We're just about to get started with those transcripts. Welcome welcome everybody glad you're here
all right, we should have transcripting occurring. Just about ready to get started here with news roundup for October 2022.
All right, everybody, we're just about ready to get started. Welcome. Glad you're here. Sorry for the late start. I had a couple of technical difficulties had to get those ironed out before we begin today in the whoops, what I just paste into the chat is not going to help you at all. Let me get back to the slide link. Here we go. They are today's slides. No, why is it not copying? Goodness I'm this is just one of those days where
all the things that should just work are not working. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. All right, there is the link to today's slides. Let's get started before anything else goes wrong, shall we? Well, good afternoon, everybody. And welcome to the news roundup here on I iThemes. Training. My name is Nathan Ingram. It is October 2022. And every month we take a look across the WordPress landscape to bring you the news that we think is important for those of us who build and manage WordPress websites for clients or especially those of us that do that. There's lots of great news here anyway, but we tried to give a little bit of interpretation based on the folks that that tend to do what our audience does. So if you are just joining us in the chat, the slide link is there for you to download. Follow along if you'd like. Slides are especially important for the news roundup, because all the links are down there at the bottom you can click through to resources or read the full articles, or whatever you'd like if you're watching this on the replay. It's in the download handout button that is just below the video. So let's get started as we always do with news from core and I should have updated this presentation at first thing this morning. And I forgot to do that because we actually just dropped you probably realize this you just fleet just dropped brand new version of WordPress. Just a minor update 602 I believe it was 603 Sorry, just launched last night filled your inbox and mindful of all those things. It's a very very short cycle, simple release, just some bug fixes, etc. Not a lot to deal with there. Hopefully. Now you have the default behavior of WordPress active where it automatically updates to these minor releases. You should be doing that there's not really a good reason why not to do that. These updates don't break things. Except for one time it did a long time ago and you already may remember that it only affected a certain amount of people and it was weird. But generally speaking, those updates are perfectly safe to just have on and have those patches being applied. So let's look forward Shall we with some things that are happening with WordPress 6.1. Very, very important news this month about massive improvements are expected to database performance with the next version of WordPress that is due out just in about a month or so. So they are the core team the core performance team has been working on making WordPress faster we've been chronicling that over the last several months. And
they are they made some changes in post query caching that they say are going to produce significant performance gains. Now in six Dotto of WordPress they made some changes to term query caching. This is different similar but different. Basically what this what this means is that before going to look for information in the database. WordPress is going to check the cache first and pull information from there if it exists, so that should result in less back and forth from the server. Clicker load better performance across the board. This is really really good news for us. So there you go. That's going to be fun to see something else is happening and WordPress six one again from the performance team. We've been following a little bit of WP drama that has occurred over web p by default in WordPress. You may remember that web p is a next generation image format that has been supported by most major browsers for quite a while now. It web P images are significantly smaller than their JPEG or ping counterparts. And it's just better like it speeds up the site. It's a good thing. But there are some issues with using web P and how web P for example, might actually work itself out in WordPress. So you know what happens if the web P happens to be larger than the corresponding JPEG you just uploaded? Or are we going to keep JPEGs and web peas and is that that will basically double the size storage space size of our media library. Lots of questions were answered. It caused quite a kerfuffle last month we talked about that they were pushing ahead with web p by default and WordPress six one that has now been changed. Matt Mullenweg weighed in on this several weeks a few weeks ago anyway, talking about it's probably better to move these sorts of things, rather than putting them in core WordPress instead to put them in canonical plugins. Now a canonical plugin would be something that, you know, it's developed by a core team, it's maintained, it's whatever like it's, these could be like feature plugins that you could see within WordPress. We don't quite know how this is going to flesh out but that's the direction that we are headed. So Mullenweg said I'm happy for support working for WP and ATI C files to stay in core, but not in but not with the change to convert everything to web p when JPEGs are uploaded. So that was really the rub and so that's been pulled the core committer alpha, Adam Silverstein who sponsored by Google said he was surprised by the post. He said this is a blow for everyone who worked on the feature, but I encourage us to focus on how we can move forward given the current position. So if you want web P upload by default all that work is in the Performance Lab plugin, which you can see down here in the bottom, the footer bar here wordpress.org/plugins/performance lab that's where all of these features are being developed. So you can install Performance Lab and get web p by default. Honestly though, for those of us building and maintaining sites for clients, you're better at we've talked about this in several