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You are here: Home / Archives for WordPress

WordPress

WordPress 5.7 “Esperanza”

March 10, 2021 by 7th Circle Designs Leave a Comment

WordPress 5.7 “Esperanza”

Bringing you fresh colors in the admin, simpler interactions in the editor, and controls right where you need them, WordPress 5.7 lets you focus on the content you create.

Meet “Esperanza”, the first WordPress release of 2021. “Esperanza” is named in honor of Esperanza Spalding, a modern musical prodigy. Her path as a musician is varied and inspiring—learn more about her and give her music a listen!

With this new version, WordPress brings you fresh colors. The editor helps you work in a few places you couldn’t before without getting into code or hiring a pro. The controls you use most are right where you need them. Layout changes that should be simple, are even simpler to make.

Now the new editor is easier to use

Font-size adjustment in more places: now, font-size controls are right where you need them in the List and Code blocks. No more trekking to another screen to make that single change!

Reusable blocks: several enhancements make reusable blocks more stable and easier to use. And now they save automatically with the post when you click the Update button.

Inserter drag-and-drop: drag blocks and block patterns from the inserter right into your post.

You can do more without writing custom code

Full-height alignment: have you ever wanted to make a block, like the Cover block, fill the whole window? Now you can.

Buttons block: now you can choose a vertical or a horizontal layout. And you can set the width of a button to a preset percentage.

Social Icons block: now you can change the size of the icons.

A simpler default color palette

This new streamlined color palette collapses all the colors that used to be in the WordPress source code down to seven core colors and a range of 56 shades that meet the WCAG 2.0 AA recommended contrast ratio against white or black.

Find the new palette in the default WordPress Dashboard color scheme, and use it when you’re building themes, plugins, or any other components. For all the details, check out the Color Palette dev note.

From HTTP to HTTPS in a single click

Starting now, switching a site from HTTP to HTTPS is a one-click move. WordPress will automatically update database URLs when you make the switch. No more hunting and guessing!

New Robots API

The new Robots API lets you include the filter directives in the robots meta tag, and the API includes the max-image-preview: large directive by default. That means search engines can show bigger image previews, which can boost your traffic (unless the site is marked not-public).

Lazy-load your iFrames

Now it’s simple to let iframes lazy-load. By default, WordPress will add a loading="lazy" attribute to iframe tags when both width and height are specified.

Ongoing cleanup after update to jQuery 3.5.1

For years jQuery helped make things move on the screen in ways the basic tools couldn’t—but that keeps changing, and so does jQuery.

In 5.7, jQuery gets more focused and less intrusive, with fewer messages in the console.

Check the Field Guide for more!

Check out the latest version of the WordPress Field Guide. It highlights developer notes for each change you may want to be aware of. WordPress 5.7 Field Guide.

Reposted from WordPress

Filed Under: WordPress

WordPress 5.6.2 Maintenance Release

February 22, 2021 by 7th Circle Designs Leave a Comment

WordPress 5.6.2 is now available!

This maintenance release includes 5 bug fixes. These bugs affect WordPress version 5.6.1, so you’ll want to upgrade.

You can download WordPress 5.6.2 directly, or visit the Dashboard → Updates screen and click Update Now. If your sites support automatic background updates, they’ve already started the update process.

WordPress 5.6.2 is a small maintenance release focused on fixing user-facing issues discovered in 5.6.1. The next major release will be version 5.7, currently scheduled for release on March 9, 2021.

To see a full list of changes, you can browse the list on Trac, read the 5.6.2 RC1 post, or visit the 5.6.2 documentation page.

Reposted from WordPress.org

Filed Under: Maintenance, WordPress

WordPress 5.6.1 Maintenance Release

February 3, 2021 by 7th Circle Designs Leave a Comment

WordPress 5.6.1 is now available!

This maintenance release features 20 bug fixes as well as 7 issues fixed for the block editor. These bugs affect WordPress version 5.6, so you’ll want to upgrade.

You can download WordPress 5.6.1 directly, or visit the Dashboard → Updates screen and click Update Now. If your sites support automatic background updates, they’ve already started the update process.

WordPress 5.6.1 is a short-cycle maintenance release. The next major release will be version 5.7.

