arted glad everybody's here. I'm going to drop in the slide link in the chat if you'd like to grab those as you're waiting, you may do so
we are gonna get started here in about five minutes from now. Glad you're all here I am just about to complete the caption setup. That should all be working now if you'd like captions open. As you get into zoom pop up in the chat, say hello, tell us where you're logging in from today. You'll find there the link to today's slides as well as some other links about solid WP. If you've not yet followed the solid WP YouTube channel you can do so at the link youtube.com/at solid WP
we have a lot to cover today. A lot of fun things to talk about in the world of WordPress. We'll get started about three minutes after Hey Doug from Toronto, Vern from West Virginia. Welcome, everybody. Glad you're here. Hey, Barb, from Idaho. As you're coming into the chat, coming into zoom pop up in the chat. Say hi and tell us where you're logging in from today. Good to see Heather from California. It is WordPress news round up today. The link is there in the chat if you would like to download today's slides. Has all the links and all of the things
if you've not yet seen the solid WP homepage and some of the new additions they've added there, check out solid wp.com That is the new name for I themes. There is a rebrand in public in progress. So I themes is going along this rebrand journey in the public. sharing thoughts answering questions as we go. new logo new colors, new product names, a bit of a different focusing in the products that we're working on together as a company. Glad you're all here. We'll be talking more about that as we get into the news from I iThemes. This month about halfway through the news roundup. Glad you're all here we are now about three minutes away from getting started yet show solid Nathan, I don't know. I don't know about that. It is going to be the solid Academy though. That is the name that has been that we've landed on and they'll have a logo for that at some point in the near future. If you're just joining us in zoom, the links to download the slides are there in the chat. Pop up in the chat. Say hi tell us where you're logging in from grab all those things. My face is not on the logo because we want it to appeal to people. So there you go. Glad you're all here just about two minutes to go two and a half minutes before we get started with the news round up here on I iThemes Training BB I do remember so yeah those of you that are there in the chat Barb. Barbara is one of the OG members of I iThemes way back in the day any other web design.com aged people here. I iThemes Training was previously called web designer Chris Malone. Oh Chris. You're just chatting to host and panelists. Chris Malone was one of those original people. Anybody else I think are a web design.com Do you go back that far in the iThemes Training world? Looks like me Barb. And Chris. Yeah, Ben Benjamin, the professor. All right, folks, just a couple minutes to go before we get started. If you are just joining us in zoom, the link to download the slides is there in the chat waiting on you now. There's also the links to check out the solid wp.com page and the solid WP YouTube channel. YouTube is going to be the place where lots of information is getting published the most rapidly so there you go. I was sharing they're sharing was she was also a web design.com era person been around for a while just like me. And Barbara and Chris. Very, very soon we will become solid Academy. I don't quite have a date on that yet, but probably in the summer at some point. Ivern I usually do four to a page on these in the PDF for news roundup, because there are so many slides. It's usually about 100 slides
oh the memories. Yes, the memories Barney. Thank you for that. Alright folks. 30 seconds to go. If you're just joining us in zoom pop up in the chat. Say hello. Tell us where you're logging in from today. The link to download the things are there in the chat. Sherry We're not going to talk about that. No, we're not gonna talk about that. Hey, John from Hawaii, glad you're here. By the way, chat guy and when you're chatting in the Zoom chat, make sure the little blue drop down beside the two in the chat says everyone and not just hosts and panelists Tina Are you in that again? That is a beautiful city. Nice. What a beautiful place. Hope you're enjoying it. Alright folks, it is three minutes after let me start the recording and we will dive in
Well good afternoon everybody and welcome to the news roundup here on I iThemes Training it is April 2023. And every month we take a look across the world of WordPress news and bring together the things that we are the most we think are the most important for especially those of us who are building and managing WordPress sites for clients. So glad you joined us today. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host of iThemes Training. And if you are just joining us in the chat, there is a link in the chat to download the slide deck and all the slide decks we use here important but this one in particular because it has all the links to all the stories that we're covering. If you want to read more or get more information about any of the things it is there. So let's get started as we usually do with news from core and the clicks aren't working. Let's try this again. We'll get started with news from core. There we go. Talking about what's going on in core WordPress. We had a major WordPress release drop a couple weeks ago, WordPress 6.2 dropped on March the 29th called Dollfie. It was named for Eric Allen Dollfie Jr, a jazz musician who was really known for popularizing the bass clarinet 6.2 is mostly release focused around the block editor and the site editor. Although one notable non Gutenberg inclusion is bringing open verse into the media library, so the top features of WordPress six.to include a much improved site editor if you've done any playing around in a sandbox with a block based theme, the full site editing experience was not awesome. And it's gotten a lot better now with WordPress 6.2. So the whole interface there has been redesigned and rethought and it's easier to get into the templating system that is possible with a block theme. There's now also global style controls built into the side editor, a new style book that will help you manage global styles, a new pattern inserter which is just super cool. If you use the block editor a new distraction free riding mode that's been missing since the block editor came in way back when the old classic distraction free WordPress writing mode is now back