other webinars for years now it's better to have a really good full featured image optimization plugin solution, like you know, smash or E dub or short pixel or one of the other many plugins like that that are out there. This core feature is going to be pretty light in comparison to some of the more full featured premium plugins that handle these things. So for us, maybe not a big deal for WordPress by default. You know, I don't know might have been helpful, but I understand the debate. So we'll see how this actually works out and how canonical plugins actually work their way into WordPress. One of the thing that was suggested by Timothy Jacobs actually is looking at canonical plugins kind of like you see a settings page like for example, if you're using the Kadence theme, you see how certain bits of the theme are disabled by default, but you could toggle them on so wouldn't it be cool for example, to see a page inside the WordPress admin where all these canonical plugins are listed like web p by default, you could just toggle that on and it would install the plug in for you. That sounds like a pretty good idea to me. We'll see how it actually works out I expect this to be a point of ongoing discussion over the next several months if not years in the WordPress Core community. So we're pushing forward to the WordPress 6.1 release date later this month. We're just a couple of weeks away. Dry a release candidate three is due out today the dry run next week and then the WordPress 6.1. Release should be one week from today on October the 25th. So yeah, there we go. Something
else that you need to be aware of is something we've been talking about also in previous news around UPS is this push for local fonts in core WordPress. Now this is an important issue because if you've been following news, you've been we've talked about it here on the news roundup, you've probably seen how in the EU there have been companies who've been sued or fined massive amounts for using Google Fonts because there's personally identifiable information that is pushed back and forth. It's a real problem. It could you know, it's a privacy issue using fonts that are actually loaded from Google or other font providers like that. So there was a push from the themes team to strongly urge theme authors to switch over to locally hosted web fonts that started back this summer. Now the local fonts option was originally planned for 6.1 that after some beta testing listed got some problems to fix so a push was agreed upon out to 6.2 So Stephen Bernard, one of the developers involved here says using locally hosted fonts is already recommended, but we need to fix our own things before we can make this a requirement for others. So let's clean up our own house and then fix and you know push out some standards for the rest of theme developers. Contributors are working on having a fully GDPR compliant WordPress default theme ready for 6.2 which is expected early 2023. In the meantime, you can do local Google fonts with a plug in like local Google Fonts, or switch to bunny fonts which is like the simple to do the Bunnie CDN, which is a great CDN option. It is a open source privacy first web font platform with no tracking or logging fully GDPR compliant pretty good or quite honestly, if you are using Kadence you you've been able to do this for quite a long time. So you simply go into the customizer under General in the Performance tab, and toggle on the load Google Fonts locally option. That's all you have to do. And your Google Fonts are loaded locally. Now you do need to be careful though, if you're using Kadence like with a page builder of some sort and if you're defining fonts and Page Builder modules directly, that's a bad idea anyway, because it's going to make another font call, but that that will still load the font remotely because of the page builders doing it not Kadence so there you go. I simply let Kadence handle all your typography and then let the modules of your page builder inherited. If you're using Kadence block, it's a non issue anyway, because Kadence will just load everything. So there you go. A few options there to deal with that font issue until they get it sorted out in the six.to release. Another bit of news that hit the core blog is some major improvements coming to the core editor. Lots of those are slated for 6.1 and some will come in 6.2. These are the roll up of Gutenberg features that we've talked about over the last several months here on iPhone iThemes Training in the news roundup. As you may be aware, all of the development for the block editor occurs in the Gutenberg plugin, and then it major releases like 6.1 6.2 They take all the development between the last major release and the current one in the Gutenberg plugin and drop that into core WordPress as the block editor. So your block editor is not Gutenberg. Gutenberg is the plugin in which development for the block editor and full site editing occurs. So a lot of poor a lot of improvements have happened from 6.1 to 6.2. As far as the Gutenberg development in the block editor, and some of those are like typography, support, lots of new options for typography support in blocks. So you now have the option to jump in and change your font family, the various things here the sizes, line height, letter spacing, all these things are now built into the block editor that weren't there before. That is really, really helpful. It's funny, we're actually just launching the WordCamp Birmingham site which is powered by blocks and Good grief. It's really complicated to get around with some of these without some of these features that are coming soon to core WordPress. We also have some blocks now with dimensions and spacing. So my block specific margins and padding and you might be saying, we've had that forever and Kadence and you're right we have but those things were not available on the block editor until just this new release that's going to be rolled into 6.1 and 6.2. So you can see some of these spacing things working out right here. That's all going to be present in the core block editor in 6.1. So that's pretty good stuff. We
