Good afternoon, everybody. Glad you're here. Just getting the transcript started
we've got about oh six and a half minutes or so before we get started
it is WordPress news roundup today. Had a lot of really interesting news stories to talk about. This is going to be a good one. So glad you've decided to join for the next hour or so we'll get started in about three minutes after.
As you log into zoom, head over to the chat area and say hello and let me know where you're logging in from today. Good to see Joe from Colorado.
Let me grab the link for today's slides
so everything you see on the screen is there in the slide link I just dropped in the chat area so Hey, Keith from Nashville munhu from California. Ben from Sweden. Christine from Florida. Show you know it I don't know I don't know what to say about that. I'm actually honored that anybody would want to listen to any of this. So that's awesome. Stacey, welcome from Colorado Sherry from British Columbia. Be sure you flip over your chat to everybody and not just hosts and panelists. It always defaults to that I wish there was a way to change it but alas there is not awesome Paul, welcome sharing welcome. Kevin from Indiana. Welcome, John from southern Florida. Welcome Robin from Netherlands. Hi. All right, so just about a little less than five minutes before we get started. Say hi over in the chat area. I'm going to drop in the slide link again, if you're just now coming in, you can download everything you see on your screen. Particularly important because we've got links to all the stories and so forth if you want to follow up for more information. Oh, Keith, yeah, so it may be it's a browser thing. Yeah. And using the zoom app for me, it always defaults to hosts and panelists. hope everybody's week has started. Well, we got a great week of webinars at tomorrow. If you haven't seen it yet. We'll be talking about it during the news roundup, but we've got a great webinar. If you're a Kadence user, we've been written or the founder of Kadence talking about the new Kadence shop kit that's finally just about to be released. They're killing a couple of more bugs and it'll be out very soon. That can't say when because I don't know, but he's gonna be demonstrating some of those features and it is an evolutionary upgrade from the current Kadence shop kit. So again, as you get over into zoom, I click up in the chat and say hi, tell us where you're logging in from today. I'm dropping the slide link in there as well if you're just now coming in
good to see Melanie from Georgia. As you get over to the chat, say hi tell us where you're logging in from welcome Jan from pa Clayton from Manitoba. Clayton. You may be the first man a toe bite is that what would you do what you would say Manitoba? One person from Manitoba has joined us that's the first time I've seen Manitoba that I can recall. So welcome. Glad you're here. Karen. Welcome from Florida. Elizabeth from Atlanta. Deb from Texas. All right, so we're about two and a half minutes out before getting started with WordPress news roundup for May 2022. Slides are waiting on you in the chat area. Open that up click that link download the slide PDF you can follow along there if you'd like that also gives you all the links which are down at the bottom of each slide for all the content if you want to do further research or if you don't believe me, you know, that's fine, too. The sources are there. So a couple of minutes to go. As you get over to the chat room. Say hi, tell us where you're logging in from today. It's good to see folks logging in from around the world for the WordPress news round up. Lot of interesting stories to talk about today welcome Cheryl from Florida. Ben from Sweden.
Welcome class from Little Rock who is the featured customer spotlight this month on the AI themes website will be given a link to that and showing classes face right there on the slide. Glad you're here class about a minute to go before we get started. If you're just joining us in zoom, head over to the chat area, click open the chat and say hi tell us where you're logging in from today. We'll get started here in about a minute from now. I'm going to paste in the link to today's slides. If you're just joining us. You can grab that PDF and follow along with us as we go. Welcome Amelia from Sri Lanka.
Again, if you're just joining us in zoom, head over to the chat, grab the slides they are they're waiting on you in the chat as a downloadable link.
