Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler and today we’ll be diving into the ins and the outs of the new things that came with WordPress 4.8 but before we get there let’s dive in and look at a couple of announcements. The first thing that I want to share is Jetpack 5.0. The Spring Clean has now been released. This was the last big Spring Clean before the summer comes around and Jetpack 5.0 brings several bug fixes, small enhancements, and it will polish to your WordPress sites. So, there’s cleaner code with faster execution so they made some improvements on how they handle WordPress.com API requests to make sure that the data is syncing back and forth much quicker.

They’ve also removed a deprecated method and refractured some of the frontend codes making it faster and much cleaner code. They’ve also added some stability and compatibility, so they fixed a lot of simple alignment issues on the frontend just to make things much, much easier and much, much nicer. They’ve also fixed another 7.1 PHP compatibility issue with social links that was causing fatal errors. They’ve also included it and to make sure it was compatible with WordPress 4.8, which is great because WordPress 4.8 is now out and they’ve tightened up the connection process to WordPress.com. So, now connecting Jetpack to WordPress.com is much, much more stable. If you need any more details, there’s a link in the Show Notes for the entire change log and you can see all the people that contributed to that release.

Another thing in way of an announcements and this has been found on several different places out there on the web but one that came out in the past week is that the title of the article is, “The company behind WordPress is closing its gorgeous San Francisco office because its employees never show up.” This is true. This is automatic. This is the company that I work for that has an office at 140 Hawthorne Street in San Francisco. I got the opportunity to go there when I was a brand-new hire. I got to fly out to San Francisco. I worked there for a day and – I guess I worked there for a week and there was usually a dozen of maybe two dozen people there but this is a HUGE space. It is a 15,000-square foot building that was turned into an office space and about five people go into it.

So, there’s a lot of foosball equipment and then there’s foosball and ping pong and air hockey and all kinds of like fun games and stuff. In the article, it states that there are more gaming tables than there are actually people there that work there on an everyday basis. So, this is going to be something that automatically lets go and is kind of sad. It was a really cool space but the money just didn’t make sense to continue to rent this space in the high-end, the high price that it is in San Francisco. So, that is something that I just wanted to share. WordCamp San Francisco and the WordCamp US that used to be, or the San Francisco WordCamp that used to use some of the space there as part of their venue and so since now it’s a WordCamp US thing, it kind of travels around the United States, then there’s no need for this space anymore.
So, that’s something else that came out in the news. Then the last piece of information that came out in the news that I thought was pretty interesting is that the WPForms has acquired WPMail SMTP. So, WPForms is created by – it’s the same people as the OptinMonster. It’s Syed Balke and his company and so they’ve acquired this WPMail SMTP, which is the most popular SMTP plugin for WordPress with over 600,000 active installs. So, the main reason for doing this is email deliverability is a huge problem for WordPress websites. You know, we get this all the time for support at WooCommerce, like people are like, “I didn’t get this message” or “My customers aren’t getting this message.”

Well, within hosting companies they not really necessarily provide email support in the SMTP servers or what they need to send email messages from outside, or to send a message from your WordPress site. So, as WPForms grew, they were hitting this pinpoint of so many people having problems with not being able to send their messages or actually get responses when somebody submitted a form to their website. So, they basically acquired the most popular SMT plugin and the goal is to leverage the authority and notoriety of this plugin to make significant impact on email deliverability just to make it work that much better.

So, they’re not going to build an email deliverability service but they are trying to just make it more user-friendly to use WPForms and make sure that those forms are sent to the right people. So, that is something else that I wanted to share that’s in the WordPress news this week. All right, taking a quick turn here to the, is there a plugin for that section? There’s more than 50,000 plugins in the WordPress repository and each week I just like to highlight one. A simple plugin that may do, you know, adds very basic functionality to your WordPress site or one that just may add tons and tons of complexity to your website. Today’s plugin that I want to share with you is called Enable Media Replace.

This is a small little plugin that will allow you to replace a file in your media library by uploading a new file in its place. No more deleting, renaming, or uploading files. In the past, if you uploaded a file and it wasn’t quite right and you needed to change it, you first had to delete the old one and then you had to rename it the exact same thing and update it in the image library. It was just a really big pain. Now, all you have to do is anytime you have an uploaded file, go to edit view and you can just replace the file, either within your WordPress dashboard or you can replace the file with a new name and update all the links. So, there’s two different ways to do it.

