This Week in WordPress #148

Welcome

Issue #148

Another week, and quite a lot has happened - when it is ever otherwise !?

WordPress has a new Roadmap including Full Site Editing for later this year
Automattic Launch a new theme specifically for building landing pages
Plugin authors have to honour your 'update settings' from now on
Wordfence's annual report is here with some eye-watering numbers
Apple fire a shot over Facebook's boughs with the latest update to iOS

There's a whole lot more than this, and you can find all that big scrolling down!

This Week in WordPress

This Week in WordPress #148 - "What are Contributor Tools?"

Recorded on Monday 2nd February 2021. With Nathan Wrigley, Paul Lacey, Michelle Frechette and Berhard Gronau.

Each week we discuss some of the the stories (from below) which captured our attention. It's like this newsletter but with real people!

If you ever want to join us live you can do that every Monday at 2pm UK time on the WP Builds LIVE page.

WordPress Core

WordPress Roadmap Update: Full-Site Editing Targeted for 5.8 Release in June 2021

"WordPress core contributors are pushing forward on an ambitious plan to land full-site editing in core before the end of the year. Josepha Haden Chomphosy, the open source project’s executive director, published an updated roadmap for 2021 that aims to get an MVP of full-site editing (FSE) in the Gutenberg plugin by April, 2021. FSE v1 would then be on track for shipping with WordPress 5.8, which is anticipated in June, 2021..."

'This Week in WordPress' Sponsor

AB Split Test

Want to set up your AB Split test in record time, like a couple of minutes? Use your existing pages and test anything against anything else. Buttons, images, headers, rows... anything. The best part is that it works with Elementor, Beaver Builder and the WordPress Block editor. Check it out and get a free demo at absplittest.com

Community

TasteWP Spins Up Free WordPress Testing Sites in Seconds

"TasteWP is a newcomer among online WordPress sandboxing solutions. The site allows users to spin up a new WordPress instance in a matter of seconds. Web-based sandboxes like these have been popular for a long time, since they are convenient to fire up and destroy when performing a quick test on a plugin or theme. It’s easier than maintaining a local development environment, which many casual WordPress users have not taken the time to set up."

WP Buffs Finalizes First Acquisition, Purchases WP EZI

"Earlier today, WP Buffs announced that it had acquired WP EZI, a WordPress maintenance and support service. It was a five-figure acquisition for 64 active subscriptions and 343 total customers. Paul Tselekidis, the former owner of WP EZI, is stepping away from the project..."

Big Picture Goals 2021

"During 2020’s State of the Word, Matt reminded us of our overall roadmap for Gutenberg. Much of that roadmap is on a multi-year timeline, and it can be hard to know what’s next with such a distant North Star. This post contains some near-stars for the year, but there are some things you should know before you read them. These are intentionally broad..."

WordPress User Privacy: How to Make User Data Safety a Priority

"User privacy has become an increasing concern for WordPress website owners and their visitors. Users want to ensure their private information is safe. In addition, many laws have recently come into effect that require the disclosure of the data collected on websites as well as what happens with it. Among other things, visitors are now required to “opt-in” to your use of cookies thanks to GDPR..."

Ask the Bartender: How To Bulk Convert Classic WordPress Posts To Blocks?

"I was wondering if you could help me. I want to convert all of my old posts (about 600) to Gutenberg blocks. Do you know an easy way to do that?"

Gutenberg Contributors Consider Implementing a Bot to Close Stale Issues

"Gutenberg project contributors are considering implementing a stale bot to tame the repository’s overgrown issues queue, which currently has 2,733 open issues. Stale bots are usually employed to automatically close “stale” issues and PRs based on a predefined set of parameters for inactivity..."

Plugins / Themes / Blocks

Plugin Team Draws a Line: Plugins Must Not Change WordPress’ Default Automatic Update Settings

"Unless your plugin has the purpose of managing updates, you must not change the defaults of WordPress’ update settings.You may offer a feature to auto-update, but it has to honor the core settings. This means if someone has set their site to “Never update any of my plugins or themes” you are not to change those for them unless they opt-in and request it..."

