Gutenberg plugin is beta and it's really probably not something you want to run on a live site that's super important because it is a beta plugin and sometimes things change and break, etc. All right, let's pivot to some security news. We have a lot to talk about in the security world. Starting off with our monthly vulnerability report. 96 vulnerabilities were patched this number Thank you, Chris should be 36 plugin vulnerabilities are currently active, or the plugin has been closed, no theme vulnerabilities in the last month. That's pretty cool. So this comes from I think security of course and we have this great feature called Site scan that scans your site twice a day to look for any vulnerable themes and plugins. And that will let you know if you have a vulnerability. Also if you have the Pro version of I think security you can set it in the version management feature to automatically apply the update if a vulnerable theme or plugin has an update ready to be patched but without anything, you don't do anything at all other than turn that feature on. I think security pro keeps your website patched and working. So pretty cool stuff. I have some to some interesting news about the site scan coming later in the security section. A bunch of these plugins were vulnerable and closed. This means that they are actively vulnerable. There is a real problem. And these plugins should be removed from your website. Don't just deactivate them, delete them, because even if they're deactivated, the code is still there on your server and could potentially be exploited so just delete them altogether. Amazon JS AMR shortcode any widget bootstraps shortcodes CoreOS official custom Add User download video sidebar easy Pay Pal button easy social box embed PDF FLIR field box galleries gig press human add ons intuitive custom post order list pages shortcode login logout menu maquis markup Yandex maps Olev media shortcodes zero MK shortener opening hours page builder live composer post views count Show Hide collapse expand simple file downloader 2020 image before user activity video dot j s. Widget shortcode widgets on pages WP responsive testimonials that up top bar yarp YouTube channel Gallery and the YouTube shortcode. So if you're using any of those plugins, you better do something about them. This one by the way for all of you OG old time I think has members we used to use a widget shortcode a lot back in the iThemes builder days to make things a little bit easier that that shortcode or that that plugin is actively vulnerable and needs to be dealt with. So be aware of that. Okie dokie you may or may not have heard that there is as of yesterday this was just announced yesterday. There is a zero day threat to all Apple devices. So yesterday Apple rolled out security updates for iOS, iPad OS Mac OS and the Safari browser to address a vulnerability that is being actively exploited in the wild. It's related to the WebKit browser engine and this is a big deal because Apple requires WebKit to be used by any third party app or anything that has an in browsing experience on its platform. The Mac OS update also fixes a potential problem in the shortcuts function. You should update all of your devices immediately. soothsaying why doesn't her phone show an update to install it? Probably because it already installed it. So I don't have the I didn't put down the versions that have been patched of all these, but just Google it and it's likely that that patch was already applied for you. So that is happening. There's also a incident in MailChimp. You may have heard about this. This was the end of last month, a third. A third party vendors software was exploited, which compromised a limited number of MailChimp user accounts. The information that was accessed was username email address and account settings, no financial data or anything like that. This was a big deal because hacks like this, where they didn't really get any quote unquote valuable information like there's no credit card information at risk. But the problem is they now know that you have a MailChimp account what's your username is what your email address is. And so it's these sorts of attacks that can lead to social engineering attacks where they pretend to be MailChimp to get you to to provide your credentials. So that's out there be aware of that and if you use MailChimp just know that that's a thing. If you have clients maybe let them know to Be especially mindful of any emails that purport to be from MailChimp that want their credentials. MailChimp took immediate action to secure the affected accounts and prevent any future incidents. They have formed the infected affected users and they're offering free identity theft protection and credit monitoring services. Pardon me. They're working with law enforcement cybersecurity experts to investigate. They suggest that you enable two factor authentication and review account activity for anything suspicious. All right.
