Ever felt irritated, impatient, and nervous after having to skip lunch? The same way that tasty and healthy food makes you kinder and more efficient, we hope our latest WordPress news will feed your mind and offer some inspiration to help you bring your A-game this week.
#01 WordPress 4.7 Release
You’ve already heard a lot about WordPress 4.7 Beta versions and maybe even took part in testing it. Now – finally – it is ready to be shown to the world! WordPress 4.7 is scheduled to ship today, the 6th of December. Our beloved CMS is updated with video headers, custom CSS, a new default theme, PDF thumbnail preview, REST API content endpoints and much more.
#02 Highlights From the 2016 Annual State of the Word
Matt Mullenweg and 4,000 participants (including those who visited WordCamp US in Philadelphia personally and via the live stream) celebrated WordPress’ progress and we’d like to share some numbers and conclusions.
The year 2016 was very fruitful for WordPress community. In total, there were 115 WordCamps in 41 countries! More than 2,000 speakers shared their knowledge and experience. Plugins are getting more accessible around the world with the top 10 plugins being mostly complete for the top 12 languages. The number of translation contributors has grown more than three times compared to April, 2015.
Our favorite news is that Mullenweg himself will take over the role to lead production and focus on making the editor much better – one of the core selling points of WordPress in the first place. You can read more about news on security, accessibility, PHP 7 and WordPress 4.7 here.
#03 WordPress in Public Schools
WordPress is very flexible CMS, cheap and easy to learn and use. Thanks to these features, WordPress has become very popular among nonprofit organizations. Another example of an industry that sometimes face similar challenges of limited budgets is our schools. It’s very important for teachers, students and their parents to share up-to-date information on the schools’ sites, but unfortunately the complexity of the systems can make it hard to keep up. We read an interesting case of how WordPress came to the rescue and solved this challenge! A school district in New Jersey saved $50,000 per year that is now being put to much better use. You can read more about the success story here.
#04 WordCamp Philadelphia
WordCamp US in Philadelphia has just finished and all the participants are full of impressions and eager to share them with the world via their tweets. Dozens of speakers stood in front of the large audience at the conference, and if you’re curious to see what you missed there’s a detailed schedule with all speakers and their topics here. There were many technical talks, and it was very pleasant to see Erica Varlese speak to another side of improving life for WordPress developers’ lives. In order to maintain effective and concentrated, it’s important to also stay healthy. Erica covered this in her talk about so called “yoga for desk jockeys”. To enrich your knowledge with some simple but useful exercises you can watch this video interview from WordCamp US.
#05 Torque’s WordPress Industry Survey
A new WordPress industry survey just came out, where the hosting company WP Engine and their Torque Magazine reports from answers of 303 WordPress professionals. Among the respondents were mostly developers, but almost a third of them were founders or owners of businesses. One of the most essential points in the results, in my opinion, is WHY specialists choose WordPress. According to this survey, 71% choose it because of ease of publishing, 67% for its ease of use and 59% because of the access to the marketplace for themes and plugins. More key insights you can read in this article or go straight to their slideshow.
