This bi-weekly serves to inform and enlighten our minds on latest happenings in the sprawling countryside we call WordPress Land. The president of WordPressLand has come under fire recently for spending too much time on the curling sheet.
Release News
- WP 4.7.4’s release date has been bumped up from early May to today (April 18)! This was necessitated by a bug related to TinyMCE and an upcoming Chrome release.
- In a previous WordPress Digest I mentioned a new media widget, which has been split into separate widgets for images, videos, audio, etc. The image widget merge proposal has been submitted, and barring any unforeseen issues, the widget will most likely make it’s way into the next substantial WP release.
- It’s easy to debate why WordPress has been so successful and why it continues to grow, but arguably it is because of the engagement of a large, dedicated community. One recent move to help facilitate that more is the expansion of the default WP dashboard WordPress News widget to include WordPress events nearby the WP user’s location. The feature is currently available in plugin form, and a merge proposal will soon be submitted.
Extending WordPress
- Jetpack 4.8 was released a couple weeks ago. In addition to a bunch of improvements and bug fixes, it also features a settings redesign. Version 4.8.1 was released shortly thereafter, fixing a critical PHP compatibility issue that was causing major issues with sites running on PHP versions under 5.4…which I often forget is even a thing.
- WooCommerce added a Collaborators feature to WooCommerce.com accounts to allow account holders to grant access to additional users without having to provide them with their username and password. This is helpful for agencies and developers that need access to a client’s WooCommerce downloads and subscriptions, for example.
Grab Bag
- Automattic recently rolled out Blog In A Box, which is a super easy way to install WordPress on a Raspberry Pi. This is a good start but still doesn’t solve my issues installing Laravel on carrot cake or tell me why my chocolate cake keeps telling me to bomb Syria.
- Camp Press, a wilderness-based camp-out event being held September 23 & 24, is self described as “an unplugged community event for dreamers, creators, builders, and geeks”. In related news, if you currently own stock in allergy medicine, your 401k is about to explode.
- Hackers are exploiting home routers and irresponsible ISPs to attack WordPress sites with brute force attacks. Wordfence has created a tool to detect if your home router is vulnerable.
“A great empire, like a great cake, is most easily diminished at the edges.” -Benjamin Franklin