WordCamp Asia 2024 is happening in Taipei, Taiwan, next year from March 7-9, at the Taipei International Convention Center (TICC). With the dates locked in and venue secured, organizers have now opened the call for speakers. The event will feature three days of talks, workshops, and networking events, and organizers expect more than 2,000 attendees.
Talks will be given in English and there will be four different formats for sessions:
Long Talks: 40 minutes total (30 minutes for talk + 10 minutes for Q&A)
Lightning Talks: 10 minutes total (10 minutes for talk only. No Q&A)
Panel Discussions: Approximately 60 minutes with Q&A
Workshops: 90 minutes up to half a day
WordCamp Asia’s organizers suggested nearly two dozen acceptable topics across a wide range of disciplines, including accessibility, SEO, marketing, Web3, AI, security, case studies, and more. They are especially “interested in hearing about diverse topics and inspirational stories. Topics such as trends, new approaches, and upcoming changes in related software and WordPress itself will be encouraged.”
The call for speakers includes those who are hoping to host or join a panel discussion or host a workshop. Speakers do not have to be experienced at public speaking to be selected for WordCamp Asia. Those who do not have videos of previous talks can record a 5-10 minute video talking about their topic and link to it in the speaker form.
WordCamp Asia has launched an Underrepresented Speaker Support Initiative alongside this call for speakers with the goal of removing financial barriers for speakers. The program calls on companies to invest in creating a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive tech community by sponsoring underrepresented speakers, helping them practice their talks, and promoting the cause.
The event’s organizers are also calling for sponsors, media partners, and volunteers. Prospective speakers are limited to two presentation submissions and can also indicate if they would be willing to be selected as a backup speaker. Applications will close on September 30, 2023. Speakers will be notified about the outcome of the selection process in November, followed by speaker announcements in December.
WordPress is honoring contributors the community has lost over the years through a new memorial page called WordPress Remembers:
WordPress dedicates this page to the memory of those we’ve lost. They’ve shaped our project and enriched our community. As we remember their passion and commitment to WordPress and open source software, we celebrate their spirit.
Forever in our hearts, their legacy endures through every line of code and every user they’ve impacted.
The page lists code and community contributors who left a lasting impact on the WordPress project, and links to their profiles and external blogs and memorial pages.
“As WordPress continues through the decades, we have to deal with all parts of life, including death,” WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg said, introducing the page on Twitter. “As a community, we now have a memorial place we can remember and honor those who contributed to WordPress but are no longer part of this world.” In a followup tweet he added, “I will be on this page someday.”
For a software project that is 20+ years old, with an aging contributor base, departures from this world will soon become more common. Visiting this memorial page is a heart gripping experience if you had the privilege of knowing any of these beloved contributors. It’s sobering to consider the impact and legacy of one’s investments in WordPress, but this elegantly designed memorial calls those questions to mind.
If you know of someone who is missing from this page, you can contact memorials@wordpress.org and volunteers will add them.
BuddyPress 12.0 is set to introduce a new Community Visibility feature that gives site administrators the option to restrict access to the community sections of the site. Sites set to “members only” will show an access error message and a login form when a non-logged-in user tries to view a page generated by BuddyPress.
The Community Visibility setting makes it possible to create a private community site without adding any plugins to BuddyPress, a feature that has frequently been requested by BuddyPress site admins. It is being introduced as a basic toggle but BuddyPress contributor David Cavins, who worked on the feature, said it lays the groundwork for future, more granular privacy controls.
The BuddyPress core development team has also published the BP Classic plugin ahead of the 12.0 release. The plugin provides backwards compatibility for sites using plugins or themes that are not ready for the BP Rewrite API that will be introduced in 12.0. It includes features and templates that are fully deprecated:
The BP Legacy widgets (these were migrated as Blocks in BuddyPress 9.0.0).
The BP Default theme.
The BP Legacy navigation globals (buddypress()->bp_nav & buddypress()->bp_options_nav).
An advisory about BP Classic was posted to the official BuddyPress blog to help site owners figure out if they will need this plugin. Those who require it before upgrading can install it ahead of time and it will be dormant until it is needed.
