Welcome, welcome glad everybody's here if you're just coming in to zoom up and chat and say hello. We'll get started here in just less than a minute
all right, captions should now be working for everybody. Yes, Tanya, Daylight Savings Time has struck again here in the US. I don't think anybody likes it but that's, you know, it is what it is. All right, it is just about to turn three minutes after so let's start the recording and begin. Well, good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening, everybody, wherever you happen to be around the world. Welcome to another solid Academy livestream. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at solid Academy and it is the news roundup. Once every month we take a look across the WordPress ecosystem and bring you news that quite frankly I think is important things that I think are important to those of us especially that are building and managing WordPress sites for clients. And we have a lot to talk about this month. If you are just joining us in zoom, open up the chat and say hello, tell us where you're logging in from. And once again, the link bundle is there waiting on you in the chat. You can download today's slides, particularly important for the news roundup, because the source links for all our stories and other information are down there in the footer or on the slide. And it's great to be clickable and just go right there if you want to learn more. So grab that slide deck and let us get going. So we start out as we usually do here with news from core and we are two weeks away from the release of the next major WordPress version 6.5 will drop two weeks from today March the 26th Unless something crazy happens. Everything is on track. So here are the dates that are in question release candidate two should drop today if it hasn't already. Released candidate three next week dry run the 25th code freeze and march 26. WordPress 6.5 will be released bringing emails to your inbox likely from across the world. So let's talk a little bit about what's going to be involved in WordPress 6.5. A couple of interesting features. First of all, probably the premier headline feature of WordPress 6.5 Is the font library. So it is coming to core after a last minute hiccup last week. The font library was punted from the previous release because it just wasn't quite ready but now it is. So the font library is finally going to provide a standardized way for WordPress users and developers to add custom fonts to websites without the privacy and performance issues of loading fonts externally. So you'll actually be able to upload those fonts directly into WordPress. There'll be an interface to interact with those and you won't have to worry anymore about external loading of Google fonts or all those things. It's really great. This is a big deal coming to core WordPress. So it's about time as far as I'm concerned. Over the last few weeks some last minute concerns arose in the make WordPress slack over where the fonts are actually going to be stored. And it really started to provoke this philosophical debate of what is the font anyway? Should we treat font uploads like any other file? Do they just go in the media library? Should they be treated differently? And ultimately, the decision was made that at least for now, font library we're fonts are going to be stored at wp content slash fonts which makes sense to me. Fonts are different. They should live separately. And there we go. The A lot of the pushback, though, was related to some developers who have complex sites where wp content is handled differently may be stored off site with assets. And this could create some issues for those use cases. But they've had plenty of time to prepare and hopefully it's not going to be a big deal. So font library will in fact ship with future enhancements plan. This is a basic look at what font library is going to look like you'll be able to preview your fonts, see how many variants you'll be able to click into it. See all the things related to that font family so here's fonts that you uploaded yourself your sponsor that your theme is calling. It's just going to be a really nice experience. I think for core WordPress in this is not thank you for the question there in the chat. This is not just for full site editor. This is coming to core for everyone. So this will be available. I'm not sure how it's gonna look in the menu, but it will be available for everyone. I guess it'll probably be under Appearance perhaps or maybe settings. I didn't look to see what menu item it would fall under but it is core core. So that's good. One feature that was great, greatly anticipated was synced pattern overrides. Now, I am not a fan of this name in one part it was appointed was called partially synced patterns. Also not a great name, but the idea is really cool. And that is that in the block editor. Wouldn't it be nice if you could define some patterns where only certain pieces of that pattern would be editable by the user? So you could drop in a block but only the text for example or only change out the image would be available for a client or a user of lesser privilege. And that's what synced pattern overrides are about but they're not quite ready for core it was hopefully that this would have been included in WordPress 6.5 But it's just not quite ready and they've pushed it to the next release. The underlying architecture for sync pattern overrides will be present, but the visual implementation of the feature will not so it's just not going to you won't see it. Another interesting little addition to 6.5 Is that WordPress six five in core, we'll add a V if support. So WordPress six five will support this font format if you're not on this image format. If you're not familiar with Avi F it is a newer and better image compression algorithm than web D. It offers better