We'll get started in about six minutes from now glad you've joined us. Hope everybody is having a good start to the week. We have a lot of news to talk about today. As you come in to zoom pop up in the chat and say hi hey Barbara I'm getting our caption set up right now
Hey Heather All right. captions should now be working for everyone. Glad you're all here we are. We have a lot of news to talk about this month. A lot of stuff happening with WordPress 6.3, which is on the way. Also a lot of AI news for this month. A lot of fun things to talk about. So glad you're here with us. If you're just joining us in zoom pop up in the chat and say hi, tell us where you're logging in from. And I have just dropped in the link to download the slides for today. So you can follow along and also click the links and check those things out as you would like many many things to talk about today. Hey, Debra. Hey sherry. Well, welcome everybody. Glad you're here. We're about five minutes away from getting started with news roundup. Many many things to talk about today.
Barbara AI is super cool. So many things I see this is this is a minimal m&m intake webinar. This is just all fun stuff. The changes to WordPress six, three. We've been talking about those for months now with the block editor and we'll have an overview of all those. The there's some interesting security news. There's some interesting AI news and various other things. Yeah. Yeah, I think patterns is a big deal. And that whole name change. We're going to talk about it a little bit from reusable blocks to sync patterns. I mean, I don't Okay, whatever. Yo Ken, welcome. Glad you're here. If you're just joining us in zoom, pop up in the chat, say hi, tell us where you're logging in from today. Let me drop in again, the download link there's today's slides as well as the replay link for after we wrap up today. Many many things and if you haven't followed solid WP on YouTube, you ought to do that. That's the where the the most information is being released there in the YouTube channel. Sherry Right. We have a good explanation of that. I mean, good ish explanation of that in the news roundup. Alright, attendee numbers are ticking up. Welcome everybody. Glad you're here. As you're just coming into zoom it is news roundup for July 2023. Really glad you're here. Pop up in the chat. Say hello. Tell us where you're logging in. From today. I'm dropping in once again, the slide link if you would like to download those, if for no other reason than to have the links to go further research things yourself. Many, many things to talk about. Today. This is a big news roundup. 127 slides according to my account, so we're, I may talk fast. Hey, Jeffrey from Guatemala. Welcome Manu. Good to see ya. Welcome, everybody. Glad you're here. Hey, Marcia. Marcia, Marcia. Right. Marcia? Remember that right. from Maryland, Marcy. Marcia. Either way, okay. Glad you're all here. Slide link is dropping in the chat again. If you'd like to download those things. There's the Google Drive link to download the PDF of all the slides that has all the links to all of the things in the news roundup, two minutes out from getting started. Glad you're all here, pop up in the chat. Say hi. Tell us where you're logging in from good to see folks logging in from around the world already. So much to talk about this month. So many things. So so many things. Hey Jean.
hope everybody's wake has got it gotten started off well. on the agency side. We are working through many projects right now. Many, many, many projects trying to get the deck cleared. So many projects Hey Sadie. Getting down to about a minute to go before we get started. If you're just now joining us in zoom, open the chat and they're in you will find the link to today's slides, which are right there. In the chat ready for you to download. Oh my Sue, that doesn't sound good at all. Yeah. Not good. Not good at all. Hey, John from Hawaii. Oh, a hurricane coming in Hawaii. Really? Wow. Hey, Eddie. Eddie, you are only chatting to me if you want to flip that around to everybody just beside the two in the chat. Make that say everyone? It goes. It defaults to host and panelists for me too. Hey, Shannon. Glad you're here. We're about 20 seconds away folks from getting started. If you're just joining us in chat or in zoom, open the chat say hi. And you will also find the link to download the slides. I just dropped it in once again. And the replay link and all of that. We're just about ready to get started. Hey, Shauna. All right, it's three minutes after let's get this officially kicked off, shall we? Good afternoon, everybody. Good evening. Good morning wherever you happen to be around the world. It is news roundup here on iThemes Training. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host today iThemes Training and it's time once again every month we take a look across the news in the WordPress world and we bring you a digest of that news that I think is important for folks who run an agency working with clients to know about so there's plenty of news out there in the WordPress world but we always put a little bit of a slant on it to those of us that are doing client things with WordPress. And so if you haven't been with news roundup in news roundup for a little while you notice we have a bit of new branding on our slides. That is because I think this is becoming solid WP, that transition is well underway. And I really like everything that I've seen related to it. So a lot of cool updates to the software is coming and many other things. So if you missed our town hall last week, that link is in the replays there on the AI iThemes Training site. And you can check that out and learn about all the new stuff that's going on with solid security. The next version of I think security that is to come. If you're just joining us in zoom, open up the chat and say hi and tell us where you're logging in. From and you will find once again, the links for all of the things there is a download link for the slides. If you'd like to follow along that's particularly helpful for this webinar because or this live stream because at the bottom of every slide we do give you the reference link for just about everything that we show. So if you want to go and read up more you'll have the link there to click in the slides. Also, the link is there in the chat for the replay. But an hour after we wrap up we'll have the replay of this live stream as well as the chat log and the transcript and the slide link as well. So let's get started shall we with as we always begin news from core and we're getting close very, very close to the WordPress 6.3 launch. So WordPress 6.3 will drop on August the eighth and we will have our own launch event on August the ninth. So Tuesday August the eighth is the drop date for WordPress six, three. And on that very next day Wednesday, August the ninth our lead developer for solid WP Timothy Jacobs is going to walk through the primary features of this new version of WordPress. We've done this for the past several releases, and it's always super informative. For one reason because Timothy is just an excellent presenter. He's one of these rare people that is both a brilliant genius level developer, but also has the ability to under to to explain things in a way that regular people can understand. And he always does a great job of humanizing the