Hello!
WordPress 6.6 “Dorsey”, the second major release of this year has been released with new features and various improvements. Following this release, WordPress 6.6.1, a maintenance release is set to arrive today.
Last week saw a handful of events from a global Windows outage due to a CrowdStrike faulty update, which brought the world to a standstill. Along with this a lot of users are frustrated with the massive price hike of Webflow.
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
This weekly newsletter is kindly sponsored by Omnisend and WP Job Openings
📰 WORDPRESS & AROUND
All the updates around WordPress and its closely related technologies
WordPress 6.6 “Dorsey,” has been released and is the second major release of this year. This release brings new Synced Pattern Overrides, Data View improvements, automatic rollback for plugin updates, and so on. This release saw a total of 150 first-time contributors. Also, this is the 50th release of WordPress as highlighted by Matt Mullenweg.
- Major Windows BSOD issue hits banks, airlines, and TV broadcasters: A faulty update from cybersecurity provider CrowdStrike is responsible for the global outage. Flights were grounded and hospital system thrown out of gear. Matt summed it up – “It’s like Y2K happened 24 years late.”
- WordPress 6.6.1 RC1 is now available: The RC1 is available for the upcoming 6.6.1 which will be a maintenance release. The 6.6.1 RC1 features 7 fixes in Core and 9 fixes for the Block Editor. We can expect the WordPress 6.6.1 to be released later today.
- Matt Mullenweg on the need for automated fail-stops for updates: Following the recent CrowdStrike update issue, Matt Mullenweg is open to ideas and feedback from the community to establish automated fail-safes for updates as well as to review the existing measures. He also highlights what measures can be taken by WordPress clients to prevent such a scenario.
- Aligning committer-level access across the code base: WordPress Core committer Jonathan Desrosiers explains the steps taken to unify the permissions and capabilities for the project’s committer-level contributors between the two code bases (Gutenberg on GitHub and Core in SVN).
- What’s new in Gutenberg 18.8: This release includes shadow support for group block, background image support for blocks in global styles, and more.
- WordPress Meetup Trends: This analysis examines global trends in WordPress Meetup events from January 2023 to June 2024, focusing on both in-person and online events with at least 50 RSVPs, while excluding canceled events. Regionally, Asia, especially India, showed strong engagement in in-person events. The Learn WordPress Online Workshops, led by full-time sponsored contributors, emerged as a significant trend. In-person events saw the highest engagement in Ahmedabad and Mumbai, India, while online events drew attention to SEO, accessibility, and AI topics.
- Proposal: Adjusting Dev Chat times for the 6.7 release: The weekly WordPress Dev Chat meeting might be rescheduled to take place between 3–10 UTC to allow for much greater participation for people from various time zones. The proposal is open to feedback until July 31, 2024.
- Billions of Google redirects to stop working next year: Google announced its URL shortener service will stop working completely on August 25, 2025.
- Google under investigation in Italy over user consent practices: Italian competition watchdog AGCM launched an investigation into Google’s user consent practices for ad profiling.
- Google warns of last chance to export Notes search data: Google updated their documentation for the Google Labs Google Notes experiment to remind users that Notes will go away at the end of July 2024 and showed how to download Notes content, with a final deadline beyond which it will be impossible to retrieve it.
🚨WEB SECURITY & VULNERABILITIES
A collection of web security and vulnerability news and updates for the past week
There were 225 vulnerabilities disclosed in 186 plugins and 14 themes.
- 10,000 WordPress sites affected by high severity vulnerabilities in BookingPress WordPress plugin: An arbitrary file read to arbitrary file creation vulnerability was recently patched. Users are to update to the latest version immediately.
- Squarespace Domain hijacks enabled by email address exploit on migrated accounts: In June 2023, Google sold all Google Domains accounts to Squarespace but more than a dozen customers have had their domains hijacked in the last week due to weak security defaults and migration issues.
- Notice from Node.js to users to downgrade to Node.js v22.4.1: Due to a bug in v22.5.0 caused by fast API changes users are advised to downgrade to Node.js v22.4.1.
- WordPress vulnerability report — July 17, 2024: Weekly report from SolidWP.
🔌 NEW PLUGINS & THEMES
Be one of the first ones to explore some fresh plugins and themes
- Creativium theme: A multipurpose theme.
- Bee Corp theme: A theme suitable for businesses and corporate websites.
- MAUVE++ plugin: A plugin to check the accessibility of WordPress content while editing it and before you hit publish.
- Unused Media Scanner plugin: The plugin scans your media library and content to highlight all the assets that are not currently being used.
💵 INVESTMENTS, ACQUISITIONS & PARTNERSHIPS
- WP Engine acquires NitroPack: WP Engine has acquired NitroPack, an all-in-one SaaS solution for improving site speed and performance metrics.
