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The guidelines for the reviews of commercial/pro plugins have been revised lately with the result being that such reviews are acceptable on WordPress.org as long they discuss functionality or user-facing features. The result of the annual meetup survey has also been published.

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

2023 WordPress Meetup Survey: Key findings

595 community members from 65 countries have participated. Actionable insights include the need to reach students and collaborate with schools and universities to include WordPress in their curricula, increase community and event visibility on social media and online, and improve communication and training for community leaders.

• Core Editor improvements in WordPress 6.5: 6.5 will introduce new List View shortcuts for improved efficiency, saving you time when performing common actions with this tool. It will also allow renaming blocks for better organization, bring a reorganized preference modal to personalize the editor interface and several drag-and-drop improvements.
• Improving block development documentation: 2023 recap and a look ahead: The post provides an update on the progress made on improving block development onboarding experience within the Block Editor Handbook as well as highlights areas for further refinement.
• Guideline change: Reviews of Commercial/Pro plugins: The post notifies all users about the change in guidelines regarding reviews of commercial/pro plugins on WordPress.org. Essentially, if it’s about WordPress, the review is OK. If it’s about the process of purchasing, subscribing, or supporting the paid plugin, then a review is not OK.
• Discussion: Translation plugin on Learn: The post is a call for discussion to figure out a method to manage localized content translation on Learn WordPress.
• Brainstorm: What trends about Learn WordPress leaners do we want to observe?: A call for brainstorming to find out the learner trends which in turn will help the Training Team to continue a data-informed content planning strategy.
• Sustainability Team self-approval system: The post explains the proposed deadline system for approving changes or contributions when it’s not clear who or when move forward with them.
• Google will face a new U.S. antitrust jury trial in September: Google will face allegations of abusing its dominance of digital advertising technology at a jury trial set for September 9, brought by the U.S. Justice Department and a coalition of states.
• Google renames Bard to Gemini, unveils paid version of Gemini: Bard has been renamed to Gemini and Google has also announced a paid version of Gemini, called Gemini Advanced.
• Google investigating ‘confusing ad text’ error impacting ad campaigns: Google Ads is currently investigating error messages related to “confusing ad text” and other content quality labels. While affected users can still access the platform, they will experience error messages, high latency, or other unexpected behaviors. Google is also investigating a devastating Local Service Ads (LSA) tactic that could “nuke competitors out of existence.”
• Google Ads investigating bugs impacting payment methods and credit card updates: Users experiencing these problems are unable to update their payment methods or credit card details.
• Google confirms fix to search indexing problem: After a week, Google has resolved the search indexing issue that caused delays in content appearing in search results.

🚨 WEB SECURITY & VULNERABILITIES

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

Security releases regarding the use of unserialize() in Delicious Brains Plugins:

An overview of the recently patched PHP Object Injection vulnerabilities related to the use of unserialize().

• 2023’s critical WordPress vulnerabilities and how they work: The Wordfence Team found a total of 13 authentication bypass vulnerabilities, 20 arbitrary file upload vulnerabilities,1 arbitrary file deletion vulnerability, 7 arbitrary user password change vulnerabilities, 8 local or remote file inclusion vulnerabilities, and 5 remote code execution vulnerabilities in 2023.
• Wordfence Intelligence Weekly WordPress Vulnerability Report (January 29, 2024 to February 4, 2024): There were 122 vulnerabilities disclosed in 110 plugins.
• WordPress vulnerability report — February 7, 2024: From SolidWP

🔌 NEW PLUGINS & THEMES

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

Freddie theme

 A theme using a full-screen background image and comes with two style variations.

• Smile Dent theme: A starter site template suitable for anyone starting in the dental services business.
• Construction Blocks theme: A theme suitable for businesses and professionals operating in the construction, architecture, engineering, and related industries.
• Waitlist plugin for The Events Calendar: This allows users to create and manage waiting lists for events for The Events Calendar and event tickets.
• Accordion Block Lite plugin: The plugin adds an accessible and responsive accordion block to the block editor inserter that can be added to display list items that expand and collapse to show and hide their associated sections of content.
• Show Page Slug in Admin plugin: It adds a new column in the admin “Pages” view to display each page’s slug.
• Currently plugin: The plugin displays the current work status based on configured work hours or vacation mode in WordPress.

💵 INVESTMENTS, ACQUISITIONS & PARTNERSHIPS

• NP Digital acquires Rebl House: Rebel House a creative and branding agency has been acquired by NP Digital. 
• Yandex search engine sold in $5.2 billion deal: Yandex, N.V. has agreed to sell its Russian assets – including the Yandex search engine – as part of a deal worth 475 billion rubles (roughly $5.2 billion).

👥 COMMUNITY NEWS

Updates and News from the WordPress Community

Introducing WP Inbox

A new project from Nelson Lee Miller, WP Inbox is a WordPress plugin that syncs data from your website and displays contextual info about the person in your inbox app while viewing or replying to messages from your customers, students, subscribers, and members.

