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A weekly newsletter covering updates from the WordPress ecosystem that are relevant and helpful for WordPress agencies, developers, and enthusiasts

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#172 – WordPress Turns 21, WP.Com Gets A Rare Victory in Turkey

Issue #172
|
May 29, 2024

Hello!

WordPress turned 21 and we celebrated it with an exciting informal meetup. It was a double celebration for us as our WP-Content.co blog turned 4 🎂. Hope to scale greater heights in the coming years.

We also got some exciting news! The Repository shared the details of the Five for the Future program stats. Our parent company, Awsm Innovations, has grabbed a position in the top 10 contributor list with 17 contributors and 22 hours. This contribution is from a small startup with just 18 employees.

Don’t forget to subscribe and listen to the podcast version of this newsletter on Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts, where you can hear more details and discussions about these topics and more.

See you next week!

Team WP-CONTENT.CO

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📰 WORDPRESS & AROUND

All the updates around WordPress and its closely related technologies

WordPress turned 21

 Our favorite CMS is now old enough to drink. Matt shared what he blogged on May 27, 2003, when he was still living with his parents and got locked out on the patio all night.

  • WordPress 6.5.4 expected on 5 June:  It’s a maintenance release and will address the AJAX plugin activation issue from WordPress 6.5.
  • Gutenberg 18.4 released: It has improvements to the Grid block, a new handy keyboard shortcut, and useful features for extenders.
  • Five for the Future Program Updates: As per stats of May 20, 2024, 191 total organizations have pledged contributors, with 897 confirmed contributors. A total of 7,926 hours have been pledged towards the initiative. The Repository has reported that Automattic is by far the biggest contributor to the project (109 people for 3969 hours) followed by GoDaddy (44 people for 176 hours) and WPDeveloper (33 people for 84 hours). The remaining top 10 companies include Hostinger (29 contributors and 128 hours), WebDevStudios (24 contributors and 47 hours), 10up (20 contributors and 166 hours), YITH (20 hours and 106 contributors), Yoast (19 contributors and 155 contributors), WP Engine (18 contributors and 177 hours), and Aswm Innovations (17 contributors and 22 hours).
  • WordPress Plugin Directory raised the “Active Install” limit to 10+ Million: Plugins hosted on WordPress.org can now display active installation counts exceeding 10 million. Audrey Capital-sponsored contributor Samuel “Otto” Wood made the change on May 22, 2024. Currently, the Repository has four plugins with 10 M+ installations: Elementor, Contact Form 7, Yoast SEO, and the Classic Editor.
  • A new Project Health Working Group to ensure the sustainability and health of the WordPress project: The group’s primary aim is to create a collaborative environment to gather insights and develop tools that will help maintain and improve the project’s health. Bitergia is the first tool to be trialed in this effort. The scheduled hangout times are on May 28, 29, and 30.
  • Automattic scored an important victory for freedom of expression in the Turkish Constitutional Court: Automattic has won a case against Turkish President Erdoğan in the Turkish Constitutional Court. The court ruled that blocking a site alleging corruption against Erdoğan violated the user’s freedom of expression and right to an effective remedy. This decision marks a rare success in Turkey, where Automattic had previously faced multiple unsuccessful takedown appeals – spending almost $100,000 USD appealing 14 different takedown orders, without any success.
  • WCEU 2024 Contributor Day: What to do?: The Community Team would like your suggestions about any specific topics that they should look into during WCEU. Please comment your ideas below the post before May 31st.
  • Google to shut down Business Profile chat feature: The wind-down process will start on July 15, and the functionality will complete on July 31. Google says the decision to wind down the chat feature is part of ongoing efforts to streamline its offerings.
  • Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search: Social media is abuzz with examples of Google’s new AI Overview product saying weird stuff, from telling users to put glue on their pizza to suggesting they eat rocks. The messy rollout means Google is racing to manually disable AI Overviews for specific searches. Meanwhile, an ex-Google Manager compared AI Overviews to failed Google+.
  • Google Search leak: An apparent leak of Google Search API documentation has sparked intense debate within the SEO community, with some claiming it proves Google’s dishonesty and others urging caution in interpreting the information.
  • Wix announced three new image editing tools to their suite of AI-based website building tools: Wix’s new AI image tools makes stock image libraries and image editing apps a thing of the past. Virtually everything they need for creating, optimizing and editing images is now available on the Wix platform.