Welcome, Stephanie from Germany. All right, I've got three minutes after so I'm going to be quiet for a moment. And we'll get started. All right. Welcome, everybody to the WordPress news roundup for May 2022. My name is Nathan Ingram. I am the host here on I iThemes Training and every month we take a look across the WordPress ecosystem and find the news that is interesting and things that you might want to know about. Particularly if you are someone who manages WordPress sites for clients. So we'll start out as we always do with our news from Corey if you're just joining us in the chat room, the chat area of zoom, make sure you grab today's slides everything you see on the screen is there if you're watching this on the replay, click the Download handout button that's just down below the video here on the replay page. And you'll be able to get these and most importantly because there's links at the bottom of most of these slides so you can click out and learn more about each thing. So a lot is going on in core WordPress we are in the release of WordPress 6.0 is imminent. It is scheduled for one week from today may the 24th 2022 WordPress 6.0 will be released. And yeah, a lot of things are going to be added to WordPress six. So here's a quick overview of those things and I have some more information in the moment about how you can learn even more about what's going to be included in WordPress six. This is the second major release of WordPress this year. And WordPress six most of what it's focused on is the improvements of the full site editing suite that has been gradually added into core WordPress through the Gutenberg plugin. So WordPress six is expected to integrate all the features of Gutenberg up to Gutenberg 13 dot O. And one of the most talked about features is the Select Text across blocks feature which we've talked about here over the last few months here on iThemes. Training, a number of other things as well a stacking feature that lets you stack your content vertically. I'll be showing that in just a moment, an avatar block to show the avatar of the logged in user or the author of a post or read more block that gives you additional links, especially for category pages, a post author biography and comments query loop all these are blocks that are going to continue to help the build out of the full site editing project. There's also some enhancements that have been made across multiple blocks, like the featured image now being useful on as far as media the media background image, for example on text and cover blocks, locking reusable blocks, which is a big deal. Like if you're building sites for clients and you're using reusable blocks. You want to be able to lock those so the client can't goof them up or quite frankly so that we might not goof them up. And that's a good thing. Typography changes for container blocks. So grouping rows and so forth and being able to change typography across those keeping your block styles and spacing in the gallery of kind of granular change, but welcome nonetheless. One of the neat things that's happening with the full site editing changes is the ability to switch theme styles. So the theme developers will now be able to have multiple predefined styles. So within that theme, so just an example right here as you see on your screen, there's a simple a simple white background and if you go in there's some additional styles that have been defined with a click, it changes to all the various styles defined by the theme. So that's really pretty cool. And you know, so maybe you want to have a page that has a certain look that's different from the rest of the site. You can now more easily do that with this theme styling. That's part of full site editing. They've also created five new page templates that are now full, editable, accessible through the full site editor, the site editor, those are the author template, the date template, category, tax and tax on a tag and taxonomy. So basically, lot of archive type templates are now
editable using the site editor as part of the full site editing suite. So you can also export the created block based theme and reuse it somewhere else which is really helpful. So all that's been integrated with the WordPress editor so you can push that out and import it someplace else and not have to redo all the things which is nice. Couple of well, one really big under the hood change that we've talked about a little bit over the past few months is the incorporation of the new Web Fonts API. Now this is important because there has not really been a standardized way for theme developers to deal with Google fonts or other external fonts that are being called in order to include certain fonts locally in a theme and then address those in a way that common way so that all theme developers are doing this the same way. That's the Web Fonts API, and it will be coming to WordPress 6.0. That's a good thing that you may or may not notice immediately, but it's going to help to standardize the way themes, address fonts and that's a good thing for everybody out there also, a little it's an important change. But you know, probably not something you'll see happening a lot in your world. But there's now a new API that prevents blocks that don't really work as widgets from appearing in the widgets area. So I mean, that's a good thing. For a full overview of everything in WordPress 6.0. Join us on June the first as our own Timothy Jacobs will be walking through live all the features that are included in WordPress 6.0. Timothy is the lead developer for I think security. He is also a WordPress Core contributor and he is one of the maintainers of the WordPress REST API. He is neck deep in the WordPress Core space. And he is infinitely qualified to walk through all these new changes in WordPress six. This is just added to the calendar. So I think this is the first webinar we've actually talked about this on. So you can just click the link in the slides. If you're just joining us. I'm going to drop the slide link again in the chat so you can click and download this or just go to the i iThemes Training website and you'll see the WordPress six launch event sign up for that it's a free event and Timothy will be walking us through that is June the first so it's about you know several days after the release of WordPress six, but if you're like me, it's probably going to be a couple of weeks before I think about upgrading to the next core version. All right, let's move into our next area which is our news from Gutenberg. We actually have three Gutenberg releases to talk about in this webinar since our last time together so Gutenberg 13 dot o dropped on April the 14th. These changes are expected to be included in WordPress six like I mentioned earlier. Some of the things repeat from that list that I gave you because many of the inclusions of WordPress six are here in the Gutenberg plugin but I'll we'll go into those in a little more depth. So select an in text across blocks responsive groups and the featured images in the cover block. So selecting text across blocks is a big deal and you know if you think about this and the the programming wizardry that had to happen to allow selecting across blocks, if you know anything about how those are structured, like in HTML, like being able to do that is pretty significant. And they've really cracked the nut to be able to figure that out. So congrats to the dev team for figuring this out. It really makes the block editor more intuitive to use that's a good thing. You also see featured image in the cover block we talked about this briefly. But this again, goes more toward the templating features of full side editing. So if you have a template, for example for a custom post type, and at the top, you want to have a cover block that maybe has the featured image underneath and the title across the top or something like that. You can now do that and it will dynamically pull in the featured image for that page or post into that cover block. So that's a good thing. The thing that I'm the most excited about in Gutenberg 13
