#195 - WP Engine Tracker, WordPress 6.7 Releasing Today

Issue #195 | November 12, 2024 | Reading time: 16 mins

Hello!

Automattic recently created a new website called WP Engine Tracker which tracks how many websites have migrated away from WP Engine to new hosts. Also, we can expect WordPress 6.7 later today, which will be the third major release of this year.

If you have a Black Friday or Cyber Monday WordPress deal for 2024, submit your details to be featured on our WP-Content.co blog and promoted across our social media channels.

Don’t forget to subscribe and listen to the podcast version of this newsletter, 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 6.7 Release Candidate 5

The RC5 is now available for download and testing. We can expect WordPress 6.7 to be released later today.

Getting ready for PHP 8.4: some code changes landing in 6.7: An overview of the number of commits made to get the codebase ready for PHP 8.4.
What’s new in Gutenberg 19.6: The latest update includes experimental inline comments, a new color tab for the style book, and various other enhancements and bug fixes.
Announcing the new WordPress Design System Figma library: The new WordPress Design System library for Figma has been launched to streamline the design process for folks working in the WordPress ecosystem.
Meet your 2025 Training Team Representatives: The two new representatives are Jonathan Bossenger and Muhibul Haque. They will be joining Jamie Madden as Training Team reps for 2025.
New Site Speed Tool from WordPress.com: The new Site Speed Tool can quickly identify areas impacting your site’s Core Web Vitals (CWV), like load times, interactivity, and visual stability and provides actionable insights and recommendations, making it easier to optimize your site’s performance and deliver a smoother, faster user experience.
Latest Google AIO updates may impact SEO: Updates to Google AI Overviews for shopping queries may impact eCommerce traffic as AIO expands and occupies more space.
Google sunsets Local Services Ads mobile app, shifts focus to web platform: Google will discontinue the Local Services Ads mobile app on January 6, making the web platform the only option for managing these campaigns.

🗣️TALK OF THE TOWN

WP Engine Tracker created to track websites that have left WP Engine

Automattic launched WP Engine Tracker: This new website from Automattic shows how many websites have migrated from WP Engine to different web hosting platforms. Additionally, Cloudflare temporarily blocked this website for suspected phishing. Also, someone registered a new protest website under the domain WPEngineTracker.com.
Automattic on X also posted notifying users that Silver Lake and WP Engine have filed another document in court. Automattic voices, “Silver Lake and WP Engine are blurring the lines between the open-source WordPress platform and WordPress.org.While everyone has a right to open-source software, WP Engine does not have a right to a website built for the benefit of a community that it exploits through its business practices.”
Patricia BT has an update about the checkbox to log into WordPress.org: Based on the conversation between Matteo Spirandelli and Matt Mullenweg, Matt clarified the purpose of the checkbox and specified to whom it applies.

Some writings/discussions on the subject:
The WordPress war over… revisions?: From The Delta

Defending Open Source: Protecting the future of WordPress: From Automattic

🚨WEB SECURITY & VULNERABILITIES

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

28,000 WordPress sites affected by arbitrary file read and deletion vulnerability in WPLMS WordPress theme

An Arbitrary File Read and Deletion vulnerability makes it possible for unauthenticated threat actors to read and delete arbitrary files, including the wp-config.php file, which can make site takeover and remote code execution possible was patched recently.

Regarding this vulnerability, WordPress posted on X, “ When you see articles about vulnerabilities like this “Critical WPLMS WordPress Theme” with RCE attacks, note that this is not a theme that goes through the .org directory. It’s a theme distributed by Themeforest, CodeCanyon, and WPLMS directly. Be wary of non-.org distribution.”

Announcing The Wordfence Audit Log: Off-site real-time security event logging for WordPress: The audit log captures and stores security-related events on your website as they happen, and sends them securely to an off-site location to protect them from tampering, and to store them for your analysis.
WordPress Vulnerability Report — November 6, 2024: Weekly report from SolidWP.
Wordfence Intelligence Weekly WordPress Vulnerability Report (October 28, 2024 to November 3, 2024): There were 207 vulnerabilities disclosed in 200 plugins.