The new Community Visibility feature was committed to trunk five days ago and is on track to be included in the next major release. BuddyPress 12.0 is anticipated to be released on October 30, 2023, and Beta 1 is overdue and expected any day.
WordPress.com is making a strong bid for Google Domains customers after the the product was sold to Squarespace in a deal reportedly worthy $180 million. Shortly after the sale was announced, WordPress.com pitched Google Domains customers, reminding the public that the company is also a domain registrar, but the call to action didn’t include much incentive to switch.
This week WordPress.com is putting the heat on with a new offer to pay transfer fees and an additional year of registration for the first million domains moved from Google Domains. WordPress.com is also guaranteeing Google Domains customers the same pricing or lower for 400+ top-level domains.
“This will also apply to existing WordPress.com customers across most domains, meaning that in many cases we’re lowering your prices.” Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg said in the announcement this week.
“This isn’t a temporary thing. We’re committed to keeping domain prices low, and will only raise them if our wholesale costs go up (we’ll run our domains business like Costco).”
Squarespace has committed to honor the renewal prices previously set by Google Domains existing customers for 12 months but will set its own prices after this time.
In an interview with The Verge, Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena said his company is already using a lot of the same infrastructure Google is using in their Cloud DNS product, having resold Google Workspace for almost a decade. Squarespace currently employs 1,750 people with revenue under a billion dollars this year. Acquiring Google Domains gives the company the opportunity to cross-sell website packages to its incoming domain customers. There are approximately 10 million domains up for grabs in the transfer of customers.
Casalena said that being a reseller of Google Workspace was a major factor in Google’s decision to offer the domains to Squarespace, in addition to having the infrastructure to manage the business. This partially explains what was an otherwise bewildering deal that came as a surprise to the industry:
First off — once in a lifetime opportunity for us. Incredibly grateful that we were selected as the stewards of that business. We weren’t asking them, like, ‘Hey, planning on shutting down domains or anything?’ It wasn’t exactly outbound. I think they made the decision that it’s not a business that they were going to be in. And they contacted a couple of legitimate parties who could potentially even take on a business of that size because, again, it’s not the code or the employees are moving — it’s basically the domains themselves and the hosting services and the registrations, that sort of thing. So that really narrows it down to the number of companies that could even support that.
Then the other thing that was a big factor is we’ve been a huge fan and big reseller of Google Workspace for nearly a decade now, which was very important to them, and we’re incredibly sophisticated in selling Domains, selling Google Workspace, servicing it, and managing that for millions of people. So we were able to find a transaction that worked for us.Â
Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg reacted to the deal on Twitter this week, saying that he was disappointed Google didn’t make it a more competitive process.
“This might cost a ton of money but I was bummed we didn’t even get a crack at this, my guess is Cloudflare, Godaddy, and Bluehost didn’t either—why Google didn’t make this a competitive process?” Mulleweng said. “Concerning to have so many domains going to a proprietary CMS.”
WordPress.com has been slowly inching towards becoming a one-stop shop for users’ website needs. The company recently made its monetization features available for free, making the platform more attractive to creators who are just starting out online. Based on the reaction to Mullenweg’s tweet, it seems many people are still not aware that they can buy their domains from a registrar and host their websites elsewhere. If you are just hearing about WordPress.com’s domains, it’s natural to think they are only for WordPress sites, so the company has some work to do in making prospective customers aware.
Users can be hesitant to move to a new registrar when they don’t fully understand the process and don’t want to negatively impact their online presence. In the case of Google Domains customers, they are moving to a new registrar after the sale closes later this year, whether they like it or not. WordPress.com’s deal is a compelling offer if they can better position their domains as an independent service.
Jetpack 12.4 was released today, launching the plugin’s Newsletter product. It allows users to send blog posts as newsletters, without the hassle of having to copy and paste from the WordPress editor into another newsletter service’s campaign editor and reformat it for email. This launch comes seven months after WordPress.com launched its newsletter offering, which uses the same underlying infrastructure to deliver emails.
