There’s a solid batch of headlines this week that I think you’ll find interesting before you head out to WordCamp US next week.

Speaking of, if you’re headed to WordCamp next week, be sure to say hi! I’d love to hear more about your experiences with the WP Minute and any feedback you might have. The entire WP Minute squad will be there like Me, Eric, and Raquel.

Equalize Digital is blasting off into outer space — literally!

NASA selected Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker for automated accessibility testing in WordPress. To make reports easier to understand for non-developers, Equalize Digital developed the front-end highlighting feature. This feature adds a “view on page” link to each issue in Accessibility Checker’s reports that, when clicked, takes users to the public view of the web page, highlights the element with a dashed pink box around it, and shows a panel explaining the issue and how to fix it.

The WP Community Collective Successfully Funds the First Fellowship for the WordPress Contributor Community.

The WP Community Collective is proud to announce the successful funding and launch of their inaugural Fellowship program, the WPCC Accessibility Fellowship. Long-term WordPress contributor Alex Stine was selected by the WPCC as the inaugural Accessibility Fellow as a result of his expertise in accessibility and seven years of experience as a WordPress contributor.

group.one strengthens WordPress commitment with acquisition of BackWPup.

WordPress plugin BackWPup is joining group.one, along with two newly acquired plugins Adminimize and Search & Replace, adding to the group’s growing WordPress ecosystem. group.one acquired the three WordPress plugins with a combined base of more than 1.1 million users from German WordPress agency Inpsyde GmbH, bolstering the group’s WordPress offering alongside flagship products WP Rocket, Imagify and Rank Math SEO.

The Make Team announced a new Blocks page on WordPress.org intending to be a strong starting point for visitors looking to see what blocks can do within WordPress and beyond.

Citing the original Github ticket created back in March 2023 from Ben Greeley “Currently, there isn’t a page on wordpress.org that explains in a compelling way what ‘Blocks’ are or markets it very effectively on the website. We have a filter in the plugin directory, which is useful, but that page is lacking the context of what blocks are, what the block editor is, and why it is so exciting. “

My First Million podcast, co-hosted by Sam Parr the founder of TheHustle.co now owned by Hubspot, interviews Awesome Motive founder Syed Bahlki.

2023 has drawn a lot of criticism around AM’s products and how WP Beginner leverages it’s content juggernaut for their products. I thought it was important to include an interview with Syed that didn’t revolve around WordPress, but to understand his approach to business and life.

We have some fresh new content on the WP Minute!

This week Eric Karkovack wrote about what he’s looking forward to experience at WordCamp US next week.

I sat down with Paid Memberships Pro founder Kim Coleman to help me understand how she uses ChatGPT for her content and marketing needs.

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We have a packed episode today chock full of WordPress news goodness, including some audio clips from Courtney Robertson, Jeff Chandler, and Rich Tabor sharing what they love about WordPress 6.3.

First up, Aurooba Ahmed shared her new project wphelpers.dev which gives you a snazzy UI for all core WordPress blocks and their functionality.

You can expand each block and peel back the JS-y goodness that each block is powered by. Direct link right to the GitHub repo, and more developer features. If you’re coding blocks or beginning to learn WordPress development, you’ll want to bookmark this site. Post Status announced their upcoming WP Career summit.

Join us for the WP Career Summit If you’re looking for a career in WordPress, want to host a talk, or find out how to reach potential employers you won’t want to miss everything happening on October 20, 2023 when the summit kicks off.

The WP Tavern covered a recent story pertaining to the massive backlog of plugins to be reviewed at WordPress.org. The list includes over 900 plugins awaiting approval. Sarah Gooding cites “The volunteer team responsible for reviewing plugins has undergone significant restructuring after the departure of long-time contributor Mika Epstein”

WordPress 6.3 is here! Pressable and GoDaddy have you covered with a top-to-bottom look at all of the great new features. Stick around to the end of the episode to hear more from our special guests about their WordPress 6.3 goodness.

Anne McCarthy posted an overview on how to produce WordPress demo videos for official WordPress release announcements.

I applaud the team for opening up this marketing effort to the greater community. The article is ripe with guidance on what to consider before creating a video tutorial, and how the overhead of creating an asset like this might need to be dispersed throughout many contributing members.

I do have a hot take here: As a content creator, make your own video tutorials and post them on your own YouTube channel, blog, or social media platform before committing to something like this.

While this might be the only way someone like me could ever get credit for contributing to WordPress, but I’d prefer not to have such a rigid approach to how I show off WordPress — warts and all.

Before we wrap up, I want you to check out the latest content from WP Minute’s editor, Eric Karkovack. This week he wrote a great piece exploring what it would take for other CMS’s to catch up to WordPress dominance.

I’m still amazed that the closest CMS to WordPress is Shopify. WordPress is roughly 10x that of the e-commerce platform.

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In this episode of the WP Minute podcast, host Matt discusses various WordPress news and topics.

He starts by highlighting a WordPress.com initiative to encourage people to transfer their domain registration from Google Domains to WordPress.com. Matt also talks about a joint effort by open source projects, including WordPress, to raise concerns about the proposed Cyber Resilience Act in the European Union.

He mentions an article about the new WordPress editor, Gutenberg, and concludes by remembering and honoring two individuals who made significant contributions to the WordPress community. Matt encourages listeners to subscribe to the podcast and mentions available sponsorships.

WordPress.com offers to pay domain transfer fees for the first million

WordPress.com is offering to cover the transfer fee for the first million domains that move from Google to WordPress.com. This also extends the domain registration for an additional year.
WordPress.com commits to matching or even lowering the renewal price that users were paying with Google Domains. This applies to over 400 top-level domains (TLDs) they offer. They also promise to keep domain prices low, only raising them if their wholesale costs increase.
WordPress.com has been a domain name provider for over a decade and is committed to the open and inclusive web. They aim to support users’ ability to truly own their content and identity on the web. Users don’t need a site or hosting plan to manage their domains with WordPress.com.

Link

WordPress, Drupal, Typo3, and Joomla join forces

Open Source Matters, Inc. (Joomla), Typo3, WordPress, and the Drupal Association have issued a joint letter to the legislators of the European Union raising concerns about the proposed Cyber Resilience Act. This is a significant move as these four organizations collectively serve over 50% of the European websites.
The organizations argue that the proposed regulation could undermine effective software practices due to its ban on “unfinished software”. They also express concern that the expansive definition of “commercial activity” could deter the contributions of many developers to open source software.
The groups see this as an opportunity to explain the unique role that Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) plays in the software that underpins much of the web and to develop a model for how regulation should be applied to it. They also aim to educate legislators and policy-makers about the shared values that open source communities have with the European Union.