Is this responsive groups and rows so what they've done here is they've actually incorporated some Flexbox CSS into this module. And it's going to easily allow you to change the way that rows and groups can be changed. It's called stacks, and so they can be stacked vertically or horizontally or whatever. And you'll see how this works right here. And there's a new stack settings area, and it's really easy to get into and use. We'll let this play one more time. So we can make them a row rather than stacked columns. And then as I go into those, I can change the padding and it again allows a live preview of that. It's really cool stuff. And so for the way this would actually work out on a page. See here, you can add different breakpoints, you'll be able to change the way you know things stack. Is it going to be columns, is it going to be vertical. If you're using a page builder, you're used to this sort of thing already, but we continue to see these things that those of us who have been using page builders for years have found lacking in the block editor, it just continues to improve. And again, the reason to use the block editor it is is way way faster output than as far as the speed of the website than a typical page builder will be interesting stuff. And if you've not yet experimented with Gutenberg 13 do that. We also have now the ability to customize borders for blocks. So notice we've copied a range of columns here and you can see the padding and the width and the border live preview right there and because we slick selected all of them, they're all being the styling is being applied to all of them. So pretty cool stuff. We've also got new patterns that are involved. So here's the query loop. And we've got a number of different patterns. We could select on how these posts would show and so we can just pull that right out of the pattern library and drop it in, makes it really easy to build out those queries with saved patterns. And we've also this is kind of a smaller thing, but they've they've changed the plug the post comments block which was a little lacking with the new comments query loop, so comments of course, are there elements in the database. And so it makes more sense to address those with a query block. And so that's what they've done. They've kind of taken the query block and they've repackaged it a bit to work exclusively for comments and it just gives more control over what you see and how it works. That takes us on into Gutenberg 13.1 which dropped on April 27. These things we're going to talk about under Gutenberg 13 one and in the moment 13 two are not expected to be included in WordPress six so the cut off for WordPress six was Gutenberg 13.0. Here we see some additions on borders for column blocks and accessibility improvements and more comment block improvements. So you'll be able to customize the border on any block. Now if you've been using Kadence you've been able to do this already. But this this functionality is now coming into core WordPress where you can easily set the borders and pattern, the padding and margins and so forth for the blocks. Here's a preview of how that might look. So we can just enter the thing and change the color and it's just really, really easy to use. You've got the ability to select various styles there. You can change the border radius, just like that, and works really, really nicely. So 13.1 also fixes some accessibility issues that involve what gets focused and what doesn't. I'm gonna I'm not gonna go into detail here but obviously that's important to make the editor as accessible as possible. The comments block also got some improvements. And here we see coming in the comments query loop we talked about a minute ago and you have the ability to change various things in that query block. So it's fun to play around with some of those things. Changing your sizes and so forth. Yep.
In Gutenberg 13 One, the block Settings panel has been renamed to simply settings it used to be whatever the block name was in settings, they've just kind of streamline that to now say settings, also the media font size, so if you had a description or sometimes even a caption, that font size is really large. And so they've changed that to smaller by default, which just makes sense. All right, last of all last Gutenberg released for this month is the Gutenberg thirteen.to release, which released last week May the 11th. These changes will not be included in WordPress six. They've got some persistent editor preferences, which we'll look at in a minute padding and margin, a margin visualizers comments form in the editor and margin support for the separator block all these are small but important improvements, especially the editor. preferences. So what this is, there's a new API that's in the back end under the hood of WordPress, that will so if you set your toolbar to be at the top, it's gonna stay there right now. So instead of having to redo that every time you can, others now the Persistence API that will keep it in place which is really, really nice. So that's included in 13.2. We also have the ability to visualize look at that there's a blue padding visualizer that's not a border, that's just the visualizer for the padding. So as you change the padding, you can now get a visual representation of where that padding is going to be. A lot like looking at something in the inspector, for example, and you can see the margin and padding, which is really helpful, I think. So that's a nice little improvement. They've also improved that placement, the text and the placeholders in for example, a lot of these full site editing blocks so if you drop in the post content block, it drops in some placeholder text right, which is helpful.
The separator block now also supports margin bizarrely before it did not. But now we can go in and set you know a uniform margin top bottom left right or lock them all together for the separator block, which just seems to make a lot of sense to me. The comment form now appears as it will on the front end before the comment form was it just kind of there was a static placeholder now it's actually wiziwig. So changes you make and tweaks that you make actually they look like on the back like the way they will on the front end of the site, which is pretty cool. So those are the all the changes that have wrapped up in the last three versions of Gutenberg. A lot of things have happened and they continue to iterate and improve the block editor in the Gutenberg plugin. There is an interesting little tool if you are developing with Gutenberg. This is a tool you might be interested in. It's called Gutenberg hub. It is a page generation app that ties into the WordPress patterns library. So basically what you do here and we didn't get a good video of this showing it because it was kind of hard to show, but basically it gives you think of it almost like a wireframing tool. But with actual content, like you can pull various blocks into place, kind of build a quick page, then you can actually copy that code and paste it over on a page in your website and boom, it's all there. So it's a really neat little quick page generation tool that you might want to look at Gutenberg hub. And you can go to builder dot Gutenberg dot hub and play around with it. It's free to use interesting little tool. It's only for layout creation. You can share the layout with a direct link to somebody else if you want to do that. It's pretty cool. Something else that they're working on for Gutenberg is the new distraction free mode. So this is one of the early criticisms of the block editor is that it is you know a lot of times when you when you want to write you don't want to be concerned with layout you want to be concerned with generation of the text, right? And so by nature of the way the block editor works, you are at the beginning, dealing with layout like I've got to do a heading block I have to do text block and so forth. And maybe you get distracted from the actual process. of writing. And so years ago, the WordPress classic editor had a distraction free mode or zen mode that sort of wiped everything out how many of you have used that like it wiped out all the surrounding things? So you just had a simple, narrow block of text you could just you just type in right so they're actually experimenting with that for Gutenberg now, and here's what it might look like. Again, this is just a mock up. But here's what that distraction free mode could look like. So if you mouse up, you'll get the menu. If you mouse over you might get some of the settings but in general you know when you're not moused over any of the live areas there. You simply have the content which to me sounds like a great idea. So that's about it for Gutenberg in the block editor for this month. Let's move on into some news about WordPress security. If you are an Elementor person, it's another bad bit of news for you. Major vulnerability is existing in version 3.6. It's an insufficient access control which allows the the execution of code to bad deal it basically makes use of some issues with the knots key. And if you only think about that you understand why that's a thing. And basically it allows people to execute code that shouldn't be able to execute code versions of Elementor between 3.6 and 3.6 dot two which is about 34% of the Elementor installations out there are vulnerable and it's a big deal. So if you're using Elementor make sure you are up to date, and the version in which it's past is 3.6 dot three so make sure you have the latest version of of Elementor bad things happen if you have the earlier versions.
