WordPress Roadmap: What Users Can Expect in 2020-2021
While 2019 was the fabulous release year of Gutenberg, the new WordPress editing project, what does this popular CMS have in store for us? In fact, WordPress developed its own embedded editor in 2019 putting to shame well-known editors such as DIVI, Elementor or Avada. Moving forward, what are the future developments pushed by Automattic Inc. – the editing company behind WordPress?
The Gutenberg Editing Experience – Work in Progress
Indeed, the Gutenberg editor is a complex project that goes beyond one single version. As the main WordPress editor, Gutenberg will most likely experience several updates in its subsequent versions. Here’s what we already know about planned features:
A new block directory is underway similar to plugin and theme directories for discovering new blocks.
It will be possible to build new blocks for navigation menus and widgets.
Improved theme integration using the block editor will also be available.
A simplified version will enable collaboration on co-authored content projects.
Automatic Updates
In 2020, updates will be automatic with Automattic Inc. (pun intended). Only minor updates were automatic up until WordPress version 5.4 (i.e. the 3rd digit of version 5.4.X); however, subsequent major WordPress versions might also benefit from automatic updates. But there’s a lot more to come! Plugins and themes will also be automatically updated. Don’t worry, your consent will be asked in parameter settings.
Language and Translation
A roadmap to improve and streamline multilingual website editing has been developed, particularly concerning block editing. Is WordPress expected to embed a comprehensive translation system and give up plugins like Polylang or WPML? Or will users just enjoy a set of basic translation features? Time will tell.
I hope that the WordPress roadmap will be as interesting as it is currently; therefore, the entire team editing the Sagenda booking system is looking forward to test upcoming features.
15+ Amazing WordPress Blogs and Resources You Should Follow in 2019
WordPress is arguably one of the best CMS in the world and it powers one-third portion of the entire web. That number is absolutely, totally, awesome! and day by day this number increasing as the future bloggers would like to use the WordPress platform. As a direct result, more and more people search for on-point different WordPress essentials like themes, advice, and tutorials around some common topics related to the platform. People are searching about WordPress sources to build a WordPress blog with some small steps. It began as a blogging platform, but now it’s virtually the operating system of the Web with most of the market share. It has become a huge industry probably one of the largest where there are many products and services built on WordPress. It’s been a big demand for current bloggers era.
So where to go for that? How to live? How about you start with the list we have for you today… here we trying to make a list of some trustworthy WordPress resources. Here are the 15 amazing blogs about WordPress to read in 2019:
WPBeginner is the biggest hub of WordPress tutorials. It is one of the most popular WordPress blogs and is famous for it’s easy to understand tutorials which are exclusively for beginners (as the name suggests). Started in 2009 by Syed Balkhi, it has quickly emerged as one of the most authentic sources of WordPress information. Over the years WPBeginner has not only gained the trust of many WordPress users but also of some influential content marketing personalities. The likes of Neil Patel and Chris Bogan have shown their trust by mentioning the blog on their websites.
I might be a bit biased here, but the fact remains fact; WPExplorer is without any doubt one of the best WordPress blogs out there. I mean, there’s just so much you can learn here on WPExplorer. Wondering what’s on the menu? From detailed tutorials, theme and plugin reviews to tips and great how-to guides, WPExplorer is one resource you want to bookmark right this minute. In between the great posts, we also publish giveaways and exclusive deals that can save you a whole lot of money.
Looking for expert recommendations and in-depth advice? WPMU DEV is one of the strongest blogs for WordPressers out there. The guys at WPMU DEV cover very interesting topics and somehow manage to do it in an equally interesting way. On this blog, you can find WordPress-related posts from multiple categories, everything from beginner to advanced topics. WPMU DEV will provide you with some of the best tutorials and tips in the community.
The Elegant Themes blog offers amazing WordPress tips, tutorials and updates about their new WordPress themes & plugins. The blog features respectable WordPress bloggers such as Kevin Muldoon, Brenda Barron and Jacqueline Thomas among others.
