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WordPress 4.9 has been released just in time for the holiday season. Continuing the tradition of naming WordPress releases after jazz musicians, WordPress 4.9 is codenamed Tipton for band leader Billy Tipton. Some WordPress users won’t find a lot to be excited about in WordPress 4.9, but there are some great new features for WordPress professionals, developers, and designers.

Even if you aren’t interested in the new features we’re about to discuss, you should update WordPress unless you have a compelling reason not to. Alongside new features and improvements, WordPress 4.9 brings several security enhancements, including the mandatory sending of confirmation emails for account email address changes.

Theme Previews

One of the most useful additions for WordPress users is theme previews within the Customizer: users can search through thousands of themes and see previews without leaving the Customizer.

Painless Customizer Collaboration

Over the last few releases, the Customizer has evolved from a tool I never used to an essential part of my WordPress workflow. WordPress 4.9 continues the trend with developer- and designer-focused user experience enhancements.

My favorite 4.9 update is the ability to draft and schedule customizations. I’ll often make changes in the Customizer that I don’t want to apply immediately. Sometimes I’d like to work on changes over a few sessions, rather than all at once. In the past, this sort of workflow has been awkward, but with the addition of drafts and scheduling to the Customizer, it’s possible to save customizations and schedule them to go live at a time of my choosing — just like WordPress posts.

A consequence of the ability to save customization drafts is that we can now share those drafts via a URL. That can be a huge time-saver. Designers and WordPress professionals often need approval from clients before going live, and we’re constantly collaborating with other professionals. Design Preview links makes it a breeze to share and collaborate on customizations.

On-Site Developer Features

You probably find yourself tweaking CSS files or HTML code within WordPress, especially following the introduction of the Custom HTML widget. That gets a lot easier and less error prone now that WordPress includes decent syntax highlighting and error checking. Botched CSS and HTML edits are responsible for many a white screen of death, a problem that will be substantially reduced by WordPress’s new error checking. WordPress developers will receive a warning if they try to save faulty code.

Many of the coding improvements are possible because of the integration of the CodeMirror code editor into WordPress’s CSS and HTML editing functionality. CodeMirror is a sophisticated JavaScript text editor that provides syntax highlighting, linting, and auto-completion.

As always, you can download the most recent version of WordPress from WordPress.org or update your existing WordPress site from the WordPress Dashboard.

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After a couple of weeks of rumors, Google announced that it will add an ad-blocker to the Chrome web browser next year. Chrome is the most popular browser on the web with a market share of over 60%, and the introduction of always-on, activated-by-default ad-blocking will have a substantial impact on the advertising and publishing industry.

Publishers have—perhaps surprisingly—greeted Google’s announcement with cautious enthusiasm, because the company doesn’t intend to block all advertising, only the most user-hostile and unpleasant advertising.

Although Google has its fingers in many pies, by far the biggest chunk of its revenue comes from advertising, many billions of dollars per year. So why would Google want to give users an ad-blocker?

“In dialogue with the Coalition [For Better Ads] and other industry groups, we plan to have Chrome stop showing ads (including those owned or served by Google) on websites that are not compliant with the Better Ads Standards starting in early 2018.”

No one denies the advertising and web publishing industry has a problem. Everywhere we turn, intrusive advertising competes for our attention and degrades our experience of the web. Some of that advertising goes beyond annoying and poses a real security risk to web users. Malvertising, malware delivered via advertising, has been growing in prominence over the last couple of years, affecting the readership of publishers of all sizes. In short, the web advertising industry is a mess. Market pressures and declining advertising revenues force some publishers and networks to go over the top with advertising, but that’s not a persuasive argument to the average web user.

Content creators, publishers, web hosting providers, and the rest of the multi-billion-dollar online economy depends on advertising, but the advertising industry has destroyed the goodwill of the people on whose attention it depends to generate revenue.

Users block advertising in greater numbers than ever before, aided by a growing — and not entirely trustworthy — ad-blocking industry and companies like Apple that care more about user experiences than publishers’ bottom lines.

