It’s your weekly roundup of news briefs for busy WordPress professionals! @dimensionmedia, can you believe we’ve done almost 500 of these? -Ed.
Don’t miss David‘s fresh podcast picks for the week! 🎙️ As usual, Courtney has the week’s news from the people making WordPress at .org. 🏗️
WordPress 5.9.3 was released on April 5th as a short-cycle maintenance release with 9 bug fixes in Core and 10 bug fixes in the block editor.
If you develop WooCommerce extensions, note this breaking change regarding the woocommerce_emogrifier hook.
BuddyPress has completed the Release Candidate version of the Rewrites plugin. If you’re a BP developer and have been waiting to test it, now you can.
Jetpack 10.8 introduces some new features (example: QR codes for sharing), but the most interesting item is the introduction of Openverse support. This allows users to search through the massive collection of 600 million Creative Commons and public domain images — directly from the WordPress media library.
An encouraging update from the PHP Foundation: the initial group of sponsored core developers has started! For more discussion about the Foundation, check out this Post Status Comments episode with Carl Alexander and Tonya Mork.
No new WordPress theme vulnerabilities were disclosed this week by iThemes. A number of plugins including Advanced Custom Fields, Anti-Malware Security, and Brute-Force Firewall reported successfully issued security patches.
iThemes also lists plugins with upatched critical security issues that you should deactivate. Most of these have very small install bases, but it’s worth checking over.
Jonathan Pantani notes the launch of the Grow Your Story initiative to help people share how WordPress has affected their lives:
“We would love to explore with you the endless possibilities of ways people have published thanks to the platform and also invite new users to contribute or adopt WordPress.”
You can get involved by filling out a form linked in the post.
This step-by-step tutorial from Munir Kamal will teach you how to work with the Block Styles API by extending the List Block with additional styles.
Brian Coords explains how the team from WP Wallet decided on Vue.js as their JavaScript framework.
Tomaž Zaman announced that he has left WordPress freelancing platform Codeable after roughly 10 years. Best wishes for whatever comes next, Tomaž!
The WP Wallpaper site has joined the HeroPress network. HeroPress founder and curator Topher DeRosia hopes to see WordCamps submitting their graphics every year or so.
This question on Twitter — how do you define the term “WordPress Developer” — got some interesting responses. Many focused on what term “developer” would mean OUTSIDE of WordPress and what job skills are usually required… but still the definition varies wildly. Terms like “builder” and “admin” might be become more commons as the advancements in full site editing settle into the ecosystem.
Fast has closed it’s doors. (Insert “That was Fast!” joke here.) Fast did make some inroads into the WordPress space with it’s 1-click checkout for WooCommerce, in particular by partnering up with Nexcess.
Kudos to WP Manage Ninja and AuthLab for six years in the WordPress space.
If you’re interested in providing gift cards to customers through your WooCommerce store, the recently released plugin Advanced Gift Cards (from developers of Advanced Coupons) might be worth a look.
Raitis Sevelis of WPRaccoon has made a WordPress Wapuu alphabet ebook for kids that you can download.
Some interesting numbers from the 2022 WebAIM Million report on the accessibility of the top one million websites’ home pages. Among the findings: 96.8% of home pages had detected WCAG 2 failures (an improvement actually) and 39% of the 4.4 million form inputs were not properly labeled.
In the CMS report Wix and Squarespace were the top two in least reported errors. WordPress was in the bottom half of the list, but the report notes this could be due to third-party themes and plugins inserting incorrect code. Elementor is farther down the list.
The WPBeginner Growth Fund has taken an investment stake in Wisetr, the parent company behind WooFunnels — a sales funnel and automation plugin
Congrats to Wisetr — they sound like fun people! In the announcement, WPBeginner founder Syed Balkhi also goes into the background story of how events led up to the investment which some might find interesting. The fund itself looks for companies “profitable ($250k – $10M range) where the founder is thinking about their next chapter”.
