Despite the marketing hype that Google wants to help you find information on the net, Roger Montti reports that the direction is to fill the first screen of search with AI Overviews and ads. It looks like Google is intending to use our Search Engine Optimized content in its AI search summary to offer more value to advertisers.

Oxygen released version 4.8.3 which is a security update. The security issue addressed is a privilege escalation vulnerability that would allow a user with “contributor” or higher permissions to escalate their privileges to an admin (CVE-2024-4662). This issue impacts anyone that has granted untrusted users Contributor+ access to their WordPress website. It does not affect you if you do not have Contributor+ users on your WordPress website.

Adam Preiser shares a preview of some quality of life enhancements coming in the free Spectra blocks collection. Some of these enhancements seem to have been inspired by Cwicly. It would be nice if all of them were included in core Gutenberg.

The WordPress org Themes Team is finding that reviewing block themes is much faster. Consequently, team members are helping out in other theme related areas. This was discussed in the latest team meeting along with steps to formalize the changes. One of these changes is to help theme authors transition to block based themes.

Lana Miro, the partnership manager for Crocoblock has written an ebook on the dos and don’ts on building WordPress partnerships. If you are starting a WordPress business then you’ll find some good tips on forming community relationships for promoting your products. The ebook is a free download.

It is good to see some progress on Phase 3 of Gutenberg, the collaboration phase. This is an experimental feature allowing for commenting on blocks, I imagine similar to Google Docs comments.

Congratulations to the organizers of WordCamp Europe. They received the EU Parliament’s Patronage Award. “The European Parliament grants patronage to a limited number of non-profit events that have a clear European dimension and political importance to the Council of Europe. This award is a way for the Parliament to show its moral support for these events, which can increase public interest in the Parliament’s work and EU activities. Patronage is granted to an individual event for the duration of the event, and general information is provided about the organizer.” Google AI overview

The WordPress Playground has been gaining traction and its use is expanding. I learned that you can create “blueprints” so that when a Playground instance is launched you can load demo data, plugins, and themes. Here is a central page about blueprints. It has links to a guide for creating your own blueprint as well as to a gallery of blueprints that have already been submitted.

Today the LifterLMS team announced a new page builder called Aircraft. Digging into the announcement I see that Aircraft is actually a set of attractive Gutenberg patterns designed for LMS sites. This is a clever idea and I imagine we will see more companies offering pattern packs.