State of the Word
Houston, we have a lift off
Navigating from 2017 to 2018
We have long wanted to launch a blog and we finally did it. The year 2017 was full of transformations, challenges and we expect many novelties for 2018 – a bit like the WordPress year itself.
Performance
During this year there was a growing interest in themes such as performance, security and the ever-present retrocompatibility/technological advancement dichotomy. Apparently the later seems to have, finally, the days counted. PHP 7.2 is released and is also announced for December 31, 2018 the PHP 5.6 end of life. For those who have not yet started this process, you have 1 year to migrate the PHP version to all your WordPress projects. The performance advantages are quite impressive (at ZEND website you may find the entire infographic). The “performance” issue does not end with the PHP update. We will, for sure, take a deeper look in this matter during the next year.
Security
As I type this article, WordPress is in version 4.9.x, codename “Tipton” and impact about 29.1% of all sites, according to source W3Techs. This percentile is impressive and is expected to continue to grow. With such distribution, the probability of a malicious attack is huge. There are many tutorials and guides on how to protect “WordPress” and which are the best plugins for the purpose. Truth must be told, WordPress as a platform is quite secure. Som where do vulnerabilities come from? WordPress ecosystem is constantly expanding, there are thousands of plugins and themes. Are they all well defended? Will they all be trustworthy? For us, security begins in the code itself. As such, we will share some tips on how to analyse third-party plugins and themes’ code, how to write “protected” code, and how certain vulnerabilities and attacks work.
Innovation
All major releases area eagerly awaited by some and with reservations by others. Is is set that 2018 will be released WorPress 5.0.
Matt Mullenweg promised that this released will include the much debated “Gutenberg” project. Is is already possible, for quite some time, to play around with this page builder (for now as a plugin). It is not advisable to adopt it in production though. In January we will bring our insight on this matter and a couple tutorials on how to use it and how to expand it.
See you in 2018.