WP Builds Podcast / News

Listen to the full episode here:
https://wpbuilds.com/2020/07/13/wp-builds-weekly-wordpress-news-122-image-manipulation-community-news-and-hosting-on-a-raspberry-pi/

This weeks WordPress news – Covering The Week Commencing 6th July 2020:

WordPress Core

WordPress 5.5 Beta 1

New Block-based Navigation and Widgets Screens Sidelined for WordPress 5.5

Gutenberg 8.5 Adds Single Gallery Image Editing, Allows Image Uploads From External Sources, and Improves Drag and Drop

Community

More Yoast ads in WP Admin

WP Time Machine

WordCamp Attendance Badges Could Be a Good Thing, but That’s the Wrong Discussion

Experimental Stackable WordPress Mode

After 11 Years, Users Will Be Able to Update Themes and Plugins via a ZIP File

Balloon Artist Ziv Raviv Used LifterLMS to Build a $277k a Year Business In Micro Niche

Plugins / Themes / Blocks

What’s new in Oxygen 3.4?

Elementor v3.0 Beta Release

BuddyBoss updates – Showcase, Elementor, Zoom, GamiPress, GroundHogg and more

Gravity Forms 2.5 Beta

Deals from this week

Get the WP Builds Deals emails delivered to your inbox!
and
The WP Builds Deals Page

Qubely Blocks – $49 lifetime deal

OceanWP – 25% off all packages

Crello image editing – $49

Zapier Mastery Course – 50% off with code SCREWCOVID

Brizy plugin and Cloud – 15% off with code WPBUILDS15

Continually live chat – $49

Quoters – for creating proposals – $49

Happy Forms Lifetime Deal – $49

Security

XSS Flaw Impacting 100,000 Sites Patched in KingComposer

Critical Vulnerabilities Patched in Adning Advertising Plugin

WordPress Vulnerability Roundup: July 2020, Part 1

WP Builds

187 – Let’s Fix the Broken Web with WordPress, WordProof and Blockchain and this

WordPress plugin startup – from 0 to 10k installs – Part 4

Jobs

iThemes / LiquidWeb – Software Development Engineer  and a WordPress Technician

Wholegrain Digital – WordPress Developer

Gravity Forms –  Senior Developer (s)

Wordfence – Senior PHP Developer

Human Made – Senior Sales Manager

Not WordPress, but useful anyway…

Website hosting on Raspberry Pi 4 with Mythic Beasts

Listen to the full episode here:
https://wpbuilds.com/2020/07/09/187-lets-fix-the-broken-web-with-wordpress-wordproof-and-blockchain/

Interview with Sebastiaan van der Lans from WordProof, with Nathan Wrigley

WordProof deal – if you email Sebastiaan right after you sign up and mention WP Builds, he’ll increase your WordProof account limits! Nice!

And, in a wonderful new development, WordProof recently won $1m Euros from the European Commission to assist with the development of their technology. Again, nice!

You need to prove, and I mean prove, that you own something online… something digital, something that you created. How do you do that? In the real world, you just ‘have it’. That widget that you fashioned from wood is on your property, but that blog piece that you wrote, that document that you uploaded how do you prove ownership of it. It’s a really hard question to answer, until WordProof perhaps.

You might have heard of the blockchain, and likely you’ve heard of it because of crypto-currencies like Bitcoin. That however, is just one way that blockchain technologies can be deployed.

Let’s be clear, I’m no expert on this, but my understanding goes like this… Blockchain can be thought of as a shared system. It’s like a pool of people keeping a shared list (or ledger) of all the content and amendments that anyone in the system makes. I create a WordPress post, all the people in the system get to know about that. If I update it they get to know about that as well. When anyone else in the system creates or amends content, I get to know about it. I don’t mean ‘get to know’ in the sense of you’ll be deluged with update notifications like Facebook might provide, I mean that that it goes on in the background, silently. You don’t really need to do a thing. You just share content and updates with the blockchain.

But why would I need this I hear you say! Well what if you write a great blog post, a piece that’s taken months to write. That post contains genuinely new discoveries, it adds something to humanity that has never been said before. You feel delighted, until, 3 months later you see that someone else is sharing your discovery and claiming it as their own. Naughty!

So you go to the blockchain that you’ve been a part of and you say, I need proof that I wrote this on a date before this other person started writing about it. The blockchain comes back and says ‘here you go’, you and countless other people can assert that you wrote it, because on the date that you did, we all got a copy of it.

But that’s not proof is it? They could all be lying, you could all be in-this-together! Well, yes the humans could, but the blockchain can’t. It’s a mathematical proof that you did write that post and all these other people can back that up too. I’d honestly love to see a lawyer take on the argument that you cannot trust maths!