In other news related to security and passwords LastPass now faces the first of potentially a lot of class action lawsuits over the last past breach that unfolded at the end of last year. In early January a lawsuit was filed in the Massachusetts District Court, federal district court by an anonymous LastPass user. The plaintiff is concerned about the risk of phishing emails, scams and fraud due to the possibility of a hacker cracking the master password due to their individual vaults with improved password cracking algorithms. This particular user who filed the lawsuit suspects the breach might have led a hacker to steal $53,000 in Bitcoin from him over the Thanksgiving weekend. private keys to his cryptocurrency transactions were stored on LastPass. It's unknown if there's any proof of that, et cetera, et cetera. But this is the kind of class action lawsuit that we started predicting a while back. There will probably be others. We'll see what happens there. continuing forward, I think he's published the annual 2022 WordPress vulnerability report some really good information here. I would suggest that you read this blog post it is quite good. And it gives you some good numbers about the WordPress security landscape. Here are some trends 2% of all plugins had 99% of the vulnerabilities. Isn't that interesting? So when people talk about oh, WordPress is just inherently insecure, no 2% of the plugins available had 99% of the vulnerabilities. So that tells you a lot. Every week vulnerabilities. There were 20 to 50, new vulnerabilities and plugins and themes every month on the average 121 plugins and themes had a vulnerability. The severity of the vulnerabilities declined significantly compared to last year, which is really good or 2021, which is really good. I only 26% of plugin and theme vulnerabilities were unpatched at the time of their disclosure. So this is also very good meaning. What this means is that when a vulnerability is discovered, it's reported and the reporting agency will contact the theme or plugin developer saying hey, you should fix this and they give them a certain amount of time to fix it before the vulnerability is published. They don't want to publish the vulnerability without allowing the developer to fix it because otherwise, like the hacker hackers could just read the vulnerability list and they, you know, they can exploit the plugin. So most of the plugins were patched ahead of time, which is really good. cross site scripting vulnerabilities were the most prevalent, and they represented a 73% of all vulnerabilities, SSS eSFR, and the SQL eye vulnerabilities were where things mostly occurred. Now, some other interesting things 2022 saw medium to low risk ratings for 71% of all the vulnerabilities we track so that's pretty good. So of all the vulnerabilities out there most were medium or low, only 4% rated critical that you could also look at it from the other perspective of go in this way. 79% were either medium high or critical. So you know, depends on which direction you analyze this poll to see what's important, so high and critical, really, you know, only one in three were higher critical. So that's that's pretty good. And you can see that the the levels of the threat levels declined from 2021 to 2022. So far less major issues.
26% of the vulnerabilities remaining unpatched we talked about that right there. So there's some numbers that back up that stat. This will show you some of the top threat vectors, it's mostly cross site scripting, we see that all over the place also the cross site forgery, and SQL injections that shows you where all the things happen. So over 400 plugins and themes using the Freemius framework were affected by single vulnerability. This is some of the big things that happened last year. If you remember that Freemius vulnerability that was back mid year or so. We also had those 5 million Elementor users experience a critical vulnerability and several other vulnerabilities that were patched ninja forms also had a big deal. And of course, our own Backup Buddy had a high severity vulnerability. And we responded to that by getting that update out quickly. And even making that and pushing that update to users even if they had licenses expired. And if you were using I theme sync, we automatically pushed the version out to all your sites that were in sync so you didn't have to touch anything. So that was a big deal. And it was dealt with. All right, so talking about iframes. Let's move into some news from I themes. I'm really excited about this premium event for this month, which is actually one week earlier than it normally is normally our premium events here on iThemes Training are the last week of the month. Because of scheduling. We had to get Maddie here next week. So that is next Tuesday and Wednesday, from one to 3pm each day. This is our website content workshop. So day one is going to talk all about content UX information architecture. Best practices, looking at the Google quality rater guidelines, and then putting some getting some consistency together with a brand style guide. They choose going to focus on processes for content and design like how you know which comes first content or design. What can an intake process look like for content and design to surface all the relevant details like asking the right questions up front so you're designing the right things and then how to create a content wireframe as part of the design process. Maddie is a great teacher. She is a known commodity in the the WordPress writing world she writes for many big