features and what's going on. Timothy is a core committer to WordPress and also one of the maintainers of the WordPress REST API. So he is very much connected to the whole core process. If you've not yet signed up for this event, you can do so at the link below. To learn all about the things with WordPress 6.3 that are coming we're going to give you an overview here in the next several slides. But the full event coming the day after release there on Wednesday, August the ninth at 1pm Central Time. So here's where we stand in the calendar. Release Candidate one drops today it may have already dropped with to next week release candidate three August the first the dry run Monday August the seventh with that general release scheduled for August the eighth. The core team almost always hits these numbers, these deadlines so we can expect WordPress six, three to release on August the eighth. Now let's talk about some of the key features that are coming in this latest version. And we're going to start out with the most interesting feature to me. And that is the command palette. So we've talked about this in previous roundups in the Gutenberg section because this feature is already available in the Gutenberg plugin. And just you know if this is new to you the Gutenberg plugin is the place where all of the development for Project Gutenberg happens. The block editor, the site editor and all the other pieces and then at every core release the next major core release in this case 6.3 All of the work in the Gutenberg plugin that has happened since WordPress six two will get rolled into WordPress six, three. So all the features of the Gutenberg in Project Gutenberg we've been talking about since WordPress six two was released. All that gets rolled into the block editor and there's lots of things that are going to change. One of those is the command palette. Now they went back and forth on a name for this. We'll talk about that in a minute. But basically this is a quick search like if you love keyboard shortcuts, you are going to love the command palette, because it's going to real quick let you hit a keystroke and there'll be a little search field to type that pops up. You can type something and just jump right to different places of the admin. Like right here add new and that populates the links for add new post and add page is designed as this quick search for the whole at WordPress admin area. And what's really exciting about this is that it's extensible. That means that developers can create plug in code more or less to tap into the command palette. functionality and do different things with it. So we'll see developers extending the feature set of the core command palette function and do super cool things. So they went back and forth about the names what they were going to call this and they settled on command palette. I mean, you know it is what it is. It was chosen because that that combination of words was consistent with other tools but also easily translatable. And that's what they landed on. So here's how it works. Here's your a quick keystroke pops open the little quick search and right there, click to the footer, boom, right there. Boom. Now you're in the site editor, and you're editing around in the footer and you can do all the various things that you might want to do. It's going to do something else here in a minute in this video, I believe. Yep, there's another search. Add the Add New Page. Let's add a new page. Okay. Leave that and boom, we're in a new page. So that's how it's gonna work. And you can imagine how developers might tap into that core feature and start doing really neat things inside of WordPress. So I'm looking forward to see how that is going to change the WordPress interface as we know it.
Something else that's going on here is a terminology change. So what we've known to this point as reusable blocks have been renamed patterns. Now a reusable block is a section of blocks that is kind of like a template. You can create it on a page or post in the block editor and then save it as a reusable block. And it gets stored up here and then you can just kind of drop that in other places. It's a really neat way to reuse content throughout your WordPress site. Now they've changed the name of this for various reasons. And they're decided to call it patterns now. So reasonable blocks are patterns. Some are synced and some are non synced. Okay. The move is aimed at reducing confusion between reasonable blocks and block patterns. But some people think this is just even more confusing. You can make up your own mind on this. synced patterns are going to update all instances at once, while non synced patterns can be edited one off one at a time. So a sync pattern is like your current reusable block where it's synchronized across the whole site. So if you've got maybe a call to action button and a nice row with a background, and that's a sync pattern or reusable block, when you change that once everywhere it's used throughout the site gets updated. And so that's what they're trying to change up with this naming change. This diagram is really helpful. Where now we use the term reusable block that is going to be called a synced pattern or a fully synced pattern. What we now call block patterns are non synced patterns. So there you go. That changes coming in WordPress 6.3. So 6.3 also is going to include major site editor workflow improvements. So the site editor, which is the block editor and use in other areas of your site, other than the WordPress content area. So the site editor lets you use the block editor and your headers and sidebars and footers, and it's and page templates, things like that. It's it has gotten a lot better. It was a hot mess when it first released and it's gotten a lot better with this 6.3 release. WordPress six three is gonna make it easier and faster. The Edit Site link which is up in the admin bar, before when you clicked Edit Site, it would take you into the site editor, but it would load the homepage instead of kind of what you're looking at at the moment you click Edit Site. So that was a little confusing and now they've gotten it more context aware. So what what you're editing on the front end when you hit Edit Site, it's going to take you to that same spot in the site editor, which just makes sense. The update is going to take you directly to the correct template if you're like in a WooCommerce product template, for example, and you click that it takes you to that spot in the site editor. So that's good. It makes sense. The context aware features going to it makes it easier for users to know where they are and not have to know the exact name of the template in the hierarchy. So it's good, it's a good change. Some other things coming in WordPress six, three, improved page management within the site editor. So before the site editor was just for it was kind of it was just for dealing with headers and footers and sidebars, and you really couldn't get into pages and individual things like that. They've now moved that functionality into the site editor. And so it looks like this. So when you're in the design section, you can click pages. And here's the list of all the pages on your site you can add a new page. Now at this point, you can see that happening right there. And you know, add a block, do all these things. Here's how it looks. And then it'll bounce you right