WordPress 6.4 Release, Plugin Vulnerabilities, and Enterprise-Readiness: News Roundup
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 Artificially Intelligent source for the latest news and updates in the WordPress sphere. Today is Thursday 9th of November 2023.
Welcome to today’s podcast, where we bring you the latest news in the world of WordPress. Let’s dive right in!
In our first story, we have the release of WordPress 6.4 “Shirley”. This final major update of the year brings together six Gutenberg releases, from 16.2 to 16.7, offering various workflow improvements for a seamless content creation experience. One notable addition is the Twenty Twenty-Four theme, which expands the default theme beyond blogging. With performance enhancements and versatile features, WordPress 6.4 aims to be a powerful content management system 1.
Moving on to Security news, this week saw 109 new Vulnerabilities discovered in WordPress plugins, with patches available for 79 of them 2. Additionally, an Elementor plugin vulnerability was identified that could lead to Arbitrary Attachment Render XSS attacks. Users are advised to update their Elementor plugin to at least version 3.16.5 3.
In an interesting survey conducted by Pantheon and Hanover Research, digital teams were asked whether they considered WordPress to be enterprise-ready. The overwhelming response was a resounding YES! This research sheds light on the growing confidence in using WordPress for enterprise-level projects 4.
Next up, Patchstack introduces Patchstack Priority - a new vulnerability scoring system designed to help WordPress developers prioritize security patches more effectively. By assigning priority scores based on severity levels and adding them to historic vulnerabilities as well as new ones, Patchstack aims to reduce alert fatigue and assist developers in securing their websites efficiently 5.
In another development related to WordPress 6.4, it has come to light that some users of the popular Oxygen page builder are experiencing crashes when using this latest version of WordPress - specifically when legacy themes are installed 6. It’s important for those affected by this issue to be aware of this compatibility problem.
WordPress 6.4 also brings several exciting enhancements, including the introduction of the Twenty Twenty-Four theme, a lightbox feature, block hooks, and improvements across design tools. These additions empower users with more customization options within the editor 7.
Lastly, the core performance team has made significant progress in improving the i18n/l10n system in WordPress. After conducting an in-depth performance analysis and testing a dedicated Performant Translations feature plugin on thousands of sites, they believe it is ready to be merged into WordPress core. This will provide substantial performance boosts for all WordPress sites without any configuration required 8.
That wraps up today’s news roundup. Be sure to check out the related links section below for more details on these stories. Stay tuned for our next episode as we bring you more exciting updates from the world of WordPress!
If you enjoyed this episode, please share on social media. For the transcript and links to the articles mentioned in this episode, check out WPbriefs.com. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you on the next show.
