We Are Back Baby

– ‘good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you happen to be hiding out there on the globe today! Coming to you LIVE from …'

 

Salutations and Some Reminders:

Welcome to Episode 641 – We Are Back Baby – We've got a couple of great in-depth plugins to cover for you, some recent news in both the WordPress World and the Tech World in general, and some awesome WordPress Tips!

Welcome to the New Year! I know we talked about it being the New Year and everything in our pre-recorded shows, but we gotta say it at least once in person now that we are back to it!

Over here on the island we are finally getting the winter weather – I mean we have had the rain but we are only just now getting the usual -7C kind of weather. For our American friends, that would be about 19F.

Hopefully everyone has been keeping warm and dry over the last month, we are looking forward to getting back to doing the show every other Monday!

 

A few reminders before we start the show today….

 

Reminders:

• Show starts at 12:30pm Pacific Time every other week on Monday! Join in for the pre-stream entertainment at about 12:15ish! You'll find the show notes on the home page of wppluginsatoz.com within 24(ish) hours after every show!
• This is a value for value show dear listeners, help us get some loven by hitting some like buttons, sharing an episode or two, or lovingly forcing your family members to listen to us by cranking our show way up! After all, you can't go wrong helping out the longest running WordPress Podcast!

Don't run away at the end either as we have some awesome Q&A coming up at the end! Sometimes they are questions specifically designed to help people new to the industry out, sometimes they are more intricate questions designed to help those with a little more experience out, or at least get people thinking. Worth checking out!

...When you see this in the notes, it means we didn't read this on the show. The only way to find this information out is to read our Show Notes!

…You can send any questions/suggestions or notes saying ‘hi' over to me at amber@wppro.ca, or hit up our site wpppluginsatoz.com/contact – Be creative with the title so that the spammer eater doesn't eat your note though!

 

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Let's start the show with this weeks Featured Artist:

Artist: 

Grok! You can check him and his artistic talents out by going here and following the directions.
You will wind up being re-routed to here, and although you are getting a sort of lame version you will at least be getting an idea of the real Grok!
The other option, and the best one really 'cause you will be able to get the full version of Grok, is to go to the X (formally Twitter) site and pay for premium for proper access to Grok.

We would love some new art from our Producers out there! If you are so inclined, you can send it into us at https://wppluginsatoz.com/artwork/. If you need some inspiration, you can always go to our site wppluginsatoz.com and check out our Art Vaults – you will find the link for it on the left hand side.

…We can NEVER have too much art!

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Breaking News in the WordPress World at large!! 

This is just a little taste of what will come out on Wednesday for everyone! Send anything in to me at amber@wppro.ca that you think should go into the Wed's N3W$ 4 Y0U!

News this week:

WordPress Vulnerability Report
(https://solidwp.com/blog/wordpress-vulnerability-report-january-15-2025/) – In this report there are 342 Plugin vulnerabilities; at this point 123 of them have been patched.
There is a total of 32 WordPress Themes with Vulnerabilities; currently 3 of them have been patched.

WordPress Vulnerability Report from PatchStack
(https://patchstack.com/database/) – These guys always have the latest information on what is going on regarding the latest in vulnerabilities. At the time of writing this, most recent issue was from 6 hours ago and is ‘WP All Import Pro' with a cross site scripting upload vulnerability.

Google Grip Loosens in Europe: What it means for your website (https://wpshout.com/google-losing-market-share-in-europe/) – This came out on December 5 and is rather important for people working through their SEO. This article goes through and explains why they are losing their traction and explains what is currently happening where, and what the future is likely to hold. There are some great suggestions on how to optimize for other search engines as well.

WP Engine gets its preliminary injunction against Automattic/Mullenweg (https://wpshout.com/wp-engine-gets-preliminary-injunction/) – This article is from December 12, and the information here is good to have especially if you are a WP Engine user. Most of everything that WP Engine has been asking for has been granted it appears, which means for WP Engine Users that they are able to sign in again, ACF will be completely under WP Engine again, and no modifications can be made to WP Engine's plugins from outside of WP Engine anymore. This means that stability will be returned to WP Engine users, and hopefully this stability will spread across the WordPress Community as well.

Automattic cuts weekly contributor hours to WordPress.org by 99% – Community Members fear ‘Beginning of the End' (https://wpshout.com/automattic-cuts-weekly-contributor-hours-to-wordpress/) – This article dropped on January 15, and is very important for any WordPress user to be aware of. Automattic has tended to contribute about 4,000 documented hours a week in the past to WordPress – they will now be contributing about 45. How this will affect you and your site are talked about in this article in depth. To overview they are talking about:

• ‘Loss of critical documentation and knowledge infrastructure
• Security and development oversight concerns
• Potential WordPress.com/Wordpress.org split
• Community governance challenges'

Now whether this is something that is going to be permanent, or something that is going to be only short term – the damage will be done.