🔌 NEW PLUGINS & THEMES

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

CastCore theme

A theme suitable for podcast sites.

SaasLauncher theme: A theme designed for SaaS, corporate businesses, and creative agencies.
Spike Business theme: A multi-purpose theme.
Four new plugins from Robert DeVore: Gift Cards for WooCommerce plugin lets customers easily purchase, send, and redeem gift cards on your WooCommerce powered store, the Custom Update Request Modifier plugin which modifies HTTP request user-agent strings for themes, plugins, core updates, and other WordPress API requests. The BenchPress plugin provides an easy way to measure the impact of various PHP operations, WordPress queries, and database interactions, all from within the WordPress dashboard, and the Content Restriction for WordPress plugin for managing content visibility on your WordPress site.

💵 INVESTMENTS, ACQUISITIONS & PARTNERSHIPS

Chat.com domain acquired by Sam Altman: The domain was bought from Dharmesh Shah, the co-founder and CTO of HubSpot.

👥 COMMUNITY NEWS

Updates and News from the WordPress Community

ACF Annual Survey 2024 results

The survey gathered responses from 1,350 participants, 71% of whom use ACF on all their websites. It revealed insights such as the most popular page builders being Elementor, followed by Bricks Builder, Divi, and Beaver Builder. The most popular ACF extensions are ACF Extended, Gravity Forms Addon, ACF Better Search, and Content Analysis for Yoast SEO. Other findings include that 93% are likely to continue building using WordPress, 40% have worked with multisite, and so on.

Introducing: Headless WordPress without WordPress: This new feature in Gato GraphQL created by Leonardo Losoviz allows users to migrate their applications to another framework or CMS with minimal effort.
WooCommerce 9.4 released: WooCommerce 9.4 has been released, however, not yet marked stable. An internal canary testing of 9.4 revealed issues and the team is working on the fix to update the stable tag with 9.4.1.
WooCommerce is shifting focus to work on a new beta of the Product Editor Experience: This new beta will incorporate feedback from the second beta, along with integrating more closely with the planned direction for the WordPress admin as well as with Data Forms and Data Views.
Developer advisory: Translation loading changes in WordPress 6.7: WooCommerce version 9.4 has introduced changes to how translation strings are loaded, aligning with updated WordPress internationalization practices in version 6.7. These updates are intended to prevent issues that can occur when translations are loaded too early.
Automattic is one of the most loved workplaces for veterans: Automattic has earned a spot in the 2024 Most Loved Workplaces for Veterans.
Automattic is increasing its contribution to the PHP Foundation: Starting in 2025, Automattic will increase its contribution to $250,000—2.5 times the current amount.
Kinsta renames its Managed WordPress Hosting plans: The name change is to better reflect the resources behind each plan and also they have increased the visitor limits and Kinsta CDN resources across all plans and added a new single-site plan with a 65,000 visitor threshold and 250 GB of CDN bandwidth.
US Election Day with WordPress VIP: During the US election, WordPress VIP served more than 22 billion requests, mitigated DDoS attacks and the platform delivered 100% uptime throughout.
Celebrating 14 years of WP Mayor: As a part of the 14-year anniversary, WP Mayor is running an exclusive birthday giveaway, where participants stand to win over $4,000+ worth of prizes. This includes a quick expert site audit by Jono Alderson, a personalization & CRO audit by PersonalizeWP, a full year of free access to mySites.guru, and a 10-day free trial with access to 10 hours of expert WordPress development from Work Hero Team.
Gravity SMTP plugin reaches new milestone: Gravity SMTP plugin now has over 25,000 active installs just six months after launching.
Paid Membership Pro makes two add-ons free:: As a part of the Giving Tuesday Campaign, two add-ons, Goals Progress Bar and Donations have been made free for the month of November. This offer ends on November 30, 2024.
Introducing daily backup scheduling in Jetpack VaultPress Backup: This new feature allows site owners to choose a specific time range for daily backups.
Duane Storey on how Automattic tracks WP Engine sites: He notes that WordPress sites reveal more data than necessary when calling the WordPress.org API to fetch plugin information. Specifically, it includes the website URL, WordPress version, and IP address in the user-agent header. Additionally, he also released WP API Privacy plugin to restrict information passed via the WordPress HTTP API.
What happens to WordPress when it can no longer accept contributors from Russia and when Automattic can no longer employ Russian employees to work on WordPress?: Robert DeVore on X initiated this conversation based on Biden’s Executive Order 14071, which forbids Russians from working with or using GPL’d software made in the USA which goes into effect in Mid-December.
Early access for Wooping Shop Health plugin for Woocommerce is now open: Interested users can sign up to receive early access to the plugin.
Andrew Hoyer was removed from the Raspberry Pi community: Apparently, the reason was that he violated a community rule for having a Blue Check.
Marcus Burnette joins Bluehost to take on new challenges: After working at GoDaddy/SkyVerge for 4.5 years, he has now joined Bluehost as Sr. Manager, Strategy and Customer Experience.
Kevin Geary has released his pre & post launch website checklist: It’s an 86-point checklist and is available as a Notion template, PDF, and Markdown inside the Inner Circle.
WPTuts also get blocked: WordPress.org has blocked WPTuts on X.
AlphaFold 3 is now open-sourced: Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold 3, The AI protein-prediction tool is now open-source. Bryan Johnson notes that, “The ability to predict structures, and generate novel matching proteins, will give birth to a new era of biological capability in human vitality, materials, energy, environment, and countless other areas.”
Joan Logose receives the Yoast Care fund for her contribution to the WordPress community: Joan Logose, a member of the WordPress Community Team is the latest recipient of the Yoast Care fund.