compression with JPEG, JPEG with no loss in quality, it improves performance, and you'll be able to upload Avi F natively to the Media Library so that is pretty cool. If you've not done any research into Avi if lots of articles, the compression level will be adjustable and plugins can automatically convert existing images. Look for many of the popular WordPress image compression plugins to add an AVI F support settings UI, so it's likely your favorite image compressor we'll have this very soon. Avi F format is fully supported by most major browsers, including the Big Four Chrome, Firefox, Safari and edge. There are some minor browsers some of which I'd never heard of that don't support Avi, it's those are edge cases, no pun intended. So between lazy loading priority and Avi EF core continues to advance image handling and speed, which is always a good thing. A few other noteworthy additions that will be coming along in 6.5 for better for worse, that drop shadow effect is going to be available in more blocks. If you love drop shadows, you're gonna love it. If you're not a drop shadow fan. You know, there's also going to be an updated Preferences panel. This is going to be built directly into the block editor offering a more personalized editing experience letting you adjust the settings and make preferences that better fit your workflow. Here's kind of what it's going to look like you'll be able to control a lot of things. So just for example, if you don't use categories and tags if you just have a basic blog for a small business, and you're not really using you can turn those things off which is really nice. It's a great little interface. Another piece that I'm looking forward to in particular is the ability to right click blocks and other row you know whatever else you have in the list view to get to their context menu. So currently in the in the ListView. In order to get to this little context menu, you have to click on the three dot kebab menu right here. Now it's more you kind of expect like I want to right click on that and get this menu up till now that's not possible but in WordPress six, five, that little tiny UI tweak will be added. And I like it because it's how I my hand wants to right click right there. And so now we'll be able to do that.
There's also some improvements with the way links will be handled. And this is a really nice change in the block editor. links have been a little clumsy. They've gotten a little better, but there's a new UI that is going to be added for managing links. It's similar to the old one, but it's just going to be a lot simpler to attach a link to underline text or whatever. It'll be a smoother experience. I think you'll notice that right away. As you start to use block editor and 6.51 other little bit here you'll be able to rename any block in the list view. Previously you were limited on what you could rename in the list view now any block can be renamed also the plugin dependencies have been added. We talked about that last time. This allows plugin developers to say hey this this plugin requires that a core plugin for example, be present. So a WooCommerce add on for example, can declare that WooCommerce must be active or it has this core message that appears now many plugins that are add ons for other core plugins already do this. But there wasn't a consistent way in core for developers to show these dependencies. And now there is and that's just good for everybody. Another noteworthy change is that that Mac plugin zip bug is finally going to be fixed. So if you weren't aware WordPress six dot 4.3 introduced a bug last month that prevents the upload of zip files that are created with the Mac native compress function. So if you have a plugin folder on your desktop and you have a Mac and you right click that and compress you can upload that zip file into WordPress because you may or may not know Mac add some hidden system files in there. And WordPress didn't know what to do with those. They introduced some code in 643 that would block those and so you would get an unsupported archive message. And that's kind of frustrating. So that's going to be fixed and then back ported to six four and a forthcoming six dot 4.4 release. So that's a good fix. This is one other feature that you're going to you probably won't personally dig into this, but you will begin to appreciate the power that this new interactivity API is going to give developers so interactivity API provides a standard way for developers to add interactions to the front end display of their blocks. It's going to make it easier for developers to create these rich, interactive experiences, where blocks can share data back and forth. For example, if you click an Add to Cart button, the cart block can automatically update even without like an AJAX reload of the screen. So it's really cool. You'll start to see some creative I think implementations of this new interactivity API across the spectrum of block plugins. It's really going to give developers a new and useful tool to do creative things. So that is a big deal. All right, so lots coming to WordPress 6.5. And as usual, we have planned the live stream unpacking all the goodies in WordPress six five with our own Timothy Jacobs, the lead developer at solid WP and he is a core committer and he's one of the maintainers of the WordPress REST API. Timothy is neck deep in core and he's the perfect guy to explain what's going on with six five with a live demo and that is scheduled for April the third 1pm Central time the link to register is down there. This is a new live stream by the way. We just got this on the books yesterday. So if you haven't registered for this one yet, register for that one, and joined Timothy as he walks through all those features with us. All right, if you're not sold on the site editor, you're not alone and the