Employees enter sensitive data into GenAI prompts far too often (https://www.darkreading.com/threat-intelligence/employees-sensitive-data-genai-prompts) – This is referring to all the people who are entering data into prompts for things like ChatGPT other tools of the same ilk.  As you know when you do this you are helping to train them – but any information you put into there can be used by them as well. If you are tossing in sensitive data, that is not going to end well for you or your company. This a great article talking about this, and recommends how to balance your GenAI Cyber-Risk & Reward.

 

Rogue's Corner News and Extras

Phishing plugin found in the wild
https://www.darkreading.com/threat-intelligence/phishwp-plugin-hijacks-wordpress-e-commerce-checkouts

A new Plugin Repository using GitHub
https://x.com/JamesWelbes
https://therepo.org/

Block Matt from seeing your website
https://aurisecreative.com/blog/2024/12/hide-your-wordpress-website-from-matt-mullenweg/
Plugin from GitHub
https://github.com/wp-privacy/wp-api-privacy

Interesting open letter for reform in WordPress
https://www.therepository.email/wordpress-contributors-and-community-leaders-call-for-governance-reform-in-rare-open-letter

New Repositories
https://drzimp.com/shiftwp/
https://aspirepress.org/
https://github.com/duanestorey/juniper-author

I love geeks, seems they where busy over the Christmas holidays
https://duanestorey.com/posts/repo-for-wordpress-update

Matt's slamming of WP Engine at the 2024 WP Meetup
https://wordpress.tv/2024/10/11/an-in-person-qa-with-matt-mullenweg/

 

Some Extras

check out the N3W$ 4 Y0U coming out on Weds for more, or you can check out our Facebook or Twitter!

What's next for Gutenberg? A community chat with WordPress developer Riad Bengualla (https://wpshout.com/wordpress-community-improvement-suggestions/) – this is a discussion with a Developer where people make suggestions, not an information sharing on what is actually coming next. Worth a read though – never know what will make it into the next gen!

7 takeaways from Elementor's 2025 web.fwrd event (https://thewpminute.com/7-takeaways-from-elementors-2025-web-fwrd-event/) – Really interesting read, seeing all the things that Elementor is bringing forward! They are planning on doubling down on being a one-stop shop for WordPress site creation. Worth a read!

What's new in Gutenberg 20.0? (https://make.wordpress.org/core/2025/01/11/whats-new-in-gutenberg-20-0-10-january/?ref=dailydev)

 

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Dragon Rating Time!

John's Plugin

Prime Slider – Addons For Elementor (Revolution of a slider, Hero Slider, Post Slider and Ecommerce Slider)

https://wordpress.org/plugins/bdthemes-prime-slider-lite/

 

The Lowdown:

This plug in is a great one if you want a nice simple hero slider, post slider, or ecommerce sliders. It's problematic if you want to do extended sliders though for the free version. I don't know about the premium version of this plug in, what it can and can't do, but we're talking about the free version here. And since we're now reaching the end of the Dragon year, it's time for me to actually just start giving plugins their true ratings.

This one here installs easily, it does a really great job and I've used this on an additional site. Well I didn't install it there, but the client who we picked up the site from must have installed it. It works really wonderful if you're using it as a post because it gives you some really fancy post slides without a whole lot of grief and effort. I kind of like that feature about it and I was hoping I'd be able to use it for Hero sliders. The problem is, though, is with the hero sliders, you can't really adjust them that much. You're kind of limited in what you can and can't do with them. You can't move the text around, you have some real challenges to make color changes or other miscellaneous things to it. On the whole, though, it's a pretty fantastic plugin, it works and makes it real easy. If you're looking for a cheap, easy way to do slider plugins, this is the one for you. So go check it out. It is the prime slider.

Rating 4 Dragons

 

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WordPress Tips

We would love to hear some tid bit tips from some of our producers out there – what did you figure out by breaking something? Or what did you need to learn in order to help someone? You can send these tid bits into me at amber@wppro.ca

 

My tip to you today…

How many times have you heard ‘don't put off until later what you can do today'?

Well, if you are like me, you will try and follow this advice, and find that it has been 5 hours since you last moved your head at all as you bounded happily through the rabbit hole you found.

There IS a limit – if you need to, set an alarm to remind you. I personally have 3 alarms so that when I have unthinkingly turned off the first one, I will sort of notice the next one, and the third one fully breaks my infatuation with whatever I am reading or working on.

Trust me, this happens to the best of us – and for the super patient family and friends of those who dive so deeply into their work/interests that they forget to eat food and drink water, just put whatever it is down next to them and they will eventually either notice and consume the sustenance, or they will consume the sustenance without noticing they are doing so.

Remember to always thank your family and friends for being patient and for both feeding and watering you!

So when someone talks about ‘don't put off until later what you can do today', don't take it quite so literally with all the work you have cued up. Try getting some other things done too, like laundry and getting to the outside world – remember, without your daily dose of sunshine you may develop a full on allergy and go poof in the sunlight like a vampire. Don't want that!

