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January 2017 WordPress News – This Month in WordPress w/ CodeinWP

 This is the January 2017 edition of “This Month in WordPress with CodeinWP.” 

It’s the beginning of 2017, and we’re starting out our WordPress news sessions with a strong edition. Things have been moving pretty quickly recently, and it seems like no one ever takes too long of a break from working on their WordPress projects, do they?

What’s fresh this year? Matt Mullenweg sets some guidelines on the new development circle, Wix ends the conflict with WordPress (or do they?), the core team replaces its security “Czar,” WordPress dominates the ranks again, and more … a lot more this January.

Here’s “This Month in WordPress with CodeinWP” – January 2017 edition.

January 2017 in WordPress


Wix Removes GPL-Licensed WordPress Code from Mobile App, Forks Original MIT Library

Back in October 2016, Matt Mullenweg accused Wix of using parts of WordPress’ GPL code in their mobile app. This was not pretty. And surely something that didn’t put Wix in a good light in the eyes of the WordPress community.

A couple of months have passed, and Wix has come up with an “interesting” solution to this whole problem. They’ve decided to remove the problematic GPL code and fork another library under the MIT license. Then, they invented their own version of that license, calling it Enhanced MIT (EMIT).

Not everyone’s happy about that. You can read all about it here.

January 2017 WordPress news: Wix conflict

WordPress dominates the ranks
WordPress Listed As “CMS of the Year 2016” for 7th Consecutive Year

WordPress’ supremacy continues as it was crowned once again as the fastest growing CMS of the last 12 months, having a 58.5% market share, according to W3Techs’ statistics. The podium is completed by Shopify and Squarespace, the latter being in the top 3 for the first time.

What’s even more impressive is that it’s the 7th time in a row that WordPress takes the top spot!

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Let’s Encrypt 2016 In Review

Let’s Encrypt, the top free solution that lets your site switch from HTTP to HTTPS, has become extremely popular in the last couple of months by quickly reaching 20 million active certificates.

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Let’s Encrypt is now the largest certificate authority on the web. Since it launched in April 2016, a significant percentage of the entire web has adopted encryption, turning to 49% from a previous number of 39%. And an even bigger growth is yet to come.

let's encrypt 2016

campbell
Aaron D. Campbell Replaces Nikolay Bachiyski as WordPress’ Security Czar

Speaking of security, WordPress’ core team has a new czar. His name is Aaron Campbell, WordPress core contributor at GoDaddy, who is replacing Nikolay Bachiyski. Bachiyski was the first person ever to hold the position after it was created in 2015.

Campbell said that his main objective as the security leader is to continue what Bachiyski started, which is getting WordPress onto HackerOne, a bug and vulnerability disclosure platform. This should be an interesting move to put even more focus on the security aspect of WordPress to make all of our websites safer.


Focus Tech and Design Leads

Matt Mullenweg has set some new guidelines for this year of WordPress development. The main focuses are: the REST API, the editor, and the customizer.

Some fine details:

  • REST API – getting a first-party wp-admin usage of the new endpoints,
  • editor – building “a new page and post building experience that makes writing rich posts effortless,”
  • customizer – focus on helping out the editor first, then shifting to bring some fundamental building blocks into something that could allow customization “outside of the box.”
tech and design

Great Articles From Around The Web

8 Best FAQ Plugins For WordPress Websites In 2017

People asking the same questions over and over again? You can make everyone’s life easier with a good plugin. Here’s a list of eight great FAQ plugins that will save both yours and your customers’ time and effort.

Insights and tips from our email marketing experiments

If there’s anyone you should learn email marketing secrets and tips from, the WooCommerce guys are the right people. See what’s behind the curtains when it comes to their email marketing efforts.

How To Turn Your WordPress Blog Into A Business

Simple blogs can become a huge source of revenue. Of course, it’s a lot of hard work that you need to put in, but there are tons of examples of people who have done it already and turned their personal blogs into successful businesses over time.

35 Time-Saving Productivity Apps for Busy WordPress People

We all get busy with this and that all the time. There are so many things to do and so little time. Check out these 35 productivity tools to help yourself out and make work more manageable.

Contributing to Twenty Seventeen

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be part of the WordPress core team and how the whole process takes place? Sami Keijonen is a first-time contributor and he shares his own experience of working inside the Twenty Seventeen development process.

30 Best WordPress Podcasts to Listen to in 2017

Are podcasts your thing? If yes, Optimizer WP made a list presenting the top 30 podcasters who talk about WordPress.

What’s the best font size for the web? Well, it depends…

A curious thing I personally didn’t ask myself ever. Well, most of the standard font sizes you see on websites are not chosen by accident. They’re thoroughly calculated. Based on what? See here.

Save time, not money

Money or time? That’s the question. Sometimes, we need to remember that money comes and goes, but time is irretrievable. Once it’s gone, it’s gone forever. This post is about WordPress hosting, but it shares some ideas that make you reconsider some life aspects.

We Used to Hate WordPress Page Builders – Now We Decided to Use One

How to jump from a boat into another. If you’re undecided on whether to use a page builder on your site or not, this post might offer you some tips and hints on how things actually work.

6 Niche WordPres Events To Look Out For In 2017

If you want to get more involved in the WordPress community and meet awesome people from around the world, here’s a list of six important events for you this year.

How to Optimize WordPress Videos for SEO

Videos are predicted to become increasingly popular with every passing year. You know how to optimize posts, links, images, but what about videos? They need to be SEO-friendly too. So, if you work with videos regularly, you might want to take a look at this tutorial.

That’s it for January 2017. Anything we missed?

 

 
Adelina Tuca

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