This bi-weekly serves to inform and enlighten our minds on latest happenings in the sprawling countryside we call WordPress-land. Often ahead of the curve in terms of foreign and domestic policy, WordPress-land proudly boasts a taco truck on every street corner.
Release News
- WordPress 4.7 development has kicked off and there will be renewed focus on merging the WP Rest API endpoints into core. Media handling will be getting some love too. There has been discussion about improving the usability of the media browser in the WP Admin, which will certainly be most welcome as the current one is … not great … in addition to things like better media optimization. There’s also talk of whether a new default theme (Twenty Seventeen) will be included in the release and, well, I just don’t care at all. I can’t remember the last time I even used one of the default themes.
- WordPress for iOS v6.4 was released and has a number of new features, most notably the added functionality of being able to manage your sites’ users and roles from the app.
Extending WordPress
- Disqus just announced that it has partnered with Akismet in further efforts to prevent comment spam … something that I honestly thought they had done a while ago.
- I recently found the ACF QuickEdit Fields plugin by developer Jörn Lund on GitHub that allows you to add Advanced Custom Fields to the post list screen, along with quick edit and bulk edit. I’ve tested it out and it seems to work very well.
- There’s a new plugin that connects WP to Microsoft’s Computer Vision API to automatically generate image alt text. This is fun if you like rolling the dice and either having accurate descriptions or something completely irrelevant.
- Templatify is a new plugin that gives the custom page template functionality to posts and custom post types, which is a feature I’ve long felt was weirdly missing from the WP core.
- Jetpack 4.3 is releasing shortly, and features ground-up rebuild of the admin leveraging React.js.
WP Drama
The dirty side of dev.
- GoDaddy has acquired ManageWP, a service designed to help developers manage many WordPress installs. Being the polarizing company that GoDaddy is, this has ignited some heated social media fodder.
Misc
I don’t know where to file this crap.
- In a recent survey of developers, Post Status editor Brian Krogsgard found that the two biggest perceived threats to WordPress’s future came from Medium and static site generators like GitHub’s Jekyll.
- This isn’t WordPress news, but I’m including it because it’s great. Google is going to start penalizing sites with annoying popups and interstitial windows. Let’s hope the penalty is a slow and painful death.
- I slipped into a blackhole and caught a glimpse of infinity when I discovered this NASA site dedicated to their WordPress themes and implementation documentation.
That’s all for now. Check back in two weeks for another rundown.