Hostinger Theme and WordPress 6.3

June was an exciting month for the WordPress community. WordCamp Europe was successfully hosted in Athens, Greece, and the primary beta version of WordPress 6.3, the upcoming major release, was launched by contributors.

But that’s not all that happened in June – Hostinger also released a brand new feature for WordPress users. 

Hostinger Blog Theme

Earlier this month, we launched our Hostinger Blog Theme to simplify the setup process for WordPress sites that we host. This theme is accessible to Business Web Hosting and Cloud Hosting users who arrange their WordPress sites with the hPanel onboarding feature.

The theme was specifically built with the Hostinger AI Content Generator in mind. In the course of the onboarding process, users can enter their business and blog descriptions, and the tool will deliver the web site with pre-built content. Furthermore, its integration with Unsplash includes relevant stock images for blog visuals.

Read our Hostinger Blog Theme product update post to learn more about these latest features and the way to use them.

WordPress Updates

Two latest Gutenberg versions launched in June – 16.0 and 16.1. Each comes with additional features and refinements to the block editor. Listed below are a number of the most noteworthy updates:

• Refined Site Editor page management – Gutenberg 15.8 introduced a brand new feature to ease navigation between pages using the Site Editor. Gutenberg 16.0 now allows users so as to add latest pages without leaving the editor.

• Lightbox element – a brand new option to switch image blocks with lightbox behavior is now available, eliminating the necessity for an extra plugin with the functionality.
• Changing reusable blocks to patterns – one in all the most important changes introduced with Gutenberg 16.1 involves reusable blocks. They’re now often known as synchronized patterns. The merging of reusable blocks and patterns implies that it’s now possible to create custom patterns within the editor, removing the necessity for an extra plugin or coding.

Most significantly, the WordPress 6.3 Beta version has been released for testing. This next major version integrates various features from Gutenberg 15.2 to 16.1 into the core software, together with quite a few other enhancements and bug fixes.

You’ll be able to test this release with the WordPress Beta Tester plugin. Select the Bleeding edge channel and the Beta/RC Only stream to update your site to the WordPress 6.3 Beta. To maintain the whole lot secure during testing, you’ll want to use a staging website.

Stay tuned – we’ll shortly publish a blog post to tell you of what you possibly can expect from WordPress 6.3.

WordCamps

Considered one of the essential highlights of June was WordCamp Europe 2023, which coincided with WordPress’ twentieth anniversary. At the identical time, the WordPress Community Team has announced exciting news about upcoming WordCamps.

WordCamp Europe 2023

WordCamp Europe 2023 was held in Athens, Greece, from 8 to 10 June 2023. Attended by 2,545 people from 94 countries, it was the most important flagship WordCamp to date this yr.

The event also featured several sessions relevant to recent trends, including 20 years of WordPress and AI presence within the WordPress ecosystem. Read our WordCamp Europe 2023 Roundup to learn in regards to the event’s highlights.

Next-Gen WordCamp Pilot Events

The WordPress Community Team has come out with latest ideas for WordCamps and community events. The community is inspired to experiment with latest formats and specific focuses.

After much discussion, 64 ideas were shared for the next-gen WordPress events, with 59 organizers willing to participate. More importantly, eight pilot events have been confirmed, six of that are scheduled for this yr:

• Low-cost WordCamp – a WordCamp with attendance limited to 90 people without swag, social dinners, and after-parties. It was held in Leipzig, Germany, on July 1, 2023.
• WordPress Day – held in Sevilla, Spain, on July 2, 2023. This event resembled Contributor Day, with 50 attendees specializing in three specific contribution areas.
• Rural – a quarterly community event organized in rural areas with the aim of teaching WordPress to local communities and folks who’ve limited access to big-city WordPress events. One of these event is being piloted in Spain, with the date still to be determined.
• WordPress for Publishers – a one-day WordPress event in Bangalore, India, targeted at publishers. This event will serve two purposes – existing WordPress users will discuss and brainstorm latest WordPress features, while non-WordPress users will get to know WordPress higher and make the switch. 
• Community Day – scheduled for September 29, 2023, in Rome, Italy. It’ll gather all WordPress Meetups representatives within the country for event management workshops to make sure healthy and sustainable WordPress communities.
• Scale-up Workshop – a one-day WordPress proficiency workshop event in Tegal, Indonesia, scheduled for October 22, 2023.

