Hacked casserole with a side of delayed stuffing

Gobble gobble!

WordPress 5.9 will not be released until the beginning of 2022. There were some major blockers identified with the Beta Release and the team thought it best to delay the release instead of pushing through the holidays. Beta 1 was originally scheduled to release last week. Now the overall schedule will be updated to reflect the new date, January 25, 2022 (edit: We said 22nd in the podcast, but have revised it here.)

This will give contributors more time to collaborate further on the release. There is a new video posted on Facebook that covers responsive editing and customization for 5.9. Check this out to see all the new features that are coming. 

Justin Sainton shared how he got the new brand for pagely.com launched with full site editing in WordPress. This article shares how the project was started in January of 2021 but was quickly finished in 8 weeks for the merger and acquisition with GoDaddy. Justin covers some of the pain points of Full Site Editing in Gutenberg that you should be aware of in case you decide to follow this accelerated timeline yourself.

Events

As I mentioned last week the State of the Word will be live-streamed from New York City. That means that you can join the fun either online or in person, on December 14, 2021, between 5 and 7 pm EST! You can join with your local Meetup for a watch party and now you can participate in person in New York City by filling out the registration by Sunday, November 28, but be aware that not all requests will receive a seat due to the venue capacity – set at 50. 

Sabrina Zierden shared the first plans for the largest venue for WordCamp Europe 2022. To work on the plans, they have reopened the Call for Organizers again. It looks very exciting to have live conferences scheduled in 2022. That video looks pretty amazing as an in-person venue.

Security

We should maybe be getting used to seeing Security breaches happen but when it does, it is still so disturbing. This time in a disclosure to the Securities and Exchange Commission, GoDaddy revealed that they had been hacked. This was not the first time the company was compromised. GoDaddy stated that it has discovered that an “unauthorized third party” had accessed a managed WordPress hosting environment. Up to 1.2 million users were compromised. According to this document, GoDaddy believes that the first breach occurred around September 6, 2021, and investigations are currently underway. Go change all your WordPress passwords if you have accounts with GoDaddy.

From Our Contributors and Producers

Block Building

Do you want to create your own custom block? The Wicked Block Builder is in the WordPress plugin directory. There’s no setup required and you can build blocks in as little as a few minutes. The block builder is still in beta so please make sure you have a backup in place before you give this plugin a try.

The Automattic Theme team has been working on a plugin to help you create a Blockbased child theme. You can use the existing tools to make changes to a Blockbase theme, and then export a bundle of templates and theme.json as a new child theme. Once the theme has been created then unzipped to your WordPress site, you can modify it further. It is a cool tool to go check out.

In the continued discussion around custom blocks, Matt Watson wrote a nice in-depth article about creating Gutenberg blocks over on the WPOwls. The challenge was to build a typical “Owl-Link” Gutenberg “Block” using JavaScript and React style syntax. Matt does a great job of reviewing how to build and apply a block pattern in Gutenberg.

If you are not interested in learning blocks at all, you can check out Webflow’s approach to creating Websites with no code.

BobWP shared that this will be year 11 for him in the WordPress space. His post reflects on people leaving WordPress recently and how the community has been important to him over the years.

The PHP foundation has been created as an open collective to help maintain the knowledge that has been developed over its 26-year history. The language has been actively developed by a huge number of people and in order to have this stick around for another evolution, the foundation has been established.  Many companies have joined forces to keep PHP alive, including Automattic.

Mind and Body Minute

As we are all busy around the holidays while trying not to eat all the pies so…enjoy the clip submitted by Michelle Schulp!

It is a great reminder to take care of yourself, set realistic wellness goals, and approach the season with mindfulness.

Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today: 

• Birget Pauli-Haack
• Dave Rodenbaugh
• Daniel Schutzsmith
• Bob Dunn
• Jeff Chandler
• Vinny McKee
• Maciek Palmowski 

New Members:
We would like to welcome Vinny from Wicked Plugins and Patrick Garman from Mindsize. They were quick to contribute this week in the news, and we appreciate it!