The Month in WordPress: February 2018
Judging by the flurry of activity across the WordPress project throughout February, it looks like everyone is really getting into the swing of things for 2018. There have been a lot of interesting new developments, so read on to see what the community has been up to for the past month.
WordPress 4.9.3 & 4.9.4
Early in the month, version 4.9.3 of WordPress was released, including a number of important bug fixes. Unfortunately it introduced a bug that prevented many sites from automatically updating to future releases. To remedy this issue, version 4.9.4 was released the following day requiring many people to manually update their sites.
While this kind of issue is always regrettable, the good thing is that it was fixed quickly, and that not all sites had updated to 4.9.3 yet, which meant they bypassed the bug in that version.
You can find out more technical information about this issue on the Core development blog.
The WordCamp Incubator is Back
In 2016, the Global Community Team ran an experimental program to help spread WordPress to underserved areas by providing more significant organizing support for their first WordCamp event. This program was dubbed the WordCamp Incubator, and it was so successful in the three cities where it ran that the program is back for 2018.
Right now, the Community Team is looking for cities to be a part of this year’s incubator by taking applications. Additionally, each incubator community will need an experienced WordCamp organizer to assist them as a co-lead organizer for their event — if that sounds interesting to you, then you can fill in the application form for co-leads.
You can find out further information about the WordCamp Incubator on the Community Team blog.
WordPress Meetup Roundtables scheduled for March
In order to assist local WordPress meetup organizers with running their meetup groups, some members of the Community Team have organized weekly meetup roundtable discussions through the month of March.
These will be run as video chats at 16:00 UTC every Wednesday this month and will be a great place for meetup organizers to come together and help each other out with practical ideas and advice.
If you are not already in the WordPress meetup program and would like to join, you can find out more information in the WordPress Meetup Organizer Handbook.
GDPR Compliance in WordPress Core
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is an upcoming regulation that will affect all online services across Europe. In order to prepare for this, a working group has been formed to make sure that WordPress is compliant with the GDPR regulations.
Aside from the fact that this will be a requirement for the project going forward, it will also have an important and significant impact on the privacy and security of WordPress as a whole. The working group has posted their proposed roadmap for this project and it looks very promising.
To get involved in building WordPress Core, jump into the #gdpr-compliance channel in the Making WordPress Slack group, and follow the Core team blog.
Further Reading:
- WPShout published a thorough guide to WordPress security.
- The Community Team has published interesting statistics from the WordCamp program in 2016 and 2017.
- An intriguing proposal has been made for a new ‘Onboarding’ team to be started in the WordPress project.
- The new editing experience for WordPress, named Gutenberg, continues to be actively developed with a feature-packed release this past month.
- The Advanced WordPress Facebook group held an interview with WordPress co-founder, Matt Mullenweg about the Gutenberg project.
- Two factor authentication is on its way to the WordPress.org network — this will be a great improvement to the overall security of the project.
If you have a story we should consider including in the next “Month in WordPress” post, please submit it here.
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