This bi-weekly serves to inform and enlighten our minds on latest happenings in the sprawling countryside we call WordPress-land. It seems the unscrupulous government of Drupalville has worked to undermine and influence the outcome of recent WordPress-land elections…and everyone thinks it’s weird except the dude who got elected.
Release News
- WP 4.7 “Vaughan” is out and it includes 173 enhancements and feature requests, which I will now list out individually. JK. I’ve been talking about some of the big new features in the past few issues, for a complete rundown, check out the WordPress 4.7 Field Guide on Make WP Core or WP Tavern’s hitlist.
- WP 4.7 has translations available for 52 different languages, and is the first version of WordPress to be fully translated into Urdu. The translation efforts are impressive for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that they are translated entirely by volunteers.
- WordCamp US 2016 happened recently. WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg gave his State of the Word and you can read a summary here, including a major announcement that there will be no set major releases in 2017. Instead the development of a few major features, such as the Rest API, will dictate the release schedule. You can also watch the entire thing if you have a whopping hour and 45 minutes to burn.
Extending WordPress
- There’s a new Text to Speech Widget plugin that could probably be useful for accessibility, but I just want to hear naughty words in different voices.
Grab Bag
This section is changing from WP Drama to Grab Bag and merging with the Misc section. Sometimes it’ll be drama, sometimes it’ll be random news, sometimes it’ll just be a dang meme that tickled my fancy. Life isn’t always about drama. Get over it.
- Starting early 2017, WordPress.org will only promote hosting companies that provide SSL certificates by default, and will start tying certain WordPress features to the presence of a secure connection.
- DigitalCube launched Shifter recently, the first serverless hosting product for WordPress.
- There was some super serial drama at WordCamp US involving sponsors, angry words, and $100k. Hosting company Pantheon stretched the rules of the sponsor Code of Conduct, got mad at being called on it, had their booth removed and their $100k sponsorship refunded. People got wild on Twitter.
Calm down. Collect your thoughts. Now get back to work.