and it looks really good. It's very useful. There's now a new navigation inspector for the site templating to do a nav navigation blocks. You can now copy and paste styles from block to block which is really helpful. They also have a custom white custom sitewide CSS panel like the customizer has course if you're using the side editor, the customizer is no longer there. So you didn't really have a place to put your global CSS. Well now you do. And also now in the WordPress Core settings there is block specific CSS that will just apply to the block that you're putting it in. So that's very helpful new features as the block editor, the site editor continue to evolve. Now, one notable non Gutenberg edition as I mentioned is bringing the open verse media collection into the WordPress media library. Now open verse was previously called the Creative Commons search and back in 2021 Automatic acquired that library and took responsibility for maintaining it and your thought way back then they're probably going to bring that into WordPress and with 6.2. They have done just that. So the Creative Commons search has now called Open verse has over 600 million creative works that include images, audio video, they're all free to use, although some might require attribution. So you'll want to check that out but it's really easy to access right here from within the editor. Click plus in just right there in the media and you'll see right here the option to browse right into open verse, and it drops that image right there. So pretty cool feature. WordPress 6.2. If you're really following it, you may have noticed it was released one day later than the scheduled date because right at the last minute, there was a bug discovered in some of the code and the way dates were formatted. So they pause it a day fix that tested that and then rolled it out one day late on March the 29th. The question after a big WordPress update is anybody having problems with the update? And now this is totally my experience. And you know what I'm hearing I'm not hearing anyone having issues after updating the 6.2 it's just it seems to work really, really well. We've updated several sites ourselves and no problems at all. So update with caution. Always make a backup but it looks like this is a pretty safe release. Because it's really it's mostly about the site editor and the block editor. Not a whole lot of other things that are you know, to deal with. So if you'd like a total overview of all the things that are in WordPress 6.2 RL own Timothy Jacobs back on April the fifth we did a webinar with him. Timothy is of course the lead developer for iThemes Security. He's a WordPress Core committer and one of the maintainers of the WordPress REST API. Timothy walked through all the features of WordPress 6.2 answered a ton of questions in that webinar is available right here at this link if you'd like to go back and rewatch that if you missed it. Another really good take on WordPress 6.2 comes from the founder of Kadence WP been written or been posted a very thoughtful article about the state of full site editing and WordPress. Full site editing of course, is this stage two of Project Gutenberg, which is focused on bringing all bringing the block editor to all the parts of WordPress and with 6.2. The site editor officially moves out of beta and it is however only supported in blocked themes. Now if you're Kadence user kings is not a blocked theme. So you don't that's one of the reasons if you're using a Kadence if Kadence is your theme, or if you're using any other theme that's not a block based theme. You're not going to see a lot of changes with the site editor because it's not enabled you have to have a blog theme to have that enabled. So Ben gets into a lot of those things and you know how to test and look and it's a great article there on the Kadence WP blog at the link that I have here on the slide it's stuff are the dates for WordPress 6.3 are out. The Alpha has already been released back on March. The ninth beta one is scheduled for July 12. Pardon me June 27 made his two and three the first of July with a release date looking for August the eighth. So proceeding right down. And there is by the way, a call for volunteers on joining the release squad for 6.3 By the way, you don't have to be a developer to join the release squad for a version of WordPress. There's lots of ways you can contribute to WordPress. Take a look at this link right here a call for volunteers. Sometimes it's documentation other things that just about any fairly technical user of WordPress can take part in and that's a great way to give back to the WordPress community. So I just mentioned that full site editing with the site editor was phase two of Project Gutenberg. And now phase three of Project Gutenberg is in the planning stage this is the collaboration stage of Project Gutenberg that's going to focus on real time collaboration across WordPress. And something that is misspelled right here that was rewarding this and got interrupted or something. So real time collaboration across the WordPress platform is the top priority in this phase that's what we're talking about. So basically, if you are using WordPress with a team built and then there's a bunch of plugins right now that can help you process through you know, content, revisions and so forth. A lot of this is coming to core and it's going to be really great. So the goal here is a synchronous collaboration, including drafts and inline blog commenting better version control, which has been needed for a long time and WordPress, a task management systems like a big to do list. It's kind of built into WordPress. All of that is coming to core and with the goal of enabling users and teams to collaborate better inside of WordPress. That's pretty cool. Other areas of focus in a phase three are better publishing flows, a better post revision interface an update to the WordPress admin design, which is long overdue. I think, correct me if I'm wrong in the chat, but I believe it was WordPress for where the current real like what we see now is the WordPress admin that's when it was rolled out. And there hasn't been a major update to the WordPress admin interface for years and years and years since WordPress for Dotto. So that's coming better work on WordPress navigation in the admin. A library focus area will give you a spot to manage blocks and patterns and styles and fonts better. That's definitely needed. Global Search and command components and projects related to the prior phases like adding more blocks and proof tables that's going to continue on so really good stuff coming