This bi-weekly serves to inform and enlighten our minds on latest happenings in the sprawling countryside we call WordPress-land. In WordPress-land, locker rooms are places of quiet contemplation where philosophers and scientists ponder the state of the universe and fervently praise their AI overlords.
Release News
- WP 4.7 will include a new feature for developers to register their own bulk actions on post lists in the admin. Currently the WP core has options to bulk edit and bulk add to trash. This is a really cool new feature that I could see being used to create some time saving actions for content editors.
- The REST API Merge Proposal for content endpoints has been submitted for inclusion in WP 4.7. There’s still a lot of discussion around authorization and methods for disabling the API for sites that don’t want/need it. The last merge happened way back with WP 4.4 and included just the infrastructure and since then additional merges have kept being delayed. We’ll see if this actually makes it in this release.
Extending WordPress
- WooCommerce Waitlist is a new plugin that offers a feature I always thought should have been in WooCommerce out of the box. It allows customers to sign up for alerts when an item is out of stock and allows the store admin to track demand for out of stock items.
- The official Automattic AMP plugin has released an update that allows customization of AMP article appearance via the Appearance menu in the WP admin. The release also includes a new filter (amp_pre_get_permalink) for creating custom AMP permalinks.
- WP Facebook Live Video adds a shortcode that easily enables the embedding of FB Live videos. Finally an easy way to let people watch my rest stop bathroom reviews in real time.
WP Drama
The dirty side of dev.
- The theme review process at WordPress.org is long and tedius, with themes often languishing in the queue for a really long time. Enter GoDaddy, who submits a theme and is approved in less than 24 hrs. Think people were upset? The comments on the WP Tavern analysis are a fun read!
Misc
I don’t know where to file this crap.
- José Conti, author of the popular anti-spam plugin WangGuard, has announced that he will be discontinuing the service and stopping further development due to lack of profitability. I’m sure it had nothing to do with the search engine bounce rate he was receiving from search queries for male chastity belts. On the bright side, the ideal name for my new Chrome extension that replaces dick pics with photos of kittens and puppies may have just freed up!
That’s all for now. Check back in two weeks for another rundown.