This Week in WordPress #149

Welcome

Issue #149

Another week, and quite a lot has happened especially regarding...

Full Site Editing and how the vision for the project is communicated to the community, there's even a new podcast from the project lead.
Quite a lot of news publications have signed up for Newspacks, Automattic's vision for WordPress powered news.
Do WordPress comments and the WordPress admin look tired to you? Well, perhaps there's some light at the end of the tunnel.
Apple and Facebook continue to fight it out for who should be able to track you and where.

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 #149 - "FSE FTW?"

Recorded on Monday 8th February 2021. With Nathan Wrigley, Paul Lacey, and Leo Mindel.

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

News – WordPress 5.6.1 Maintenance Release

"WordPress 5.6.1 is a short-cycle maintenance release. The next major release will be version 5.7..."

FSE and WordPress Themes: What Does the MVP Look Like?

"Josepha Haden Chomphosy, the Executive Director of WordPress, posted a follow-up to her outline of the upcoming year. Questions mounted about what a minimum viable product (MVP) looked like for Full Site Editing (FSE), which is expected to be ready in the Gutenberg plugin in April. The core team is also shooting for a June launch of FSE in WordPress when it ships WordPress 5.8..."

Full Site Editing and Themes: where things are - Josepha Haden Chomphosy

"In my Big Picture Goals post, I mentioned that our top focus for 2021 will be merging Full Site Editing (FSE) into Core. This goal includes a v1 for FSE in Core that shows a plausible promise, components (like the widget and navigation editors) that help bridge the gap to FSE, and block-based themes that really showcase how blocks can lower the barrier to entry for WordPress users at all skill levels."

WordPress 5.7 Beta 1 Is Ready for Testing

"WordPress 5.7 Beta 1 was released this week on schedule and is ready for wider testing. This release will introduce 68 new features and enhancements, dozens of bug fixes, and versions 9.3 – 9.9 of the Gutenberg plugin..."

WordPress 5.7 Will Make It Easier to Migrate From HTTP to HTTPS

"The next major release of WordPress will make it much easier for users to migrate their sites from HTTP to HTTPS. It introduces new capabilities to detect if the user’s hosting environment has support for HTTPS and provides a one-click update process, handling mixed content rewrites where possible..."

Gutenberg 9.9 Adds Color Options for Social Icons, Includes Rounded Borders for Images, and Changes the Theme JSON Format

"Version 9.9 of the Gutenberg plugin landed earlier today. While it includes several minor UI improvements, the biggest user-facing change is the inclusion of icon and background color options for the Social Links block. Theme authors can now add support for rounded image borders. They are also faced with a breaking change to their theme JSON files..."

Community

Welcome to your WP Briefing

Improving the WordPress comment system to encourage conversations

"You might be writing in-depth content and sometimes tackle controversial topics that might have steer-up some debate, but for the most part, there seems to be a lack of engagement with your content in the comment section..."

New Report Estimates WordPress’ Market Share of US Higher Education Institution Websites at 40.8%

"A new report from eQAfy, a company that collects and analyzes data about higher education websites, has benchmarked which content management systems US institutions are using. The report is a snapshot of data from December 2020, sourced from the National Center for Education Statistics IPEDS database. After scanning a list of 4,000 active institutions, EQAfy’s headless browser was able to detect the CMS for 3,359 homepages (83.8%)..."

Skinning the WordPress Admin, CSS Custom Properties on the Way

"Using CSS custom properties for the WordPress admin color scheme system is listed for the WordPress 5.7 milestone. It feels low-key enough that most would pass it over as a simple upgrade to keep up with the times. However, this feature can create ripples that spread and benefit the ecosystem in the years to come..."

Newspack Publishes Showcase with 60 Newsrooms Launched

"Newspack, a project funded by the Google News initiative and WordPress.com, has published a showcase of 60 news sites running on the platform. WordPress.com announced its plans to build the Newspack CMS two years ago and successfully signed on more than 50 sites in the first year. The cloud-based platform is open source and highly customized to generate revenue for small to medium-sized publications..."