to core WordPress within that Project Gutenberg in this phase three. That is beginning of the planning phases now so pretty cool stuff. All right. Speaking of Gutenberg, let's take a look at what's been going on in the Gutenberg plugin. Gutenberg 15.4 dropped back on March the 20 seconds, color and layout support has been added for the cover block. It is easier now to customize all the color for all your inner blocks with a single setting inside that the cover block itself. So if you've dealt with a cover block, sometimes it's a little hard to make sure all the colors and styles filter down that is now improved in Gutenberg 15.4. It's gonna be easier to handle transformations in the media and text block. And it just kind of gives it more consistency as you're editing through the cover block. It's really nice looking to the way they've implemented this. And so you kind of see a little screenshot here as well the new tabbed interface, inner blocks use, you know, kind of nesting and bringing all the content throughout all the things that are inside that cover block. So that's definitely needed and there they've just dropped that
also into Gutenberg 15 Four and updated template description within the site editor. So now you kind of understand what each of these templates are about if you're a WordPress pro archive template, for example made sense but if you're not a super pro, it would be helpful to have a description so they've added that Gutenberg 15.5 dropped a couple of weeks ago on April the fifth they have added now patterns as template starters. So this is a really interesting addition to the flow of the site editor. So if you want to, for example, create a pattern for a 404 page or for your single Posts page or whatever your search results page. That would be like an archive type template page. Now, within this new drop of Gutenberg, develop theme developers can suggest patterns that might work really well on those template pages. So like here, if we want to add a 404 template lo here's we've got some pre baked patterns that a theme developer could say here's some options for you. And so this is really good. I think we'll see theme developers grabbing on to this and using this flow to make site development easier. Pretty cool. Something else has been missing for a little while is that captions for images can now be styled in the UI, the styles interface UI, until then you had to just add CSS someplace. But now there's actually a styles for captions, where you can select font typography and size and so forth. That's in this latest Gutenberg 15 Five. They've also added that we're gonna see more development on this. They've also added this new experimental grid layout. Now there's been grid layouts in you know, the post block and so forth. But this is actually you can set a width and then the number of posts will sort of modified to that. Let me just show you what this looks like. So minimum column width is set right there and as you drag it in the posts, fit, and if you drag it out, they also begin to just sort of fit whatever you've got set. So this is experimental. It's going to be worked on even more but I really liked this and I love the preview. Pretty neat stuff. All right. That's it for Gutenberg. Let's move on into some security news and we have a lot to talk about here. The number of plugin vulnerabilities continues to be incredibly high at the time of these reports. Total. There were 77 plugin vulnerabilities that were active or the plugin has been closed. Now I will say there are 77 listed here. They were in our weekly reports. You want to make sure that like if you see a plugin on this list that you use, make sure it makes sure it hasn't been patched. So for example, if there was on the march 29 list, it might have been patched by now, but we haven't caught that for this list. So this is a list of the vulnerable and closed plugins that were vulnerable at the time of our reporting. And I'm there 77 of them. I'm not going to read all of them, but I will pause just very briefly on this list. And if you see one that you use, then you're probably going to want to just double check and make sure that it has been patched or that you get that off of your site. Now of course if you're using I think security Pro, you're getting those daily site scans twice a day, you would have been alerted for these vulnerabilities already and hopefully you would have taken action to either remove them or replace them or do whatever you need to do to make those make your site safe. So many, many plugins vulnerable. We're just seeing that number continue to grow, particularly over the last few months. There was a major vulnerability in the Elementor Pro plugin over the last month that URL actually earlier this month. A recently patched security vulnerability in WordPress Elementor Pro is being actively exploited by hackers. It affects impacts approximately 12 million sites and effects Elementor Pro version 3.116 Not six, it allowed a patch that says it allows a malicious user to turn on the registration page if it's disabled and set the default user role to administrator so somebody could just log in create an account with the standard WordPress registration page and they're an administrator. So that's not good. After this patch that says they're likely to either redirect the site to another malicious domain or upload a malicious plugin or backdoor or whatever. They have admin rights so they can do lots of things. Successful exploitation allows an unauthenticated attacker to take over a WordPress site that has WooCommerce enabled so if you are an Elementor Pro user, make sure you are up to date to version 311 seven or three dot 12 as soon as possible. This is actively being exploited. Another big time WordPress vulnerability in the last month was a vulnerability within WooCommerce payments, not not WooCommerce itself, but the WooCommerce payments plugin which is sort of a white labeled version of stripe. I WooCommerce partnered with stripe to bring that interface within WordPress it works really well actually it's kind of nice but there was a major vulnerability in the last month. So WooCommerce actually forced an update working with wordpress.org team to push sites to next update that we're running payments version 483561. This site allows an unauthorized access to to get to into your store active on more than half million websites. So one thing that's very important, the forced updates was only delivered to sites that had Automatic Updates enabled inside the settings of that WooCommerce payments plugin. So if you are using WooCommerce payments and you have an updated update immediately, like stop listening to this webinar, or go out and update your website, because this is a major problem and it's being actively exploited. Or there's no evidence of active exploit but you don't want that to happen to you. So make sure you get that plugin updated. If you are a Windows user major vulnerability in Windows over the last couple of weeks, seven of the 97 bugs that were talked about in this latest issue, were rated critical. 