back out to the site editor when you're finished right there. You have all the page information post status, slug all that there. And now you're back into the site editor. So this is really nice. And this is going to be the way the WordPress interface is evolving. And we're going to talk about that in just a minute. So it's kind of nice, I like it, it makes a lot of sense. Also, site authors will be able to seamlessly switch back and forth between templates and page content within the editor. So think about it this way, you'll be in the site editor. And not only will you be able to edit the template of a page, you'll actually be able to jump in and edit the content of a particular page. So let's show you how this works. So right here we're in the about page and this is the actual content of the about page itself. So we're gonna go in and change the title of the page and notice that it updates right up here. We're going to add a featured image or this background image to the spot right here. So there that is, but now okay, we want to change the way this looks. So we just clicked Edit Template, and it shows up in the breadcrumbs that now we're in the page template, not the not just the the page itself. So we're going to change that image now to full width. And we're going to make the page title centered. And when I go back to the page look now it's updated so this is really great. I mean it's if you've been using a page builder to do this sort of thing like Beaver Builder or Elementor or whatever, and you know, you have like a beaver theme or layout or that Elementor Pro layout that affects your pages. This is exactly the same way that works and it's pretty smooth in the site editor. It was a little bit clunky. It's a lot clunky when it was first released, and it's gotten better and better with every iteration pretty cool. Simon something else they've added in six three is a distraction free mode in the site editor now this is a big deal for me. Especially because if you've ever tried to edit a page that has a complex layout and you're doing it in blocks, you know, you're kind of restrained between, you know, the left and right sidebars and your editor and sometimes it would be nice just to see the page how it looks without having to preview it and that's what this distraction free mode is going to do. So take a look here. Now we're in the standard editor over here with our sidebar. But watch what happens when we click the kebab menu and we click distraction free. Now when we click back over into the content look now we see the whole page and it will be full width and it's full width. It's a really nice view on editing the site. So I'm right here in the editor. I can do all the editor things and my sidebar doesn't show up until I go back over there and toggle it so pretty cool. They've also added a new style book. We talked about this a few months ago and the Gutenberg section. The style book can be activated as your browsing. And so you go in here to the site editor and styles and you can see all the various styles and preview those live over there in the column. So pretty nice bit of functionality. You can change the styles there as well. Something else they've done here is they in WordPress six, three, there will be revisions to styles. So if you've ever gone through and made changes to one of your global styles in the style book, there currently is not an easy way to roll that back to a previous state. But now there's revisions for the style changes just like there are page and post revisions. So look, we're gonna go in here. We're going to edit this style. We're going to change up our layout a bit, maybe add some padding to this element. Change up some things okay, we've saved our style. Now let's go here under the kebab menu and now it look we see all our revisions there, where we can preview or rollback those revisions to where they were before. So it's really I mean, this interface is quite good. And congrats to the dev team for doing that. This is this is a really easy interface to use. Also, in WordPress, six, three, they've changed the way or give you another option for the way your top toolbar is going to work. So if you've ever been editing a page or a post in the block editor, and you know the little toolbar across the top, like if you're typing in a paragraph, there's the, you know, bold italic and the center edge text justification, all those links that kind of get in the way of what's around it. Well now you have an option to actually push that up to the top. So in the kebab menu, you can tell it top toolbar, boom. And when we click over here, look your toolbar is now going to be up here instead of in the content, which in a lot of cases that might be better. So pretty cool. I like that a lot nice change, and you have the option of how you know whether you want to view it regular or up in the top or whatever. So pretty cool. They've also added a couple of new blocks we talked about these last time the the reading time is now a core block that can be added. In addition to the details block which we covered last month. This is kind of in a text expander like you Cago here's this little arrow, what's the best thing about Switzerland and you open it up you click the text and opens up the flag is a big plus but a bunch right haha very funny. But yeah, it's this is a nice little addition for show and hide text which is pretty nice. Several other things there's color and layout support for the cover block caption styling for images, a lot more curated patterns. Have come out easier now to create a pattern lots more so plenty to talk about in WordPress six three, and we'll give it the full overview with Timothy there on August the ninth and he'll be there to answer questions as well.
Something else you want to be aware of is that WordPress 6.3 is going to drop support for PHP five. Hopefully, none of you have sites that are still on PHP five dot something. But there are still some sites that are back on PHP five, six, so about 4% of WordPress installations are still way back on PHP five six, which has been unsupported for years now. So with the release of WordPress 6.3. PHP seven will be the minimum supported version. So it will you know PHP continues to grow and seven hasn't been supported in a while but when you have a project as big as WordPress, that's 40 something percent of the entire internet dropping support for PHP, it's a big deal and it can affect some sites. You know, 4% of 40% of the internet is still a lot of sites and they need to update their sites but you know, you don't want to do something in poor that's gonna break somebody's site. So that's its attention that the core team has to deal with. But the argument is that bumping that PHP version up is going to improve the plugin ecosystem, the perception of the project by others and the ability for developers to work better. PHP core support is still very good for PHP 881 and a two if there is a site that is still running PHP five, six, it cannot upgrade to six three, but the core team will continue to provide security updates for the WordPress six two branch that the site will remain on. So let's say some major issues you know, some security issue comes out in core WordPress, not only will they release a six dot 3.1 or two or whatever, they'll also update the six two branch so that those sites get their updates, which is a