core team is listening. There's a growing feeling that the Gutenberg Project is not prioritizing the needs of website builders, developers, agencies, freelancers, and as a result, many continue to use the classic editor or page builders instead. If that's you, you are definitely not alone. The automatic product wrangler and McCarthy, who stepped back from the full site editing project recently, has been collecting the common complaints about the site editor in a really good post called overlapping problems on her blog. I'd recommend that read it's right here in this bottom link. It's a really good article most of these issues are they already linked to pull requests that are being worked on, that folks are concerned about. But there is a full site editing outreach experiment that was launched three years ago. It aims to bridge the communication gaps between Gutenberg developers and users. They've recently simplified the name of that outreach, experiment and analysis called outreach. And this is a way for the core development team to get good feedback from users. So quality feedback during initial feature development, and not months later after the feature has been released, and it's way down the road that's going to help prevent issues of usability are being discovered so late. So this new outreach was not really new. This outreach approach wants to facilitate better communication between users like us and the developers working behind the scenes on Gutenberg and the lead architect of the site editor Matthias Ventura clarified the site editor is ready for some use cases. But look, it's it may still need plugins to fill in functionality gaps, and that's just true. But WordPress core remains dedicated to improving real user experiences with the site editor and they're just continuing to make it better and better. It's good to see that the core contributors to full site editing are openly discussing its weaknesses. And they're collaborating. They're open to ideas and collaboration. Of course with the WordPress community as a whole. You can get involved in the outreach project on GitHub or participating in the outreach channel of the make WordPress slack group. Alright, several of you coming in late and there's the slide link there in the chat. Alrighty, so let's turn the page and start talking about Gutenberg. This is, by the way, a short news cycle for us on news roundup. We were a little bit late last month. We're a little early this month. And so we only have one release of the Gutenberg plugin, and that was on February 28. A new one probably dropped today or will drop today or dropped earlier. We couldn't get it in the slides. But anyway, this is what's going on with Gutenberg. They've added a really neat grid layout variation. It's a new way that the group block can behave. Couple of options for the grid now include auto where it will automatically create columns based on screen with the number of posts and manual will allow you to specify the exact number. Here's kind of how it looks currently in auto you can set your minimum column width, and it will adjust appropriately how many things are in that grid based on your screen size? That's kind of nice. Here in manual mode, you can specify the number of columns, and it will just make the images or content fit those columns. So pretty neat. I really like this. It's a good addition to Gutenberg. There's also some changes that have been made in the grid child sizing and basically what you can do is resize an item in a grid, and it just makes it all work. It's kind of cool. Now again, all these features are in the Gutenberg plugin, not the core block editor. It's been a while since we've talked about this. I think I'll just talk about this for a second in case anybody hasn't doesn't have a full understanding of this. The development for the block editor and full site editing happens in the Gutenberg plugin. These are the releases we talk about they drop every two weeks. There's a really good cadence of updates that happen in the Gutenberg plugin. And these are some of the updates that have are happening in the plugin. Gutenberg which you can get an install. This is beta development, so probably not something you want to have on an alive active client site, but maybe one to have on the testing site. Then every so often, right before a new core release, like 6.5 That's just around the corner. They'll take the work that's happened in the Gutenberg plugin and merge that into core. So actually, many of the features that we talked about that are coming to core WordPress 6.5 that we talked about earlier in the news roundup, those were things that had been developed across the course of the last few months in the Gutenberg plugin. Finally they're making their way to core. The new Gutenberg plugin also allows the bulk exporting of patterns this is a great addition because you can export multiple patterns at the same time and move them from site to site so it looks like this. You can click your your settings button and export the selected patterns as a JSON, which you can then copy and move to other sites are really great feature that's coming to block editor. You'll also be able to browse and try alternative templates in the sidebar of the site editor. Here's how that looks. We're getting we're here in the site editor and in the templates area. You have your selection of templates here in the sidebar, you can just click that and it will reload the page for you right there. So you can see what it looks like without affecting the front end of the site. That's an excellent feature. Gutenberg 17.8 Of course includes several accessibility and performance improvements,