Introducing Elementor 3.1: Experiments, Performance Enhancements, And a New Landing Page Workflow

"The new version of Elementor introduces performance improvements, a new landing page workflow, and additional exploratory experiments..."

Automattic Launches the Blank Canvas WordPress Theme for Building Single-Page Websites

"On Monday, Automattic announced its Blank Canvas theme on WordPress.com. The goal is to allow end-users to build single-page websites, such as an “about me” or product landing page..."

Toolset Blocks 1.4 Brings Dynamic Sources and Inline Fields to Popular Block Plugins

Toolset Blocks 1.4. allows you to use dynamic sources in WordPress core blocks and popular block plugins. You can also display dynamic sources inside any text blocks. Finally, this release introduces the new Divi module for Views.

Jump-Start a Year’s Worth of Content via the Launch With Words Plugin

"On Sunday, Bridget Willard announced her latest project, Launch With Words. In collaboration with Ronald Huereca, who performed the development work, they built a plugin that helps clients jump-start routine, monthly blog posts. In the future, there will be premium “content packs” that include content for various industries..."

Security

The Wordfence 2020 WordPress Threat Report

"Over the course of 2020, and in the process of protecting over 4 million WordPress customers, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team gathered a massive amount of raw data from attacks targeting WordPress and infection trends, in addition to the malware samples gathered by our Site Cleaning team."

Multiple Vulnerabilities In WordPress Plugin Popup Builder

"The Popup Builder – Responsive WordPress Pop up – Subscription & Newsletter plugin (versions 3.71 and below) suffers from a lack of authorization in most AJAX methods."

New Linux Server Vulnerability

"Security researchers at Qualys discovered a Privilege Escalation vulnerability in the Linux program sudo. An attacker could exploit the vulnerability to increase the privileges and take over the server."

WordPress Vulnerability Roundup: January 2021, Part 2

"New WordPress plugin and theme vulnerabilities were disclosed during the second half of January. This post covers the recent WordPress plugin, theme, and core vulnerabilities and what to do if you run one of the vulnerable plugins or themes on your website..."

WP Builds

'C' is for Caching - WP Builds Weekly WordPress Podcast #214

It’s the third in our series of chats called the A-Z of WordPress, where we attempt to cover all the major aspects to building and maintaining sites with WordPress. Today, it’s the letter ‘C’ for Caching (including server side caching, front end caching (plugins) and CDNs. However, we avoid getting too deeply into page load times and scores, which we cover separately on another podcast.

Not WordPress, but useful anyway…

Arcade

"Let the gaming begin. Play old school Atari classics plus your own collection of game ROMs and emulators on your favorite devices, courtesy of Plex Labs and Atari. It’s a guaranteed win!"

Twitter Acquires Revue - Newsletter Publishing Startup

"Twitter announced the acquisition of newsletter publishing and monetization company, Revue. Synergy will help publishers earn more from newsletters..."

How to Test Your Website for Accessibility

"More than 1 billion people in the world and 1-in-4 U.S. adults have a disability. Websites not developed to be accessible are challenging for people with disabilities to navigate and use, and inaccessible websites put their owners at risk of receiving an accessibility complaint or lawsuit. It is increasingly important for developers in the U.S., Canada, and EU to ensure the websites they build are accessible..."

Twitter Announces Birdwatch - Volunteer Program Against Misinformation

"Twitter introduced a community-driven program called Birdwatch for identifying and labeling misinformation. Currently accepting applications to participate..."

Apple’s Tim Cook warns of adtech fuelling a ‘social catastrophe’ as he defends app tracker opt-in

"Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has urged Europe to step up privacy enforcement in a keynote speech to the CPDP conference today — echoing many of the points he made in Brussels in person two years ago when he hit out at the ‘data industrial complex’ underpinning the adtech industry’s mass surveillance of Internet users..."