On today’s episode, we are going to be talking all about the GDPRenberg Update. That’s right – GDPR and Gutenberg. What updates are happening and things you need to know about – right here on Your Website Engineer Podcast, Episode #390.

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Hello and welcome to another episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler. I’m excited to be here with you today and we are going to be talking about all things WordPress today. I’ve got lots of things. I’ve got some news. I’ve got plugins. I’ve got things to talk about that’s coming in the update section of the show. So, let’s go ahead and dive right in.

The first announcement is – you may have seen this – this came out last week. I believe it was a Thursday, but WordPress 4.9.6 was released as a privacy and maintenance release. And it is one that is encouraged for you to update your sites and take advantage of some of the new privacy features.

So, within privacy, there’s the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation – GDPR. We’ll talk more about that in a little bit, but that goes into effect on May 25th. The GDPR requires companies and site owners to be transparent about how they collect, use, and share personal data. It also gives individuals more access and choice when it comes to how their personal data is collected, used, and shared.

And so, it adds some information to allow the store owner or the website owner to protect that data and allow people to request that information if they need. It allows you to automatically create a privacy page, which is really nice. Now you can just designate a page that’s your privacy page and it will be shown on your log-in and registration pages. You can add this link wherever and it automatically generates all the data that you need for those pages.

And then there’s a section for data handling. This is under Tools and it’s export personal data. That’s a new option under Tools and it will allow site owners to export a zip file containing a user’s personal data and it will allow you to erase a user’s personal data, including data collected by participating plugins. And so, that all is in the update.

There has also been 95 updates that were made in WordPress 4.9.6 and I think – and this isn’t a – I guess this is a personal opinion – but I think that this could have been considered a major release of WordPress even though it doesn’t have the – you know – 4.9, 5.0, 5.1 – it could have been a major release for some of these features because it’s a big deal and this needs to happen in the WordPress space. But, since we’re waiting on 5.0 for Gutenberg, it’s not considered an officially – like a big release. So, it’s just WordPress 4.9.6. So, I recommend updating your sites this week, and if you have auto-install already turned on, then it’s probably already updated.

The next step in the news is from wptavern.com and it is an article talking about how wordpress.org – the plugin review team – is going to be closing unused plugins. So, this is a kind of a process that the team over there – the plugin review team – and they’re going to start removing and closing down unused plugins. And this is a plugin that has been approved for the directory but no code was ever uploaded by the developer in six months or more.

So, this means, if you submitted a plugin or you submitted some code and you got approved for the name – and so, basically the naming structure – the url – you know – wordpress.org/plugin/ – you know – whatever – that slug name – if it has been held for six months or more and no code has ever been uploaded, then they’re going to take these down and they’re going to reuse those slugs and those urls.

At first, we thought that it was if code hasn’t been updated on the plugin for six months – and that’s not necessarily the case. It’s just that if no code has been updated or uploaded in six months after the url has been created, then those are going to be removed and just kind of clean up and save some resources there on the WordPress repository. So, that’s the other piece of news.

The other thing that I heard this week on a similar podcast – or a different podcast that I listen to – is about CSS tricks. And that’s at css-tricks.com and they have all kinds of tutorials for all kinds of things – mainly CSS, believe it or not. But they’re running a series written by Chris Coyier who is the founder of css-tricks, but it is learning Gutenberg – a series introduction. That’s the first article. And right now, as of today when I’m recording this the day before the podcast comes out, there are actually three of the seven-part series that are out and available – so, the introduction and What is Gutenberg Anyways and a Primer to Create a Gluten Block. That is an article as well.

And they’ll also be talking about moderate JavaScript syntax coming soon – React 101, Setting Up a Custom Web Pack, and A Custom Card Block. And so, I think, with all of those resources – it’s with Chris and a couple other people – we’re starting to write these big long tutorials together – or separate – and then they decided, hey, this makes more sense if we can do this all together as one team and release it as one big – a big article. So, they’re doing that over there on css-tricks. And you can find out more in the show notes for Episode #390.

