WordPress.org

May 27, 2018 is the 15th anniversary of the first WordPress release — and we can’t wait to celebrate!

Party time!

Join WordPress fans all over the world in celebrating the 15th Anniversary of WordPress by throwing your own party! Here’s how you can join in the fun:

1. Check the WordPress 15th Anniversary website to see if there’s a party already planned for your town. If there is, RSVP for the party and invite your friends!
   
2. If there isn’t, then pick a place to go where a bunch of people can be merry — a park, a pub, a backyard; any family-friendly venue will do!
3. List your party with your local WordPress meetup group (Don’t have a group? Start one!)  and then spread the word to other local meetups, tech groups, press, etc and get people to say they’ll come to your party.
4. Request some special 15th anniversary WordPress swag (no later than April 27, please, so we have time to ship it to you).
   
5. Have party attendees post photos, videos, and the like with the #WP15 hashtag, and check out the social media stream to see how the rest of the world is sharing and celebrating.

Don’t miss this chance to participate in a global celebration of WordPress!

Special Swag

In honor of the 15th anniversary, we’ve added some special 15th anniversary items in the swag store — you can use the offer code CELEBRATEWP15 to take 15% off this (and any other WordPress swag you buy), all the way through the end of 2018!

Keep checking the swag store, because we’ll be adding more swag over the next few weeks!

Share the fun

However you celebrate the WordPress 15th anniversary — with a party, with commemorative swag, by telling the world what WordPress means to you — remember to use the #WP15 hashtag to share it! And don’t forget to check the stream of WordPress 15th anniversary posts.

When 30% of the internet has a reason to celebrate, you know it’s going to be great!

Gutenberg 2.7 is available for testing and not only does it refine the visuals around block controls, it adds the highly requested ability to edit permalinks.

Editing Permalinks in Gutenberg 2.7

A new pagination block is available that adds a page break, allowing users to break posts into multiple pages. The block is located in the Blocks – Layout Elements section.

There are a number of changes to the link insertion interface. Gutenberg 2.7 brings back the option to have links open in the same window.

Toggle Determines Whether Links Open in a New Window

When editing linked text, the Unlink icon now stays in the toolbar instead of displaying within the link options modal. When adding links, there’s a URL suggestion tool similar to what’s available in WordPress’ current editor.

What will be welcomed news to plugin developers, the PluginSidebar API is exposed and considered final. According to the pull request, this change does the following.

Refactors all the existing Sidebar components to share the same set components and removes duplicated custom CSS styles applied to <PluginSidebar />. There are no changes to the public API of <PublicSidebar /> component, other than it is going to be available under wp.editPost.PluginSidebar.

Grzegorz Ziółkowski

This release, like the others before it, has a changelog that’s a mile long. Please check out the release post for a detailed list of changes and links to issues on GitHub.

The WordPress Accessibility team is seeking contributors for its handbook project. It’s a collection of tips, resources, tools, and best practices. The goal is to educate users through summaries, articles, and reference materials.

The handbook was created after the accessibility team repeatedly noticed the same accessibility issues cropping up and not having a central place to send people to learn about them.

The team is looking for people to review articles, discover resources to add to the handbook, and suggest topics to cover. If you’re interested in contributing, please join the #accessibility-docs channel on Slack where you can ask questions and learn more about the project.

Also, consider following WPAccessibility on Twitter to keep tabs on team projects and links to resources.

The BuddyPress development team has released Beta 2 of BuddyPress 3.0. BuddyPress 3.0 is a major release that contains some significant changes. A new template pack called Nouveau will replace the bp-legacy template packs introduced in BuddyPress 1.7.

The new template pack has been refactored to be semantic, accessible, and use a new set of markup files. Loops, members, and activity areas now run under Backbone to provide a smoother experience. JavaScript has been rewritten to be more modular and have better structure.

BuddyPress 3.0 Customizer Options

BuddyPress 3.0 utilizes the Customizer by providing options to manipulate the Nouveau template pack or the site itself. For example, you can modify a user’s navigation options from the frontend. There’s also an option to adjust the number of columns for the Members loop.

There are 138 tickets closed in this release. In addition to what’s noted above, 3.0 will remove support for WordPress 4.3 and below and BuddyPress functions for bbPress 1.x forums will be deprecated.

Considering the scope and breadth of changes in 3.0, users are highly encouraged to test BuddyPress 3.0 Beta 2. If you encounter any issues, please report them in the Troubleshooting and How-to section of the support forums.

A couple years ago I was given possibly the biggest gift the WordPress community has ever given me. The organizers of WordCamp Pune called me to speak, and the community sent me. It was an amazing experience that changed my life.

While I was there I met Mahangu Weerasinghe, a wonderful man from Sri Lanka. He spoke about things that really really resonated with me. His talk was about linguistic accessibility to the Internet in Southeast Asia. Many people told me that English is enough to communicate to all of India, but Mahangu pointed out that MILLIONS of people in Southeast Asia cannot read or understand a single language on the web, let alone English.