90 of them were rated important. So those are the top levels of severity. They have to do with code execution flaws, and it's a bad deal. It could make your computer vulnerable to an attacker getting system privileges. Kaspersky the Russian security as a cybersecurity firm says the vulnerability has been already weaponized. By a cybercrime group to deploy ransomware so this is a bad deal so if you're using Windows as your you know as your operating on your on your station as your operating system, make sure you update your windows immediately. But not to be left out. Apple also had a zero day vulnerability in the last month and affects all of the things apple so iOS, iPad OS, Mac OS and Safari. that Apple has not released details about what the vulnerability actually was. Because they don't want to allow people to use it to hack things. Just make sure you're updated. So anything Apple, iPhone, iPad, Mac, Safari, update all of the apple things because this is also a major vulnerability. All right, let's take a look
at news from I themes as as we mentioned in the pre show and as we have mentioned in lots of webinars over the last few weeks, I themes is becoming solid WP so on April the 11th Matt Cromwell, the senior director of customer experience for solid introduced the new solid WP brand in a webinar here on iThemes Training. Solid is the next evolution of AI themes that provides the solid foundation that you need for every WordPress site that you build. I themes as a name just didn't really make sense for us anymore because I themes itself didn't really have a theme like Kadence is part of our family, but it wasn't really our theme. And so the name even though it's been around since 2007 just didn't really fit where we are as a company anymore. And so solid is rebranding and sharpening our focus to our four key offerings, security, backups, website management and training. And it's really interesting. I think the approach the solid team has taken to this rebranding project. They've called it a rebrand and public I'd never heard of this before. I think it's a brilliant idea where we're just showing in public the process of the progress is we're going and taking questions and feedback and modifying some of the direction and of where we're going based on that feedback. Some of you that are in this webinar. Today we're part of a private townhall meeting with Matt and myself talking through some of these things. And yes, I love the direction it's going. The brand is beautiful. Here's some other treatments of the solid s I think security is becoming solid security. Backup Buddy is becoming solid backups. I think sync is becoming solid Central. And not only are the names changing and the brand and the colors, but all the products are going to get much some much needed attention in the development area. So here's one of the the early prototypes of the solid security interface. And I really, really like the direction the UI team went with designing this. So one of the things that a lot of folks struggle with I think security is that the interface is kind of hard to get around in and it's might be hard to figure out where you're going and get back to where you were. And so the menuing has now been changed to a more typical WordPress plugin, where rather than sort of sub screens in the same settings page, there are you know, here's your dashboard site scans, user security, firewall, vulnerability settings, etc. This is the free plugin by the way, there's an option to go pro Of course, it just it's a much nicer, easier to navigate interface. I really liked this. That so a lot of work is being done on the security plugin. Backup Buddy will be called solid backups. It's kind of a cosmetic change right now but a lot of development work is being done. On Backup Buddy to become solid backups and excited to see that coming. I think sync here's just a quick snapshot of what that interface is going to look like as solid Central. In some, some development time was going to be given to that as well to address a lot of issues that have been flagged as things that need to change and be made better for solid Central. So lots of good things coming. By the way if you were part of this webinar right here at the bottom, introducing solid WP with Matt Cromwell and myself. Lots of great questions were asked during that webinar and all of those questions had been answered in a blog. Post right there. All the questions that were some questions we didn't have time to get to in the webinar. They've all now been answered as a blog post at that link. Some of the questions or were really good with, for example, are the existing lifetime deals. Those of you that have a lifetime deal for some or many of the IPS products that will continue to be honored. What products in the iThemes current offering are going to be sunset. There's a whole list of them right here. It is some of the plugins that you know, not many people were using, and so it's better to just focus on the plugins that people are using and put development resources there and focus on making those better. So that's the thought and the list of plugins that are going to be sunset is provided at this link. Is there going to be abundant? Yeah, solid sweet. Is training going to continue? Yes is the solid Academy so the best way to stay up to date here is youtube.com/at solid WP for the solid YouTube channel. Pretty cool stuff. All righty. This month's premium event here on iThemes Training is the digital marketing crash course with Elizabeth pampelonne. That is next week. April 25 and 26th next tuesday thursday from one to 3pm Central. Every month when I finish training we do a premium event with a subject matter expert. That's a four hour event on some particular topic that is relevant to those of us that are building and managing WordPress sites for clients. So day one, Elizabeth's going to be talking about social media and day two email marketing with the second hour of day two talking about how to do digital marketing services, social media and email marketing for clients. So she's going to give some inside tips on how she does things and her agency and