Media cleanup tool, canvas portals, doomscrolling, brand guide, font safety, After Effects, client feedback, Threads surge and government cheese. I had a frustrating situation recently with a client. A spam tool used on their email starting blocking my emails to them. So they would send requests to me and I was unable to respond directly. We found a way around it for now, but the fault really lies with spam filtering tools that are overly aggressive. Make sure to check out all the news (and a little fun) in the stories below.

For those of you in the world of Web design, I invite you to join our new Divi Unleashed Facebook group.

• 100,000 WordPress Sites Affected by Privilege Escalation Vulnerability in Advanced Custom Fields: Extended WordPress Plugin
• WordPress Advanced Custom Fields Extended Plugin Vulnerability
• Oxygen 6 RC 1: We’re Almost There
• Dynamic Tags for Elementor Are Now Free in The Plus Addons for Elementor – Big Announcement
• NotificationX WordPress WooCommerce Plugin Vulnerabilities Impact 40k Sites
• 20,000 WordPress Sites Affected by Backdoor Vulnerability in LA-Studio Element Kit for Elementor WordPress Plugin
• Inside WordCamp Europe 2026: Lead Organizers on Getting More People to Kraków and This Year’s Education Focus
• Matt Mullenweg on WooCommerce’s Existential Threat, AI Hype, and Why Breaking Sites Makes Him Furious
• WP Engine Customers Refile Class Action After Judge Flags Pleading Gaps
• Critical Arbitrary File Upload Vulnerability in RealHomes CRM Plugin Affecting 30k+ Sites
• BuddyPress WordPress Vulnerability May Impact Up To 100,000 Sites
• 10Web WordPress Photo Gallery Plugin Vulnerability
• FluentCart 1.3.8: Improved conversions with Modal Checkout and more
  We now include licensing for Fluent Cart Pro and much more with our Gold and Platinum Care Plans. Let us build an eCommerce site for you!
• WordPress 6.9.1 Release Schedule
• WP Media Cleanup Deletes Unused Images Hiding in Your Media Library

• The AI Easy Button imperils the future of marketing research
• Why Agentic AI May Flatten Brand Differentiators
• CEOs: AI Isn’t Helping Us Make Money, But It’s Required to Remain Relevant
• When Platforms Say ‘Don’t Optimize,’ Smart Teams Run Experiments
• The Psychology Behind Doomscrolling—And How to Avoid It
• 45 Best Subreddits For Marketing & SEO Professionals
• 5 Google Analytics Reports PPC Marketers Should Actually Use

• Inside SearchGuard: How Google detects bots and what the SerpAPI lawsuit reveals
• GEO myths: This article may contain lies
• Perplexity AI Interview Explains How AI Search Works
• Case Study: How Entity Linking Can Support Local Search Success
• Data Shows AI Overviews Disappears On Certain Kinds Of Finance Queries
• Organic search traffic is down 2.5% YoY, new data shows
• Does llms.txt matter? We tracked 10 sites to find out
• SEO in 2026: What will stay the same
• A Little Clarity On SEO, GEO, And AEO
• How Recommender Systems Like Google Discover May Work
• Same URL in AI Overviews and blue links counts as one Google Search Console impression
• Five Things To Do That Will Increase Authoritativeness And Earn Links
• SEO Brand Marketing: Create a Brand Guide That Drives Search Visibility
• How to Rank in AI Overviews: What Actually Works (Based on Data, Not Speculation)
• What 75 SEO thought leaders reveal about volatility in the GEO debate [Research]
• Google outlines risks of exposing its search index, rankings, and live results
• How to explain flat traffic when SEO is actually working
• SEO Pulse: Google’s AI Mode Gets Personal, AI Bots Blocked, Domains Matter in Search
• Google’s New User Intent Extraction Method
• User Data Is Important In Google Search, Per Liz Reid’s DOJ Filing
• SEO Pulse: Google’s AI Mode Gets Personal, AI Bots Blocked, Domains Matter in Search

• ‘Not just a typeface’: Volvo’s new font wants to keep you safe
• The Traitors branding is murderously good. Design experts explain why
• 7 Weird Old Punctuation Marks We Should Bring Back
• Rebranded Adobe Premiere 26 Arrives With One-Click Object Tracking
• Nothing’s new logo is giving me Jaguar flashbacks
• The YouTube logo: a history
• Wix Introduces Harmony AI Website Builder
• Adobe’s AI can edit your PDFs and spin them into presentations in minutes now – here’s how
• This American Pie star has been making craft videos – and I adore them!
• Adobe After Effects finally levels up with its biggest update in years
• These rejected Wikipedia logos are a ’00s design time capsule
• Is Canva’s cringey Gen Z mode secretly genius?
• This 67,800-year-old hand stencil is the world’s oldest human-made art
• What the hell is going on with the 2026 Super Bowl ads?
• Dr Pepper’s new ad just won the internet

• Threads edges out X in daily mobile users, new data shows
• X open sources its algorithm while facing a transparency fine and Grok controversies
• W Emerges as X Alternative Aimed at Combating ‘Systemic Disinformation’
• YouTube on what updates to expect in 2026: Music, ‘fully customizable’ TV multiview, more
• YouTube Acknowledges Slop Problem, But It’s Still Full Steam Ahead on AI Features
• Portrait of the Pie Artist as an Instagram Star
• TikTok forms U.S. joint venture, names Adam Presser CEO
• Vimeo’s Slow Fade: An Engineer’s Front-Row Seat to the Fall of a Web Icon

• The Biggest Sports Rivalries This Year Are Between National Foods
• How South Korea Fell in Love With Norway’s Unique Cheese
• Why Did the U.S. Government Amass More Than a Billion Pounds of Cheese?
  This story made me think of a song from a band popular in my college days. The Rainmakers may not have been big everywhere, but they were a big deal in the Kansas City area. And one of their more popular songs was titled Government Cheese. I’ve embedded below if you want to give it a listen.
  

If you see some important news that you feel we should share with our readers, please let us know and we’ll consider including it in our next post.