All this rambling is to say that by spreading the blockchain all over the place, you get a widely distrubuted, mathematically verifiable system of proof. And that could be proof of almost anything…

That song that you wrote and saved as an .mp3 which you just heard insert name of famous musician playing on the radio, that PhD thesis that you wrote which proves that cold fusion is possible, that insurance document which you know you amended just days before your house was flooded, that video that just went viral etc etc. You have proof. Bullet-proof proof!

If you can put it online, you can prove that you did, and that it was or was not amended. It’s watertight, and with the WordProof system, easy to do!

This might not matter to you of course, but it matters to a lot of people and until recently, blockchain was a great idea but all but impossible to implement. Not now that we have WordProof .

WordProof makes this easy to do on your WordPress website. It enables you to assert your authorship of content, and prove when things were created and amended. You could even deploy this in your eCommerce offering to prove that sales happened, refunds occured and so on. In the future, adding timestamps might well act as a positive factor in SEO rankings!

Obviously, there’s way more to it that this and we cover a lot…

• How do WordPress and the WordProof blockchain work… what are the benefits of combining both?
• Why you might need to, and how you can timestamp content
• eCommerce and timestamps
• SEO and timestamps
• the WordProof plugin for WordPress
• GDPR compliance

I’d advise that you get the podcast on and hear what Sabastiaan has to say. It’s a wonderful new frontier and I’d really like to know what you make of it.

Please leave a comment down below or post in the thread over on the WP Builds Facebook Group .

Mentioned in this episode:

wordproof.io

WordProof plugin

sebastiaans.blog

Sebastian speaking at WordCamp Europe 2019

Listen to the full episode here:
https://wpbuilds.com/2020/07/06/wp-builds-weekly-wordpress-news-121-jquery-updating-community-news-and-nice-chrome-css-feature/

This weeks WordPress news – Covering The Week Commencing 29th June 2020:

WordPress Core

Updating jQuery version shipped with WordPress

Decision Time: What Block Patterns Should Ship With WordPress 5.5?

Community

The JavaScript for WordPress Conference

WordCamp Tulsa 2020 Canceled

Learn about the three Core Web Vitals: LCP, FID & CLS

Build Static or Dynamic Blocks With the WP Block Builder Script

WordPress Contributors Seek Sponsorship for Improving Gutenberg Developer Docs

Flywheel Relaunches Local Pro with Revamped Live Links and New Host-Agnostic Pre-Launch Tools

Web File Management Comes to WPMU DEV Hosting

Plugins / Themes / Blocks

GiveWP 2.7 Brings Donation Form Templates & Per-Form Stripe Accounts

WooCommerce 4.3 to Introduce New Home Screen

Deals from this week

Get the WP Builds Deals emails delivered to your inbox!
and
The WP Builds Deals Page

Buddyboss Lifetime deal

Astra – 25% off all plans and upgrades

OceanWP – 25% off all packages

Crello image editing – $49

Zapier Mastery Course – 50% off with code SCREWCOVID

WP Rocket – 25% off, no code needed

Brizy plugin and Cloud – 15% off with code WPBUILDS15

Continually live chat – $49

Quoters – for creating proposals – $49

Happy Forms Lifetime Deal – $49

Security

iThemes Security Pro Feature Spotlight #1: Magic Links & Passwordless Login

WP Builds

186 – Business liability insurance v’s none

WordPress plugin startup – from 0 to 10k installs – Part 3

UPCOMING – WP Builds UI / UX review with Piccia Neri on 8th July, please submit your site

Jobs

Sentree Hosting – Customer Support and Frontend WordPress Developer

Not WordPress, but useful anyway…

New in Chrome: CSS Overview

Hi there! I’m Moss – The virtual sysadmin for web developers

MacOS security bug could allow a bogus version of Safari to steal your data

Listen to the full episode here:
https://wpbuilds.com/2020/07/02/186-business-liability-insurance-v-none/

Debate with Nathan Wrigley and David Waumsley

Setting up the Debate

“Web professionals should not only think about insurance, but also understand it. Insurance is something we don’t necessarily want to budget for or consider, yet as professionals, we have to”

Scope creep, unexpected project delays, client relationships breaking down, and unpaid invoices. The good news is that there’s an insurance policy to help with these scenarios. In the UK, we call it “professional indemnity insurance.” Elsewhere, it can be called “professional liability” or “errors and omissions insurance.”

