The WordPress project recently released WordPress 4.9, “Tipton” — a new major release named in honor of musician and band leader Billy Tipton. Read on to find out more about this and other interesting news from around the WordPress world in November.
WordPress 4.9 “Tipton”
On November 16, WordPress 4.9 was released with new features for publishers and developers alike. Release highlights include design locking, scheduling, and previews in the Customizer, an even more secure and usable code editing experience, a new gallery widget, and text widget improvements.
The follow up security and maintenance, v4.9.1, has now been released to tighten up the security of WordPress as a whole.
To get involved in building WordPress Core, jump into the #core channel in the Making WordPress Slack group, and follow the Core team blog.
Apply to Speak At WordCamp Europe 2018
The next edition of WordCamp Europe takes place in June, 2018. While the organizing team is still in the early stages of planning, they are accepting speaker applications.
WordCamp Europe is the largest WordCamp in the world and, along with WordCamp US, one of the flagship events of the WordCamp program — speaking at this event is a great way to give back to the global WordPress community by sharing your knowledge and expertise with thousands of WordPress enthusiasts.
Diversity Outreach Speaker Training Initiative
To help WordPress community organizers offer diverse speaker lineups, a new community initiative has kicked off to use existing speaker training workshops to demystify speaking requirements and help participants gain confidence in their ability to share their WordPress knowledge in a WordCamp session.
The working group behind this initiative will be meeting regularly to discuss and plan how they can help local communities to train speakers for WordCamps and other events.
To get involved in this initiative, you can join the meetings at 5pm UTC every other Wednesday in the #community-team channel of the Making WordPress Slack group.
Further Reading:
- WordCamp US 2017 is happening on December 1-3 in Nashville, with the annual State of the Word talk happening on Saturday afternoon — the live stream of the entire event is available to view for free.
- Tide, a new service from XWP designed to help users make informed plugin choices, is due to launch at WordCamp US.
- Gutenberg development is continuing rapidly, with a packed new release and a focus on usability testing.
- After some discussion among the community, a new type of micro-regional WordCamp is going to be introduced into the global WordCamp program.
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