The last thing that I want to say is that this past weekend was WordCamp Dayton. It was a ton of fun and I learned a lot. I actually went to a lot of sessions even though, being the lead organizer, you typically just kind of – you know – going around with your head cut off trying to figure out, you know, this issue, then this issue, then this issue – and honestly, we didn’t have that. We used the Dayton Metro Library – their brand new facility downtown – and it is a gorgeous facility.

We’ve got it all set up for next year. We’re going to be March 1st and 2nd next year. So, if you’re willing to come to Dayton in the winter months, I would put that on your schedule right away and so you don’t forget about it. But that’s coming up in about 10 months or so. So, we’re beginning that process. I was telling some friends it’s almost like when you give – or when you have a baby – and then, after a while, you know, things get kind of back to normal or whatnot, and then you’re like, oh, let’s just do it again. And it’s kind of the same thing – like we did all this work over the last, you know, couple months and then it’s like, oh, that wasn’t so bad. This was fun. Let’s do it again next year.

So, we are going to be doing that next year. And as part of that, I had a couple friends in and we recorded a couple of podcasts from the Get Options podcast and our links in the show notes window or live and available. But we did some recording here in my studio and we had three of us and it was really a lot of fun. It was the first time I’ve done – well, I guess I’ve done some in-person interviews at WordCamps and different things, but this was the first time I had people in my studio and we all had good mics and good set-ups and whatnot and all in one space. So, that was a lot of fun. And again, I’ll share that more in a few weeks when that post goes live.

Okay, onto the Plugin of the Week. There’s one called Meks Easy Maps and you can find that if you search for that. Meks is spelled M-E-K-S. And this is a plugin that will allow you to easily assign locations to your posts or categories via Google Map or Friendly Interface. It’s a highly configurable and it provides you with the various options for displaying the map.

So, one thing that I would think this would be really cool is for like a travel blogger. You could tag every one of your posts with a geolocation or some sort of location and then you can have a map displayed across your website to show every place that you traveled and things like that. So, that’s the Plugin of the Week. It’s really cool. Meks Easy Maps and it’s highly configurable and you can use it and you can find that one in the WordPress repository or the link as always is in the show notes for Episode #390.

All right. Today, I just want to give you a brief update. I wasn’t sure what to talk about on the show because, you know, there’s lots of things going on in the WordPress space, but I feel that Gutenberg’s coming, so we want to talk about that and we want to see how we can get prepared for our sites with Gutenberg. But then, also, GDPR is this week. It’s the 25th. It’s coming up, you know, within a couple days of now. And so, I just want to give you some updates about WordPress and GDPR and all of those things.

So, we already talked about 4.9.6 is out. It’s available. It has all of its data privacy. It’s getting ready for that so that WordPress Core is pretty much ready I would say. I won’t say that it’s 100 percent ready, but I would say that it is the start of the process. I don’t think any tool is going to be 100 percent ready until we really know what the GDPR is and how they’re going to enforce it and whatnot. But WordPress Core, as long as we’ve updated it to 4.9.6, is ready. It’s the first round of tools that has been added and it’s kind of ready to go.

It also has that default privacy policy. That’s something that I talked about too – that it allows you to create a privacy policy right within the dashboard. This is a big win for the average WordPress site owner. It can be expensive and daunting to get some sort of contract or like contract a legal service to help you create a GDPR-friendly privacy policy that you can use much of this new text that’s in there to reshape your own privacy policy and you can get that set up on your website.

You also have the ability to export personal data. So, if somebody comes to you – and this is a big deal for folks that are in the European Union – they have the right to request their personal data to see what information that you have holding from them or what you have collected from them on their website. So, you can run this and that was a section under the Tools that I was mentioning earlier that you can go ahead and they can – it’s actually just an automated tool. There’s even the ability to do that as well. So, you could – they can put in their email address – or the email address and the site admin must approve the transaction, but then it will automatically kick out all the information that you have on them.

Also, it has the ability to erase personal data. So, if you need to erase data for somebody, you can do that. And then there is a comment/consent box. So, within this update, the consent statement will be automatically added to the Submit Comment button for logged-in users or logged-out users which asks the commenters if they want to save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. So, that’s built into WordPress as well. I missed that in the updated post.