Here’s a primer article that might get you up to speed from Smashing Magazine:
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/03/guide-business-insurance-designers-developers/

We also found that people were talking about this and wanting some clarity in the WordPress Facebook groups that we frequent:

WP Builds Group
https://w w w.facebook.com/groups/wpbuilds/permalink/3219295024801940/

Beaver Builder Group
https://www.facebook.com/groups/beaverbuilders/permalink/1470031866489491/

For business liability insurance

• All the augment “for” are here:
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/03/guide-business-insurance-designers-developers/
• Some say they get insurance for maybe $20 – 30 per month
• https://www.techinsurance.com/professions/web-design
• https://www.hiscox.com/small-business-insurance/professional-business-insurance/web-design-insurance

Against business liability insurance from David’s perspective…

David is working ‘with’ clients more than ‘for’ clients and perhaps this method insulates him from the need to protect himself with insurance?

• Can you ever have enough to protect you?  The Smashing Magazine piece talks about needing cover from £100,000 – running to millions!
• No Legal requirement – at least in the UK.
• Like all insurers they are using your fears to sell you something.
• Can’t we safeguard in other ways? What about moving to hourly rates for work. Then you don’t deliver a result and frame it as a collaboration with clients!
• Scope creep is paid for (it’s an agile pay as you go scheme).
• Project delays don’t matter – they pay upfront hours up to a deadline. I have a way to use those hour even if they are delayed.
• Client relationship break down. In one session I don’t charge anything I could not refund. The client can only pay more if they choose to – which assumes they are happy too.
• Intellectual property – not relevant – GPL code (or CC zero).
• Negligence – surely this can be escaped? If you start from the position they you can’t control the software or service use. More so I can control what they do.

Final thoughts from David…

If you charge on promises of end results and a lot of money is at sake then probably you need some protection. Always balance your risks.

Listen to the full episode here:
https://wpbuilds.com/2020/06/29/wp-builds-weekly-wordpress-news-120-gutenberg-8-4-free-wordpress-training-and-youtube-takes-on-tiktok/

This weeks WordPress news – Covering The Week Commencing 22nd June 2020:

WordPress Core

Gutenberg 8.4 Adds Image Editing, Includes Multi-Block Controls, and Enables Block Directory Search

Community

WordPress Contributors Propose Updating Trac Ticket Resolutions to Be More Friendly

Why Expand HeroPress?

WDS Gives Back to WordPress with Five for the Future Tomorrow

University of Wisconsin Offers Free Course on Creating WordPress Websites

Smash Balloon is Now Part of the Awesome Motive Family

A WordPress Plugin For Managing Your Cloud Servers – WP Cloud Deploy

Plugins / Themes / Blocks\

Control Block Design via the EditorPlus WordPress Plugin

Add Per-Block Notes and Create Draft Blocks With the Wholesome Publishing Plugin

Announcing: Virtual Events Add-On to The Events Calendar

Deals from this week

Get the WP Builds Deals emails delivered to your inbox!
and
The WP Builds Deals Page

Buddyboss Lifetime deal

Crello image editing – $49

Amelia booking plugin – $49

WP Reset – starting your WordPress afresh – $49

Brizy plugin and Cloud – 15% off with code WPBUILDS15

Continually live chat – $49

Quoters – for creating proposals – $49

Happy Forms Lifetime Deal – $49

Security

WordPress Vulnerability Roundup: June 2020, Part 2

Malware Detection: Measuring Recall to Catch Them All

WP Builds

185 – Why you should automate all-the-things with James Rose

WordPress plugin startup – from 0 to 10k installs – Part 2

Jobs

Nothing for you this week…

Not WordPress, but useful anyway…

Virgin Galactic flies second SpaceShipTwo test at New Mexico spaceport, clearing the way for powered spaceflight

YouTube’s latest experiment is a TikTok rival focused on 15-second videos

Listen to the full episode here:
https://wpbuilds.com/2020/06/25/185-why-you-should-automate-all-the-things-with-james-rose/

Interview with James Rose

A saved is a penny earned, or so they say. But perhaps we could throw the net a little wider? What about… a minute saved is a penny / dollar earned? That sounds good.

There’s one person who I think of when I think about saving time, and that person is James Rose. That’s because I know that he’s spent a whole heap of time automating just about anything that he can get his hands on. If it is possible to save some time, I suspect that James has done it.

Now, perhaps you’re thinking, well if James has spent ages saving time, then that’s just an oxymoron. Well, he’s cleverer than that! He only spends time trying to save time, when he thinks that the benefits in the longer term will justify the time-cost in the short time. Very wise.

