WordPress Digest #17

Welcome to the seventeenth 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 4.5 Release Candidate is out, but the official release ships on April 12. So I think you can wait. Chill.
  • #thatmomentwhen it’s announced that WP 4.5 will have oEmbed support for Twitter Moments and Timelines.
  • WordPress Accessibility Code Standards have been approved and all new or updated code must meet them before being merged into core.
  • The WordPress Theme Review Team is making moves towards automating the process, in just another example of humans blindly trusting their fates to robots. You were warned, people.
  • V6 of the WordPress for iOS app is out. Some new features, but nothing that gets me all hot and bothered.

Extending WordPress

  • Shopify has entered the WP ecomm world, releasing a new official plugin. So far this really only supports very simple product selling, but given all of Shopify’s functionality, I could see this scaling up big in the future and becoming a real competitor to other WP platforms like WooCommerce. Side note: the plugin is only available via GitHub and is in the process of being reviewed for inclusion in the plugin store, which means no update notifications yet…which is big for an ecomm plugin, so maybe wait to use it.
  • WPForms Lite is a newcomer forms plugin that looks pretty awesome and streamlined despite co-developer Syed Balkhi’s decidedly not-streamlined summary: “We made simple tasks EASY rather than letting the complex tasks define how hard simple will be.” Uh…sure…
  • WP-CLI v0.23.0 has been released, and something to note here is that earlier versions will not work on WP 4.5. So if you use it, update it!

WP Drama

The dirty side of dev.

  • Sure WP has its problems, but its existence means I can eat all the burritos I want, and that’s pretty OK! WordPress developer and blogger Chris Wallace’s recent post “The Biggest Threat to WordPress Isn’t Another CMS” discusses how a community-based software can be greatly affected by rude and unconstructive criticism. His final thoughts sum it up pretty well: “Let’s all take a few minutes to be grateful for the opportunity to make a living off the hard work of thousands of other people who donated their time and code to build something that has made a huge impact on the Internet and in people’s actual lives.”
  • Before diving into the WPEngine universe whole hog, our plugin of choice for caching was W3 Total Cache. This plugin has had a rocky year, with very little in the way of updates, and a recent fake-out update (merely updating the readme.txt file) has left users…um…less than pleased.

Misc

I don’t know where to file this crap.

That’s all for now. Check back in two weeks for another rundown.