Link

This project is moving hella fast

The author expresses their love for Gutenberg, the block editor for WordPress, but also highlights its rapid pace of development. They note that this speed can sometimes leave developers behind, especially due to the shift from PHP to JavaScript (JS).
The author discusses the challenges of debugging Gutenberg, particularly when encountering errors. They note that unlike PHP, where errors are logged in a file, JS errors are logged in the browser console. This shift in error handling can be confusing for developers used to PHP.
The author criticizes the lack of proper documentation for Gutenberg, particularly when it comes to resolving specific errors. They argue that the current documentation is inadequate and that developers often have to search through GitHub issues to find solutions to their problems. They believe this is one of the reasons why some developers have negative feelings towards Gutenberg.

Link

Remember those that have passed

WordPress dedicates this page to the memory of those we’ve lost. They’ve shaped our project and enriched our community. As we remember their passion and commitment to WordPress and open source software, we celebrate their spirit.

Forever in our hearts, their legacy endures through every line of code and every user they’ve impacted.

Link

From the grab bag!

Here are some other interesting links from the week.

https://www.underrepresentedintech.com/webinars/sponsor/
https://wptavern.com/classicpress-community-considers-re-forking-woocommerce-for-classic-commerce-v2
https://jonathanbossenger.com/2023/07/28/the-state-of-wordpress-developer-tools-survey-results/
https://us.wordcamp.org/2023/schedule/

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If you're sick and tired of the WordPress dashboard, maybe you want to give Eric's post, The WordPress Dashboard Needs Some Love, a read. Also in today's episode, I'm reminding you about our other podcast feed The WP MInute+, a free podcast that covers the long form WordPress discussions like my old podcast, The Matt Report.

The conversation I just published featuring CliftonWP highlights a lot of what a modern day WordPress entrepreneur is thinking in this fast paced iteration of our favorite CMS. Be sure to add us to your podcast app! Search for "The WP Minute" and you'll see both podcasts available to follow.

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There are a lot of exciting features coming to WordPress 6.3 which will set the tone for the next few years of our favorite CMS.

We’ll explore the upcoming state of this new release and provide some thoughts on which demographic of WordPress user it’s shaping to serve. As always, please share this on social and be sure to join the newsletter.

The Not-So-Nice Side of the WordPress Community

The WordPress community, like any other, has its share of negative behaviors and incidents. While the majority of the community is supportive and positive, there are instances of abuse and misconduct that can’t be ignored.
Several recent incidents highlight the issue: Mika Epstein, a member of the WordPress Plugin Review team, faced abusive behavior from plugin developers; Raiber Cristian, a WordPress developer, decided to stop offering free support on WordPress.org due to abusive behavior; and WordCamp Dhaka was cancelled due to concerns about corporate influence and favoritism.
The author suggests that the community needs to police itself, support each other, and stay informed about abusers. They also suggest that more concrete rules could be part of the solution, but acknowledge the challenges in enforcing them and the potential for unfairness.

Read the original article

Accessibility expert Adrian Roselli sued for wanting accessibility to be accessible

Adrian Roselli, a well-known accessibility expert, is being sued by AccessiBe, a company that provides automated accessibility solutions. The lawsuit is in response to Roselli’s criticism of AccessiBe’s product.
Roselli’s main argument is that automated tools like AccessiBe’s cannot fully ensure a website’s accessibility and may give a false sense of compliance, potentially leading to legal issues for the website owners.
The lawsuit has sparked a backlash from the web accessibility community, with many viewing it as an attempt to silence valid criticism and discussion about the effectiveness of automated accessibility tools.

Read the original article
Vox media drops its own CMS

It stopped licensing Chorus to external publishers last year, per Adweek, but continued to use it to power its own network of over a dozen digital media sites.
The company still owns other tech products, including Concert, its advertising platform, and Coral, the commenting platform it acquired in 2019. But moving forward, monetizing its own audience engagement will become a bigger focus.
Vox Media will move its own websites off of Chorus and into WordPress VIP, the enterprise arm of the 20-year-old CMS company.

Read the original article

Use ChatGPT to Generate Group Conversation Topics for Your Online Community

The article discusses how AI, specifically OpenAI’s ChatGPT, can be used to generate conversation topics for various online communities, including those focused on Brie cheese lovers, video game wiki writers, backyard gardeners, and digital nomad business owners.
The author emphasizes the importance of a well-crafted prompt in generating relevant and engaging conversation topics. Being clear and specific in communicating what you want from the AI greatly improves the chances of getting a useful response.
The article also promotes Paid Memberships Pro, a WordPress plugin for building and managing online communities. The plugin allows users to sell free and paid subscriptions to their community and offers a variety of add-ons and integrations designed for community websites.

Read the original article

Links from the grab bag

Jeff Matson has officially joined Pressable’s marketing team
Syed Bahlki defends WordPress with a $1M wager
WPCoffeeTalk: Going deeper with Bluehost new Wondersuite
Watch the 6.3 product demo

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Matt explores some of the more challenging aspects of the WordPress project, in today's episode. With so many parts of the project being planned or already underway, the challenge to keep up with the software's evolution might become rather difficult. Pointing to a WordCamp talk from Courtney Robertson "We are they" Matt provides a bit of a public service announcement to dealing with the upcoming changes.

Read this week's news updates on the website.

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In this WP Minute podcast episode, Matt discusses changes in WordPress. He focuses on a feature called the Command Palette. This used to be known as the Wayfinder. Matt talks about how this is similar to things you can find in Apple's Spotlight and Descript Notion. He also looks at the competition between WordPress and new platforms like Wix and Squarespace.

Then, Matt talks about what it's like to run a WordPress news site. He shares his experience trying to work with WordCamp, but getting rejected. He thinks about how the relationship between media and events like WordCamp could get better. This episode gives a straightforward look at the challenges of running a WordPress media site and why it's important for people to know your brand. If you're interested in what's next for WordPress or how media partnerships work, this is a great episode to listen to.

WordPress 6.3 Will Introduce A Command Palette

WordPress 6.3 will feature a new tool called the Command Palette, designed to be a quick search and command execution tool.
There was a discussion about renaming the Command Center to Wayfinder, but the majority of participants were against it due to translation and comprehension issues.
The decision to move forward with the name Command Palette was made because it's easier to translate, consistent with other tooling outside of WordPress, and it matches the current functionality.
The API for the Command Palette is now public and ready for developers to create their own custom commands.