as always, all right, let us turn the page now to some WordPress security news. Our WordPress vulnerability reports from solid WP have tracked 148 plugin vulnerabilities this month that have been patched 81 plugin vulnerabilities still active or closed and six theme vulnerabilities. You can of course reduce your site's risk to nearly zero with solid security pro with its combination of site scan, version management and the patch stack firewall. version management might still my favorite feature in solid security pro because it automatically is it scans your site twice a day looks to see if an if a version. If there's a vulnerability if a version has been released that patches that vulnerability. It automatically updates your plugin for you without you having to do a thing. And in the meantime, the patch that firewall gives you that virtual patching where the vulnerability from a vulnerable theme or plugin is fixed in the firewall. So before it even gets to your site, any attacks that are aimed at that vulnerability are automatically filtered out. So super powerful approach to WordPress security. They're in solid security Pro. Speaking of patch stack, a really excellent post on the admin bar from Oliver sild, the CEO of patch stack, the most common misconceptions about WordPress security, first of all that hackers don't care about your small website. And in fact they do. They're just looking for any vulnerability. Hiding that your website runs on WordPress. They can figure that out. It's not doesn't really help your security, keeping your plugins up to date and you're safe. It's important, but 30% of vulnerabilities still remain unpatched by developers According to Oliver. And last of all using only server side WordPress security. So server side security is very important but you still need a WordPress plugin that is focused on two FA session management, virtual patching just like solid security Pro offers. So that this is just the highlights of that article. I would this is a great article I would encourage you to read because it'll give you some great language to use as you're talking to your clients about WordPress security. Alright, let's look at some news from us here at solid WP mostly focused on Academy this month. Really excited that WordPress disaster Week is coming back. That is next week, Tuesday Wednesday of next week, one to 3pm Central each day. So total of four hours talking all about WordPress security. Our first hour will be a state of WordPress security by our friend Kathy Zant. WordPress security expert. She's going to set the table for us with all the things we need to be looking at on WordPress security. Our to that second hour of day one, we'll have a great panel of WordPress security experts including Kathy Timothy Jacobs, Tom ray from we watch your website and David Johnson from solid. We'll be I'll be hosting that panel and we'll have some great interaction and conversation with those experts with plenty of time to take your questions about WordPress security. The third hour this is the first hour of the second day. This is one hour one of Wednesday, Timothy will be with us talking about how do you actually reduce your site's risk to nearly zero with solid security Pro. He'll be stepping through the settings in solid security Pro that are essential to bringing your risk down and finally in the last hour, I'll be talking about talking to clients about security. And just some insight on how I talk to my clients about WordPress security to keep them safe and build recurring revenue for your business. So that's a free event. It is coming up next week, and you can register for it. At this link here for all of our upcoming events. Let's see a few several other upcoming events. We talked about this in the pre show our own Stacy Clements will be Stacy Clements your fellow solid Academy member, Stacy is going to be talking tomorrow at 1pm Central with a practical guide to demark reporting stage. Stacey as a fellow agency owner has done a lot of research into the hands on issues of demark reporting. In the wake of all these Google and Yahoo changes over the last couple of months. Stacy has tested all the tools she's going to give you her results and it's gonna be a really good practical webinar tomorrow. Make sure you register for that one WordPress disaster week. Of course we've already talked about that plug in Roundup coming up April the second the WordPress 6.5 launch party on April the third in the news roundup coming up April the 16th for solid Academy members the final week of the month is always a premium course four hours of premium content with an expert in the space and this month we're talking about accessibility with Amber Hines from equalised digital, Amber and her team had built the the accessibility checker plugin that NASA uses on their website. I think it's the best accessibility plugin for WordPress. Amber is an expert in this area. She comes from an agency background. And I'm really excited about this course because it's a two fold approach. First, what do you need to know about accessibility as an agency owner? What are the laws, the principles, all these things? But most importantly and this is what I'm the most excited about? On day two of this course, we're going to be focused on how to offer accessibility as a service to clients. And that's going to be really great. Of course, if you're a member you also get office hours with me every Thursday from one to two central if you're not a member of solid Academy, I'd invite you to do so you can become a member simply by having any solid suite membership that starts as low as 199 a year you get all the premium training all the office hours, and that includes even one license of each of our products solid security pro backups. And Central. So if you're not a member join, right it's a great investment of your time. All right, let's turn the page and talk about plugins and what's going on in the plugin world. First of all our friends over at Kadence have done a name