🚨WEB SECURITY & VULNERABILITIES

A collection of web security and vulnerability news and updates for the past week

Wordfence Intelligence Weekly WordPress Vulnerability Report (May 13, 2024 to May 19, 2024)

Last week, there were 107 vulnerabilities disclosed in 82 WordPress Plugins and 8 WordPress Themes

  • Critical vulnerability patched in UserPro plugin: This plugin suffers from an unauthenticated account takeover vulnerability that allows any unauthenticated users to change the password of any users with certain conditions. The vulnerability was fixed in version 5.1.9.

🔌 NEW PLUGINS & THEMES

Be one of the first ones to explore some fresh plugins and themes

Lativ theme

A block theme specifically designed for businesses and startups.

  • Greyd WP theme: A multipurpose theme.
  • Mpho theme: A minimalist single column theme.
  • Scheduler Widget plugin: A free WordPress plugin that will display an events scheduler component on your site.
  • Infinite Moving Cards plugin: This plugin allows you to create an infinite loop of cards that seamlessly move across the screen, presenting your content in an engaging and dynamic manner.

💵 INVESTMENTS, ACQUISITIONS & PARTNERSHIPS

👥 COMMUNITY NEWS

Updates and News from the WordPress Community

TranslatePress AI from TranslatePress

This AI website translator combines the best neural machine translation engines into one integrated solution.

  • Wordfence CLI 4.0.1 released: It includes a massive scan speed-up of 6X to 30X depending on your workload. Wordfence claims that Wordfence CLI is now the fastest and most thorough PHP malware scanner in the world.
  • Scot Birchfield released WP Scriptly: It provides you with easy-to-use scripts.
  • wp-oop-plugin-lib from Felix Arntz: A library providing classes around WordPress APIs, to be used for example in object oriented WordPress plugins. This library is currently in early development.
  • New and improved WPBakery Customer Center: They also introduced a dedicated hosting section in partnership with Indystack.
  • Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) version 6.3 released: It introduces validation support for fields in ACF Blocks and the ability to store ACF Block field data in the post meta table.
  • WPML 4.6.11 is out: Packed with performance enhancements that contribute to a smoother, more efficient translation workflow, it also fixes a security issue in String Translation.
  • Oxygen 4.8.3 now available: It is a security update that addresses a privilege escalation vulnerability and also includes a fix for broken Gutenberg blocks in the latest version of WordPress (6.5+) when using Oxygen.
  • Ask me anything about WordPress: The Automattic-sponsored design contributor Rich Tabor is ready to answer your questions about the block editor, site editor, building blocks, designing themes, creating patterns, or just using WordPress.
  • The State of Enterprise WordPress survey 2024 is open: It is a collaborative effort from key brands in the enterprise WordPress community, hosting organizations and The Scale Consortium. The survey will help to understand how the platform can be strengthened to provide even further benefits to large-scale organizations.

🔖 INTERESTING READS & PODCASTS

More blog posts and podcasts from WordPress Community you don’t want to miss

🛠 GUIDE ZONE – HOWTO’S and MORE

Handpicked fresh guides from WordPress circle

📆 SAVE THE DATES

Do not miss a WordPress event ever again

🎁 WORDPRESS DEALS OF THE WEEK

Just the best deals of the week, again, handpicked by yours truly!

EXCLUSIVE DEALS

  • 4 Months free offer on hosting plans of WP Engine (Coupon Code- FREEDOMTOCREATE)
  • 15% off yearly plans at Videvo (Coupon Code – WPV15)

OTHER DEALS

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Team WP-CONTENT.CO

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