good thing. All right. After 6.3 is released. We have now reached the end of phase two of Project Gutenberg. Now Project Gutenberg is a four Phase project. The first was the creation of the block editor to work in the WordPress content area. The second which we're just completing with WordPress six three was the movement of the block editor not only from the in the content area, but also in the headers and footers and sidebars and page templates across your site. That's going to be completed in WordPress six, three, and now phase three comes along which is the collaboration phase, y'all the things that are coming in in the next versions of WordPress are gonna be really, really something. So this is focused on real time collaboration and improvements to the WordPress media library. So real time collaboration is going to enable concurrent post edits. So how many times have you gotten into a page? Oh, you can't edit this because some person is already on this page, right? Don't you hate that error? Well, now you'll be able to both edit the content at the same time. So you'll be able to add comments suggest edits, tagging users for peer review. There'll be document level history browsing and single block change, restoration. Here's how that might look. Maybe you've seen something like this and other tools. So here's one person editing and here comes another person. And you'll be able to see each other doing things on you know, so there are other apps that do collaboration this way. And this is coming to core WordPress. Yes, like Google Sheets or Google Docs, Google, whatever it's called. It's very similar, right? Or one of those things that this reminds me of is the way figma does collaborate collaboration. You can see people mousing around it's really pretty cool. So that is all coming. The WordPress Media Library is also going to get significant updates My goodness, it needs it. The WordPress Media Library has not been significantly updated since WordPress three dot something and even then it wasn't a big update. But things like categorization of images tagging, how WordPress handles attached media, which is not great. And then overall user interface improvements are coming as part of WordPress 64 And that is overdue. I'm looking forward to that. Something else we can see as a very ambitious it's being described overhaul to the WordPress admin area. Again, the WordPress admin UI has not changed much since somewhere around WordPress four. It's been a long time since the admin interface has been changed at all. And major overhaul was underway. Our plan the update is going to improve the overall navigation scheme, the user experience and make it more easier and more intuitive and accessible for all users. So the goal is to evolve the WordPress admin to more of a fluid editing feel kind of like when we're just showing the videos of the site editor. The way it moves back and forth between screens and the animations. It just feels good. That's what's going to come to the core WordPress admin area as part of WordPress six four. So the proposed plans also include an extensible design system meaning the WordPress admin right now is not the easiest thing to restyle and change up. It's that whatever this new system is they're going to build is going to be extensible meaning developers can build extensions and plugins to easily modify the way the admin area behaves. They're also going to address the pollution of top level menu items. Thank goodness. Don't you hate it when somebody's plugin installs a top level menu item. It's one of my pet peeves. I see this all the time in the plugin Roundup. They're going to deal with that in this overhaul. They're also going to deal with all those admin notices that show up in your admin area. And for once and for all have a solution for that. So developers emphasize the need for new design to handle sites with large number of posts, pages, categories and menus. All those things are going to be taken into account in this new redesign. And I say it couldn't come soon enough. Pretty cool. This is a very early possible preview of what something might possibly look like one day, is that enough? Is that enough? caveats who knows what it's going to look like but maybe something like this very clean, very nice. Pretty good stuff, right? Here's a dark mode view that you might see as well, but a lot cleaner and easier. 6.4 betas are out at the end of September release candidates in October and a general release on November the seventh. That is the plan so big changes coming to WordPress pretty cool. All right. If you start playing with block patterns or patterns in general, there is now a curated patterns section in the WordPress pattern library. And now they've started showing curated patterns by default. Now, curated patterns are patterns that were developed by core wordpress.org core team members and they're just better right now. I mean, honestly, they're done better. They're done well. There are community contributed patterns that are out there. But this will allow you to first see curated patterns across the top. If you haven't take a look at the WordPress pattern directory. Just go to wordpress.org and hit patterns and you'll see all the patterns that are out there. You can drop these right into your block editor layout, they work really well. It's pretty cool. So discussions are ongoing about how theme builders can have predefined been patterns and bundles of patterns out there that are just they automatically work with those themes. And all this is good. It's rich Tabor, who's a big developer, as far as in the block world, says the top ones, the curated ones are the best and there's still lots of work to do here. This is definitely something to watch out for. Yeah, so Sherry saying she didn't know that existed. So go out there and play around with it. It's out there and I think that's wordpress.org/patterns but don't quote me on that. But just go to wordpress.org you'll see the link it's a directory just like themes and plugins, and you can use any of them right there in the block editor. Alright, let's talk about some news from Gutenberg. That was a lot of core news almost 25 minutes worth there. These from Gutenberg a lot of development is happening in the Gutenberg plugin, Gutenberg 16, one dropped on June the 29th. They have now created a new pattern library or a new way to access your own patterns in your library. You can now create and sync design patterns across your own site and access them in the pattern library. We talked about how reusable blocks are renamed to patterns and you can now allow the synchronized updates with patterns across your site. So here's how it look in my library in the site editor. I can create a pattern very easily. Here's my pattern name. Ma image with text, it's going to be synced or not synced. And then I'm going to create that and then it'll be saved. It's really easy to do. So if you've not played with this yet install the Gutenberg plugin you can play with it. unsynced patterns can be edited independently, like we talked about all your reusable blocks, custom template parts and patterns are displayed and searchable right there in your library and they're also available with the inserter you can just hit slash and start typing the name of your pattern. It'll pop right up there just like you would drop a block in really easy to use.
