Welcome to the thirteenth installment of my WP Digest. This is the blog version of our internal bi-weekly email which we use to inform, enlighten, and titillate our minds on some of the latest happenings in WordPress-land.
Release News
- WP 4.4.2 is set to be released today. It’s a security and maintenance release that addresses 17 bugs in WP 4.4.
- WP 4.5 dev is in progress with work being done on https, image handling, multisite, among other areas. Check out the latest Core Dev Chat notes here and here and the latest feature plugin chat for more info.
- WP 4.5 will also see some changes to the editor. Check out the wishlist here to see what’s being discussed and worked on.
- It’s nice to see some dedicated work being done on improving https support for WP. Check out the latest discussions.
- The php-ssh2 for WordPress has some issues with PHP7. If you use it, you might want to wait on upgrading to PHP7. More details here.
- The WordPress Accessibility Team posted up a draft of the new Accessibility Coding Standards for the core handbook. This is a good place to start if you want to make your code more accessible and I am sure it will evolve to become more useful in the near future.
- Two Factor Authentication wasn’t going to be ready for WP 4.5 so it’s on a brief hiatus while they spin off part of it, Application Passwords, into a stand alone feature. This will be important for the REST API so it makes sense to focus on it a bit with the API being fully integrated in WP for 4.5.
Extending WordPress
- If you use Coda2 like I do, get the new WP 4.4 plugin to add autocomplete for WP functions and stop forgetting which functions have “_the_” in the title and which do not.
- WP Engine added backup points for staging sites. No more sleepless nights worrying about losing all those Homer Simpson gifs I use for testing.
- Jetpack 3.9 is out and includes a new site maps module among other additions.
- Torque published a round-up of poll plugins…helpful for content producers who want to pretend to care what their readers think.
- Easy Image Filters is a plugin that adds image filters to the WP media interface. Now everyone can be Instagram!
- Deployer is a service to publish WP plugin code from GitHub to the WordPress.org plugin directory. Which is cool since no one really likes using WP’s subversion setup.
- WP API v2.0 Beta 11 is out. Check out all the breaking changes!
- Kernl is a service for delivering updates to private plugins and themes, in the same way that updates come through for themes and plugins from the WordPress.org directories.
WP Drama
The dirty side of dev.
- Some members of the WP community are concerned WordPress evolves too quickly and makes it hard for developers to keep up. Matt Mullenweg’s response is basically “LOL we’re only going to get faster #sorrynotsorry.”
Misc
I don’t know where to file this crap.
- Is everyone ready for Joomla Day Florida? I’m not even going to make a joke here.
- WooConf, a conference devoted entirely to WooCommerce, will be held in Austin April 6-8.
- The WordPress.org testimonials section is getting a revamp with an #ilovewp social media campaign. I started crafting a joke about how badly this could go based on other things with the initials “WP” but I’ll let you use your own imaginations there.
That’s all for now. Check back in two weeks for another rundown.