This bi-weekly serves to inform and enlighten our minds on latest happenings in the sprawling countryside we call WordPress-land. In WordPress-land we are all taught proper manners, like saying “please” and “thank you” and to always hold the door.
Release News
- WP 4.6 is going to see a bunch more improvements to Multisite, including a Network Admin settings API, which seems like a small thing, but will be pretty awesome for complex Multisite setups and applications that leverage a Multisite CMS.
- Also in 4.6, Categories and Tags (and custom terms that use the edit-tags.php page) will see changes and adjustments to make them more accessible. There shouldn’t be a lot that needs to change in your custom code to support this, but I don’t know how you do things…I’m not your dad…I won’t tell you how to live your life…you’re 34 years old now…make your own decisions. Wait, what were we talking about?
- Not really news, but last week 78 WP support tickets were closed and 74 were created. Interested in what else happened last week that might not be a big flashy news item? Look here. I enjoy reading through these to get a sense of the pace of support.
Extending WordPress
- Downgrade is a new plugin that reverts your WordPress install to a previous version, which could be handy when you forget to uniquely name your custom functions and your site breaks into a million pieces after you update your WP install. That’s never happened to me. I swear.
- The WP REST API has introduced the Authentication Broker to fix the problems the API has suffered with difficult and incomplete authentication methods. I was hoping it would also take care of the insufferable #liveauthentic trend, but nope.
WP Drama
The dirty side of dev.
- So WordPress.org has this recommended host page. It gets updated every so often and people cry about it every time. I see it as just another instance of finding any damn reason to complain about Automattic. I mean, I’m not a Matt Mullenweg fanboy by any means, but we’re talking about a free platform that you’re making money off of. Chill.
Misc
I don’t know where to file this crap.
- Migrating from Drupal to WordPress is a tedious and frustrating process. WPEngine released a new whitepaper to aid in the process. It’s pretty helpful and not at all motivated by luring in new customers.
- Automattic won a bidding war to become the registry for the new .blog top level domain. They beat out bigger companies like Google but kept their involvement on the DL by going through a previously unknown LLC, the puntastically-named Knock Knock Whois There LLC. How much did they drop? Around $20 million.
That’s all for now. Check back in two weeks for another rundown.