So he speaks about why you might want to get skilled in this area. What the real benefits are and what the pitfalls are. Clearly not everything shoudl be automated; if you try to do that, you might end up with systems and processes which are a little robotic, shall we say. We don’t want to become inauthentic. This is more about saving time on tasks that literally are just a time suck, ones in which there is literally zero benefit to you or your business from pouring that time down a drain.

Now, I could learn a lot from James in this regard. For reasons that I cannot explain, I never invest the time and imagine that it’s better to do things by hand… just this one-last-time! I’m sure you’ve been there, you could invest twenty minutes to automate a process that you hate, a process that you do each week, knowing that, a year from now this automation will have saved you ten hours. But I don’t! I just do it and then forget about it!

Well, it’s that you, James is here to put you straight. Automate the things you can and leave the things that don’t feel right.

The next thing to worry about is exactly how do you automate boring, repetitive tasks. James has a Zapier Mastery course which will help you along the way. He explains how the platform works and how you can get up and running in the shortest possible time.

His bullet list of course benefits runs as follows:

• Take the pressure off
• Scale your business
• Stay focused
• Reduce human error
• Feel like a wizard – I like this one best, because honestly some of this does seem like wizardry!

We also dip into another app that you might know James from, and that is Content Snare . The team have been busy updating it and giving the UI a new lick of paint and so we talk about that and how Content Snare can be used to make the process of getting content from your clients way easier.

So, go check out the podcast and leave a comment below or in the WP Builds Facebook Group .

Mentioned in this episode

Automation & Zapier Training

Zapier Mastery – 50% off (as on 22.06.20)

Content Snare

Agency Highway

Listen to the full episode here:
https://wpbuilds.com/2020/06/22/wp-builds-weekly-wordpress-news-119-wordpress-requiring-php-7-2-yoast-acquires-duplicate-posts-and-instagram-is-massive/

This weeks WordPress news – Covering The Week Commencing 15th June 2020:

WordPress Core

WordPress Bumps Minimum PHP Recommendation to 7.2

Gutenberg 8.3 Updates Block Categories, Includes Parent Block Selector, and Adds New Design Controls

WordPress 5.5 to Include Extensible Core Sitemaps

Community

Duplicate Post joins Yoast and
Yoast Acquires Duplicate Post, Brings on Creator Enrico Battocchi as a Senior Developer

Grant For The Web Accepting Proposals Through June 22

New Documentation and Training Courses for Toolset

Plugins / Themes / Blocks

Fluent Forms 3.6.0 is here, and it is full of user-suggested features!

Build Forms via the Block Editor With Gutenberg Forms

WooCommerce 4.3 Beta Available for Testing

Deals from this week

Get the WP Builds Deals emails delivered to your inbox!
and
The WP Builds Deals Page

Amelia booking plugin – $49

WP Reset – starting your WordPress afresh – $49

Quoters – for creating proposals – $49

Happy Forms Lifetime Deal – $49

Security

Nothing this week that I know of – phew, this never happens. I bet I missed something!

WP Builds

184 – Limited client access v’s full access

WordPress plugin startup – from 0 to 10K installs

Jobs

Page Builder Framework x2 – Gutenberg Developer and Writer

Not WordPress, but useful anyway…

Instagram to Surpass Twitter As a Popular News Source

Is AppSumo Worth the Hassle for WordPress Plugin Developers?

Just a nice story from ‘Stack’ about being saved by their customers

Listen to the full episode here:
https://wpbuilds.com/2020/06/18/184-limited-client-access-vs-full-access/

Debate with Nathan Wrigley and David Waumsley

Setting up the Debate

We see this debate all the time. Some WordPress freelancers and agencies give clients full admin access to WordPress. Some give another role, such as the Editor role or (with WooCommerce) a Shop Keeper role.

Some completely reconfigure and white label the WordPress dashboard. Some give an Editor role for everyday use and an Admin role so they have ownership. I’m sure there are more variations.

Perhaps you’ve changed your position on this over the years, or still have a level of uncertainty.

Perhaps the size of your team matters? If it’s just you dealing with the website, you might have greater oversight into what’s going on and feel more willing to allow a client to have the Administrator role.