she does a really good job and is going to make all that very practical for us. So that's digital marketing Crash Course. Coming up next week the link to join for members is right there in the green. Also coming up on iThemes Training tomorrow. Don't miss this if you haven't signed up for it yet. Kathy Zant from the Kadence team is going to be with us talking about the new Kadence design library. She's going to be doing a few things with Kadence Blocks Three if you've not seen that yet. Wow. It's pretty amazing. But really focusing in on the new Kadence design library. It is a powerful tool, and you can sign up for that webinar. It is free at training that I think is.com Office Hours Thursday digital marketing Crash Course next week, and then our standard schedule moving forward from there plugin roundup on May the second if you're not a member of I iThemes Training and you'd like to be you can do so with a 30 day free trial and I think.com/training I'm not sure by the way how the solid Academy offering is going to work. And if you like the current pricing of I iThemes Training, which I think is a great deal for training. It's only $39 a month for all have unlimited access to replays to all of our premium events. Or if you pay for the year in advance, you get two months free. I don't know how pricing is going to change so if you want to lock in the deal now you can do that before we make some changes to solid Academy this summer. Alrighty let's talk about some plugins and news from plugins. The gift WP team has been doing a lot of work around their donation form creation tool. It's currently in beta it's a new form builder that uses the block editor and it works in all sections of the gift donation form. Give is a beautiful plugin that empowers nonprofits to raise funds with some really creative and powerful fundraising techniques. It really brings tools into WordPress that some nonprofits pay 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of dollars for bigger platforms to do and so give really brings that sort of fundraising power and makes it available inside WordPress for even small organizations. And the ability to customize the form has been something that gives them working on for a while. Everything is now in the block editor. It's able to be edited and changed and custom fields added and so forth. This is a standalone plugin. It's still in beta so not for production sites, but you are able to do all of the things. And so if you serve nonprofits, this is definitely something to play around with and see how it might be able to work for you. As someone else we found interesting was a post on the Gravity Forms website. I know a lot of folks here in our audience use Gravity Forms. Gravity Forms open AI is a free plugin that integrates Gravity Forms with open AI and so how interesting is it to do something with form responses, and chat GPT that's what this is gonna allow you to do. So you can communicate through the open AI API using live merge tags within your form, and then get real time responses from chat GPT right there in your form. In an HTML or a text field. Ai generated responses can be used to create confirmations, notifications, or even add form fields. It works with GPT 3.5, which is 10 times cheaper, more intelligent and better. It's really cool. So some of the use cases might be generating articles to an SEL research, qualifying new leads, processing support responses, verifying documents, extracting info like contact details or meeting tasks, and then moderating submissions. Really cool stuff. So there's a great video about this right there on that YouTube link. I think this could be a lot of fun to play around with your Gravity Forms user. And you have an open API API key. Pretty neat stuff. This is another bit of news from Gravity Forms that I absolutely love. So if you're a Gravity Forms legacy user like myself, I've had a developer license for a long, long time. I was a little frustrated, to be honest that a lot of the new Gravity Forms plugins they were developing, like geolocation, Google Analytics, conversational forms and entry moderation. Those new premium add ons were putting a different tear that wasn't available to me as a longtime Gravity Forms user. I'm paying customer. They've changed that now. So if you are a legacy, grandfathered in developer license, or if you bought the Gravity Forms lifetime deal a long time ago, you can log in right now to your Gravity Forms member area and you'll see all these plugins are now there. They have now made those available to everybody and I applaud that decision. Thank you Gravity Forms.
Moving into some Yoast SEO news, Yoast has now dropped support in their latest version for any PHP less than 7.2 dot five so you got to be running 7.2 dot five in order for Yoast to work. So also, by the way, and with this release, they've added a really nice Google cert preview a lot better than before. I kind of like that. So they've dropped support though for PHP 56771 About 10% of WordPress. sites are running a version of PHP that is less than 7.2, which is a very vulnerable version of PHP. So hopefully this will push give a little nudge to some of those WordPress sites that are using Yoast to go ahead and update their PHP at their host. Historically, Yoast has been a force for change and pushing users to upgrade php. This latest version of Yoast also requires at least WordPress six dot o in order to function. There was also a drop of the WooCommerce plugin 7.6 was released earlier this month. Seven six was primarily focused on WooCommerce blocks, but it also has a few different bug fixes and performance improvements that have to do with some of their new database Tabeling so it's really good to new blocks were added especially if you're using the site editor and the templating in full site editing to new blocks were added to make that easier, a single product details block for your single product template and a really, really cleverly designed and functional cart form block. So you're not going to this is not going to help you for example, unless you're using a block based theme. So if you're a Kadence user, this doesn't work. It's still in development, and Kadence has its own way of doing this with Shotcut. So, but the WooCommerce blocks will help block based themes with some new things. So here for example is the product details. block where you can kind of drop things in on your design for the product page. You've also got some additional filters that you can use in a product grid to pre bake a product grid. Or they've also added some new block patterns that if you're Kadence