The WP Minute

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This is Malcolm Peralty here from PressTitan and this is The WP Minute, Episode 151

The most important news this week is the release of WordPress 5.1 nicknamed “Betty”. It comes with performance improvements and fixes to the block-based editor and adds the start of the new site health features. This release has much more polish than the 5.0 release and is, in my mind, ready for production use, so for those of you holding onto the 4.9 branch of WordPress, you should be safe to update at this point, but please test on a staging environment and have good backups before you do.

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This is Malcolm Peralty here from PressTitan and this is The WP Minute, Episode 150

I really love the idea that so many people are finding ways to customize Gutenberg blocks. Today I have a post by ThemeShaper that highlights how easy it is to create block styles or alternative CSS for a baked in block. This is something I want to experiment with as I think it could be very helpful for some of our clients to help quickly create design variations for different sections of a page, or different brands.

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This is Malcolm Peralty here from PressTitan and this is The WP Minute, Episode 149

The first thing I need to point out today is the latest WPWeekly podcast. It might seem strange to promote another podcast within a podcast, but in the three hundred and forty-fifth episode of WPWeekly, they talk about the relationship between corporate cash and open source. IT is a really fun discussion, started thanks to Morten Rand-Hendriksen, that gives opinions on how companies can move WordPress in the direction they want just by spending money to hire developers to contribute to core. It is definitely worth a listen.

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This is Malcolm Peralty here from PressTitan and this is The WP Minute, Episode 148

WPEKA has a post that covers the main reasons why you might run into a too many redirects error in WordPress and how to fix it. In my experience, it is often due to either a plugin or a setting conflict. To fix it, I’ll often have to edit the wp-config file to define the home and site URL as per the instructions in the post.

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This is Malcolm Peralty here from PressTitan and this is The WP Minute, Episode 147

Simple Social Buttons had a security vulnerability that let people take over entire sites. ZDnet has all of the details. It looks like up to 40,000 sites were at risk of having someone be able to modify site settings and even installing backdoors or taking over admin accounts. There is already a patch for this, so if you are using Simple Social Buttons, please upgrade now, and don’t forget to double check that your site wasn’t compromised. If you don’t know how to do this, please reach out.

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This is Malcolm Peralty here from PressTitan and this is The WP Minute, Episode 146

WPEka has a post that covers the top 10 WordPress translation plugins and it is a nice list. I didn’t realize there were so many translation plugins as I’ve only really used WPML and TranslatePress. I think translation is super important. I would love to have our entire PressTitan website translated someday. I keep hoping that machine translation will get to the point where it doesn’t require humans to do the work.

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This is Malcolm Peralty here from PressTitan and this is The WP Minute, Episode 145

How long should juvenile mistakes haunt you? That’s the question being asked today in an article on WPTavern that talks about Joost de Valk being called out for objectifying women a decade ago. It looks like it might have primarily been just some playful messing around between friends that have since been taken out of context and Joost has come out to apologize for his actions and words, but is that enough? Read the full article to learn more.

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This is Malcolm Peralty here from PressTitan and this is The WP Minute, Episode 144

My first story today is an article on Colin Nelson’s blog and it talks about how small “d” developers are being left behind in modern best practices being applied to WordPress development. I have to admit that the increase of JavaScript in WordPress is something I’m a little concerned about as it is a language that I’m currently very weak in and even more so when you add a layer of React on top as a requirement.

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This is Malcolm Peralty here from PressTitan and this is The WP Minute, Episode 143

WPLift has a post that reviews Gravity Perks, a growing collection of small add-ons for Gravity Forms that can seriously help you extend where and how you use the already massive data collection plugin for WordPress. I can’t help but laugh that the post has a WPForms ad next to it, which is a competitor to Gravity Forms. Gravity Perks is developed by a Gravity Forms developer as a side-project, something that rocketgenius is really great about as many of the team members have side projects both relating to and separate from Gravity Forms. I have used Gravity Perks on a few occasions and highly recommend it.

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This is Malcolm Peralty here from PressTitan and this is The WP Minute, Episode 142

WordPress.org released their month in review post where they talk about the changes to WordPress leadership, WordPress 5.1’s development status as well as some other highlights. One of the more interesting ones to me is the fact that 2,300 tickets weren’t resolved but instead closed since they hadn’t been worked on in a while.

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