Welcome to the second 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
WordPress 4.3 is set to ship TODAY!
The last post went into more detail about the various feature changes and upgrades coming in 4.3, so check that out for the rundown. Here’s another interesting feature change:
- List Table Changes – This is an admin-facing change. The main takeaway is that admin tables are becoming responsive in better ways. From a dev standpoint, this will effect theme and plugin devs who have created custom list pages in the admin. Old methods will still be supported, but if you want to take advantage of the better responsiveness, you’ll want to take a minute to make some adjustments. Expect some of our favorite plugins to have updates in support of this (like ACF and AIOSEO).
Extending WordPress
- WordPress plugins hit 1 billion downloads in the last week. That’s cool! http://wptavern.com/wordpress-plugin-directory-surpasses-one-billion-total-downloads
- Expire Posts plugin – This is a new plugin that’s gotten some press. WordPress gives you functionality to schedule the publishing of a post, and this extends that to schedule expiration.
- Transferable Installs – The gist is that WPE gives you the ability to fire up an install on one account and then move it to another account. We’ll definitely be leveraging this in the future with client sites, especially clients that want to setup their own WPE accounts that they control.
- WP Cron – Sometimes WP Cron misses scheduling a post. This can be frustrating. WPE has an alternate cron built into their setups that you can ask them to turn on that makes the plugin unnecessary. They have a good run down here: http://wpengine.com/support/wp-cron-wordpress-scheduling/
- Site Import – Another brand new plugin. So new it has no ratings yet. But, it’s been getting some attention from blogs. The basic idea is that it can scrape any content site and import that scraped data into WordPress. There is a lot of potential here so let’s keep this one on our radar.
- WordPress for iOS – There’s a new version out. I’d definitely recommend throwing it on your phone and testing it out. The new version has more stats and insights. Something to remember is that this app requires the site to have xmlrpc turned on.
- WP REST API version 1.2.3 is out now. It’s mainly a security release. Again, we don’t use this yet, but I want to keep it on our radar so when it folds into the WP core, or more realistically, when we have a project where it makes sense to use it, it’s not totally foreign to us.
WP Drama
The dirty side of dev.
- People are still bitching about the security release that caused some plugins and themes to lose some functionality (talked about in more depth in the last post). The WP folks are pretty great at being accountable for everything they decide to do (they are probably the most transparent organization in existence). To that end, they did an audio interview Nikolay Bachiyski, who Matt Mullenweg hired as the first WordPress “Security Czar” to discuss this in greater detail. If it were me, I’d probably just be like “fuuuuuuck you guys”, but they handle these whiny babies pretty nicely!
Misc
I don’t know where to file this crap.
- Richard Best published a “Human Readable Summary” of the WordPress license. This is a very quick read, so I recommend checking it out.
- WordPress Core Team Receives Praise For Security Efforts – This is cool to have on record from security experts.
- Infographics! WPE has gone infographic-happy this week.
- This is just kind of funny to me: SkiPress Week (a week in a French Alps ski resort skiing and deving).
- ThemeConf – New conference for theme developers.
That’s all for now.