WordPress is moving nicely with all the new jazz that makes it even better. Be it upcoming PHP 8 powering faster WordPress websites or building mobile apps of your WordPress powered course membership communities. This issue covers it all, including 2020 WordPress survey.
What’s Buzzing in WordPress 💖
- Freshly baked… BuddyBoss App service has launched allowing you to create your own Apple & Android apps for courses and membership communities on WordPress. The other new thing is the brand new header and footer builder in Astra theme and how it would work.
- Plugin Focus… Ultimate Dashboard 3.0 got a big feature bump with custom admin pages, login customizer, and white label settings. Typemarker is a new option to generate professional look reports in MainWP for maintenance care clients.
- LearnDash users… can look forward to 4 new Astra themes with course setup via LearnDash plugin. Also, noticed a new place to get LearnDash specific plugins and custom development.
Extended WordPress Buzz 🔥
- Core Updates… the latest WordPress 5.5.2 security and maintenance release auto-installed official theme and Akismet plugin. This goofup was fixed immediately in the follow up 5.5.3 update.
- Dev Focus… Kinsta hosting is now using the new wp_get_environment_type function to differentiate between live and staging WP installs. And, Chris Lema explores possible options of using WordPress with Amazon S3 service.
- Blocks Life… Rich Tabor’s proposal to improve Gutenberg block styles and transforms. While new Editor Plus 2.0 has added a lot of missing Gutenberg blocks into the plugin.
Quick Bits 👍
- New Gutenberg templates added to Astra theme directory.
- Yoast 15.2 update has added enhanced slack sharing feature.
- WPforms 1.6.3 added Divi module and email filter options.
- GiveWP Paypal Donations support card payments in free plugin.
- Billable Hours is a new podcast for WordPress agency owners.
- Is your WooCommerce store ready for Black Friday surge?
- Make sense of Google Core Web Vitals concept for WordPress.
- A possibility of adding dark mode to upcoming 2021 official theme.
- It’s 15th birthday of Akismet (500+ billion spam comments caught).
- Aligning WordPress release cycle with the industry standard.
- Official 2020 WordPress Annual Survey & view 2019 results.
[Looking Ahead] PHP 8 and WordPress 🏴
PHP 8 is making in-roads with various WordPress specific service providers. Siteground has made PHP8 available on their servers. Also, check the detailed report by Yoast on PHP8 and its compatibility with WordPress in general. Bottom line, this should make things faster and efficient in the long run.
