This bi-weekly serves to inform and enlighten our minds on latest happenings in the sprawling countryside we call WordPress Land.
Some of you who follow this regularly (what?) may be asking yourselves, “Where has this jerk been the past several months??” Well, to make an 8-month story short, I have been deeply involved with 3 startups in which my efforts have been mostly focused on iOS development (Swift) and front end development for Rails-backed applications. There’s been some WordPress in the mix too, cause let’s face it, I just can’t quit you. As you might imagine, working on 3 startups is pretty much the definition of insanity and has left me with little time for anything else. But I’ve missed writing these, so I’m going to get back into it and add yet another thankless task to my plate!
Now without further ado…
Release News
- Ok so the biggest talk in WordPress Land is the impending inclusion of Gutenberg in WP core. The internet and WP community haven’t exactly been mincing words about their feelings on Gutenberg…which are overwhelmingly negative. I too am not a fan, but let’s be real, if they keep pushing forward, I’ll adapt and it’ll be fine. But man are people pissed. One dude is going to make his own WP in protest. and the community is widely panning the plugin (it has almost 3x as many 1 star reviews as 5 star reviews). At the very least it’ll be interesting to see if the core team addresses these concerns or simply plows forward, community be damned.
- WordPress 4.9.8 released a couple weeks ago and among other things, this security and maintenance release significantly reduced memory leak, which is good cause no one likes a leaker.
- WordPress for iOS has been humming along with regular updates, including better support of Gutenberg…which is probably kinda sorta important if Gutenberg is coming to core soon.
Extending WordPress
- For those that are really really not into the idea of the editor switching to Gutenberg, there is a plugin for that. The Classic Editor plugin will erase all mentions of Gutenberg and maintain the tried and true editor we all know and (mostly) love. It’s probably not a bad idea to have this plugin queued up and ready for production sites when you do update to the WP release that has Gutenberg in core, just in case your site isn’t totally compatible…which for a lot of custom themes, etc could very well be the case.
- Advanced Custom Fields, my plugin drug of choice, announced that it will be fully compatible with Gutenberg, which should go a long way to sooth some of the saltiest detractors from the project.
- Speaking of Gutenberg, it’s on version 3.6.2 and is still not included in core, which is kind of nuts considering they were trying to fast track it into core when I wrote the last issue 8 months ago.
Grab Bag
- WordPress.com shut down a bunch of Sandy Hook conspiracy website and while people like myself are super cool with that, internet trolls and alt-right d-bags cried claims of “DISCRIMINATION!” and “FREE SPEECH VIOLATION!” along with very salty tears into their lukewarm Hot Pockets. I’m sure someday someone will tell them that’s not how free-speech works and they will listen, but today is not that day.
“Don’t say Aretha is making a comeback, because I’ve never been away!” -Aretha Franklin