Notes of our Meetup on September 21, 2017 at Rocket Lounge in Fort Myers.
WordPress News
4.8.2 Maintenance and Security Release is out. Upgrade now.
There are plenty of security vulnerabilities fixed. Read more
What’s to come in 4.9?
All the information about the upcoming release of 4.9 is available on the make blog. Today we look at the Custom Widget for Galleries – mergee of current feature plugin for testing
You can download Core Media Widget from the Repository
While the audio, video and single image widget section were already merged into Core with 4.8, the Gallery widget is slated to be merged into core for the 4.9 release.
If you test it, please report any issues on GitHub. Sarah Gooding tested things and posted an article on WPTavern
We did our own test on our test site. I really like it:-) It also shows, that you need to be consistent when uploading images to your library. The Widget displays the caption section for the image underneath the image, and it looks much nicer if you fill out the caption field for all images to be displayed in the Widget.
How to use the Gallery Widget?
- Got to Appearance > Widget
- Click on Galllery widget and select the widget section
- Give the widget a Title
- Click on “Add Media” to select the respective images from the Media Library
- Make adjustments to other settings, like column number and type of display
- Click on “Insert Gallery” button
- Preview in Gallery Widget admin screen
- Click on Save
Note: You might see in the video that the desired number of columns is set to 2, however, the display in the widget admin screen shows 3 columns. That is a known issue and already in the issue tracker as #190
WordCamp US Dec 1 -3, 2017,
- Nashville, TN – Tickets are still available
- Twitter List of announced #wcus Speakers
- Livestream ticketsfor Couch WordCampers will again be available for free. They will be released closer to the event. You can subscribe to updates at the website
Gutenberg – 1.3
Since our meeting, there were two more updates to the plugins. It’s now in version 1.3. If you’d like to test it but don’t want to set-up a new test site, send me birgit.pauli@gmail.com an email and I will give you access to the tt.wpswfl.org site where we keep the Gutenberg plugin updated
You can catch up all things Gutenberg on this Storify including links to online discussions, documentation, blog posts on how to interact w/ Gutenberg in Themes and Plugins.
WordPress ditched React… see what happened next.
Matt Mullenweg announced that WordPress.org will not use Reactjs as it’s new javascript library because of the license that is attached to the open-source library. This decision requires a rewrite of Gutenberg, once the decision is made with of alternative Javascript libraries, the Gutenberg time will change over to the new framework.
This will delay the release of Gutenberg a few weeks and with it the 5.0 release.
Made it Techcrunch pay attention
And then Facebook announced they will release the next version and other open-source projects without the patent clause. And on the subsequent post by Matt Mullenweg more discussion happened. Seems like a never-ending story.
Topics survey results
Schedule & Speakers
- September 21, 2017: Tools & Plugins to Schedule Social Media posts
- October 19, 2017: Decisions, concepts and options for various e-commerce business models w/ Chris Christof
- November 16, 2017: Top 10 Plugins or which Plugins do you need for your site
- December 21, 2017: How to get backlinks for your site and how to disawow bad ones
- January 18, 2018: Creating web apps with WordPress & Gravity Forms w/ Colleen Brady
- February 15, 2018 Understanding WordPress Vulnerabilities (XSS, CSRF, WTF) with Chris Wiegman
Tools & Plugins to Schedule Social Media posts
Plugins to handle Open-Graph meta tags
- Jetpack
- Yoast SEO
- Social Warfare – create different image sized for each social network.
Plugins for auto-post / cross-posting to Social web
Tools for scheduling
- Sprout Social – awesome bulk scheduling feature
- Hootsuite
- CoSchedule – WordPress plugin right from your post screen
- Buffer – Long time around – always relevant
- SocialOomph – nice Twitter features on the free account, with bulk upload.
- HopperHQ – only scheduling tool for Instagram
Mini-Tip
if you have a Gmail account and you need more email addresses, you don’t need to create a new account. Just add a + sign after the handle and another string before the @ sign. Example:
