WordPress News Headlines: March 8, 2017

In years gone by we’d send out an email via Meetup.com with a roundup of recent WordPress news headlines worth checking out. We’re rebooting that series on the blog. Headlines below!

This week in the news: We’ve got a WordPress security release; improvements for WordPress.com and Jetpack users; Clef shuts down; Ninja Forms adds Recurly; ManageWP shares their roadmap; Freemius Insights for theme developers; and bringing Image Processing Queue to WordPress Core.

Let’s roll!

For Everyone

WordPress 4.7.3 Security & Maintenance Release: This update addresses six security issues, several of which are XSS (cross-site scripting) related. If you’re on a managed WordPress host you should be patched within the next day or so (if you haven’t been already).

Improvements to WordPress.com stats: If you’re a WordPress.com or Jetpack user running WordPress.com stats on your site, take a look at the recent improvements to summaries and insights on the stats page.

WordPress.com for Google Docs: WordPress.com and Jetpack users can now save their Google Docs as draft blog posts. Speaking from experience, a lot of blog posts start off in Google Docs, where simultaneous real-time editing blows the native WordPress editor experience out of the water.

Clef two-factor authentication is shutting down: The announcement came two days ago on Medium. Clef encouraged their users to flip over to Wordfence, which offers SMS authentication on their Premium plan, but other options are available, like  Secure authentication via Jetpack.

Ninja Forms adds Recurly integration: Ninja Forms announced yesterday that they’ve added support for Recurly, a subscription management platform. This is huge if you’re building a website that charges a recurring fee, e.g. for memberships, services, or product access.

ManageWP publishes their product roadmap: “A good roadmap will show you where a product is going, and whether it’s going your way.” Check out the announcement on the ManageWP blog or jump straight to the roadmap.

For Developers

Freemius launches Freemius Insights for theme developers: This new solution lets users opt into sharing data about their theme usage, providing developers with more information about how their products are being used. Check out this post on WP Mayor for more details or hit up the Freemius website to watch a demo.

Introducing Image Processing Queue: “What we need is a solution that doesn’t affect page load time, is mindful of server resources, and works seamlessly with WordPress core as it is today.” Here’s the Git repo and here’s the intro post from Brad at Delicious Brains. Goal is to get this into WordPress core.

That’s it for this week!