These pilot events, while diverse in format, share a typical theme – they’re smaller and inexpensive than traditional WordCamps. These events should pave the way in which for cheaper community get-togethers, enabling WordPress users to fulfill more regularly in various engaging formats.

WordPress Playground

WordPress Playground was a hot topic during WordCamp Europe 2023. As noted by Matt Mullenweg in his State of the Word 2022 keynote address, this browser-based sandbox is becoming increasingly stable and incredibly useful for testing themes, plugins, and even designing a web site.

Should you would love to experiment with WordPress Playground, simply visit the Playground URL, and also you’ll be immediately supplied with a short lived site you possibly can tweak. Use the admin bar at the highest to enter the admin panel.

What’s cool in regards to the Playground is which you could switch between PHP and WordPress versions, so it’s easy to do compatibility checks for any plugin and theme.

It’s also possible to upload and download the web site, making it easy to experiment and customize, after which upload your work to your live site.

WordPress Playground has some limitations, though. For instance, you possibly can’t install themes or plugins from the directory within the admin panel. As an alternative, you might have to put in them manually by uploading ZIP files.

WordPress Security News

In the case of WordPress security news, we’ve examined the Patchstack database to discover significant security issues in popular plugins. The excellent news is that fewer vulnerabilities were found this month, and all the favored plugins listed below have already released updates to handle these vulnerabilities.

Abandoned Cart Lite for WooCommerce

CVSS Rating: 9.8 (Critical Severity)

This abandoned cart plugin for WooCommerce was vulnerable as a result of broken authentication. It could allow attackers to achieve access to user accounts – namely, customers who had abandoned carts of their accounts. Higher-level users, including administrators, were also vulnerable.

While no exploitation has been reported, the developers already fixed this issue with version 5.15.0.

WooCommerce Stripe Payment Gateway

CVSS Rating: 7.5 (High Severity)

This WooCommerce-developed plugin with 900,000+ installations was at risk of two vulnerabilities – broken access control and insecure direct object references. Although they’re various kinds of vulnerabilities, each could end in malicious actors getting high-level access to a site.

Despite this, they got the identical Common Vulnerability Scoring System grade – 7.5. The vulnerabilities were fixed in version 7.4.1. Nevertheless, almost 50% of lively installs still use earlier versions, making over 450,000+ web sites vulnerable.

Download Monitor

CVSS Rating: 9.9 (Critical Severity)

Probably the most popular download manager plugins with 100,000+ lively installations was vulnerable to critical arbitrary file upload vulnerability. Malicious attackers could upload any variety of file to a web site, granting them backdoor access to it.

All versions of Download Monitor as much as 4.8.3 are vulnerable, with the fix available with version 4.8.4.

Unlimited Elements For Elementor

CVSS Rating: 8.3 (High Severity) to 9.9 (Critical Severity)

Multiple vulnerabilities were detected in Unlimited Elements For Elementor plugins, including broken access control, restrictions bypass, and arbitrary file upload. Users who’ve installed this plugin’s version 1.5.65 and lower are at high risk of security breaches.

Should you’re using this plugin, ensure your site is secure by updating it to at the very least version 1.5.67.

What’s Coming in July

In July, many of the WordPress community’s focus will likely be dedicated to the upcoming WordPress 6.3. Although the ultimate release is slated for August, you possibly can start testing the Release Candidate version from July 18, 2023. 

Should you are a web site, plugin, or theme developer, we highly recommend testing your products with the Release Candidate version to make sure the whole lot functions as expected.