This bi-weekly serves to inform and enlighten our minds on latest happenings in the sprawling countryside we call WordPress-land. Sources say FBI Director James Comey has incriminating evidence against WP 4.7, but won’t announce until a week before the release date.
Release News
- WP REST API content endpoints identified in the merge proposal have been officially approved for merge into WP core for the 4.7 release. Contributors will also start working on authentication and pivoting admin functionality to make use of the API starting in WP 4.8 and beyond.
- WP 4.7 will ship with the new Twenty Seventeen theme. I don’t know how many ways I can make jokes about needing to delete another theme from WP installs, but dammit, someone has to.
- WP Dashboard Icons (or Dashicons) are currently a font. This is being converted to SVG for better rendering and CSS control, among other reasons.
- WP 4.7 is adding functionality to allow users to select the language they would like to use in the admin, making it possible for collaborators around the world to work in the same admin in their native languages.
- Custom page template functionality will be extended to other post types in WP 4.7. This is awesome. I’ve been waiting for this for a long time.
- The WYSIWYG editor in WP 4.7 will also see some changes, including reordering buttons for better usability and killing the underline and justify buttons because they bad-mouthed core contributors and didn’t properly make amends.
Extending WordPress
- Security is always a big concern with websites. There are some best practices to follow to properly secure your WP install, as well as some great security plugins you can install. WPEngine posted a blog entry recently with a round up of a lot of these practices and plugins.
WP Drama
The dirty side of dev.
- Wix recently released a new mobile app. WP founder Matt Mullenweg publicly accused them of stealing the WP mobile app content editor in violation of the license on his blog. The CEO of Wix responded…and then Mullenweg responded in an update to his original post. Obviously the standard Twitter storm ensued, including a fun story from TryGhost founder John O’Nolan about Automattic doing the same thing very recently. O’Nolan posted the story as a dig at Mullenweg for airing the whole thing publicly, but really, it kind of illustrates the problem with Wix’s reply by showing the that the proper response would have been to apologize and fix the issue.
Misc
I don’t know where to file this crap.
- WPEngine announced that it has added Let’s Encrypt SSL/TLS certificates to its feature set, effectively giving free SSL to all of their customers.
- I enjoy this “Should I Work For Free” flowchart.
That’s all for now. Check back in two weeks for another rundown.