 

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Dragon Rating Times 2!

Amber's Plugin

Name Your News – Customize Your WordPress Dashboard News Experience

https://web321.co/our-plugins/name-your-news/

 

The Lowdown:

This plugin was sent into us by Web321 – and it is a pretty useful plugin! This is a free plugin, although you will need to go to their site ‘WEB321' to download this plugin. The link is here for you (https://web321.co/our-plugins/name-your-news/).

When you first upload and activate this, nothing obvious happens so you will need to go to your ‘Settings' in your left-hand menu. Looking in that small menu, you will see ‘Name Your News'. Click on this and you will be brought to the dashboard for the plugin.

Here you will have the option to rename your news to anything you like – be careful what you name your news though, because I named my ‘unicorn rainbow poop' in less appropriate words – and it is right there on the dashboard, titling all the news. So whatever you choose be sure it is something you and anyone else that is going into your site will be happy seeing, and that it makes sense.

You have 5 slots that you can enter in your RSS feeds too. The first one is filled out as a full URL from Web321's feed, so I just placed the URL's of the sites I wanted to have the RSS feed of – and it works like a charm! No need to go searching for the RSS feed of the sites to enter the information in, just throw in the URL of the feed you want and hit ‘Save Settings'.

You have an option of choosing the ‘Refresh Frequency' as well:
Hourly
Daily
Weekly
Monthly

The first time I clicked on ‘Dashboard' after setting this all up, it took a bit longer then usual, although I am not finding it to do that again, so I think it was just a one time thing.

Crazy useful for keeping up to date on things pertaining to your site in particular, this is a great way to throw the news into your dashboard for you! Highly recommend using this if news is something you are regularly going searching for (like me!)!

I think this would be awesome as a page/post builder plugin rather then just a dashboard plugin, though it is pretty awesome as is!

Rating: 5 Dragon

 

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Earn yourself a Producership Credit!

There are a lot of ways that you as our Producers can utilize us as your tool to help yourself out, and help us at the same time – get a producership credit, do an interview, donate some time to get your name up here, all kinds of things! You can look further into the Producership credits options by going to our site wppluginsatoz.com and clicking on Time, Talent, or Treasure in our main menu.

 

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Miscellaneous Announcements from all:

Have an announcement like a meetup, or to announce you'll be on stage at a WordCamp? Let us know and we will add it here and help get your news out to the world!

 

WordCamp Pune, India – Feburary 2, 2025

WordCamp Zaragoza 2025 – February 14-15

WordCamp Asia – February 20-22, 2025

WordPress Developer Day San José – February 22, 2025

WordCamp Madrid, Spain – March 7-8, 2025

To see the entire list you can follow the link here in the show notes, then click on ‘More WordCamps' right below the list of the next 5. https://central.wordcamp.org/

 

If you are interested in finding a WordPress Meetup somewhere around the world you can go check out the places here: https://www.meetup.com/pro/wordpress/

 

Keep checking back every week to find out what else is going on!

 

And remember, the show notes found at wppluginsatoz.com have a whole lot of extra information to grab up that we don't read on air so be sure to check them out!

 

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How to reach us:

Feel like sending us something through the snail mail system? You can do that thanks to our brick and mortar address that we provide for you!
You can also reach us the more common way of the internets – have both of our internets available down below for ya!

 

WP Plugins A to Z
C/O John Overall 
20-754 E Fairview Rd. 
Victoria, BC  V9A 5T9  
Canada

 

John:

• My website:http://www.johnoverall.com/
• WordPress Emergency Support:http://wppro.ca/wpemergency
• email:john@wppro.ca

 

Amber:

• email: amber@wppro.ca

 

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Today's Plugins we covered were:

 

John’s Plugin:

Prime Slider – Addons For Elementor (Revolution of a slider, Hero Slider, Post Slider and Ecommerce Slider) By BdThemes

• Responsive (perfectly viewable on any device including mobile, tablet and desktop)
• SEO optimized (with title, breadcrumb, link etc)
• Highly optimized for web and server performance

Rating: 4 Dragons

 

Amber's Plugin: 

Name Your News – Customize Your WordPress Dashboard News Experience by Web321

• Easy news direct to your dashboard
• Easy to use
• Light weight Plugin

Rating: 5 Dragon

 

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Q & A Time with Amber – Catch this info on our YouTube Channel

If you have questions you would like to have asked on the show, send them in to me atAmber@WPPro.ca – we may never stump my dad, but we can get some good conversation out of him at least!

 

• What exactly is an RSS feed?

• How would you get an RSS feed if you didn't have one of these awesome new plugins where you can just drop the URL into the plugin and click ‘save'?

 

Questions asked after closing credits:

 

• Are RSS feeds a security risk at all?

• Have you ever come across those who charge for usage of their RSS feeds? If not, is there a reason why someone might do that, or are they just always free?
  • Why are they always free?

 

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