Original Article

Podcasting as a Marketing Strategy

The article discusses the potential of using podcasting as part of a marketing strategy, regardless of the industry.
The podcast episode features a conversation between Michelle and Hazel about the different podcasts she manages and how podcasting can help spread the word about a company.
They discuss the importance of understanding what your audience wants to hear and where they look when considering podcasting as a marketing strategy.
Michelle provides a presentation about starting a podcast, which can be accessed through a link in the article.

Original Article

CMS Market Share Analysis June 2023

WordPress continues to lead the CMS market share, remaining stable over the last year.
Shopify shows a small decline, but still presents strong financial numbers.
Prestashop, which was acquired in 2021, is the fastest-growing CMS in the top 10 and shows real promise.
The article provides an in-depth analysis of the CMS market share, with special attention to eCommerce platforms.

Original Article

AI Website Builder: The Next-Gen Builder Created by 10Web

10Web offers an AI-powered website builder that allows users to build or recreate any website in minutes.
The platform provides AI-generated content and images, and allows customization with a drag-and-drop editor.
In addition to the AI Website Builder, 10Web offers services like automated WordPress hosting, WooCommerce hosting, cloud hosting, BuddyBoss hosting, and more.
The platform also offers a range of plugins and a blog for users to explore.

Original Website

How Guildenberg Hopes To Improve the WordPress Ecosystem

Guildenberg is an organization aiming to address challenges faced by product founders in the WordPress ecosystem, which lacks cohesiveness and standards for code and marketing.
The organization believes that product creators are key to growing the WordPress ecosystem and mitigating the tradeoffs of decentralization.
Guildenberg plans to help products succeed through collaboration, without picking winners and losers.
The WP Minute article includes a Q&A with Jonathan Wold, CEO of Guildenberg, who shares his vision for bringing positive and profitable change to the WordPress ecosystem.

Original Article

10 WordPress Site Editor (FSE) Features You Didn't Know About

The WordPress Full-Site Editing (FSE), also known as the Site Editor, is a relatively new addition to the WordPress platform and is under continuous development.
The article discusses some lesser-known features of the WordPress Site Editor that can help users build better designs and customize their sites more effectively.
One of the features highlighted is the ability to change style variations, which allows users to change the entire look of their theme with a single click.
Another feature is the ability to edit styles for individual blocks, which can be applied site-wide, providing a consistent look across different templates.

Original Article

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Apple Journals & Day One | Matt Mullenweg

Important Takeaways:

Apple announced its own Journal app at WWDC, which competes with Automattic’s product, Day One.
Day One has a few advantages over Apple’s Journal app. One of them is the upcoming feature of Shared Journals, which allows fully end-to-end encrypted shared private journals with friends and family.
Another advantage of Day One is its cross-platform availability. Unlike Apple’s Journal app, which is limited to Apple devices, Day One works on all Apple devices, Android devices, and the web.

Link: Original Article

A Place of One’s Own, in Noho – Automattic Design

Important Takeaways:

Automattic has a unique office space in Noho, New York, which is described as a “magic space” with unobstructed views of lower Manhattan.
The office design is inspired by the aesthetics of jazz clubs and features collections of mid-century vintage furniture, art and design books, and original art pieces.
The office is designed to be a practical and elastic canvas for diverse uses, and it reflects the rich aesthetics of Automattic’s multiple creative tools.
The office space is not just for work; it also serves as a socializing and connecting space for Automattic employees.

Link: Original Article

Linking to Supporting Orgs – Make WordPress.org

Important Takeaways:

The post discusses the need for a dedicated page on WordPress.org to link to independent organizations that support WordPress’s mission of democratizing publishing.
These organizations are not officially part of WordPress but offer valuable resources and opportunities to get involved.
The proposed structure for such a page includes an introduction, organization categories, organization listings, updates and announcements, and contact information.
The organizations should align with the mission of WordPress, adhere to a code of conduct, and actively contribute to the WordPress community or the broader mission of democratizing publishing.
A vetting process is suggested for adding organizations to this page, including initial screening, detailed review, contacting the organization, decision to list, and periodic review.

Link: Original Article

WordPress Accessibility Day Gains Nonprofit Status Through Partnership with Knowbility – WordPress Accessibility Day

Important Takeaways:

WordPress Accessibility Day, a virtual 24-hour conference focused on accessibility best practices for WordPress websites, has gained 501(c)(3) nonprofit status through a partnership with Knowbility.
The event was initially started in 2020 by the WordPress core Accessibility Team and was revived in 2022 by Amber Hinds and Joe Dolson as an independent event.
The 2022 event was a success, with 11 organizers, 1604 attendees, and 20 volunteers from 52 countries. After all event expenses were paid, WordPress Accessibility Day donated $2,000 to Knowbility.
The partnership with Knowbility allows WordPress Accessibility Day to gain nonprofit status, making donations tax-deductible in the United States. It also provides access to Knowbility’s accessible online event planning resources.
The 2023 event will be held from 10:00 AM CDT (3:00 PM UTC) on Wednesday, September 27th, until 10:00 AM CDT (3:00 PM UTC) on Thursday, September 28th. The event will be live captioned and have sign language interpreters.

Link: Original Article

One Equity Partners acquires cloud services provider Liquid Web and forms new holding company, CloudOne Digital

Important Takeaways:

One Equity Partners (OEP) has completed the acquisition of Liquid Web, a provider of managed cloud services, forming a new platform known as CloudOne Digital.
The senior leadership team of Liquid Web will transition to expanded roles in the new, larger CloudOne platform with Jim Geiger as CEO, Carrie Wheeler as COO, and Joe Oesterling as CTO.
Liquid Web, founded in 1997, operates 10 global data centers with more than 500,000 sites under management. With its brand acquisitions, CloudOne Digital will serve over 187,000 clients worldwide.
CloudOne Digital will offer a broad portfolio of cloud products that meet the needs of web-dependent small and mid-sized businesses, cloud servers for developers and businesses with highly persistent, compute-intensive workloads, and managed private cloud for mid-market businesses that require enterprise-grade infrastructure and solutions.
OEP plans an aggressive expansion strategy for CloudOne Digital, aiming to combine and integrate complementary businesses in the multi-cloud infrastructure segment.

Link: Original Article

WordCampers Demand Changes to Q&A Format – WP Tavern

Important Takeaways:

WordCamp attendees are calling for changes to the Q&A format at live events, citing issues with attendees abusing the format for self-promotion or not asking relevant questions.
WordPress Core Committer Felix Arntz suggested that questions taking longer than a minute should be asked informally at a later opportunity.
Arntz proposed several ideas to improve the Q&A format, including submitting questions to a central platform for upvoting, discarding lengthy questions, and providing mandatory training for emcees on handling problematic Q&A situations.
He also suggested making Q&A optional, depending on the speaker’s preference, to create a more inclusive environment for speakers.
The feedback received on Arntz’s Twitter thread was largely positive, with other attendees offering their own suggestions for improving the Q&A format.