Jetpack Newsletter is launching as a free product, with a percentage of fees collected from creators who choose to offer paid subscriptions:
Fees are only collected when you accept payments. Fees are based on the Jetpack plan you have and are calculated as a percentage of your revenue from 10% on the Free plan to 2% on the Complete plan (plus Stripe fees).Â
Jetpack users are probably familiar with the plugin’s ability to send posts to subscribers via email. The newsletter feature uses this same infrastructure that site owners have relied on for years to allow subscribers to get updates in their inboxes when new posts are available.
Newsletters can be turned on under the Discussion tab in the Jetpack settings. Many Jetpack users likely already have this turned on.
The Subscribe block can be placed anywhere on the site and new subscribers will be sent a confirmation email to confirm their subscription. They have the option to choose between instant, daily, or a weekly digest, as well as control the time and day they receive their digests. Subscribers can also pause or unsubscribe from the site.
Subscriber import and other features, such as newsletter stats for opens and clicks, is available via the Jetpack admin pages on WordPress.com.
At this time, newsletter creators can only import up to 100 subscribers via CSV file. This is severely limiting for all but the smallest of newsletters, but the Jetpack team has confirmed that it is high on their list of priorities to change as it creates too much of a barrier. The limit was set for spam prevention, but it makes it nearly impossible to migrate to Jetpack Newsletter if you have a popular newsletter. Those who are on paid plans can upload unlimited subscribers.
Newsletter creators can change the site name and logo for their emails and paid users will have more customization options in the future.
One thing that sets Jetpack Newsletter apart from the vast majority of other traditional email service providers is that it allows unlimited email sends and unlimited subscriber lists for both free and paid users.
Most popular services like Mailchimp, Brevo, and SendGrid, allow only a few hundred emails to be sent per day or up to 1,000 per month for free users. Paid plans get expensive quickly as a newsletter’s subscriber base grows. Emails and subscriber numbers usually determine the pricing for these services, which makes Jetpack’s product stand out from the crowd, especially for those who intend to independently monetize their newsletter through ads and paid sponsorships.
Jetpack Marketing Lead Rob Pugh said that although popular newsletter services are more limited in emails and subscriber numbers, they also offer a completely different feature set. The Jetpack Newsletter product is aimed at competitors like Substack.com, Beehiiv.com, and Ghost.org, which also all offer unlimited email sends. On paid plans, Jetpack Newsletter’s offer beats Substack, as it collects 2% (plus Stripe fees) as compared to Substack’s take of 10% plus credit card fees.
Newsletter creators should be aware that Jetpack Newsletter’s unlimited emails and subscribers may not last forever, as the FAQ section of the product states that it is an introductory offer:
As an introductory offer, we do not limit you or charge you based on your email list size. This may change in the future. Fair usage policy applies.
Jetpack representatives were not able to confirm the limits of fair usage or how long the introductory period will last.
“Launching without a limit on emails isn’t the most financially responsible thing, but we’re most excited to get this feature into the hands of people to get feedback,” Pugh said. “We’re focused on the immediate roadmap to make the product better, although there will likely be a limit at some point in the future if we see extreme use from people on free plans.”
He said the Jetpack team goes out of its way to make pricing changes as fairly as possible “and we don’t want to pull the rug out from anyone, so we’ll certainly consider how people are impacted before making changes.”Â
Until the limited subscriber import issue has been solved, any pricing changes down the road are only likely to affect newsletters that are just starting out getting people signed up. Apart from this limitation, Jetpack Newsletter is making a competitive debut in the market. For those who are already using Jetpack and have an existing subscriber base, it makes it nearly effortless to add paid subscriptions. Using the block editor is far easier than most newsletter campaign editors out there, and Jetpack streamlines the sending process so creators don’t have to copy and paste between email services.
If you are familiar with WordPress as a project, you probably know that it is divided into teams for different areas. There is the Core team, the Design team, and the Polyglots team, which we have talked about before. In this post, we want take a look at the newest addition to the roster: the WordPress Sustainability team.
The topic of sustainability first came up during a Q&A session with Matt and Josepha at WordCamp Europe 2022. This also resulted in the establishment of a #sustainability channel in the official WordPress Slack chat to give members of the community a place to discuss this topic.
