Hi!

WordPress 6.4 Beta 1 has been released and is now available for testing. Beta 2 is expected later today. The voting for the Test Team reps is now open. The major talk of last week was the roadblock faced by the OllieWP theme from being accepted into the themes repository.

You can also subscribe and listen to the podcast version of this newsletter on Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts.

Until next week,

Bye!

Team WP-CONTENT.CO

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📰 WORDPRESS & AROUND

All the updates around WordPress and its closely related technologies

WordPress 6.4 Beta 1 released

The beta version is now available for download and testing. Beta 2 is to be released later today.

• Help test WordPress 6.4: With the release of WordPress 6.4 Beta 1, the upcoming features need testing by the community to iron out issues, if present.
• WPVIP powers the new NASA.gov and their science website: J.J Toothman announced via X that the beta label has been removed from the nasa.gov website. “Houston, we have a solution” tweeted Matt Mullenweg.
• What’s new in Gutenberg 16.7?: The latest version introduces an all-new Font Library, the ability to import and export patterns as JSON files, a new pattern filtering, and more.
• Help influence the future of WordPress by taking the 2023 Annual Survey today: This year’s annual survey is live and is open for five weeks. The results will be published in early December.
• Proposed 2024 Global Community Sponsorship Program: The proposed draft for the 2024 Global Community Sponsorship Program has been published.
• Discussion: Defining active and engaged faculty: The Training Team is seeking community feedback to help define what makes an active and engaged faculty member.
• Sunsetting Tagregator plugin on WordCamp.org websites: The Tagregator plugin which hasn’t been updated in years is being retired. The plugin will remain active on old sites and the content it has already pulled will be unaffected.
• Test Team Reps: Submit your votes: The poll will remain open for two weeks, until October 12, and the community can vote for two nominees, from the three nominees. The three nominees are Ankit K Gupta, Pooja Derashri, and Rajin Sharwar.
• Twenty Twenty-Four demo site: The upcoming default theme with WordPress 6.4 now has a demo site that allows users to preview and experience the new theme.
• Hallway Hangout: Working session on consolidating various navigation modes: The upcoming Hallway Hangout scheduled to take place on Wednesday, November 15, 2023, at 09:30 PM GMT+5:30 will focus on what streamlining the navigation modes might look like, including considering the use of List View and evolving Focus Mode for container blocks.
• Design Share: Sep 11-Sep 22: The design team has shared an update on a few projects they have worked on over the past couple of weeks.
• Google Podcasts to shut down in 2024 with listeners migrated to YouTube Music: Google Podcast launched in 2018 is shutting down in 2024 and all its listeners will be migrated to YouTube Music.
• Mistral AI launches open-source LLM, Mistral 7B: Mistral AI announces the launch of Mistral 7B, a 7-billion-parameter open-source model. The company hopes the new 7-billion-parameter model will become an open-source alternative to current AI solutions.
• Getty Images launches ‘commercially safe’ AI image generator: Getty Images and NVIDIA have partnered to introduce Generative AI for creating images for commercial use.

🗣️ TALK OF THE TOWN

• Ollie theme faces pushback from WordPress Theme Review Team: After receiving significant pushback from the Theme Review team during Ollie’s three weeks in the queue, McAlister has put up a poll requesting feedback on how he should proceed. “After a very rocky (and downright combative) theme review process at WordPress.org, I’m not sure if it’s the right place for our @BuildWithOllie project” he tweeted.
• Justin Ferriman, Louis Gan, Jamie Marsland, Simon Harper and several others encouraged McAlister to distribute his work independently while Ellen Bauer and Christian Zumbrunnen suggested the plugin + theme route.
• I wouldn’t be contributing to WordPress if the reviewer of my theme had not helped me: Tweeted Carolina Nymark.

🚨 WEB SECURITY & VULNERABILITIES

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

Wordfence Intelligence Weekly WordPress Vulnerability Report (September 18, 2023 to September 24, 2023)

There were 42 vulnerabilities disclosed in 37 WordPress Plugins.

• WordPress Vulnerability & Patch Roundup September 2023: Month-end report from Sucuri.
• Two path to privilege escalation bugs found in the Simple Membership Plugin: Two privilege escalation vulnerabilities were patched and all users are to update to the latest version immediately.

🔌 NEW PLUGINS & THEMES

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

Bounds theme

This theme is meant for slide deck and offers two style variations.

• Niya theme: A minimal and lightweight theme for writers and bloggers.
• Classified Listings theme: A theme suitable for online classified ads platform websites.
• Fluent Comments plugin: A comment form and comment spam protection plugin and it is compatible with all themes except FSE Themes.
• Auto coupon for WooCommerce plugin: The plugin allows a coupon to be applied automatically by checking the “Auto apply” option on the edit coupon page.
• Less Tags plugin: The plugin redirects tag pages to the home page if they contain fewer than a specified number of posts. The plugin can be downloaded from GitHub.

💵 INVESTMENTS, ACQUISITIONS & PARTNERSHIPS

• InstaWP partners up with Tyche Softwares: The latest partnership with Tyche Softwares results in their plugin Abandoned Cart Pro pre-installed when setting up a WooCommerce website thereby allowing users to try it out before making a final decision.