All right, let's move into our WordPress vulnerability roundup we actually have there see there's five weekly updates as well as the Elementor blog that we talked about in the last slide. If you're not getting these vulnerability updates that come out every week, from my themes, you can just click one of these blog links and sign up to receive those. i It's a weekly update of plugins that are vulnerable. And we pull all those together from the last news roundup to this current one and give you a list. These and by the way, we're only now talking about plugins with 10,000 or more installs back in the early days of news roundup. We used to just do all the vulnerabilities and there just got to be too many. So all these that you see are only plugins with 10,000 or more installs. There are more that had been vulnerable that just have a smaller footprint of installs. So the 3x socializer Admin Menu Editor Advanced Image sitemap advanced uploader? AGI L the Amazon link plugin the new sitemap for Google Bajau s which I know a lot of you are using banner man birthdays widget, the BMR calculator caldera WP License Manager Colin book mobile bar choreo LF number plugin Curtan custom Tiny MCE shortcode domain replace donate extra easily generate REST API URL easy fac external media without import footer text image selector hermit WP be dashboard ignite up IMDb InfoBox KB support no future posts product filter psychology tests quotes llama which I think I just want to know what quotes llama is I don't even know what that is. Raph page scroll reveals SEMA simple real estate pack slideshow social stickers th 23 Social track tweets turn off all comments vertical scroll video sync visual slide box WP context manager WP J S dopey maintenance social buttons subscribe video widget smart wishlist and Dopey invoice. These are plugins that have no current fix, as of the publishing of the vulnerability report. They may have been patched since. But at that at the time of the publishing of our vulnerability report, there was no fix. So you want to make sure you don't have any of these installed. And if you do if you have one of these plugins installed, I remind you this every month it is not sufficient simply to deactivate the plugin that does not solve the vulnerability. The code still exists on your website. The plugin folder is still there. And it could be reached. If depending on the kind of vulnerability it needs. These plugins need to be deleted and removed if they are currently vulnerable and have no fix. So it's a big deal to watch out for these. These this next list are plugins that have been patched again plugins with 10,000 or more installs all in one WP migration booking calendar breeze page editor bolt page creator bulletproof security CALL NOW button change admin login change check log email Elementor. We talked about External links for maker by 10 web G media photo gallery, the Google XML Sitemap generator that's the big one that a lot of folks use Java chat met form Elementor Contact Form monitor events light which by the way, if you're using modern events light which I know many of you are and we feature here and a number of webinars. That plugin has now been removed from the directory permanently. We'll talk about that in just a minute. Multiple plugins from cool plugins pop up soon something pop up Faker, short pixel slide anything slider button web Smash. Subscribe to comments tabs responsive team members ultimate member to FA meta SEO subtitle that'd be cargo and the WP vivid backup plugin and all those are patched. Just make sure you're running the latest version of those now also there's one theme ColdFusion Builder that is also currently was vulnerable and has been patched these plugins that are vulnerable and have been patched. This is why you definitely want to be using theme security Pro and the version management feature. I think security pro scans your site twice a day with the site scan and if it finds a vulnerable theme and plugin a plugin for which a fix exists in the WordPress plugin directory or theme directory. It will automatically patch that vulnerable theme or plugin it is an incredibly useful tool to keep your site updated. So hopefully you're using that. All right, let's move on into some news from I think we have a lot this month to talk about here at I themes and things going on in our family. First of all, we had a great webinar not long ago talking about the dynamic HTML block and post relationships that were added to Kadence blocks pro in 1.78 been written or was with us and we talked about we built out a custom post type and we showed how to build out custom
templates for custom post type is really really cool stuff. So if you missed that webinar, read more about it here at the blog, the blog post on Kadence wp.com. And it links over to that webinar that Ben and I did about these nifty new dynamic blocks that are part of Kadence really cool stuff. The Kadence shop kit two dot O is almost here. I can't say when exactly because I'm not sure but it is on it is like teetering on the edge of release they are in the final process of adding and tweaking a few things. Super, super cool stuff. Now, one of the big issues with block editor and WooCommerce the WooCommerce core team has just been I mean really, really slow. If I'm honest about implementing any sort of editing abilities into core WooCommerce using the block editor there still as of last month, no real plan on how full site editing is going to affect WooCommerce templates. So the Kadence team has been working on a great solution and the Kadence Shotcut two dot O is what is going to address that. It will give you new ways to present products and categories using a fast, easy to use templating system that is built to work in Kadence it's going to be super cool. Tomorrow, Ben Ratner is going to be with us to give us a sneak peek at Kadence Shotcut two dot o make sure you're signed up for that the link to that webinar is down here in the footer. Or you can just go to training data ithemes.com It'll be the second webinar on the list. Join us for that one. It's going to be a good one. Something else that we added here on iThemes Training in the last month and maybe you've seen this is that along with our swap over to zoom has come some changes with our chats and changes and now live transcripts which we love and all of our replays from the point last month when we switch to zoom and forward. Now have not only the download handout button for the slides and by the way, if you're coming in late here's the link to download today's slides. If you're watching it on the replay, click that download handout button right below the video. Now that we've had that for years, but now