To see a full list of changes, you can browse the list on Trac, read the 5.6.1 RC1 post, or visit the 5.6.1 documentation page.

Reposted from WordPress.org

Filed Under: Maintenance, WordPress

WordPress 5.6 “Simone”

December 8, 2020 by 7th Circle Designs Leave a Comment

Meet Simone, our latest and greatest WordPress release. Named for the legendary performer Nina Simone, who is known for tunes like “Feeling Good”, “Young, Gifted and Black”, and “Four Women”. Fire up a playlist with her best work and read on to discover what we have in store for you.

WordPress 5.6 Simone with a photo of Nina Simone

Welcome to WordPress 5.6

Sharing your stories has never been easier.

WordPress 5.6 brings you countless ways to set your ideas free and bring them to life. With a brand-new default theme as your canvas, it supports an ever-growing collection of blocks as your brushes. Paint with words. Pictures. Sound. Or rich embedded media.

colored circles

Greater layout flexibility

Bring your stories to life with more tools that let you edit your layout with or without code. Single column blocks, designs using mixed widths and columns, full-width headers, and gradients in your cover block—make small changes or big statements with equal ease!

More block patterns

In some themes, preconfigured block patterns make setting up standard pages on your site a breeze. Let the power of patterns streamline your workflow and save you clicks. Plus, share these features with clients, editors, and more.

Better video captioning

To help you add subtitles or captions to your videos, you can now upload them within your post or page. This makes it easier than ever to make your videos accessible for anyone who needs or prefers to use subtitles.

black vertical line

Twenty Twenty-One is here!

Examples of block patterns available in Twenty Twenty-One.

Twenty Twenty-One is a blank canvas for your ideas, and the block editor is the best brush. It is built for the block editor and packed with brand-new block patterns you can only get in the default themes. Try different layouts in a matter of seconds, and let the theme’s eye-catching, yet timeless design make your work shine. 

What’s more, this default theme puts accessibility at the heart of your website. It conforms to the WordPress accessibility-ready guidelines and addresses several more specialized standards from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 at level AAA. It will help you meet the highest level of international accessibility standards when you create accessible content and choose plugins which are accessible too!

A rainbow of soft pastels

A mobile screenshot of each included color palette in Twenty Twenty-One, going in ROYGBIV order.

Perfect for a new year, Twenty Twenty-One gives you a range of pre-selected color palettes in pastel, all of which conform to AAA standards for contrast. You can also choose your own background color for the theme, and the theme chooses accessibility-conscious text colors for you — automatically!

Need more flexibility than that? You can also choose your own color palette from the color picker.

colored circles

Improvements for everyone

Expanding auto-updates

For years, only developers have been able to update WordPress automatically. But now you have that option, right in your dashboard. If this is your first site, you have auto-updates ready to go, right now! Upgrading an existing site? No problem! Everything is the same as it was before.

Accessibility Statement 

Even if you’re not an expert, you can start letting others know about your site’s commitment to accessibility! The new feature plugin includes template copy for you to edit and publish, and it’s written to support different contexts and jurisdictions.  

Built-in Patterns

If you’ve not had the chance to play with block patterns yet, all default themes now feature a range of block patterns that let you master complex layouts with minimal effort. Customize the patterns to your liking with the copy, images, and colors that fit your story or brand. 

colored and textured rectangles

For developers

REST API authentication with Application Passwords

Thanks to the API’s new Application Passwords authorization feature, third-party apps can connect to your site seamlessly and securely. This new REST API feature lets you see what apps are connecting to your site and control what they do. 

More PHP 8 support

5.6 marks the first steps toward WordPress Core support for PHP 8. Now is a great time to start planning how your WordPress products, services, and sites can support the latest PHP version. For more information about what to expect next, read the PHP 8 developer note.

jQuery

Updates to jQuery in WordPress take place across three releases 5.5, 5.6, and 5.7. As we reach the mid-point of this process, run the update test plugin to check your sites for errors ahead of time.    

If you find issues with the way your site looks ( e.g. a slider doesn’t work, a button is stuck — that sort of thing), install the jQuery Migrate plugin.

Check out the Field Guide

Read about the latest version of WordPress in this guide. It highlights developer notes for each change in the release. 