Something else we talked about was the distraction free mode that's coming to WordPress 6.3 That was released in Gutenberg 16 one back on June the 29th. Something else this is pretty cool. Text Blocks now offer footnotes. So this is something you had to have a plugin to do in the past. To add really nice footnotes if it's a scholarly work of some sort. Or you just want to footnote something in your blog post you can do that now. It built right into the paragraph tool, a paragraph block so right here let's just highlight WordPress drop down and look footnote is an option. And right there I can just start typing in the footnote and it'll track all that and keep them at the bottom of the page. So that is pretty cool. That is a core block a part of the core of Gutenberg now in 16.1. The site editor sidebar has also been renewed again this is something that will be in Gutenberg six one I think is a little simpler here. We have the ability to make some changes to things right there in the site editor. You can also more easily see where you are in template parts versus pages and so forth. So we talked about this a little bit in the animation showed when we were talking about WordPress six three all this was released back in Gutenberg 16. One really easy to get your way around here in the site editor that the the navigation and the usability of the site editor was y'all it was it was complicated. I had a lot of trouble using it when I played with it. It is now much much better. Image block has gotten some enhancements. These are really cool and this will be in WordPress six three as well. So here's an image. I can change the aspect ratio right there very easily. Also, I can quickly add additional if I want to just grab an image I can drop it on an image block and it just updates it that's kind of cool. So that is working now in Gutenberg 16. One, Gutenberg 16 to release last week, and one of the things they did here was more of this the work on getting sync, the non sync patterns work and consolidating how all of those are going to work together. We saw something of this in the previous slide with the video. But now there's a toggle that says Keep all pattern instances in sync, which makes a little more sense than the way it was labeled before it'll also make it more easily translatable. So as you look at some of these changes that WordPress Core is making, and you wonder why is this so why can I just say sync pattern or something like that? Keep in mind this is a global product and there are people of many different languages using WordPress and all this needs to be translated and having a more explanatory setting makes the translation a little easier, which is pretty nice. There's also the ability to consolidate patterns into your own my patterns area where you can more easily categorize and store your own patterns and make those easier to use. You can also see how they've put your attempt make template parts a little more readily accessible. The header parts are all together there's an easier to understand icon here. Think before they all used to have this diamond icon. They've added some icons there to make things a little better. This sounds kind of interesting. They've now added Vertical Text orientation. That is a good beginning to support the fourth phase of Gutenberg which is internet internationalization and translation in core WordPress. And so now there's the option in a paragraph block to orient the text vertically for vertically written languages. So you can do that in Gutenberg 16 too, which is pretty outrageous. All right. Let's turn the page from Gutenberg and start talking about security. My goodness it was another big month for plugin vulnerabilities 196 plugin vulnerabilities have been patched. 102 plugins are vulnerable active now or they've been closed. And there were seven theme vulnerabilities this month. And as always, we remind you that you can keep your site secure with the version management feature of I think security pro twice daily, your site is scanned for vulnerabilities using the patch stack scanner which is just excellent head and shoulders above the rest. I think security can email you if it detects a vulnerability and it also has the ability with that single toggle and I think security Pro to automatically update a vulnerable theme or plugin if the patch is available. So all these patches and things you see in the iThemes vulnerability report. If you're using I think security Pro and you have the version management feature toggled on, it'll automatically update it if it finds something vulnerable in the patch exists. You don't have to lift a finger it's going to be automatically patched probably in many cases before you even know something was vulnerable. So this is pretty good. Let's talk about a few big plugins that have had some issues that you need to be aware of the first is ultimate member. Ultimate member has been around for a long time in the WordPress world. It's used on over 200,000 WordPress sites they had a critical security vulnerability last month it was actively being exploited by hackers. It was a 9.8 out of 10 Vulnerability huge, huge deal. It allowed an unauthenticated attacker to create a new administrator user. This is not good. So it was a major issue. security researchers observed a large number of attacks from varying IP addresses on ultimate number sites, there was an organized attack on ultimate Ember sites. The plugin released an initial patch for this it was not sufficient to fix the problem. But the current version 267 As of today 267 was released on July one and that does patch the vulnerability just make sure what did I just do? Just make sure that your ultimate member is up to date. All right, another big time vulnerability was in the all in one security plugin. This was a big deal because the all in one security log in the text log that it creates as part of its function was actually logging username or logging passwords that people logging in, in plain text in the log. That is not good. Patch tech CEO Oliver sold warned of hackers harvesting credentials from logs of compromised sites that run this plugin. The issue was fixed in version 5.2. But most users of all in one security are running an older out of date version and therefore vulnerable so make sure if you or someone you know is running all in one security update to beyond 5.2. Immediately when you do that, it's going to go through and wipe the logs so you don't have to do anything else about the log. That's part of the update. But be sure those sites are updated big big deal. Another big vulnerability this month was in the malcare blog vault in WP remote echo system. These are owned by the same company they share a lot of the same code. They had some big vulnerabilities affects over 300,000 WordPress sites. It's a security flaw that allows a potential site takeover through stolen API credentials. So some things they could do would be like creating rogue administrator users or uploading random files exactly what you want a hacker to do. At first malcare dismissed this as just industry standard API authentication. However, they did patch the plugin on July the eighth and there are similar vulnerabilities that word WP remote and blog vault. Just make sure everything is up to date if you're using any of those plugins.