also have color support in various blocks. You can see some of those things right here where you can change the color of icons, the background of icons, let's make this as ugly as possible. There we go. It's all black and yellow. There you go. So those per block settings are there. And again, we've been able to do this in Kadence blocks for quite some time. But this has not yet been possible in core until just now. There's some additional layout features that are here. You can go into container blocks that effect the the the settings of the blocks that are contained within it. You can see some of that happening here. Here's the menu block and the full side editing module. Yeah, justifying all those things. And everything sort of inheritance and works. blocks now are going to have border support. This is something that is just starting you can see the completion state, not quite there. Some blocks have it some blocks don't but the Gutenberg team is working on support for borders. Here in the block editor. You can see that starting to happen here. We'll get our post title dropped in our featured image and you can see the border control. It's really I do like that live preview. It's really, really nice to see that happening. So they're beginning to add border support to all of those core blocks. Also, you know, really looking at how this can come together as you're doing layout and design. So now we're changing up our fonts and now we can jump into the padding of this block that we're playing around with and just visually see how those things change. Pretty nice. Yeah, so really great to see these features coming together and it gives the block editor a lot more power than it's had previously. See some of this happening here as well with a with an image
pretty neat stuff. All right. Well, let's look at what's been happening in the Gutenberg plugin itself. What we just saw was what's coming to core WordPress in the next major release. Let's look at what's been happening in the Gutenberg plugin itself. Gutenberg 14.2, dropped on September 28. We've got some query loop variations. We've got improvements to the flow of writing some letter spacing a better calendar block banners and footers. Let's take a look at some of these things here. A better writing flow here is pretty interesting. We as we click here to add a block. We can look here you're able to drop in some line insert, it's a more natural effect as you're dropping in inserters line by line. You can now select multiple blocks a lot easier. And the block inserter hides itself when you're typing. So that's actually kind of nice so you can see it there. It doesn't show up until you actually start to move your mouse again. So that's pretty nice. You've also got an ability for letter spacing and headings, which is happening here typography, editing and just changing out your letter spacing there. The calendar block looks a little better this is your posts calendar, not as event calendar. Of course, not really sure there's not a whole lot of sites that use this much anymore, but it is there for blog sites that like to seek a calendar of their own posts. The banners and footer blocks now give you the ability to their cat their categories of these block patterns for banners and then footers. In the full site editing suite. We actually just experimented with some of this as we're building the word camp Birmingham site that just launched this morning. We use the whole full site editing suite. Definitely a lot of work still to be done there. But we were able to do it and it worked you know once we figured out what was what it worked pretty well. Now also this is kind of cool auto completion for links. So you do the double square bracket and that's going to bring up a list of links that you can quickly add into a post so that's kind of cool. A double double the square bracket so a lot of simple things but useful user interactions included in Gutenberg 14.2 14 Three released about a week ago, October the 12th. Some better drag and drop navigate block text navigation, and then some additional options here. So here's how images were this is pretty cool. Like you can drag an image from your desktop right into the editor which is nice. By drop it in. It's going to upload it plop it in right there, right in the editor, just like you were editing a document so that's pretty cool. The you can also now navigate through your blocks of text with alt with your with keyboard shortcuts, which is pretty nice alt arrow up, arrow down, etc. You can also drag and drop blocks and patterns. Watch here we pull in our pattern library and just drop it right in so that's kind of nice as well. In this Gutenberg 14.3. Pretty cool. So we also have some improved tool panels for the typography options. We saw some of that just a minute ago. didn't play. There we go. So you can just jump jump right in the typography settings and change link styles and how all that's gonna look right there in your immediately updating visual editor. Pretty cool. So they continue to make progress here. It's incremental. ever release a Gutenberg, they're inching more and more towards something really, really cool. All right, so that's all the things that are happening in Gutenberg. Let's turn the page Shall we and look about some some news with WordPress security. Paul has a great question in the chat when you use that image drag and drop is it going to compress if that type of plugin installed it should? It's something you'd want to test I'm sure that that's what's happening because it's actually in the background doing that media upload feature. And so whatever happens when you upload a file to the media library, if you're running, you know, an image optimization plugin, it should take over and make it happen. Yeah, you'd want to test that but I'm sure that would is what's happening. Hopefully you're aware that