So, those are some things that are coming. The WordPress Core team is going to continue to work through some of those privacy tools, enhancements to WordPress Core, the WordPress ecosphere – we should be able to automatically add information in our plugins and repopulate – or prepopulate – and suggest additionals to your previously-generated privacy policy. And some other stuff is coming. They’re still working on it, but they’re just not quite there yet when it comes to GDPR.

Also, I probably could have had articles for some of the big, top-name plugins that are out there, but I know for a fact that WooCommerse is working this. JetPack is working on this. Some of the big name plugins that take users’ data, they’re working on figuring out how we can add those same types of tools or how can they hook into WordPress’s tools to be able to extract data and be able to erase data on behalf of the customer when they’re ready for that.

So, those are some things that are coming. I think, in this week, what we need to do is make sure that we’ve updated our sites to the latest version of WordPress – that we have that ability – and then, if you’re using some sort of third-party newsletter system, then start sending messages to those who are in the European Union. Make sure that you’re sending them privacy policies – especially to those in the European Union. They don’t necessarily have to be blasted to everyone. I mean this is only a regulation that is for the European Union, so take some time and filter out your list and make sure the North Americans aren’t getting the information that they don’t really need to have right at this time.

So, that’s the GDPR update. That’s what we need to be working on this week and make sure that you’re kind of filtering through the list and getting the correct people the checkboxes that they need to say, yes, I would like to continue to be on your list – for your email list or whatnot. So, that is the GDPR update.

Now, let’s talk about Gutenberg and how to prepare our site for Gutenberg and how we should just start getting ready for testing. So, we talked about Gutenberg and I’ll just – one more recap of what it is – it is the WordPress project that aims to give users more flexibility or more flexible way to design their content. The project aims to replace the current editor which performs mostly as a word processor with a more visual and structured interface. Currently, Gutenberg is just a plugin and it grants users the ability to modify their content – similarly to how the visual composer or other drag-and-drop editors do – but it’s a more simplified, highly-intuitive way all built on the power of JavaScript.

And so, let’s talk just about a few pieces of our site and how we can set up a test area and what we need to be doing to get our website up and running and ready for Gutenberg. So, Gutenberg is this massive project. It’s a massive undertaking that will touch a large number of end points within your website. The three main places that you want to check for issues are in your theme because Gutenberg comes with its own set of styles for content. You want to make sure that your theme is compatible. What will it look like when Gutenberg is added or activated. Does anything change?

Your plugins – it’s possible that Gutenberg may interact with your plugins in an unexpected way and you want to look for those and what – just to see what kind of issues that you may run into, you know? Maybe you won’t be able to add any of the metafields or that checkbox that’s on the post page isn’t going to be visible anymore. Or maybe even you won't be able to get to the Settings page because there are – you know – it’s hidden within – you know – somewhere within Gutenberg. So, you want to check for that.

And then your content – it will affect how your content is displayed and you – it’s not going to change anything that you currently have. So, right now, like on yourwebsiteengineer.com, I have 390 posts and there are 390 podcasts show notes and none of those will be changed. There will be nothing that I need to go back and update or change. They’ll all continue to work as is. Now, as soon as I turn on Gutenberg or as soon as WordPress 5.0 happens, then it’s going to be when all these blocks are starting to be used and all of the changes and whatnot. So, those are some things to look at when it comes to your website.

So, first off, I recommend setting up a test area. You don’t want to necessarily do this on your live server. Of course, you can. I don’t recommend it though. It’s always best to do things on a testing environment – whether you do that locally on your computer – or a lot of the WordPress hosts these days have the ability to click a button inside your host dashboard and create a staging site. Once you have a staging site set up, then it basically is going to – or once you click that button, I guess, then it’s going to duplicate all your content so you have an exact clone of your website.

