By NCode Technologies, Inc.

08/10/2018 With the world revolving around the technology, innovative web development has brought people closer. The internet has penetrated deep into the regular lives of people, so people access the sites online to get their desired services and product. In the online business world, the WordPress holds high significance as the CMS (content management system) helps people to develop a personal blog or full-fledged business website with ease. The open source program is a boon to many small business people as it allows them to have an impact web presence and compete among the peers.
What Is WordPress?
WordPress is the open source CMS (Content Management System) based on PHP and MySQL. But, novice users can work on it without having the skill of an expert. The WordPress support templates and themes that allow users to personalize the look and feel of the site/blog without any complex coding. Therefore, it supports people to create a site of their choice to become visible on the cyberspace.
WordPress 4.9.6 Update
The WordPress 4.9.6 update released on May 17th, 2018 with the leadership from Jonathan Desrosiers and Allen Snook. It has features built around the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) compliance, which harmonizes the data protection laws and reshapes the approach of the organization towards the data privacy. The release focusses on providing more security and privacy to the website running on the WordPress 4.9 or higher.
The open source developers at WordPress have included many new privacy-centric features in the maintenance/security update. The new features contained within the update provide the much-needed toolkit for the GDPR compliance without impacting or manipulating the existing WordPress features. The safe release strengthens the website or blog features by making it GDPR amenable.
Privacy Centric Features
On May 25th, the European Union’s GDPR came into effect that insists the site owners maintain transparency while collecting, using, and sharing personal data. The regulation offers an individual user more choices and access to the methods on the personal data collection, usage, and sharing. So, the WordPress team, which specializes in GDR compliance has worked diligently to address the concerns.
The team has created new features, quashed bugs for better protection, assigned task forces, and developed documentation to ensure the features comply with the GDPR regulations. The new update assists the site/blog owners to comply with the new EU privacy regulation without spending too much time to address the different concerns raised by the law. The main features provide by the update are;
· The WP-Admin Panel: It is added with new privacy tool page for addressing the privacy requests from the commenters and users of the site.
· User Data Request Handling: It manages the private data by adding the helper function for the plugins. The private data collected is anonymized with the added tool to providing discretion to the user.
· Privacy Policy Page Creation: The site owners can generate privacy policies for their website with the newly added tool.
· User Data Export and Removal tools: It adds privacy functions/tools to ensure safe data export to get a copy of the comments made on the site. The erasure function ensures the users can remove the personal data to discourage the tracking of posts.
· Cookie Opt-in: The commentators visiting a site need to consent to set the comments cookies.
Addressing The Concerns
The update is highly beneficial to the designers, developers, and polyglots as it addresses several of their concerns.
· Designers: The designers or theme developers can enable the new function that allows them to create the opt-in fields, which links to the privacy policy of the site without issues. For more information access the https://make.wordpress.org/core/2018/05/17/changes-that-affect-theme-authors-in-wordpress-4-9-6/.
· Developers: The developers can easily self-report the private data collected by the plugins to the WP install. Developers can get more information on https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/privacy/.
· Polyglots: The translators of the WordPress can contribute their ideas to make it more effective at https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots/.
Benefits Of The Update
The European regulation GDPR is applicable to all the sites and online business functioning on the cyberspace who access the information of the EU residents. Therefore, irrespective of the business location, the sites that collect, store, or process personal data of the people residents in European Union countries need to comply with it.
Many site developers have spent countless hours wracking their head to develop a strong privacy policy that comprises of the details regarding the private and personal data collected. With the 4.9.6 update, it is now easy to streamline the process to maintain privacy. The update offers a privacy policy page editor that offers the site owners or developers with the self-reporting of private data collected.
In addition to the privacy enhancements, the update has also fixed more than fifty bugs. The WordPress Media Library is added with the Mine filter, which displays the minimum PHP version while viewing a plugin at the backend.
The site developers who worry about the GDPR compliance can now sigh with relief as the WordPress 4.9.6 updates take off the pressure from the shoulders. The open source developers have put in enormous efforts to respect and address the privacy of the users of the WordPress site. The development team provides technical information related to the WordPress 4.9.6 features, which people can access at https://make.wordpress.org/core/2018/05/17/4-9-6-update-guide/