there are links to download the transcript and the chat logs so everything in the chat log gets automatically dropped up into Google Drive and we can get that link and so we didn't couldn't get we're not able previously to supply the chat log on webinars like this. So I know a lot of you like that. And we've now added that button to our webinar replays. So really cool stuff. All right, something we've been focusing on and I themes over the last several months our customer spotlights, and this month spotlight is class. Yeah, yeah, class, man. I'm gonna fumble your last name. unison they get that right class last unison. So we see class a lot in our members only webinars and class has been a great part of our I think community for many years. So you can read his customer spotlight right here, check out his website, learn more about him and all the neat things he is doing. If you would like to be part of a customer spotlight, we are still looking for participants. A lot of you even here on this webinar have taken part in that. Everybody said it's a fun conversation with Kristen from iThemes marketing. Cole takes about 45 minutes she's going to ask you a bunch of questions and you get to really cool things are really three you get your your your spotlight and your detail on ithemes.com inside of that post is going to will give you a backlink to your site. I think.com has a really high page ranking. And so that's going to be helpful to you for your SEO and we'll give you a coupon for $100 And I think swag just for participating in that 45 minute call so you haven't signed up do it. It'll be a lot of fun.
Alright, moving into this month's premium event it is next week. Lindsey Halsey from Pathfinder SEO is back with us. May 24 and 25th. That's next Tuesday and Wednesday. So this time next week, we will be neck deep in link building with Lindsey. This is the SEO masterclass the first day we're talking about authority and link building. The second day we're talking about local search. So these are two topics that we haven't done quite as deep of a dive on in the past. And I'm looking forward to that. So if you're an i iThemes member or a toolkit, I iThemes Training member or a toolkit member, be sure you're registered for the masterclass next week. Now, I've been talking about this event off and on for quite a while because I'm super excited about it. I mean, I love all of our premium events. But this is one that I know is going to be incredibly helpful to all of our members. And that is our WordPress accessibility bootcamp. This is the June premium event. This is with Amber Hines and equalised digital who is a an expert in the WordPress accessibility space. She's an excellent instructor as well. And so we're spending four hours all about website accessibility day one is getting the lay of the land basically, understanding accessibility the guidelines and legal requirements you need to be aware of as a web professional. And day two, we're actually it's all live demo, we're going to be getting into actually identifying and fixing the problems that come up in accessibility scans. So this is going to be great again, it is for i iThemes Training members and toolkit members. And you can sign up at the link right there and there's a lot like this, the landing page that gives all the details about that event has a ton more than are on the slide. And I would encourage you just to read about all the great stuff Amber is going to talk about at the end of June. I've also got stubbed in our July and August events just to give you a little look out into what we're going to be doing. We're going to have my buddy Ben Meredith back. You may remember Ben earlier this year did a great webinar talking about give WP that is the company he works for which is now a sister brand I themes underneath the the stellar WP Family of Brands owned by liquidweb. Ben is an incredibly Ben's a good guy and those of you who know Ben from WordCamps and maybe you started on that webinar know he's a great speaker and instructor as well. He has for years been the Director of Customer Support forgive WP. He has written the customer support manual that he's open source. And so July is going to be all about customer support for so for those of you who work with clients, this is going to be a don't miss webinar. He's going to give you lots of insight into supporting your customers. Now the August event, David Zimmerman is going to be back with us. David did a great webinar about Google Search Console earlier this year. And he is going to be doing our Google Analytics bootcamp at the end of August. So those are not out to sign up for yet but I just wanted to give you a sneak peek of what is coming on our I iThemes Training premium events now our upcoming webinars we've got our dynamic content with Kadence shot kit coming up I talked about Office Hours is Thursday. The premium event SEO masterclass is next Tuesday and Wednesday office hours again Thursday. Here's one that I've talked about briefly in a couple of webinars I want to mention here again April Weir who is owns an agency in Atlanta, Georgia WordPress agency she has been focusing for a while on building sites for medical providers. And if you are in that world, you've got to understand HIPAA compliance if you're in the United States, there'll be similar laws likely in other parts of the world as well. But HIPAA is has a lot of regulations that are not necessarily something that you would just think of by common sense. And so April is going to talk about medical marketing unlocked and give you some of the things that you probably don't know about HIPAA. It is going to be excellent webinar. Sign up for that. It's a free one on May the 31st the WordPress six launch event coming up and of course plugin roundup there on June the seventh. We started doing office hours every week earlier this year, and I realized not long ago that we have now passed the 1000 question mark in my office hours which just blows me away. We started back in March 2018. And over that time, most of the time twice a month. 1000 questions have been asked and answered or at least attempted at an answer during that fun webinar. It's a lot of fun members only. And I'm not answering any of those questions that are in the chat. Right now. But they were really really funny. Okay, so if you are not an iThemes Training member, you can join and get a month free if you're interested in the SEO masterclass you can sign up today at I think.com/training get a free 30 day membership and get that masterclass free and get access to all my office hours as well. Yeah, good stuff. So I'll also of course I think toolkit members get access to all iThemes Training premium events as well.
