WordPress 4.9 Field Guide

WordPress 4.9 is just around the corner (scheduled for release tomorrow, November 14th).  This version brings an impressive number of new features and improvements.  The stats so far are:

Roughly 400 bugs, 181 enhancements, 7 feature requests, and 42 blessed tasks have been marked as closed in WordPress 4.9.

Figuring out all these changes and how they affect you is an effort in itself.  But don’t you worry!  Here’s the WordPress 4.9 Field Guide, which showcases all the main changes and provides plenty of additional resources to follow up.

Wow!  WordPress 4.9 packs quit a punch!

WordPress now powers 27.1% of all websites on the Internet

wordpress-market-share

WordPress Tavern states:

WordPress now powers 27.1% of all websites on the internet, up from 25% last year. While it may seem that WordPress is neatly adding 2% of the internet every year, its percentage increase fluctuates from year to year and the climb is getting more arduous with more weight to haul.

Linking to these statistics from W3Techs.  Impressive!

Those who think that WordPress is just a blogging system are far from the truth…

WordPress : Preferred Languages Research

Pascal Birchler of the WordPress blogs some interesting research he did in the area of handling preferred language and how different systems – ranging from browsers, wikis, and social networks to all kinds of content management systems – approach and solve the problem.

drupal-language-hierarchy-module

Drupal

Drupal 8 has a rather powerful user interface text language detection mechanism. There is a per session, per user and per browser option in the detection settings. However, users can only choose one language, so they cannot say (in core at least) that they want German primarily and Spanish if German is not available. But the language selected by the user is part of the larger fallback system, so it may fall back further down to other options.

The Language fallback module allows defining one fallback for a language, while the Language Hierarchy module provides a GUI to change the language fallback system. It allows setting up language hierarchies where translations of a site’s content, settings and interface can fall back to parent language translations, without ever falling back to English. This module might be the most interesting one for our research.

Apart from the research itself, I think this is an interesting example of how complex some seemingly simple features are.