brands in the WordPress space, and she's just great to listen to. So that's gonna be a lot of fun next week, that is for members. You can sign up here by the way, if you're not a member of iThemes Training, you get 30 days free so sign up. That's gonna be a great event. And you can take part in that at no cost at all. The March event is yours truly talking about the web foundations workshop. This is gonna be a lot of fun. We did this one about 18 months ago and it's time to refresh this one and deal with some of these topics. Again, they one more these are the four of the things that most often confused those of us that Build and Manage websites. So we're going to talk DNS, we're going to talk redirects, we're gonna talk about transactional email and making sure that emails from WordPress don't end up in the spam box. And last of all optimizing images in WordPress. So four very important topics. That's the end of March next month here on iThemes Training again, for members. A few things coming up here on iThemes Training we have tomorrow is the fly 2023 course talking about work habits, then office hours, of course the website content workshop we talked about and then followed by office hours. We actually have another webinar that I just added and I forgot to update this slide. So this is March the 28th. We just scheduled this if you are a user of the events calendar, we have Jeff Bollinger he's done a number of events, calendar webinars and Kadence webinars for us. We just added this one with the new Events Calendar Automator. It is a fantastic little piece of software just dropping the link there in the chat. You can register for this free webinar. It basically lets you do automations based on your events. Calendar plugin, so selling tickets do like if somebody buys a ticket, you can do some things with it with Zapier and other automations. It's a really cool web. Really cool tool. And I'd encourage you to come with come watch Jeff talk us through it. And that is on February the 28th. All right. Let's see here. Again, if you're not a member of iThemes Training, you can join free for 30 days and I think.com forward slash training. Looking at a couple of other things from I iThemes. We talked about this. We had a great webinar with Timothy Jacobs last month about the new capture options and I think security the Cloudflare turnstile and H capture are now part of I theme security, you can use either of those or the classic google recaptcha if you would like Cloudflare turnstyle is a game changer. It is really, really good. We're starting to use that throughout the sites that we manage. So if you miss that webinar, there's a blog post there that talks all about it. It's really good stuff. I would encourage you to read through that blog post and to watch the webinar. Also, turnstile is now available in the Kadence CAPTCHA plugin. So even if you don't use I think security and you want to make use of the Cloudflare turnstile CAPTCHA replacement, you can download the Kadence CAPTCHA plugin and you can get turnstile connectivity right there as well. Alright, another big change for I think security users you may have noticed this in vulnerability reports last week, we announced that we are partnering with patch stack to power the I iThemes Security site scan. Now site scan is that function and I think security that alerts site owners if a version of a plugin or theme that we're using has a known vulnerability so it scans the site twice a day and lets you know previously we use the WP scan database and now we've partnered with patch stack, which is a better fit for us as a company. One of the things that is really great about patch stack is that we're gonna get a 48 hour heads up if there's a new vulnerability so before it even goes public, the I think security scan will know this is one of those themes or plugins that has a vulnerability that's not public yet, but if the developer has patched it, it's going to go ahead and patch it using the version management feature and I think security pro so this is really great. 48 our heads up really good patch stack is a leader in WordPress security. If you're not familiar with them, check them out at patch stack.com. They've got a reputation for openness and collaboration. And we're just thrilled to be partnering with them. You'll notice the patch stack logo up here in the vulnerability report if you have a problem on your site. All right. Those of you that are Kadence users do we have Kadence users in the house I know we do Kadence Blocks Three is slated for next week. likely Monday, who it's coming yesterday Kadence Blocks Three release candidate one was released for testing major major update to Kadence blocks which introduces grid CSS, and many new UI improvements. It was originally planned for launch last month, but the goal has been to release this product that is backwards compatible and bug free. And when you really can't take the guts out of it and put grid CSS back in its place. That's a lot of work. And so Ben and the team at Kadence had been working hard on this. It is now sheduled for Monday February the 20th. So here's some of the things you can expect in Kadence Blocks Three, a whole new block settings layout that makes development faster. This is