The WordPress Marketing team has put together a pretty cool resource: a guide to a lot of the weird lingo you’ll hear casually cast-off in WordPress conversations without context. While I hope that this can move to a more canonical place: jargon.wordpress.org (with a built-in quick-search feature) would be AMAZING, I love the approach that Bridget Willard and the team have taken to break down some of the unintended barriers that new people to WordPress face.

If you’re in and around Colorado, or you just want an excuse to visit, you should come out to WordCamp Denver this year. Rather than just being a supporter, I’m on the organizing team this year.

Ever since I made a nice little spreadsheet of WordPress security plugin features for WordPress Security with Confidence, I’ve wanted to pull that out to a standalone site. While we didn’t create WPHierarchy.com, we’re its proud maintainers. The idea here is similar.

It’s rare that you find good write-ups with evidence-based details on the field of security. (This I learned while working on WordPress Security with Confidence.) This is true for a whole host of reasons, but it’s one of the many reasons that I’m pointing you all at this write-up from Larry Cashdollar.

A few months ago, Skillshare got in touch and asked me to make a course for them. They’re trying to bulk up on great technical and WordPress content. On a lark, I decided to take them up on it. Flash forward to yesterday, and the course is finally live. It’s called, somewhat grandiosely, “A Complete Site-Owner’s Guide to Securing Your WordPress Site.” It’s really the most-essential subset of the content in WordPress Security with Confidence‘s Site Owner tier.

There’s been some hubbub around PHP version support in WordPress world lately. Most prominently, Iain Poulson of Delicious Brain (makers of WP Migrate DB Pro) published a post telling plugin developers to stop supporting old versions of PHP. Then yesterday, our friend Josh wrote to tell us that he had made up his mind: Caldera Forms is dropping support for PHP versions 5.5 and below. WordPress itself is still written to (and proud to) run on PHP 5.2, although they’ve formally recommended more modern versions for a few years.

I’ve written a couple posts here on WPShout about functional programming, the best of which is “Gentle Introduction to Functional PHP for WordPress Developers: Using Filter and Map on Arrays of Posts“. That post inspired me to give a conference talk, which got me invited to give a talk at the Nomad PHP online users-group. Nomad PHP has a small fee to see live talks, but it’s a nice little community and certainly for a talk that interests you well worth the largely nominal event charge.

While I’ve not been a regular listener recently, I do love the Shop Talk Show with Dave Rupert and Chris Coyier. Both Dave and Chris are smart and talented guys, and their attitude is consistently friendly and positive.

A pretty unfortunate and important issue happened when WordPress 4.9.3 was released a few days ago: it has an error that makes it impossible for WordPress to update itself again. After the error was understood, they stopped rolling out automatic updates. But that was after quite a few sites (speculatively: millions) had updated to it. That’s a problem. So, if you’re running 4.9.3 on any WordPress site, make sure that it (manually, perhaps) gets to WordPress 4.9.4. That’s crucial. Let’s explore why.

Our friend Zac Gordon rushed home from WCUS and made a great course (I’m still working my way through, but so far I’m impressed) about developing your own blocks for WordPress’s forthcoming Gutenberg editor. He published it just a few weeks ago, and he’s still got a launch discount available thanks to his sponsors, which is very cool.