This article from Justin Tadlock over at WP Tavern caught my attention over holiday break. While Justin’s been talking about full-site editing themes for a while, Armando was the first of these “future of WordPress themes” that I took a look at.

Without knowing this news, MailPoet came up organically last night in a discussion we were having at the Fort Collins WordPress Meetup. Someone was looking to send an email newsletter from WordPress, and MailPoet was the option a few of us had heard of for that. (No one had used it.)

Always a worthy read, the Field Guide for the next version WordPress—5.6—is here. The new theme, application passwords being integrated, and a load of incremental updates are the highlight features for me. Sure to be a solid release, but if you’ve got an older site you’re not paying attention to, the jQuery update remains a source of possible fear.

I have to admit that one of the places I feel I most conspicuously show my age is how little interest I have these days for the latest of web-dev hype. I would consider the “JAMstack” hype train one of those things. I’m vaguely aware of it, I know that a lot of people I respect as “cutting edge developers” are super into it. But I just don’t really care. (And only part of that is because it is 2020 😝)

I admit I haven’t been following the concept and execution of Gutenberg Block Patterns very closely. Primarily this is because visual design has never been with a strong suit for me, nor (consequently) something I spent much time on. It is precisely for this reason that I’m so grateful for Birgit Pauli-Haack’s “WordPress Block Patterns Resource List.”

I’ve somewhat intentionally given this little story about a new WordPress 5.5 feature a silly title. But as this story from Sarah Gooding over at the Tavern illustrates, people are already putting the new WordPress wp_get_environment_type() function to good use. And this story was doubly-interesting to me because I for one had no earthly idea that this new function existed. 😳

Ben Gillbanks has been a minor celebrity in my internet world for over a decade at this point. Even back in the 9rules days (if you knew what that was without looking, please sound off in the comments. I love OG interneters, as a general rule.).

I’m a sucker for small useful programmer features. While most of the WordPress peeps are chockablock with opinions on Gutenberg blocks vs PAGE BUILDER OF CHOICE, I just want you to know that you can now pass some variable around in your template files. If you’ve looked at the PHP files in a theme, you may be familiar with functions like get_template_part().

The Wordfence Security team has found a security vulnerability in Elegant Themes’s themes Divi and Extra, as well as in the Divi Builder plugin. Elegant Themes writes:

In just about two weeks (depending on when you read this 🤓) the WordCamp that I (David) have been helping to organize for a few years—I actually forget if I helped in 2017 🤷‍♂️—is happening. That is it’s WordCamp Denver 2020 time. Because of that whole bother about COVID, we’re going to be virtual, which does mean that if your area has good time-zone overlap with the US, you can likely attend all or parts of it live. And we’d love to have you!