And then what you’ll do is you’ll go into your – into the plugin section – you’ll go and search for Gutenberg and then you will install Gutenberg. Now, once you have that installed, the first section that you may want to look at is your theme. If there are any problems at this point such as database errors or problems in the WordPress Admin, you’ll want to – you’ll make note of this. Make sure that you’re making notes and figuring out what type of issues are you running into and what types of things are you seeing?

So, you want to check just on the front page of your site. Look what it looks like. You know, are the fonts looking okay? Is the spacing okay? Things along those lines – and if you forget what it looked like before, then you can just turn off Gutenberg and continue to look and browse across your website. You’ll just have to kind of look through all the pieces. If you need to make some adjustments because of the Gutenberg CSS is overwriting your theme’s Gutenberg, then it’s a great time to create a child theme or add some CSS in the additional CSS area inside the customizer.

And so, it’s just going to be a once-over. Most of the time, things should look okay, but it’s just going to be some occasional fonts or occasional colors that may look out of whack. So, that’s the first way to put your theme through its places.

Now, the next part is you want to look at your plugins. Once your theme is all kind of squared away, up next is looking at the plugins. Specifically, keep an eye on any plugins that provide short codes in your comments. So, like gravity forms or there’s a bunch of plugins out there that create – you know, WooCommerce uses short codes – like those are the ones that we’re going to have to look at. We’re going to make sure that the plugins affect the appearance of your content and what that looks like in the plugins or in plugins that directly insert content into your page such as like advanced custom fields or custom metadata or things like that.

So, the first thing – let’s look at the short codes. You may gather a list of all the short codes you’re using. I know I’m using half a dozen – one for the podcast player – and I’m using a couple for –some of the ones that I’ve created just insert text into the show notes and what not. So, I want to look for those and look through your website and see if you see any of the dreaded short code – actually the code itself – appearing on the front end. Then, if you do – if you see that – then you know, okay, that could be an issue. Let’s see. How can we fix that? Like look through and see what that looks like.

We’re going to look at content with your plugins. Make sure that looks okay. Make sure those forms are generated. Make sure that all the plugins are doing exactly what they need. And then we want to make sure if there’s any conflicting issues concerning elements that are being created with Gutenberg or, you know, I mean just basically – for an example – like what I would do is I would create a brand new show notes episode and then I would just do my regular routine.

Okay, I’ve created all of this in the notes app on my computer and then I’m going to copy and paste this and see if the markdown comes through, see if the short codes come through, and just kind of see what happens like when you copy and paste all this information like I normally do and see what kind of workflows and things that need to be changed in order for me to be much more efficient with using Gutenberg and making sure that all my content is in a block, etcetera.

So, that’s kind of the steps and things that we should be doing now before Gutenberg releases. We want to be just kind of on the forefront and ready for this. And I’m writing this down for something for me to do next week. I’m doing some traveling to go to a team meetup. And so, this is one of those things that’s like, oh, this isn’t urgent to do, but I could do this on an airplane or it’s something that I can do in the mornings or the evenings as I’m getting ready for the day. I’m waiting for the team to get ready to do things.

And so, that’s kind of going to be my goal. I’m going to install Gutenberg and just kind of work through things and see what it looks like and see how it feels and see what kind of issues that I’m running into. And so, I can ready and confident when Gutenberg or WordPress 5.0 is ready to launch to the work. Then I can be, yes, I am ready to do it and I don’t have to do all this testing later when I’m sure that I’ll have other more important things to do.

So, those are the two updates for today. We want to think about the GDPR. See what you need to do to get ready for that this week. And then get ready for Gutenberg. In the next couple weeks, I’d say spend some time duplicating your site, installing Gutenberg, and just work through the process of playing with it. The interface will change a little bit over time, but it has gotten a lot better than the third, fourth, fifth time that I used it. And so, that’s really nice. And so, they’re continuing to add features and take away bugs and whatnot.

So, that’s what I wanted to share with you today – getting ready for Gutenberg and getting ready for GDPR. Next week, I’ll be in Montreal for a team meetup, but there will be another podcast episode in the queue waiting for you on Wednesday morning just like always. And so, until then, take care and we’ll talk again soon. Bye-bye.