👥 COMMUNITY NEWS

Updates and News from the WordPress Community

Applications are open for Bluehost Creators Awards 2023

The last date for entry is on November 16, 2023, and the results will be announced in March 2024.

• ScanFully: ScanFully is a WordPress performance and site-health monitoring tool created by Remkus de Vries and Barry Kooij which is now open to beta testers.
• Dream Web conference: Elementor will be hosting its Dream Web conference on November 2, 2023, in Berlin, Germany. The tickets are now available.
• WooCommerce Blocks 11.2.0 released: The latest release brings a new editable template in the site editor called “Order Confirmation”, predefined patterns in the production block, new store API order endpoints, and so on.
• The Ollie website just got a new fresh coat of paint: OllieWP has got a complete revamp and the blog post deeply dives into all the new features of the site.
• WordPress.com and WordPress.org YouTube channels compared: Jamie Pootlepress in an X thread has compared WordPress.com and WordPress.org YouTube channels against Webflow, Canva, Wix, and Squarespace providing insights into their growth.
• wd_s (wdunderscores) version 4.0.0 released: In this release, wd_s transforms into a powerful hybrid theme, equipped with the Site Editor and pre-styled core blocks via theme.json.
• Traffic transparency: unleashing the power of Cloudflare Trace: The Cloudflare Trace enables users to understand how HTTP requests traverse your zone’s configuration and what Cloudflare Rules are being applied to the request.
• Introducing Fluent Booking: Fluent Booking is an all-new scheduling solution for WordPress.The option to join the waitlist is open now.
• Kirana theme launched: ThemeGrill has launched a new WooCommerce theme called Kirana theme and is now live.
• PHP 8.2.11 released: PHP 8.2.11 is now available and is a bug-fix release.

🔖 INTERESTING READS & PODCASTS

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

• How WordPress developers can keep their users satisfied: From WordPress Developer Blog
• Plugins: Threatening to go public: From From Half-Elf on Tech
• ChatGPT wrecked our type of content: From Tom McFarlin
• Nine years of being a committer for WordPress core: From Aaron Jorbin
• Which WordPress brands get the most website traffic?: From Pootlepress
• Benchmarking SEO: Do a competitive analysis: From Yoast
• 7 tips to get more traffic to your Shopify store with SEO: From Yoast
• The WordPress Core Performance Team: What do they do?: From Torque
• You need to update to PHP 8. Here’s why: From WebDevStudios
• Juliette Reinders Folmer on When Contributions Need to Be Paid: From WP Tavern Jukebox
• A place to remember WordPress community members: From The WP Minute
• Torque Social Hour: Organizing WordCamps in 2023: From Torque Magazine
• Wake-up WP founders: From Justin Ferriman
• How to choose a B2B e-commerce platform: From WooCommerce
• The 10 Best AI Writing Tools for Content Creation: From Jetpack

🛠 GUIDE ZONE – HOWTO’S and MORE

Handpicked fresh guides from WordPress circle

• The HTML API: process your tags, not your pain: From WordPress Developer Blog
• Using Block Patterns: From Learn WordPress
• Common APIs – Responsive images: From Learn WordPress
• Build a React application for AI-powered image generation using OpenAI DALL-E API: From Kinsta
• How to install Composer on Windows, macOS, and Linux: From Kinsta
• How to easily enable debugging in WordPress: From RankMath
• How to install a WordPress Plugin: From RankMath
• How to limit login attempts on WordPress (+ Should You?): From Patchstack
• WooCommerce Tutorials Ecommerce Video Marketing: A Beginner’s Guide: From Iconic
• How To Change Your WordPress Logo Size: Easy Beginner’s Guide: From CyberChimps
• WordPress salts: The complete guide to understanding, generating, and managing them: From Melapress
• How to recover from the Google rich results shake-up: From Search Engine Land

📆 SAVE THE DATES

Do not miss a WordPress event ever again

• WordCamp Masaka on October 6-7, 2023: Tickets are available now.
• WooSesh on October 10-12, 2023: WooSesh is a live, virtual conference for WooCommerce store builders.
• WordCamp Deutschland 2023 on Oct 19-21, 2023: Call for speakers is now open.
• WordCamp Mumbai on October 28-29: The event is in the early planning stages.
• WordCamp Montreal on November 8-9, 2023: Tickets are available now.
• WordCamp Manila on November 11, 2023: The call for speakers is now live.
• WordCamp Udaipur on November 25, 2023: The call for speakers and sponsors is now open.
• WordCamp Asia on March 7-9, 2024: Share your personal stories of contribution at WordCamps

🎁 WORDPRESS DEALS OF THE WEEK

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

EXCLUSIVE DEALS

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• Up to 75% off hosting plans at HostPapa
• 50% off for Advanced Giftcards for WooCommerce plugin
• 60% off all hosting plans at Nexcess
• 85% off at AtlasVPN 
• 20% off for Fluent Forms plugin
• 50% off at Formidable Forms
• 20% off for FluentCRM plugin
• 50% off for WP Social Ninja plugin 
• Upto 95% off for PitchGround products 
• Upto 65% off WordPress Hosting plans at InMotion Hosting
• 77% off hosting plans at SiteGround
• 60% off at Hostgator India (Coupon Code – SUNSHINE)
• Up to 74% off on 24 month VPS Plans at Liquid Web
• 50% off on Managed Dedicated Server Hosting at Liquid Web

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