user you can use they are more consistent help the margins are better. This has been kind of a problem with WooCommerce blocks. They get a little weird when screen sizes change. So this should bring some consistency to the blocks in the block patterns that are pre developed by WooCommerce. Pretty cool. There's also a new multi channel marketing tool we mentioned this a couple of months ago and a news roundup. Basically inside the marketing area of WooCommerce. There is now a campaigns card that will allow you to create campaigns and advertising campaigns on various platforms like for example, Google ads, and so right from within WooCommerce you can create a new campaign by attaching your accounts on different platforms like Google ads, Pinterest, Tiktok, Amazon and eBay and Walmart integration and see all of those things happening right there inside of WooCommerce. So that's super powerful. It is in beta so it could be a little buggy here and there. But yeah, if you have a client or if your website needs to get out to multi channels to sell, this brings it all in house right inside of WooCommerce. So pretty cool stuff. All right, let's take a little journey into the world. of AI shall we? There are many things happening in the AI world as you've probably already experienced. Wow, this is a pretty cool month though. There is now a new Zapier plugin for chat GPT So zooming back out just for a second in the last month open AI the company behind chat GPT released a plugins API, much like WordPress released the plugins API way back in the early days of WordPress that allows people to extend the capabilities of the core with some other things. And so open AI has done that they've given you an API where other platforms can tap into the power of GPT so Zapier is taking advantage of that. So the Zapier chat GPT plugin connects 5000 Plus apps like Google Sheets, Gmail slack, right into chat GPT so that you can do some things with this. So it works with all Zapier plans, and they're rolling this out slowly, HipChat, GPT Plus users right now. So you do have to have a paid account with chat CPT for this to work. So take a look at some of the use cases here. Drafting messages, sending emails, updating databases like this. Here's a Gmail integration so this is in our Zapier. Now, we're talking within chat GPT to Zapier, find that latest email from Lars so it looks it up. Zapier connects to Gmail pulls in the details of the email right there. Now why would you want to do this? Well, now that it's in chat GPT you can do some things with it, you know, practice response, do this do you know do other things. It gives you the ability to tap out to other places and pull things in. Also, here's something similar with Slack. So here we are in Zapier, setting up an action and here's the use case. summarize this leaves details share it. Here comes there's the lead
and it shares and slack. Pretty, pretty cool. Pretty cool. You can also use this with notion. So here's our same email. Now can you check and see if he's on the notion lead list? If not, can you add them? Okay, it's not in the lead the leads list. Zapier. is checking. Nope. So I prepared this entry. Does that look right? Yep. Does that look right? Yep, run it. And now he's on the list. So this is just a few of the very beginning things that are going on with the Zapier. Integration. We're gonna see more and more services integrated, lots of cool use cases. Really, really amazing. All right, it's also coming into WordPress. So there's a great article on the tavern talking about how WordPress developers are experimenting with native AI blocks. So developers are trying to figure out how can you instead of doing something in chat TPT and copying and pasting stuff into WordPress? How can we interact with chat GBT? right within WordPress so it goes back to this plugins API and being able to attach things together. Joe Hoyle of human made which is a WordPress plugin company, I showed an early preview of how generative AI could work natively in the block editor widely see this. So let's click here. What do you want to write about? Okay, what is my tone? So pick a tone. What is my writing style all this is from within chat GPT so I want to see five tips for WordPress security. And you know, now you've done this maybe in chat GPT but here right it is in here in the block editor. And now look, we can go in and highlight one of the things and ask AI to improve or simplify the language and boom, there it went. Isn't that amazing? And this is all experimental. It's still you know, people are figuring this out, you know, make this longer improve this and you know, whatever. Right there within the block editor. Look here translation. Let's translate this to Urdu. But boom, it's just amazing. Absolutely amazing. Now, another developer Muneer Kamal, who was the founder of Gutenberg hub has created a native AI writer that was inspired by the way notion integrates with chat GPT so check this out. If you thought that last example was cool, watch this. So we're gonna do an article about Artemis list me all the moon landing attempts. And there they are. That came in from open AI. Okay, now great. Make that into a table. Now we're in the WordPress block editor right now. Add another column with each landing programs budget. Boom Wow. And now sorted by the year boom. Pretty amazing. Right. Now make a hero block with a dark background and white title that says the new moon landing countdown. This it knows what a title block is. Make a title case. Add a call to action and says discover now. Boom. Absolutely amazing. Write a short paragraph about the upcoming Artemus landing. There you go. Make it longer, make it shorter. Make it a different language. Absolutely amazing. Make the interesting words bold. Now. How does it know that? How does it know that? I don't know it just makes them it makes them bold. Absolutely amazing. Link the relevant terms to their Wikipedia page. absolutely unbelievable. Mega three columns placeholder image in each column. I mean look at this now, typing all this is a little frustrating. But what if you were dictating this? Imagine the accessibility implications of this for folks that struggle with a mouse or you know they could literally compose technical you know, late lay pages would lay out verbally? Absolutely. Unbelievable. So when I see these things, I'm like what's happening in AI is absolutely unbelievable. Now let's look at the other side of AI shaly. article published on the verge last month why the AI industry could stand to slow down a little bit. So yes, AI is moving faster than anybody could ever