This week we have news about the first betas of the new WordPress version 4.9. Our colleagues from Hootproof also show you why you should avoid maintenance mode when revising your WordPress projects and we show you how to speed up your landing pages with Google AMP.
Business
Down with the maintenance page
Maintenance pages are a great thing in principle. If you have to work on the site because it no longer works properly or you have to make changes, the user gets the impression that something is happening here. The service may not be available, but the people responsible are working on it. And that's why maintenance pages are only a great thing in principle. Wouldn't it be better if the site remained available during problems, tests and redesigns and could continue to generate visitors and sales? This is exactly what Michelle, founder of the WP support service provider Hootproof, deals with in her latest article and shows how staging massively simplifies the development and maintenance of your sites.
Cheat sheets ftw!
What were the most important commands for the WordPress REST API again? What are the most practical shortcuts for the WordPress editor? And what was that one CSS element called again? The WordPress Blog Code in WP has compiled more than 120 cheat sheets, in which you will not only find a lot of help for your everyday work, but also a lot of inspiration.
Performance
Especially in the mobile advertising sector, speed is the top priority for websites. With its Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP for short, Google has created an extremely fast content delivery system for mobile users. So it only makes sense to use the fast Google servers for landing pages too. The colleagues from Template Toaster give a good outline of the basic information.
Security
Hiding is not a security concept
Security Through Obscurity is the concept behind measures such as hiding the WP admin area. It's a nice idea in itself, but it's not a sensible security concept. David Hayes from WP-Shout shows why masking your WordPress site is a waste of time.
WordPress Attack Report September
The security provider Wordfence, whose plugin is currently used on more than two million WordPress sites worldwide, publishes its WordPress Attack Report every month. The figures are a good approximation and show how the security situation in the WordPress universe is changing. September, for example, was a relatively quiet month: the number of certain types of attack fell by up to 45 percent.
WordPress
There are actually weekly updates for the new WordPress editor Gutenberg. This is intended to prepare the editor step by step for its core integration in WordPress 5. With the latest update, Gutenberg now has the option to edit block content directly in HTML mode, among other things. Matias Ventura presents all the new features and a roadmap for the upcoming updates in the Gutenberg blog. Meanwhile, Matt Mullenweg's goal of 100,000 active Gutenberg installs is still a long way off. Just over 2,000 sites are currently actively using the editor.
The second beta for the new WP version 4.9 has now been released. The update, which is expected to be released on November 14, 2017, focuses primarily on the usability and customizability of the CMS.
