Roundup of WordPress ecosystem #4 – May 2017

There have been a lot of interesting things happening around the WordPress Community lately and we are now all curious about the WordPress 4.8 and this year’s Edition of WordCamp Europe.

Read about these topics and much more, on what happened around the WordPress ecosystem below.

News & Updates

Community News

At the end of this month, on May 27th, WordPress became 14-years old. This content management system has come to a long road to what it is today and tough it faced various challenges, it now powers 27% of the Internet.

Beyond the celebration, we have a major release that will happen soon, most probably before the WordCamp Europe. You will find more about this below.

Image source: Matt Mullenweg on ma.tt

New JavaScript Framework to be used in the WordPress Core

Another piece of worthy news is the new JavaScript Framework to be used in Core. This was announced by contributors that have recently started efforts at the regular core-js meetings. This will influence various products within the community that will be built and re-written.

The decisions regarding this new framework have not been made, so if you have experience with the implementation of JavaScript frameworks you should join their next meeting, after the WordCamp Europe’s Community Summit.

WordPress News

WordPress 4.7.5

First, we had a Security and Maintenance Release that came out on May 16th that fixed six security issues:

• an insufficient redirect validation in the HTTP class
• improper handling of post metadata values in the XML-RPC API
• lack of capability checks for post meta data in the XML-RPC API
• a CSRF vulnerability discovered in the filesystem credentials dialog.
• two XSS vulnerabilities related to the WordPress Customizer

WordPress 4.8

On May 13th, the core team has released the first beta version of the WordPress 4.8 and the final release is scheduled to happen on June 8th, before the WordCamp Europe.

This will be the first major release from this year and will focus on new features, such as

• new media widgets
• new and improved text widget
• new “WordPress Events  and News” dashboard widget
• improved link boundaries

The following steps in the release of WordPress 4.8 are the dry run and the 24 code freeze. Check out the complete roadmap on the Make WordPress Core.

WordPress Events

WordCamp Europe is only one week away. Ticket sales have ended and speakers have been announced long time ago. If you are attending this edition you can take a look closer at this year’s topics and mark down your favorite talks.

Also, we will attend the conference and would like to meet you around Les Docks de Paris. Reach us on Twitter or Instagram. There, we will keep everyone updated with news from our journey.

More than this, there is an active discussion about ideas for new types of WordCamp. Since WordCamp for Publishers has been announced to happen later this year, some community members are wondering what type of events would be interesting to develop further.

WordPress business

Around the business topic, we also gathered some interesting news, so read about them below.

• Weglot, the multilingual plugin closed $450K in seed funding from SIDE Capital – Co-founder Rémy Berda reports that there are now more than 10,000 websites using Weglot and the company has passed 30K€ in monthly revenue.
• Profile Builder, our WordPress profile plugin reached 1 million downloads – Read more about our journey, lessons learned and how we celebrated the milestone.
• Ionut Neagu share insights and lessons learned about his journey with ThemeIsle – This is a WordPress themes site that makes $50.000/month.
• How to Beat The Competition On The Envato Marketplace – Henry Rise, the CEO of ThemeRex and Power Elite Author is sharing his experience about how to make progress on Envato marketplace.

WordPress Resources

Beginner’s Guides & WordPress Tutorials

Here we start with a development topic, on How to Extend the WordPress Customizer. You can read about three main tools that will help you, namely plugins from WordPress.org, simple custom development and advanced custom development.

Other good ones are some tutorials from WPbeginner about:

• How to become a WordPress Core Contributor with one line of code – Contributing with code to the WordPress code can be a real challenge for a first-timer. Here you can find useful tips and tricks and Derrick Koo’s experience, starting with little knowledge of the Core and the result of his first Core props.
• How to Prevent Hotlinking in WordPress – In this tutorial, you will learn what hotlinking is, why it is bad, and how you can prevent the stealing of images or bandwidth on your WordPress site.
• Beginner’s Guide: Vital Security Tips for WordPress to Increase Your Website’s Safety – Learn how to back up your site regularly, keep the WordPress Core and your Plugins, and Themes Updated, install a good security plugin and much more.

Finally, I would want to recommend you another WordPress round-up article written by Capsicum MediaWorks with 101 great reasons why WordPress is the best Content Management System of 2017.

A lot of things happened around the ecosystem in May 2017 and we’re excited about the release of WordPress 4.8.  If you have anything else that you may think we missed or find it interesting, share your opinion below in comments section.

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