Welcome to the eighteenth 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 releases today! I’ve covered much of the release in previous issues, and here’s the field guide for more info on what to expect.
- One potentially breaking change in WP 4.5 is an update to the packaged versions of jQuery and jQuery Migrate to versions 1.12.2 and 1.4.0, respectively. I’m sure it’s fine. But maybe test it. Don’t be lazy.
- The feature plugin system is how new features are tested and rolled out in WP. A new post outlining the history of this system and how it can evolve has gone up on Make WordPress Core. Most notable is a shift in priority to give stronger emphasis to discovery and design before development starts building.
Extending WordPress
- WP Dev Dashboard is a plugin that offers more info about your WordPress.org plugins and themes, such as statistics and unresolved supprt requests. It sounds cool, but leaves me wondering how much bandwidth it would require to run on a site with lots of plugins. I kinda want to install it on an amateur WP developer’s site just to watch the world burn.
- Because I love tacky garbage, here’s a plugin that allows you to simulate scratch off tickets on your site.
- The WP REST API team is putting off the merge of Core endpoints from WP 4.6 to 4.7. In the meantime just make your own damn endpoints and quit whining. I may be projecting.
- The User Role Editor plugin released a critical security update fixing a bug that allowed any user to escalate their privileges to admin level. I guess no one told them that in the grand scheme, admins are no better than subscribers, nothing has meaning, entropy is inevitable, and all light will fade.
WP Drama
The dirty side of dev.
- Jetpack 3.9.5 released and had a fantastic bug that randomly inserted Vimeo videos into post comments. Version 3.9.6 released shortly after, “fixing” this pretty awesome “bug.”
- My absolute favorite thing on the internet the past couple weeks is that a company handling billions of dollars in assets couldn’t pony up the drop-in-the-bucket level of cash it would have cost to keep their WordPress plugins updated…and that may have been what led to the largest data leak in history.
Misc
I don’t know where to file this crap.
- Having issues trying to publish to Apple News? You are not alone.
- WordPress.com has enabled free SSL on all its sites.
That’s all for now. Check back in two weeks for another rundown.