we've now included biometric logins and pass keys for WordPress in the latest version of I think security. It's I think security now allows you to log into your WordPress with face ID Touch ID Windows Hello, as well as past keys and various browsers. We did a preview webinar on this a couple of weeks ago, a couple of months ago. As we were just starting to get the feature rolled out. But we're going to have a webinar tomorrow at one o'clock with I think security and core contributor Timothy Jacobs. That is tomorrow at one o'clock central time. If you've not registered for that yet. I strongly recommend you do that. You can just follow this link here or just go to training.ai ithemes.com and click that webinar link there and sign up. If you're watching this on the replay. Just go into the full library. You can watch the replay of that webinar if it's already past. Timothy is going to walk us all the way through how pass keys work, how biometric logins work, and that should be a great webinar because this feature it's available and ready to go right there in your I think security now, pass keys and biometric login. It's really the solution. If you have clients, for example, that struggle to use those complex unique passwords if you've got that client who just refuses to use a password manager and they've got their favorite password they use for everything, you know, that's a bad idea, but yet getting them trained to use, you know, some other thing like LastPass or one password is that's hard to this is going to make that whole situation a lot simpler and allow your client to have a secure password on their WordPress site and make it very easy for them to log in at the same time. So watch that webinar tomorrow. That's coming in 1pm Tomorrow, central time with Timothy Jacobs. We're changing up the way we do our vulnerability reports here on the news roundup, rather than me reading 100 different plugins that are already patched. We're just going to give you some numbers and then look at the vulnerable and closed plugins. So over the course of the last month 44 plugin vulnerabilities were had been patched 14 have no known fix. And two theme vulnerabilities were patched and of course, you can keep your site secure with I think security pro even the free version of I think security scans your site twice a day for vulnerabilities. But in I think security Pro you can get an email when that vulnerability is found. And even with the version management feature, automatically update that theme or plugin if a fix is available pretty good stuff. Now here's a list of the plugins that as of today are still vulnerable and closed you definitely want to have these plugins removed. From your website contact bank cryptocurrency pricing list and ticker the forum plugin lb stop attack member press downloads that's not the member press plugin it's a an add on plugin for member press by a third party developer called memberpress downloads, retain live chat search logger web gateway. They're up humans they pee total hacks, ironic login and WP word count all of those plugins vulnerable and closed you need to remove those from your site. We do publish these words these WordPress vulnerability reports weekly on the i iThemes blog was a little glitch in our publishing from last month. We did miss a week at the end of September because of some internal technology issues that prevented that blog post from happening. But it's it's every week and that's there on the iThemes blog which you can sign up to get there on the iThemes website. Big vulnerability in the shortcode codes ultimate plugin. This is a plugin that's been used on more than 700,000 WordPress websites to manage your shortcodes major vulnerability. There is no evidence that was actually exploited in the wild but I'm sure there will be an exploit at some point. Just make sure if you're using shortcodes ultimate that you've updated to the latest version which is five dot 12.1 or higher where that vulnerability is patched. It's a big deal.
Alright another bit of security news that I think is pretty cool is a new option from Cloudflare. That's now in free beta called turnstile now turnstile is purported to or they've designed it to be a CAPTCHA replacement. So if you get frustrated using CAPTCHA on your websites, yeah, this is going to be a replacement for that it's going to be provided free through Cloudflare whether or not you're using any of the other Cloudflare features or not. So you don't have to be running Cloudflare DNS to use turnstile and it's gonna solve problems like poor accessibility CAPTCHA has accessibility issues. cultural bias, like if you're another part of the world, maybe you don't know what a US tax he looks like. And there's data plan issues on low bandwidth data where capture can cause a problem. Anyhow, it's an open beta. It's not primetime yet, but this is definitely something we're going to want to be watching. Because it could be an excellent option to replace CAPTCHA on our websites. Yeah. So I would encourage you to read the Cloudflare article, read the TechCrunch article. If you haven't read anything about turnstile yet. This is a big deal and I think it's going to help everybody up the road. All right, let's move into some news from Ai things big news, actually, internally here and I iThemes. Matt Danner, who is the was the former general manager of iThemes has moved on to a new opportunity. We wish Matt the best. Matt is an excellent guy. I've known him for many years. He's one of the original ipmns folks, Matt has moved on to something else. And so some shifts had happened in the leadership of I iThemes to Devin Walker and Matt Cromwell. So these guys you may recognize if you've been in the WordPress space for any length of time, Devin and Matt were the founders of give WP which was also acquired by Stellar WP recently, and so their leadership skills have now been moved over into the AI iThemes team. Devin is now the general manager for I think Matt is the manager for marketing support and operations both those guys are just awesome. I really look forward to working with him even more. And of course Kathy Zant who we've gotten to know really well as the Kadence WP marketing manager. She is now the Director of Product Marketing for I iThemes and Kadence. Now, so the good news is you get folks get to see a lot more Kathy as well and we just open we look forward to that opportunity anytime because Kathy is awesome. So lots of great changes. There's a blog post about this on the i iThemes blog that I would invite you to read from Devon, a lot of good thoughts there. Here's a basic summary. I think this is going all in on our foundational products and training so we're going to focus on the core products that power the I iThemes engine which are I think security Backup Buddy I think sync and I iThemes Training. So in the coming months you're gonna see new energy poured into these foundational products. Now along with that comes the sunsetting of some legacy products. So some dust is settled on some of those older legacy I think products and by sunsetting some of those the team can focus better on the things that make it seem so valuable to the WordPress community today. And anything that gets sunsetted or re homed will work to provide a smooth transition for users as you would expect. Now something else that's interesting is a revisiting of the identity of I themes. Look, I think it's been around since 2008. We're one of the oldest WordPress companies that are out there. And a lot has changed since 2008. So internally, the iThemes team is going to be getting is going to be beginning a discovery journey that's going to revisit the entire I think is brand identity. We'll see what happens there. It's going to be interesting and we'll keep you posted about that as well. Also at the future this was there. No pun intended, of course, the future of AI iThemes is in fact stellar. A lot of companies are cutting back these days and uncertain times but I think is on the other hand is investing in our community and products. We're looking forward to bring even more services products and initiatives that connect across all the stellar WP brands. So stay tuned with that we just I mean thing just last week, we saw a great collaboration between the gift team and the Kadence team to bring that give WP cloud which has all those giving patterns, if you're using give to just drop those patterns right into your pages through the Kadence cloud system and there's going to be even more integration of stellar brands across the board as we go forward. So really looking forward to what's going to happen in the future here that I themes I'm very excited about it. Pretty cool. All right. Our customer
spotlight for this week is Debbie Campbell for Debbie P minor. Debbie is a good friend of mine very very awesome person and does a great job both with her building and managing of websites in Colorado. So if you want to read Debbie store, you can do that right there and ithemes.com/customer spotlights. Yeah, she's great. Got a great story there for you to read. All right, our premium event is next week. So one week from today we'll be starting the Kadence power users course here on I iThemes Training. This will be a one to three each day, two hours a day September 25 through that should say October who sorry about that October 25 and 26th. One to 3pm each day with Ben Ratner, the founder of Kadence. We're going to look at the suite of Kadence tools from a developer perspective. So this isn't an intro to Kadence. So you're going to need to understand code snippets and you know not be maybe afraid to copy and paste code snippets that sort of thing. This is a power users course. It's not a Kadence 101. We're gonna look into some advanced CSS, dynamic content with Kadence elements, code snippets and some lesser known but powerful tools that are tucked away in Kadence. So if you if Kadence is part of your stack, you do not want to miss this webinar with Ben. And of course, you can ask Ben, anything you want to we get to that q&a About Kadence. It's going to be a great, great webinar series. So that starts next week, this should say October 25, and 26th one to 3pm. Now wrapping up the fall of premium events here on iThemes Training next month, and in December, as has been our habit for the last few years. We're going to do our Starter Site course. So creating a Starter Site with me in November, and then optimizing your starter site in December. We always have extra tweaks and things that have happened over the last year that we build into those Starter Site packages. So that's always one of our most requested webinars series. And we're doing it again this year. November and December. Don't have registration pages up for those but we'll have that up here in the next few weeks. All right, coming up here on iThemes Training we just mentioned earlier the webinar tomorrow with Timothy Jacobs about biometric logins and pass keys. Office hours on Thursday the Kadence power user course Tuesday Wednesday of next week with Office Hours Thursday plugin round up his back on November the first office hours and then our fly for November is talking about working with contractors. All right. If you are not a member of I iThemes Training you can join and get a month free so for example if you want that Kadence power users course you can join right now and get access to that course at no cost. Or you can that you can join on a monthly or annual basis and it's right there and I think stock comm slash training do that. All right, let's move forward and some news on plugins. We had another bit of WP drama over the last month when wordpress.org the stats for active installs and growth data for plugins were removed. So the contributors to the WordPress plug in directory removed the active installed growth charts for plugins and this is not the number of active installs that shows on plug ins but the chart over time of how that install base changes. Not sure why that happened. There. There really well the reason that was given was insufficient data obfuscation, so this probably had something to do with a privacy issue. And so it was pulled. But the real issue was with folks that are concerned about this is that this was a key metric metric that a lot of developers depend on. It's one of the few things they can get for tracking the growth or decline of their plugins. is one of the only indications of you know how our plugin is performing. So Amber Hines from equalize digital said that she wanted to echo disappointment in that chart being removed. Hopefully we'll hear something soon. In an ideal world this commit should be rolled back pending community discussion. Not sure what's going to happen on any of this. The discussion is certainly far from over and his again provoked conversation about governance in the web community and how these decisions are made. So we'll see what happens here. Yeah, interesting. Another bit of news, you
may have encountered this, Yoast SEO 19.7 contains a conflict with some other plugins, basically, any any plugin or code that was added that changed the login URL of the WP admin area, after this Yoast 19.7 update caused that website to receive a fatal error and it's the third time this year that plugin conflicts have caused a Yoast update to fail. So the Yoast team did quickly investigate and publish an update that solved the problem. It's it's really it's really interesting and honestly Yoast had a very, very honest comment here. This is a sort of word WordPress plugin conflict situation I literally don't know how to prevent from happening. Six with 60,000 Plus plugins. Plus your own custom code could cause How do you test a plug in against all of those options? I don't know either. And he's got em. It's very honest point. about this. It's tough, right? It's tough. So yeah, we'll see what happens there. They did get a quick update out. That's about all you can ask. Okay, some ecommerce news here i WooCommerce has rolled out a new cross selling block in their eight dots, six version of WooCommerce blocks. So WooCommerce blocks continues to get better and better. It's giving me it used to just be essentially a block that replicated the shortcode. Now we're starting to get some settings in there. cross selling if you're not familiar with it, it's a strategy where other potential add ons are presented in the cart. Hey, you bought this you might like these related products, for example. So as a customer checks out, you might want to cross sell and upsell to some other things. The cross selling block is now available on the cart page. So your cross sells will show up beneath the contents of the cart. Audit. You know as soon as you add related products to certain products in your store. Looks kinda like this right down here. Pretty good. That's usually a blank spot where your subtotal stuff happens over here. So pretty good, interesting stuff going on there with WooCommerce. So if you're playing around with WooCommerce, and you ever using blocks to design your WooCommerce checkout process now, give it a look. Alright, let's move into some other news. This to me was one of the biggest stories of the last month so last month PayPal updated its acceptable use policy that would allow it to take pardon me that would allow it to take $2,500 from your account if it feels you have shared misinformation, or content that it deems to be discriminatory, discriminatory, discriminatory. Thank you, or promoting hate speech. So this was something that was unilaterally published by PayPal under its acceptable use policy. It was set to take effect on November 3 Less than a week prior to the midterm elections in the United States. Pay Pal said it's expanding its existing list of prohibited activities. To include sending posting publication of messages, content or materials that meet certain criteria. The direct link to their policy is here below. The former president David Marcus for President of PayPal, I said it's really hard for me to criticize a company I used to love and gave so much to but this goes against everything I believe in. A private company gets to decide to take your money if you say something they disagree with. Matter of fact, even the commissioner of the Federal Communication Commission, Brendan Carr responded calling it Orwellian, is a big deal. Now, the Pay Pal has issued an update to this they said A
and A up acceptable use policy notice recently went out in error. Interesting, that included incorrect information. Pay Pal is not finding people for information and this language was never intended to be inserted in our policy. Okay. Our teams are working to correct our policy pages. We're sorry for the confusion This has caused it's an odd apology to me to be honest, how do you add is it x this? This is the sort of thing that should not be accidentally added to a policy it's big deal, particularly in the light of the very well known history Pay Pal has a freezing funds and deep platforming customers and Lord help you if that happens to you. It's really hard to get that reversal to happen. It's Pay Pal has a very heavy hand when it comes to freezing accounts and and doing doing pulling money out of accounts. So yeah. Interesting, by the way, as of today, today, the Pay Pal User Agreement still includes providing false inaccurate or misleading information that is linked below so the fine amount is not there, but they can still do something to your account if they say you provide false inaccurate or misleading information. Very, very interesting. We try not to use Pay Pal at all anymore. It's been a while for various reasons. This being one on some other news that happened. This is pretty cool. This is definitely of developer interest. But there is a core contributor sponsored by automatic by the name of Adam Zelinsky, who has created a prototype of WordPress running in a browser with no PHP server. Here's how it looks. So you'll notice right here this is a local instance just running directly in the browser. WordPress is running as it should here. Look at this. We've got a page being created and published. Now one thing here permalinks are an issue because we don't have an htaccess file or way to redirect permalinks. So we're at this point, we're having to use the direct ID of the post. But yeah, just as a as a prototype. This is pretty cool. This is pretty cool. And so I would if this is of interest to you, I would encourage you to read the WP tavern article. There is also the dopey SQL lite plugin which is available on GitHub. It was running this we talked about SQL lite last month as a flat database file, basically a text file that stores database information. Now there's a push by the some folks in core to have WordPress support SQL Lite. If for simple websites, and it probably would speed things up. It's pretty interesting how you could see as some usage of this particular concept in creating a quick staging site for example, or testing an in browser WordPress environment to test different versions of WordPress and PHP and Gutenberg. You can also very quickly use something like this to do demos of a plugin or