Google Chrome’s forthcoming ad-blocker is intended to stem the movement of users towards full-scale and undiscriminating blocking of all advertising. Installing an ad-blocker usually means all ads are blocked. Users can whitelist sites they consider valuable, but only a tiny proportion ever do.

Google is grasping the nettle and introducing an ad-blocker that will remove the worst advertising from the web in the hope that it will prevent users from pursuing the nuclear option of blocking all advertising.

What counts as bad advertising? The Coalition For Better Ads has introduced some guidelines about what it considers unacceptable. You should take a look at the guidelines to see what Google and the Coalition For Better Advertising considers bad, but it’s really just common sense. Anything that blocks users’ access to content or provides a particularly negative web experience is considered an unacceptable ad, including ads that distract, interrupt, or clutter web pages.

If you’re wondering whether the advertising on your sites fits the bill, you can use the Ad Experience Report to get an idea of how Chrome’s ad-blocker will affect what your visitors see.

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JSON Feed is a new feed format that provides the same functionality as RSS, but without asking developers to tangle with the complexities of XML, the format underlying both RSS and Atom. The creators of JSON Feed have released a WordPress plugin, which makes it simple to add a JSON Feed to an existing WordPress site.

The JSON Feed WordPress plugin isn’t in the official WordPress plugin repository yet, but it’s easy enough to install from its GitHub repository. If you want to take JSON Feed for a spin on your WordPress site, go to the GitHub repository in your browser, and click on the green “Clone or download” button. Choose “Download ZIP”, and then drop the resulting folder into your WordPress site’s /wp-content/plugins folder. Next, activate the plugin as you would with any other plugin. You should now have a JSON Feed available at http://yourdomain/feed/json.

Feeds have been central to blogging since its earliest days. The adoption and development of RSS was heavily influenced by the first bloggers in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Although social media streams like Twitter have supplanted RSS feeds for many users, they’re still an important part of blogging — not to mention being vital to podcasting. WordPress sites generate RSS feeds for posts by default, and many of the most engaged blog readers are heavy users of RSS.

But RSS has a problem. The decision to base RSS on XML makes it more complicated to implement than it should be. As anyone who has tried to build an RSS reader knows, that complexity causes no end of headaches. Non-standard and subtly broken feeds are everywhere, and RSS readers have to be able to handle a huge number of edge cases. Because of the prominence of social media streams and the challenge of implementing RSS properly, many publishers and developers don’t make the effort.

JSON Feed, which was created by Manton Reece and Brent Simmons, who created NetNewsWire, one of the earliest popular newsreaders, is intended to provide an alternative feed format without the headaches associated with RSS.

JSON is a lightweight data interchange format and it’s hugely popular. Originally developed for use with JavaScript, JSON is now a de facto standard for data exchange and APIs. Every programming language used on the web includes a JSON parser. Those of you who follow the WordPress world will be aware that the new WordPress REST API delivers data in JSON. Most importantly, the JSON Feed format is simple enough that correct implementation isn’t likely to be a problem.

JSON Feed is an excellent addition to the feed ecosystem, and it will hopefully see wide adoption. Many prominent feed readers have already integrated JSON Feed support, including Feedbin, Newblur, and Inoreader. However, if you choose to offer a JSON Feed on your site, don’t disable RSS. It’ll be a long time before the majority of services and applications that consume feeds adopt the JSON Feed format, if ever, so most sites will want to use both formats simultaneously for the foreseeable future.

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If you’re anything like me, you’re full of ideas for projects you’d love to work on if only you had the time. I’m a writer, and I have no end of ideas for essays, blog articles, and books I’d like to write. Most of us are the same; whether it’s writing, photography, music, podcasting, art, or any of an unlimited variety of creative projects, we have an idea that we’d love to share with the world, but our daily responsibilities get in the way and we just can’t find the time.

