This bi-weekly serves to inform and enlighten our minds on latest happenings in the sprawling countryside we call WordPress Land.
Just an FYI, I’m making a concerted effort to not ONLY talk about Gutenberg, but it’s kind of hard. It’s like 90% of what people are talking about in WordPress Land lately.
Release News
- WordPress 4.9.9 is shaping up to be a typical 6-8 week maintenance development cycle, after which WP 5.0 development cycle starts. So Gutenberg in core seems like it’s right around the corner. Dammit. See…I tried to not talk about Gutenberg…
- This is so small and I feel fairly silly for being as excited about it as I am, but WordPress might soon be getting a dark mode! Check out the recent merge proposal for the details. Hopefully this is merged sooner than later.
Extending WordPress
- The new Network Media Library plugin creates a shared media library for sites in a network. This is different than other plugins in that all media files are shared across the network, rather than having local and networked files…so not great for instances where some networked sites may have sensitive items in their media library, it’s a simple way to solve this problem for most multisite networks.
- Planning has started on WP Rest API 5.0 and some of the major priorities include support for Gutenberg, meta handling, and authentication, including a release of the OAuth 2.0 plugin by the end of the year and a possible basic auth solution within the WP core.
- There’s a new premium plugin for password security. Advanced Passwords upgrades the security of user passwords and also encrypts post passwords, which are normally stored in plain text.
- WPEngine has recently announced access to the Genesis Framework and 35 premium themes with every account.
Grab Bag
- I mentioned last issue that there are quite a few people who are VERY upset about Gutenberg. Well evidently, some of those people don’t know how to be constructive in their feedback and do that thing that so much of the internet seems to default to these days: personal and caustic attacks. This was addressed in a recent Make WordPress Core Dev Chat Summary where they linked to the WordPress Etiquette and Support Forum Guidelines. They were much more diplomatic than my response which would have been more along the lines of “stop behaving like spoiled, entitled little shits.”
- If you couldn’t make it to WPCampus 2018, which took place July 12-14 in St. Louis, you can now watch videos of all the sessions via the WPCampus schedule page.
- If you know me, you know how much I love/hate tech speak. I believe that in most cases, the greater the number of tech terms packed into a sentence is a direct and opposite correlation to how good of a developer the speaker actually is. So I’m pretty into this new WPGlossary site that takes terms from WordPress and puts them in layman’s terms. Right now it’s mostly just top line, high level terms. It would be cool to see it expand into deeper terminology, making it a nice resource when developers are talking to non technical people.
“Success often lies not in what happens but in what you prevent from happening” -Ron Stallworth