imagine. And there's a group of technologists that include Elon Musk, one of the founders of open AI, they've written an open letter calling for a pause in AI development. The letter claims that the pace of AI advancements might surpass society's ability to adapt and process them. The journalist as recline said society is going to have to figure out what it's comfortable having AI doing and what AI should not be permitted to try before it's too late to make those decisions right before the toothpaste gets out of the tube. Yeah, so it's interesting. This is definitely something to follow. If you've not watched this interview, it was happened actually just this past Sunday night, Sunday, April 16, the CEO of Google Sundar Pichai was interviewed on 60 minutes and it's about 30 minutes long and it's absolutely worth a watch. I've given you the YouTube link for this interview right here. I would strongly encourage that you watch this. Pichai said that AI is going to impact every product across every company in the near future. And I don't think that's an exaggeration. He's called for new regulations to govern AI. I think we have to be very thoughtful. These are all things society needs to figure out as we move along. It's not for a single company to decide. I agree with that. We got to like there's a lot happening with AI. It's it's scary to some degree, Pichai warns, warns that AI is likely going to create job losses among knowledge workers like writers, accountants, architects and software engineers. Now before you get nervous, the best AI quote about this topic that I've heard, we shared last month. It comes from CJ Pawan, the founder of brainstorm force that creates Astra and ultimate add ons and all those things. CJ said computers didn't replace accountants. Accountants that use computers replaced accountants that did not use computers. And that's a good analogy. It's a for AI. So some of the lower end content I saw somebody in the chat earlier. Earlier, it's not so much that all content writers are going to be phased out. It's that kind of basic content writers are going to be phased out yet like we got to be more creative and more clever, and continue to embrace this technology. That interview continues. The Google CEO said we don't fully understand how it works. That's comforting. So in the interview, Pichai admits that Google doesn't fully understand how Bard the Google AI comes up with some of its answers. He explained some bizarre scenarios where Google's AI developed what he called emergent properties, or learned unanticipated skills in which they were not trained. For example, Bard taught itself the Bengali language, and Google doesn't know how. So people in the AI world call this phenomenon the black box, they don't get it, they don't understand it. And that's really something isn't it? Yeah, Bernie saying in the chat. It's like Skynet. Yeah, it's it's happening. It's out there. So while AI can be very lifelike and it can it can be very intelligent and its responses and very helpful. We have to be very careful to not take everything in AI chat bot says fact. Sometimes chat bots report incorrect information. My goodness, I've had that happen over and over again, in using chat GPT. For example, to write code, it messes it up a lot and you have to know enough about what's going on to suggest maybe how to fix things. In the AI world. They call those things hallucinations for the AI and you see that sometimes like I'll ask it to summarize an article and it brings in stuff from other places and it just makes things up. And so nobody has solved that problem yet. They're not quite sure how it works. But it is an amazing thing that's happening right now in our own time. You know, this is the the increase of AI in our world today is potentially the same impact that the internet brought when it first came on the scene. And people really started to understand the power of what an interconnected group of people could do. And by the way, that's both good and bad. Like it's the internet is the best and worst of mankind. And I'm afraid AI might be the same way. But it's an amazing tool, and it's going to be fun to see how that develops. In the continued AI problem issues. Here are this great story where Google and Microsoft's chat bots are citing each other in a misinformation showdown so beings to Microsoft beings to incorrectly claimed last month that Google's barred AI was shut down. Citing a news article that was just a joke. So they've rushed these chat bots to market without ensuring you know, fact checking. I'm not sure how they'd even do that. It's so their site, they could cite each other's mistakes. But here's a screenshot of where this happened. You know, did Google barred has Google barred been shut down? Yes. It's been shut down on March 21, after less than six months. Oh, that's totally incorrect, right. So
who knows? I this is this is a problem that has to be solved. They're already spreading misinformation by inventing new stories or promoting non existent books. So we need some sort of caution and oversight over this. I don't know. I mean, smart people are gonna have to figure this out. I'm not sure the answer to it. WordPress is certainly in the mix. WordPress plugin developers are adopting AI power tech and building it into their products. WordPress developers are using chat GPT to build plugins, and sometimes it works. And sometimes it wasn't. Developers are reporting better success, developing code with chat GPT rather than Bard but one thing for sure that AI and AI tools are opening up development to people who would not otherwise be able to create a plugin without hiring a developer and I would say I'm one of those people. I've done some really cool things with chat GPT in a code sense, over the last couple of months, I never I would never have even tried it because it was too complicated. But knowing a little bit about how things work, I was able to create code that actually worked. That might be a fun webinar, actually. Maybe. So here's a tweet from Armando Armando siRNA. I've never coded a WordPress plugin in my life I just did with the help of chat GBT for about 30 minutes. I work through it. And there we go, right. Amberly says chat TPT developed a WordPress plugin for us in just three minutes. Now, these would be very basic plugins, but nevertheless. So how is wordpress.org going to deal with this? Developers have already started submitting AI generated plugins to wordpress.org. The plugin team is warning developers that code submitted must be GPL compatible to meet our standards. They say you're welcome to use whatever tool