WP Tavern is the main news site in the WordPress community. It brings you a daily dose of news stories on all WordPress-related topics. Check it out to stay updated with all the latest releases, announcements, events, plugins, themes, general goings-on and etc. Chances are if anything happens in the world of WordPress, WP Tavern will cover it.
WPLift features WordPress guides, tutorials, and tips from some of the best WordPress bloggers around. Plus they’ve got some great deals to boot. This plus a focus on entry-level users makes WPLift a great blog to follow for WordPress knowledge.
Unless you started using WordPress recently, you must have heard a thing or two about Chris Lema – a top-level WordPress blogger who has been called in to advise the likes of WooThemes, iThemes, Reaktiv, WP101 and more. He blogs about eCommerce, freelancing, memberships, e-learning, and presentation among other WordPress-related topics.
This is us! CodeinWP covers myriads of WordPress content, starting from tutorials on WordPress usage, to the company’s transparency reports, to plugin lists, to top theme lists, to in-depth research posts. Check out CodeinWP if you want to learn about WordPress overall, and find out not only about the platform’s tech-related inner workings, but also the business side of things. The goal is to give you in-depth information about various WordPress resources, but also deliver it in an easy to understand form.
WinningWP is managed by Brin Wilson and is a great resource for WordPress. Learn about new WordPress themes, check out some plugin reviews and learn new skills with helpful tutorials.
WP Mayor is one of the most recognizable brands in the WordPress space. It’s known for covering various related topics, starting from tutorials, to WordPress themes, plugins, exclusive deals, and even e-commerce for WordPress. WP Mayor also hosts giveaways and publishes product reviews, should you ever need a new theme or plugin and want to find out if it’s going to work for you.
I don’t know how they came up with the name, but it surely grows on you after a while. But the name isn’t the reason WPEka made it to this list; the blog publishes great opinion posts, theme and plugin reviews, and in-depth tutorials several times a week.
WPKube delivers lots of great insights from various categories, such as beginner guides, security, themes, plugins, news, product reviews, advanced tutorials, quick WordPress tips, and tricks. The site’s main goal is to provide in-depth information and great insights on everything related to WordPress.
Torque is a WP Engine publication, and it comes with both advanced and beginner-friendly tutorials and guides. On top of that, it also covers various news stories and interviews with people working with WordPress.
Torque keeps its posts in well-defined categories, catering to different types of readers: community, beginners, developers, and “learn” (their how-to section). Also, there are separate sections for themes and plugins.
Whether you’re a beginner or an advanced WordPress user, you can always learn something from Bob Dunn. He is kind of big deal, so you better pay attention when he takes to the stage. You can also follow his podcast for even more WordPress goodness.
ManageWP allows you to manage multiple WordPress sites from a single dashboard, saving you lots of time and effort. I’m not trying to pull your leg, it’s really convenient, especially if you struggle to manage your sites. Featuring top-level writers and developers such as Vladimir Prelovac, Charnita Fance, and Brenda Barron among others, the ManageWP blog shares tutorials, tips, reviews, opinions, news, business advice, themes and plugins among others.
WPsetup is a new blog that aims to be to go to resource for anyone wanting to install and setup WordPress. Their guides are super easy to follow and will have you up and running in no time!
They also cover numerous other topics, from the best managed WordPress hosts to WordPress plugins, SEO, Monetisation and more. WPsetup is an excellent new WordPress resource you should check out today.
Backing up your WordPress website is necessary if you want to make sure your website stays safe and secure. It gives you peace of mind that you can easily restore your website and continue doing business as usual, instead of suffering downtime while you rebuild your site. You now know how to backup and restore your WordPress website for free so there is no excuse to delay. Download either one of the plugins mentioned in this tutorial and set up your backup schedule: https://websitesetup.org/wordpress-backup/
Sagenda Achieved WPML Certified Compatibility as Multilingual Plugin
Nowadays, using a multilingual booking plugin is essential to reach an international target audience across all multimedia devices. As WordPress booking plugin, Sagenda has recently acquired its WPML multilingual compatibility certification. Following compatibility testing, Sagenda and WPML are 100% compatible plugins for users of multilingual WordPress sites.
