WP Builds Newsletter #40 - WordPress Release Candidate 5.0, new blocks creator and VSCode course

This weeks WordPress news - Covering The Week Commencing 19th November 2018:

WordPress 5.0 RC Expected on U.S. Thanksgiving Holiday, despite Last-Minute Pushback from Contributors
"WordPress core committers, core contributors, and former release leads made strong, last-minute appeals on Monday for the 5.0 release to be deferred to January. RC was expected Monday but those urging its delay cited the large number of open issues on the milestone and the fact that many confirmed bugs are being aggressively punted to followup releases..."

WordPress 5.0 Release Candidate
"The first release candidate for WordPress 5.0 is now available! This is an important milestone, as we near the release of WordPress 5.0. The WordPress 5.0 release date has shifted from the 27th to give more time for the RC to be fully tested. A final release date will be announced soon, based on feedback on the RC. This is a big release and needs your help—if you haven’t tried 5.0 yet, now is the time...!"

New Block Lab Plugin Makes it Easy to Create Custom Gutenberg Blocks
"Block Lab is a new tool that provides an admin interface and a templating system for creating custom Gutenberg blocks. Rob Stinson, Luke Carbis, and Rheinard Korf, all employees at XWP, kicked off the project in their own time with the goal of removing the relatively steep barrier to block creation. The plugin is now available on WordPress.org and Stinson said their target audience is WordPress developers ranging from junior to experienced..."

Figma Partners with WordPress to Improve Design Collaboration
"Figma, an online collaborative interface design tool, has donated an organizational membership to the WordPress project. The browser-based application helps designers and developers collaborate more efficiently and is used by organizations like Microsoft, Slack, and Uber. It provides design tools, prototyping, previews, and real-time feedback, all in the same place, and is often described as the 'Google Docs for designing apps.'..."

An Introduction to WordPress Penetration Testing
"What is Penetration Testing? The deeper you get into site security, the darker it gets. Penetration testing is the practice of simulating an attack on a system, network, app or website to identify vulnerabilities that might be exploited..."

ExpressionEngine Goes Open Source after 16 Years
"In a post titled “Open Source Has Won,” EllisLab founder Rick Ellis explained why ExpressionEngine is going open source after 16 years. The content management system is an evolution of the pMachine blogging software first released in early 2002. EllisLab previously required a license fee to use the full version of ExpressionEngine, which is built on object-oriented PHP and uses MySQL for storage..."

XSS Injection Campaign Exploits WordPress AMP Plugin
"News broke last week disclosing a number of vulnerabilities in the AMP For WP plugin, installed on over 100,000 WordPress sites. WordPress contributor Sybre Waaijer identified the security issue and confidentially disclosed it to the WordPress plugins team. To exploit the flaw, an attacker needs to have a minimum of subscriber-level access on a vulnerable site..."

Elementor: New Marketing Widgets: Evergreen Countdown Timer, Star Rating, Reviews & Sitemap
"So long to expensive bulky marketing tools! Grab the new Evergreen Countdown, Star Rating, Reviews and Sitemap, 4 different widgets to supercharge your marketing workflow..."

Beaver Builder: BBHero
Free Templates for Beaver Builder. Free stuff, yay!

WordPress and more...

VSCode Power User Course
"From Ahmad Awais. For beginners or advanced developer? Both! Investing time on your code editor can help you improve your productivity. After this course, you'll be writing code with best practices, 2x faster than you do now, and will be saving 15 to 20 hours every month. Details in the modules below..."