What’s Been Happening in the WordPress World Last Month
- WordPress 4.9 to Focus on Managing Plugins and Themes, Gutenberg Targeted for 5.0 – https://wptavern.com/wordpress-4-9-to-focus-on-managing-plugins-and-themes-gutenberg-targeted-for-5-0 with more details found about Gurenberg here, https://make.wordpress.org/core/2017/06/16/4-9-and-gutenberg/ and the plugin for testing Gutenberg can be found here if you want a play, https://wordpress.org/plugins/gutenberg/, and if you want to find out more about Gutenberg, have a read here, https://wptavern.com/why-gutenberg
- WordPress Marketing Team Launches Case Studies and Usage Survey for Agencies, Clients, and Enterprises – https://wptavern.com/wordpress-marketing-team-launches-case-studies-and-usage-survey-for-agencies-clients-and-enterprises – This is a really positive step forward to marketing WordPress as a platform
- WooCommerce Drops 50% Renewal Discount on Subscriptions – https://wptavern.com/woocommerce-drops-50-renewal-discount-on-subscriptions – Something to be aware of if you’re using WooCommerce Extensions which isn’t going down too well in the community
- WordPress 4.8 “Evans” Released Featuring Nearby WordPress Events, New Media Widgets, and Link Boundaries – https://wptavern.com/wordpress-4-8-evans-released-featuring-nearby-wordpress-events-new-media-widgets-and-link-boundaries – Great to see a few new members at the event this month as a direct result of the local WordPress meetup event being listed in the dashboard 🙂
- Holler Box: A Smart Notification Plugin for WordPress Websites – https://wptavern.com/holler-box-a-smart-notification-plugin-for-wordpress-websites – Handy little plugin. There are various different versions of plugins like this which can be found in the WordPress repository
- Gutenberg 0.2.0 Released, Adds New Custom HTML and Cover Image Blocks – https://wptavern.com/gutenberg-0-2-0-released-adds-new-custom-html-and-cover-image-blocks – This isn’t going down too well in the community and there have even been blog posts pleading not to make this part of WordPress Core. Time will tell. This type of page builder style technology is good and bad
- Popular WordPress Plugins Slow to Add Meta Box Support for Calypso – https://wptavern.com/popular-wordpress-plugins-slow-to-add-meta-box-support-for-calypso
- WooCommerce 3.1 Adds New CSV Product Importer/Exporter, Improves Extension Management – https://wptavern.com/woocommerce-3-1-adds-new-csv-product-importerexporter-improves-extension-management
- Create your own Street View imagery with new 360 cameras – https://www.blog.google/products/maps/create-your-own-street-view-imagery-new-360-cameras/
- Google have launched a Mobile Sites Certification – https://www.contradodigital.com/2017/06/08/weve-passed-googles-mobile-sites-certification/ – It’s worth running through the test if you want to learn more about mobile websites and technologies beyond the surface level. For the majority of WordPress users, most quality Themes will have a lot of this taken care of
- Recommended Themes and Plugins – https://beewug.uk/resources/recommended-wordpress-plugins-themes/ – The discussion came up again, so here is the information for reference
- Any ideas and feedback you would like to contribute to the WordPress world and community, get involved here, https://wordpress.org/support/forum/requests-and-feedback/ – Many of the features you see today are based on comments, discussions and generally getting involved with the WordPress community online
- Discussion around cacheing, quite a handy tip if you’re using Google Chrome to completely disable browser level cacheing, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5690269/disabling-chrome-cache-for-website-development and always consider additional cacheing levels at the WordPress level and the web server level that are quite likely impacting what you are seeing
- Handy tool for testing the speed of your website, https://tools.pingdom.com/ and optimising the content of your website to load faster
- A good responsive slider plugin if needed, http://soliloquywp.com/
- New image attribute for responsive websites for multiple devices, srcset, https://www.sitepoint.com/how-to-build-responsive-images-with-srcset/ – Many quality WordPress themes will implement this by default, others may not. Something to consider for making sure that smaller images are loaded on mobiles and larger images are loaded on larger screens such as laptops and desktop computers
- Imsanity Plugin to avoid people using your WordPress website uploading extremely large image sizes – https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/imsanity/ – A very handy plugin that I’m sure will come in handy for people.
The next meetup is on Wednesday 2nd August, full details here, https://www.meetup.com/Blackburn-WordPress-Meetup/