Okay, let's move on into some news from plugins. We have a few a few interesting bits of discussion when it comes to the plugin space this month. The first how many of you saw this little bit of news? There is some hubbub shall we say? Or the hashtag is WP drama surrounding member press which is one of the more popular WordPress membership plugins that is out there. Membership a member press has done something in the latest update which is it's really controversial. Normally when a premium plugin when you don't re up the license for a premium plugin and WordPress. The plugin you just simply lose access to updates and support right. The plugin is still there, it continues to function, but you obviously can't send in a support ticket and you no longer get updates to the software. Well memberpress has taken the step of actually locking you out of the back end of the site if you don't re up your license. Now the plug in itself will continue to function on the front end as it was the settings like before the license expired but you can't get into do anything you can't issue refunds you can't add new members manually you can't manage your memberships. The the the screen looks something like this. The whole back end is deactivated. Yeah, this is a thing right? So technically, this is not a violation of the GPL because you actually could go in and hack the plugin and remove the code that puts up that barrier in license activation. But this is definitely a departure from what WordPress insiders would call the WordPress way. Like there's a way that WordPress companies do things and this is a departure from that way. And you know some people think well the heck with that. I'm just gonna do things my way and that's fine. You certainly have the right to do that but it does create some ripples. In the WordPress community. So Jason Coleman, who is a longtime plugin developer, and in the WordPress space indirectly addresses this behavior with their statement of value which is doing things the WordPress way means making all of our software free and open source just like core WordPress, it means our code will continue to work as expected if your paid license expires, it means providing simple one line code solutions to disable upsells or extra gateway fees. It means using the WordPress coding standards. So our code is more readable to developers who are used to reading WordPress based code. That is the WordPress way and that is the way many longtime well respected plugins operate. It's just the culture of WordPress plugins member press decided to go a different direction. Post status which if you're not familiar with post status as a WordPress professional, you probably ought to be familiar with that. I've had a membership there. For a long time. It is a great connection point for people who are professionals in the WordPress space. A great tweet out from on their account, the G word and by that they mean governance. They could apply to industry, trade associations like what if plugin developers came together in a trade association to adopt some standards for WordPress plugins that makes a lot of sense to me and maybe that will actually get some traction. Either way. The WordPress community is going to vote with their dollars and this is sort of a little bit of mud and memberpress His face All right, moving on to a little bit of news from WooCommerce. They are planning to bring some full site editing support to single product templates. Now this is a long time coming for WooCommerce. It is I would say far behind the other development in this area. They do have nearly two dozen core blocks but it's not yet possible to utilize full site editing for customizing a store. WooCommerce stores are fully functional with block themes, but they're missing elements than these things are gradually going to be added to the product template. They're adding first a mini Cart button and they have some other things on the roadmap. So at least WooCommerce is moving a bit and it's going to be something definitely to watch. So we'll see actually what happens on this. Now I mentioned earlier that the modern Events Calendar light plugin was removed from the plugin directory if you go to the plugin page which is linked here. You'll see this note it's closed, not available for download permanent closure as of May the 11th 2022. This has been one of the plugins that's been mentioned here for years as one of the kind of standard event calendar options if you're going to build WordPress sites. The lite version of the modern events calendar was was pretty feature rich, but they have pulled it now. Usually by the way, when you see a closure like this, this is developer initiated.
