This bi-weekly serves to inform and enlighten our minds on latest happenings in the sprawling countryside we call WordPress-land. Citizens of WordPress-land recently held an election in which they chose a pile of burning feces and old truck tires as their supreme leader.
Release News
- WP 4.7 will introduce the wp_list_sort() function, which is designed to help ease the sorting of arrays in PHP. Good news for our ol’ pal Santa Clause who has a whole lot of people he needs to sort on his naughty list this year.
- Because I want to distract you from your grief with tedium, in WP 4.7, custom post types will receive TWO NEW LABELS! YOU PUMPED YET?
- Some new progress has been made with WP Multisite, mostly involving transitioning older functions that will be deprecated with new, better, faster, stronger functions, like get_site().
- Last issue I mentioned that admin users will be seeing language and locale selectors in the admin in 4.7. Along with this new feature will come new functions to get that info for use in themes and plugins. I can see functions like get_user_locale() and switch_to_locale() being used for aiding in multi-language sites with a need for user localization.
Extending WordPress
- This new tiny little plugin disables the admin email notifications when users change their passwords. I personally like to keep them on so I can illogically and passive-aggressively judge people when they change their passwords.
- The top dawgs for WordPress event handling are The Events Calendar and Events Manager. There’s a new plugin that is compatible with both that connects to MeetUp.com to allow easy importing of events from the site.
- For the most part, I disable WP Emoji support on sites I build that don’t need the functionality. For sites where it makes sense, there is now a plugin to serve pre-compressed emojis, to aid in load times.
WP Drama
The dirty side of dev.
- Pretty undramatic couple weeks in the WP world, actually. That’s cool because I don’t know how much more I could take. Please everyone just be good to each other.
Misc
I don’t know where to file this crap.
- WordCamp US is set to be very heavily attended. If you can’t make it, they will be livestreaming it free.
- In my ongoing series aptly titled “WPEngine Is Super Duper In Love With Infographics”, here’s their latest, which compares WP with Tumblr.
That’s all for now. Check back in two weeks for another rundown.