Hi,

Hope you are safe and happy.

Things are looking a bit bleak now and WordCamp Birmingham has been postponed.

But everything is on track for the WP 5.9 release on January 25. Please do take part in the Call for Testings issued.

Stay safe

See you next week.

Thanks!

• WordPress 5.9 RC 2 is now available: Since RC1 was released, six bugs have been found and fixed. There were 13 bug fixes backported from Gutenberg.
• Call for Testing: WordPress for Android 19.0: WordPress for Android version 19.0-rc-1 is available for testing on the Beta channel. You can ask to join the Beta Program at Android App Testing on Google Play.
• Call for Testing: WordPress for iOS 19.0: WordPress for iOS version 19.0 beta is available for testing on TestFlight. You can sign up for TestFlight program and join as a beta tester by opening that link on your iPhone or iPad.
• WooCommerce 6.1 released: Please create a backup of your site and make sure that your theme and any other plugins are compatible before updating.
• Jetpack 10.5 released: This release has new features for VideoPress, as well as other under-the-hood improvements and bug fixes to create a better Jetpack experience for you and your site. This makes it easier to release to #SVN
• WordCamp Birmingham 2022 postponed until Spring: The rising Covid cases is the reason. The team is investigating dates in April or May, 2022.
• Get early access to Full Site Editing: The WordPress.com team has announced that they are now offering early access to Full Site Editing (Beta) for all new sites created by existing English-speaking users. Just spin up a new site from your dashboard.
• Daniel Schutzsmith on the differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org: He has explained the differences in the best way possible.
• What are Block Themes?: With the release of WP 5.9, Block themes, global styles, and the site editor will kick-start a new future for WordPress. Justin Tadlock shares the points you must know before the release.
• Customizer will disappear for some Block Theme users with WordPress 5.9: Users have grown accustomed to adjusting colors, fonts, and even internal WordPress options through the customizer. However, it will disappear for many once a block theme is activated.
• Proposal for opening the editor interface to more extensibility: Fabian Kägy would love to hear others' thoughts around this.
• Accessibility Team’s goals for WordPress 6.0 and beyond: The discussion to identify major team goals will be held during the next weekly meeting, happening on Friday, January 22, 2021.
• Diverse Speaker Training Group (#WPDiversity) 2021 year-end report: The Diverse Speaker Training Group expanded from one to three programs- Diverse Speaker program, Allyship program, Diverse Speaker Support program, and held 26 #WPDiversity events.
• Elementor celebrates 10 million Active Installs: Congrats to the WordPress website builder with no limits of design.
• Modern for Wikipedia: Modern for Wikipedia is a free extension for Google Chrome. Once installed, Modern will simply apply the new look and features to existing Wikipedia article pages, without you having to do anything.
• Minimator - a minimalist graphical editor: The editor was built with touch tablets in mind. Providing undo/redo/zoom/move in a simple gesture. An info tooltip is available in the editor to list the shortcuts available.
• DuckDuckGo passes 100 billion searches: DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused search engine, announced it has surpassed 100 billion searches – all time. But its year-over-year growth is slowing down considerably.
• Drupal turns 21: This open-source platform owes its existence to Dries Buytaert. The Drupal Community Working Group also announced that nominations for the 2022 Aaron Winborn Award are now open. Nominations are open until Friday, March 25, 2022.
• IndexNow now officially co-sharing URLs between Microsoft Bing and Yandex: The Microsoft Bing team said that the IndexNow protocol is now at a place where those participating are co-sharing URLs submitted, meaning if you use IndexNow to submit URLs to Microsoft Bing, Microsoft will immediately share those URLs with Yandex.
• Google Ads bug again for Gmail on desktop Safari browsers: Google has confirmed a bug impacting how ads are served on Gmail desktop with Safari browsers. The issue seems to be with displaying or serving the ads to this “significant subset of users” on Safari desktop while accessing Gmail.
• Google Search showing (1) in Shopify websites titles: The issue is resolved but it might take time for your titles to be reprocessed.
• Social media usage statistics for Digital Marketers in 2022: Check out these social media usage statistics.
• Google Business Profiles sets waiting period for new owners and managers: Newly granted users now must wait 7 days before they can manage all the features of the profile.
• Google Research: Themes from 2021 and beyond: In this post, Jeff Dean highlights five areas where Machine Learning is poised to have a great impact.
• Austrian website’s use of Google Analytics found to breach GDPR: A decision by Austria’s data protection watchdog upholding a complaint against a website related to its use of Google Analytics does not bode well for use of US cloud services in Europe.