change. The Kadence cloud is now called the Kadence pattern hub. This is a change that happened last week and it just kind of makes sense. The pattern hub is what lets you organize your designs into multiple libraries and add them right into any of your sites using Kadence blocks. The new name really better describes the tools capability to centralize and distribute pattern libraries. So Kadence cloud now the Kadence pattern hub. Another big bit of news in the plugin world maybe you saw something about this. The quickly plugin has discontinued development. Now you may or may not be aware that quickly as a popular block based page builder. It was really a creative approach to using the block editor but it kind of felt like a page builder was really clever some of the things that they did, but they abruptly announced that they have ceased further development of the plugin. The company cited hostile criticism from influencers that created a demoralizing atmosphere for them to operate in the developers using quickly for client sites. were very concerned obviously, are they gonna have to rebuild their sites on other platforms. People on Reddit expressed sympathy but also noted that the move leaves left users stranded with defunct software. Some felt like the shutdown like this so abruptly of a plugin that many relied on would diminish the trust in new plugins coming on board that are trying to tackle these same hard problems. The quickly Facebook group and discourse forums were made read only but there is if you're a quickly user there is an unofficial quickly Facebook group to discuss alternatives and migration workflows. Now that was the news last week over the weekend quickly did update its future plans. So just a few days ago, the founders released an update and clarification to their plans to close the plugin. Users have quickly we'll have ongoing access to bug fixes and security patches through the end of the year. From 2025 Onward. The quickly developers are going to offer a maintenance plan that will keep quickly bug bug fixes coming and deal with any security issues that might arise in the quickly plugin. But they're they're clear that they're not adding any new features. This is simply management of the plugin as it is but the good news is if you're quickly developer if you know a quickly developer, you don't there's not the rush or urgency anymore to rebuild sites because they will continue as they are with bug fixes and security. If you opt into that maintenance plan. Your lifetime deal holder you get that at no charge. If you purchase quickly in January forward that's been refunded and this really does help to calm the fears. That was a good move by the quickly folks.
All right, some WooCommerce news WooCommerce 8.7 is going to be released at first of next week. The next version will drop on Monday with several new interesting features. First, the new block product collection block has smoother transition. So if you played with that product collection block that came out last month, it's a little quirky in some ways, transitioning with filters and things. They've smoothed that out and it's pretty nice. They've also added something very interesting, which is what they've called a receipt rendering engine. So with this WooCommerce built in receding, it creates a public URL for receipts that can be sent to any printer. So this makes a POS a point of sale type system a lot more possible with WooCommerce than it was before. It's all accessible through the REST API that's going to open up a lot of options for developers to make WooCommerce even more usable than it already is. There's also a new check our pardon me it's an extension of the existing checkout fields API and this is really cool. Okay, it's still a developer experiment, so you have to opt into it. But in the new block based approach to WooCommerce checkout, you will be able to add custom checkout fields, right on the in the block editor. With the checkout block. That's pretty cool. That's where you naturally want to add custom fields and they've now have a way to do it. It's being developed. It's, you know, potentially a little buggy. So it's an experiment right now, but i this will likely make its way to core WooCommerce someone has also noted that WooCommerce is developing woo a is a new plugin designed to enhance your woo experience. It's going to offer AI product title optimization, automated product descriptions, and boost your store's efficiency. This is going to be core to loop WooCommerce perhaps, or as a separate plugin. It's now available free on GitHub. You can take a look there on the official WooCommerce GitHub. That's interesting to you take a look at it. It actually works. The WooCommerce blocks plugin has now been archived so you may remember that last year I think it was December WooCommerce merged their WooCommerce blocks plug in into core WooCommerce WooCommerce blocks is no longer needed as a separate plugin. So if you still have the WooCommerce blocks plugin running on a site that you it's yours or you manage it, it's time to remove that plugin because all that code is now in WooCommerce. Core is to make sure that's removed. All right, let's turn the page and start talking about some AI news. While there's always some neat things happening in AI, starting with a kerfluffle automatic has a created a an AI content deal. With some publishers that has a lot of criticism happening. So automatic is reportedly in talks to sell access to all the content of Tumblr and wordpress.com users to AI companies like mid journey and open API. The story broke last two weeks ago, and automatic in response published a policy outlining user controls over how their information content would be shared. The problem is, by default, every user opts in to content sharing they do offer an ability to opt out. But if