All right, another great article that I think is published this month that if you haven't read this, this is a read. You should absolutely read this, bookmark this it's an excellent article by Dan conosce, who's our technical writer, and Dan does a great job of explaining why WordPress malware scanners don't work. There's new research that shows that scanners that are running within WordPress are vulnerable to being sabotaged. In other words, a compromised environment cannot be trusted to analyze itself. That just makes sense, right? But here's here's the way this works. If you're running a local malware scanner like wordfence or WP mu defender or all in one security or Ninja scanner, in its scanning WordPress malware can very easily defeat that because they're all running inside the same WordPress in the same php. So and by the way, even external scanners like malcare and virus die all in one security Sucuri jetpack scan. They're all they're vulnerable because the malware is running inside the same PHP universe. And so as these plugins are sending reports back the malware can be set to just change when it sends back and say no malware here. A vulnerable environment cannot be trusted to scan itself. That is really good. So the question is what do you do? The focus of security policies at the WordPress level should be on login authentication, hardening, user management, proper delegation of privileges and a vigilant version management strategy. That's what I think security and solid security are based on. Now Sue is saying Well, I think security runs a malware scan. No, it does not. What I think security does is look at the versions of your installed themes and plugins and bounces that off of the database of known vulnerabilities. So WordPress level file scans just don't that's not what you should rely on. Because malware can change and insert you know, it can. Malware can defeat a WordPress level file scanner. If you're going to use a file level scanner, it needs to be at the server level and there are server level malware scanners that do work that operate outside the WordPress environment and just scan the files. That's what to use. And if you're going to security at the WordPress level should be used in addition to that with these particular priorities that I'm talking about right here. Anyway, the article does a great job of explaining this better than I just did. And I would strongly encourage you to read that article. That's very well done. Alright right let's take a look at what's happening with solid WP we are still in the process of the rebrand and public as I think is becoming solid WP. We'll look at some changes starting to happen as we get into the fall there. Including I iThemes Training becoming solid Academy. I'm super excited about that. We talked about the WordPress three Dotto launch event on August the ninth. I really would invite you to join us for that it's gonna be a lot of fun. We also have some Kadence news, the Kadence 3.1 blocks 3.1 beta is out and you can sign up to be part of that at this link right there in the footer and test that out see how it's working and what feedback you have. 3.1 introduces some really neat features like an advanced form block and a progress bar block and that as well. And this is the one feature the key feature I'm really looking forward to the ability to rename blocks. So if you're like me and you like the list mode on the side of the block editor, but you have all these rows in different sections, you'll be able to rename those so you can tell what's what in that list view, which is going to be great. Kathy Zant is going to be with us tomorrow for a demo of this new advanced form block and she'll be there to answer all your Kadence questions as well strongly encourage you to test Kadence blocks 3.1 beta on a staging site. And again, you can be part of that beta at the link below and talk to Kathy about it's more of a lot of fun stuff. Here's some other upcoming premium training events. We have this month next week is our SEO basics workshop. Once again, Lindsay Halsey from Pathfinder SEO is going to be with us. She is an extraordinarily good instructor, period, but particularly in her area of specialty in SEO she's just has a great approach to SEO and teaching people how to do it. So SEO basics is July 25 and 26th. Also, the masterclass will be next month, which is August 29 and 30th. And so last year's masterclass by the way, one of the days was focused on local SEO the second day of the masterclass was focused on local SEO. Since we just did our training event on local SEO with Trisha Clements, which was excellent. Lindsey has swapped that part out and now on the second day in the masterclass, she is going to be talking about using AI in SEO and that is going to be great. So those are our next couple of months coming up. We also have Google Analytics bootcamp coming up in September with David Zimmerman. And this is the first time I'm mentioning this the October event. You can't register for it yet. There's no information about it yet, except for right here. I am going to be doing a WordPress AI workshop as our premium event in October. And I am excited about this. We're doing some really neat things at the agency with AI right now, both in content development, as well as code development. And I've got some nifty tips and tricks that I'll show you how to really up your game with AI in WordPress. So that's coming in October, November, December, of course, will be our Starter Site, premium trainings as they always come right there at the end of the year. All right. So here's the calendar. If you want to take a look at a training that I think is.com Free upcoming webinars. Here's the next ones coming up that we've mentioned those to those plugging around up August the first course office hours for members throughout every Thursday. All right, let's talk about plugin news. But two things to talk about here. The WordPress plugin review team has added six new sponsored volunteers. This is really good news. Because as we mentioned, I think last month mica Epstein who was the longtime plugin team contributor, spent I think her her she was working full time sponsored by I believe Bluehost as a full time person working on the WordPress plugin team. This is the group that reviews and approves plugins for the WordPress plug in directory. So it's a critical role. Mica has been doing that for over a decade and she's going to be stepping down. But now there are six new team members that have come in to help with the work. So they're going to be in charge of approving new plugins and maintaining the plugin review handbook. The new team members had been sponsored to more than 50 hours in total. They're still volunteers that are needed. If that's something you'd like to do, you can do it. They need somebody who can at least spare five hours a week to volunteer on that team. So if you've got five hours to spare you can be part of that plugin review team go through the process. See if you meet the criteria they're looking for. It's a very important role. There's a vetting process for new members. And there's a big backlog of plugin reviews that are still needed. There are many plugins out there that have not they're not live yet in the WordPress plugin directory because there simply isn't the number of eyeballs needed to look at them and approve them for listing. All right, so the link to that application is down there and learn more at these links down at the footer. Interesting article that was published by plugs score.io was an analysis of 39 different WordPress plugins that have over a million active installations. So the most popular plugins in WordPress what can we learn from these plugins so first thing we learned is that plugin name matters. The average WordPress plugin title is 33 characters and has five words why so long? Because of the way the WordPress plugin directory search works. It's like old school. Alta Vista search if you under if you remember Alta Vista, you are an internet geezer like me. And you remember that what you do is you just cram all the words in the title. And that's how the WordPress plugin search works, unfortunately. And so that's why you have these plugin names that are super long, but it works and these 39 1 million plus plugins prove that 33 characters and five words long on average the average cost of premium versions is $68 a year. They depends on the category of plugin, ecommerce and security are more expensive than others. The highest cost plugin is $300 a year that's will express the lowest premium plugin $12 a year. I'm not sure what that was. It is very clear the the companies that have plugins in the WordPress plug in directory the awesome motive which is the plug the company behind WP beginner also All In One SEO and many others. They have the highest number of plugins with over a million here's how they break down as far as category security optimization plugins affecting the admin area SEO and backups are by far the primary with other ones over there. 39 plugins only four offer lifetime licenses. Now I know Look, I know I love to get a good lifetime deal. But let's be honest, you cannot survive in any business with lifetime deals. You just can't. It's a good way to raise a bunch of money really quickly. But a lifetime deal is not it's not a good business model. Because at that point like who's gonna pay for ongoing upkeep and development of the product. If you're not paying on a regular basis for a product, it's more likely that product is going to slowly disappear or not get updates at all. So yeah, they mostly all follow a subscription model.