What quickly followed was a proposal to establish a formal sustainability team on WordPress.org, which promptly happened. They got together for the first time at the Contributor Day of WordCamp Europe 2023. Reason enough to devote an article to learning more about this team and their goals.
What is the WordPress Sustainability Team?
To learn more about the new team, let’s first examine why it was established and the goals behind it.
The Need to Respond to Global Challenges
Climate change is one of the main struggles of our time. The science is pretty clear that human activity is causing it and the impact of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is becoming more visible every year. New weather extremes and “once in a lifetime” temperatures occur all around the globe. From wildfires over devastating floods to catastrophic storms, we can see the results all around us.
To address the underlying cause and mitigate the outcome, every industry and sector of society has a role to play. That includes the Internet. It has become an integral part of our everyday lives in the last 20+ years. However, it’s easy to forget that it uses up energy and thus produces greenhouse gases as well.
After all, the infrastructure behind the web needs inordinate amounts of electricity for running the required server farms. Plus, there are the devices we use to go online, which use up resources and energy in the same way. Both their number and the amount of Internet traffic are steadily increasing.
Therefore, in order to decarbonize the world economy as a whole, the Internet is definitely a sector that needs to be addressed.
What Can WordPress Do?
Now, you might think that this topic is just something for politicians and people in power. That only they have the responsibility and means to make meaningful changes. However, with WordPress’ position in the online world, it has both an opportunity and maybe a special responsibility to play an integral part in the solution.
First of all, WordPress as a CMS runs 40+% of the web. As a consequence, it can have a big impact on online energy consumption. By setting standards and integrating more sustainable practices, it can reduce the footprint of potentially millions of websites.
Want an example? Danny van Kooten, the developer of the MailChimp for WordPress plugin, managed to reduce the carbon emission of his plugin by 59 tons per month (!) by removing a 20 KB JavaScript dependency. His plugins are running on more than two million websites, so any small change he makes has impacts a much larger scale.
If one plugin can make that much of a difference, just imagine what WordPress Core could do?
Community and Events
Then we have WordCamps, which are attended by thousands of people. People who all need to travel there, find accommodation, eat and drink, etc. while there, which also uses up resources. Introducing more sustainable practices for can also help reduce trash, emissions, and more.
This is especially important for the larger WordCamps (US, Europe, and Asia) as they function as role models for smaller events. If they can adopt more eco-friendly practices, it can set an example for the rest. Especially since they all use the same handbooks.
Finally, the WordPress community is made up of hundreds of thousands of people. Promoting more sustainability can affect a lot of individual behavior as well.
In short, WordPress can not only have an actual, measurable impact but also provide leadership for the WordPress ecosystem and beyond. It also goes well with WordPress’ mission of building a better web. In this day and age, sustainability is one of the ways the Internet needs to be better.
What’s the Goal of the Sustainability Team?
So, how does the Sustainability team plan to help WordPress meet these challenges and take on a leadership role? In their own words:
The main objective is to embed sustainable practices into WordPress processes and its community, […] to promote awareness and actions that lead to carbon footprint reduction throughout the WordPress ecosystem.
As to how to achieve this, the approach is threefold:
Spread awareness about the impact of carbon emissions generated by the web and ways to work with and build websites in more eco-friendly ways. To help users understand how websites impact the climate and ways to mitigate their effect.
Provide guidance for WordPress event organizers on how to run events in more sustainable ways.
Creating and promoting eco-friendly themes and plugins.
It’s important to note that while environmental sustainability is the main focus of the team, there are other areas that it aims to address. Among them is finding ways to bring new and more diverse members to the WordPress community, support contributors, ensure the economic sustainability of the WordPress project, and more.
The establishment of a formal team for sustainability is also a sign in itself. It means that WordPress acquires ways to provide a clearer direction in this area and formalize guidelines for its implementation. It also simply increases visibility for this topic in the WordPress project. In addition, there are ample ways to collaborate with and have a positive impact on other WordPress teams such as Accessibility, Performance, and Community.
Tapping Into an Ongoing Conversation
What’s important to stress is that this discussion isn’t entirely new, it is only that it’s starting to receive the attention it deserves. For example, there was another sustainability initiative around Abha Thakor a few years ago and she spoke on the subject at WordCamp Stuttgart in 2019.