🔖 INTERESTING READS & PODCASTS

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

Down the rabbit hole – A look at the WordPress Update API: From Duane Storey
The State of ACSS as we near the end of 2024: From Automatic.css
What’s new with GrimoireLab, the open-source community analytics platform: From CHAOSScast
In conversation with Mike Auteri: From Seriously BUD?
Damon Cook & Seth Rubenstein on the transformational Interactivity API: From WP Tavern Jukebox
PHP 8.4: Here’s what’s new and improved: From Kinsta
App store optimization: A guide to enhance your app’s visibility: From Yoast
How a Google breakup could change the PPC industry: From Search Engine Land
How to conduct a WordPress security audit in 17 Steps: From Jetpack

🛠 GUIDE ZONE – HOWTO’S and MORE

Handpicked fresh guides from WordPress circle

How to add content-only editing support to a block: From WordPress Developer Blog
Overview of WordPress block theme terms and hierarchy: From WordPress.tv
How to simulate color-blindness and other visual impairments, in your web browser: From Anne-Mieke Bovelett
Step-by-step: Blocking IP addresses in WordPress: From SolidWP

📆 SAVE THE DATES

Do not miss a WordPress event ever again

WordCamp Romania on November 14-15, 2024: Tickets are out.
WordCamp Malaysia on November 22-23, 2024: Tickets are out.
WordCamp Netherlands on 29-30 November 2024: The call for sponsors is out.
WordCamp Asia on February 20-22, 2025: The venue will be the Philippine International Convention Center, Manila, Philippines.
PressConf 2025 on April 23-26: A conference for WordPress Professionals and the tickets are now available.
WordCamp Europe on 5-7 June 2025: The event will be held at Basel – Switzerland’s Capital for Art and Culture.
WordCamp US 2025 on August 26-29, 2025: The event is in the early planning stages.

🎁 WORDPRESS DEALS OF THE WEEK

Again, these are the best deals of the week, handpicked by yours!

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4 Months free offer on hosting plans of WP Engine (Coupon Code- FREEDOMTOCREATE)
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