#196 - WordPress 6.7 Released, WP Engine Updates Legal Complaint

Issue #196 | November 19, 2024 | Reading time: 13 mins

Hello!

WordPress 6.7 “Rollins,” the third major release of this year, has been released. This release brings a new theme – Twenty Twenty-Five, a couple of new APIs, and so on. WooCommerce 9.4.1 was also released.

If you have a Black Friday or Cyber Monday WordPress deal for 2024, submit your details to be featured on our WP-Content.co blog and promoted across our social media channels.

Don’t forget to subscribe and listen to the podcast version of this newsletter, 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

WordPress 6.7 “Rollins” released

WordPress 6.7 “Rollins” has been released and is the third major release of this year. This version brings a new default theme- Twenty Twenty-Five, a new zoom-out mode, two new APIs—Template Registration API and Preview Options API, and so on. They have also released a video explaining this version’s new features.

WordPress.org experienced outage after the release and Systems Wrangler at Automattic, Barry, has confirmed that WordPress.org experienced intermittent elevated latency and increased error rates on November 12, which affected both the WordPress.org website and API.

WordPress 6.7.1 scheduled for release on November 21, 2024: This release focuses only on fixing bugs that were introduced in the 6.7 release. The release will fix these key issues: sizes=auto causing small images, translation errors, uncategorized patterns breaking the editor, zoom-in misalignment, and the missing zoom-out button when plugins add toolbar items.
State of the Word 2024: This annual event, presented by WordPress Co-Founder Matt Mullenweg, will highlight the latest developments and the future vision of WordPress. This year’s State of the Word will be held in Tokyo Node Hall, Japan, on December 16, 2024.
A new theme for Make WordPress is now available for preview: The new theme is available for users to preview. If there are any issues, you can report them on GitHub.
Nominations call for the themes team representatives: 2025 Edition: The nominations are now open and the deadline is on Sunday, December 15, 2024.
Nominations for Hosting Team Reps 2025: The nominations are now open and the deadline is November 27th, 2024.
Google to halt political ads in EU over new regulations: Google will stop serving political ads in the European Union by October 2025 due to new Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising (TTPA) regulatory hurdles, the company announced.
Google’s AI Search Experiment: “Learn About”: Google has quietly introduced a new AI Search experiment called Learn About, which summarizes content and offers navigational menus to explore related subtopics.

🗣️TALK OF THE TOWN

WP Engine updates its legal complaint

WP Engine escalates legal battle with Automattic and Mullenweg: WP Engine escalated its lawsuit, citing Automattic’s WP Engine Tracker website as evidence of harm and exposing customers to cybercrimes. The new document, with 144 pages, begins, “This is a case about abuse of power, extortion, and greed. The misconduct at issue here is all the more shocking because it occurred in an unexpected place—the WordPress open source software community built on promises of the freedom to build, run, change, and redistribute without barriers or constraints, for all.”
Dumitru Brinzan has analyzed the dataset available from the WP Engine Tracker website and it revealed various insights, such as the top three themes being Divi, Hello Elementor, and Astra. The top three plugins were Yoast, Elementor, and Contact Form 7. Based on the findings Hendrik Luehrsen on X posted, “ The unintended takeaway from the leak: most sites aren’t running block-based themes. Full Site Editing (FSE) adoption in the wild is negligible. At some point, WordPress needs a sobering reality check about its architectural direction.”

Some writings/discussions on the subject:
How does Automattic vs WP Engine impact freelancers?: From The WP Minute

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg is ‘more energized’ than ever amid WP Engine battle: From Observer

🚨WEB SECURITY & VULNERABILITIES

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

Critical account takeover patched in Really Simple Security plugin

The plugin recently patched an unauthenticated account takeover vulnerability which allows any unauthenticated visitor to take over and login into any account only by knowing the user ID.

WordPress Elementor Addons vulnerability affects 400k sites: The WordPress Happy Addons for Elementor plugin patched a stored XSS vulnerability that allowed attackers to upload malicious scripts.
Nearly 1000 plugins closed during WordPress security cleanup: Patchstack hosted a special event in October for its Bug Bounty program during Cyber Security Month which saw 1,571 submissions leading to over $17,000 in rewards as well as the temporary closure of over 1000 plugins/themes.
WordPress vulnerability report — November 13, 2024: Weekly report from SolidWP.
Wordfence Intelligence Weekly WordPress Vulnerability Report (November 4, 2024 to November 10, 2024): There were 287 vulnerabilities disclosed in 274 plugins and 5 themes.
Wordfence Bug Bounty Program End of Year Holiday Extravaganza: The event will run from November 12, 2024 – December 9, 2024, and the goal is to receive over 1,000 submissions and award more than $100,000 in bounties.