In addition, at this year’s WordCamp Europe, in the panel about the future of WordCamps, sustainability was one of the main topics. Former WCEU organizers talked about how they tried to integrate more sustainable practices into the event and how they have tried to pass on the idea to organizers of subsequent WordCamps since. You can find the discussion in the video below.
Plus, other open source projects, such as Drupal and Wagtail, have similar initiatives. Overall sustainability is something that’s generally becoming more prominent. By forming a dedicated team, WordPress now has the possibility to put in the energy and effort this topic deserves.
What Has the Sustainability Team Done So Far?
Since the start of the effort to create a WordPress team on sustainability, we have already seen some promising initiatives.
Collect Community Feedback
One of the first things that those community members who would later form the Sustainability team did was to consult the WordPress community what their vision for a sustainable WordPress looks like. In a post, the team asked to what the community’s understanding of sustainability is and how they see WordPress implementing it.
This sparked a lively discussion with lots of input and a number of interesting ideas, such as:
Implementing the ability to mark and sort themes in the WordPress directory with a “sustainable” tag.
Including tips in WordPress themes that guide users to more sustainable design choices. Maybe even use the upcoming Twenty Twenty-Four theme to show off best practices in eco-friendly design.
Educating community members how to introduce more sustainability into their individual lives.
Working with hosting providers to encourage more sustainable practices on their servers and the way they run websites. Educating users on what kind of hardware they actually need to avoid idling unnecessarily powerful hardware.
I highly encourage you to check out the post and read up on the many ideas our community members came up with. The Sustainability team also put their own thoughts into writing that you can read on a dedicated website.
#sustainability Slack Channel
The sustainability channel remains active. In about a year it has grown to more than 200 members (237 at the time of this writing). They are holding regular meetings, which are announced and summarized on the Make channel.
Draft a WordCamp Sustainability Document
Several contributors are working on a Google document with guidelines how to make WordCamps more sustainable. It documents efforts from previous organizers and provides suggestions for future events. Tips include:
Picking a venue that is easy to reach via public transportation and certified in sustainability practices.
Avoiding plastic tableware other single-use items.
Sending out a headcount email shortly before the event to get a more accurate number of attendees to order the right amount of food. Working with local food banks to donate excess foodstuffs.
Reduce the amount of swag given out. Alternatively, provide the option for attendees to opt in to swag instead of making it the default
Gear event marketing more strongly towards encouraging attendees to use sustainable modes of transportation and other eco-friendly practices
Once finished, the document will be shared with the Community team to make it part of the handbooks for Meetup and WordCamp organizers. Plus, it will likely be amended and built upon over time by collecting practices from future events.
WordPress Sustainability Plugin
There is a plugin called WPSustainable created by members of the WordPress Hosting team. Similar to Site Health, when you install it on your site, it displays the eco-friendliness of the hosting provider used for and carbon emissions caused by the website in question.
What’s Next?
Besides what they have already done, the Sustainability also has plans for the future. They have been brainstorming a roadmap that is publicly available. It contains ideas such as:
Designing guidelines for low-bandwidth connections.
Exploring possibilities for collaborating with other teams and existing programs such as Five for the Future.
Thinking about how to attract more diverse voices to the team and WordPress community.
Brainstorming ways to measure the impact WordPress has on energy consumption and greenhouse gases.
Looking to other open source initiatives focused on sustainability and integrating their learnings into WordPress.
You can read up on the document under the link above and also add your own suggestions.
Want to Get Involved With the WordPress Sustainability Team?
Sustainability, especially environmental sustainability, is a topic of global importance to meet current world challenges. As one of the biggest energy consumers, the Internet is one of the sectors where implementing sustainability practices is sorely needed.
Being the leading content management system puts WordPress in a position to take point in this matter and affect change in various ways. The Sustainability team formed to develop visions and practices for doing so.
Though it has only been around for a short while, already some great initiatives have come out of it and there is more on the horizon. If you want to get involved, join the Slack channel and regular meetings. Here you can give your input on existing initiatives as well as provide your ideas for how the WordPress community can approach the topic of sustainability and make changes for the future.