Link: Original Article

New Filter Controls: Discover “Commercial” and “Community” in the Theme and Plugin Directory – Make WordPress.org

Important Takeaways:

New categorizations were introduced in the Theme and Plugin Directory in late 2022 to enhance the browsing experience. These filters categorize plugins/themes as “Commercial” and “Community.”
The “Commercial” filter allows users to discover themes and plugins developed by professional companies and individuals who offer their products for a fee. These premium options often come with dedicated support, advanced features, and customization options.
The “Community” filter showcases themes and plugins created by the WordPress community. These products are often developed by passionate individuals who share their work for free or follow an open-source philosophy.
The introduction of these filter controls is part of an ongoing effort to improve the browsing experience and refine the visual aspects of the Theme and Plugin Directory as part of the site redesign.
Users are encouraged to provide feedback on these updates and try out the new filter controls.

Link: Original Article

The Power of Community: A WordCamp Europe Sponsorship Story

Important Takeaways:

Barn2 Plugins sponsored WordCamp Europe (WCEU) for the first time in June 2023. The experience was described as a great opportunity for networking, brand exposure, and team bonding.
The company spent a total of €13,256 on the event, including sponsorship costs, travel and accommodation, team t-shirts, WordCamp tickets, and other related expenses.
The sponsorship booth was a key part of their presence at the event. They created a quiz for attendees, with winners receiving premium swag items. The quiz was a success, with 145 participants.
The team also produced a video showcasing some of their most popular plugins, which was displayed at their booth.
The author, Katie Keith, highlighted the difficulty in calculating the return on investment (ROI) for sponsoring a WordCamp. However, she emphasized the intangible benefits, such as increased brand awareness, networking opportunities, and team building.

Link: Original Article

Sustainability Team • Supporting Organizations • Commercial & Community Themes & Plugins • Pattern Curation – Post Status

Important Takeaways:

The WordPress Sustainability Team has been established with the main objective of embedding sustainable practices into the WordPress community and its processes, focusing on ensuring longevity socially, economically, and environmentally.
Several organizations exist to support the work of WordPress, such as The WP Community Collective and HeroPress. A proposal has been made to display such supporting organizations.
Filters have been introduced for Themes and Plugins to distinguish between Commercial and Community efforts. The Patterns Directory is considering using filters for displaying all patterns associated with a theme.
The post also includes a roundup of other WordPress news, including updates on WordPress 6.3 and 6.4, WP-CLI releases, community events, core updates, design updates, and more.

Link: Original Article

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We’re slapping the beta label on it!

For the summer, we’re experimenting with a new format to the podcast and the newsletter. In the past, I’ve talked about the cost of curating and commenting on the weekly cycle of WordPress news. The cost is starting to catch up, sponsors want more, and the audience is falling out of interest.

We’re experimenting with delivering your the links our team and members have curated throughout the week, with a podcast episode from contributing members. This doesn’t mean we’re totally off the old format, but need to experiment, in an effort to provide the content our readers/listeners want.

“Demand for WordPress in 2023” – The blog post discusses the growing demand for WordPress in 2023, highlighting its dominance as a website platform and the increasing popularity of its ecosystem.
YouTube video: “The Importance of Cybersecurity” – The video emphasizes the significance of cybersecurity in today’s digital landscape, providing insights into various threats and preventive measures to ensure online safety.
“Introducing Jetpack AI Assistant” – Jetpack, a popular WordPress plugin, introduces an AI assistant that offers personalized recommendations and suggestions to help website owners improve their site’s performance and user experience.
“Johannes WordPress Theme” – Johannes is a WordPress theme that boasts a minimalist design and robust features, providing users with a versatile and visually appealing option for building their websites.
“Arbitrary Plugin Installation Vulnerability in Formidable Forms” – This blog post highlights a vulnerability in the Formidable Forms plugin for WordPress, emphasizing the importance of promptly updating plugins to mitigate security risks.
“WordPress 6.4 Development Cycle” – The blog post provides an update on the development cycle of WordPress 6.4, giving insights into the features and improvements being worked on by the WordPress core team.
“Newsletters Paid Subscriptions” – WordPress.com introduces paid subscriptions for newsletters, allowing content creators to monetize their newsletters and provide exclusive content to their subscribers.
YouTube video: “10 Tips for Effective Social Media Marketing” – The video offers valuable tips and strategies for effectively utilizing social media platforms to enhance marketing efforts and reach a wider audience.
“Underrepresented in Tech Webinars – Sponsorship Opportunities” – The webpage highlights sponsorship opportunities for webinars organized by Underrepresented in Tech, aiming to support diversity and inclusion initiatives in the tech industry.
“Design Share May 22 – Jun 2” – This blog post on the WordPress Design Team’s website shares updates and discussions about design-related topics, offering insights into recent activities and collaborations within the WordPress design community.
“Tim Ferris Podcast: Seth Godin Hints at Automattic’s Top-Secret AI Plugin” – The article on The WP Minute discusses a podcast episode featuring Seth Godin, where he hints at a top-secret AI plugin being developed by Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.

Classifieds listings buy yours

WPSlay 🎯 Get professional #WordPress support and maintenance services tailored to your website needs without breaking the bank!

Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:

Eric Karkovack
Sam Munoz
Michelle Frechette
Alex Borto

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We have to start this week’s news with coverage of WordPress’ 20th birthday. Our beloved CMS officially reached the milestone on Saturday, May 27. Dozens of celebratory events were held around the world. You can even sign an online birthday card as part of the #WP20 From Blogs to Blocks campaign.

Meanwhile, there is some special content worth checking out. First, WordPress co-founders Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little joined Drupal founder Dries Buytaert for a conversation on open source, AI, and the future of the web.

And if you’d like to read about the last 10 years of WordPress history, take a look at Building Blocks: The Evolution of WordPress. The online book serves as the second volume in a series.

Not surprisingly, the WordPress community also shared their thoughts via blog posts. That’s how this whole thing got started, right?

Among the highlights:

WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy shared an ode to the WordPress community’s role in the project’s success;
Sarah Gooding of WP Tavern reflected on the impact of WordPress and outlines future challenges;
HeroPress founder Topher DeRosia looked back at his start in blogging and what WordPress has meant to him;

For more coverage of the big celebration, check out the #WP20 hashtag on Twitter.