pattern or a theme, like the DEP readme.com website or scaling like you could have lots of instances of WordPress to do something. So a pretty interesting use case here. It's total prototype at this point though, it was just a proof of concept but this is something interesting I think, to watch and see how this actually works out I have a feeling we're gonna be referring back to our remember when back in October 2022. We talked about this in browser WordPress thing. Yeah, I think we're gonna be going back to this at some point in the future when somebody finds a very clever and useful adaptation of this technology. Alright, another bit of other news is the publication of the 2022 web almanac report. You may remember that in previous months we've talked about using the W three Tex stats that the WordPress his user base had plateaued. But you may remember that I did say when we talked about all these statistics and it was I think, I believe it was under Yoast state of WordPress when he looked at all the different platforms. I believe that was the blog post we referenced in with this but the data from which W three Tech's pulled, their sources had changed. And all of a sudden the WordPress install base changed. Here's another look at the particular data. And the web almanac report actually shows that WordPress adoption is continuing to grow they've also added some page builder data about what page builder certain sites are using. So we got data on page content, user experience, content, publishing, etc. It's a data set that evaluates millions of web pages, whereas the W three tax only evaluate or the the data source previously only evaluated the top 10 million websites this looks at all websites. So here we go. WordPress is
still leading the market with a 35% market share on mobile versus all the other things here. closest competitor being Wix which is growing, but only a 2% install base versus WordPress. This again is in contrast to the three tech stats which show WordPress market share declining from March to June and then holding steady. The web almanac shows it's up 1.4% over 2021 that 1% One and a half percent web wide is a lot of websites. So again, the W three tech stats only include the top 10 million websites and its stats. This looks at the internet as a whole. We also see that Drupal and Joomla are slowly declining and Wix has grown over the past three years but still just 2% of the CMS market. New this year in this year's data are the top five WordPress page builders. The Webalizer detection found that 34% of the WordPress websites in the dataset, were using some sort of page builder plug in Elementor the big one that if you bakery Divi Site Origin oxygen Why don't see beaver builder here and I that's interesting to me they may not be detecting Beaver Builder for whatever reason. But there you have it. The web almanac also published data for the core web vitals performance across CNSs and you'll see that WordPress is still at the back this is bad, bigger scores are better. What percentage of these website website platforms have good, whatever that means? Core web vitals, WordPress lagging at the back so we have a lot of work to do there and the performance team is certainly working on those things. Data scores pretty high dude is an interesting it's a white labeled Squarespace like CMS platform. Interesting. All right. Moving into the WP acquisitions, watch their be super cache was acquired by jetpack automatic grid pain got a strategic investment from automatic as a hosting platform. And that's REM get got a strategic investment from Yoast Volk and some others there as well. So happening in acquisitions Meta Slider plugin Meta Slider lightbox from the extended AI platform was acquired by published press in WP shout which is a tutorial site for developers was acquired by theme I'll which is the creator of the Hestia theme which you may have heard of before. All right, some other news that was worth a look are things we ran across during preparing for news roundup we thought were interesting. If you would like to get a little more information on Aria, as it relates to accessibility. Here's a great guide from Smashing Magazine making sense of ARIA as far as it's used in accessibility. So give that a read. It's pretty interesting. Good article from Master wp.com from some things I want to see at WordCamp us 2023 Good respectful perspective about improving WordCamp. us good article, if you're a word camp person, maybe you've run across the Google error in Search Console, discovered certain URLs that are not currently indexed. Yeah. It means that Google knows about the URL but hasn't crawled it or indexed it yet, and that we're seeing that more and more on sites I manage as well. So there's a five step process on ahrefs.com to diagnose and fix the issue. The 2022 theme is the first default block theme to get tagged as accessibility ready which is pretty cool. So you can read about that on the dopey tavern site. And last but not least a really fun photo that I ran across this month. This is when you look at the back end. So those of you who might have some age on you like I do know exactly what this is down to you. This is the big wheel on the prices, right? This is what it looks like behind the big wheel. And so if your back end development looks kind of like this too. You know, it happens right? I just thought that was funny. All right. Let's turn the page and talk about some WordPress community events. WordPress accessibility days coming in a few weeks that's November, the second and the third 2022. It's a free 24 hour virtual event focused on practical learning website accessibility and promoting website accessibility in our community. It's being led by Joe Dolson and Amber Hines, both of whom have spoken here on iThemes Training in the past. Joe is the author of a WP accessibility plugin that you might be familiar with. And Amber Hines Of course, just did our accessibility bootcamp here from equalised digital. This is a free event WP accessibility dot day. If you are interested in accessibility for WordPress, this is a great event. To sign up for it even if you can't make all of them live. It is a 24 hour event. It'd be good to watch the replays on these.