WordPress can change that, and that’s where WordPress really matters.  It’s wonderful that people around the world can make a living with it, and it’s wonderful that it gives creative outlet to so many, but important that WordPress can give global voice to those who have none.

Mahangu felt for a long time that he had no voice. WordPress changed that for him, and now he’s using WordPress to change that for everyone.  He’s been hugely inspirational to me, and I hope he is for you as well.

Breaking the Silence

The post Where WordPress REALLY Matters appeared first on HeroPress.

You probably haven’t thought much about beer cans, Abstract Aluminum Space, the Midwest Premium, and how it all ties into Goldman Sachs, so you should read how the Goldman Sachs aluminum conspiracy lawsuit is over.

It’s with a huge amount of pleasure and excitement that we’re announcing the Beta 2 release of BP 3.0 today ready for testing and feedback.

BuddyPress 3.0 will be a major milestone release for us and one we’re all really excited about, it’s been a long time coming but finally we are close to releasing the first template pack for BP, this is a completely new ‘theme’ or set of template files and functionality designed to replace bp-legacy which has served us so well since it’s inception way back in the major release of 1.7 where we introduced ‘Theme Compatibility’, and we’re all really eager for any feedback during these beta phases you may grab a copy of our beta1 release here to test with.

Nouveau – as our new template pack has been named – provides an all new clean set of markup files, refactored from the ground up to be semantic and accessible. Styles are re-written and provided as Sass partials for developers if wanting to build out new packs. A lot of core functionality for components has been re-written and re-located to be sourced from include files by component in the template directory which allows even easier access to modify functions by overloading to a new theme or child theme. Our major loops, members, activity etc have been re-factored to run under Backbone for a smooth Ajax experience and indeed all the Javascript functionality is re-written to be far more modular than it was before and has a far better modern feel to it’s structuring.

For the first time we have brought in the Customizer to provide user option choices and a range of layout configurations may be selected. In our initial offering we have provided various layout options for the main BP navigation elements allowing for vertical navs or horizontal, tab effect where suitable. for the component loops such as members, Groups we provide an option to display in a grid layout & at row quantity options or simply as a flat classic list layout.

While we are really excited about Nouveau 3.0 also has many other improvements to offer and you can view a list of all closed tickets for 3.0

As always your feedback and testing is an invaluable part of our releases, helping us to catch any last minute bugs.
You can download the beta release for testing at downloads.wordpress.org and install on a local copy of WordPress ( please remember this is a beta release and should not be run on an active production site). Any issues found can be reported on our Trac by creating a new ticket

If you’re a developer comfortable with SVN you might like to checkout a development copy which you can do from this link patches can be submitted to existing tickets or issues found reported on a new ticket.

Further guidance on contributing to BuddyPress is covered on our Contributor guidelines page in our Codex

Last week, I had the pleasure of joining Michael Fienen and Aaron Hill, hosts of the Drunken UX podcast, to discuss Gutenberg. We covered a lot of topics, including, why Gutenberg was created, our experiences, its timeline, pros, cons, resources, our biggest concerns, and what developers and freelancers need to know.

The show is one hour and thirty minutes in length. By the way, please don’t criticize my drink of choice.

#8: Sweet Home Automattic, Where We Use Gutenberg

The plugin review team has amended guideline number nine which states, developers and their plugins must not do anything illegal, dishonest, or morally offensive, to include the following statement:

• Implying that a plugin can create, provide, automate, or guarantee legal compliance

Mika Epstein, a member of the WordPress.org plugin review team, says the change was made because plugins by themselves can not provide legal compliance.

Sadly, no plugin in and of itself can provide legal compliance. While a plugin can certainly assist in automating the steps on a compliance journey, or allow you to develop a workflow to solve the situation, they cannot protect a site administrator from mistakes or lack of compliance, nor can they protect site users from incorrect or incomplete legal compliance on the part of the web site.

Mika Epstein

Since sites can have any combination of WordPress plugins and themes activated, it’s nearly impossible for a single plugin to make sure they’re 100% legally compliant.

Plugin developers affected by this change will be contacted by the review team and be asked to change their titles, descriptions, plugin header images, and or the text within the readme.

Instead of claiming compliance, the team has published a frequently asked questions document that recommends plugin authors explain how the plugin will assist in compliance. If you have any questions, please leave a comment on the announcement post.

Welcome to the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and via RSS for your favorite podcatcher. Post Status Draft is hosted by Brian Krogsgard and co-host Brian Richards.

In this episode, the two Brians discuss the current conversations and controversy surrounding data collection and visitor privacy on the web. The duo dig in to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and what it means for you both as site visitors and site owners and, in particular, how WordPress core and plugin authors are (or should be) responding to the new regulation. It’s a pretty deep topic with many implications and ramifications. Be sure to follow the episode links, too, so that you can be best informed and prepared for when GDPR goes into effect on May 25, 2018.