All right, let's take a look at news on AI. My goodness do we have many things to talk about in this particular area? Let's see. Let's start off with this one. Amazon has secret plans. secret plans with Amazon and they are targeting developers so an email was recently linked from Amazon that reveals the company's AI plans. Amazon has actually been using some form of artificial intelligence for over 25 years in their back office. But it's still struggling to compete with other AI companies. On the scene. So to catch up, Amazon decided, well, let's get into an area of AI that isn't as competitive. So let's focus our AI. Work on developers. Amazon as you know as a huge Amazon Web Services Division with lots of different software platforms that people build apps on. And so that's where they're going to focus their AI efforts. So AWS has created a new team called Next Generation developer experience to build AI tools for developers. So there's two that are out right now, bedrock, which builds scalable AI applications using API's from Amazon partners that already exists. So taking these building blocks that are already there and using AI to put things together with them pretty cool. And they also have something called Code whisperer, which is a coding companion for AI. I've not played around with either of these but one thing I do want to play with this code whisper and see how it is how it works. Another big tech company talking about AI this month is Google Google barred, which is Google's version of Google's competitor to chat GPT Google Bard was recently updated with new features that really helped to start to bridge the gap with chat GPT chat GPT is still the one to beat right now. But Bard has just gotten much better in the latest updates. Bard can now speak responses in more than 40 language with more than with multiple styles and tones. It has also developed integration with Google lens, which is the Google Images image analyzer. So you can actually upload an image into your prompt and use that uploaded image to as part of your AI conversation which is pretty cool. You can also pin conversations and share conversations with others which is kind of nice. Now, not to be outdone, there is a new AI player on the market called Claude. It is from a company called anthropic, which is an AI safety and research company that is backed by Google. They have released Claude to which is a new generative AI model that some people say rivals chat GPT in some very important ways. Claude to uses Apple's Terms of Service, which means there's a lot of trust factors that are baked in there. So it's maybe a more trustworthy AI than others. But the big deal is a Claude to can handle 75,000 words at a time, meaning you can paste the entire contents of a 300 page book in the cloth at once and say summarize this book for me and 10 bullet points, and it'll do it. Pretty cool, right? It's also been trained up to current knowledge in 2023. So pretty neat things. If you want to try it out. There's the link claud.ai/login If you're in the US or UK. If you're not in either of those countries, you can use a similar product called po and there's the link there as well. YouTube is also gotten into the AI market. You may have noticed this by the way in your home feed. If you watch any sort of educational content, this is where they've rolled out this feature. YouTube is using AI to create quizzes automatically based on the content of educational videos. So the AI is in the background, looking at watching the captions or audio or whatever. And from this video content, it's creating a quiz automatically. So this has revolutionary applications. You know, what is that gonna do for training and product tutorials? You know, watch this and I can automatically generate five questions to see how your knowledge was. That is pretty amazing. And that's out there working now you can read more about it in the TechCrunch article, or in the Google support article that talks about these new experiments. The University of Montana has compared chat GPT with 2700 college students and a recent test. So these 2700 students at the University took this test and they had somebody out there who was running the side show decided they'd have chat GPT take the test. And the people that were evaluating the test results had no idea that chat GPT was one of the entrance of the or one of the people taking this test. GPT scored in the top one percentile for originality and fluency that is pretty amazing in comparison to 2700 other college students pretty amazing. So what do you do with all this AI is moving so fast? There's a great article this month on the verge called Hope, fear and AI. And it's talking about some of these things. They conducted a poll of 2000 adults in the US asking their thoughts, feelings and fears related to AI. So despite the widespread media coverage, AI still seems limited. The use of AI products remains limited usually to younger users or people like us that are kind of on the cutting edge of tech. Respondents showed just the average person out there showed high expectations for the impact of AI on society. 74% said that AI is going to have a large or moderate impact on society. They were concerned about the ethics of AI especially when it came to clone a cloning the ideas and styles of artists. This is a big discussion in the artists community right now. My youngest daughter, in fact, is an art student right now working on her Bachelor's of Fine Arts, the big discussion in her world. The fact that AI is really taking other people's work and modifying it AI can't really create anything from scratch. It has to take place that you know other people's work and modify it. That's there just seems to be inherent issues with that. The majority of participants in this study recommended or they favored regulations on AI development. Yeah, something has to happen here. We're going a little fast and there's not a lot of thought being given I'm afraid to the impact of AI on our whole world. Yeah, so roughly 50% of these respondents expect a sentient AI will emerge at some point in the future. My goodness, a couple of other articles you might be interested in with AI. Here's interesting post on godaddy with some prompts for content creation that are quite good. So if you want to play around with using chat GPT to create content, there's a good starting place there. Also five ways to use chat TPT for WordPress development, and I'll tell you, we've been on the agency side doing some very clever things with chat GPT I mean, chat GPT being the clever one us just knowing we can ask questions. It solved some code problems in you know, 10 seconds that would have taken us hours to figure out it is really cool. So this WP shout article gives you some insight on how that works. The big question, all right, will AI replace designers? The big question out there. And here's a great, great response from board panda. AI will replace the designers job and Here are images of AI accepting the job. I like that you have if you've ever used AI image generation current, currently this is yeah, that's pretty much par for the course of of what you get. All right, let's move into some other news. How many of you saw this little blurb that hit last week stripe is as the stripe invoicing plus rates are going to increase on January the 31st. So stripe invoice plus feature actually launched back in 2021. That feature includes smart retries quotes, automatic reconciliation, batch invoicing and an installment plan purchase. So after and they didn't announce this at the beginning after a three year grace period, stripe is going to begin charging a fee for this service starting on January 31. It's half a percent on top of a just for the amount of the invoice that's collected using this system. So the question is I'm using Stripe for my monthly web management billing. Is this going to increase my percentage? The answer is no. I've confirmed this directly with stripe. If you are using Stripe subscriptions, this does not use the invoicing plus service. It's only for the invoicing plus if you create an invoice and use any of those advanced features on invoices, it will charge you an extra half a percent. It may actually be worth that to use their invoicing service because it's quite good. But if you don't need those services, you can switch the invoicing starter at point 4% per paid, or just create an invoice and share payment link and you don't have to pay anything extra. So that's the that's the truth around this. There's been a lot of talk about this going around social media of all stripes rates are going up. That is not true. It's only for this one feature if you use it, and then it's only for the payments that come through the invoicing. Plus feature. So does that make sense? Hopefully that gives everybody a big sigh of relief. I was concerned about it to be honest. At this point 5% Over several $1,000 adds up. All right, something