Also word fest is returning on November the 18th. One month from today this is the fourth word fest another 24 hour virtual event focused on the health and well being of remote workers promoted by big orange heart which is a fabulous organization. You can sign up for free at this link right there and get access to wordfest LIVE. We also have available to 2021 to 22 annual meetup survey from the WordPress community team. If you ever attended and official WordPress meetup, the community team wants your feedback takes less than five minutes to fill out even if it wasn't in the last year. If you've been up to WordPress meetups, or even if you haven't really fill out that survey and let the community team know what you're thinking about WordPress meetups. All right, we got some word camps on the calendar. Several that are coming up in October and November internationally. We're camp Valencia Spain is coming up next week or this weekend actually. We're camp Brno in the Czech Republic also this weekend. We're camp Leone in France next weekend. I work out in Nepal November 5, and sixth. Also that weekend word camp Sofia in Spain and WordCamp San Jose in Costa Rica, all coming up November 5 and sixth. Now also if you are in the United States, we've got some planned word camps on the calendar. My word camp work camp Birmingham Alabama we called WP y'all is coming February 4 And fifth of 2013 The website is now up you can purchase tickets at WP y'all dot com that is it. We are ready to go. We're also have our call for speakers available. So hey, come on down to Birmingham. speak at a word camp. It's really nice in February that in Birmingham, especially if you are in a colder climate, it's usually not that cold down here during that time. We're camp Phoenix is on the books for March 25 24th and 25th. You can sign up to get more information there they're coming soon pages up. They don't have tickets or anything for sale just quite yet. We're kept buffalo is May the sixth as well. Buffalo New York. Are THEY'RE COMING SOON site is up but they are going to happen May the sixth Last but certainly not least WordCamp Europe 2023 is scheduled for June 8 through 10th In Athens, Greece. WC EU is looking for organizers. The deadline to apply was September 22. Maybe that's supposed to be October. I don't know check it out. If you want to volunteer, click the link. Hopefully it's still there. Like we missed up on the date there. All right. One last thing here the 2022 WP Awards, which lets you vote for your favorite things in WordPress. is up. If you haven't voted yet. Go check that out at the WP weekly.com/awards You can vote for your favorite types of various plugins, your favorite communities etc. Go vote Well, yeah. And just show your support for various things. I think security is on that list as a security plugin. So go vote for us over there, William. If you want to see last year's results you can do so at this link all sponsored by the WP weekly. Alright folks that wraps up the October 2022 WordPress news roundup here on I iThemes Training. I'm dropping today slides in once again, they're in the chat, download those if you came in late, follow it you can go back and review all those things and click all the links. We are back tomorrow with that I think security webinar with Timothy Jacobs talking about past keys and biometric logins that is going to be a great webinar. Make sure that you join that one. Timothy is one of those folks who is absolutely brilliant and still able to communicate well. Sometimes it's hard to get that combination of a developer who is brilliant with someone who can also really make things practical for those of us that aren't developers, and Timothy is one of those people. So he'll be around to talk us through biometric logins and pass keys as well as just answer your security questions in general. So don't miss that tomorrow. It's a free webinar here. One o'clock central time Until then, we'll see you have a great rest of the night. See you back here tomorrow and I iThemes Training, where we go further together.