I don't know but it's closed. That's all we know there is no comment from wetness the developer on their blog or on their Twitter feed the pro version if you go to their website here, the pro version is still available for purchase. But if you are using the modern events, calendar light on websites, you might want to start thinking about alternatives because currently can't they it will not update and they're not going to update it in the WordPress plugin directory. So that is not good news. And they're not talking about it which makes me a little worried about what's going on there. I mean, there's just no information. So who knows? Alternatives you know the the events calendar for modern tribe is about the best alternative for monitor Events Calendar All right, let's move on into some SEO news. More kerfuffle regarding Google Google Analytics over in the EU. French sites have been ordered to stop using Google Analytics. This is a developing story a great link down there if you want to read more about this the French National Information Commission has ordered at least three websites to stop using Google Analytics in the claim that it violates GDPR which it does by default unless you do some things to it. Now they have 30 days to comply or face fines up to 20 million euro they said this is just the beginning. By the way, if you are wondering why it seems like Google is pushing everybody to switch to Google Analytics for they have sunsetted Universal Analytics old fashioned Google Analytics. They have sunsetted it and you know it's going to go away next year period. Like there's a drop dead turning, turning it off date and Google Analytics for is really not great. It is not ready for primetime yet there's a lot of problems with it. If you're wondering why Google would push people towards a half baked product, this is why like there are going to be more and more legal issues surrounding Universal Analytics Google Analytics for was designed from the ground up to be more private or privacy oriented than the standard you a Universal Analytics urgent Analytics code from Google Analytics. Alright, let's move on in to some other news. This. This is an interesting article. I would strongly encourage you to read this whole article on Yoast defaults blog. This is Yoast of Yoast SEO, and the link is there in the footer of this slide. WordPress market share is shrinking. For the first time since the W three is C tracking began. WordPress has lost market share. Now over the last several years we've talked about the increasing market share of WordPress and wondered if there was a ceiling and it looks like maybe we hit it. So since February of 2,022.4% of market share has been lost for WordPress now. There's a little bit of unclarity here and Yoast gets into this in his blog post. Alexa, which is not the Amazon home device I may have just actually turned mine on with that word. The a word has been a longtime provider of source data, a web statistics for the W three see they are shutting down that API. And that happened about this time so it could be that maybe the data is different. Yost did tweet out to SW three texts about this. And they say the API still works till the end of the year and they're working on it. So it's the data shouldn't be the issue here. And it may actually be that WordPress has lost market share. It's an interesting thing to follow. Shopify has also lost 1% of market share recently, so who knows what's going on? If market share is a zero sum game, which it probably is, Wix and Squarespace appear to be the winners because they're going up a bit. Elementor continues to grow especially with their move toward what's ultimately I think, gonna be a competitor of wordpress.com a SASS approach to WordPress using Elementor as a page builder and site editor. It continues to grow but even with that growth those numbers should show up in the WordPress numbers and WordPress market share. Still shrinking i It's interesting. It's interesting. So they say there's a Yoast says there's a couple of few causes, perhaps for this loss of market share, wicks and Squarespace that improve their speed and performance more than WordPress. The WordPress full site editing project is still just lagging behind. It's taken forever. He says it is simply taking too long wicks and Squarespace. They're easier to use. I don't know if you've tried it lately, but as they continue to improve their tools, it might be a better option for some people than going into WordPress. I mean if you hand the average person, a WordPress site, it is harder and harder for them to know what to do with it. It really takes a professional now to build
to Build WordPress sites. That's not the way WordPress started. So it's interesting. So Yoast says WordPress needs to focus on performance and get the full site editing project completed to reverse this trend. Interesting stuff. Another bit of news is out of Texas, the court a the Fifth Circuit Court in Louisiana has upheld a Texas law which was banning social media censorship. So back in September of last year, the Texas governor signed a law into effect, which allowed Texas residents to sue social media platforms with more than 50 million users for issuing bans based on political viewpoints. So that law was stayed back in December by a judge but it was reinstated last week by the Fifth Circuit. This is really, really interesting. its constitutionality is being contested in district courts. Still, this is an interesting story to follow. Because central to this case is now you may say well, why should anybody limit free speech on a social media platform and a lot of this comes out of the last election where there were, you know, various criticisms of certain social media platforms restricting speech that had a certain political slant, and right or wrong. You may say, well, it's not fair for them to censor that but the other side to that argument is, is can a should a government entity be able to force a company to host speech that it disagrees with? That's interesting, right? So there's two bits of free speech here. And I don't know the other part of this law is that HB 220, the Texas law attempts to define social media platforms as common carriers, which is interesting. That's like telephone companies and railroads and electric utilities that have long established precedents of non discrimination. So is a social media platform, a common carrier? I don't know. This is a bit of internet law that has not yet been defined. The Texas law was written I think, the challenge of that and get some case law generated through all these appeals process and so forth. And yeah, it's really interesting to follow it. This the impact of this case could change the landscape of social media. We just don't know it's gonna be interesting one to follow. Now Ben is asking what is this? How does this affect our sector? I don't I can't think of anything specifically. It's really more about social media at this point. I don't see a direct effect, although I will tell you this. Back in the late 90s. I was served with a lawsuit in federal court in the state of Louisiana for it because we were hosting a website on which some defamatory text was placed by a user of that website, and we got wrapped into a federal lawsuit back in the late 90s. Because there was no case law. They said it was defamation, and we're like, we're just a web host provider. So you know, that thankfully, the Federal Court just threw out the lawsuit. But that's still a bit of case law that is not written by its they've been relying on law pertaining to other areas of life, rather than Internet specific case law, even in 2022 There's a lack of specific law that governs social networks, for example, and should there even be laws governing social networks? I don't know. It's an interesting no matter where you fall on the political spectrum, this is an interesting subject matter to follow. So there we go. Ah, Justin Tadlock has said farewell to WP tavern, and that's unfortunate. I've really appreciated Justin's insight on WP tavern. We brought a lot of his articles here on the news roundup. Justin as a longtime WordPress developer, he created the Mimbres plugin that many of us used back in the early days of WordPress, matter of fact that we just called it by default members by Justin Tadlock. How many of you remember that right? And so Justin stepped away from plugin development for a while moved into writing for them up tavern. His background was English and journalism. It was great. He's written, you know, 647 stories over the time for WP tavern. And, yeah, it's gonna be sad to see him go. He says, Be kind to one another. I appreciate that. We all want WordPress to be successful that we might have different opinions about how to make that happen. Sometimes those ideas clash, but if we treat one another with respect and have constructive discussions, things will work themselves out. We'll miss Justin and his wisdom there on WP tavern.