Links

• CJR report on understanding the General Data Protection Regulation
• Core’s roadmap for GDPR compliance
• Trac issues related to GDPR
• Pagely’s GDPR guide
• Heather Burns’ detailed GDPR analysis in Smashing Magazine

Sponsor: Valet

This episode is sponsored by Valet. Valet helps keep your clients happy & coming back. They offer expert services and keep the websites they manage functioning flawlessly. They offer preventative care that provides peace of mind around the clock. For more information, check out their website and thank you to Valet for being a Post Status partner.

From Bertrand Russell’s A Conquest of Happiness.

It is very singular how little men seem to realize that they are not caught in the grip of a mechanism from which there is no escape, but that the treadmill is one upon which they remain merely because they have not noticed that it fails to take them up to a higher level.

He also says later, “There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.”

GDPR compliance is an important consideration for all WordPress websites. The GDPR Compliance team is looking for help to test the privacy tools that are currently being developed in core.

What is GDPR?

GDPR stands for General Data Protection Regulation and is intended to strengthen and unify data protection for all individuals within the European Union. Its primary aim is to give control back to the EU residents over their personal data.

Why the urgency? Although the GDPR was introduced two years ago, it becomes  enforceable starting May 25, 2018.

Make WordPress GDPR Compliance Team

Currently, the GDPR Compliance Team understands that helping WordPress-based sites become compliant is a large and ongoing task. The team is focusing on creating a comprehensive core policy, plugin guidelines, privacy tools and documentation. All of this requires your help.

The GDPR Compliance Team is focusing on four main areas:

• Add functionality to assist site owners in creating comprehensive privacy policies for their websites.
• Create guidelines for plugins to become GDPR ready.
• Add administration tools to facilitate compliance and encourage user privacy in general.
• Add documentation to educate site owners on privacy, the main GDPR compliance requirements, and on how to use the new privacy tools.

Don’t we already have a privacy policy?

Yes and no. That said, The GDPR puts tighter guidelines and restrictions. Though we have many plugins that create privacy pages, we need means to generate a unified, comprehensive privacy policy. We will need tools for users to easily come into compliance.

Site owners will be able to create GDPR compliant privacy policy in three steps:

1. Adding a dedicated page for the policy.
   
2. Adding privacy information from plugins.
3. Reviewing and publishing the policy.

A new “postbox” will be added to the Edit Page screen when editing the policy. All plugins that collect or store user data will be able to add privacy information there. In addition it will alert the site owners when any privacy information changes after a plugin is activated, deactivated, or updated.

There is a new functionality to confirm user requests by email address. It is intended for site owners to be able to verify requests from users for displaying, downloading, or anonymizing of personal data.

A new “Privacy” page is added under the “Tools” menu. It will display new, confirmed requests from users, as well as already fulfilled requests. It will also contain the tools for exporting and anonymizing of personal data and for requesting email confirmation to avoid abuse attempts.

New section on privacy will be added to the Plugin Handbook. It will contain some general information on user privacy, what a plugin should do to be compliant, and also tips and examples on how to use the new privacy related functionality in WordPress.

The new privacy tools are scheduled for release at the end of April or beginning of May 2018.

How can you get involved?

We would love to have your help. The first step is awareness and education. For more information about the upcoming privacy tools see the roadmap.

If you would like to get involved in building WordPress Core and testing the new privacy tools, please join the #gdpr-compliance channel in the Make WordPress Slack group.

In this episode, John James Jacoby and I start the show by sharing our thoughts on Mark Zuckberberg’s congressional hearing. We then discuss what’s new in Gutenberg 2.6 and describe our user experience. We let you know what’s in WooCommerce 3.3.5 and discuss what the development team is doing to prepare for GDPR compliance.

Stories Discussed:

Gutenberg 2.6 Introduces Drag and Drop Block Sorting
Theme Review Changes Place More Onus Onto Theme Authors
WordPress Accessibility Statement
WooCommerce 3.3.5 Released
How WooCommerce is tackling GDPR

Picks of the Week:

AtomBlocks by Mike McAlister

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Listen To Episode #312:

This week’s throwback essay is titled “I don’t know anything, and that’s ok“. It was written back in 2015 by my friend Kyle. He and I grew up in similar circumstances; far from a hub of civilization, in a relatively economically depressed area, without the best education opportunities.

Yet he and I both managed to find the web, dive in, and find home. We support our families and find joy in the work we produce. I’m not sure there’s a better way to live than that.

Check out Kyle’s essay and let him know what you think.

I Don’t Know Anything and That’s OK

The post Growing Up Rural appeared first on HeroPress.

The WordPress Theme Review team has implemented changes that simplify the process and places more responsibility onto theme authors. Theme reviewers now only need to check the following items to pass a theme.

• Licensing
• Malicious or egregious stuff
• Content Creation
• Security

Although the bar to pass a theme is significantly lower, theme authors are still expected to follow the required and recommended requirements listed in the theme handbook.

Moderators will check themes after they’ve gone live to make sure the author is following guidelines. If a moderator discovers any issues, a request will be made to the theme author to correct them. Failure to do so could lead to a temporary or permanent suspension.

Justin Tadlock clarified in the comments examples of egregious issues.

