WordPress December in short:
On December 4th, Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, announced the release of version 5.0 on December 6th, only 2 days later. The 5.0 release was all about the new Gutenberg editor and the race of developers to make their sites, themes and plug-ins compatible with this new editing experience.
In the run-up to the 5.0 release, the public opinion was not all positive. But that is to be expected with a big change like this. Never the less at the time of writing the new WordPress version has more than 16.7 million downloads and counting.
We will have to see if Gutenberg will be just as popular as the classic editor. But I can not wait to get my hands dirty and see what Gutenberg can do in the wild.
WordPress updates and releases:
- Dec: 19th: WordPress 5.0.2 Maintenance Release
- Dec 13th: WordPress 5.0.1 Security Release
- Dec 6th: What’s New in WordPress 5.0 (Features and Screenshots)
- Dec 6th: WordPress 5.0 “Bebo”
WordPress development tutorials and resources:
- Read up on “The most important Advantages and Disadvantages of the new WordPress Gutenberg Editor” by Sprylab technologies
- Iain Poulson asks “Are Your Plugins Really Ready for Gutenberg?”
- If you’re site is not ready yet here are “2 Ways to Override the New WordPress 5.0 Editor” by Okechukwu Chigbu
- An in-depth read if you want to start with “Gulp for WordPress” by Ali Alaa
- Brian Jackson writes about the advantages of having a mulitlingual WordPress website in his article “Ultimate WordPress multilingual guide — How we launched 12 languages”
- If you are intrested in learning how to “Write a Custom WordPress plugin“ by Christopher Casper is a great starting point.
- Daniel K has some very nice tips in his article: “My development setup for WordPress“
- Kinsta updated there article “How to Speed up Your WordPress Site (Ultimate 2019 Guide)”
- Mikhail Vasin started a great tutorial on “Dockerizing WordPress”
- A notable plugin update by Advanced Custom Fields which now includes the ability to create custom Gutenberg blocks with plain php and no react.
WordPress/Web dev articles and resources:
- WPFriends is “A New Social Network For WordPress Users”
- Want to build a WordPress plugin your self, start with this great Wppb Plugin Boilerplate by Devin Vinson
- Antón Garcia writes about all the different image formats in his article: “Picture this: the best image format for the web in 2019”.
- In my quest to stop using jQuery in WordPress I fell in love with Swiper, A modern touch slider by idangerous
- In-View.js by Cam Wiegert is great to only run code when needed!
- Google released a brand new Page Speed Insights with Lighthouse and Lab Data.
- Bringing the best of Google tools to WordPress with Google Site Kit.
- Its all about speed and “How to make any website faster” by Ohans Emmanuel has some very usefull tips.
- If you are a freelancer this is a great read to start the new year with fresh ideas. “How to brand yourself as a freelance Developer in 2019” by Kyle Prinsloo
- Tyler Smith wrote this inspirational post “Why you should execute on your idea, even if you don’t think it’s the best idea”.
Interesting WordPress questions on Quora:
- Is WordPress 5 worth upgrading to?
- Is WordPress useful for more than blogging?
- Is WordPress good for making business websites?
- How do I create a business website on WordPress?
- What are the top WordPress plugins for 2019?
Suggestions?:
I noticed a lot of weekly and mothly recap articles lately, but have not yet found one on WordPress. So i thought it would be an intresting project to start on myself. If nothing else it’s a fun way to keep myself informed! I’m totaly new to this whole writting thing so if you have any suggestions for improvement please do let me know! You can get in touch via Twitter: Vanaf1979
Wishing you a healthy and loving 2019.