few bits of news in the WordPress acquisitions watch WishList Member which is an OG WordPress membership plugin. It's been around forever has been acquired by Min Barian, which is now called member shipper, which is an interesting name that happened this month. Reply box plugin was acquired by the founder of iconic James Kemp and postmark. My favorite transactional email platform has been acquired by Active Campaign and talking a little bit more about that the CEO of postmark, Natalie Nagel says I believe that with support from Active Campaign postmark will not only continue to be the email delivery service you've come to love, but it will become even better. They've got a great post answering questions about this. postmark will remain a standalone product like it always has been. But they now have more resources from a different organization. The entire postmark team has moved on to work under active campaign which is a good thing. No expected interruption of service deliverability maintains the priority and that pricing won't change so it looks like a good thing all the way around. My notes on this one is it seems like a good marriage Active Campaign is going to get really good insight from postmarks brilliance in transactional email deliverability and issue they've had problems with over the last month. And postmark gets a great injection of capital so good for them. And so I'm encouraged as a postmark. Customer not worried at all. I think this is a good thing. All right, let's move into news that is worth a look. A few other little blips here I want you to be aware of if you want to get ready for Google Analytics for you need to think about saving if you want to save your old you a data you can't migrate. But there's some thoughts on keeping your historical data on in the Search Engine Journal article. We will be covering some getting David Zimmerman's insights into this whole transition in the Google Analytics bootcamp that is scheduled for August. If you're a beaver builder person you definitely want to check out these two links these are special case mostly free Beaver Builder resources that I kind of nerd out on just a little bit. I think you'll be interested in those as well. If you've never seen Beaver junction.com or site spot dot Dev and you're a beaver person you want to see those trust me. There's a great article on post status about WordPress work life balance. That is there. Take a look at that. And there's a good blog on ithemes.com great post on 12 ways to offer WordPress maintenance services always good to get a little additional insight into what we are doing. All right, let's pivot in to some word camp news Hey y'all in person work camps are back. For there's a new set of guidelines for official WordPress events. Organizers are told to follow all current local guidelines in the area in which the event will be held when they do their are asked to provide masks and hand sanitizer and also stickers that attendees can opt to wear saying please wear a mask if you're going to be near me or whatever. But there's no requirement for masks or any sort of vaccination requirements for a negative COVID test results. All of that is now those requirements have been lifted. And so we're gonna see some in person word camps coming back very, very soon. Attendees will be encouraged to wear a mask encouraged to be fully vaccinated, all those things that we would just hopefully already do as a good citizen. And that'd be rounding being around others like that. So there's also a new program that word camp Central is trialing to help to improve underrepresented speakers. So it's a connection for speakers who are from underrepresented groups to connect them with corporate sponsors in the WordPress space help to pay for travel and lodging. I think that's awesome. And I hope this program goes really really well. So here's some upcoming word camps. There's word camp rune Spain June 234 WordCamp. Europe is an in person event in Porto, Portugal, June 2 to fourth word camp Warsaw the next weekend June 11. And 12. We can't Montclair New Jersey is June the 25th. I was hoping to be at that one but will not be able to be at work at Montclair WordCamp. Us is scheduled to be an in person event September 9 through 11th. And work camp Netherlands September 14 through 16th. I imagine by the way, I imagine by the next round up we will have WP y'all word camp Birmingham on this list. I can't talk about the exact dates yet but we are really really close to announcing we were planning to be the first in person word camp back. But the Omicron spike just killed our event. And it was a bummer. But we are we just looked at a venue yesterday and I believe we're gonna be all set. And I hope that I'll have WordCamp Birmingham WP y'all on this list for next month.
All right, that brings us to the end of the WordPress news roundup for that's the wrong date, April no may 2022. Here on iThemes Training matter of fact, let's just do that. There we go. May 2022 I iThemes Training. Thanks for hanging out with me for the next hour. Hopefully you're registered for tomorrow's Kadence webinar with Ben Rittner. I'll see you back then one o'clock Central here on I iThemes Training, where we go further together.
