This bi-weekly serves to inform and enlighten our minds on latest happenings in the sprawling countryside we call WordPress-land. WP Digest is 1 year old! In WordPress-land, birthdays are celebrated by burning effigies of all those who have wronged you in the previous year.
Release News
- PHP 7 will become the minimum recommended version in WordPress 4.8. This should give theme and plugin developers time to update their code, but we all know they’ll just wait till the last minute anyway.
- I’ve talked ad nauseam about the features coming in WP 4.6, but there are additional updates that I haven’t really mentioned, like persistent comment cache and enhanced meta registration. Not sure what those are? Look at the full WP 4.6 Field Guide to get a rundown on everything. Or you could just download the release candidate and give it a whirl.
- WordPress for Android v5.6 is now available. I pinged my Android App Content Expert to get his thoughts on the new features but still haven’t heard back.
Extending WordPress
- What’s better than streamlining your dev process by using the command line instead of a GUI? Using a GUI to generate your commands… wait… what? WP-CLI GUI does just that. Weird.
- WooCommerce now has an official plugin for integration with Square for payment processing and syncing products and inventory.
WP Drama
The dirty side of dev.
- Discussions as to whether WordPress should throw its market share weight around and force web hosts to upgrade to PHP7 have been mostly cordial, but also have gotten a little spicy (boi). A particular twitter conversation had some juicy bits including one from WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg that read, “@perezbox @Rarst shallow article: straw man assumptions and arguments, poor understanding of hosting ecosystem, faux controversial ending.” ¡Ay, caramba!
Misc
I don’t know where to file this crap.
- Summer of Pwnage, an unfortunately named Dutch community program for anyone interested in software security is taking aim at WordPress for it’s current bug-hunting event. So far they have discovered a slew of vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins, including many well-supported, popular ones like WooCommerce and Ninja Forms (which have already been patched by the plugin developers).
That’s all for now. Check back in two weeks for another rundown.