👥 COMMUNITY NEWS
Updates and News from the WordPress Community
After Shahjahan Jewel posted the Open Letter to WordCamp Europe 2025 Organizers regarding the date clash with Eid al-Adha, the WordCamp Europe 2025 organizers issued an apology for the oversight. However, due to signed contracts and the venue availability, it is impossible to shift dates for WCEU 2025 now.
- Sybre Waaijer warns users not to enable comment pagination on WordPress FSE themes: Enabling comment pagination will lead to the website being deindexed from Google, and a Core Trac ticket to address this issue is open and being discussed.
- Daniel Hayes Smith highlights the confusion regarding the Synced Patterns: According to him, Synced Patterns might not be the best term, and he has suggested a few alternatives which might be better suited, such as “Repeatable Patterns” or simply “Patterns”. Several community members also expressed their opinions on it.
- Aaron Jorbin has shared some random stats about how often folks contribute to WordPress: The stats reveal that 6 folks have contributed to all 35 versions of WordPress since the introduction of the credits API, while WordPress 6.6 saw 154 new contributors, and so on.
- New job board released by WPShout: The new job board is dedicated to WordPress professionals, providing a fast and efficient way to find various opportunities within the WordPress ecosystem.
- Webflow massive price hike has left users frustrated: Nico Cerdeira took his frustration to X regarding the recent 32x price hike at Webflow. Matt Mullenweg on this occasion expressed his opinion, on why open source is the right way to go. Jamie Madden proposed that users affected by this jump in pricing always have the option of easily migrating to WordPress.
- Switzerland mandates software source code disclosure for public sector: A legal milestone: Switzerland has enacted the “Federal Law on the Use of Electronic Means for the Fulfilment of Governmental Tasks” (EMBAG), establishing a mandatory requirement for open source software within public sector bodies. The law states that all public bodies must disclose the source code of software developed by or for them, unless precluded by third-party rights or security concerns.
- WPML 4.6.12 is fully compatible with WordPress 6.6 and PHP 8.3: WordPress 6.6 moves away from PHP 7, embracing the faster and more efficient PHP 8+. This release of WPML ensures full compatibility with the latest WordPress and PHP versions.
- Zaman Hassan receives the Yoast Care fund for his contribution to the WordPress community: Zaman Hassan, 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
- Pooja Derashri contributing and developing in WordPress: From Women in WP
- WordCamp Canada 2024: From Courtney Robertson
- WordPress is a UI/UX disaster – Change my mind!: From WPTuts
- An introduction to Git bisect: From Aaron Jorbin
- WordCamp Canada recap: From James Giroux
- WordPress 6.6: From Rich Tabor
- Dealing with burnout in entrepreneurship: From The WP Minute
- Fernando Tellado on AI tools and rehumanising the web: From WP Tavern Jukebox
- Cooking Websites: My favorite productivity tools for web designers: From WPBakery
- 9 common WordPress user experience problems (and practical tips to fix them): From Kinsta
- Mastering WordPress file permissions: A guide for all levels: From Sucuri
- Content monitoring: A comprehensive guide: From RankMath
- Password spraying attacks: What they are & how to avoid them: From Jetpack
- What is Search Experience Optimization (SXO)?: From Yoast
🛠 GUIDE ZONE – HOWTO’S and MORE
Handpicked fresh guides from WordPress circle
- JSON Schema in WordPress: From WordPress Developer Blog
- Mixing and matching styles, colors, and typography in WordPress 6.6: From WordPress Developer Blog
- Submitting your theme to WordPress.org: From WordPress.tv
- WordPress revisions history not showing? Here’s the fix: From Melapress
- GitHub actions to create and deploy plugins/themes: From Epiphyt
📆 SAVE THE DATES
Do not miss a WordPress event ever again
- do_action Ahmedabad on July 27, 2024: The call for sponsors and charity organization applications is now open.
- WordSesh 2024 on July 30: The registrations are now open.
- WordCamp US on 17-20 September 2024: The tickets are now available.
- WordCamp Netherlands on 27-28 September 2024: The call for speakers is now open.
- WordCamp Nagpur on September 28, 2024: The call for sponsors is now open.
- WordPress Accessibility Day on Oct 9-10, 2024: The call for speakers and volunteers is now open.
- WordCamp Asia on February 20-22, 2025: The venue will be the Philippine International Convention Center, Manila, Philippines. The call for speakers is now open.
- WordCamp Europe on 5-7 June 2025: The call for organizers is now open.
🎁 WORDPRESS DEALS OF THE WEEK
Again, these are the best deals of the week, handpicked by yours!
EXCLUSIVE DEALS
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- 40% off for 4 months on all hosting plans + 40 free migrations at Cloudways (Coupon Code – BFCM4040)
- 53% off for NordLocker
- Up to 50% off on EchoRewards PRO.
- Up to 75% off on plugins, themes and hosting at WP Hive
- 50% off on the Thrive Suite yearly plan.
- 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
- 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 69% off WordPress Hosting plans at InMotion Hosting
- 83% off hosting plansat 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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Team WP-CONTENT.CO
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