Sharpen Your WordPress Developer Skills at DE{CODE} 2021

"The completely virtual, developer-focused conference will take place on March 4th with 15 expert-led sessions on how to leverage WordPress for easy setups, fast builds, smooth launches, and effortless maintenance. Register here today!..."

WP-CLI: A Beginner's Guide

"Anyone new to WordPress can get easily overwhelmed by just the complexity of its interface. After all, as the CMS that 39.9% of all websites use, it needs to be pretty feature-rich. It typically takes weeks and a lot of caffeine to learn the ins and outs of the Graphical User Interface (GUI). Though knowing the WordPress GUI is a skill in high demand, it’s only part of being a true guru!..."

Building Backcast, Part 2

"After thinking through what it might be like to build something like this over the next few-however-long-it-takes, publishing a podcast on something like this seems like a fun and logical thing to do especially since this whole project is about podcasts..."

Plugins / Themes / Blocks

Mobile Pages – WordPress plugin

"The Mobile Pages plugin makes it easy to create awesome Mobile Pages for WordPress using the Gutenberg Block Editor..."

Block Manager Redesign Coming Soon

"WordPress’ block management interface was introduced in Gutenberg 5.3, released in March 2019, and is due for an update. In case you haven’t explored the editor’s Tools menu, the block manager setting allows you to select which blocks will be shown or hidden in the block inserter..."

Security

Unpatched Vulnerability: 50,000 WP Sites Must Find Alternative for Contact Form 7 Style

"On December 9, 2020, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team discovered a Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) to Stored Cross Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability in Contact Form 7 Style, a WordPress plugin installed on over 50,000 sites. Please note that this is a separate plugin from Contact Form 7 and is designed as an add-on to that plugin..."

WP Builds

Checkout CheckoutWC for a customised WooCommerce experience - The WP Builds Weekly WordPress Podcast #215

"So if you’re a user of WooCommerce, then the podcast today will be of interest to you. It’s all about creating the best checkout experience to increase conversions with the CheckoutWC plugin. The checkout process of WooCommerce ‘out-of-the-box’ is okay, but it’s not all that great. Yes, it works, but you know that you’ve seen better workflows; better ways of guiding you through the final stages of your purchase..."

Jobs

Ellipsis Marketing LTD: Senior Marketing Strategist

As our new Senior Marketing Strategist, you’ll be leading our Marketing Strategy projects.

Our clients trust us to develop the right marketing strategies and you’ll be leading that work. You’ll work with WordPress businesses, ranging from startups looking for product/market fit, to the largest enterprise businesses in our space. It’s extremely rewarding to see businesses experience growth following your recommendations.

Not WordPress, but useful anyway…

Alphabet is shutting down Loon, its internet balloon company

"Alphabet is shutting down Loon, its division that provides internet from floating balloons, according to a post on the blog of Alphabet’s X moonshot division..."

India plans to introduce law to ban Bitcoin, other private cryptocurrencies

"India plans to introduce a law to ban private cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin in the country and provide a framework for the creation of an official digital currency during the current budget session of parliament..."

Location broker X-Mode continues to track users despite app store bans

"Hundreds of Android apps, far more than previously disclosed, have sent granular user location data to X-Mode, a data broker known to sell location data to U.S. military contractors..."

The Internet Health Report 2020

"A healthier internet is possible. In a challenging year for the world, the internet helped us and harmed us like never before..."

Facebook prompt will encourage ad tracking opt-in ahead of Apple’s privacy push

"The new screen, first reported on Monday by CNBC, will be shown to users globally starting today and will provide Facebook with early data on how Apple’s privacy change might affect the social network’s business, ahead of Apple’s planned update in early spring that will make the opt-in request mandatory..."