This bi-weekly serves to inform and enlighten our minds on latest happenings in the sprawling countryside we call WordPress Land.
Release News
- WordPress 4.8 released just the other week, and now some news is coming out about what to expect out of WP 4.9. The focus will be on improvement in managing plugins and themes, while the new editor project named Gutenberg is being pushed back a bit more to allow more adoption and testing via a plugin.
Extending WordPress
- Ever want to try out a premium plugin before you buy? WP Testdrive is a new site that aims to give you that ability. The library of premium plugins they offer for testing is fairly limited right now, but will expand in the future.
- WordCamps happen all over the world so knowing that CampTix is the ticketing plugin that powers the experience of getting tickets to those events inherently instills a solid level of trust. It’s a fully featured plugin and totally free so that’s cool.
- Users of the popular WP commenting plugin Disqus reported problems syncing comments between WordPress and the service. There’s a new version out that should correct that problem, but the real story here is the explanation for the bugs that was given by Disqus CEO Daniel Ha: “We may have taken some services offline to work on them which may have affected those who were trying to sync.” Which is basically saying “we screwed you with no warning, deal with it.” I like his style.
- WooCommerce 3.1 releases in a little over a week and includes a built-in product CSV import/export tool, an inline terms and conditions agreement in the checkout screen, as well as some other feature improvements.
Grab Bag
- When I read that there was a new WordPress theme and plugin company called Lifted, I was sure it would be the best place to find WP products dedicated to helping me get swole. But no, it turns out that “get lifted” is just a different way of saying “get high”. Go figure. Early high school me is freaking the hell out that you can now setup a website dedicated to selling weed with just a few clicks of a mouse. I bet Jeff Sessions hates it.
- WordCamp Europe drew 1,900 people from 79 countries to Paris. That’s a lot of croissants.
“Even though you can’t expect to defeat the absurdity of the world, you must make the attempt. That’s morality, that’s religion, that’s art, that’s life.” -Phil Ochs