In the News
You’re in luck for 2021 if you are dragging your feet using Gutenberg and the block editor. The Classic Editor Plugin was published in 2018 to help with the transition to the block editor with support through the end of 2021.
Now the Classic Editor plugin will be supported through the end of 2022.
It may be a good time to re-think your transition plans on your websites.
Frontity has been acquired by Automattic. Even though Frontity is a React framework, it doesn’t mean that they are going to push React to the WordPress frontend.
Matt Mullenweg wrote in his recent blog post that there’s still a lot that:
We can learn from decoupled systems and we can incorporate those learnings into WordPress itself as we emphasize performance, flexibility, and ease of development.
I look forward to Frontity joining WordPress and channeling their efforts into the WordPress APIs, documentation, and Gutenberg’s full-site editing tools.”
Sarah Gooding over on WPTavern updated the community about the progress on the block-based Navigation editor screen.
The screen got a status check last week as part of a Hallway Hangout meeting. Once the Navigation screen is available by default in the Gutenberg plugin, the team working on the feature will be able to gather more feedback. Matias Ventura provides a quick overview of the main areas and features currently underway for 5.9 in Gutenberg. Some are in more advanced stages than others, but together they paint a picture of what this will look like.
Some News Around Security
On August 13, 2021, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team responsibly disclosed two vulnerabilities in Nested Pages, a WordPress plugin installed on over 80,000 sites that provides drag and drop functionality to manage your page structure and post ordering. If you have any friends or colleagues using this plugin, please share this announcement with them and encourage them to update to version 3.1.16 (or newer) of Nested Pages as soon as possible.
On August 3, 2021, the same team initiated the disclosure process for two vulnerabilities discovered in the Gutenberg Template Library & Redux Framework plugin, which is installed on over 1 million WordPress sites. One vulnerability allowed users with lower permissions, such as contributors, to install and activate arbitrary plugins and delete any post or page via the REST API. A second vulnerability allowed unauthenticated attackers to access potentially sensitive information about a site’s configuration. Please go ahead and update that as soon as possible.
WooCommerce news
They are planning to raise the minimum WordPress and PHP requirements needed to use the Action Scheduler plugin. This change will impact any plugin or theme that includes the Action Scheduler as one of their bundled vendor libraries. It also impacts any sites where Action Scheduler is installed as a standalone plugin. In these cases, before updating Action Scheduler to 3.3.0 or higher, it is important to perform some basic safety checks.
From the Grabbag
People are moving and grooving in and about the WordPress Space. Congrats to Birgit Pauli-Haack who has run the Gutenberg Times and Changelog Podcast. She has started as a developer advocate over @Automattic.
So many of us are familiar with Andrea Middleton’s work and know her personally from WordCamps.
Andrea made the announcement on Twitter and her blog that she is moving to Reddit after contributing to WordPress for nearly ten years.