• Illegal
• Dishonest
• Morally offensive
• PHP Errors

In the past two years, The Theme Review Team has battled the theme review queue with moderate success. In early 2017, the number of themes in the queue dropped below 200. Although there has been some work on automating the process, it’s largely reliant on humans.

Even though it hasn’t been updated in more than a year, theme authors are highly encouraged to use the Theme Check plugin before submitting themes for review.

With a simplified process to get a theme live, reviewers are hoping it will free them up to focus on larger projects.

Gutenberg 2.6 is available for download and with it, comes a new way of sorting blocks. In addition to using up and down arrows, this version introduces the ability to sort blocks by dragging and dropping.

If you hover the cursor over the up and down arrows on the left side of a block, you’ll see a hand icon. Simply click, hold, and drag the block up or down below or above the blue indicator.

In my limited testing, I found drag and drop to be hit or miss. Sometimes, when I try to drag and drop a block, the blue line doesn’t show up.

The hand icon for the cursor is different for the top and bottom of the block. You can drag a block by hovering over the bottom of it but you can’t do it from the top.

Hovering the cursor at the top of the block Hovering the cursor at the bottom of the block

I also found it difficult to add a new block manually. For example, when I add a paragraph block, I don’t see the Plus icon to create a new block underneath it anymore.

Pressing enter at the end of a paragraph creates a new Paragraph block automatically. But I don’t know how to transform it into an image block. I’ll need to do more testing to figure out what’s going on.

There’s a host of other improvements and bug fixes in this release, some of which I covered in this post. 
. 

Welcome to the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and via RSS for your favorite podcatcher. Post Status Draft is hosted by Brian Krogsgard and co-host Brian Richards.

In this episode, Brian and Brian discuss a variety of news topics spanning design, development, and business. Tune in to learn about the history of WordPress and the web, the newest TechCrunch redesign, a WordCamp for WordCamp organizers, and more.

Links

• Leaky Paywall
• 2018 Design in Tech report
• Gutenberg Development Course
• TechCrunch redesign
• WordPress turns 15, via History of the Web
• Proposal for a WordCamp for WordCamp organizers 

Sponsor: Gravity Forms

Gravity Forms makes the best web forms on the planet. Over a million WordPress sites are already using Gravity Forms. Is yours? Thanks to Gravity Forms for being a Post Status partner.

Not long after I published my experience with Gutenberg, developers reached out to me to work on some of the issues I mentioned. Riad Benguella figured out why meta boxes were not collapsing or expanding.

It turns out that some meta boxes depend on the post script which has a side effect of calling the window.postboxes.add_postbox_toggles( postType ) twice, causing meta boxes to break.

Gutenberg 2.6 released earlier this week, fixes the issue and all meta boxes function properly again. This also fixes the issue I had with the Telegram for WordPress plugin.

Public Post Preview still doesn’t work in Gutenberg but the plugin’s developer, Dominik Schilling, shared some experiments he has conducted with adding support for Gutenberg on Twitter.

Can't wait for seeing Gutenberg in WordPress core. So many new possibilities. Even for Public Post Preview (https://t.co/Xsw9hugxKT). With just a few lines I was able to create this: pic.twitter.com/fxyuBIMPOl

— Dominik Schilling (@ocean90) April 1, 2018

In the preview video, you can see Public Post Preview’s options added to the sidebar and in addition to generating a link, you can choose when that URL expires which is better than what’s currently available in the plugin.

I mentioned how Tags would sometimes disappear and there overall behavior was inconsistent. This pull request that made it into Gutenberg 2.6, fixes the issue by only including the term in the Tag selector if it’s known.

Although I’m still bummed that certain plugins are not yet compatible with Gutenberg, I’m pretty happy that two of the major pain points I experienced have been fixed. Thanks to Riad, Tammie Lister, and others for helping to solve these problems so quickly.

Last year, Drew Jaynes and Carol Stambaugh proposed a new WordCamp event geared towards organizers to the WordPress Community Team. After fleshing out the details and discussing the idea over the course of seven months, the duo has announced that a WordCamp for Organizers is officially on the table.

The goal of the event is to provide an opportunity for meetup and WordPress event organizers to share their experience with others in the community. The plan is to host a one-day event a day or two before WordCamp US in Nashville, TN, later this year.

“The idea for WordCamp for Organizers – what some of us affectionately refer to as ‘dotOrganize’ – was really borne out of many conversations I’ve had over the years with others in the WordPress community lamenting the lack of a ready knowledge sharing opportunity between event organizers,” Jaynes said.

“One common thread seemed to be the idea of common lessons learned, and how awesome it would be to just have an event for organizers to get together and swap tips and tricks.

“We’re all here organizing the same community, maybe we should get together and trade notes! And so we now have a new topic-based WordCamp just for organizers.

“It’s kind of meta – organizing a WordCamp for Organizers, but I really feel like this could be a boon for anybody currently organizing or looking to start organizing in WordPress. Exciting!”