beautiful. I mean look at this beautiful tabbed interface here that's very similar to the the Gutenberg tabbed interface that you saw earlier, where you can change the number of columns and how they work and the gutter and all the things and the set. It's just a beautiful new interface. There. The row layouts are now going to use CSS Grid like we mentioned for more robust layouts. So you can see how all of this works. You can bump into your advanced settings and you get to preview the gutter and so forth between the columns. It's really amazing. The new advanced form block which the blog post here if you haven't read this blog post you should. The blog post talks about this being the feature that the Kadence team is the most excited about it's completely rewritten from the ground up. Kathy Zant says this advanced form block is going to put WordPress form plugins on notice like it is amazing. It runs on its own custom post type. You can it so I haven't played with it yet, but I'm looking forward to you can also within the new Kadence Blocks Three Import Export and reset block defaults easier and there's so much more. This is going to be a wonderful addition to the Kadence lineup. Can't wait to play with it for real.
All right, let's move into some plugin news. We've been talking about this for several months this SQL lite integration for WordPress. So this is the IN BROWSER essentially WordPress where it doesn't require a database, SQL lite rescue lite I'm not sure how you pronounce that one of the other. It runs essentially out of a flat text file. So this is ideal for simple websites. Like brochure type websites that don't have a lot of pages not a lot of detail. It's just you know, sort of a static more or less static site. It's faster, it's more secure, running out of this SQL lite approach. So it also if you're a developer, it's going to make it easier to test applications and spin up dev environments. Pretty cool stuff. So take a look at this if you if you're not familiar yet with SQL Lite. You should read this article from WP tavern. Also the plugin is available out there ready to go in the WordPress plugin directory pretty cool stuff. If you are a Yoast SEO user, you might have noticed a few little changes in the Yoast admin interface. I kind of like it actually. They realized that the old interface really was old and they wanted to totally refresh. The Yoast SEO interface took me a minute to figure out where everything was and how it worked. But after I did I really really liked it. They reorganize the sidebar menu for the plugin. They they didn't add any new features. They just sort of moved them around so that they're easier to find and it's a quicker workflow. fewer clicks to get to the most used features. Quick Search which is really helpful. Yoast Vox said we felt the WordPress default admin design just didn't work for us anymore. And it looks sort of like this. Pretty nice actually. The Quick Search up there is super helpful, especially as you're like, where do they put this I just start typing and much like the I think security interface, the features just appear magically that you're looking for. Cool. Here's how it looks in the posts interface to see how the post should look pretty nice. There's also a lot of conversation happening around WooCommerce blocks the the dev team at WooCommerce has now started a monthly block chat. They're calling on their dev community to join a new monthly chat focused on WooCommerce block extensibility. So if you're doing WooCommerce things you might want to poke your head in there and see what's going on. The first three months are focusing on the cart and checkout blocks and improving those. You can learn more there at woocommerce.com/community-slack. All this is going to happen in the WooCommerce Slack channel. Let's talk a bit about SEO, shall we? We've been talking a lot about AI here on AI iThemes Training. And the pushback has always been well you're not supposed to use, you know any sort of automated AI processes to generate content for your website and Google has now clarified that this isn't exactly true. At Google, they say we've long believed in the power of AI to transform the ability to deliver helpful information. Google's ranking systems aim to reward original high quality content that demonstrates the qualities of what we call eat which is experience expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. In other words, it's good content, right? So instead of banning content generation sources, we choose to reward high quality content. So basically what Google is saying here is it's not really the issue of where the content comes from. It's the end product that really matters. So using AI to produce content for the purposes of manipulating rank, does violate their spam policies, but using AI as part of a process that creates original high quality people first content is acceptable. You may remember in the last in the last month news roundup, we featured what was happening at Bankrate. Bankrate is one of the big properties in the financial services content world and they've started using AI and they even say in the byline, this odd this article was generated using automated processes and thoroughly fact checked by a staff editor. That's