Hello!

The WordPress 6.5 release squad has been announced and we can expect the WordPress 6.4.3 maintenance release in a week. The Incident Response Team (IRT) has also shared a report highlighting the various incidents that are being analyzed.

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.

That’s all for now. 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 6.5 release squad formation

The release squad members of the upcoming first major release of 2024 have been announced. As of now, the WordPress 6.5 beta 1 is scheduled for February 13th.

• Big picture goals 2024:  Josepha Haden Chomphosy has shared the top areas of focus for 2024 and the obstacles that need to be overcome.
• 6.4.3: An upcoming maintenance release: As of now the release candidate for WordPress 6.4.3 is scheduled for 25 January 2024 and the final release is planned for 30 January 2024. The remaining bug scrub will take place on Wednesday, January 24, 2024.
• Twenty Twenty-One, Twenty Twenty, and Twenty Seventeen updates now available: These updates revert a recent change from using false !== strpos( … ) in favor of the newer native str_contains() PHP function.
• Editor: Important milestones for WordPress 6.5: The post provides an update on some milestones and recommendations for contributors working on the Gutenberg repository.
• Incident Reports 2023 recap: A summary and update on the status of all the 17 reports that the Incident Response Team received in 2023.
• What’s new in Gutenberg 17.5: The latest version results in improvements to the gallery block, progress made to the editor unification project, and more.
• Phase 3 Media Meeting: The Media Component team is coordinating a meeting with the Editor team and other interested stakeholders to work on planning for the proposed Phase 3 Media Library which is scheduled for February 8 and will take place in the #core-media channel on Slack.
• Proposal: Pilot program to test GatherPress on the WordPress.org network as a Meetup alternative: The proposal seeks to test GatherPress a community-developed plugin, within interested and active WordPress meetup groups. The pilot program would be held in real-world conditions with WordPress Meetup groups.
• Share your feedback about the new WordPress Events Page!: The post is a call for feedback on the changes that should be made to the new Events page to improve it further.
• Hallway Hangout Let’s explore WordPress 6.5 Recap: The post provides a summary of the recent Hallway Hangout dedicated to exploring WordPress 6.5.
• Design Share: Jan 1-Jan 12: The design team has shared an update on a few projects they have worked on over the past couple of weeks.
• The recently updated plugins overview is back in the repository: Remkus de Vries has shared an interesting update about the plugin repository, as it now shows the recently updated plugin list. This feature was removed seven years ago but has made a comeback now.
• Google to cut thousands of search quality rater jobs after dropping contract with Appen: Appen, an Australian data services company that Google contracted with for a large number of its third-party search quality raters, was notified by Google that its contract is ending on March 19, 2024.
• Google updates data privacy policies for targeted ads in the EU: Google is toughening its data privacy policies for targeted ads in Europe to comply with the Digital Markets Act (DMA). Brands and advertisers will begin to notice the changes, such as additional consent banners and a new Data Portability API, as they are rolled out in the coming weeks.
• Google banking bug de-ranks sites on weekends: Multiple Google support forum discussions call attention to a possible bug in Google’s algorithm that causes select generic top level domains (gTLDs) to disappear completely from the search engine results pages (SERPs).

🚨 WEB SECURITY & VULNERABILITIES

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

Wordfence Intelligence Weekly WordPress Vulnerability Report (January 8, 2024 to January 14, 2024)

There were 67 vulnerabilities disclosed in 60 plugins.

• WordPress vulnerability report — January 17, 2024: Weekly vulnerability report from SolidWP.
• ACF 6.2.5 Security release: From ACF 6.2.5, the use of the ACF Shortcode to output an ACF field will be escaped by the WordPress HTML escaping function wp_kses.

🔌 NEW PLUGINS & THEMES

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

JinJang theme

A blog theme with a split, 50:50 layout like Yan Yang.

• Negai theme: A bold blogging theme.
• Plain Post theme: A minimal theme.
• Flush Transients plugin: The plugin allows users to flush WordPress transients.
• Cartick – Advanced cart for WooCommerce plugin: The plugin adds various features such as instant add to cart, sticky cart, and more.

💵 INVESTMENTS, ACQUISITIONS & PARTNERSHIPS

• ZIP Recipes acquired by Igor Benić: Zip Recipes is a plugin for creating and sharing recipes has been acquired by Igor Benić and he has also shared the next steps that will follow post the acquisition.

👥 COMMUNITY NEWS

Updates and News from the WordPress Community

All new Easy Email

Vinny McKee has announced a new service to help users tackle the problems of WordPress emails not getting delivered as well as ending up as spam.

