There’s surely some positive vibe going on in the WordPress community at the beginning of the year! We had new releases, nice improvements, relevant numbers, interesting survey results, a couple of curious changes, and some great articles that offer useful advice on various matters overall.
Welcome to the January 2016 edition of This Month in WordPress w/ CodeinWP – the first edition of 2016. This is our monthly roundup of news and stories from around the WordPress space.
January 2016 in WordPress
A new WooCommerce version is here. I’m talking about 2.5, called “Dashing Dolphin.” It is focused on providing a quicker e-commerce experience by making your store run more smoothly than before. Some other changes worth pointing out:
- WooCommerce now tracks your website’s visitors and what they have in the cart.
- A couple of back-end pages have been improved. The tax settings screen, for instance.
- The layout of the email pages has been improved.
- WP CLI support has been built in – the possibility to control your site via the command line.
- REST API improvements.
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WordPress 4.9 is ready to rock on all Android devices, and comes with two new important features:
- New support for the fingerprint scanner – feature available in Android 6.0 Marshmallow.
- Several refinements to the media library experience, including a new design. This app can now handle better multiple video and photo uploads.
The new release also fixed a couple of bugs, including the one that permanently deleted files instead of sending them to the trash.
It’s time for WPShout’s annual hosting review. It’s a survey that brings out opinions and real thoughts on the most popular WordPress hosting providers out there.
The survey investigates seven traits important for every web host: average satisfaction, value, reliability, speed, support, median site count, usability, and WordPress compatibility. There’s more than a hundred respondents (users who own a WordPress site).
Curious to know what other people think of your host?
The guys from WordPress.org realized how old many of the testimonials on the site got, and decided to renew the section. From now on, the testimonials page will be showing the latest opinions, thoughts, and statements from everyone who uses the #ilovewp
hashtag on WordPress, Twitter, and Facebook. The individual messages will be selected by the WordPress team.
Do you have anything to say to/about WordPress? Share your best WordPress-related stories and don’t forget to add the hashtag.
This is a great report by Wordfence about the state of WordPress security. Wordfence interviewed 7,375 users about various security issues that they stumbled upon in 2015.
The results were put together into a nice infographic that’s divided into a number of sections. You’ll find great insights related to plugins, security attitudes, security concerns, and lots of other interesting facts and numbers.
Some interesting facts:
- 50%+ of the respondents manage 5 sites or more.
- 61.1% report customizing their sites constantly.
- 38.9% reported a hack in the last 12 months.
From now on, you can use ad banners on your site through the new WordAds, which is Automattic’s version of Google AdWords. WordAds advertising network will be available through Jetpack and the new AdControl plugin.
To be able to use ads on your site, you need to:
- join the network,
- have a minimum traffic required (in the thousands),
- install Jetpack and AdControl to make it work.
Great Articles From Around The Web
Charts and tables contribute to your posts’ interactivity. Check out the best free and premium plugins that will give your articles a more friendly vibe.
2015 in Review: 80 of The Best Free WordPress Theme Releases by Category
Wondering where you can find the best free and premium themes released last year? WPLift did the heavy lifting for you on this one.
Hacked? How to Clean Your Site and Get Off Google’s Blacklist
You thought it won’t ever happen to you, but you somehow got hacked. Okay, so what now? Check this article to see what the next step is.
What To Do When Encountering WordPress Errors
Errors happen all the time, no matter how great the technology is. See this list of the most common issues, and what to do when they occur.
The 20 Best WordPress Facebook Groups You Should Join
Is there any comment needed here? If you’re into WordPress, check out these great Facebook groups. Or better yet, join one in your region.
I know routine kind of breaks down your motivation sometimes. But that’s where tools come into play! Interested in social media marketing? Here’s a list of great plugins that can help you with social media promotion.
100 WordPress Influencers To Follow In 2016
Meet 100 interesting people behind this whole WordPress community.
How To Increase Media File Maximum Upload Size In WordPress
Have you ever noticed that WordPress media uploader has a limit for each upload? This can be bad if you want to upload a song or a video bigger than the accepted size. Here’s how to change it.
WordPress Multilingual, finally explained
Finally, a good guide on how to work with WordPress multilingual and everything related.
How to Use FTP Properly with WordPress
Find out how and what it takes to transfer your files from your computer to your WordPress site and vice-versa. FTP might look difficult at first glance, but after starting to work with it, you’ll see that it’s not really a big deal.
That’s it for this edition. Anything we missed?
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