Links You Shouldn’t Miss

WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg wrote a short post regarding his creation’s 20th anniversary. And he also announced the Audrey Scholars program. The aim is to provide 100% scholarships to selected members. There are currently 13 scholars in the program, which renews annually. All are encouraged to apply, although the focus will be on “children of parents or guardians who have contributed significantly to open source, or have been significant in our principal Matt Mullenweg’s life.” Audrey Scholars is run by Audrey Capital, Mullenweg’s angel investment and research company.

Does Automattic have a top-secret AI plugin in the works? Author Seth Godin recently discussed such a tool on the Tim Ferris Podcast. The WP Minute’s Matt Medeiros took a closer look at how important AI will be to WordPress. He even makes a guess at this new item Godin referred to as the “single best use I have seen of Chat GPT or whatever they’re using.”

European service provider group.one has acquired popular WordPress SEO plugin Rank Math. The free version of the plugin currently boasts over 2 million active installations. This a deeper dive into WordPress for group.one, as they also own web host one.com and the WP Rocket optimization plugin.

A couple of well-known WordPress workflow solutions are teaming up. Sandbox site provider InstaWP has partnered with collaboration tool Atarim. There will be cross-product integration. Together, the aim is to make it easier to spin up test environments, collaborate, and track changes.

From the Grab Bag

Now it’s time to take a look at some other interesting topics shared by our contributors.

Automattic has pushed an automated update of the Jetpack plugin to patch a security hole. The vulnerability was found during an internal audit and would allow site authors to modify WordPress files. If you use Jetpack, make sure to update to the latest version immediately.

There’s been lots of talk regarding diversity and inclusion related to the upcoming WordCamp Europe. With that in mind, Michelle Frechette has shared some thoughts on moving forward as a community.
WordPress developer and accessibility expert Joe Dolson has announced the closure of the Access Monitor and WP Tweets Pro plugins. Both plugins will be shuttered due to complications with their third-party tie ins.
The results of the WordPress Individual Learner Survey are in. A total of 583 people participated. An analysis shows that 321 respondents described themselves as ‘somewhat knowledgeable’ or ‘very knowledgeable’ of WordPress, while nearly 32% had more than 10 years of experience.
The WordPress Performance Team has conducted an analysis of version 6.2. The goal was to identify opportunities for future enhancements. Based on their findings, performance upgrades for classic theme templates, block widgets, and translation loading are among the identified targets.
There’s a new proposal to establish a WordPress Sustainability Team. The group would be responsible for promoting eco-friendly practices on the web and for in-person events. It would also include creating themes and plugins that serve this purpose.
Developer Bill Erickson has released BE Starter, a hybrid starter theme. The package combines classic PHP templates with a theme.json file to control block styles.

Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:

Michelle Frechette
Mustaasam Saleem
Daniel Schutzsmith

Outro

Thanks to you, dear listener, for tuning in to your favorite 5-minutes of WordPress news every Wednesday.

You can support independent content like this by purchasing us a digital coffee at thewpminute.com/support

Or join the #linksquad membership for $79/year to support the show and become a producer of the WP Minute at thewpminute.com/support

That’s it for today’s episode, if you enjoyed it, please share it wherever you do social media and jump on the mailing list at thewpminute.com.

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The hot topic this week was diversity. More specifically, how it relates to the upcoming WordCamp Europe speaker lineup.

After the event announced its fifth round of speakers, StellarWP’s Michelle Frechette took to Twitter with the following observation:

“So far only 25% of the speakers announced for #WCEU are women (by name/photo), and only three appear to be non-white. Hoping to see some more inclusion in the next few rounds of announcements.”

What followed were some heated comments - including one from event organizer Sjoerd Blom:

“Please stop being prejudiced and wait until ALL speakers have been announced. Thanks.”

It’s worth noting that subsequent announcements have included more women and people of color. However, the tenor of conversation in Frechette’s thread has raised eyebrows.

To read more about the issues at hand, check out posts from Job Thomas, “Diversity in conference speaker line-up” and MasterWP’s Rob Howard, “For WordCamp, the challenge of diversifying tech takes center stage”.

Links You Shouldn’t Miss

A new proposal aims to modernize WordCamps. In the near future, the events could be focused on a singular topic and a specific audience. The WP Minute’s Eric Karkovack spoke with Angela Jin, WordPress Head of Programs & Contributor Experience, to learn more. They discussed the current state of WordCamps and how these community cornerstones might benefit from a change.

This month marks the 20th anniversary of WordPress. As part of the celebration, The WP Minute+ released a panel discussion about the software’s biggest moments. Hosted by David Bisset, the panel features Rae Morey, Jeff Chandler, Ken Elliot, and The WP Minute’s Eric Karkovack.

WordPress 6.2.1 was released on May 16. This version includes 20 bug fixes to WordPress core, 10 for the block editor, and a handful of security patches. And it also introduced an issue that breaks shortcodes used within block theme templates. If this describes your site, think twice before updating. Meanwhile, a workaround has been created and a permanent solution is being discussed.

Last week, we reported on a reflected cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability that was recently patched in the Advanced Custom Fields plugin. Sarah Gooding at WP Tavern reported that, within 24 hours of the vulnerability’s disclosure, attackers had begun attempts to exploit it. According to Ryan Barnett of Akamai Security Intelligence Group (SIG), malicious actors used code examples shared within the disclosure. It’s recommended that users of the plugin update their installs immediately.

From the Grab Bag

Now it’s time to take a look at some other interesting topics shared by our contributors.

WordPress has accumulated 13 default themes since 2010. To cut down on maintenance requirements, there’s a proposal to retire some of the older themes.
Cloud service provider WPCS announced that they’ve secured investment from Emilia Capital. Emilia is owned by Yoast founders Joost de Valk and Marieke van de Rakt.
Users of Essential Addons for Elementor should take note of a recently-patched security vulnerability. Sarah Gooding of WP Tavern reports that the unauthenticated privilege escalation vulnerability was rated as critical, and was patched in version 5.7.2 of the plugin.
Speaking of security - ever wonder what it’s like to work in the field? Check out an interview with Alexander Concha, an Application Security Engineer at Automattic.
The Kirki Customizer Framework plugin has found a new home. Founder David Vongries previously announced that he was sunsetting the product and looking to sell. WordPress development firm Themeum has acquired the plugin and plans to keep it in active development.
Gravity Forms has launched a new podcast called “Breakdown”. The show explores different ways to use the popular plugin and will feature special guests. And it’s hosted by our very own Matt Medeiros.
WordPress competitor Wix now offers support for “headless” website configurations. The service takes advantage of the growing popularity of headless installs, with the ability to manage content from the Wix site builder.
There’s a difference between branding and marketing. Hazel Quimpo and Michelle Frechette discussed the topic on a recent episode of the Audacity Marketing podcast.
Curious about the benefits of a 4-day workweek? Social media toolkit provider Buffer have released data regarding their three-year journey using the arrangement.

