WP Realm

WordPress news, community news, reviews and more from all over the world

The WordPress Core team proposes to auto-update old WordPress installations

There’s an interesting proposal on the Make Core blog by Ian Dunn. The proposal suggests to auto-update all older or equal than 3.7 – the version that introduced auto-updates – WordPress instances to 4.7.

The reason for wanting to do this is actually best summarized by Otto in a comment:

If we simply said “we’re not backporting fixes anymore” and left it at that, then that changes nothing except now we’re intentionally leaving a huge portion of the web vulnerable to undiscovered threats

Samuel “Otto” Wood

Read the rest of the post on the Core blog and weigh in. It’s a bit of a read, but I would include the comments before asking your questions or adding your comments.

Themes on WordPress.org will require keyboard navigation to be built in

The Theme Review Theme announced today that they will shortly be requiring new themes to include keyboard navigation to be built in.

The main goal for this new requirement is to make the themes on WordPress.org have better accessibility features by default. Having keyboard navigation included means you would be able to navigate theme settings and such in the browser without the use of a mouse. This is especially needed for users of alternative input devices who are sighted.

Read more about it at the announcement post.

Google launches Site Kit

Google announced the developer preview of Google Site Kit on GitHub. They’re launching it on GitHub first so this way they allow WordPress developers to test drive the plugin and test Site Kit compatibility with other plugins. For now, it’s the easiest way for Google to gather implementation feedback and recommendations for this plugin.

Google’s current implementation of the plugin setup flow requires developer know-how and familiarity with Google Cloud Platform and OAuth verification process.  The current setup experience is not the final user experience they plan to make available to WordPress users. Learn more about it on GitHub.