It’s a new day, it’s a new life for me….and I’m feeling good.

~Nina Simone

Reposted from WordPress.org

Filed Under: WordPress

WordPress 5.5.3 Maintenance Release

October 30, 2020 by 7th Circle Designs Leave a Comment

WordPress 5.5.3 is now available. 

This maintenance release fixes an issue introduced in WordPress 5.5.2 which makes it impossible to install WordPress on a brand new website that does not have a database connection configured. This release does not affect sites where a database connection is already configured, for example, via one-click installers or an existing wp-config.php file.

5.5.3-alpha Issue

Earlier today — between approximately 15:30 and 16:00 UTC — the auto-update system for WordPress updated some sites from version 5.5.2 to version 5.5.3-alpha. This auto-update was due to an error in the Updates API caused by the 5.5.3 release preparations (see more here). The 5.5.3-alpha version at this point was functionally identical to 5.5.2 as no development work had been started on 5.5.3; however, the following changes may have been made to your site:

  • The default “Twenty” themes installed as part of the pre-release package.
  • The “Akismet” plugin installed as part of the pre-release package.

These themes and plugins were not activated and therefore remain non-functional unless you installed them previously. It is safe to delete these features should you prefer not to use them. 

If you are not on 5.5.2, or have auto-updates for minor releases disabled, please manually update to the 5.5.3 version by downloading WordPress 5.5.3 or visiting Dashboard → Updates and click “Update Now.”

For more technical details of the issue, we’ve posted on our Core Development blog.

Filed Under: Maintenance, WordPress

WordPress 5.5.2 Security and Maintenance Release

October 29, 2020 by 7th Circle Designs Leave a Comment

WordPress 5.5.2 is now available!

This security and maintenance release features 14 bug fixes in addition to 10 security fixes. Because this is a security release, it is recommended that you update your sites immediately. All versions since WordPress 3.7 have also been updated.

WordPress 5.5.2 is a short-cycle security and maintenance release. The next major release will be version 5.6.

You can download WordPress 5.5.2 by downloading from WordPress.org, or visit your Dashboard → Updates and click Update Now.

If you have sites that support automatic background updates, they’ve already started the update process.

Security Updates

Ten security issues affect WordPress versions 5.5.1 and earlier. If you haven’t yet updated to 5.5, all WordPress versions since 3.7 have also been updated to fix the following security issues:

  • Props to Alex Concha of the WordPress Security Team for their work in hardening deserialization requests.
  • Props to David Binovec on a fix to disable spam embeds from disabled sites on a multisite network.
  • Thanks to Marc Montas from Sucuri for reporting an issue that could lead to XSS from global variables.
  • Thanks to Justin Tran who reported an issue surrounding privilege escalation in XML-RPC. He also found and disclosed an issue around privilege escalation around post commenting via XML-RPC.
  • Props to Omar Ganiev who reported a method where a DoS attack could lead to RCE.
  • Thanks to Karim El Ouerghemmi from RIPS who disclosed a method to store XSS in post slugs.
  • Thanks to Slavco for reporting, and confirmation from Karim El Ouerghemmi, a method to bypass protected meta that could lead to arbitrary file deletion.
  • Thanks to Erwan LR from WPScan who responsibly disclosed a method that could lead to CSRF.
  • And a special thanks to @zieladam who was integral in many of the releases and patches during this release.

Thank you to all of the reporters for privately disclosing the vulnerabilities. This gave the security team time to fix the vulnerabilities before WordPress sites could be attacked.

For more information, browse the full list of changes on Trac, or check out the version 5.5.2 HelpHub documentation page.

Filed Under: Maintenance, Security, WordPress

WordPress 5.5.1 Maintenance Release

September 1, 2020 by 7th Circle Designs Leave a Comment

WordPress 5.5.1 is now available!

This maintenance release features 34 bug fixes, 5 enhancements, and 5 bug fixes for the block editor. These bugs affect WordPress version 5.5, so you’ll want to upgrade.

You can download WordPress 5.5.1 directly, or visit the Dashboard → Updates screen and click Update Now. If your sites support automatic background updates, they’ve already started the update process.

WordPress 5.5.1 is a short-cycle maintenance release. The next major release will be version 5.6.