New Members This Week

Adam Weeks

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Results from the WordPress 2022 Annual Survey have been released. WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy notes that this was a slimmed down version of the survey. It featured 29 questions - as opposed to nearly 100 in past editions. This led to a 26% increase in completion rate. However, there was also a 56% decrease in overall submissions.

Among the highlights of this year’s results:

53% of respondents say they’ve used the Block Editor. Meanwhile, the Classic Editor saw a 25% drop in use.
76% of respondents install WordPress themselves.
68% agree or strongly agree that WordPress is as good as, or better than, other site builders and CMSs.
Ease of use, flexibility, and plugin options were rated as the top reasons to use WordPress.
The most frustrating aspects of WordPress were Gutenberg’s unfinished status and the difficulty of learning full site editing.

For more in-depth data, a slideshow is available for download.

Links You Shouldn’t Miss

WordPress turns 20 years old this month. And it has had a major impact on freelancers during its run. The WP Minute’s Eric Karkovack took a look at how the software became the perfect tool for solo entrepreneurs and small agencies.

Stacks, the first-ever community theme, is now available in the WordPress theme directory. The theme is geared towards creating slide decks that can be used in presentations. In the official announcement, core contributor Ben Dwyer writes that it’s part of a “new initiative to provide high quality themes for free.”

Last week, WordCamp US announced a new approach to programming. The flagship event is looking for speakers outside of the WordPress community. However, the traditional call for speakers is still part of the plan. It’s now open to anyone interested in giving a presentation. WordCamp US will take place from August 24-26 in National Harbor, MD.

Keeping with the WordCamp theme, the events may look different in the near future. WordPress Head of Programs & Contributor Experience Angela Jin laid out the vision for the Next Generation of WordCamps. The big change is in event programming. That includes a more clearly defined audience and a focus on specific topics. Community feedback is welcomed.

From the Grab Bag

Now it’s time to take a look at some other interesting topics shared by our contributors.

In acquisition news, WooCommerce multi-vendor plugin WC Vendors has been sold to Rymera Web Co. Rymera is known for building WooCommerce extensions, including Advanced Coupons and Wholesale Suite.
MasterWP is providing $1,000 travel grants for WordCamp US speakers from underrepresented groups. The program is now accepting applications and sponsors.
Security firm Patchstack reported a reflected XSS vulnerability in the free and pro versions of Advanced Custom Fields. The issue was patched in version 6.1.6, so make sure to update your installs.
Speaking of Advanced Custom Fields, users will want to check out the ACF Annual Survey. The feedback received will help “guide the evolution” of the popular plugin.
eCommerce platform Shopify has announced staffing cuts. In a letter to employees, founder and CEO Tobi Lütke said the platform’s workforce will be “smaller by about 20%”. Additionally, Shopify Logistics has been sold to supply chain management firm Flexport.
Developers Aurooba Ahmed and Brian Coords have launched WordPress Icons Library. It’s a searchable index of all icons used within WordPress. Icons can be copied and pasted in various formats.
You can hear Josepha Haden Chomphosy’s thoughts on WordPress’ 20th anniversary in the latest episode of the WordPress Briefing podcast.
How do we navigate the future of WordPress? Bluehost will host a webinar on May 11 to discuss the latest trends and predictions.

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On May 27, 2023, WordPress will celebrate its 20th birthday. It’s hard to fathom that the software has been around for so long. Yet some of us may struggle to remember what the web was like without it.

Just think of the designers, developers, and users that have come along during these past two decades. A whole generation has had easy access to content management and nearly-endless customization. Lucky them!

As a more experienced (ahem, old) freelancer, I can recall the challenge of building advanced websites pre-WordPress. Thus, I believe the software has been transformative. It has impacted virtually every aspect of a web designer’s job.

To celebrate this incredible milestone, let’s take a look at what WordPress means to freelancers. We’ll explore how its features and philosophy have empowered web professionals the world over.

A Reliable Foundation for Any Project

A typical WordPress project starts like this:

Install WordPress.
Add a theme and any necessary plugins.
Optionally add custom code as needed.
Add content.
Launch!

There’s more to it – but you get the idea. The amazing part of this process is that it doesn’t matter what type of website you are building. WordPress and its ecosystem make it possible.

This wasn’t always the case. Previously, content management systems (CMS) had been either built for niche usage or were severely limited in capability.

Themes existed for some systems, but nowhere near the breadth of what we see today. And the same goes for plugins.

For freelancers, this often meant scouring the web for a suitable solution. If you were a particularly gifted coder, you could build a tool from scratch. But either way, there were obstacles at every turn.

WordPress brought a new level of flexibility to the masses. We may spend time picking out the perfect plugins. But the foundations of what we need are already there.

This doesn’t mean WordPress is the perfect fit for every project. But we can be confident that what we want to build is at least possible. That’s a big deal.

Plenty of Opportunities for Monetization

When you think about it, the concept behind WordPress is revolutionary. It’s free, open-source software that can be used for any purpose.

To put this into perspective: there’s no separate license for commercial use. You don’t need to buy anything. You don’t even have to send co-founders Mike Little or Matt Mullenweg a “thank you” note.

When I first started using WordPress, I was taken aback by this ethos. I was even a bit suspicious of it. Surely, they would pull the rug out from under us at some point? The software will inevitably cost money, right?

Well, that hasn’t happened. Quite the opposite. As people around the world have discovered, WordPress is a vehicle for making money.

Freelancers can use it to build websites for clients – and charge whatever the market will allow. Developers can sell their creations as well. The past 20 years have seen the rise of a strong commercial plugin and theme market. And web hosts have tailored their services around it.

This also means that starting a freelance web design business is incredibly affordable. Anyone willing to learn WordPress can begin serving clients with minimal (or even zero) monetary investment.

It provides us with the opportunity to start small and evolve as needs change. How many other industries can say that?

Advanced Features That Are Within Everyone’s Reach

WordPress helped to resurrect my career. I began using it regularly around 2010. And I was in a major rut at the time.

My specialty had been hand-coded HTML and CSS. I still consider them essential skills. But I was limited in the type of websites I could build. Implementing advanced features seemed impossible.

I wasn’t sure where my business was going. Then I started experimenting with WordPress. In a way, it was like rediscovering my passion for web design.

The software and its ecosystem allowed me to expand my capabilities. Complex functionality was no longer a pipe dream. I could enlist plugins like WooCommerce, Gravity Forms, and Advanced Custom Fields to help me build bigger and better.