Some of the session topics that could be presented on include:

• Spreading the word about your community events
• Tips for wrangling speakers, volunteers, and sponsors
• Conflict resolution among organizing teams
• How to respond to a code of conduct issue
• Finding and using official organizing tools and resources
  

The team is seeking volunteers who can spend 2-4 hours per week to help organize the event. Although it’s focused on organizers, those who have attended many conferences, including WordCamps, with little event organizing experience, are encouraged to join the team.

If you’re interested in volunteering, please leave a comment on the official announcement post.

Jetpack 6.0 is available for upgrade. It comes with improvements to the social media icons widget, enhanced brute force protection, and better compatibility between WooCommerce and Jetpack.

Its headlining features though are privacy related as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is set to go into effect May 25th. In 6.0, Jetpack has a dedicated privacy settings page that links to privacy documents and includes a way to opt-out of activity tracking.

These settings can be accessed by clicking the Privacy link at the bottom of the Jetpack Dashboard page.

Jetpack 6.0 Privacy Settings

The 'What Data Does Jetpack Sync' page outlines what data is used, how it's used, the relationship it has with the WordPress mobile apps, and provides an inside look at how Jetpack works.

These are the first steps towards GDPR compliance with more updates planned before the regulation goes into effect next month.

In this episode, John James Jacoby and I discuss a great article published by Caspar Hübinger on AMP and WordPress. We cover what’s new in WordPress 4.9.5, Jetpack 6.0, and a WordCamp geared toward organizers.

Stories Discussed:

WordPress 4.9.5 Squashes 25 Bugs
‘Try Gutenberg’ Prompt Pushed Back to A Later Release
Jetpack 6.0 Released
Code of Conduct Survey
Want to Help Organize a WordCamp for Organizers?

WPWeekly Meta:

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Listen To Episode #311:

In 2010 I was beginning to take on client work creating WordPress web sites when I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Ironically, at 43 years old I was more fit and healthy than I had ever been in my entire life. I had been running road marathons and trail ultra marathons for a few years leading up to my diagnosis. Good thing too, because surgery and treatment were obviously very tough.

I was transitioning my design studio from analog to digital. Previously, I was working as a professional artist and illustrator creating commission portraiture and college mascot illustrations with some moderate successes. My background is in Fine Art and Design. I studied Drawing, Sculpture, & Time Arts. (2D, 3D & 4D – 4D can be described as: Length, width, height, and time/ motion) Naturally, as a Time Arts artist/illustrator I love the web! I love designing for the web and mobile too. Web work is immediately gratifying. I do design for both the web and print but I have always felt drawn to the web as it is more accessible, more fluid, dynamic, interconnected, animated, media rich, and well … if you are reading this then you already get the picture.

To get through treatment it was important to me that I still work every day.

Some days it was just a couple hours in the afternoon but it really helped me to cope and endure unplanned surgery and many painful chemotherapy treatments. I had recently completed a couple of websites with the help of my mentor Jerry Turk. Those sites had good reach. I mean they were the kind of sites that groups of people used and managed so I got some attention for the work and word of mouth spread locally.

It was while getting through that period of treatment and the shock of a devastating diagnosis that my digital design agency really got legs. It could not have happened at a better time. So, my studio, C&D Studios – https://CandDStudios.com continued it’s move towards being 100% digital. No more analog photography and not much more drawing at the drawing table either. Now my work was nearly 100% focused on screens and it would also begin to pay the bills. That was eight years ago. I was very fortunate to learn using reliable frameworks, themes, plug-ins, and hosts that would also stand the test of time. Thank you Genesis Framework, StudioPress and Gravity Forms to name a few…

Fast forward to 2016 after having been cancer free all those years and cranking out a lot of agency work, I had a cancer reoccurrence. I never wanted cancer to be part of my story and I tried to deny or overcome it in all ways but it had resurfaced in October of 2016. Professionally, I was involved in collaborating on very large scale enterprise sites with teams. I was spending the year testing the waters at a new level of production. It was not good timing to require another surgery and 18 more rounds of chemotherapy. Fortunately, I found support in the community from other designers and developers whom helped me to the finish lines with 3 large projects in areas of e-commerce, college membership and enterprise site work -one with a large volume of SVG animations. After surgery, in February of 2017 I completed 18 rounds of chemotherapy treatments.

I have survived and am cancer free once again!

While going through treatment the second time I was not really focused on what good thing will I be able to grow towards professionally. Honestly, when you go through these things in life – you just spend your energy getting through as best as you can. I think it is worth noting here that while a positive attitude is great and it can improve a patient’s overall experience. Please don’t tell people they will survive cancer because of their positive attitude. Cancer is horrible, it does not discriminate and when people can’t beat a disease with their mental attitude they end up blaming themselves unnecessarily. That is not good. That is not what people intend when then try to offer support in that way but that is something I wanted to share.

Now I have landed on the other side of treatment again and as I reflect, it’s been a really epic year! Our WordPress community has been open and supportive, welcoming me at conferences, online, and in slack groups, whether I had hair, energy, or resources – always welcoming and always encouraging. Over the years I have made some wonderful friends through WordPress! Some of us have been at this for a long time and we now have many shared experiences and skills.