What sustainability initiatives would you like to see in the WordPress ecosystem? Share your thoughts in the comments section!
Ever wished there was an easy way to point out nitty-gritty details of your SEO, so you don’t have to worry about it?
Every minor detail can fluctuate search rankings, but ensuring they’re in place is not easy.
Today, I’m excited to share the launch of my brand new Google Chrome extension, All in One SEO Analyzer, which shows you all your SEO details in a click.
We built this tool to help you save time with fast SEO checks, so you can focus on creating great content while our tool handles the SEO details.
Once you install the extension on your Chrome browser, all you have to do is to visit the page where you want to perform an SEO analysis. Then click on the extension, and you’ll get a detailed SEO report of that page, which includes…
Analysis of basic SEO elements, like meta descriptions, titles, keywords, and content structure
SEO score analysis of your meta data, which shows you whether they need further improvement
Quick links to your robots.txt file and your website’s sitemap
Detailed reports of your heading tags, image’s SEO, internal, and external links, schema markups, social media tags, and more.
In a nutshell, the All in One SEO Analyzer Chrome extension shows you all your SEO details instantly.
Why Use the All in One SEO Analyzer Chrome Extension?
For most website owners, SEO is complex because there is no clear-cut way to analyze your website’s SEO unless you hire an SEO consultant or buy premium software that costs a fortune.
Unfortunately, not everyone has the budget or resources to do so, which limits their ability to grow their website and rank better on search engines.
We want to fix it once and for all. This is why we decided to build a free Chrome extension for SEO analysis and make it free for everyone.
Our SEO extension makes it easy to do quick SEO checks and make necessary changes to your site in no time.
Easily Generate an SEO Audit Report
Ever wondered if there’s any room for optimizing your content to boost your SEO?
No matter how well-structured your content is, there will still be room for improving it. With AIOSEO’s Chrome extension, you can scan your entire page with a click and generate an SEO audit report to see if there is any room for improvement to boost search rankings and organic traffic.
Here are a few elements that our Chrome extension helps you analyze and improve.
SEO title and meta description: Optimize how your search results are being shown on search engine result pages for higher click-through rates.
Keywords used and heading tags: The extension shows you how many heading tags are used and what keywords you were using on the site.
Image SEO: It shows you how many images you’re using, whether they’re optimized with alt tags and titles.
Internal and external link count: Have a quick understanding of the total number of links you use on your site, whether they’re internally linked or externally.
Schema.org data: Schema is a type of microdata that provides additional information about the content of a web page to search engines. You can quickly figure out whether you’re using the right Schema markup.
And more…
Perform SEO Analysis of Any Websites
The best thing about our Chrome extension is that it lets you analyze any website you want, whether yours or your competitors.
It also helps you learn from the SEO strategies of your top competitors and peers in your industry so you can discover how they structure their content and replicate the process on your site.
For example, you can visit any blog post you admire, click the extension, and then navigate to the Heading section. Then click the Export button.
All headings used in that article will be downloaded in a CSV file.
Find SEO Errors Right Within WordPress
Do you want to perform a detailed SEO audit and find critical errors right inside your WordPress dashboard? Then, we recommend installing the All in One SEO (AIOSEO) WordPress plugin.
Aside from showing you a detailed report, its free plugin offers suggestions to improve it.
AIOSEO also offers a premium version that provides you with advanced features like a redirection manager, powerful sitemap tools, schema markups and more.
What’s Coming Next?
All in One SEO Analyzer is a great Chrome extension to help you step up your website’s SEO strategy.
SEO takes time, but with the right tools at your disposal, like our Chrome extension, you can save your efforts with fast SEO checks.
The All in One SEO Analyzer Chrome extension provides you with an SEO report, but if you want to get actionable insights into how to make improvements to grow your traffic, then install the free All in One SEO plugin.
Aside from SEO suggestions, it comes with several essential tools, like breadcrumbs, sitemaps, and more, to optimize your site.
We’re truly building something special here. If you have ideas on how we can make the plugin more helpful to you, please send us your suggestions.
As always, I want to thank you for your continued support of WPBeginner, and we look forward to continue serving you for years to come.