Suddenly, I didn’t need to be a senior-level PHP or JavaScript developer. And I didn’t need to turn down projects that seemed too dense. Plugins provided the main features I needed. From there, I could use the skills I had to add further customization.

And my skill level also increased. Diving into more advanced projects made me curious. They put me on a path of learning that I still enjoy to this day. WordPress helped to make it possible.

Part of WordPress’ mission is to democratize publishing. But one can argue that it has done the same with design and development.

A Community To Share Knowledge and Kinship

As software, WordPress is wonderful. But the community it inspired is even more amazing. It’s something each of us benefit from.

For freelancers, the WordPress community has been an invaluable resource. It has provided opportunities to connect, share, and grow.

That’s because community members are all-too-happy to share what they’ve learned. Whether it’s a handy code snippet or business advice, there is so much knowledge out there.

At our best, we genuinely enjoy lifting each other up. That’s what makes events like WordCamps so powerful. But it’s also something we see every day on social media and other platforms.

Freelancing is often about individuality. We run our businesses in a way that best suits us. But the WordPress community helps to bring us together. Regardless of background, identity, or geography.

For all of its faults, it’s also worth remembering the good that this community has done. I think there are people from all corners of the globe that would agree.

For Many Freelancers, WordPress Is a Lifeline

I don’t have the statistics in front of me. Perhaps they don’t exist. But it’s safe to say that WordPress has had a major impact on freelancers.

And 20 years has been a good long run. That’s especially relevant in tech, where big ideas come and go all the time.

Thankfully, WordPress has become something freelancers can rely on. That says a lot about the software – and even more about the people behind the project. Those that contribute in ways both official and unofficial.

Milestones are a great time to look back at what was. But it’s also an important reminder to never take what we have for granted.

What WordPress has done for freelancers, and countless others, is worth celebrating. Let’s hope for another 20 years and beyond.

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It looks like the days of automatically sharing WordPress.com content to Twitter are over. Automattic announced that customers will no longer be able to auto-publish to Twitter via the Jetpack Social plugin.

You may recall that WordPress.com’s access to the Twitter API was suddenly suspended in April. While it eventually came back online, changes to Twitter’s policies have made the continued use too expensive.

Automattic says that Twitter’s price increase is “prohibitive for us to absorb without passing a significant price increase along to you, and we don’t see that as an option.” Bye bye birdie.

Links You Shouldn’t Miss

The Beaver Builder page builder plugin has been on the market for 9 years. The WordPress landscape has changed dramatically in that time. For instance, page builders are now seen as competitors to the native Block Editor. What does that mean for the future? Matt Medeiros spoke with Robby McCullough of Beaver Builder for an in-depth discussion of the topic.

There’s news to report regarding this summer’s WordCamp US. The first round of ticket sales started on May 1 and quickly sold out. Another round of sales will be coming soon. Meanwhile, there will be a different approach to event programming. Organizers are targeting “experienced, seasoned, professional speakers at the top of their industries who are not currently active members of our unique community.” They’ve put out a survey for suggested speakers and topics. A traditional call for speakers will also be announced in the near future. The event will take place from August 24-26th in National Harbor, MD.

WordPress community member Michelle Frechette has launched WP Speakers. It’s a free resource that connects speakers and event organizers within the WordPress ecosystem. In a press release, Frechette notes that "As well-connected as I am in WordPress, I couldn’t even imagine how much more difficult it might be for someone who didn’t know a lot of speakers personally. So WP Speakers was born."

WordPress agency Human Made has recently published articles detailing their experimentation with AI. Now they’re hosting a virtual event to examine how this technology will impact the content management system (CMS). Word on the Future is a virtual event and will take place on May 25.

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Managed WooCommerce hosting is a growing segment within the WordPress ecosystem. And it has a new entrant: WooCommerce. The Automattic-owned eCommerce provider recently launched WooExpress.

The service is hosted by WordPress.com. It aims to be a one-stop shop for building and maintaining an online store. Packages start at $40 per month with discounts for paying annually. A selection of pre-installed extensions and themes are included.

Sarah Gooding of WP Tavern reports that WooExpress’ starting price is higher than entry-level products from GoDaddy and Bluehost. However, the most expensive package ($70 per month) comes in below GoDaddy’s premium tiers.

Beyond its name recognition, WooExpress may enjoy a few advantages over competitors:

As we reported last week, the price of WooCommerce extensions is going up. Bundling popular titles built by WooCommerce is likely to attract value-conscious store owners.

Meanwhile, its beefed-up hosting infrastructure was already in place. WordPress.com has been offering packages that include WooCommerce for some time. That’s likely to cut down on growing pains.

Lastly, ownership’s vast internal knowledge of WooCommerce and WordPress is a win for customers.

How will WooExpress fare? How will its competitors respond? The WP Minute will keep you posted.

Links You Shouldn’t Miss

SEO plugin maker Yoast announced the departure of former CEO Marieke van de Rakt. Under her watch, the company was acquired by Newfold Digital in 2021. van de Rakt will now turn her focus to investing in open source, sustainable, and female-led companies via Emilia Capital. In a related note, Yoast founder Joost de Valk announced that he too is stepping away from Newfold to focus on entrepreneurship.

Security firm Sucuri published a detailed report regarding the abuse of an abandoned WordPress plugin. The Eval PHP plugin hasn’t seen an update in a decade, but it’s being leveraged by malicious actors to install malware. The report also questions the wisdom of leaving similar plugins in the official repository long after abandonment.

WordPress.com launched a website building service back in 2021. It was a controversial topic at the time, with some freelancers wondering if their businesses would be impacted. The service initially aimed for the mid-range market, with prices starting at $4,900. Now they appear to be targeting the lower end of the market as well, with a $499 Built By WordPress.com "Express" package. The package promises a 5-page website built within 4 business days. Thanks to WP Minute Member Paul Lacey for reporting this development.

From the Grab Bag

Now it’s time to take a look at some other interesting topics shared by our contributors.

CertifyWP has launched the WordPress Management and Design Credentialing Exam. The $150.00 exam aims to certify those knowledgeable in front-end WordPress development. The organization also offers an optional course to help learners prepare for the exam.
There have long been calls for a well-organized notification system for WordPress. Project core contributor Joe Bailey-Roberts provided an update on such efforts over on the Make WordPress blog.
How can WordPress developers leverage AI tools? WP Engine Builders will hold a virtual event on April 28 to discuss the possibilities.
Big changes to Twitter’s verification system have been in the news. Users who haven’t purchased the Twitter Blue service are now missing those famous blue checks next to their name. WordPress co-founder and Tumblr CEO Matt Mullenweg recently explained why he’s now a Twitter Blue subscriber.
Mark Westguard, founder of the WS Form plugin, shared some thoughts about the cost of sponsoring WordCamps. Westguard has questioned the affordability for small businesses.
When it comes to SEO, page experience has been mentioned as a factor in recent years. However, Google recently removed it from their ranking systems page.
What does a “power user” think of Gutenberg in its current form? Torque Magazine’s Nick Schäferhoff published a review that points out the good and bad.
We’ve all seen software and services that use urgency as a marketing tool. The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has offered advice pointing out what is and isn’t permissible.

