Summary of discussions
What’s Been Happening in the WordPress World Last Month
- Stack Overflow Jobs Data Shows ReactJS Skills in High Demand, WordPress Market Oversaturated with Developers – https://wptavern.com/stack-overflow-jobs-data-shows-reactjs-skills-in-high-demand-wordpress-market-oversaturated-with-developers – We’re not too convinced with the stats surrounding WordPress, but it’s interesting never the less. The reality is that there are a lot of people around working with WordPress, although in our experience there are very few skilled WordPress Developers. There are many ways to build WordPress websites, many bad practices around with a core set of solid principles to build solid WordPress websites.
- Following on from above, the annual StackOverflow Developer Survey is always an interesting read for those interested in the skills within the general web and software development markets, https://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017#most-popular-technologies
- Google Launches Invisible reCAPTCHA – https://wptavern.com/google-launches-invisible-recaptcha – Everyone hates these, but the reality is that they do significantly help reduce spam and in some cases even completely stop spam altogether. You can download the WordPress Plugin for this here, https://wordpress.org/plugins/invisible-recaptcha/
- Google is Retiring Its Adsense for WordPress Plugin in May 2017 – https://wptavern.com/google-is-retiring-its-adsense-for-wordpress-plugin-in-may-2017 – Information for anyone using this on their WordPress website to monetise their blogging activities
- WordPress.com Releases Chrome Add-On for Google Docs – https://wptavern.com/wordpress-com-releases-chrome-add-on-for-google-docs – This is serious cool. Essentially you can write on Google Docs and publish straight to WordPress as a Draft blog post. So no more copying and pasting between documents when you’re writing elsewhere prior to uploading to your WordPress website. This is only for WordPress.com at the moment, so it will be interesting to see when this comes out for self-hosted WordPress installations.
- WordPress 4.7.3 Patches Six Security Vulnerabilities, Immediate Update Advised – https://wptavern.com/wordpress-4-7-3-patches-six-security-vulnerabilities-immediate-update-advised – As always, keep your WordPress website up to date and secure at all times to minimise the risk of being hacked
- WooCommerce 3.0 has launched with a bunch of new features – https://wptavern.com/woocommerce-3-0-brings-major-improvements-to-product-gallery-introduces-crud-classes-and-a-new-cli
- Blog in a Box Project Integrates WordPress with Raspberry Pi – https://wptavern.com/blog-in-a-box-project-integrates-wordpress-with-raspberry-pi – A bit of a random piece of news, but this just goes to show the power and flexibility of projects like WordPress and the Raspberry Pi – Have a go at building this yourself if you have a bit of time on your hands, it would be great to see someone build this and bring it along to one of the future BeeWUG events – https://inabox.blog/
- WordPress App for Android Adds Better Support for Jetpack-Enabled Sites – https://wptavern.com/wordpress-app-for-android-adds-better-support-for-jetpack-enabled-sites
- Community Team Releases Plugin That Displays WordPress Events Nearby – https://wptavern.com/community-team-releases-plugin-that-displays-wordpress-events-nearby – This is quite handy and can be installed here as a Plugin – https://wordpress.org/plugins/nearby-wp-events/ – We’ve just installed this ourselves and it’s quite a handy little plugin. It only shows the data in the Admin Dashboard at the moment, so it would be great to see an option for displaying this on the front end of the website too.
- New WPstats.me Site Displays WordPress.org Plugin Download Stats – https://wptavern.com/new-wpstats-me-site-displays-wordpress-org-plugin-download-stats – Again for anyone who loves data, like me, this is seriously awesome. You can see the number of downloads for plugins in total and how this changes on a day by day basis which is such powerful data, have a play here, http://wpstats.me/?#plugin/wordpress-seo – To test any of the other 50,000 plugins from the WordPress Plugin directory, simply change the URL slug at the end and you’ll see data for that plugin instead. It would be great to see this same data for all of time which would show some really interesting trends over time too.
- Data From Theme Reviews Shows Authors Need More Education on Developing Secure WordPress Themes – https://wptavern.com/data-from-theme-reviews-shows-authors-need-more-education-on-developing-secure-wordpress-themes – This isn’t really any great surprise. In my personal experience, I deal with a lot of poorly built company WordPress websites that have been built extremely badly and need full re-builds. Hopefully this will change over time and sharing best practices within the WordPress and business community through events like BeeWUG and others are one step towards making this better for everyone.
- WordPress Relaunches Plugin Directory with New Design and Improved Search Algorithm – https://wptavern.com/wordpress-relaunches-plugin-directory-with-new-design-and-improved-search-algorithm – This should hopefully help you find the right plugins you are looking for. The old search functionality was extremely bad so it’s great to see this has been improved.
- PHP 5.6 Is Now the Most Widely Used PHP Version – https://wptavern.com/php-5-6-is-now-the-most-widely-used-php-version – This is a step in the right direction. The current version of PHP is 7.2 so there is still a long way to go, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP
- GoDaddy Acquires Sucuri – https://wptavern.com/godaddy-acquires-sucuri – Interesting…
- Foxhound Is the First REST API Powered Theme on WordPress.org – https://wptavern.com/foxhound-is-the-first-rest-api-powered-theme-on-wordpress-org – With the awesome REST API now available, we expect to see a lot more of this over the coming years as more people create much more dynamic websites using WordPress and even, dare I say, basic web applications.
- Adding Images to WordPress Sidebars Is About to Get a Lot Easier – https://wptavern.com/adding-images-to-wordpress-sidebars-is-about-to-get-a-lot-easier
- Yoast SEO 4.5 Urges Users to Upgrade to PHP 7 – https://wptavern.com/yoast-seo-4-5-urges-users-to-upgrade-to-php-7 – It’s good to see companies pushing this
- Display All Images Sizes Plugin – https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/display-all-image-sizes/ – This is a seriously handy plugin that I came across recently. By default when you upload images to WordPress, multiple versions of that image are created in varying sizes, so that your website doesn’t load a huge image for people accessing on mobile devices for example. Although quite annoyingly, it is remarkably difficult to find out what these varying images sizes actually are as width and height attributes as there is no standard. This handy little plugin will let you know what the various images sizes are and what the specific URL is for each of the image sizes. This is super handy as you may want to use a specific size for something.
- Finally, handy WordPress statistics for reference – https://wordpress.org/about/stats/
The next meetup is on Wednesday 3rd May, full details here, https://www.meetup.com/Blackburn-WordPress-Meetup/events/238835029/