Why Use a Multilingual Plugin?
Defining the target audience requires an extreme level of accuracy. Since this is a multilingual booking plugin, Sagenda targets independent businesses, small enterprises or public institutions looking for a safe booking, rental or appointment scheduler online calendar, regardless of geographic location. Therefore, offering a multilingual website content is essential to reach interested sectors.
WPML Multilingual Compatibility for Sagenda
With over 500,000 active installations, WPML is one of the most widely used WordPress translation plugin allowing users to translate websites into multiple languages for a variety of content: modules, articles, pages, themes, dashboard items and so on. WPML includes its translations or submitted translations, thereby ensuring a localized content.
Next Steps
The WPML certification is an essential step confirming our interest in making Sagenda accessible to a larger and targeted audience. At Sagenda, we simplify multilingual content without affecting other features.
Subsequently, our team aims to work closely with WordPress services to ensure the performance and compatibility of Sagenda with other plugins as well. Keeping our clients satisfied is at the center of our concerns.
As you might know, we love WordPress and are pretty excited about the upcoming release of WordPress 5.0 with its new features and moniker (generally, a jazz man). This is a major version as there were no releases over the past 4 years (since WordPress 3.0 switched to 4.0).
So let’s take a peek at what’s new!
Gutenberg: A New WordPress Editing Experience
Gutenberg is the latest WordPress editor and so much more: easy to use and intuitive design but also very powerful allowing you to build responsive pages. It’s all about “blocks” that you can build and manage on your own website depending on the display size. From now on, you may create and change the “responsive design” behavior of pages without affecting the theme and with no HTML, CSS or Twitter Bootstrap skills whatsoever.
However, Gutenberg is not as comprehensive as other recent commercial products extending the features of page editing, such as page builders (i.e. DIVI, Elementor and so on) which will likely be overtaken in the medium term.
If page editors available as WordPress plugins are rather seen as partners instead of competitors, this is not the case when it comes to external platforms such as Wix. In fact, when speaking about WordPress, we’re referring to an open source project available for download from WordPress.org. However, it also includes WordPress.com which allows you to start your own website without worrying about web installing or hosting based on some fees. You got that right: WordPress.com provides most of its revenues and WordPress 5.0 is poised to fight those competitors offering paid CMS versions.
Gutenberg, the new page editor
Gutenberg is an editor already available for use with WordPress 4.9.x. Optionally, you may also download it as a plugin here !
Don’t fret: the old editor is also bundled as a plugin to allow its continued use in WordPress 5.0 in case of difficult transition. However, it will probably become unavailable at a certain point as I believe the WordPress team won’t support it all the way through WordPress 6.0 or 7.0. In other words, you’d better get started to get things done! OK, enough about Gutenberg, what else?
Twenty Nineteen: New Theme
Twenty Nineteen is the new theme of WordPress 5.0. There’s nothing special about it if you’re already using it as users rarely change the theme when doing a major web content overhaul. However, Twenty Nineteen includes a very interesting option (free of charge) for new websites as it has a very understated and minimalist theme unlike in previous cases. This is also a pretty interesting sandbox for web designers willing to learn new features and best coding practices in terms of WordPress 5.0 themes.
Developers can finally use JSON to upload language files. We’re hoping this is the end of formats which should have never existed in the first place, such as .mo and .po.
Scheduled mid-November, but postponed somewhere end of November 2018, the roll-out of WordPress 5.0 is not all milk and honey. Here are some tips before updating:
Feel free to wait for WordPress 5.0.1 and let others do the dirty work.
Make sure your theme and plugins are updated for this version.
Don’t update directly on your live website: make a test copy and, if all goes well on copy, update your website thereafter.