🔌 NEW PLUGINS & THEMES

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

Building Architect theme

A theme designed for architects, firms, and designers.

Vemity theme: A multipurpose WordPress theme designed for agencies, businesses, freelancers, and creatives.
FSE Photographs theme: A theme suitable for photography websites.
RAVE for WordPress plugin: An automated tool which compares the contents of published packages of WordPress with the canonical source code to verify they have not been tampered with.
StellarPay plugin: A Stripe payment integration plugin for WooCommerce.
Markdown Exporter for WordPress plugin: The plugin is designed to seamlessly convert your WordPress posts, pages, and custom content types into well-structured Markdown (MD) files.

💵 INVESTMENTS, ACQUISITIONS & PARTNERSHIPS

Themeisle acquires WP Full Pay: WP Full Pay plugin, a Stripe payment plugin for WordPress has been acquired by Themeisle.

👥 COMMUNITY NEWS

Updates and News from the WordPress Community

Black Friday statistics 2024: Key consumer insights and shopping trends for the upcoming holiday season

Hostinger has revealed various Black Friday statistics and trends that they have collected from their survey in October 2024. The statistics reveal that 31% of Americans plan to spend more this year, Gen Z wants more but has less to spend, Hybrid shopping dominates, but online-only shoppers are rising and so on.

HTTP Archive’s 2024 Web Almanac report: The report reveals that WordPress sites account for the majority of the relative market share—with over 35% adoption on mobile in 2024, followed by Wix (2.8%), Joomla (1.5%), Squarespace (1.5%), and Drupal (1.2%). When it comes to e-commerce, WooCommerce leads with 38% market share followed by Shopify with 18%.
Introducing xCloud White Label Program: This program allows you to run your own branded hosting business without technical barriers. With this, you can create, brand, and sell custom hosting packages under your name and effortlessly scale a cloud-hosting business
WordPress Brand Tone and Voice Survey Results are out: The survey from WPShout received 222 responses from engaged members of the WordPress community and the findings reveal that the WordPress brand’s tone and voice are friendly but unclear and WordPress needs to be more professional.
AnyoneCanWP winners announced: The first place was bagged by the TenantSync website created by Ryan, the second place was secured by Team Ona Architecture by Aleksandr, and the third place was co-shared between BloodBridge by Hardik & Talk Waves by Mithun Biswas.
WooCommerce 9.5 release is scheduled for December 16, 2024: WooCommerce 9.5 will introduce new collections in the product collections block, new customer notification emails, payment status in receipts and so on. The team has also published a developer advisory, to alert the upcoming changes to the dependency injection container (introduced in WooCommerce 4.7) that will roll out with WooCommerce 9.5.
The WooCommerce Navigation feature has been deprecated: The deprecated Navigation classes will be completely removed in WooCommerce 9.5 and replaced with aliased deprecation classes to avoid unnecessary fatals.
WooCommerce 9.4.1: Dot release: WooCommerce 9.4.1 was released shortly after the release of WooCommer 9.4 to fix issues related to usage of the Action Scheduler library as well as some type safety issues in the Store API.
Winstina Hughes receives the Yoast Care fund for her contribution to the WordPress community: Winstina Hughes, the founder of Support Inclusion in Tech (SiNC), 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

10 years of Freemius, 24 hours of impact: Campaign results: From Freemius
WordPress 6.7 in 250 seconds!: From Jamie WP
Why we invested in Patchstack: From G+D Ventures
In conversation with Katie Keith: From Seriously BUD?
Calvin Alkan on Enhancing WordPress Productivity With CommandUI: From WP Tavern Jukebox
What is ChatGPT Search (and how does it use Bing data)?: From Yoast
Protect your store: The ultimate WooCommerce security checklist: From Patchstack
The top 24 e-commerce metrics every online store should track: From Jetpack
Google November Core Update: 6 Insights from millions of queries: From Search Engine Journal

🛠 GUIDE ZONE – HOWTO’S and MORE

Handpicked fresh guides from WordPress circle

Exploring WordPress 6.7: From Learn WordPress
Working with properties and key-value pairs in theme.json: From Kinsta

📆 SAVE THE DATES

Do not miss a WordPress event ever again

WordCamp Malaysia on November 22-23, 2024: Tickets are out.
WordCamp Netherlands on 29-30 November 2024: The call for sponsors is out.
WordCamp Asia on February 20-22, 2025: The venue will be the Philippine International Convention Center, Manila, Philippines.
PressConf 2025 on April 23-26: A conference for WordPress Professionals and the tickets are now available.
WordCamp Europe on 5-7 June 2025: The event will be held at Basel – Switzerland’s Capital for Art and Culture.
WordCamp US 2025 on August 26-29, 2025: The event is in the early planning stages.

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