• Announcing Kadence AI: The AI brings forth features such as content generation, AI-powered starter templates and patterns, and inline AI tools.
• Curlwind is now live: Steve Bauman has announced via X that Curlwind which allows users to generate Tailwind utility stylesheets on demand is now live.
• WPBakery introduces SEO Toolkit: WPBakery version 7.4 has introduced an all-new SEOToolkit integrated into the page builder that allows users to improve the website’s SEO performance. The various features are SEO insights, social media sharing previews, and more. 
• WPX celebrating 10 years: As a part of this milestone, they are offering an instant discount on the hosting plan and those who buy a hosting service until Feb 14th stand a chance to enter their special birthday raffle.
• Hover Color Contrast Bookmarklet: A side project from Joe Dolson, which is a bookmarklet to trigger hover states and check the color contrast of hovered focusable elements.
• WP-CLI is now possible with Playground: Adam Zieliński has announced via X that users can now run wp-cli in terminal with Playground’s WebAssembly PHP. Also, this development was quickly followed by another that makes it possible to run WP-CLI with WordPress Playground together in the browser.
• Bay Lights darken Matt and WP Community relationship: Even after a week, the issue is still ongoing with the community expressing their opinions, and amidst all this, the original tweet still stands.
• The plugin review queue has come down drastically: Maarten Belmans drew the attention of the community to how the backlogs of the plugin review team have been reduced by a good margin. Andrew Hoyer also noted how the time for review has come down to 30 days. Meanwhile, Justin Sainton has announced that he has officially joined the plugin review team as its new member.
• The Performant Translations plugin hits a new milestone: Performant Translations now has over 4k active installs and is on its way to being merged into the WordPress Core.
• Carl Hancock on why the plugin repository should have a SaaS tag: According to Carl Hancock having a SaaS tag will be helpful for users in knowing which plugins are self-contained and those that rely on a SaaS backend.
• Jack Arturo shared interesting data on the usage of various page builders: As per the data, Elementor is the leading page builder, followed by Divi and Beaver Builder.
• Gutenberg has built-in forms coming: James LePage drew everyone’s attention to the possibility of forms being a part of the Gutenberg editor by default in the future.
• Katie Keith from Barn2 Plugins is selling one more plugin from their portfolio: A week after announcing that a few of their plugins are up for sale, she has announced yet again that one more plugin is up for grabs. This one has 10k active installs so far.
• Allyson Souza receives the Yoast Care fund for his contribution to the WordPress community: Allyson Souza a web developer and an active member of the local WordPress Brazilian community is the latest recipient of the Yoast Care fund.

🔖 INTERESTING READS & PODCASTS

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

• Anil Gupta on the challenges posed by multi collaboration in WordPress: From WP Tavern Jukebox
• The benefits of podcasting for business: What we learned from launching plugin.fm: From Freemius
• #SamGoesHeadless: Chapter 00: From Sam Brockway
• What does it mean to be customer-centric?: From WP Product Talk
• The billion dollar WordPress page builder idea: From Jamie Marsland
• 2023 Review – A Year of Incredible Growth for Rocket.net: From Rocket.net
• How many WordPress plugins are too many?: From Melapress
• How black hat SEO can sabotage your online presence?: From Nestify
• Your 2024 guide to Google & Yahoo’s new requirements for email senders: From Postmark
• Ethical hacking on trial: German court fines security researcher for reporting a company’s data vulnerabilities: From Socket
• 15 SEO localization dos and don’ts: Navigating cultural sensitivity: From Search Engine Land

🛠 GUIDE ZONE – HOWTO’S and MORE

Handpicked fresh guides from WordPress circle

• Setting up the WordPress core local development environment: From WordPress TV
• Mastering advanced CSS techniques: a deep dive into transitions, animations, and transforms: From Kinsta
• WordPress block patterns: How to use them & create your own: From Jetpack

📆 SAVE THE DATES

Do not miss a WordPress event ever again

• NextGen Jakarta 2024: The event will take place on 27 January 2024. The call for volunteers is now open.
• WordPress Photo Festival 2024 on February 3rd – 10th 2024: The event is organized by the Kerala WordPress community and more details are awaited.
• WordCamp Pune on February 17th, 2024: The event is in the early planning stages.
• WordCamp Asia on March 7-9, 2024: The third batch of tickets was released and are still available. The sixth round of the speakers list has been published. WordCamp Asia is also searching for its 2025 location.
• WordCamp Europe on 13-15 June 2024: The call for speakers and sponsors is live.

🎁 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)
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• 25% off on Quiz and Survey Master (Coupon Code – CNY2024)
• 25% off on Responsive Menu (Coupon Code – CNY2024)
• 53% off for NordLocker
• 35% 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)
• 80% 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 75% off WordPress Hosting plans at InMotion Hosting
• 83% off hosting plans at SiteGround
• 60% off at Hostgator India (Coupon Code- SUNSHINE)
• Up to 74% off at Liquid Web
• 52% off on Managed Dedicated Server Hosting at Liquid Web

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