This bi-weekly serves to inform and enlighten our minds on latest happenings in the sprawling countryside we call WordPress-land. We heard Joomla is voting on whether to leave the Publishers’ Union, but unlike Brexit, no one seems to care.
Release News
- WP 4.6 Beta 1 is available if you are into that sort of thing. I find it adorable that whenever they release a beta it always has the same “This software is still in development, so we don’t recommend you run it on a production site,” warning.
- Speaking of WP 4.6, let’s round up some of the incoming features. Most of the user-facing changes are pretty minor and not exciting in my opinion, but here are some changes on the developer side I’m looking forward to:
- New WP_Site_Query and WP_Network_Query classes for Multisite installs to make querying sites and networks much easier, more reliable, and more consistent.
- WP_Term_Query is a new query class that will provide a more consistent structure for term queries.
- WP_Post_Type will provide easier access to post type objects.
There is a few more things coming in 4.6 too, so for a complete and almost unreadable list of everything, check this out.
Extending WordPress
- Need to make a theme or plugin that is translation ready? Check out this article for a great primer.
- Jetpack 4.0.4 was released and contains several security fixes as well as some feature improvements.
- WordPress for Android version 5.5 released and the big news here is a new visual editor. The release prompted vast numbers of iOS users to abandon their iPhones and switch to Android, resulting in plummeting stock prices for Apple shares. Haha just kidding.
- Order Export Import for WooCommerce does exactly what the title suggests, easily imports and exports order data from your WooCommerce site. I could see this being modified to interface with many other inventory management tools. Import / Export baron Art Vandelay has not responded to requests for comment.
- A new Google Chrome extension, WordPress Admin Switcher, adds a browser button and keyboard shortcut that quickly jumps you between the front end and admin screens in WordPress, saving you precious clicks and seconds of your life.
WP Drama
The dirty side of dev.
- WordPress and Medium are rivals in the web publishing game and in a recent interview at WordCamp Europe 2016, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg fired the latest volley of shots claiming that big publishers are being paid to move to Medium. Some key quotes include: “Competitors have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to compete against WordPress” and “Medium has a good WYSIWYG, but that’s it. It doesn’t offer the same flexibility as WordPress.”Also, in a very Mullenweg-esqe statement, he both acknowledged Tumblr as a the biggest competitor but also wrote them off as old news, saying, “Tumblr, from a publishing point of view, is still the best competitor we’ve had in the past five years … I think that they have really nailed something with their tool. I was very sad when they sold, because we lost a very good competitor.”
Misc
I don’t know where to file this crap.
- WordSesh 4, a virtual WordCamp, will call on August 19 & 20, with a format of one session per hour for 24 hours.
- WordPress will be expanding their plugin review team, which will hopefully speed up the review process and also better check plugins for vulnerabilities and undesirable practices.
That’s all for now. Check back in two weeks for another rundown.