WP Builds Newsletter #56 - WordPress 5.2 Beta 1, Elementor motion effects and security updates

This weeks WordPress news - Covering The Week Commencing 25th March 2019:

WordPress Core

WordPress 5.2 Beta 1 Released: Help Test New Blocks, Block Manager, and Improved Fatal Error Protection
"WordPress 5.2 beta 1 was released this evening with an exciting lineup of new user-facing features that are ready for testing. The upcoming release introduces new blocks for RSS, Search, Calendar, Tag Cloud, and Amazon Kindle embed..."
and this too...

How Will Gutenberg Phase 4 Impact Multilingual Solutions for WordPress?
"During the 2018 State of the Word address, Matt Mullenweg announced that Phase 4 of the Gutenberg project would be aimed at developing an official way for WordPress to support multilingual sites. There are no technical details available yet for what approach core will take, because it’s still in the experimental stage. The site building objectives in Phase 2 are currently the primary focus of the Gutenberg team..."

Security

Announcing disallow pwned passwords
"Admins know it’s key that WordPress users have secure passwords to keep web security watertight. But do you know if your WordPress users are accessing your CMS with insecure ‘pwned’ passwords? And do you know the risk...?"

Stored XSS Patched in WordPress 5.1.1
"WordPress recently released an update, 5.1.1, which patches a stored XSS vulnerability in the platform’s comment system. Even 10 days after the release of this security patch, around 60% of all WordPress sites scanned by our services didn’t have this fix applied. We are not aware of any exploit attempts using the vulnerability currently..."

Recent Social Warfare Vulnerability Allowed Remote Code Execution
"In posts last week, we detailed a vulnerability in the Social Warfare plugin, and discussed the attack campaigns against it. These issues were reported widely as Cross Site Scripting (XSS) flaws, due to an unexpected disclosure and proof of concept released by an unnamed researcher. Our Threat Intelligence team quickly released a firewall rule to mitigate impact for our customers, and the plugin’s author issued a patch shortly thereafter. Attackers have issued persistent exploit attempts against this flaw, which are primarily connected to injected JavaScript redirect activity..."

Community

Gutenberg Cloud Team Advocates for Making WordPress.org’s New Block Directory a CMS-Agnostic Library
"Frontkom‘s presentation at WordCamp Nordic introduced the audience to the Gutenberg Cloud project, which allows developers to share JS-only blocks across CMS platforms. Marco Fernandes and Thor Andre Gretland, representatives of the 45-person agency based in Europe, are also part of the Drupal Gutenberg project that brings WordPress’ open source editor to Drupal via an optional module..."

A New WooCommerce Alternative – Hello BigCommerce
"WordPress is the most widely used content management system on the planet. In fact, it powers over one-third of all websites on the internet. In the past, if you wanted to incorporate an e-commerce store into your site, the most popular option was typically WooCommerce..."

Codecademy Launches New Free PHP Course
"Codecademy introduced a new free course today called Learn PHP. The company, which offers free coding courses, is rebuilding its PHP education after removing all of its PHP courses in 2017..."

New Gutenberg Playground Offers a Standalone Version of the Editor for Testing Outside the WordPress Admin
"The Gutenberg team merged a pull request three days ago that adds a local “playground” development environment for testing outside of the WordPress admin. Riad Benguella, the technical lead for Gutenberg phase 2, said that the playground could grow over time to contain “more than just a standalone version of the editor” and could become a way for developers to test out components in isolation..."

rtCamp Releases GitHub Actions for Automated Code Review, Deploying WordPress, and Slack Notifications
"rtCamp, a 60+ person agency and WordPress.com VIP service partner, has released three new GitHub Actions that handle automated code review, WordPress deployment, and Slack notifications. The PHPCS Code Review action takes advantage of GitHub’s pull request review feature. It performs an automated code review on pull requests using PHPCS. This Action is based on WordPress.com VIP’s GPL-licensed review scripts..."

Pantheon Launches Community and Advocacy Program for Drupal and WordPress
"Pantheon [] today announces the launch of the Pantheon Heroes Community. By helping some of the brightest minds in the Drupal and WordPress communities shine, Pantheon hopes to empower Open Web development..."

Plugins

MultiLive - Multiple Live Stream Broadcaster Plugin for WordPress
"MultiLive – Multiple Live Stream Broadcaster Plugin for WordPress is a streaming website live video streaming tool which allows you to go live on multiple streaming websites (even SIMULTANEOUSLY), with pre-recorded videos. You can go live directly on your streaming website’s channel, to increase views..."

Google Ads for WooCommerce
"Google Shopping Ads are the most effective way to advertise your Woo store and increase sales and revenue. In a few simple steps, generate a fully optimized Google Shopping Ads campaign. Select what categories you want to advertise and we automatically generate smart Google Shopping feeds, automate bidding to maximize your return on advertising spend, and measure conversions and sales for your marketing..."

Elementor motion effects
It's a display of what the new motion effect in Elementor can do.

WP Builds

Automate your social postings using Social Web Suite with Tina Todorovic
"Do you post your content to multiple social platforms? If you do, I’m almost certain that this task is a little bit on the dull side. Is it isn’t it? It takes time and is repetitive. Social Web Suite is a WordPress plugin that hooks into your social media accounts just waiting for your to publish something. As soon as you do, it gets to work making the social media posting nightmare evaporate – it does it all for you. Check it out..."

Not WordPress, but useful anyway...

Ahrefs Announces Plan for New Search Engine
"Ahrefs CEO Dmitry Gerasimenko announced a plan to create a search engine that supports content creators and protects users privacy. Dmitry laid out his proposal for a more free and open web, one that rewards content creators directly from search revenue with a 90/10 split in favor of publishers..."