The Weekly round up of news, tips, and information to help you create the best possible WordPress website.

This is a weekly round up of WordPress news I have accumulated from across the web. Some old, some new, but always interesting. The new relates to WordPress and sometimes other areas of the web. It often has a focus on security and more.

We try to have news here that is important to help you with your website as well as news from the #wpdrama scene and more to share.

Some of the news here will be of interesting links to not only articles but training materials and other sources I can find online that will help you create a better WordPress website.

This week we have the following news for you.

How to Use Gmail to Send WordPress Emails

By default, WordPress uses the mail function in PHP, which is sufficient for the few emails that a new or small WordPress site needs to send. When your email volume increases, you’ll start to notice email delivery issues. You’ll need to switch over to a third party provider such as Gmail at this point.

In this post, I’m going to teach you how to configure the WP Mail SMTP plugin to use the Gmail API for sending WordPress emails. I’ll also teach you a faster and multisite-friendly way to set this up using WPMU DEV’s Ultimate Branding plugin. We’ll go over why using a third-party email provider is imporant and look at some popular transactional email service providers. Read original article here…. premium.wpmudev.org

Top 4 Ways to Turn Off Gutenberg in WordPress 5.0

It’s easy to turn off the Gutenberg text editor. See my top 4 ways to do it, depending on your needs.

Here are my top choices, and tips for selecting the one that is right for you.

NOTE: WordPress has announced that the Classic Editor plugin will be bundled with the WP 5.0 update. However, for new installs, you’ll need to manually add the plugin via the WordPress plugins repository (like you do for other free plugins). Read original article here…. blogaid.net

This week we have the following Security News for you.

WP GDPR Compliance Plugin Patches Privilege Escalation Vulnerability

At the end of last week, a plugin called WP GDPR Compliance sent out a security update for a privilege escalation vulnerability that was reported to the WordPress Plugin Directory team on November 6. The plugin was temporarily removed and then reinstated after the issues were patched within 24 hours by its creators, Van Ons, a WordPress development shop based in Amsterdam.

The changelog for the most recent release states that previous versions are vulnerable to SQL injection due to “wrong handling of possible user input in combination with unsafe unserialization.” The fixes are in version 1.4.3, which includes the following:

Van Ons said they requested the Plugin Directory team do a forced update but they said it was not an option in this case. Read original article here…. wptavern.com

And now for something older in the past article collections.

18 No-Fail Tips for Stunning Landing Pages with WordPress

We’re all familiar with the term “landing page” thanks to Google Analytics. But while a landing page is technically the first page someone “lands” on when they visit a website, that’s not always what we mean when we talk about landing pages.

While most pages on your website should be able to convert visitors (i.e. sign up to an email list, click a call-to-action button etc) in some form or another, that’s not always the explicit intention of them (at least from the visitors’ point of view). Home pages elicit emotion. Services and product pages educate. Blog posts inform and deliver value. Read original article here…. premium.wpmudev.org