To see a full list of changes, you can browse the list on Trac, read the 5.5.1 RC1 and 5.5.1 RC2 posts, or visit the 5.5.1 documentation page.

Filed Under: Maintenance, WordPress

WordPress 5.5 “Eckstine”

August 11, 2020 by 7th Circle Designs Leave a Comment

Here it is! Named “Eckstine” in honor of Billy Eckstine, this latest and greatest version of WordPress is available for download or update in your dashboard.

Welcome to WordPress 5.5.

In WordPress 5.5, your site gets new power in three major areas:
speed, search, and security.

Speed

Posts and pages feel faster, thanks to lazy-loaded images.

Images give your story a lot of impact, but they can sometimes make your site seem slow.

In WordPress 5.5, images wait to load until they’re just about to scroll into view. The technical term is ‘lazy loading.’

On mobile, lazy loading can also keep browsers from loading files meant for other devices. That can save your readers money on data — and help preserve battery life.

Search

Say hello to your new sitemap.

WordPress sites work well with search engines.

Now, by default, WordPress 5.5 includes an XML sitemap that helps search engines discover your most important pages from the very minute you go live.

So more people will find your site sooner, giving you more time to engage, retain and convert them to subscribers, customers or whatever fits your definition of success.

Security

Now you can choose to update plugins and themes automatically–or pick just a few–from the screens you’ve always used.

Auto-updates for Plugins and Themes

Now you can set plugins and themes to update automatically — or not! — in the WordPress admin. So you always know your site is running the latest code available.

You can also turn auto-updates on or off for each plugin or theme you have installed — all on the same screens you’ve always used.

Update by uploading ZIP files

If updating plugins and themes manually is your thing, now that’s easier too — just upload a ZIP file.

Highlights from the block editor

Once again, the latest WordPress release packs a long list of exciting new features for the block editor. For example:

Block patterns

New block patterns make it simple and fun to create complex, beautiful layouts, using combinations of text and media that you can mix and match to fit your story.

You will also find block patterns in a wide variety of plugins and themes, with more added all the time. Pick any of them from a single place — just click and go!

The new block directory

Now it’s easier than ever to find the block you need. The new block directory is built right into the block editor, so you can install new block types to your site without ever leaving the editor.

Inline image editing

Crop, rotate, and zoom your photos right from the image block. If you spend a lot of time on images, this could save you hours!

And so much more.

The highlights above are a tiny fraction of the new block editor features you’ve just installed. Open the block editor and enjoy!

Accessibility

Every release adds improvements to the accessible publishing experience, and that remains true for WordPress 5.5.

Now you can copy links in media screens and modal dialogs with a button, instead of trying to highlight a line of text.

You can also move meta boxes with the keyboard, and edit images in WordPress with your assistive device, as it can read you the instructions in the image editor.

For developers

5.5 also brings a big box of changes just for developers.

Server-side registered blocks in the REST API

The addition of block types endpoints means that JavaScript apps (like the block editor) can retrieve definitions for any blocks registered on the server.

Defining environments

WordPress now has a standardized way to define a site’s environment type (staging, production, etc). Retrieve that type with wp_get_environment_type() and execute only the appropriate code.

Dashicons

The Dashicons library has received its final update in 5.5. It adds 39 block editor icons along with 26 others.

Passing data to template files

The template loading functions (get_header(), get_template_part(), etc.) have a new $args argument. So now you can pass an entire array’s worth of data to those templates.

More changes for developers

  • The PHPMailer library just got a major update, going from version 5.2.27 to 6.1.6.
  • Now get more fine-grained control of redirect_guess_404_permalink().
  • Sites that use PHP’s OPcache will see more reliable cache invalidation, thanks to the new wp_opcache_invalidate() function during updates (including to plugins and themes).
  • Custom post types associated with the category taxonomy can now opt-in to supporting the default term.
  • Default terms can now be specified for custom taxonomies in register_taxonomy().
  • The REST API now officially supports specifying default metadata values through register_meta().
  • You will find updated versions of these bundled libraries: SimplePie, Twemoji, Masonry, imagesLoaded, getID3, Moment.js, and clipboard.js.

Reposted from WordPress.org

Filed Under: WordPress

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