Earlier this year, WordPress contributors announced that they are working on a new Interactivity API that will allow developers to build interactive blocks. This API will support the kinds of frontend experiences that let visitors interact with content and get feedback without having to refresh the page.
Automattic-sponsored contributor Luis Herranz, who has been working on the API, is now encouraging developers to test it with their own blocks. Gutenberg 16.2 included the Interactivity API under the Experiments flag and this version or later is required for testing it.
Developers can follow the API’s “Getting Started” guide on GitHub to scaffold an interactive block with `@wordpress/create-block`. Take a look at the roadmap, which has an extensive list of tasks the team has in mind for the initiative and will include tracking issues for features as they progress.
Those who are testing the Interactivity API can follow and participate in the discussions happening in the new Interactivity API category on GitHub. This early testing invitation is for those who are eager to help shape the API and offer feedback.
“If you want to use the Interactivity API in your projects, please subscribe to this discussion where we will provide updates with instructions for migrating your code each time there is a breaking change,” Herranz said.
There is no official documentation yet, but a the team is working towards creating a bare-bones version first which will be used as the base for the official docs further down the road. The documentation efforts are being led by Automattic-sponsored contributor JuanMa Garrido and anyone willing to collaborate is invited to join the conversation on GitHub.
After a recent in-depth performance analysis earlier this year showed that translations can have an impact on server response times, WordPress contributors are proposing half a dozen technical solutions for consideration to improve performance for the ~56% of WordPress sites that use translations.
“Initial benchmarks showed that the median loading time for a localized site can be up to 50% slower than for non-localized sites, depending on which themes and plugins are being used,” Google-sponsored WordPress core committer Pascal Birchler said.
Based on recent discussions on GitHub, the Performance team has whittled it down to an updated list of six possible top contenders for speeding up sites with translations, including the advantages and disadvantages of each:
Solution A: Use different file format
Solution B: Native gettext extension
Solution C: Cache translations
Solution D: Lazily evaluated translation calls
Solution E: Optimize/Rewrite existing MO parser
Solution F: Splitting up translation files
Localized WordPress sites currently download .po and .mo files that contain the translations, but the first suggested solution proposes storing translations in .php files and using the .mo file as a fallback, as Birchler proposes that PHP loading and executing another PHP file would be a faster approach. He has a proof of concept on GitHub at at swissspidy/wp-php-translation-files and swissspidy/ginger-mo.
“When looking at all these factors, it appears that a revamped translations parser (solution E) could bring the most significant improvements to all localized WordPress sites,” Birchler said. “Especially when combined with a new PHP translation file format (solution A), which Ginger MO supports, the i18n overhead becomes negligible. Of course the same risks associated with introducing a new format apply.
“On top of that, a revamped i18n library like Ginger MO could also be combined with other solutions such as caching or dynamic MO loading to potentially gain further improvements. However, those routes have yet to be explored.”
The Performance team plans to test these ideas further on a wider scale through its Performance Lab feature project after gathering feedback from the broader community. August 6, 2023, is the deadline for leaving feedback on the proposal, which includes benchmarks and more details from the analysis.
a broken access control on form submissions export feature that allows Subscriber and Contributor role users to export all of the Ninja Forms submissions on a WordPress site (7.6 CVSS 3.1 score)
Patchstack researchers discovered the vulnerabilities on June 22, 2023, and Ninja Forms patched them on July 4, 2023. The security advisory was publicly released on July 27, 2023.
The plugin’s changelog for version 3.6.26 transparently identifies the security fixes included in the release:
Security Enhancements: * Prevent unauthorized download of submission * Prevent scripts in dashboard field labels; responsibly reported by Sayandeep Dutta * Prevent front-facing label scripts; responsibly reported by Jonathon Zamora & WordPress.org * Prevent excess extra data through automated form submission * Prevent override access where not permitted
Ninja Forms is used on more than 800,000 WordPress sites. The majority of the plugin’s users are on version 3.6.x (73.6%) but WordPress.org doesn’t offer a more detailed breakdown of minor versions, so it’s not clear how many are still vulnerable. Ninja Forms users are recommended to patch their sites immediately. At this time, the vulnerabilities are not known to have been exploited.