• Deploy your plugin to the WordPress.org repository using GitHub Actions: This Action commits the contents of your Git tag to the WordPress.org plugin repository using the same tag name.
• Extendify launches new pattern library plugin: Extendify has simplified access to its pattern library with a new plugin that offers patterns and full-page layouts for WordPress sites using Gutenberg-friendly themes.
• Wicked Plugins launches UI-based WordPress Block Builder: You can create your own custom blocks with Wicked Block Builder without any programming or a complicated build process. The plugin allows developers to add blocks, block categories, patterns, and pattern categories.
• Livro - a minimal Block Theme for writers: This Automattic theme’s most impressive feat was using a single font family, Newsreader, across the entire design.
• Liquid Speech Balloon – Plugin to create speech balloons: The plugin helps create a talk style design with a visual editor Gutenberg.
• Hello Beautiful plugin: It tells you how amazing you are. Every time you log into your WordPress dashboard, you will receive a positive message just below the Hello, Your Name, on your site.
• Plugins with most active installs on WordPress.org plugin Repository: This list includes all plugins that have reached 1 million active installs and higher.
• 2 Plugins are available for acquisition: Twitch for WordPress and Udemy for WordPress is up for acquisition as the current owner wants to focus on other products.
• 84,000 WordPress sites affected by vulnerability in 3 plugins: The vulnerability was found in the plugins - Login/Signup Popup, Side Cart Woocommerce (Ajax) and Download Waitlist Woocommerce (Back in stock notifier – all by the same author.
• Simple Feed Stats plugin is now "Simple Statistics for Feeds”: The author Jeff Starr has changed the name of the plugin that tracks your feeds automatically using a variety of methods.

• WP Experts has acquired Login Designer plugin: The Login Designer WordPress plugin has joined the WP Experts family. WP Experts is a prolific agency/product shop that has a proven track record of leading many highly-rated WordPress plugins.
• Acquisitions & Exits: how much is your WordPress business worth?: A useful read for plugin authors from Freemius.

• WordPress Community Team proposes stricter COVID-19 safety protocols for in-person events in 2022: Mounting concerns about loose safety protocols at upcoming WordPress events, and the prevalence of the highly transmissible Omicron variant, have prompted the Community Team to be more explicit in its COVID-19 safety guidelines. The team is proposing additional measures previously not required.
• Sponsor WordPress contributors: Aurooba Ahmed's page on Github to sponsor WordPress contributors working hard to build WordPress.
• MainWP has a new extension - Lighthouse: The MainWP Lighthouse Extension is used to automatically measure the quality of your Child Site(s). It audits the performance, accessibility, best practices, and search engine optimization of websites connected to your MainWP Dashboard.
• CreativeThemes announced a new starter site - Floreo: Floreo is an online shop, dedicated to all interior decorators and plant lovers. It has been built with the latest web technology stacks, using Stackable 3.0 and WooCommerce.
• PressItWP from HeroPress: Any company, person, or service related to WordPress in any way can post press releases at no charge or make a post announcing a sale of a product or service.
• New SeedProd Theme Builder & Page Builder updates: You can now create WordPress themes from scratch with SeedProd. The SeedProd Theme Builder lets you create themes by dragging and dropping in the visual editor.
• Twenty Twenty-Two Theme review: Nick Schäferhoff examines its design, core features, and how you can try it out ahead of time.
• An anonymous survey about receiving credit for tasks in open source: Please take the survey conducted by researchers at the University of Vermont in partnership with Google Open Source.
• Introducing "Everything Open Source" by Mesrenyame: In the #everythingopensource twitter space, there will be discussions on different open source topics (both code and non-code)
• Impossibly knotted together: Meditations on the WordPress community: Chris Hardie considers Friends, Elders, the Matt Factor, and the traits of a resilient community.
• Lesley on open source contributions: Her thoughts on contributions and some possible solutions.
• Simple site design with Full Site Editing: Part one of a series from Learn WordPress team.
• So you want to talk about Full Site Editing?: Anne McCarthy put together a post to help empower more folks to both dig into and educate others about the new full site editing features.
• 2 New mini courses from Chris Lema: Each mini course has only 4 lessons (the most common four mistakes you want to avoid) and lasts less than 30 minutes.
• React for WordPress developers: Getting started with React can be tricky. This post from Lax Mariappan can help you.
• Using Custom Taxonomies and Custom Fields in WordPress development: Fred Meyer covers the key points of two of WordPress’s most powerful APIs for defining custom post data: custom fields (also called post meta), and custom taxonomies.
• Why is it important never to reuse a nonce?: Eric Mann on never reusing a number intended for only a single use.
• Open Source considered harmful: Morten Rand-Hendriksen on how it is time to rethink the foundations of open source.
• The burden of an Open Source maintainer: Jeff Geerling on how he deals with pull requests and his coping strategy for the past five years.

• WEST Career Dev Summit on January 20-21: Join the WEST Virtual Career Dev Summit for a day of inspiring talks, meditation practice, and career defining workshops led by incredible women leaders across the tech industry.
• WordFest Live 2022 on March 04: Call for Sponsors is now open. This fun festival of WordPress, is also a fundraiser for the Big Orange Heart charity that promotes positive well-being and mental health within remote working communities
• IAC22 on April 18-23: The IA conference exists to promote discourse and learning about the intentional design of information environments. Save $50 on standard and premium passes by registering before February 16th, 2022.
• Expand 2022 on April 27-28: Call for speakers is open. Expand (organized by GoDaddy Pro in Orlando, FL) is an event created to connect web pros through networking, education, and fun. The theme of Expand 2022 will be Empowerment.
• The First Post Status Twitter Conference on May 24: The goal for the Post Status Twitter Conference is to have two presentations every hour from 9am – 4pm EST, all around WordPress and the web industry.
• 10th Annual WordCamp Europe on 3-4 June 2022 in Porto: Tickets are available now.

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