Welcome to the ninth installment of my WP Digest. This is the blog version of our internal bi-weekly email which we use to inform, enlighten, and titillate our minds on some of the latest happenings in WordPress-land.
Release News
- As I’ve mentioned before, responsive images are coming in WP 4.4. A comprehensive run down on how to implement and customize, including the new functions and hooks associated was posted up in Make WP Core.
- Speaking of WP 4.4…its release is imminent (TODAY!). Check out the Field Guide for an overview of the major features (REST API Infrastructure, Term Taxonomy, etc).
- CALYPSO. What is it? It’s a completely reimagining of what WordPress can (and should) be. Rolled out into WordPress.com, Calypso is a new, completely JS based admin powered by APIs. WP co-founder Matt Mullenweg posted a better overview than I could write. This is huge and should be viewed as a herald for things to come. You can download the desktop App for Mac here. WP Tavern posted their analysis of Calypso as well. The Post Status podcast interviewed Mullenweg about the project and you can listen here.
- With all of these major announcements, it’s easy to forget about the little guys. A “menu_id” argument has been added to the “wp_page_menu” function allowing theme authors to use a unique id with the containing menu div. This comes in WP 4.4. More here.
Extending WordPress
- Ad Blocking Advisor is a plugin that detects when users have ad blockers running and asks the user to whitelist your site. I mean, the point of an ad blocker is to disable ads, probably not going to be super effective to just be like “PRETTY PLEASE LOOK AT OUR ADS??” but hey, why not.
- REST API plugin v1.2.4 is available for compatibility with the upcoming WP 4.4. This overrides the REST API infrastructure that comes packaged with WP 4.4 core.
- Torque threw together a how-to on setting up a multisite. If you are interested, give it a read. Or just install WP and try it out yourself. I always learn better by trying it and screwing up everything then fixing it.
- I had it on the brain recently, so here are a few e-learning plugins that look pretty cool: CoursePress, Educator, and StudyPress.
- The WordPress Importer plugin is getting some new love finally! Less memory usage, faster parsing, and partial imports are just some of the new features. Still a ways away from release, you can grab the latest from the GitHub. Read the overview here. Accolades here.
WP Drama
The dirty side of dev.
- The WordPress Theme Review process is broken. Theme authors are left waiting 2 months or more to receive their first review and many are just releasing them on their own to save all the headaches.
- “If you pick a free plugin that is released today, there’s a 80-90% chance that in three years time you won’t have any more updates.” That’s a major takeaway of a post by Luca Fracassi, founder of Addendio, an alternative search engine for the WordPress plugin and theme directories. How dare those developers who are giving stuff away for free stop providing free updates and support?! LAZY.
Misc
I don’t know where to file this crap.
- WP Remote is up for sale. There are a bunch of competitors in the remotely-managed-wp ball game, but with 18k users and 96k sites monitored with the service, it’s nothing to scoff at.
- International cyber security company Imperva recently published a report that shows spam is the largest security threat to WordPress. WP Tavern broke it all down.
- WPEngine has released a Guide to the WordPress REST API for non-developers. Hey producers, start reading!
- Ghost Referral Spam! SO SPOOPY! How do you stop them? Playing annoying notes on a piano? Let WPEngine guide you.
- Siobhan McKeown has written a “History of WordPress” book and in typical WP fashion, it’s open source.
- The WordPress theme directory replaced download counts with number of active installs. A small change, but an important one. Clearly it’s more helpful to know how many people are actively using something than just downloading it once and discarding it.
- PHP 7 is coming to WPEngine. They talked about it. So it has to happen.
- Daniel Bachhuber, the current maintainer of WP-CLI, ran a Kickstarter campaign to fund the project and blew past his goal of $17,500 and ended at $32,822
That’s all for now. Check back in two weeks for another rundown.