To here are some of the things that we think are important when deciding what user role to allow your clients:

Limited client access

• make the website bullet proof for clients
• reduce the confusing clutter created by lots of plugins a client should not need to see
• arguably website care plans are a good thing for clients and us professionals so surely the Admin role should be for us in those circumstances?
• it prevent clients from installing plugins / themes which could break sites, slow them or compromise security
• in most cases you can use snippets or a Role Editor plugin to customise client access
• prevent clients on Care Plans running off with your licenses – gor those who are not using GPL software this can be more of and issue as they are not even entitled to the code itself

Full access

• transparency – nothing is hidden from the client
• perhaps a more adult relationship of trust is created by it
• one of the benefits of WordPress is the ownership that comes with open source
• some useful plugins are not accessible to clients – Analytify Free and Gravity Forms
• clients are increasingly expecting to be able to manage more aspects of their own site – if they Google for WordPress help they will see articles that assume they have admin access
• if you adopt the position that you are helping them on THEIR site they take responsibility for it, if they break stuff they will pay you to fix it
• you shoulder less of the blame when there is an issue with WordPress and plugins
• avoiding the extra weight and problems that comes with trying to maintain a granular set of permissions – things can break and suddenly the client sees (or looses) options in the Admin area

So where do you stand on this one. Allow the clients full access to their WordPress website, or try to limit access for a whol raft of reasons. Both are possible, but it one better? After listening to the podcast, perhaps join the conversation below or in the WP Builds Facebook Group .

Mentioned in this episode

User Role Editor

Editor Menu and Widget Access

Members – Membership & User Role Editor Plugin

Listen to the full episode here:
https://wpbuilds.com/2020/06/11/183-how-i-have-evolved-my-wallace-inline-wordpress-plugin/

Interviewwith Bradley Kirby

If you’re the kind of person who likes to make sure that the website that you hand over to your clients is safe from their clumsy hands, then your might be interested in the podcast today.

Wallace Inline is a great tool for making it really easy for people to update their website content. The idea is that you find a place on the page that you want to edit, and you click on it and alter it right there without the need to go into the settings for the module / element.

Now this has been around for a little while and so you might be wondering why you might need this. Well, one word… permissions. What if you could set it so that your clumsy, trigger happy client only has access to amend that one paragraph on the page that they need to alter from time to time. They have no business altering other parts of the page, that’s not their job. Well, Wallace Inline can help you do all of that.

Like I said the plugin is not a new one, and we featured it on a Wallace Inline WP Builds Podcast back in 2017!

But time and tide wait for nobody and so Bradley has been busy beefing up the capabilities of what Wallace Inline can do, and we spend quite a bit of the podcast talking about that.

• there’s now some minimal support for the ever popular Elementor Page Builder
• ACF / Pods fields are now working through Beaver Themer – caveat emptor, you’re actually altering the value of the field, so besure that you know where else on the site this field’s data might be being used!

We talk about how the plugin is able to conceal editing capabilities and what granularity this is capable of.

At present the plugin works for text, images and background images, but there’s plans to expand this at some point.

It’s a nice episode from a great guy and I hope that you like it. If you do, please leave a comment, either on the WP Builds website or in the thread about this episode in the WP Builds Facebook Group .

Mentioned in this episode

Wallace Inline

Beaver Builder

Elementor

Listen to the full episode here:
https://wpbuilds.com/2020/06/08/wp-builds-weekly-wordpress-news-117-all-women-release-squad-assistant-plugin-and-lots-of-physics/

This weeks WordPress news – Covering The Week Commencing 1st June 2020:

WordPress Core

WordPress Names 5.5 Release Leads, Plans All-Women Release Squad for 5.6

Community

WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks (2020) – Enterprise ($500+/Month)

Freemius Releases Weekly Free Videos for Every WordPress Business Owner

Plugins / Themes / Blocks

Blockify the WordPress Dashboard with the Mission Ctrl Plugin

An Introduction to Assistant (And Why Developers Should Be Excited About It)

MailHawk – WordPress Email Delivery Solved!

Gravity Forms Roadmap

Deals from this week

Get the WP Builds Deals emails delivered to your inbox!
and
The WP Builds Deals Page

Amelia booking plugin – $49

WP Reset – starting your WordPress afresh – $49

Link Whisper – 25% off

Publer – for posting to social channels – $39

Happy Forms Lifetime Deal – $49

GiveWP – a donations plugin – 40% off

If So – for showing dynamic content on your website – $49
Here’s the video that I made about how to use it…

Quoters – for creating proposals – $49

Security

Large Scale Attack Campaign Targets Database Credentials

New! Protect Your WordPress Website with the iThemes Security Site Scan.

WordPress Vulnerability News, June 2020

WP Builds

182 – Office v home working

Jobs

Nothing for you this week…

Not WordPress, but useful anyway…

Automattic Invests $4.6M in New Vector, Creators of the Matrix Open Standard for Decentralized Communication

The Show Must Be Paused

Ancient DNA is offering clues to puzzle of Dead Sea scrolls, say experts

Next-Gen HAMR Platters Promise 80TB Hard Drives

Scientists blow up their lab after creating strongest magnet ever

The Big Boy Fusion Reactor Takes a Big Boy Step