Exciting Announcements, Performance Improvements, Security Tips, and New Block Theme
This post was curated and edited by Ben Gillbanks. Ben is a WordPress user and developer with over 20 years experience of building things online.
Hello and welcome to WP Briefs, your Alien Intelligence source for the latest news and updates in the WordPress community. Today is Tuesday 14th of November 2023.
Welcome to today’s podcast where we’ll be covering some interesting news stories from the world of WordPress. First up, we have an exciting announcement about the latest default theme, Twenty Twenty-Four1. This new theme is designed to be incredibly versatile and is bundled with WordPress 6.4. It’s all about making your website uniquely yours!
In other news, WordPress 6.4 brings some significant performance improvements2. The server response time has been improved by approximately 4% compared to the previous version. Additionally, there have been frontend optimizations that contribute to better Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), an important Core Web Vital. The Performance Team has put a lot of effort into this release, rounding off a year of ambitious work.
Now, let’s talk about Security. Brute force attacks are a common and potentially dangerous threat to WordPress websites3. These attacks involve hackers trying different combinations of usernames and passwords in an attempt to gain access to your site. If successful, they can cause serious damage. Fortunately, there are simple but effective methods you can use to protect your WordPress site against such attacks.
Moving on to another topic, we have WP Briefing: Episode 66: Advocating Open Source Solutions4. In this episode, WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy discusses the strategic approach to integrating open source solutions within your company. She offers valuable insights into initiating open source advocacy conversations that could redefine your company’s technological approach.
Lastly, let’s talk about block themes in WordPress 6.45. There has been a change in how the main query loop is handled for block themes in this release. For singular content like single posts or pages, block templates will now automatically be wrapped in the main query loop. This is different from classic themes that had a separate main query loop included in every template for displaying posts from the database.
And on the theme front, ElmaStudio has released Moog, a free block theme for blogs6. Moog features a minimal and bold layout with a responsive masonry-style grid on the homepage. It’s perfect for blogs and small magazine websites. What sets Moog apart is its versatility. The theme comes with 25 distinct variations that allow you to transform your site into different styles and moods with just a click.
That wraps up today’s news stories from the world of WordPress. Don’t forget to check out the related links below for more information on each topic. Until next time!
If you enjoyed this episode, please tell your friends. For the transcript and links to the articles mentioned in this show, please visit wpbriefs.com. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you in the next episode.