a user makes no changes, they're giving automatic the right to share that content with AI. Automatic claims that only public non opted out content will be shared with select AI partners and they agree that have agreed to attribution and user controls. Automatic stance is that since AI laws don't exist yet they are proactively giving users more control. But making content sharing opt in by default has drawn a lot of criticism over informed consent as you can imagine, now this is only at this point, perhaps in wordpress.com. It's a little murky there. But it's really Tumblr where a lot of this content is going to happen. The executive director of WordPress to set the hidden gem folksy has said that wordpress.org users that's us are not affected. She says I can confirm that the WordPress project is not involved in selling user data or content for AI training purposes. This has been our consistent stance across the long history of WordPress. So there you go. Definitely something to keep an eye on currently. All right. Google is testing an AI tool that finds and rewrites quality content, another kerfluffle in the AI world. So this new Google AI tool, finds news stories and rewrites what they're calling quality content. So the tool pays small, independent publishers to post rewritten content, meaning an article per day quota. It resembles a practice that was once called article spinning. Were summaries of existing content and maybe replacing some of the words and sentences programmatically would take someone else's work, basically rewrite it and publish it someplace else without proper attribution. And this is actually coming from Google this tool. The reaction among journalists, as you can imagine, is highly critical of the beta test. Some believe the Google's that this tool conflicts with Google's role as a search arbiter by targeting some content for duplication. If it's adapted beyond news, journalists claim it threatens content creators and all online publishing fields and I kind of agree this is a mess. It's a head scratcher. To be honest. If you're a Microsoft co pilot users, this is pretty cool if you if you haven't seen it yet, Microsoft has opened its copilot AI powered advertising asset generator to more advertisers copilot will allow users to instantly generate campaign assets like images, headlines descriptions, all from within their advertising tool. Their goal is to make it easier to advertise. You can generate all your assets right there and just drop it right in Copal it's baked into the Microsoft ad platform. It really can be a lot more efficient. Than standalone AI tools. And copilot of course, taps right into the same core of knowledge that chat GPT uses. So this feature is still in the trial phase, but it's working towards a general release candidate. Here's an interesting little story that popped up there is now a new AI image generator on the scene. It's called Koala and it does things better, faster, cheaper. So this is created by a South Korean group of scientists. It is eight times faster than dolly to which is the premier image generator created by open AI. But what's more impressive is that koala only needs eight gigabytes of RAM to process requests. What that means is it can run on cheap consumer grade graphic processing units, where the big and the bigger generators like dolly require high end industrial GPUs. So this is better, faster cheaper. It's pretty interesting. A koala achieves similar sample quality but better performance. It can be trained to prevent harmful image generation that's good. It's still in lab test not open yet. to the general public. But you can see all this research is really moving forward with Koala and other generators. Pretty interesting. One more little bit of AI news is a good article on Yoast if you're interested is AI content, helping or hurting your website read that article that the Yoast team has produced? All right, let's talk about some SEO news. And there's a lot this month. Google has just released a massive search quality enhancement across its algorithm. This is a big one. The latest Google helpful content update is now live it leads to a big reduction. They say an unhelpful content. Elizabeth Tucker, who's the product director for search at Google says we expect the combination of this update and our previous efforts will collectively reduce low quality on original content and search results by 40% 40% reduction in bad quality results. That's pretty astounding. This month update is more complex than usual, with changes to multiple of Google's core systems. So this is something if you're doing SEO, you're probably aware of this already, but you'll definitely want to watch your search rankings to see how your sites are performing with these new metrics that are in place. Some of these changes focus on site links.
So this latest Google update Institute's multiple new ranking signals that scrutinize links even more closely to make sure they're not linked from manipulative intent or low value content. Now what they mean by that is spammy links. So this is the new signal. A signal is Google's term for things that their search algorithm detects that might enhance or reduce your appearance in search for this new signal detects low value content, created primarily for manipulative links. It also is intended to any links that are intended to manipulate rankings may now be considered spam. In the updated guidelines. outgoing links are now expressively called out they're going to be analyzed for spammy intent. And this is a big one. Have you ever seen somebody or some domain that's expired and now it's a gambling site or some other site selling pharmaceuticals? They are now looking at expired domains that had been bought and repurposed with content that was contrary to their original purpose. So that's really good news, like