Having Survived Again I’m Launching a WordPress Product

Having survived again, and having been inspired at PressNomics in Tempe last spring, I’m busy launching a mobile product/service with my team Dr. Kendra Remington and Rita Best called Docs With Apps.

I still accept some client work, and some retainer work but I’m pretty selective about the projects we work on “in house.”

I love SVG animation work so in 2018 I’m overjoyed to be doing more contracted SVG animation work with my collaborator Jackie D’Elia. Hit us up!!

These are some very wonderful times in technology and within the Internet of things. I feel very grateful to have been able to ride the digital wave into the present and future. At WCUS in Nashville I began the process of contributing to make WordPress after having spent many years empowering others with it.

When I was young I needed a way to get my portfolio on line and that is how I got started. Thank you for the opportunity to share my story, to publicly thank my husband Dominic, my family, and friends too. The future is going to be awesome!

Take care of yourself and of each other, it’s very important.

The post The Year I Got Cancer Was The Year My WordPress Business Took Off appeared first on HeroPress.

WordPress 4.9.5 is available for download and is a maintenance and security release. WordPress 4.9.4 and earlier versions are affected by three security issues. The following security hardening changes are in 4.9.5.

• Localhost is no longer treated as the same host by default.
  
• Safe redirects are used when redirecting the login page if SSL is forced.
• Versions strings are correctly escaped for use in generator tags.

Twenty-five bugs are fixed in this release including, improve compatibility with PHP 7.2, previous styles on caption shortcodes are restored, and clearer error messages. To see a full list of changes along with their associated trac tickets, check out the detailed release post.

WordPress 4.9.5 is now available. This is a security and maintenance release for all versions since WordPress 3.7. We strongly encourage you to update your sites immediately.

WordPress versions 4.9.4 and earlier are affected by three security issues. As part of the core team's ongoing commitment to security hardening, the following fixes have been implemented in 4.9.5:

1. Don't treat localhost as same host by default.
2. Use safe redirects when redirecting the login page if SSL is forced.
3. Make sure the version string is correctly escaped for use in generator tags.

Thank you to the reporters of these issues for practicing coordinated security disclosure: xknown of the WordPress Security Team, Nitin Venkatesh (nitstorm), and Garth Mortensen of the WordPress Security Team.

Twenty-five other bugs were fixed in WordPress 4.9.5. Particularly of note were:

• The previous styles on caption shortcodes have been restored.
• Cropping on touch screen devices is now supported.
• A variety of strings such as error messages have been updated for better clarity.
• The position of an attachment placeholder during uploads has been fixed.
• Custom nonce functionality in the REST API JavaScript client has been made consistent throughout the code base.
• Improved compatibility with PHP 7.2.

This post has more information about all of the issues fixed in 4.9.5 if you'd like to learn more.

Download WordPress 4.9.5 or venture over to Dashboard → Updates and click "Update Now." Sites that support automatic background updates are already beginning to update automatically.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to WordPress 4.9.5:

1265578519, Aaron Jorbin, Adam Silverstein, Alain Schlesser, alexgso, Andrea Fercia, andrei0x309, antipole, Anwer AR, Birgir Erlendsson (birgire), Blair jersyer, Brooke., Chetan Prajapati, codegrau, conner_bw, David A. Kennedy, designsimply, Dion Hulse, Dominik Schilling (ocean90), ElectricFeet, ericmeyer, FPCSJames, Garrett Hyder, Gary Pendergast, Gennady Kovshenin, Henry Wright, Jb Audras, Jeffrey Paul, Jip Moors, Joe McGill, Joen Asmussen, John Blackbourn, johnpgreen, Junaid Ahmed, kristastevens, Konstantin Obenland, Laken Hafner, Lance Willett, leemon, Mel Choyce, Mike Schroder, mrmadhat, nandorsky, Nidhi Jain, Pascal Birchler, qcmiao, Rachel Baker, Rachel Peter, RavanH, Samuel Wood (Otto), Sebastien SERRE, Sergey Biryukov, Shital Marakana, Stephen Edgar, Tammie Lister, Thomas Vitale, Will Kwon, and Yahil Madakiya.

Last week, we reported that WordPress 4.9.5 would ship with a call-out prompt that asks users if they want to try the new editor experience.

Within the comments of the post, Gary Pendergast, who works for Automattic, is a WordPress core contributor, and a lead developer on the Gutenberg project, informed us that the prompt would not be in WordPress 4.9.5. Instead, it will ship in a later version once it has gone through a few more refinements.

Change of plans, this won’t be happening in the 4.9.5 release: there are still a few issues we’d like to fix up the callout happens, they won’t be done in time for the 4.9.5 release. I expect there will be a smaller 4.9.6 release that contains this callout, and any bugfixes that happen to be ready.

Gary Pendergast

Reverting the call-out has extended the conversation surrounding its implementation. Jadon N who works for InMotion hosting and is a contributor to the #hosting-community slack channel, says the hosting-community group is working on ideas to help test popular plugins for Gutenberg compatibility.

