Inform Video Match v1.7.3 is now available

A new version of the Inform Video Match plugin has been committed to the shared plugins repository. V1.7.3 is intended to replace v1.4.3.

Recent upgrades include;

• Update style and script addition methods
• Properly hook plugin with WordPress native enqueue script
• Remove password sanitization
• Add error handling on API response
• Add user checks and messaging on form inputs

We encourage all VIPs using Inform Video Match to upgrade to this version by specifying the version parameter of wpcom_vip_load_plugin() like so;

wpcom_vip_load_plugin( 'inform-video-match', 'plugins', '1.7.3' );

For VIP Go, you can take advantage of the new version by copying the reviewed plugin from our shared plugins repository into your VIP Go repository.

If you have any questions please open a ticket where we’ll be happy to assist you transition to the newest version.

Coming changes in WordPress 4.7

What’s happening?
WordPress 4.7 will be released in the coming weeks. This post is to help you understand changes behind the scenes, and highlight important updates.

For customers on WordPress.com VIP, updates to 4.7 will be completed in approximately two weeks. This timeline is dependent on any issues we may run into during testing. WordPress.com merges in core code from oldest to newest revisions (more about the WordPress.com VIP codebase).

For customers on the VIP Go platform, your sites are scheduled to be upgraded from 4.6 to 4.7 on December 6th, the official release date.

What version is WordPress.com?
WordPress.com is using WordPress version 4.6, on PHP 7.

What should I look out for in 4.7?

• REST API content endpoints
• User admin languages & locale switching – will allow devs to set their preferred locale/language when editing their profile that will be used on their dashboard, while the site front end will continue to use the site’s specified setting.
• WP_Hook revamp – to fix bugs. If your plugin directly accesses the $wp_filter global rather than using the public hooks API, you might run into compatibility issues.
• Comment “allowed” checks
• New Post type templates, and labels theme developers
• Video Headers
• Editor improvements – including a rearrangement of some toolbar buttons
• Custom bulk actions – can be registered by developers for the wp-admin list table screens.
• Expanded Settings Registration API via register_setting() – which now accepts an array of arguments in the third parameter (useful in the REST API).
• New WP_Taxonomy class, and new capabilities for individual taxonomy terms provides finer grained capabilities for taxonomy terms.
• wp_list_sort() and WP_List_Util – New function makes it easy to sort object or array lists by one or more of its elements’ properties.
• Attributes for resource hints – Allows specific HTML attributes to be passed to the resource hints added in 4.6.
• PDF thumbnail previews – PDF files will now show an image representation of the first page in the media library and on media attachment screens.
• Improved accessibility for alt tags – New images with no set alt tag won’t have automatically generated alt tags based on the file name, as these resulted in a poor user experience for people using screen readers.

How should I test?
The easiest way to test is to use our VIP Quickstart development environment. It automatically sets you up with an SVN checkout of trunk (and auto-updates hourly while the VM is running). You can also use the Beta Tester plugin to easily update beta releases and test.

We’ll also be opening up a ticket in Zendesk with clients who will be directly impacted by these changes.

What if I have questions?
As always, if you have any questions about the 4.7 updates, please open a ticket with our support team.

Resolved: Issues with uncached images

For approximately 10 minutes between 2:19 – 2:29pm EST, there were some availability issues with our origin storage clusters in our Virginia and Los Angeles data centers.

This problem would have resulted in slow loading and in some cases 502 or 503 errors for newly uploaded or uncached images. WordPress.com’s image serving infrastructure operates in a multi-tiered configuration spread across 22 locations and this issue affected only the bottom tier in two locations.

The issue has been resolved and all images should now be viewable.

The root cause of this issue was identified as a manually-initiated operation which caused some of the storage controllers to become unresponsive. In some cases these controllers recovered on their own after the operation timed out and in other cases they required manual intervention to recover.

We apologize for the trouble and if you have any questions, please contact us via support ticket.

U.S. Election week – November 6-11, 2016

The U.S. Election on November 8, 2016 has the potential to be a high profile and busy time for many sites, and for the VIP team.

Here are a few things you can do in preparation:

• Let us know in advance if you are scheduling any launches, new features, or election-specific specials during that week, especially if you require assistance from the VIP team.
• Adhere to security best practices:
  • Encourage your users to enable Two-Step Authentication.
  • Encourage your users to follow User Security Best Practices.
  • Audit your user list to ensure that only folks who require “Administrator” permissions have it.
  • Optionally, you can open a ticket to ask the VIP Team to make Two-Step Authentication a requirement on your site. Once this is enabled, all users without Two-Step Authentication will see a notice in wp-admin that their permissions are demoted to Contributor-level access until they have Two-Step Authentication enabled.

In anticipation of a busy week, we will have increased staffing on tickets and deploys. As always, if you have a security issue or workflow-blocking concern, please open an urgent ticket with us and we will respond immediately.