Free PHPFree PHP scripts classes and info

The Month in WordPress: October 2020

October 2020 was a notable month for WordPress lovers, thanks to the release of several products and updates. Read on to keep up with all the latest news!

The 2020 WordPress Annual Survey is out

The team published the 2020 WordPress Annual survey —  to help those who build WordPress to understand more about our software usage and our contributors’ experience. The Annual Survey will be open for at least 6 weeks and is available in French, German, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish. The survey results (once complete) will be posted on WordPress.org/news. The 2019 survey results have also been released and can now be viewed as slides or downloaded in PDF format. 

WordPress Translation celebrations spanned four weeks

The last week of September and most of October were focused on recruiting and encouraging polyglot contributors to the WordPress translation project. What was originally envisioned as a single-day event lasted 24 days! The Polyglots and Marketing Teams are exploring how future mini-events can be supported to continue building the momentum. Recordings of the live talks and interviews with contributors are available on YouTube. Write-ups from the different events are on the WPTranslationDay website.  The Polyglots team is also working on its 2020 survey and is requesting feedback on the questions.

Want to help WordPress speak your own language? Follow the Polyglots team blog and join the #polyglots channel in the Making WordPress Slack group. 

WordPress maintenance and beta releases

The Core team released WordPress 5.5.3 on Oct. 31, following the release of Version 5.5.2 on Oct. 29. Both releases fix several bugs and security issues with WordPress. You can update to the latest version directly from your WordPress dashboard or download it now from WordPress.org.  The team also released WordPress 5.6 Beta 1 on Oct. 20, followed by Beta 2 on Oct. 27. When ready, the final release will include improvements to the editor, auto-updates for major releases, PHP 8 support, and the Twenty Twenty One theme. You can test the Beta versions by downloading them from WordPress.org or using the WordPress Beta Tester plugin.

Want to be involved in the next release? Follow WordPress 5.6 updates on the development cycle and sign-up for the code review/commit office hours. You can help build WordPress Core by following the Core team blog and joining the #core channel in the Making WordPress Slack group. If you would like to help out with WordPress 5.6 outreach, contact the WordPress Marketing team on the #marketing channel.

Gutenberg 9.2 is released

Version 9.2 of the Gutenberg plugin came out on Oct. 21. This release offers support for video subtitles, the ability to transform selected blocks into the columns block, background patterns in cover blocks, along with several exciting features such as improvements to the widget screen, as well as bug fixes. You can find out more about the Gutenberg roadmap in the What’s next in Gutenberg blog post.

Want to get involved in building Gutenberg? Follow the Core team blog, contribute to Gutenberg on GitHub, and join the #core-editor channel in the Making WordPress Slack group.

Learn WordPress is gearing up for launch

The Learn WordPress initiative, which offers WordPress video workshops followed by interactive discussions, is aiming to put out two courses by the end of the year as part of its full launch. The team is working on creating courses and is requesting feedback from community members on the planned list of courses.

Want to contribute to Learn WordPress? You can now submit a workshop application (submissions in non-English languages are welcome), apply to become a discussion group leader, organize discussions for your local WordPress meetup group, or update screenshots on existing lesson plans.

Further Reading:

• The Q3 2020 update from the WordPress project is now out!
• The WordPress Marketing team has put together a list of WordPress 5.5 marketing resources consisting of video presentations, slides, questions & answers, social media posts, and more – aimed at both developers and non-developers. The team has also prepared a list of captioned screen-recordings in several languages to aid new contributors. Contact the team on the #marketing channel if you would like to contribute to these and upcoming projects. 
• The WordPress Core team has announced a proposal to introduce application passwords for REST API integrations.
• Five online WordCamps took place in October: WordCamp Rochester, NY, WordCamp Austin, TX, WordCamp Italia Online, WordCamp Los Angeles, CA, and WordCamp Bulgaria Online. You can find livestream recaps of these camps on their websites. The camps are also in the process of uploading their videos to WordPress.tv. Check out the WordCamp Schedule to catch up with upcoming online WordCamps.
• Contributor teams have started work on adding dark mode support for the Twenty Twenty One theme. Additionally, the development of the Full Site Editing version of Twenty Twenty One has also kicked-off in the Theme Experiments GitHub repository.
• BuddyPress 7.0 beta, which comes with new administration screens, blocks, and improved CLI support – is now available! 
• The Core team is revisiting starter content for WordPress themes as part of the 5.6 release. The team also decided not to ship the widgets screen in WordPress 5.6 and have started discussions on aligning the WordPress release cycle with industry standards.
• WordPress Accessibility enthusiasts all over the world joined hands for the first ever 24 hour WP Accessibility day event on Oct. 2. You can find the recorded livestream of the event on its YouTube channel.
• The Meta team has kicked off a discussion on setting up a Block pattern directory (similar to the existing block directory). 
• The Themes team has published a post clarifying how Block based themes will work with WordPress 5.6. Check out the block-based theme tutorial and its documentation to learn how to build block-based themes. 

