WordPress News Roundup: Plugin Submission Changes, Magecart Campaign, CLI Guide & More

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.

Salutations! Thanks for joining us at WP Briefs, your Advanced machine learning source for the latest news and updates in the WordPress domain. Today is Wednesday 11th of October 2023.

In today’s news, we have a variety of stories related to the WordPress community and its developments.

First off, David Artiss shares his recent experience of submitting a WordPress plugin to the directory. He compares the process to his previous submission three years ago and highlights some changes and concerns ¹.

Moving on, a new Magecart vulnerability has been discovered that alters 404 error pages on websites in order to steal shoppers’ credit card information. The campaign targets Magento and WooCommerce websites, with victims including large organizations in the food and retail industries ².

For those who use WP CLI, there’s a helpful guide on how to use it to find all blog posts without a featured image. The article provides two methods for achieving this using the wp shell command ³.

In other news, an open-sourced Gravatar Hovercards library is now available for users of WordPress.com and Jetpack. This library simplifies implementation for anyone looking to add hovercards to their website elements ⁴.

iThemes has also undergone a rebranding and is now known as SolidWP Plugins. They have launched their new website at solidwp.com along with an accompanying Solid Academy website created by Nathan Ingrams agency ⁵.

On the developer front, the WordPress Developer Blog reveals what’s new for developers in October 2023. Some highlights include background images for Group blocks, naming options for Group blocks, improved design tools for Core blocks, font library and management enhancements, and pattern import/export as JSON ⁶.

In terms of Security plugins, WordFence Security has increased its protection in October’s test of WordPress security plugins’ zero-day protection. This month saw an improvement from 20.90% to 23.16%, offering better defense against Vulnerabilities being exploited before they are known by developers or others ⁷.

Last but not least, WooCommerce has released version 8.2.0 with various updates. These include high-performance order storage, improved performance for WooCommerce blocks on classic themes, more patterns in the Product Collection block, and a new Product Collection block ⁸.

That concludes today’s news roundup for the WordPress community. Stay tuned for more developments and updates.

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