This weeks WordPress news - Covering The Week Commencing 30th September 2019

This weeks WordPress news – Covering The Week Commencing 30th September 2019:

WordPress Core

WordPress 5.3 Beta 2

Preparing Themes For WordPress 5.3

Date/Time component improvements in WordPress 5.3

Community

WordCamp US tickets on sale

Brian Gardner Steps Down From StudioPress and here

WordPress Theme Review Team Brings Back Review Shindigs

First Look at PHP 7.4 for WordPress Developers

Matt Mullenweg and David Heinemeier Hansson Discuss WordPress Market Share, Monopolies, and Power in Open Source Communities

Kinsta – Automatic MySQL Database Optimizations, Self-Healing PHP, GCP Firewall and More Disk Space (SSD Storage) on All Plans

Gutenberg Tips

Plugins / Themes

Here Comes Hummingbird 2.1 With Compressed Caching & Cookies

BuddyPress 5.0 Introduces BP REST API, Paving the Way for Blocks

Automattic Has Discontinued Active Development on Edit Flow Plugin

SmartSlider3 – New template – Portfolio Categories

Deals from this week

Piotnet Addons For Elementor

Yay Images – $59 for 1,000 images

Security

WordPress “Theme Editor” Plugin: Multiple Vulnerabilities

WordPress Vulnerability Roundup: September 2019, Part 2

A New Wave of Buggy WordPress Infections

WP Builds

Spinning up a WordPress optimised server in minutes with Spinup WP

LIVE – UX and UI audit with Piccia Neri WP

Jobs

Nothing this week, but please let me know if you have a vacancy!

Not WordPress, but useful anyway…

Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.

Spotify now lets you add podcasts to playlists

Google Announces New Ways to Hide Personal Activity, Including Incognito Mode in Maps

This is a little bit different. Today we talk to Brad Touesnard from Delicious Brains about Spinup WP their new service which aims to make it trivially simple to get your WordPress website up and running on a cloud hosting provider - in fact just about anywhere. You login to their platform, fill out a few form fields and then go and grab a coffee. By the time that you're done your WordPress optimised server will be ready and just waiting to get WordPress installed on it. This all sounds so simple, but there is a very large amount of heavy lifting going on in the background, heavy lifting that you'd have to learn and do your self. If you've ever wanted to install WordPress on a cloud provider, then check this podcast out...

Interview – Spinning up a WordPress optimised server in minutes with Spinup WP

Today we chat with Brad Touesnard from Delicious Brains. Delicious Brains are a team of eight full timers who do nothing but WordPress. They have a bunch of products that I’m sure you’ve heard of, such as WP Migrate DB Pro, WP Offload Media and WP Offload SES, but we’re not here today to talk about those, even though we really could have done a podcast on each product!

Today we’re talking most of the time about Spinup WP, a new way of hosting your website.

When we recorded this podcast, which was a little ago now, this product was in beta, but it seems that this label has now been dropped. It might be that some of the other fine details have changed a bit too, but I doubt it as what we talk about is a very high level discussion about the platform, and it’s unlikely that any of that will have altered significantly.

Spinup WP allows you to quickly spin up a server. This is a WordPress specific server with a bespoke server admin panel. You get great performance because of full page caching, and a while raft of other features, and the while process only takes about ten minutes!

There are so many hosting options available to WordPress professionals that I sometimes think that it’s hard to keep up. Pity those who are just looking to launch their own website and have zero interest or background in WordPress hosting! There’s shared hosting, VPS, dedicated, managed WordPress hosting and all of the cloud service that have popped up lately.

Each of these options have a range of benefits and drawbacks. Usually this revolves around a trade off of money v’s customisation. I think that it is also true to say that it’s quite possible to be somewhat mislead. Things like… unlimited disk space, 100% uptime. We all know that this is simply not possible and yet sometimes the price is just so tempting!

More recently we’ve seen a whole range of companies start to leverage the enormous infrastructure that companies like Amazon, Google and Digital Ocean have. They build their service on top of these other highly available platforms and build their own applications so that you don’t have to learn the incredibly complex ins and outs they they can require.

Spinup WP enables you to hook up to any service that offers you some hard disk space and has SSH available. It’s completely platform agnostic and will connect to pretty much any modern cloud hosting platform and take you through the pain of setting up a WordPress optimised server.

As of the recording of this podcast Spinup WP has a special relationship with Digital Ocean. You can sign up with Spinup WP and they will automate all-the-things if you choose to go the Digital Ocean route. You won’t need to configure anything at all. All other providers will require you to sign up with their platform first, then copy / paste the SSH keys over to Spinup WP. Hardly a big deal, but a tiny bit more work. Brad does say that they have plans to roll the ‘easy’ version of their platform to other cloud providers in due course, so you might want to go and check out what’s what on their website.

Brad is pretty clear that if you have literally zero background in working with technology (and no interest in learning) then Spinup WP might not be for you. But… fear not… if you’re a willing learner and have played with code a bit in past and like problem solving, then this is not going to be out of bounds for you! Phew! They have plenty of guidance within the app as well as a bunch of WordPress hosting blog posts which will help you if you are worried about your technical capabilities.

So the idea is that you can get a server and WordPress site up and running in the time that it takes to make and (not quite) finish a coffee. Most of that time is literally spent waiting! Brad says that the w

This weeks WordPress news - Covering The Week Commencing 23rd September 2019

This weeks WordPress news - Covering The Week Commencing 23rd September 2019

Do you think that you're a success as a WordPress professional? Have you got everything sorted out and working just how you like it? Perhaps yes, but possibly no! What exactly do we mean by failure? Is it a measure of how much we earn, the kind of work that we are able to do? Perhaps it's the amount of free time that our work allows us to have at our disposal. Failure is not so easy to pin down. Can we prevent it and plan ahead, put cash aside for a rainy day. Maybe failure is out of our control - the bad boss or the slowing economy. We chat through this whole topic and see what it is that we strive for and how we've approached these problems in the past.

Do you think that you're a success as a WordPress professional? Have you got everything sorted out and working just how you like it? Perhaps yes, but possibly no! What exactly do we mean by failure? Is it a measure of how much we earn, the kind of work that we are able to do? Perhaps it's the amount of free time that our work allows us to have at our disposal. Failure is not so easy to pin down. Can we prevent it and plan ahead, put cash aside for a rainy day. Maybe failure is out of our control - the bad boss or the slowing economy. We chat through this whole topic and see what it is that we strive for and how we've approached these problems in the past.

This weeks WordPress news - Covering The Week Commencing 16th September 2019

This weeks WordPress news - Covering The Week Commencing 16th September 2019