It’s super easy, super cool plugin. It’s got more than 200,000 active installs, so it is clearly a plugin that has a lot of use and has a lot of value for people that are using WordPress. So, that’s Enable Media Replace. You can search for that on the WordPress repository or as always, look in the Show Notes for Episode No. 341. Okay, today we are going to dive in and we’re going to talk about the latest version of WordPress. WordPress 4.8 is called “Evans” and it is an update with you in mind. That’s kind of the tagline for it. So, this version of WordPress is named “Evans” in honor of jazz pianist and composer William John “Bill” Evans and it’s now available to download and update in your WordPress dashboard. There’s great new features and it just will allow you to express yourself and represent your brand. A lot of the features or updates in this version will seem very minor. They’ve been built by hundreds of contributors with specifically WordPress users in mind. So, let’s go ahead and just kind of dive in and talk about some of these things that are out there. There’s been a lot of work in WordPress 4.8 in the widget area. So, there are three new default digits in WordPress 4.8 and users have been asking for these for a very long time and they’re finally here. The first one is the image widget and, previously, if someone wanted to add an image to a WordPress sidebar, they either had to use a plugin or they had to write custom HDML.

With WordPress 4.8 you can just drag and drop the image to the sidebar. You can click the add image button in the widget settings and it will bring up the familiar WordPress media uploader. You can upload that image from your computer or you can select a previously uploaded image from your media library. Once it’s uploaded, click add to widget and the button and you’ll be able to see the image in the window preview and don’t forget to click the “save” button and store your widget settings. So, it makes it really easy to add an image in the sidebar. Maybe you want to put some sort of logo or an ad or something. You can just do it right with this brand-new image widget.

The next one is similar. It is a video widget and it will allow you to easily add videos to your WordPress sidebar or display any video from YouTube, Vimeo, or any of the other oEmbed Providers. So, the video widget makes it super easy to embed videos from popular hosting companies. You just click “add video” at the bottom of the widget and it brings up the media uploader and so if you want to upload it to your server you can do that or you can select the area insert from URL and then you paste in the URL, so like the YouTube link or the Vimeo link and then WordPress will fetch at the video thumbnail and they’ll display it. You click on the Ad Widget and you’ll actually see a video thumbnail in the widget area, which is really nice.

Then you click “save” and it will add it to your sidebar or any widget, I guess. I keep referring to this as the sidebar area but you can have widgets in any part of your WordPress theme. There’s one called the audio widget and just like the video or just like the image, it’s exactly the same. You can add audio files to your WordPress sidebar. Just click the “add audio” button and it will embed the audio in a nice HTML 5 audio player. It supports MP3, OGG and Wave file formats. Then the visual editor in the text widget, that’s a kind of a new thing as well. So, in the past, the text widget was basically just a box. It had the title. You could put the title for the widget and then you just had a textbox. You had to provide ALL the formatting yourself.

Now, with this new visual editor built into the text widget, you can make your text bold, italicize, and you can do order lists or unorder lists so numbered lists or bulleted lists and you can create links, all right within the widget itself. So, it’s a very light version of the same visual editor that you get when you write posts and pages and it just adds extra functionality and it just makes it that much easier because it’s really tough to tell somebody, oh, to make this bold you have to wrap it around strong text or you have to write this HTML so that you can create the links or you can make these different colors or whatnot. So, not a lot of features are in there. I guess in this example you still have to use some HTML to change colors or to make the sizes different but we’re getting there. They’ve added some features there and that’s really nice, so the visual editor has been added to the text widget. The one that is probably the hardest to try to explain is the enhancements that have happened in the visual editor. So, the main one is we add a link to a post. Many beginners… most people using WordPress in the visual editor found it difficult to move the cursor away from a new link.

You know, maybe you created a link and then you started typing before it or after it and all of that text is now hyperlinked or you try to add a word in the middle of your link and then it jumps to the end. It was just a really confusing situation of how that actually works and how it’s set up. So, over all, this has been the hardest to explain but it’s called link boundaries. It just kind of works. There is a link in the post for the WordPress news release notes that you can see this in place and see how this actually works. But that is link boundaries and once you’ve created a link it knows where the boundaries are and it allows you to easily, quickly, update or change the text within your link. So, again, this is something you will have to play with probably.

