Support Team Meetup Summary for July 23rd

Items discussed at today’s Support Team meetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area.:

WordPress 4.2.3 and Shortcodes

WordPress 4.2.3’s security fixes had to make alterations to the ShortcodeShortcode A shortcode is a placeholder used within a WordPress post, page, or widget to insert a form or function generated by a plugin in a specific location on your site. APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways., which broke some shortcode plugins. More details on that are available in this writeup.

WordPress 4.3 BetaBeta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process. 4

People are testing, that’s good. More people should be testing.

Also, don’t panic, Site Icon controls are now available in the CustomizerCustomizer Tool built into WordPress core that hooks into most modern themes. You can use it to preview and modify many of your site’s appearance settings. only.

If you find a non-alpha/beta post in the Alpha/Beta forums, please feel free to remove it by any means necessary. Let’s keep that place clean.

Chrome and the HTTPSHTTPS HTTPS is an acronym for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure. HTTPS is the secure version of HTTP, the protocol over which data is sent between your browser and the website that you are connected to. The 'S' at the end of HTTPS stands for 'Secure'. It means all communications between your browser and the website are encrypted. This is especially helpful for protecting sensitive data like banking information. oops of 2015

Chrome is currently forcing some non-HTTPS sites to HTTPS, most notably for us are WordPress login pages, sometimes causing 404s, certificate errors, or other fun things. The issue is being looked at and present in stable and beta Chrome release channels, so be on the lookout for reports of blogs broken in Chrome only. (Update: Fixed as of Chrome version 44.0.2403.107.)

Helphub

Helphub hasn’t gone anywhere yet, it’s still on the todo list. The first goal is to get organized, then probably dev work, then finally porting over good Codex articles and re-writing bad ones.

Gamification

We’re generally not in favor of gamification, it leads to poor quality replies, but we are in favor of some automated way to earn the Support Team badge.

OMGWTFBBQ draft post

Nothing to add yet, keep testing.

View today’s meetup transcript in the Slack archives. (A Slack account is required)

#weekly-chat