Have a story that we should include in the next “Month in WordPress” post? Please submit it here.

How to Update WordPress Themes and Plugins with a ZIP File

When updating a WordPress theme or plugin, we’ve long had two choices. Either manually upload the updated files via FTP or install the update within the WordPress dashboard.

In general, both of these methods work pretty well – most of the time. FTP is fairly reliable, but isn’t recommended for non-technical users. Then, some themes and plugins seem to be extra finnicky when attempting to update via the dashboard.

Thankfully, there is now a more convenient solution. WordPress 5.5 introduced the ability to apply updates to a theme or plugin by uploading a ZIP file within the dashboard. Now, the same downloadable file that has been long used for installing software can also be used to update it. It’s about time!

Today, we’ll walk you through the process of updating your website’s themes and plugins using only a ZIP file.

First, a Few Technical Notes

While updating a theme or plugin via a ZIP file is fairly straightforward, there are a few technical items to keep in mind:

Test and Back Up Your Site

As always, the best way to prepare your website for updates is to test them out. This could be done via staging site.

In addition, make sure to keep a current backup of your site on hand just in case something goes wrong.

Check the ZIP

If you’re downloading from the official WordPress theme or plugin repositories, your ZIP file should be good to go. However, software from other sources may require some more action on your part before you can upload to your website.

For example, there are commercial themes that provide more than just the installable files within a ZIP archive. You may have to extract another ZIP archive contained within for installation/update purposes. If you’re unsure, open up the archive first to see what you’re dealing with.

Beware of File Upload Limits

All WordPress websites have a file upload limit. There may be occasions when a ZIP file exceeds that limitation.

In this case, you’ll either have to increase the upload file size or unzip the archive and upload via FTP.

Now that we have these technical details out of the way, let’s explore the update process.

Update a WordPress Plugin with a ZIP File

Let’s start out with updating a WordPress plugin with a ZIP file. It’s nearly identical to that of a theme (which we’ll get to later) – the main difference being the location of the upload screen.

In this example, we’ll update Yoast SEO to the latest version. That requires us to download a fresh copy of it to our device.

1. Within the WordPress dashboard, navigate to Plugins > Add New.

2. Click on the Upload Plugin button at the top of the screen.

3. Next, click on the Browse button and locate the ZIP file on your device. Select it and click on Open (the look and terminology used here may be different, depending on your device’s operating system).

4. You should now see the file name displayed on the Add Plugins screen. Click the Install Now button to start the upload process.

5. Now, WordPress is going to do some detective work. It’s going to check to see if the plugin is already installed (which it is). Once it sees that we already have a version of Yoast SEO, it’s going to give us a comparison of the existing and uploaded versions.

In our example, WordPress correctly sees that the plugin we uploaded is a newer version. We want to go ahead and apply the update, so we’ll click Replace current with uploaded to finish up.

6. Success! The new version of Yoast SEO was updated using a ZIP file.

Update a WordPress Theme with a ZIP File

As we mentioned, the process for updating a WordPress theme with a ZIP file is pretty much identical as the one outlined above. Here, we’ll update to the latest version of the Twenty Twenty theme.

Here are the differences:

1. Within the WordPress dashboard, navigate to Appearance > Themes.

2. Click on the Add New button at the top of the screen. You’ll be taken to the Add Themes page. Click on Upload Theme to select the ZIP file from your device.

Steps 3 – 6: Repeat those listed above.

Once again, WordPress will inform us that the theme we’ve uploaded already exists. From there, it will point out the version difference.

Clicking on Replace current with uploaded will apply the theme update.

A Simple Solution for Theme and Plugin Updates

The ability to update your WordPress website’s theme and plugins via a ZIP file is incredibly handy. There are a number of situations that arise where utilizing FTP or the automated dashboard updates either don’t work or aren’t very convenient.

This provides us with another method that just about anyone can do. It will make the process of maintaining your site that much easier.

The post How to Update WordPress Themes and Plugins with a ZIP File appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.