affiliate content that are now on old government webpages or a former school website, now being redirected to a gambling site. Experts are advising to watch your rankings closely because this is a big update. It affects a lot of things. So and you know, it wouldn't be the first time if your content that's actually good, gets flagged for being bad. So this is definitely something you'll want to watch. Now in the middle of all this, Google has introduced a new featured snippet that's killing commercial list based content. So SEOs are complaining about Google's new list based SERP feature that you may have seen it says from sources across the web and it gives some answers in a list format. This is a feature that's really begun to show up lately. In the AI generated search section. These rich snippets dominate and take the top organic spot and approximately 35% of clicks. The problem is the sources that are used to generate these links are often low quality and spammy. So on one hand, we've got Google improving their algorithm to weed out some of the stuff but your own AI generated list is appearing first and sometimes has garbage content. It's frustrating the process actually contradicts Google's own quality guidelines. It fails to meet search intent. It's just it's a mess. So we'll see what Google does with this. But you'll see I mean, try to, you know, Google something that might result in a list of content and look at that AI generated snippet and see if you find it useful. Because oftentimes, I've noticed this myself, it's not great. Big news for Google business profiles, they now offer social media integration. So Google now allows you to show social media posts on your GBP this you can go in and opt in to connect your different social platforms to your profile and actually pull in your posts there. So you can have one Facebook account, one Instagram account, one LinkedIn account, you can edit it there at business information, contact social profiles, not all Google business profiles have this yet it's being rolled out, but many do. And if you have a GBP or if you manage that for others, this is a great little feature that you might want to activate another little bit of Google Business Profile issues that we had the story last month that websites that were created through the Google business profile links that use the old Google Sites tool. Those were going away. We reported that last month, but now those websites are being redirected to Google Map listings as a temporary stopgap. So last month, those websites started going away. And those URLs now those domains are now being redirected to that business's map listing, but this is only a transitional step. Those redirects are going to stop working on June the 10th. or there abouts. You know, Google, sometimes they do it on the day they say sometimes they don't but at some point after that, those old Google Business Profile websites will start giving for a force. So they've dropped in a middle stage. And they're not just showing for for errors yet, but eventually that will be the case. All right. Let's look at some other news. We talked last month about the new Data Liberation project from within core WordPress. There is this new project then the goal is to make WordPress content easily portable between platforms between various block builders and page builders. In the end, it's a great idea I don't know about you, but if you've ever tried to convert out of one page builder to another, or from a page builder to blocks or from blocks to something else, it's complicated, right? And so the Data Liberation project is going to create this standard to make exporting and importing of the data easier. And that includes hopefully influencing other platforms, like for example, Squarespace to adopt a Data Liberation policy as well to make it easy to pull content out of their platform and drop it into someplace else. The end goal is one click migration to and from WordPress or to and from WordPress, a builder type plugins. So there's a big push behind this. It's getting a lot of effort and some interesting work is happening. I would encourage you to read this article. They're on the make WordPress blog. They are seeking your feedback. So jump in and offer your feedback. This is one of those things that you can shape the progress of this feature development in core. All right, this is an interesting thing. I actually just learned about this this morning. It's a brand new website. Called plugins. Plugins. It's a search feature for the WordPress plugin directory because the core search feature is pretty terrible. If you if you notice that it's really hard sometimes you can search for the exact plugin name and it doesn't even come up. So this is an AI powered search of the WordPress Core plugin directory. And it works really well. It works really well so you can give it a try. Here's what it sort of looks like. So you type in a plug in name like your pricing table for WooCommerce. Here are the search results. It actually shows what you're looking for. And then you have this really nice sort by feature there. So give that a try. It is alive and kicking@plugins.io you can pull it up now and give it a try. Pretty nice. Another little bit of Google News get a lot of Google News last month talking about various lawsuits that Google is involved in. There's now a new one. This is a $2.2 billion lawsuit by European publishers against Google over its digital ad practices. They allege Google has abused its market dominance resulting in financial losses for them. They argue that they would have earned more if Google hadn't been involved in misconduct. Worse, Google denies this claim. That's just one in many lawsuits out there that are targeting Google for leveraging its position in search. So yeah, by the way, this lawsuit was filed in the