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

Welcome to the May 2017 edition of “This Month in WordPress with CodeinWP.”

WordPress 4.8 is nearly complete and ready to be released! The launch date was set to June 8-9, so, if you get the chance, try it out to make sure everything works just fine for you. The Release Candidate 2 is already out, and it fixes a handful of errors found in the previous versions.

What’s new in WordPress 4.8? Click here to see the new features in action. Here’s the TL;DR:

• New and improved text widget
• New image, video, and audio widgets
• New “WordPress Events and News” dashboard widget
• Improved link boundaries
• Setting the foundation for Gutenberg

WordPress turned 14 on May 27. It’s been 14 years since Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little made the first steps towards WordPress greatness. And the rest, like they say, is history.

And what a journey it has been. We’ve had 32 major versions of the platform (4.8 is going to be #33), over a quarter of all websites are powered by WordPress, thousands of plugins and themes have been built, hundreds of dedicated WordCamps are hosted on every continent every year, … well, I could go on forever, you get the point.

Happy birthday, WordPress!

Shopify’s official WordPress plugin will not be available anymore as it was removed from the official plugin repository this month. The plugin’s functionality was fairly simple – create buy buttons from Shopify products and add them via shortcodes.

From now on, those who used the plugin will need to integrate the buy buttons manually by following the official manual. (Support for the plugin will be offered until June 30.)

The reason why it got deleted is that, “it was outdated and difficult to maintain”, according to a Shopify support representative.

The schedule for WordCamp Europe 2017 is now complete, so feel free to take a look at the sessions and make your own agenda for this year’s edition. There will be almost 3,000 participants, which makes it the biggest WordCamp Europe to date.

Among the 42 speakers, Matt Mullenweg’s interview will be the highlight of the second day. WordPress co-founder will be interviewed in a 30-minute session by Om Malik, the founder of Gigaom. Right after, there will be a 20-minute Q&A session.

So, the schedule contains 26 long talks and 16 lightning talks that will cover a broad spectrum of topics: development, design, community, business, and accessibility.

I kind of knew that this would happen. Traditionally, WordPress.com was not very friendly towards third-party plugins. What you got was basically a built-in set of features (familiar if you’re a Jetpack user).

This seems to be changing.

However, third-party plugins won’t be something available for everybody. It starts with people on the Business Plan. We’ll see where this takes us. Things are still in an experimental phase and this new feature has been in testing just for a couple of weeks now.

It’s happening! WordPress is on TV! I should specify … that’s WordPress.com. Here’s some more detail from Matt Mullenweg himself.

11 Quick Ways to Insert Ads into WordPress… and Increase Your Income This Year

If your business relies on advertising a lot, you should learn about all the different (and effective) ways in which you can place ads on your site. Here, WPMU DEV lists 11 examples.

Social Media Strategy: For Real? (No, But I’ve Tools)

Tom McFarlin says you don’t need social media strategies to get online visibility. Is it enough just sharing your posts, the posts of others, chatting with people, and having fun in general? Do you agree?

How To Beat The Competition On The Envato Marketplace: An Insider Perspective

Selling on Envato? Cloudways shares a talk with a successful theme author, in which they go into detail on what it takes to make the most out of the ThemeForest marketplace.

The Most Important Elements of Providing Superb Customer Support

Customer support can be tough. Some people are just not willing to overlook your mistakes or imperfections and, sometimes, they forget that those on the other side of the screen are humans too. So, here’s how to improve your customer support and deliver better solutions to your people overall.

People are always looking for fresh content that they can rely on. Your standard “published on” label doesn’t always work for that … especially if it’s outdated. The “last updated” label is a much better idea. Here’s how to set it up.

How to Prevent Hotlinking in WordPress (5 Easy Methods)

Hotlinking is not a very cool practice on the web. More or less, it’s stealing someone’s bandwidth. Depending on the popularity of the page in question, this can mean serious hosting charges. Here’s how to prevent hotlinking and keep your site safe.

Top WordPress Plugins to Share Your Posts Automatically on Social Media

If you’re already busy with splitting your time between marketing, sales, writing posts, and taking care of your business in general, you’re probably more than happy to find another thing you can automate. Here are the plugins that can share content from your site without involving you at all.

Get Free Unlimited WordPress Test Installs from the Strangely Named Poopy.life

If you want to quickly see how a plugin works, but don’t have a handy test install of WordPress to use, you should try this new tool. Poopy.life is the tool’s name, believe it or not.

How to Make Money With a Blog – 17 of the Best Ideas

If you’re just getting started with the idea of blog monetization, this post should help you out. It lists 17 basic and tested methods that are suitable for most niches and markets.

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