• Dokan “Cloud” Beta now available: weDevs has launched the beta version of Dokan Cloud, which is a standalone cloud-based eCommerce platform that will enable users to create a multivendor marketplace.
• WPTavern set to return soon: Matt Mullenweg has provided an update on the status of WP Tavern and that he has shortlisted seven candidates for a two-week trial. Out of these seven candidates, two of them will be selected as full-time writers and he is also planning to set up a system that makes it possible for freelancers to contribute to the site.
• Find My Blocks plugin has been adopted by Morgan Hvidt: Morgan Hvidt made the announcement on X and an update can be expected once he has gone through all the tickets and feature requests.
• Winners of the Kerala WordPress Photo Festival: The Kerala WordPress Photo Festival has concluded and the top three contributors who submitted the most photos are Binita Gothe, Nilo Velez, and Sarath AR.
• 20i are an Agency Hackers recommended partner: 20i is now an Agency Hackers recommended partner, the UK’s largest agency community.
• Introducing: Lock my site for ultimate WordPress protection: This new feature by Rocket.net is aimed at enhancing website protection and when enabled no files can be changed in the WordPress website folder. Also, WordPress MySQL Database user is also stripped down to select privileges only.
• WP-CLI v2.10.0 release notes: This release introduced a new i18n make-php command, the two commands user add-role and user remove-role are now less lazy and can accept multiple roles to add or remove for a given user, and so on.
• A new and enhanced customer center from WPBakery: WPBakery has announced its new customer center with all new navigation and interface, instant answers to FAQs, access to customer support, managing licenses, and so on.
• Contact Form 7 ends the Constant Contact integration: Contact Form 7 has marked the Constant Contact integration as deprecated and no longer recommends that any of the users use it.
• WordCamp Asia 2024 full schedule is now live: The schedule for the three days has been published. Do keep in mind that the schedule is subject to change.
• Cashflow block theme: A new block theme project from Kim Coleman and Tammie Lister built for Paid Memberships Pro plugin-powered websites.
• Yam B Chhetri receives the Yoast Care fund for his contribution to the WordPress community: Yam B Chhetri, a member of the WordPress Community Team is the latest recipient of the Yoast Care fund.
• Huge milestone achieved by Spotlight: Mark Zahra on X announced that the Spotlight plugin now has over 1 million downloads.
• TYPO3 association co-founds the Open Website Alliance: The international community organizations behind Drupal, Joomla, TYPO3, and WordPress join forces in a leadership-level alliance.

🔖 INTERESTING READS & PODCASTS

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

• People of WordPress: Sunita Rai: From WordPress.org
• The ultimate guide to WordPress user management: From Melapress
• Special episode with Matt Mullenweg: From StellarWP
• Ben Ritner on how Kadence WP managed the pivot towards AI: From WP Tavern Jukebox
• When the wolves are hungry, let them feast: From WPMotivate
• Funding WordPress projects with Tom Willmot and Joost de Valk: From Do_the Woo
• Building a low-code accessible WooCommerce website: Amber Hinds: From Equalize Digital
• The secret to speaking at WordCamp Asia and leading a CloudFest Hackathon digital accessibility project:  From Anne-Mieke Bovelett
• Calculating customer lifetime value based on churn rate: From Deluxe Blog Tips
• #SamGoesHeadless: Chapter 02: From Sam Brockway
• Open letter from security experts voices concerns over the proposed changes to UK investigatory powers act’s notices regime: From Center for Democracy and Technology
• Local vs XAMPP: Which should you use for local development?: From Torque
• What’s new in Laravel 11: From Kinsta
• Threat mitigation vs remediation: Key differences and overlaps: From Jetpack
• Statamic for WordPress developers – differences and installation: From Maciek Palmowski
• What is inclusive language?: From Yoast
• How to create magical WordPress scroll effects: From Jamie Marsland
• SEO meta tags: A comprehensive guide for beginners: From RankMath
• Product page SEO: A complete guide: From Search Engine Land

🛠 GUIDE ZONE – HOWTO’S and MORE

Handpicked fresh guides from WordPress circle

• Adding and using grid support in WordPress themes: From WordPress Developer Blog
• Xdebug and local development environments: From WordPress TV
• How to configure Laravel Herd, Xdebug, and Visual Studio Code: From Tom McFarlin
• Guide to forcing user logout in WordPress: When and how: From Patchstack
• How to easily add widgets in WordPress: From RankMath

📆 SAVE THE DATES

Do not miss a WordPress event ever again

• WordCamp Pune on February 17th, 2024: WordCamp Pune 2024 is looking for sponsors.
• WordCamp Asia on March 7-9, 2024: The organizers are on the lookout for passionate individuals to lead the Community Team Table during the Contributor Day.
• WPEngine Decode 2024: The registrations are now open and the event will take place on March 19 in the U.S. and March 21 in EMEA.
• WordCamp Europe on 13-15 June 2024: The call for speakers, volunteers and sponsors is live.
• WordCamp Canada on July 11-13, 2024: The call for speakers is out.

🎁 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)
• 53% off for NordLocker
• 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
• 30% off for Fluent Forms plugin
• 50% off at Formidable Forms
• 30% 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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