WordPress.org

The WordPress.org privacy policy has been updated, hurray! While we weren’t able to remove all the long sentences, we hope you find the revisions make it easier to understand:

• how we collect and use data,
• how long the data we collect is retained, and
• how you can request a copy of the data you’ve shared with us.

There hasn’t been any change to the data that WordPress.org collects or how that data is used; the privacy policy just provides more detail now. Happy reading, and thanks for using WordPress!

 

WordPress 4.9.6 is now available. This is a privacy and maintenance release. We encourage you to update your sites to take advantage of the new privacy features.

Privacy

The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) takes effect on May 25. The GDPR requires companies and site owners to be transparent about how they collect, use, and share personal data. It also gives individuals more access and choice when it comes to how their own personal data is collected, used, and shared.

It’s important to understand that while the GDPR is a European regulation, its requirements apply to all sites and online businesses that collect, store, and process personal data about EU residents no matter where the business is located.

You can learn more about the GDPR from the European Commission’s Data Protection page.

We’re committed to supporting site owners around the world in their work to comply with this important law. As part of that effort, we’ve added a number of new privacy features in this release.

Comments

Logged-out commenters will be given a choice on whether their name, email address, and website are saved in a cookie on their browser.

Privacy Policy Page

Site owners can now designate a privacy policy page. This page will be shown on your login and registration pages. You should manually add a link to your policy to every page on your website. If you have a footer menu, that’s a great place to include your privacy policy.

In addition, we’ve created a guide that includes insights from WordPress and participating plugins on how they handle personal data. These insights can be copied and pasted into your site’s privacy policy to help you get started.

If you maintain a plugin that collects data, we recommend including that information in WordPress’ privacy policy guide. Learn more in our Privacy section of the Plugin Handbook.

Data Handling

Howdy,

A request has been made to perform the following action on your account:

Export Personal Data

To confirm this, please click on the following link:
http://.wordpress.org/wp-login.php?action=confirmaction…

You can safely ignore and delete this email if you do not want to
take this action.

This email has been sent to [email protected].

Regards,
Your friends at WordPress
http://wordpress.org

Site owners have a new email-based method that they can use to confirm personal data requests. This request confirmation tool works for both export and erasure requests, and for both registered users and commenters.

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Maintenance

95 updates were made in WordPress 4.9.6. In addition to the above, particularly of note were:

• “Mine” has been added as a filter in the media library.
• When viewing a plugin in the admin, it will now tell you the minimum PHP version required.
• We’ve added new PHP polyfills for forwards-compatibility and proper variable validation.
• TinyMCE was updated to the latest version (4.7.11).
  

This post has more information about all of the issues fixed in 4.9.6 if you’d like to learn more.

Download WordPress 4.9.6 or venture over to Dashboard → Updates and click “Update Now.” Sites that support automatic background updates will start updating soon.

Please note that if you’re currently on WordPress 4.9.3, you should manually update your site immediately.

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Thank you to everyone who contributed to WordPress 4.9.6:
Aaron D. Campbell, Aaron Jorbin, abdullahramzan, Adam Silverstein, Alain Schlesser, allendav, Andrea Fercia, Andrea Middleton, Andrew Ozz, Ayesh Karunaratne, Birgir Erlendsson (birgire), bridgetwillard, Burlington Bytes, Chetan Prajapati, claudiu, Corey McKrill, Daniel Bachhuber, David Herrera, Dominik Schilling (ocean90), Ella Van Dorpe, Eric Daams, Fernando Claussen, Garrett Hyder, Gary Pendergast, Heather Burns, Helen Hou-Sandi, herregroen, Ian Dunn, ibelanger, imath, Jb Audras, Jeffrey Paul, Jeremy Felt, Jesper V Nielsen, JJJ, Joe McGill, John Blackbourn, Jonathan Desrosiers, Josepha, jrf, Kåre Mulvad Steffensen, Laken Hafner, laurelfulford, lbenicio, macbookandrew, Marius L. J., Mel Choyce, Michael Nelson, Mike Jolley, Pascal Casier, pbrocks, postphotos, Prashant Baldha, PressTigers, programmin, Robin Cornett, Sergey Biryukov, Stefano Lissa, Stephane Daury (stephdau), Subrata Sarkar, Tammie Lister, teddytime, thomasplevy, Timothy Jacobs, Tobias Zimpel, Tom J Nowell, Tor-Bjorn Fjellner, Towhidul Islam, voneff, William Earnhardt, and Xenos (xkon) Konstantinos.

This past month saw a lot of preparation for upcoming events and releases across the WordPress project. Read on to find out more about these plans, and everything else that happened around the community in April.

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The WordPress 15th Anniversary is Coming

On May 27 2018, WordPress will turn 15 years old — this is a huge milestone for the project, or, indeed, for any open-source platform. The Community Team has been hard at work helping communities around the world plan local anniversary parties.

Check the central anniversary website to see if there’s already a party being planned near you. These parties are all organized by local communities — if there’s no local community in your area, you can start one today and host a party yourself.

Work has Started on a Gutenberg Migration Guide

With Gutenberg, the upcoming WordPress content editor, in rapid development, a lot of people have been wondering how they will convert their existing plugins to work with the new features. To mitigate the issues here and help people overcome any migration hurdles, a Gutenberg Migration Guide is underway to assist developers with making their code Gutenberg-compatible.

If you’d like to contribute to this guide, you can review the existing documentation on GitHub and open a new issue if you find something to add.

Theme Review Team Launches Trusted Authors Program

Reviews of themes submitted to the Theme Directory can take quite a while to complete. In order to combat this issue and to make the theme submission process smoother for everyone, the Theme Review Team is introducing a Trusted Authors Program.

This program will allow frequent and reliable theme authors to apply for trusted status, allowing them to upload themes more frequently and to have their themes automatically approved. This will allow more high-quality themes to be added to the directory, as well as recognize the hard work that authors put in to build their themes.

If you would like to get involved with reviewing themes, you can read their getting started guide, follow the team blog and join the #themereview channel in the Making WordPress Slack group.

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Further Reading:

• WordPress 4.9.5 was released early this month, fixing numerous bugs and potential security issues. The two leads for this release published some interesting feedback about the process.
• In addition to the Trusted Authors Program mentioned above, the Theme Review Team is making some changes to their review process to minimize theme review delays.
  
• The Marketing Team produced a handy Contributor Day onboarding PDF for organizers to hand out to contributors attending WordCamps.
• The Accessibility Team is actively looking for contributors for their handbook.
• A new type of WordCamp, targeted at organizers, is in the planning stages now.
• The WordPress.org About pages received a significant redesign to make them more clear and useful.
• The Community Team posted the roadmap for this year’s WordCamp Incubator program.

If you have a story we should consider including in the next “Month in WordPress” post, please submit it here.