This (mostly) bi-weekly serves to inform and enlighten our minds on latest happenings in the sprawling countryside we call WordPress Land.
Release News
- WordPress 5.1 Beta 3 is out. Run it on production. Go ahead. Live dangerously. WP 5.1 is scheduled to release February 21, so you could also just wait till then if you like to play it safe.
- One thing I was really looking forward to in WP 5.1 was the Site Health Check features. These have been pulled from 5.1 and moved to 5.2 due to some security concerns. One of the features that will be coming to core when this does release, however, is the ability to catch fatal errors and allow users to still login to WordPress to potentially fix the issue. So the next time a plugin update breaks your site, you can go in and disable the plugin rather than needing to fire up FTP to delete the offending files.
- There’s a lot of features that will still be coming in WP 5.1, and rather than list them all out here, check the following spots for all the details: developer changes, taxonomy metabox sanitation, new REST API notice, cron improvements, new human_readable_duration function, user related short circuit filters, admin table pagination links styling.
- The WordPress 5.0.3 maintenance release dropped way back on January 9th, but I took the month off for writing the digest. Most likely this is already installed on most sites, but if you want the details, read up.
Extending WordPress
- Jetpack 6.9 released January 10 with three new editor blocks: subscriptions, related posts, and tiled galleries.
- CoBlocks, a block collection for Gutenberg, has released their latest version, which comes packaged with new row and column page layout blocks.
- Advanced Custom Fields and ACF PRO have both released their latest 5.7.10 versions, which includes a ton of fixes, many of which focus on how ACF interacts with Gutenberg. There is still no word on when 5.8 will release with its custom block building functionality, but this is a much needed step in the right direction.
Grab Bag
- The WordPress leadership team has taken on two new additions: Josepha Haden as Executive Director and Joost de Valk as Marketing and Communications Lead.
- WPCampus has selected Tenon LLC to conduct the thorough accessbility audit that has been in the works since the fallout between WordPress’s accessibility team and Gutenberg project leadership.
- There’s been this crazy story floating around about a former employee of WPML who hacked the company website and gained access to customer emails. Apparently he left an exploit on the server before leaving the company. Guess they don’t have great redundancies or code reviews over there!
“If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?” – Albert Einstein