Hi!

Sorry our newsletter is late. Our whole team is going today to the queen of hills “Ooty” for our annual meetup and we are so excited! Hope you are all set to welcome the holiday season.

The plugin review team is looking for new members and the application is now open. There is an ongoing phishing scam trying to lure WordPress users to download and install a malicious plugin.

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

Join the Plugin Review team!

The plugin review team is looking for new members and the applications are open till the end of this month. As per the current schedule, the three new members will be announced in January 2024.

• Updates on the Hosting Team Reps 2024: The hosting team reps for 2024 have been selected and they are Lucas Radke and Javier Casares.
• Embracing Matrix for enhanced communication: The post provides an update on the ongoing efforts to explore Matrix as a possible replacement for Slack.
• Hallway Hangout: Performance end of year review 2023: The upcoming end of year hallway hangout to review the WordPress performance enhancements from 2023 and a look ahead to 2024 will be hosted by Felix Arntz, Joe McGill, and Emily Clarke on December 7, 2023.
• Request for feedback: Lesson Handbook pages: To help the Learning Pathways to scale, the proposal seeks to create a new Handbook section and the draft is now available for review.
• Introducing an all new Gravatar profile editor: The profile editor gets a revamp allowing users to further customize their profiles. Along with this, there are new privacy settings and three new fields.
• GPT Store set to launch in 2024 after ‘unexpected’ delays: In an email to GPT builders, OpenAI shared that the GPT Store, a highly anticipated venture in the realm of generative AI technologies, is set for launch early next year.
• Google officially drops mobile usability report, mobile-friendly test tool and mobile-friendly test API: Google alerted users about this way back in April 2023 and now these services have been retired on December 4.

🚨 WEB SECURITY & VULNERABILITIES

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

Fake CVE-2023-45124 phishing scam tricks users into installing backdoor plugin

The Phishing email claims to be from the WordPress team and warns of a remote code execution vulnerability on the user’s site with an identifier of CVE-2023-45124, which is not currently a valid CVE. The WordPress Security Team is also aware of this ongoing phishing scam and has asked users to stay alert.

• Thrive Theme: Dismiss Tooltip to privilege escalation: An authenticated privilege escalation vulnerability was patched and users are to update to the latest version immediately.
• WordPress AMP plugin vulnerability affects up to 100,000+ sites: Accelerated Mobile Pages WordPress plugin patched a medium severity vulnerability that could allow an attacker to inject malicious scripts to be executed by website visitors.
• WordPress vulnerability report — November 29, 2023: Weekly vulnerability report from SolidWP.
• Wordfence Intelligence Weekly WordPress Vulnerability Report (November 20, 2023 to November 26, 2023): There were 115 vulnerabilities disclosed in 87 Plugins and 1 theme.

🔌 NEW PLUGINS & THEMES

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

Tomoni theme

A theme that displays a use case of multilingual content with Japanese.

• Novel Writer theme: A theme ideal for writers.
• Alicorn theme: A base full site editing theme.
• My WP Photos plugin: The plugin allows users to add their WordPress photo directory photos to your website as a gallery.
• Tour plugin: A plugin that allows users to create tours for their site.

👥 COMMUNITY NEWS

Updates and News from the WordPress Community

Rodolfo Melogli launched the Business Bloomer Club

The platform from Rodolfo Melogli allows users to meet with Woo creators, participate in events to learn and grow, live WooCommerce masterclasses, and so on.