Don’t forget to back up before upgrading!
WordPress 6.0 To-Do List
WordPress still does not have a native multilingual management of front-end pages. For multilingual websites, users still need to use plugins such as WPML and Polylang, thereby affecting website compatibility. Your website requires internationalization in so many aspects: text content, but also media (images, videos, sound, and so on), URLs (links, web page redirect, and possibly different domain names by country language). Therefore, internationalization management requires various plugins as well as lots of testing and settings.
However, we’re positive WordPress 6.0 will make a case for it! Anyway, this is the most wanted feature so feel free to vote for it : here !
Sagenda Is Beta Testing Its WordPress Calendar View
Summer is officially here and online bookings are at an all time high for holiday rentals or appointments. Perfect timing for us to let you know that Sagenda is beta testing its calendar view for WordPress users.
Our calendar view is available for all WordPress plugin users registered on Sagenda. Make sure you’re using the latest WordPress Sagenda Calendar plugin’s version on your website, then insert the following shortcode [sagenda-calendar-wp] to display your calendar.
The shortcode may be used in any page or post of the WordPress website to display your monthly, weekly or daily calendar view. According to selected bookings, your drop-drown menu will display available bookable items and corresponding event patterns. What a better way to showcase your occupancy rate and get new customers onboard!
For the time being, beta testing of the new calendar view is available for all our WordPress Sagenda plugin users although our team is working around the clock to enable it for sagenda.net frontend and on other CMS frameworks as well. So stay tuned!
Have a go at the latest calendar view and let us know what you think! Need help with the shortcode or just want to share your suggestions?
Those hosting services that speed up your web load time – #PROductivity 3
Cheap and Fast Hosting Services
All hosting services are not the same. But beware: there is no point in comparing page load speed based on the various “premium” plans offered by web hosting providers! Quite often, marketing jargon pollutes clear and precise information. You’ll definitely hear about ‘TOP Speed’ or ‘Power’ modes, but what’s in it for you? To be honest, absolutely nothing!
Even technical data does not seem to clarify things. Some will sell you SSD hosting services! Pretty cool, isn’t it? But what’s so special about SSD hosting if the server’s processor is overwhelmed by queries from the rest of the 500 websites hosted on the same server with a permanently saturated RAM memory running at 98%? Well, it certainly looks less reliable than the old magnetic hard disk drives that would have always stored your top 10 favorite search pages!
It’s possible to find extremely fast web hosting providers, but are you really ready to fork out 1,200 Euros per month for a showcase website? Not exactly!
So, which are the fast and affordable hosting providers able to host WordPress easily (e.g. a Fantastico installer)? I would go for NameCheap and its Business SSD plan costing less than $20 per month if you’re looking for speed, or its Value plan is you want to save some money as it sets you back a mere $10 per month; otherwise, go for Site5 hosting.
Where Am I Going? Where Am I Headed?
Watch your destination. Your website will not enjoy the same load speed all over the world. Think twice before choosing your hosting provider. The worst case scenario is finding a hosting service close to your whereabouts, but which is slower than a service provider located on the other side of the world! Fortunately, there are alternatives you may test and content delivery techniques.
CDN
CDN (Content Delivery Network) is some sort of replica of your cache in different parts of the world. Thus, visitors will look for information on your website through the closest server at any given time.
Test and Improve!
There are no written instructions that you may follow as with IKEA’s furniture assembly; each website is unique with a unique audience. There are some major guidelines as the ones outlined in this article, and some great tools are readily available online allowing you to test the performance of your website.
Google Page speed is your number one choice: it’s essential since it will provide you a report on speed and user experience (at least in terms of desktop and mobile experience). If you happen to have other preferences, don’t forget to keep Google happy as Google is the number one search engine. Get my drift?
Pingdom is really interesting as it allows you to test your website in different parts of the world. It’s definitely more convenient than popping in every possible Internet cafe across the world, isn’t it?