you want to build plugins but you are 100% responsible for that code if you choose to. Host it here. So here's the thing. Who knows where chat GPT gets the code, right. It may be crawling code that is not GPT compatible, and that's on you, as the plugin developers, so very interesting, and we'll see how that sorts out. Our chat GPT did have a bug few about a month ago. Where you may have noticed it was down for quite a while. Yeah, there was there was some issue on the back end where some account things were happening and some payment information might have been leaked. It was kind of a weird thing. Chances are extremely low. I had to do with a bug in the Redis Database. That chat GPT uses really something. A few other little bits of AI news GPT for a test hired a Task Rabbit worker by pretending to be a visually impaired human. So GPT four was given a test to check the accessibility of the website and it went actually went out and contracted a TaskRabbit worker which is if you're not familiar with TaskRabbit, it's you can go hire a human being to do something very small micro task. This is an interesting read if you're interested in AI. Also being brings chat GPT into iPhone, it's pretty darn cool. This article says there's three other lessons Microsoft can teach Apple, here's the being work in on the iPhone. Pretty cool. Also, it's been discovered that reliably detecting AI generated text is mathematically impossible. So there are tools out there that purport to do it, but the reliability of those tools is in question. And also, this is something I mentioned way back when we had the LastPass issue last year. You know, the issue is not how long it takes to crack a password today. The issue is next year or two years from now, how long is it going to take to crack a password for your stuff that's been stolen? And currently encrypted, that maybe not in the future? AI technology is enabling password cracking even quicker. So take a look at that article on nine to five mac.com. All right, a little bit of other news. When it comes to accessibility, the US Supreme Court is hearing a very important case that relates to an ADA tester who is suing hotel so Deborah Lau for filed hundreds of lawsuits against hotels claiming that their websites were not compliant with ADA rules. Now, her goal was to make websites hotel websites accessible to people who would not be able to access they have, you know, sort of visual impairment or mobility impairment of some kind. The district court dismissed and appeals court ruled in her favor. The real issue here was she didn't intend to visit any of these hotels. She was just going out. She didn't book anything. She was just simply testing the websites and that gives the address you have legal standing to sue it's got it's a whole thing. It's an interesting story if you want to read the story on CNN, but the court is going to take all this into consideration and this will be a ruling that will help to provide some precedent and guidance around accessibility for the future. So take a look at that. i It's really interesting, by the way, some of the most of the hotels that she is suing are in particularly the one that's involved in this Supreme Court case, the actress in hotels, some really small hotel that just doesn't have the resources to make its website accessible with the booking process and all that. So it's I don't know, it's a hard it's a hard decision. It's a hard issue. They argue that lawsuits like this burden small businesses and clog the judicial system, as you'd expect the business to argue, I don't know. It's going to be interesting to see how this how this sorts itself out it will certainly whatever this ruling is certainly going to set the trajectory for accessibility law going forward. All right, WordPress 20th anniversary swag is out there if you want to take a look@mercantile.wordpress.org There's a new coat is poetry, t shirt as well as a whole bunch of other things like coffee mugs and bandanas and that sort of thing. Some acquisitions have happened in the WordPress space. The real big plugins collection has been acquired by LearnDash, our SR product under the stellar umbrella. This is a great collection of plugins for LearnDash it includes a gradebook Slack integration, MailChimp, integration and ConvertKit integration for LearnDash so good job LearnDash for grabbing those folks and bringing them in house and making them part of the core offering advanced ads as required by monetize more, and the change they'd be admin login was acquired by the WP experts. A couple of other things that we saw that were interesting. There's a great blog post if you want to learn more about WordPress security on the iThemes blog, what is a file inclusion attack? Sometimes you see that in a security vulnerability report. There's a very good explanation of what that is right there on the i iThemes. Blog, and the 6.4 update for WordPress, which is scheduled for November is going to be the second all woman and nonbinary release squad for WordPress. So watch that it is going to drop later this year. A little bit of community news to wrap things up WordPress buffalo is scheduled for May the sixth WordCamp Montclair, New Jersey June 24. And the WordPress community summit and WordCamp. Us is scheduled for August of this year in Washington DC. And we're kept Omaha in October. So several plan that US word camps are on the books. So hey, let's buy some plane tickets and meet up there. Hmm, that's gonna be fun. Hopefully I can get back on out on the road this year. Looking forward to that. Some global work camps as well where camp Europe in Athens is the first second week of June and work camp Jinja and Uganda is in September. So I mentioned earlier that WordPress is turning 20 And there is a resource link there@wordpress.org about organizing a WordPress 20 celebration. If you have a local meetup or if you want to make a local meetup to celebrate WordPress is 20th birthday. There's all manner of resources right there at the link in the green. Well, that's gonna wrap it up for us today. Folks, that is all of the news for April 2023. I'm going to share the slide link once again there in the chat. If you came in late, you can download the slides at that link. So you'll have all the links that we talked about today. We're back tomorrow with Kathy Zant talking about the Kadence design library and the very cool things that it brings very, very much power into the block editor. And of course office hours Wednesday for members. That's it for us today. We'll see you back here tomorrow on I iThemes Training where we go further together.
