Last month, we released Search with Google — a plugin that bypasses the WordPress default search query with server-side results from Custom Search Site Restricted JSON API and displays a pre-rendered search results page that is fully AMP Standard compatible.
This plugin will be beneficial for websites looking to go fully AMP, or any other website whose structure relies heavily on search besides navigation. Search with Google is available in the WordPress plugin repository. Full release post here.
Insights 🔮
- The upcoming WordPress default theme, Twenty Twenty-One, will feature Dark Mode support. Following this interesting discussion, the Themes team has decided to ship Dark Mode via a dedicated plugin post-release, as this will provide maximum control to users while also facilitating better handling of any edge cases.
- Slack Connect lets you create separate shared channels with other organizations. They show up just like any other Slack channel and we’ve found this to be an efficient way to work with our partners and clients.
- Facebook now requires all API requests to be authenticated, hence leaving the old oEmbed API defunct. Publishers will need to conform to new guidelines to render embedded content from Facebook and Instagram.
News from Around the Web 📢
- Stripe recently acquired PayStack – the leading online payment gateway service in African ecommerce. PayStack has been powering thousands of WooCommerce and other ecommerce websites with their payments system since 2015, and interestingly enough, has been called the “Stripe for Africa.”
- GitHub introduced a code scanning feature for all users (including the free tier). The feature is powered by CodeQL – GitHub’s own free and open source code analysis engine for open source codebases. Code scanning will help developers to find and resolve security issues and vulnerabilities faster than before.
- Cloudflare rolled out its Automatic Platform Optimization service for WordPress to improve load times for dynamic sites. This is achieved by “intelligently caching dynamic content” in addition to static content as with most CDNs.
- Gutenberg 9.2 is out, with nifty new features such as super easy blocks → column transformation, video subtitles, and more.
Popular articles on rtCamp’s #watercooler 📚
A list of some interesting articles that rtCampers shared on our internal Slack.
- Someone let a GPT-3 bot loose on Reddit — it didn’t end well
- This cool podcast episode that shows a glimpse of what software engineering was like in the 60s.
PS: The theme music is by Hans Zimmer, of Batman and Inception fame.🎼 - IBM to break up company to focus on cloud computing after 109 years, ‘landmark day’ says CEO
- Gap plans to close 220 stores and focus on e-commerce and off-mall retail
That’s it for October, see you next month! 👋
Links: Search with Google