We have been working to expand our collection of data about how well plugins function with Gutenberg. To help with that effort, we would like to explore using feedback collected from WordPress users through the Try Gutenberg effort to add to the existing database on WordPress plugin compatibility if that could be worked out.

The goal of this project is to make sure everyone can use Gutenberg without having to worry about plugin incompatibilities.

Jadon N

The Gutenberg Plugin Compatibility Database project launched by Daniel Bachhuber last month attempts to determine which popular plugins are already compatible with Gutenberg by having volunteers test them in a sandboxed environment.

Out of the 4,213 plugins in the database, 84% have an unknown compatibility status. Out of 610 plugins that have been tested, 82% don't include editor functionality.

Pendergast supports the idea of hosts collecting a wide range of testing data and turning it into actionable items for the team to work on. There's also been some discussion on creating snapshots of plugin compatibility and filtering those results into Bachhuber's project.

Chris Lema, Vice President of Products at LiquidWeb, responded in the trac ticket with a suggestion that the team place as much emphasis on the Learn More and Report Issues sections as the Try Gutenberg message. He also added a prototype screenshot of what the call-out could look like.

Gutenberg Call Out Prototype by Chris Lema

"The reality is that people don't read a lot, so people may not fully grasp the 'testing' part given the proposed design," Lema said. "When there are equal weight to the design, the message also carries with it the same equality."

One of the best suggestions I've read comes from Bachhuber. He suggests displaying the prompt to a small percentage of WordPress sites to prevent thousands of users from re-reporting known issues with Gutenberg. It would also help lessen the load on the support forums.

One of my main concerns with the call-out is the lack of upfront information to the user that it is beta software and it could cause adverse affects on their site. Lema's prototype does a great job of informing the user of this possibility and a link to known issues is a great enhancement. What do you think?

There was a beautiful poem by Kayo Chingonyi in the New York Magazine this week titled The Nod:

When we’re strangers that pass each other
in the street, it will come down to this tilt
of the head — acknowledging another
version of events set in a new-build
years from now, a mess of a place filled
with books and records, our kids thick as thieves
redefining all notions of mischief.

Perhaps our paths will cross in a city
of seven hills as the light draws your face
out from the bliss of anonymity.
Maybe you’ll be stroking the goose-down nape
of a small child with eyes the exact shade
of those I met across a room at the start
of this pain-in-the-heart, this febrile dance.

When I hear "seven hills" my mind immediately goes to Rome, then San Francisco, but Wikipedia has a helpful list of cities that claim to be built on seven hills.

A friend pointed out The Nod is a fine complement to The Invitation by Oriah Mountain Dreamer.

Welcome to the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and via RSS for your favorite podcatcher. Post Status Draft is hosted by Brian Krogsgard and co-host Brian Richards.

In this episode, the dynamic Brian duo discuss the highly-anticipated return of WordSesh, the different ways in which we all learn the same, and some of the problems we face in skill building. The guys also spend time finding and contacting the addressable market around WordPress, characterizing a business as WordPress-focused vs providing WordPress services in the context of a broader market, and some of the nuances of providing contextualized services (whether they be training, consulting, or otherwise).

Links

• New human organ
• WordSesh.com
• WPSessions.com

Sponsor: OptinMonster

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With a significant new milestone and some great improvements to WordPress as a platform, this month has been an important one for the project. Read on to find out more about what happened during the month of March.

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WordPress Now Powers 30% of the Internet

Over the last 15 years, the popularity and usage of WordPress has been steadily growing. That growth hit a significant milestone this month when W3Techs reported that WordPress now powers over 30% of sites on the web.

The percentage is determined based on W3Techs’ review of the top 10 million sites on the web, and it’s a strong indicator of the popularity and flexibility of WordPress as a platform.

If you would like to have hand in helping to grow WordPress even further, you can get involved today.

WordPress Jargon Glossary Goes Live

The WordPress Marketing Team has been hard at work lately putting together a comprehensive glossary of WordPress jargon to help newcomers to the project become more easily acquainted with things.

The glossary is available here along with a downloadable PDF to make it simpler to reference offline.

Publishing this resource is part of an overall effort to make WordPress more easily accessible for people who are not so familiar with the project. If you would like to assist the Marketing Team with this, you can follow the team blog and join the #marketing channel in the Making WordPress Slack group.

Focusing on Privacy in WordPress

Online privacy has been in the news this month for all the wrong reasons. It has reinforced the commitment of the GDPR Compliance Team to continue working on enhancements to WordPress core that allow site owners to improve privacy standards.

The team's work, and the wider privacy project, spans four areas: Adding tools which will allow site administrators to collect the information they need about their sites, examining the plugin guidelines with privacy in mind, enhancing privacy standards in WordPress core, and creating documentation focused on best practices in online privacy.

To get involved with the project, you can view the roadmap, follow the updates, submit patches, and join the #gdpr-compliance channel in the Making WordPress Slack group. Office hours are 15:00 UTC on Wednesdays.

