This Week in WordPress #178

Issue #178 | Tuesday, 14 Sept 2021 | Read online

This week’s WordPress news for the week commencing 6th September 2021

Another week, and we’re bringing you the latest WordPress news from the last seven days, including…

WordPress 5.8.1 is just released and 5.9 is just around the corner
Automattic acquires the Social Image Generator Plugin
ResponsibleWP will plant trees from your WordPress website purchases
There’s some major optimisations this week from the Bricks and Divi page builders
Are cookie banners getting too much, some people think so and think that they can change things

There’s a whole lot more than this, as there is each and every week, and you can find all that by scrolling down and clicking on the links!

WP Builds Deals Page - Find Deals on WordPress Plugins

This Week in WordPress #178 – “No fish”

With Nathan Wrigley, Paul Lacey, Joe Casabona and Matt Cromwell.

Recorded on Monday 13th September 2021.
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.org

WordPress 5.8.1 Security and Maintenance Release

WordPress 5.8.1 is now available! This security and maintenance release features 60 bug fixes in addition to 3 security fixes. Because this is a security release, it is recommended that you update your sites immediately…

wptavern.com

WordPress 5.9 Proposed Scope: Major Push Towards Full-Site Editing, Plus a New Default Theme

WordPress 5.9 is starting to take shape as Josepha Haden Chomphosy published a planning roundup at the end of last week with a tentative schedule and scope. This will be the last major release of the year, which Haden Chomphosy said will require “a slightly larger release squad,” considering the proposed scope…

AB Split Test - the fastest way to create split tests in WordPress

Community

wptavern.com

FSE Program: Insights Into Switching Between Block Themes

Unlike routine testing rounds for the FSE Outreach Program, Anne McCarthy threw a bit of a twist on the Make WordPress Test blog earlier today. The announcement asks users to think about what they would like to see when switching between block themes. The test is open to anyone who wants to participate through September 29…

Screen-Shot-2021-09-08-at-11.51.02-PM.png

wptavern.com

Automattic Acquires Social Image Generator Plugin, Plans to Integrate with Jetpack

Automattic has acquired the Social Image Generator plugin, a commercial product that automatically creates social share images for WordPress content from a set of fully customizable templates…

responsiblewp.com

Plant trees with WordPress

Global impact with every purchase your customers make. The trees of our planet Earth are one of the best ways we have to clean our air. By way of the Ecologi Impact API, you can let your EDD customers plant any number of trees every time they make a purchase or renew a subscription…

gutenbergtimes.com

Changelog #51

Birgit Pauli-Haack and Grzegorz (Greg) Ziolkowski discuss Automattic becoming a sponsor of Gutenberg Times and Gutenberg Changelog, Classic Editor, Frontity, Theme.json, the Gutenberg 11.4 Release and more…

Plugins / Themes / Blocks

Bricks

Bricks 1.3.4 – Asset Loading Optimization (CSS & JS)

This release focuses on further optimizing the way assets are loaded on the frontend. With the “CSS Loading Method” set to “External Files” the default CSS & JS file size can be reduced by 88% (from 647kb down to 79kb). If you enable server-side compression (gzip, etc.) even down to around 17 kb…

elegantthemes.com

Speeding Up Divi From Every Angle

Today we are excited to release a transformational Divi Performance update that speeds up Divi from every angle and lays down a foundation on which Divi can grow with more modules and more features without ever adding bloat to your website. We turned Divi into a super light-weight theme by modularizing its PHP framework and assets, loading and processing only what’s needed on-demand based on the modules and features you use…

brizy.io

Plans & Pricing Changes For Brizy PRO WordPress & Cloud

Some changes are coming on the 18th of September 2021 for Brizy PRO plans & pricing for Brizy WordPress & Brizy Cloud. Read more for details…

toolset.com

5 Advanced Uses of Toolset’s Conditional Block in WordPress

The Toolset Conditional block allows you to control the visibility of any WordPress blocks you put inside it…

Deals

WordPress Deals for WP Builds readers / listeners

WordPress Deals for the WP Builds Community. It’s like Black Friday, but every day of the year…

Security

Patchstack

WordPress Vulnerability News, August 2021

WordPress vulnerability news is a weekly digest of highlighted WordPress plugin or theme vulnerabilities. Make sure to update these ASAP…

WP Builds

wptavern.com

#7 – Ajit Bohra on Gutenberg, Full Site Editing and React

On the Jukebox podcast today we have Ajit Bohra. Ajit is a keen advocate of WordPress, having used it and committed to it, for many years. He’s a full stack developer working at Lubus which is based in Mumbai, India. His team works with WordPress as well as offering solutions built with Laravel and React…

wpbuilds803.e.wpstage.net

246 – Building your own social network with the Friends plugin

So you love Facebook and you hate Facebook, you love Twitter and you hate Twitter. You love… You get the idea! If you’re anything like me you have at times…

Jobs

Post a job for FREE!

Post a Job If you know of a job in the WrdPress community, please feel free to post it here.
It’ll go in this newsletter FREE OF CHARGE!

Not WordPress, but useful anyway…

zipmessage.com

Asynchronous video messaging software for remote business

ZipMessage is the easiest way to start an async video conversation with customers or colleagues. Ask anyone to share their screen or camera…

konstantin.blog

Sail: Deploy WordPress to DigitalOcean – Konstantin Kovshenin

Sail is a free and open source CLI tool to provision and deploy WordPress applications to the DigitalOcean cloud. Here’s a quick video demo of how it works…

laravel-news.com

PHP 8.1 Release Candidate 1 Is Here

The PHP team announced the release of the first PHP 8.1 release candidate. Learn the latest scoop on the upcoming release of PHP 8.1…

searchenginejournal.com

Google Lighthouse 8.3.0 Update

Update affects PageSpeed Insights, SEO description emphasizes CWV over SEO and introduces Project Fraggle Rock.

bbc.co.uk

Cookie banners: G7 urged to consider solution to pop-up notices

Information commissioner Elizabeth Denham believes the issue needs to be solved collectively…

bbc.co.uk

Audio of Ripper the ‘talking’ Australian duck rediscovered

The 1987 recording appears to show Ripper the Australian musk duck saying: “You bloody fool”…

theguardian.com

Study finds growing government use of sensitive data to nudge behaviour

National and local governments using targeted ads on search engines and social media…

Check out some recent podcast episodes…

246 – Building your own social network with the Friends plugin

So you love Facebook and you hate Facebook, you love Twitter and you hate Twitter. You love… You get the idea! If you’re anything like me you have at times…

245 – ‘S’ is for SEO

So today on the podcast David and Nathan talk about SEO. David certainly knows more about this than Nathan does, but neither of us claim to be experts. It’s the usual nonsense…!

Before you go…

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Show Notes

This week’s WordPress news for the week commencing 6th September 2021

This Week in WordPress #178 – “No fish”

With Nathan Wrigley, Paul Lacey, Joe Casabona and Matt Cromwell.

WordPress Core

Community

Plugins / Themes / Blocks

Deals

Security

WP Builds

Jobs

Not WordPress, but useful anyway…

Before you go…

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