The Guardian: Preserving our digital content is vital. But paying $38,000 for the privilege is not. “Storing online data in perpetuity is not just about photos and texts but thoughts and ideas. Platforms such as WordPress are starting to act, but it must be at a realistic price.”
WordPress: Introducing Twenty Twenty-Four. “Unlike past default themes, Twenty Twenty-Four breaks away from the tradition of focusing on a specific topic or style. Instead, this theme has been thoughtfully crafted to cater to any type of website, regardless of its focus. The theme explores three different use cases: one designed for entrepreneurs and small businesses, another for photographers and artists, and a third tailored for writers and bloggers.”
Search Engine Journal: WordPress 6.4.1 Maintenance Release Fixes Bugs In Version 6.4. “WordPress released a maintenance release on Wednesday evening to fix problems discovered shortly after WordPress 6.4 was released to the public on Tuesday November 7th. Two of issues were somewhat serious in that they affected the operation of certain plugins and could cause issues for sites encountering either of the two problems. The third one was a typo that resulted in a misconfigured notice in the admin panel.”
WordPress: Meet Site Profiler: Instant Access to Everything You’ll Ever Need to Know About Any Domain. “Site Profiler is a fast, accurate, and ad-free tool designed to provide WHOIS and hosting information about any domain. Whether you’re a domain owner or just curious about where a site is hosted, Site Profiler is a fast way to pull up the details you need. Just drop in any URL and you’ll have the hosting and domain registration details right at your fingertips. It’s free, simple, and user-friendly.” I know there are lots of tools like this, but this one is blazing fast and I like how the information is laid out.
WP Tavern: WP Data Dashboard Tracks WordPress.org Themes Ecosystem. “Munich-based digital agency owner Hendrik Luehrsen has been tracking the usage of themes with the FSE tag (block themes) using a spreadsheet that pulls in data from the WordPress.org API. Wrangling the data in a spreadsheet became too cumbersome, so Luehrsen launched WP Data Dashboard over the weekend as a ‘centralized hub for exploring, analyzing, and visualizing data across the WordPress landscape.’”
Search Engine Journal: WordPress LiteSpeed Plugin Vulnerability Affects 4 Million Websites. “The popular LiteSpeed WordPress plugin patched a vulnerability that compromised over 4 million websites, allowing hackers to upload malicious scripts. LiteSpeed was notified of the vulnerability two months ago on August 14th and released a patch in October.”
Search Engine Journal: WordPress 6.4 Release Contains +100 Performance Wins. “WordPress 6.4, releasing on November 7th, is packed with over 100 improvements to site performance which promises to make this release one of the most important ones to get right away.”
WordPress: Your New Go-To Keyboard Shortcut: Introducing the Command Palette. “Can we all agree that keyboard shortcuts have become indispensable to the experience of using a computer? Just think about where the world would be without copy/paste! We may not think about them much, but these combinations of keystrokes have helped millions of people make their daily—even hourly—workflows faster and more efficient.”
WordPress: WordPress 6.3.2 – Maintenance and Security release. “This security and maintenance release features 19 bug fixes on Core, 22 bug fixes for the Block Editor, and 8 security fixes. WordPress 6.3.2 is a short-cycle release.”
Ars Technica: Thousands of WordPress sites have been hacked through tagDiv plugin vulnerability. “Thousands of sites running the WordPress content management system have been hacked by a prolific threat actor that exploited a recently patched vulnerability in a widely used plugin. The vulnerable plugin, known as tagDiv Composer, is a mandatory requirement for using two WordPress themes: Newspaper and Newsmag. The themes are available through the Theme Forest and Envato marketplaces and have more than 155,000 downloads.”
WordPress: New to WordPress.com: Earn More By Adding a Paywall . “While there are many ways to monetize your website, there’s one strategy that stands out for its potential and simplicity: the paywall. We’re excited to tell you that this feature is now available on all WordPress.com sites.”
TechCrunch: WordPress blogs can now be followed in the fediverse, including Mastodon. “In March, WordPress.com owner Automattic made a commitment to the fediverse — the decentralized social networks that include the Twitter rival Mastodon and others — with the acquisition of an ActivityPub plug-in that allows WordPress blogs to reach readers on other federated platforms. Now, the company is announcing ActivityPub 1.0.0 for WordPress has been released allowing WordPress blogs to be followed by others on apps like Mastodon and others in the fediverse and then receive replies back as comments on their own sites.”
Search Engine Journal: Creating A Simple WordPress Plugin With 6 AI Chatbots. “I tested six AI chatbots by creating a WordPress plugin. Find out if ChatGPT, Bard, Bing, Claude, Code Llama, and Llama 2 completed the task.”
WordPress News: Welcome to Our Brand New Learning Hub. “We’re thrilled to unveil the new and refreshed WordPress.com learning hub! This new resource is easily accessible at WordPress.com/learn. Our mission is to create a central place for all your educational needs. In this post we’ll give you a tour of the new digs and explain the behind-the-scenes design work that has made this resource more accessible, more navigable, and more enjoyable to use.”
WordPress: The Future of WordPress & What’s Next for Gutenberg. “Nearly 2,000 attendees gathered for two days of keynotes, sessions, and community-building conversations at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in the largest attended WordCamp US ever. Saturday’s sessions concluded with back-to-back keynotes by WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg and Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy.”
The ResearchBuzz Firehose is regular RB content presented as individual posts.
For digest-type posts a couple of times a day, please visit ResearchBuzz.
Want to know how to best use the Firehose for content discovery?
Check out this handy article.