This bi-weekly serves to inform and enlighten our minds on latest happenings in the sprawling countryside we call WordPress Land. Despite sanctions, Drupalville continues to test methods of delivering malware to the WordPressLand mainland.
Release News
- WP 4.8.1 is out and available for download. In addition to a bunch of bug fixes and performance improvements, the release contains a custom HTML widget, so you never have to let go of your marquee text.
- WordPress 4.9 kicked off development and is slated for a November 14th release date. The focus of this release will lie in managing plugins and themes, user-centric customization, code editing, and polishing other recent feature additions.
- I’ve previously mentioned the progress being made on Project Gutenberg and I don’t have anything super important to share on the front currently besides this brilliant 1 star review of the feature plugin that probably took more time to write than it would have taken to branch the project and fix the bugs.
Extending WordPress
- For people who use WPEngine for hosting, the company recently added a User Activity Log to the WPE dashboard, furthering our dark Big Brother fantasies.
- Jetpack 5.2 released about a week ago and includes a revamped contact form experience along with some performance improvements.
- Dobby, a plugin after my own heart, captures and hides unwanted admin notices that often pop up from plugins, web hosts, etc. Kill the clutter!
Grab Bag
- WPCampus, a conference that focuses on the use of WordPress in higher education, was held on July 14 & 15. All the sessions were recorded and are now available to view.
- In a recent blog post, Above the Law compares the adoption of WordPress for law firms (an industry often slow to change tech) to the switch from WordPerfect to MS Word.
- Remember last year when a Medium was all like “hey publishers, ditch WordPress, we’re better!” and a bunch of publishers took the van candy? Well now they are realizing that taking candy from strangers might not have been such a great idea.
“America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.” -Tennessee Williams