I hope you had a great start of the new year, 2016! I also hope that it will be a great, exciting and interesting year for all of us who use WordPress for our websites whether you use WordPress as a personal blog or for your company.
A new year always open up for new goals and opportunities, and I am sure many of you have new projects planned for 2016, right? It may be personal growth, changes in your current website, start a business, start more websites, etc. I believe it’s positive to think or plan what you want to accomplish during a coming year.
We at WP Daily Themes also plan and has already made some changes. Starting this year, I will write most of our roundups myself and we will also change the publishing day to Friday, which gives us a better chance to collect all WordPress news from the week.
We will also redesign WP Daily Themes shortly to hopefully boost both the look and improve the performance. We are also building a new website for a new project that I really look forward to launch.
When we talking about a new year and what lies ahead of us, there are bloggers who are reflecting the direction WordPress will take in 2016. Which news and features will we see this year? Today I want to highlight some articles that deal with this specific topic. Plus lots of other WordPress tips, tutorials, resources and podcasts.
Let’s take a look at the latest news from the WordPress community. Here is our Weekly WordPress Roundup #35.
WordPress in 2016
WordPress is constantly evolving and has come a long way since I started using WordPress back in 2008. Much has changed for the better and WP is now a stable and reliable publishing platform with millions of users. Last fall, we could read that WordPress now powers 25% of the web which is big! Fantastic numbers, right? It will be exciting to see what’s new and coming up in WordPress during this year.
Noel Tock has written a great article – WordPress in 2016 where he talks about REST API coupled with a front-end JavaScript library (such as REACT) is the future of many websites and progressive web apps. More topics are – The decline of the WordPress Assembler. Patterns over Pages and Centralisation of Community.
WordPress in 2016: How the REST API and Calypso Will Force Change
Rachel McCollin has written an article on the WPMU dev blog about the REST API and Calypso and what changes for developers. A suitable sentence and described in the article are:
“The REST API, in particular, and the Calypso interface that makes use of it, will introduce WordPress to a new audience of developers who don’t work with PHP and users who’ve been put off by WordPress’, frankly, confusing interface.”
Have you had the opportunity to try Calypso yet? It represents the biggest change to the admin interface since WordPress was launched more than 12 years ago. It is already implemented in WordPress.com and you’ll be able to use the new Calypso interface via Jetpack plugin on self-hosted WordPress sites. More features in Calypso are – A more intuitive interface, much faster editing and publishing, publish and edit posts and pages etc. If you want to know more about the REST API, Calypso, and more I recommend you read the article.
Matt Mullenweg Addresses Concerns WordPress is Moving Too Fast
Is the development of WordPress going too quickly? Right now there are three major releases annually, about every four months new features and major bug fixes can be expected. For most users, there is no problem, but worse for all the plugin, and theme developers struggling to keep up.
In the article from WordPress Tavern – Matt Mullenweg Addresses Concerns That WordPress is Moving Too Fast, a user who is concerned with WordPress ‘release strategy points out:
“I’m worried that the pace of core updates is driving the larger ecosystem toward failure. Everyone is scrambling to keep things patched, then new conflicts arise and things break down. The person on the end ‘companies maintaining their sites, responsibly, or services like mine’ face a constant flow of updates, then testing, then trying to fix things that have broken.”
Mika Epstein asked Mullenweg during the Q&A session of 2015 State of the Word at WordCamp US if WordPress is moving too fast and if the number of releases per year should decrease by one. Mullenweg answered improvements can be made to the plugin directory, and the speed of WordPress development will increase instead of decrease. Meanwhile, the development team will continue to release three major versions per year. What is your opinion? Do you want to see more updates or fewer?
Useful Tutorials:
- How to Create an Image Gallery in WordPress
- How to Easily Create a Quiz in WordPress?
- How to Hide Password Protected Posts From WordPress Loop
- How to Show Parent Comment in WordPress Comments
- How to use WordPress.com App with Self-hosted WordPress Blogs
- How to Find Your WordPress Login URL
- How to Create a Welcome Mat For Your WordPress Website
- How To Install Cloudflare CDN On WordPress
WordPress Resources:
- Top CDN Providers for Your WordPress Website
- 33 Beautiful, Lightweight and Responsive WordPress Themes
- The 5 Best WordPress Websites Disaster Recovery Plugins
- WordAds – New Advertising Network to Make Money with WordPress Blogs
- Native vs Plugin: WordPress backups using different methods
- 2015 in Review: 80 of The Best Free WordPress Theme Releases by Category
- WordPress onpage SEO Checklist: step by step guide to boost post traffic
- How To Get More Visible Online With A WordPress Avatar Image
- The Ultimate Guide to WordPress Permalinks
Product Reviews:
- wpDataTables: A Powerful WordPress Table and Charts Manager Plugin
- PE Beauty Center WordPress Theme: Elegance At Its Best
- Extra Theme Review: Best Drag and Drop Magazine Theme
- Monstroid: The Most Versatile WordPress Theme You’ve Ever Seen
- Boss Theme 2.0 Review: A Great Theme For Community Site
WordPress Giveaways:
- New Year 2016 Giveaway by 8Degree Themes
- WordPress CDN Giveaway – Win a 1TB KeyCDN Account
- Giveaway Week at ThemeIsle – Win 1 of 5 ThemeIsle Pirate Club Memberships
Podcasts:
- Automattic’s Relationship With WordPress
- Interactive Popup Surveys, Site Staging lugin – WordPress Plug-ins from A to Z
- Create a Child Theme After Modifying a Parent Theme
- iThemes Enters The Real Time Backup Space
- Rocking Your Plugins in 2016
Ending Notes:
That’s all for now folks. Let’s make this year a great WordPress year! I hope you continue to send in all conceivable WordPress tips to us so we can add them to our next roundup. Until then. See you soon.