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Further Reading:

• The WordPress Foundation has published their annual report for 2017 showing just how much the community has grown over the last year.
• The dates for WordCamp US have been announced — this flagship WordCamp event will be held on 7-9 December this year in Nashville, Tennessee.
• WordPress 4.9.5 is due for release on April 3 — find out more here.
• Version 2.5 of Gutenberg, the new editor for WordPress core, was released this month with a host of great improvements.
• WordSesh, a virtual WordPress conference, is returning in July this year.

If you have a story we should consider including in the next “Month in WordPress” post, please submit it here.

In this episode, John James Jacoby and I discuss the news of the week including, the removal of offensive lyrics in Hello Dolly, a request for plugin developers to stop supporting legacy PHP versions, and changes coming in WordPress 4.9.5.

We also talk about community management, the difference between comments and forums, and finally, John shares his concerns on how the Gutenberg call-out prompt is being built into core.

Stories Discussed:

A Plea For Plugin Developers to Stop Supporting Legacy PHP Versions
Without Context, Some Lyrics Inside the Hello Dolly Plugin Are Degrading to Women
Why Gutenberg and Why Now?
Noteworthy Changes Coming in WordPress 4.9.5
In WordPress 4.9.5, Users Will Be Two Clicks Away From Installing and Activating Gutenberg From the Dashboard

Picks of the Week:

How to Disable Push Notification Requests in Firefox

Facebook Container Add-on for Firefox

WPWeekly Meta:

Next Episode: Wednesday, April 4th 3:00 P.M. Eastern

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Listen To Episode #310:

Ive used Gutenberg for several months and during that time, there have been moments where I love it and situations where I've had to disable the plugin because of frustrating bugs.

One of the most frustrating aspects of using Gutenberg is the lack of support from the plugins I depend on.

Publish Post Preview

I use the Publish Post Preview plugin to generate a preview link for posts so that people can see what it looks like before it's published.

Publish Preview Checkbox in the Current Editor

In the current editor, the checkbox to generate a link is in the Publish meta box. In Gutenberg, that option doesn't exist. According to a recent support forum post, the author does not plan on making it Gutenberg compatible until there is a finalized API to extend the sidebar.

Telegram for WordPress

We use the Telegram for WordPress plugin to automatically send published posts to our Telegram channel. The plugin adds a meta box that has options to send the post, configure the message structure, send a file, and display the featured image.

In Gutenberg, the meta box is open by default which provides access to those options. However, when I edit a published post, there are times when the meta box is closed and clicking the arrow to expand it doesn't work. Since the Send this post to channel option is on by default, saving changes to the post will resend the post to Telegram subscribers. Something I don't want to happen for simple edits.

Edit Flow

We use Edit Flow to collaborate on posts and often use the Editorial Comments feature to provide feedback. In Gutenberg, the meta boxes for Editorial Comments and Notifications do not open when clicking the arrow. Therefor, we can't use those features.

Edit Flow Meta Boxes are Broken

After the Deadline

I'm a fan of After the Deadline which is a proofreading module in Jetpack. It checks posts for spelling, grammar, and misused words. When activated, a button is added to the visual editor to perform the checks. This button is not available in Gutenberg, so those features are not available as well.

Adding Images to Paragraphs is a Pain

Adding images to paragraphs in Gutenberg is more cumbersome than it needs to be. In the current editor, all I have to do is place the cursor where I want to insert an image, add media, choose image size, align it, and I'm done.

In Gutenberg, you need to create an image block below the paragraph block, move the image block to the paragraph block, align it, and use handlebars on the corner of the image to resize it.

I realize that there are a few workflows that I'm going to have to change because of how Gutenberg works, but this workflow doesn't make any sense to me, especially when I can't insert images without creating a new block. Thankfully, the Gutenberg team is on top of it and is working on a solution to add images within a paragraph block.

Random Blank Paragraph Blocks

I recently copied a large amount of text from a Google Doc and pasted it into Gutenberg and was surprised by how well it worked. Blocks were created in the right spots and I didn't have to edit it much.

I opened the post in the classic editor so that I could use the proofreading feature and it mangled the post. I opened the post in Gutenberg again and noticed a bunch of empty paragraph blocks created in-between paragraph blocks.

This resulted in having to spend some time deleting the empty paragraph blocks and questioning whether I should avoid transferring posts between editors in the future.

Tags Sometimes Appear Blank in the Meta Box

When adding tags to posts, sometimes the tags appear blank although they show up on the front-end. Also, deleting tags sometimes doesn't work. I click on the X and nothing happens in the back-end, but the tag will be removed from the front-end.

Blank Tags in Gutenberg

Gutenberg Has a Lot of Rough Edges

If this version of Gutenberg were merged into WordPress today, it would be a disaster. It's clear that the project has a long way to go before being considered for merge into core. Most of the issues I've outlined in this post are known and are being addressed. 

Gutenberg is supposed to make everything we do in the current editor easier and more efficient. If it doesn't, then I have to ask, what's the point?

What concerns me the most about Gutenberg is plugin support. Some of the plugins I mentioned above are active on 10K sites or less but are important to the way I craft and publish content in WordPress.

Without them, using Gutenberg is not a great experience and instead, makes me want to use the current editor where things simply work.