But, as I’ve learned, it almost certainly doesn’t take as long as you think to create something worth sharing. A couple of hours a week is probably enough, if you have access to the right tools. For me, WordPress is that tool. WordPress is the world’s most popular content management system, and it’s the perfect platform for publishing your content. I prefer WordPress to social media networks like Facebook because, although I share on Facebook too, everything I publish lives on a site that I control.

Get Up-And-Running In No Time At All

The idea of setting up a website may seem daunting, but in reality you can be up and running with a WordPress site in a couple of minutes. The best WordPress hosting companies install and configure WordPress for you, and all you’ll have to do is choose a theme and start publishing.

Choose From Thousands Of Designs

Speaking of themes, WordPress provides a rich variety of designs so that you can choose the perfect look for your side project. There are thousands of high-quality free themes available in the official repository, and, if you don’t mind spending a few dollars, thousands more premium themes.

WordPress Can Make Your Vision A Reality

WordPress is modular and extensible. In simple terms that means developers have created thousands of plugins to add functionality to your WordPress site. In fact, if you can think of it, there’s probably a plugin for it. Take a look at the official WordPress plugin repository and search for something you’d like to do with your side project — you’re almost certain to find a plugin that will make it that much easier.

Plugins aren’t just about making WordPress easier to use; they also provide a wide range of extra functionality for the content management system, including plugins for SEO and eCommerce.

WordPress Is Fast And Secure

There are two secrets to ensuring that WordPress fulfills its potential as a fast and secure content management system.

First, choose a WordPress hosting provider that cares about performance. The best managed hosting providers invest in networks and servers that make the most of WordPress’s performance capabilities.

Second, make sure you keep your WordPress site up-to-date. The majority of security problems that WordPress site owners have are due to outdated plugins or WordPress installations. Updating is simple: most of the time it happens automatically, and for major updates, all you have to do is press a button.

If you have a side project that you’ve been putting off because you’re worried about the complexity of creating a website, try WordPress. You’ll be up-and-running with a beautiful, feature-rich website in no time at all.

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One of the most compelling parts of the WordPress ecosystem is the huge number of high-quality plugins. If you want to add a feature to your WordPress site, there’s almost certainly a plugin that will do the job. Plugins allow WordPress to be flexible without becoming bloated and they allow the WordPress ecosystem to advance more quickly than a centralized development model ever could.

But plugins are software, and as with any software, WordPress hosting clients should be aware of potential security risks. The majority of plugin security issues can be avoided by updating plugins regularly. Updates bring fixes to security vulnerabilities; plugins that aren’t updated are quite likely to be vulnerable. Updating plugins is easy: all WordPress users need to do is press a button in the WordPress dashboard when they’re notified that a new version of a plugin is ready.

The update system works perfectly most of the time, but what happens when a developer never releases a new version of a plugin? The update system relies on developers to fix security vulnerabilities in their plugins. Sometimes that doesn’t happen. Developers may decide they no longer want to work on a plugin. Outwardly, there’s no obvious way for a site owner to tell if a developer has abandoned a plugin without investigating — the plugin is just never updated.

In some cases, a plugin is removed from the repository because it is discovered to contain a particularly bad security vulnerability, but that happens rarely. There are tens of thousands of plugins and the WordPress project doesn’t have the resources to check every one. The onus is on site owners to check that plugins are regularly updated and to investigate if they suspect a plugin might have been abandoned.

• If a plugin hasn’t been updated for six months, investigate to see if it’s still being actively developed.
• Investigate if a plugin isn’t promptly updated to make it compatible with the most recent version of WordPress.

In many cases the plugin won’t be abandoned and there’s no reason to stop using it. But I’m more than willing to spend the time checking — most of the information I need is available in the “more details” section of the “Plugins” pane of the WordPress dashboard.

Manually checking for abandoned plugins is workable if you have a small number of plugins on one site. But if you manage lots of sites or install a lot of plugins, you might want to think about an automated solution. WordFence recently added the ability to check for abandoned and removed plugins to their well-regarded WordPress security plugin. WordFence will let you know when a plugin may have been abandoned and any outstanding security issues.

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