else has happened is that Gravatar which is an automatic property, that is the one that creates you know, gives you a little image of yourself on various WordPress blogs and other sites. Gravatar has added a new payment feature for its profiles. So you can now add links to PayPal, Venmo and Patreon in your Gravatar profile. Each profile has a unique QR code to push those transactions through. You can also display links to cryptocurrency wallet if you want to do that. Gravatar is a service from automatic. It's used on wordpress.org and.com sites as well as things like Slack Atlassian or Trello. GitHub Stack Overflow discuss open AI if you ever wonder how your picture shows up when you add your email address on a site. It's Gravatar probably automatic, by the way does not get a cut of any of these payments. They just passed that through. And they're also considering adding cash app and other payment providers in the future. So that's kind of cool. Someone else you may want to be aware of if you're an Evernote user. Evernote has laid off their entire US workforce and they plan a move to Italy. So their entire operations are moving to Italy under their new parent company bending spoons, which as I understand it, I believe is an Italian company. I could be wrong about that. Ben experienced had laid off 129 Evernote employees earlier this year because of Evernote long term unprofitability. The remaining us and Chilean employees have just received notice that their layoffs that's bad news for those folks. Evernote CEO assures their plans for the app are ambitious, and there are now going to proceed with a dedicated Europe bass team. Despite its early success in the space and a large user base. Evernote just has not been able to keep up with other apps many of which are free. And some of the free apps are even a little more powerful than the Evernote Premium version. They've also faced criticism for substandard cryptographic practices and privacy concerns. So just be aware, you're an Evernote user you might just want to keep your ear open to that doesn't look like anything is urgently needed to change if you're an Evernote user, but just this is something to keep listening for. This is an article that got me a little riled up when I read it earlier this week there is an accessibility expert who's now been sued by an accessibility overlay product. So Adrian Rosselli is being sued by audio AI, which is an accessibility overlay provider like the other ones, you know, they put that little overlay where you can change things and make supposedly the site more accessible. Audio is accused Rosselli of bias against their overlay product and arguments against real relying on overlays for accessibility. Rosselli says that overlays might not detect most accessibility issues. He shares his experience on his blog that's clickable, you can read those articles. But this company didn't like it and so they sued this expert for expressing his opinion online. This just burns my biscuits. So this lawsuit has been called a slap, which is a strategic lawsuit against public participation. That's a legal term for a nuisance suit that's just, you know, a suit filed by a company with resources against an individual that maybe doesn't have resources to try to silence that person's opinion in the marketplace. By definition, slap suits don't have any true legal basis. So we'll see what happens with this. I just I hate to see that happen to anybody for expressing what is probably a correct opinion about overlays. Yeah. All right. Let's move on to some news. That is worth a look. Just a couple of things this month as we're already running late. On time. Interesting our interview here with a featured WordPress professional their daily content.co Andre Andre of checking that out interesting interview with him I see the future of WordPress as an all in one platform with everything you need for website building. And you see that coming with all these core changes pretty cool. Something else if you're ready for a new blog post on your own site and you want some great WordPress stats, here are some the newest WordPress stats for 2023 from the iThemes blog. For example, WordPress is 62.3% of the content management system market. So 40 some percent of the web at large 62% of the CMS market and WooCommerce is used on half of all ecommerce sites on the web. That is pretty amazing. All right, let's wrap up with some WordPress community news. Several things to talk about this month. First of all, there's some WordPress drama floating around the word camp DACA word camp, which is Bangladesh city and Bangladesh, where camp DACA was cancelled due to alleged corporate influence on decision making. This is a big nono in the WordPress world WordPress community team stepped in all the event organizers and organizers from the local meetup group were removed. The violating companies had been banned from sponsoring WordPress events for a year but they have not been publicly named by the community team. Some folks are saying you should name them publicly because as a community we kind of want to know who was interfering with the organization of a local word camp. So far, no information on that. You could probably figure out if you wanted to dig I haven't taken the time to do so. WordPress community members want greater transparency. And look, Mitch Cantor, who's a longtime WordPress dev at web dev studios said actively trying to sabotage a word camp is a serious breach of trust. I couldn't agree more. I want more information about this. We talked about this a couple of months ago and there is now a mentor ship team in the WordPress community team to bring on people to help onboard them into becoming WordPress developers and serving the WordPress community in other ways. The WordPress community team has initiated its experimental mentorship program with the first 30 mentees chosen from 50 applications. They'll participate across eight teams in the WordPress echo system membership comprises a mentorship comprises weekly check ins, self directed courses, learn up sessions and contributions to the team. It's really good way to bring people into the WordPress space. It's being modeled after similar programs that have had great success in the Drupal community and other open source programs. Pretty good stuff. So glad to see that happening. We've got several US based word camps on the schedule. It's great to see more of those coming. The WordPress Community Summit and WordCamp. US are coming in a little over a month from now to Washington DC the Community Summit August 22 23rd WordCamp us 24th through 26th. I'll be at both of those and hopefully some of you will as well. If you are tweet at me, I'd love to meet you in person and say hi WordCamp Omaha, Nebraska coming in October and we're camping Atlanta, Georgia, October 14 and 15th. I'll be in Atlanta for sure. So, come on out to WordCamp y'all. It's great to see these things happening again. And I look forward to seeing many of you in person after a very long time of not having done so. Several word camps globally as well were kept Nairobi Kenya August 15 were kept Genja and Uganda September 4 And fifth and we have WordPress accessibility day coming September 2017 28. That's a 24 hour again 24 hour event with 27 presentations from presenters globally. It is free to attend. But you do have to register there's the link there at the bottom. All right, y'all at the end of all we have reached here the end of the WordPress news roundup for July, so many things to talk about this month. Hopefully you've learned a few things and you got a couple of things to research even further. That's going to do it for us today. We're back tomorrow with Kathy Zant on Kadence blocks and especially that advanced form block make sure you're registered for that. We'll see you back here tomorrow, one o'clock central time. For that webinar here on I iThemes Training where we go further together.