• Matt Mullenweg to speak at WordCamp Asia 2024: The first speaker at WordCamp Asia 2024 has been announced and it is Matt Mullenweg and the session is planned to be hosted on March 9th.
• Earn up to $10,000 for vulnerabilities in WordPress Software – 6X Rewards in the Wordfence holiday bug extravaganza!: Starting from December 1-20, all researchers will earn 6.25x normal bounty reward rates for any eligible vulnerabilities submitted as part of the Wordfence Bug Bounty Program.
• Patchstack launches new firewall engine, advanced hardening module & more: The new protection engine makes improvements to the vPatch rules, two new protection modules are introduced, new advanced hardening for WordPress, changes to the OWASP module, and more. Also, Patchstack recently announced that they are now a member of the Open Source Security Foundation.
• Introducing VideoMentions: Kellen Mace has launched VideoMentions which allows users to find out what’s being said about their brand in the spoken words of YouTube videos.
• Breaking Content – New podcast series by Matt Medeiros: A limited podcast series by Matt Medeiros is coming soon and according to the update shared via X, the first episode has been recorded.
• Yoast SEO 21.6 released: The latest release expands the AI abilities to the Yoast WooCommerce SEO plugin.
• Jetpack Mobile App gets update: The latest update introduces changes to the pages and posts screen, a new context menu, new swipe actions on iOS, and so on.
• Pagely is now SOC 2 Type 2 compliant: Pagely has achieved the SOC 2 Type 2 compliance thereby assuring that the data is handled responsibly and securely.
• Lua Salazar receives the Yoast Care fund for her contribution to the WordPress community: The latest recipient of the Yoast Care fund is Lua Salazar who is a member of the WordPress Community team.
• PHP Code Sniffer from Squiz Labs is abandoned: The GitHub repo is being abandoned, but the project continues in the PHPCSStandards organization.
• Evernote free accounts will have fifty notes and one notebook: From December 4, new and existing free users will have a maximum of fifty notes and one notebook per account.

🔖 INTERESTING READS & PODCASTS

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

• Pooja Derashri on creating educational WordPress content: From WP Tavern Jukebox
• Openverse & photo directory rewind: From WordPress Briefing
• All things WordPress 6.4 with Anne McCarthy and Bud Kraus: From Doo the Woo
• Goodbye, hello dolly: From WPwatercooler
• What is virtual patching?: From SolidWP
• Smart defaults and your WordPress plugin settings: From Matt Cohen
• Beautiful website remade in WordPress in 10 mins: From Jamie Marsland
• Optimize your site with the accessibility checklist: From Yoast
• SEO vs. PPC: Pros, cons & differences: From Search Engine Journal
• Google Bard director talks usage, ethics, and competitive advantage: From Search Engine Journal

🛠 GUIDE ZONE – HOWTO’S and MORE

Handpicked fresh guides from WordPress circle

• A great read—four simple steps to your best body copy ever:  From WordPress Developer Blog
• Styles, patterns, and more with the details block: From WordPress Developer Blog
• Create block theme improvements: From Learn WordPress
• Testing your products for PHP version compatibility: From Learn WordPress
• Developer Hours: How to extend core WordPress blocks: From WordPress TV
• Everything you need to know about installing WordPress in a subdirectory: From Delicious Brains
• How to build and deploy microservices with Python: From Kinsta

📆 SAVE THE DATES

Do not miss a WordPress event ever again

• WordCamp Ahmedabad on December 9, 2023: The second batch of tickets will be out on Oct 25th.
• Kolkata CareerCamp 2024: The event will take place on 6th January, Saturday, 2024.
• NextGen Jakarta 2024: The event will take place on 27 January 2024. The call for volunteers is now open.
• WordCamp Asia on March 7-9, 2024: The third batch of tickets was released yesterday and are still available. WordCamp Asia is also searching for its 2025 location.

🎁 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

• 40% off for 4 months on all hosting plans + 40 free migrations at Cloudways  (Coupon Code – BFCM4040)
• 70% off for NordLocker
• 45% off for HappyAddons
• 50% off for FluentBooking‘s Early Bird Lifetime License Deal
• Up to 40% off for CartFlows
• Up to 75% off on plugins, themes and hosting at WP Hive
• 50% off Web Hosting Packages at StableHost (Coupon Code – 50OFFYEAR1)
• 85% off for plugins at WPPool
• Up to 77% off hosting plans at HostPapa
• 50% off for Advanced Giftcards for WooCommerce plugin
• Upto 55% off hosting plans at Nexcess
• 86% 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 67% off WordPress Hosting plans at InMotion Hosting
• 77% off hosting plans at SiteGround
• 60% off at Hostgator India (Coupon Code- SUNSHINE)
• Up to 85% off at Liquid Web
• 68% off on Managed Dedicated Server Hosting at Liquid Web

Latest from WP-CONTENT.CO

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Team WP-CONTENT.CO

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