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 5.2.2 released a couple weeks ago and brought fixes to 13 bugs and improvements to the Site Health features. Check out the release docs for more details.
- Version 12.6.1 of the WordPress iOS app is now available to download from the App Store. Cleaner/clearer interface, more stable stats, and improvements to the block editor interface are a few of the key updates.
Extending WordPress
- Google’s new Site Kit plugin brings a dashboard to the WordPress admin to display site data from Google’s Search Console, Analytics, AdSense, and PageSpeed Insights. It’s currently in developer beta. I’d like to try it out…my biggest concern would be performance when hitting the various apis for data.
- Google’s new version 1.2 of the AMP plugin introduces an AMP Stories editor. AMP stories are similar in style to stories on Instagram and Facebook in that they are mobile-centric, but unlike those social platforms, these stories are meant to be more for “visual storytelling” rather than the ephemeral nature of the others.
Grab Bag
- WooCommerce isn’t down with CBD oil. Or at least, they aren’t down with their Automattic services being used to sell CBD products. But you can totally use WooCommerce to sell CBD oil. Confused? Yeah so were a bunch of people.
- We all know tech as a whole isn’t the most diverse field. (Well…ok…not everyone knows that or wants to acknowledge that…but that’s a different topic). There’s an effort underway to foster more diversity in the WordPress community through a Diversity Speaker Training Workshop aimed at helping WordPress event organizers get more women and other underrepresented groups to speak. It’s a fantastic idea and I hope it helps the community branch out and thrive. This initiative was started by Jill Binder and Automattic has signed on to sponsor the effort.
- WordCamp EU 2020 is going to be held in Porto, Portugal on June 4-6. Plenty of time for me to figure out how to get my supervisors to agree that traveling to Portugal should be a business expense.
“If there’s a there there, there’s a road that’ll take you there.” -Foster Kinn