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GDPR Dominates WordPress Discussions, Gutenberg 2.7 Out, Theme Review Rules Changing ๐Ÿ—ž๏ธ May 2018 WordPress News w/ CodeinWP

 This is the May 2018 edition of “This Month in WordPress with CodeinWP.” 

Hey guys! 2018 is flying by and I can’t believe it’s already May. It feels just like yesterday when our team was setting individual New Year’s resolutions, and now we’re almost halfway through 2018.

At this near-midway point, Gutenberg keeps evolving, WordCamp organizers announced their own conference (meta WordCamp?), GDPR is putting pressure on companies, and the WordPress.org teams are working on the improvement of user and developer experiences with WordPress.

Keep reading to learn more about those topics, as well as some of the best WordPress articles and how-tos from the past month.

May 2018 WordPress News

What’s new in Gutenberg? (18th April)

Version 2.7 of Gutenberg is live and brings new interesting features that push the new editor closer to being merged with the WordPress core. Gutenberg’s latest release is ready for testing, so go ahead and get yourself familiar with the changes.

Here are some of the most recent changes:

  • Refined visuals around the block controls.
  • Ability to edit permalinks.
  • A new pagination block, which you can find in theย Blocks โ€“ Layout Elementsย section.
  • Option to have links open in the same window.
gutenberg 2.7

See the demo video

WordCamp for organizers
Want to Help Organize a WordCamp for Organizers?

If you’ve ever been to a WordCamp, it’s the after party that really brings people together. The Speakers and Volunteers Dinner also offers the chance for everybody involved in making the event possible to meet. But up until now, there was nothing dedicated to the organizers.

That’s about to change!

A WordCamp for Organizers has been in the planning stages for seven months now and its goal is to offer everyone who ever organized a WordPress event (be it a meetup or a WordCamp) a chance to chat with their fellows from all around the world and exchange ideas based on this experience.

WordCamp for Organizers will be officially held as a one-day event before WordCamp US, that will take place in Nashville in December 2018. If you want to be a volunteer at this mini-conference, you can join via the link above.


GDPR Compliance Tools in WordPress

The GDPR Compliance team is working hard to make sure WordPress meets all the requirements set forth by the new EU GDPR law. The team is focused on creating a comprehensive core policy, plugin guidelines, privacy tools, and documentation. But all these things can’t be accomplished by May 25th (when the law turns official) if the team doesn’t receive help from volunteers.

If you feel like dedicating your time to the GDPR Compliance team to make WordPress compliant together, raise your hand (aka join their Slack channel via the link above) and you can start from there. Here’s a recap with the highlights from the April 4th meeting.

gdpr

You may also be interested in:


accessibility
WordPress Accessibility Team Is Seeking Contributors for Its Handbook Project

The WordPress Accessibility team is also seeking help for their handbook project. What is this handbook? It’s a collection of resources, tips, practices, and tools meant to educate and guide users to a better experience when using WordPress.

If reviewing articles, coding, discovering resources for the handbook, and coming up with new topic ideas for the project sounds like something you would enjoy, you can simply join theย #accessibility-docs channel on Slack. But before that, you must read more details about the team and your future contributionย here.


Theme Review Changes Place More Onus Onto Theme Authors

The WordPress Theme Review team had something to work on this month as well. They implemented changes meant to simplify the review process, which will transfer a big part of the responsibility to theme authors’ shoulders from now on. What does this mean? While the reviewers used to be the ones to check all the important aspects of a theme before accepting it to the repo, now the team will only look at four things:

  • licensing
  • malicious stuff
  • content creation
  • security

The rest of the responsibility falls on theme authors. The Theme Review team made sure to present the guidelines clearly to everybody. So you, as a theme developer, must meet all the officialย requirementsย and recommendations in order to see your theme online on WordPress.org.

On a similar note, one of the plugin guidelines was also modified, and it’s related to legal compliance.

theme changes

Great Articles From Around The Web

How a company blog can help your clients (and get you more projects)

Can you succeed as a company if you don’t have a blog? Probably. But you will miss a lot of opportunities to promote your business and get significant revenue as a result. Of course, you will have to invest important amounts of money in a blog, but it’s all paying off at the end of the day. Sabina wrote more details about blogs at ManageWP.

Everything You Wanted to Ask a GDPR Expert but Were Afraid to Ask

In a month from now, GDPR will be official and not respecting its requirements and rules can get you punished harshly. Which is why you should learn about it as much as you can and let your employees know more about its implications. The team at WPMU Dev talked with an expert and asked him the questions that matter.

How to Republish Old Blog Posts โ€“ and Why You’ll Want to

When you’re writing evergreen content, you can republish it any time. Why let valuable pieces of information get lost when you can take some time and update them so they can match today’s trends? You can’t always write new big articles, which is why reviving old posts can get you as much satisfaction. Here’s Darren Rowse on how to do it right.

Benefits of Releasing a Free WordPress Theme on WordPress.org

After working so hard on releasing a theme, you’re probably not so prone to give it for free to everyone. BUT offering free stuff is not as demotivating as it may sound. Because lots of opportunities can arise from publishing the theme on WordPress.org, which will trigger your business development further on. See what the benefits are of giving away your theme for free in this article.

How to Use FOMO on Your WordPress Site to Increase Conversions

For those who didn’t hear about FOMO yet, it stands for “fear of missing out”. It’s this uncomfortable feeling that you’re missing something awesome such as an event, a gathering, a temporary offer, or anything nice that happens in your absence. You can use this phenomenon as a marketing strategy to increase conversions at your site. WPBeginner will teach you how.

What Is Image Alt Text? How It Helps, Plus How to Set It in WordPress

You’re seeing it every time you upload an image to WordPress. But you probably never pay attention to it because you think it’s optional. And it is optional, that’s true, but it has miraculous powers when it comes to SEO and accessibility. So if you care about ranking high in Google and making your website accessible to all visitors, you should not ignore it anymore.

What is the Optimal Content Length? Here’s What the Science Says

This question has been analyzed in-depth over the years, and this is basically a recap that brings together the results of many case studies from famous blogging and marketing brands. According to most of them, the content that gets the most shares has around 2000+ words on average, but it depends on the publication and type of content, of course. Have a look, it’s very interesting.

How to Build a Membership Site on WordPress

You usually create a membership site when you want to limit your content to people that belong to your community. You can then either charge for access or still give away some content for free. So, how can this be done? WooCommerce tells you.

First Time Speaker? 9 Tips For Giving A Better Presentation

Made the decision to speak in front of a crowd for the first time? By reading this article, you will learn what you need to do to make sure your presentation and appearance are a success.

Error Pages โ€” What They Mean and How to Get What You Want

What are error pages? Those that display numbers instead of the content that you are looking for. It means that either something got broken, the page was removed, or something wrong happened with the site/page. There are many reasons that cause errors, some of which you get to learn about if you give this article a look.

How to Create a Referral Program in WordPress

If you want to have your own referral program on your site, so that you can be promoted by other companies or make partnerships with various brands, it’s not hard to create one. You just need to sign up forย a third-party program for referrals and install their dedicated WordPress plugin. Learn how exactly you can do that in this article.

That’s it for May 2018. Anything we missed?

Don’t forget to join our crash course on speeding up your WordPress site. Learn more below:
Adelina Tuca

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Ryan Biddulph
May 4, 2018 11:56 pm

I’m noting more sites being compliant Adelina. Just trying to figure out how I want to work in the disclaimer; a little bar at the bottom of my blog seems like the best idea. Thanks for the round up!
Ryan

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