what I think you're gonna see more and more happening in the content world. So there's a great post here all about these things, and there's a helpful fact there if you want to learn more about it. All right. So Google is beginning to set up GA for for you. Now. We just had some fun there. But yeah, so maybe you got one of these emails. So an email was sent in the last few weeks to all users of Google Analytics, Google announced that they're going to begin automatically setting up basic GA for properties for all UA properties that don't have an associated GA for property with them. So Universal Analytics is just going to stop working on July the first like it's done. That data doesn't carry forward. So Google is saying, starting in March, we're going to start automatically setting up a GA for property for you. So you have some historical data. So they recommend setting up J for now to maximize historical data, as the UA data will cease to exist and is not migratable. So it's good. It's done. Like it's over July 1. So we've been recommending now for months actually, we started recommending this last summer, during our Google Analytics bootcamp with David Zimmerman to start, you know, set up Google Analytics for so you have historical data when this end of thing you know, the end of life happens for Universal Analytics. So maybe you get that email. They're starting to talk about it. Now, as I talk more to David about this this past week. I it's important, like, who knows how they're going to set these properties up, and it may not be the way you want it. So if it was me, I wouldn't personally allow Google to set it up for me automatically. I will just go ahead and start you know, every week doing a few properties, getting them you know, getting GA for added to them to start tracking the analytics. That's what I would recommend doing. Another leading search engine in the world is Yandex. This is Russia's largest search engine and other other points in Asia really lean on the Yandex search engine, as a bit of their data was leaked by an allegedly former employee. We'll see. But this data contain 1900 factors that were used by Yandex for ranking websites and search results. Now why does it matter? Because a lot of these search engines share the same sort of factors. And what they learned from the Yandex leak might point towards some of the things and Google for example, there were useful insights to better help us understand how search engines work from a technical standpoint. They denies that Yandex of course denies it was a hack. They said the data first appeared on unknown hacker site 64% of the factors in the data were listed as inactive or deprecated. By Yandex, I don't know. You can still download it right there. Take a look at it. If you're curious, rather interesting. Some of the ranking factors are number of unique visitors percentage of organic traffic and average domain ranking across queries. So I don't know how to take a look at it if you're into SEO could be interesting. Okay, this is my least favorite news story of the day. Google Cloud has changed than Google never changes names or anything, right? Ever. Like it's always the same. Like they never changed their names. But in this weird situation, Google Data Studio is now being called Looker studio. Now, I'm just going to state for the record that I will probably never call it that. Like, I'm going to call it Google Data Studio. Probably forever, because I hate this name. But they didn't ask me so anyway, October 2022. Google has unified all its business intelligence tools under the looker brand. Looker is a company that it acquired last year, I believe. It will now be the face of all existing Google Cloud Data Analytics programs that includes Data Studio, which is now Looker studio. Google acquired Looker out there it is in 2020, and has been working on this alignment since that time combining all its analytics offerings under one umbrella. Google wants to provide us with more functionality than traditional dashboards. So there's your Looker studio. Don't you just love it.
Okay, a new section of news we've added this month and that is AI news. Really happy about this. We've been talking a lot about AI here on iThemes Training. We had a fun webinar about that. Last week. Let's talk about some AI news, shall we? Chat GPT users topped 100 million in January. And investors are betting big on AI. This is an article in Barron's a mainstream financial publication. So 100 million users in January up from 57 million in December for chat GPT absolutely amazing. Venture capitalists are speculating the market for generative AI application could be as large as a trillion dollars unbelievable. In January, Microsoft expanded its investment in open AI the company behind chat GPT by 10 billion over multiple years. The fear on the street Wall Street is that natural language search in the style of chat GPT poses the first real threat to both Google's share of the search market and its primary monetization engine which is search related advertising. Interesting. Interesting. We'll chat GPT replace Google we all we already know that Bing is incorporating the next version of chat GPT into its own search engine. That's why Microsoft is investing so heavily in open AI the company behind chat GPT so we'll see what happens. Now here's the thing. Interesting, a little bit of news. Google shares have dropped $100 billion after its chat bot failed in a demo. So Google is not new to the world of AI. They've been working on their own chat bot called Bard and it made a factual error in an ad. So you know, everything's all about chat. GPT and Google, just a head of a meeting that the Google senior executives had in Paris, this ad the Twitter ad dropped, talking about Google's barred AI, and it made a factual error which I'll show you in just a minute. And after this, the shares of alphabet the parent company of Google dropped by as much as 9%. During trading hours last Wednesday, here's the error. What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my nine year old about and here's the answer the problem is, this is wrong. This is not correct. The JW S T took the very first pictures of the planet outside our solar system when in fact, it did not. The James Webb Telescope did not discover exoplanets. The European Southern Observatory is telescope. I did that back in 2004. So it was it's a factual error like that happens in AI right. The problem was, they recorded this screenshot and tweeted it out on the official Google channel. Social media replies indicated that Google could have fact checked their response by you know, Googling it, which I think is hilarious. I just think that's funny. So anyway, it's the thing about these AI searches. It's not there yet. It's not gonna it's not to the point of replacing Google and other things as we know it. It is certainly on the way and it is certainly going to change the face of search as we know it. But they do make factual errors like we've tried some of the work here on the news roundup, we pushed through AI, you know, take this article and summarize it in eight bullet points. And we found that some of those summarization, it just totally made up. Like it wasn't even in the article. I don't know what it was thinking about. So you got to fact check it today. But what will it be like in six months or next year or in two years from now? It's game changer, y'all. We'll see how it all shakes out. I here's something interesting. wordpress.com is also testing AI generated images and content. wordpress.com is aiming to create more engaging content for websites making it easy with AI images. So here's a screenshot the search a snowy village with an ice skating pond, small bridge, a library and shops lit from inside and there are our AI generated images actually pretty nice. That can then be dropped right there in the editor. This is wordpress.com. But wow, I can see a plugin like that there are a number of plugins by the way that will do this sort of thing right within WordPress. we demoed a couple of those on the webinar last week. Pretty cool. The system can also create blog post introductions by summarizing the content in a few sentences. Automatic has not yet announced when the AI generated images and content will be available to all users but it's happening and we're gonna see more and more like that. How about this if you're a Visual Studio Code user, this is a free tech text editor code editor app from Microsoft chat. GPT is now integrated with the VS code extension. So co GPT allows developers to write code with natural language inputs, just like we did in our webinar demo last week. Creating code snippets right there in chat GPT it's amazing. It's based on the open AI language from chat GPT I crates code completions, code summarization cogeneration. To increase productivity, reduce development time, it's available free on the Visual Studio Code. Marketplace. So if you're using Visual Studio Code, try it out. Or if you're using Visual Studio trap, this edition Visual Studio code. We got some more AI news. We just didn't do all these chat GPT passes the Google coding interview for Level Three engineer salary of 183,000. Yeah, so it's pretty smart. Chat. GPT can pass medical licensing exams and the bar. A Colombian judge actually use chat GPT creating the ruling for a Child medical right case. Pretty interesting. Here's an article on how this person saved a medium article saved 108 140 minutes in a week by embedding chat GPT in his email, which is interesting. Here's the inside story of how chat GPT actually came to be. It's a pretty interesting read. I read some of that last night. If you want to learn how to build a website just as chat GPT it'll tell you how about this open eyes tool may help you identify text written by Chet GPT. So if you want to figure out if it's if this is generated text or not, there's a tool and this is the funniest Article of the week. Here are seven AI blunders that show the revolution isn't quite here yet. So read that article on fast companies a lot of fun. A couple other things. So here's that webinar that I've referenced a couple of times. If you missed that last week, I would strongly encourage watching that one not just because it's my webinar, but this webinar, I think is the most important one that we've done in the last year. I had the most fun doing it and it's super helpful. So if you've not really even gotten your feet wet with chat GPT and AI watch this webinar and