You won’t even really notice it until it happens to you once or twice and you’re like, wow, that really just works as it supposed to. That’s how it’s built. That’s how it’s set up. So, that’s the enhancement in the visual editor. Kind of the biggest feature that you may see comes from the dashboard and, again, not a lot of us look at the dashboard but this is something that, you know, you come into your WordPress and you’re into the dashboard and now this new. WordPress events and news area and you have to go in and you have to select your location. You can put in, like Dayton, Ohio. You can put probably the biggest, closest city to you and then from there it shows different information.

So, for example, if I was living in Orlando or Columbus or wherever you pick… your city… then you can see where are official meet-up groups happening and what are the next sessions and then it also shows WordCamps that are in close proximity. So, the widget automatically tries to guess your location by setting the IP address, the time zone, and the locale with using an API but if you’re using a VPN service you will see events based on the server you’re using but you can change that manually. So, you can go in there and put it in there so you can see what’s happening any other place in the world.

So, it just shows up on your dashboard and, of course, if you don’t like it or if you don’t want to see it you can go ahead and in the screen options area and uncheck that box for the WordPress events and news and that will be removed from your dashboard. So, those are kind of the big features that you will see when you’re starting to play around and you’re starting to use this new version of WordPress 4.8. There have been quite a few under the hood changes. There’s been some changes in the editor API, so some new APIs for the tiny MCE editor just to work a little bit better. There’s a variable customizer width, so if you have a live theme and the customizer on large screens, you may have noticed that the sidebar sometimes looks too narrow, so WordPress 4.8 makes the customizer sidebar to be proportional to the user screen size. So, if you’re using a giant monitor, then you’ll have a little bit more real estate there in the left-hand sidebar of the customizer. Let’s see, user’s name is prominently displayed on the edit user screen, so now in WordPress 4.8 the edit user screens will now prominently display the user’s name in the heading. So, that was a bug that has been fixed and then the tag cloud, which it will not use a title tag. So, previously, the cloud widget showed a number of posts filed under a tag in a title popover. The title tag in the code is now replaced with a more accessible area label attribute, so this was another bug that they worked on and they fixed.

So, not an outstanding change in the way of like hundreds and hundreds of new features but just the incremental updates to make it easier to update the content and make it easier to update the website. So, that’s kind of where WordPress has been going over the last couple of years, you know. It’s always been these small little increments and this one was focused specifically on the visual editor or the tiny MCE editor, just making it easier to do these things. Remember the other two areas that we’ll see releases this year are the customizer and so it looks like the customizer got a little bit of work this time with the width, you know, making sure that the width is proportional inside your editor or inside your website browser.

Then the other one is some API expected results. So, it is June and we just got in the first release and that’s not to say we’re only going to get three releases per year but I’m sure that the team is kind of tackling this type of stuff, the editor and those types of things. They’ll be working and they’ll probably get some more changes and there’s probably a good chance that we may get an additional release from them in this year as well. So, that’s what I wanted to share with you today. It’s just one of the highlights of updating to the latest version of WordPress. Make sure that before you update, you ARE using and you’ve got a backup of your website. There’s tons of backup plugins out there. VaultPress is one that automatically offers that is an amazing plugin to make sure that all of your sites are backed up.

Backup Buddy is a premium one that’s out there as well. Then you can always use the BackWPup, which is a free plugin the WordPress repository. Just install that, do a backup, and then update to the latest version. Your webhost does do some backups but I wouldn’t rely on them, especially when you’re making a big update and a change like this to get to WordPress 4.8. I’m excited to get all my sites updated and start to see these new features in the while. You know, I’ve been playing with it on a development site and it’s just not the same when you are kind of testing it but when you really get using it and you’re like, oh, I need to do this and you can go and grab that widget and you can easily add that image.

Or if you’re building a website for somebody and they want to change that image regularly. I know that I’ve had that happen before back in my past client work… that somebody wanted to update regularly on the sidebar and it was just like, oh, well, first you have to go upload the media into the media library and then copy the URL and then create this, you know, use this HTML. It was just a real big pain and now it works really well and it is really nice. So, that is WordPress 4.8. Next, we will be coming to you with more information on where you can learn WordPress and where you can just continually to soak in information and continue to learn and take this journey on becoming the best WordPress developer or the WordPress user that you’d want to become. So, that’s what I wanted to share with you this week. We’ll talk again next week. Bye-bye.