This week Automattic, the company behind WordPress, announced Release Candidate #3 for WordPress 6.2. The WordPress 6.2 release is scheduled for March 28, 2023—just one week away!
CU*Answers Web Services is testing this new release and will automatically roll out updates to our hosted client websites shortly after the final release. Most of the updates in this new release revolve around the Gutenberg editor and will have little impact on our sites.
Read the Release Candidate Announcement over at WordPress.org.
Want to see some of these featured highlights in action? Check out the WordPress 6.2 Demo provided by WordPress.org and recorded March 2, 2023.
Last week, Microsoft finally removed Internet Explorer 11 from circulation replacing it with the updated Microsoft Edge browser. Microsoft launched Internet Explorer nearly three decades ago, in 1995. At one point in the past, Internet Explorer ruled the browser realm. In 2003, it controlled 95% of the browser market. The days of Internet Explorer’s reign are long over, though, as user moved to faster, more secure and more standards compliant browsers like Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. Microsoft Edge is the new replacement browser for Windows devices and uses the same rendering engine as Google Chrome.
On Tuesday morning, January 17, from 12:00 AM – 8:00 AM ET, we will be performing internal network maintenance. During this time, there may be brief network interruptions to our website and email hosting.
Currently, Windows 7 runs on over 11% of all Windows systems worldwide. Which is pretty crazy for an operating system that launched in 2009, reached end of support in 2015 and end of extended report in 2020. Now, officially, Windows 7 is no longer supported at all.
Microsoft Edge 109 and Google Chrome 110 will be the last browser to work on Windows 7, and will no longer receive any security updates.
CU*Answers Web Services strives to develop websites that work for the majority of members by following web standards as practically as possible. This also helps with keeping your website accessible with WCAG. Officially, CU*Answers Web Services only supports the 2 most recent major versions of Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge and Apple Safari on currently supported operating systems.
Read our previous articles about this or read more information about Windows 7 end of life at Bleeping Computer.
Last week Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress, delivered his annual address to the WordPress community. This annual event called “The State of the Word” gives the WordPress community an update on what’s to come in the next year, as well as, a little bit of the current state of WordPress. WordPress continues to be a popular choice for websites and is also growing faster than ever, currently powering 43% of websites according to W3Techs and 32% according to Builtwith.1
Also, next year the WordPress web application is turning 20 years old, which Mullenweg noted that not many software projects make it that long. Coincidentally, CU*Answers Web Services is also celebrating our 20th year in 2023. CU*Answers Web Services launched our first credit union websites all the way back in 2002. And we began using WordPress for all our site builds in 2006.
Next summer, Google will be discontinuing the current incarnation of Google Analytics, called Universal Analytics, and replacing it with Google Analytics 4 (GA4). Since there is no migration path from Google to keep your historical analytics, CU*Answers Web Services set up GA4 collection for all the sites we currently have access to. This is intended to give you at least some runway of historical stats before the cut off.
GA4 is different than the Universal Analytics you might be used to. We came across this Beginners Guide at Search Engine Journal with some introductory content. Note, you can skip the whole Google Tag Manager installation steps as CU*Answers Web Services does not use GTM.
If CU*Answers Web Services is not hosting your site, or you have not provided us access to your Google Analytics, you should prepare for this change next year. Please note, this requires setting up GA4 account at Google and also getting this new code snippet on your website. CU*Answers Web Services only made changes to sites where we have access to both of those items.