you'll be blown away. You absolutely will. And last of all one of the tools that I demonstrated in this i iThemes Training webinar last week called Get Genie, which is a WordPress based AI tool is now on AppSumo with lifetime deal, so you might want to try it. It has little few quirks with it that we saw during the demo. But it might be a tool that's worth investing in. If you can grab the lifetime deal play around with it. See if it works for you. All right, let's move to some other news. The WordPress community collective has named Alex Stein as its first accessibility fellow. So the WP CC is a newly formed nonprofit dedicated to funding individual WordPress contributors and community led initiatives. Alex Stein is the first fellow for accessibility. He is a fully blind individual contributor who has been working on the WordPress accessibility team since 2016. That is awesome. Love to see that. Once the accessibility fellowship is funded, Stein will continue his work with the accessibility team. He serves as a team rep and also does some private work. That's great to see and hope more of these things happen over the next several years with the community collective. There is a survey that is available for the make WordPress team and the the learning modules are starting to create for WordPress, five to seven minutes survey right there. Take a moment if you would over the next week or so and take that survey. It will be helpful to them to set the direction of what kinds of learning content needs to be created. Another bit of news, GoDaddy laid off more than 8% of its employees. More than 500 people affected announced by the CEO last week affects employees mostly from the United States including a number of friends of mine which very sad to hear that they expense multiple levels in every division of GoDaddy we're gonna see more tech layoffs I think in the weeks to come. Looking at there will be acquisitions Thrive Themes, which is the creator of the Thrive family of themes the Thrive architect, thrive theme builder etc. was acquired by side bulky and automotive the team behind them up beginner and OptinMonster and others. So interesting acquisition there. They're up overnight, which creates some really nice actually WooCommerce plugins was acquired by the updraft team. And jason and kim Coleman, who are the co founders of paid memberships pro have made an investment in lifter LMS that's an interesting combination of a membership system and an LMS they've been working together for a while. These are all good people involved. They're both the Colemans and lifter LMS folks.
Alright, a few other things worth a look that we discovered in preparing for this month. WordPress needs a design system I use default explains here why he thinks the admin area of WordPress should be treated like an operating system. This is a great article on Yoast blog, I would encourage you to read it 15 typography trends for 2023 If you're a typography nerd such as myself, you will enjoy this. And last but not least black press presents how to break into government contracting as a WordPress developer agency. Black press is a group of African American individuals people of color who are in the WordPress space and helping folks who are other peoples of color to break the barriers and get into other levels of WordPress. It's great stuff great video there on YouTube. All right. Last little bit of information here is our WordPress community events. We had a great weekend at WordCamp Birmingham a couple of weeks ago a lot of fun. It was great to see people in person including several of the folks who are right here on this webinar today. I was just great to have WordPress things happening live in Birmingham. A number of webinar a word camps are coming up in the US over the next several months. We're camp Phoenix is about six weeks away March 24 and 25th We're camp Buffalo New York May the sixth we're at Montclair, New Jersey, June the 24th. Also the WordPress community summit and WordCamp. Us is planned for the last third week of August. They are in Washington, D. C, several global word camp side this week. WordCamp Asia they're in Bangkok, Thailand February 17 through 19th word camp tour I'm not going to work out Madrid. I will butcher this probably is March 11 and 12 word camp Corolla and India March the 25th. Word camp Switzerland is on March 31 April the first WordCamp Europe is in Athens Greece on April pardon me goodness on June 8 through 10. Well, folks that ends the WordPress news roundup we got through all those slides much quicker than anticipated. We had 20% more slides and finished right under the wire here. So a lot of things to talk about today. Here is if you came in late I'm gonna drop in the link to today's slides and the link to the replay in the chat. You can download those, so you have the links, especially for many of those articles. Alright folks, that's going to wrap it up for us today. We are back tomorrow for I think training members for the fly course. talking all about habits and then of course also for members on Thursday. Office hours with yours truly. So until tomorrow have a great rest of the day. I'll see you back here one o'clock Central tomorrow on I iThemes Training, where we go further together.