Netherlands, which is known for its there's just a no nonsense approach to antitrust cases like this one. Should be interesting. Here in the US, tick tock might get banned so there is a crucial vote in Congress coming up about this. Proposed congressional action puts tiktoks future at risk. The house is going to vote this week on legislation that will give tiktoks Chinese owned parent company six months to sell off Tik Tok to a non Chinese owned company. This is a result of security concerns. Joe Biden said he would sign a bill banning Tiktok in the US if it's passed by Congress or the president is on board. The bill aims to address national security concerns around tic TOCs Chinese ownership. The White House has already banned Tiktok on government devices over security issues. But President Biden himself joined tic tock last month. Well I'm sure he didn't but his campaign did as part of the reelection campaign. So you know, politics, the vote outcome is still uncertain. The legislation may change but it's definitely one to watch. A lot of folks rely on tick tock for advertising, so we'll have to see what happens. Another interesting story, at least to me is an excellent article on Chris coin a.net. Chris is the founder of a website that I used to love called CSS tricks. How many of you have gone to CSS tricks in the past and found really cool CSS tricks? And you may have noticed that it's gone downhill. Well, it was once a vibrant resource for tutorials, but two years ago, it was sold off to Digital Ocean a year later. Digital Ocean fired the entire content team they stopped publishing new articles, and they did some really odd things to the site. The founder offered to return to help write the ship and publish new content but that offer while it was envisioned as a win win, it was ultimately rejected as too risky for Digital Ocean. So a lot of folks have expressed disappointment in the wasting of a beloved community asset. I'm in that list shame.
Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress suggests an external accessibility solution for wordpress.org So a discussion has emerged in core channels about adding the accessibility checker plugin from equalised digital to wordpress.org sites to help. WordPress org meet accessibility guidelines. Oh the idea was rejected and Amber Hines tweeted her disappointment at the lack of support. Matt Mullenweg instead suggested paying for external scanner instead of integrating a WordPress based scanner into WP admin. Amber and others have argued that scanners don't provide real time feedback during content creation like Accessibility Checker does. And with the EU's accessibility regulations taking effect next year. Something has to be done to address these concerns. There's an ongoing debate about this in the make WordPress slack which you and take a look at. A few other items that are worth a look. The first being what is accessibility right what is W CAG 2.2. And how do you test for it? Here's a great article on equalized digital.com explaining the WK 2.2 guidelines and what to do about them. I really enjoyed this article. This is a an article that talks about how do you use AI to make a content workflow more efficient, excellent article here on Search Engine Land. If you're a WooCommerce developer and you'd like to know how do you make a WooCommerce site access accessible, you can look at another article there on equalised digital, they're about building a low code, accessible WooCommerce website. Really good stuff there. Finally, remote code execution. Here's a guide for users about what is this remote code execution vulnerability. How do you test for it? How do you avoid it? Oh, one more. This is real. It's an interesting read. A study has been done that shows that social media engagement around an article isn't translating into people actually reading an article. The study finds that less than 1% of readers to news articles actually come from social media. That's really, really interesting. All right, last but certainly not least, is our news from the WordPress community. WordCamp. Asia is over it drew 1300 attendees for talks on web tech open source and WordPress. Just Seth I gave a great talk on community and managing distractions and embracing opportunities for growth. Matt Mullenweg revealed that the 2024 state of the word would actually take place there in Tokyo. You want to view Matt's talk you can do so at this YouTube link here. There are several upcoming US word camps. I work camp buffalo just got on the schedule that's may 4 and fifth. So a full weekend up there in Buffalo, New York. Also work camp Montclair is on June the first one day word camp there in New Jersey. And of course word camp us scheduled for Portland in September. It's a big event there with a pre conference conference and a conference and all the things so if you've never been to a WordCamp us you really ought to take a look at that it is a quite an event. It'll blow your mind with all the WordPress that happens in one weekend. If you're not in the US are several global word camps that are out there. We're camp Europe is planned in Torino, Italy June 13 to 15th WordPress Canada and Ottawa on July the 11th. Through the 13th is also planned. Many other individual word camps planned globally, quite a few more than I could put on the list. So if you are looking for a word camp, you can take a look at the link at the bottom of those slides. Alright, folks, that ends our WordPress news roundup for March 2024. We will have this replay up in about an hour. And just to remind you, make sure you register for that live stream tomorrow with Stacy Clements talking all about practical demark. Thanks for hanging out with me for the last hour. Hopefully you've learned a few things. And I'll see you back here tomorrow on solid Academy where we go further together.