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Most Impactful

The uncertainty surrounding social media providers like Twitter has sparked interest in alternatives. Mastodon and other Fediverse networks have received a look. But longtime WordPress users may recall a self-hosted option: BuddyPress.

The venerable plugin can turn any WordPress website into a social hub. It still boasts over 100,000 active installs. And even if you haven’t heard much about it lately, it’s still very much in development. Version 11.1 was released back in February.

And as Sarah Gooding of WP Tavern reports, a Virtual Contributor Day will be held on April 20. It coincides with French WordPress Community Contributor Day in Paris.

Taking the current social media climate into account, BuddyPress may have an opportunity to grow. That’s not to say it will overtake Twitter or Facebook anytime soon. But it could become an attractive option for those who want to build smaller, tight-knit communities.

Links You Shouldn’t Miss

If you’ve purchased (or are planning to purchase) any commercial extensions from the WooCommerce Marketplace, you may notice some price increases. The WP Minute has confirmed that emails are being sent to customers announcing higher costs for yearly renewals. In an email exchange, a WooCommerce support representative stated that “Only a subset of extensions had their prices changed.” We’ve reached out to WooCommerce’s official press channels but have not yet received any comments. Have you been impacted by a price hike? Let us know on Twitter @thewpminute.

WordCamp Europe is all about the kids! Sarah Gooding at WP Tavern reports that the event, held from June 8-10 in Athens, Greece, will feature free childcare. This will allow attendees of the conference and Contributor Day to bring their children along. And a special workshop for kids will take place on June 8.

Last week, we told you about Joe Hoyle’s integration of AI within the WordPress block editor. The Human Made co-founder and CTO has posted a follow up that demonstrates some new features. Content streaming and content-aware editing add a new level of convenience to the tool. As Hoyle says, “small incremental improvements make a large difference to productivity and quality of life.” These experiments are worth keeping eye on.

From the Grab Bag

Now it’s time to take a look at some other interesting topics shared by our contributors.

In acquisition news, WP Minute member Justin Ferriman reports that plugin developer SnapOrbital has been scooped up by writer and entrepreneur Andrei Tapalaga. SnapOribital is known for their premium add-ons for LearnDash.
The 4th annual Atarim Web Agency Summit will take place from April 25-28. The virtual event will feature 40+ sessions aimed at helping agencies grow their business. WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy is listed among the presenters this year.
If you’re a WordPress product maker seeking investment, Emilia Capital is encouraging you to make an in-person pitch at WordCamp Europe. The firm is run by Marieke van de Rakt and Joost de Valk of Yoast SEO.
Developing WordPress plugins within the browser may soon become a reality. Automattic developer and WordPress Playground creator Adam Zielinski shared three examples of how it could work over on the Make WordPress blog.
WordPress Playground relies in part on the SQLite database engine. Core contributor Ari Stathopoulos has posted an update on the proposal to add official support within WordPress.
The COVID-19 pandemic took a toll on in-person events - including WordPress Meetups. They’re slowly starting to come back. That now includes Boston, which will reconvene on April 24.

Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:

Justin Ferriman

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Do you remember what made WordPress 5.6 so historic? It was the first version of the software produced by an all-woman and non-binary release squad. And it looks like history is about to repeat itself.

WordPress 6.3 is scheduled to be released in July and will once again feature an all-women and non-binary squad. Project Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy made the announcement and shared an outline for those interested in contributing.

The momentum for this reprisal can be traced back to Matt Mullenweg’s 2022 State of the Word. During the Q&A portion, project contributor Laura Byrne asked Mullenweg to commit to another such release. The result is another step forward for inclusion and diversity in the WordPress community.

Next up (listen to the podcast for more): Michelle Frechette with the Community Minute!

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AI experimentation continues in the WordPress community. This time around, Human Made’s Joe Hoyle has demonstrated a generative AI plugin that’s natively integrated into the block editor. The plugin works with ChatGPT and allows users to enter prompts. Content is then generated based on that input. But there’s more to the story. The WP Tavern’s Sarah Gooding took a deeper look at this and other AI experiments currently taking place.

Block Visibility is a WordPress plugin with over 9,000 active installs. Developer Nick Diego recently made the decision to convert his freemium product into a free one. He spoke with The WP Minute’s Eric Karkovack about the change and his WordPress journey so far.

Guildenberg, a new organization geared towards WordPress product founders, is up and running. The aim is to help with product monetization, accelerate adoption, and standardize compatibility. CEO Jonathan Wold has put out a call to founders who are interested in learning more.

What’s the state of workplace culture within the WordPress ecosystem? The Team Experience Index aims to find out. It’s an anonymous survey for employees designed to gather feedback that can be shared with emplo

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After a time formatting bug caused a 24-hour delay, WordPress 6.2, code-named “Dolphy”, was released on March 29th. According to core contributor Jean-Baptiste Audras, 607 people from at least 50 countries were part of the release squad.

Perhaps the biggest development in 6.2 is that the “beta” label has been removed from the Site Editor. The feature was first added in WordPress 5.9 and has undergone steady improvements. A new interface has been implemented this time around.

Other enhancements include a revamped UI for both the Block Inserter and individual block controls. Direct access to Openverse media has also been added, allowing users to search, download, and insert openly-licensed content into their sites.

For a rundown of key features, check out a handy guide from GoDaddy’s Courtney Robertson.

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WordPress.com alerted users that its access to the Twitter API was suspended on April 4. No specific reason was provided by Twitter. As Sarah Gooding of WP Tavern reports, the API powers Jetpack’s Social Sharing feature. The situation was in limbo for a few hours, but service was eventually restored. During the outage, users couldn’t automatically tweet out new content from their websites. Ironically (or not), Twitter recently announced a “new era of transparency” at the company.

WordPress core contributor Mario Santos recently posted a proposal outlining the Interactivity API. This would enable developers to build blocks that are interactive on the front end. Santos notes examples including the ability to “heart” a post and performing an instant search. The project is currently experimental. A plugin is available for testing.

The makers of Beaver Builder have announced the launch of Assistant Pro. It’s a cloud storage and community template platform. Free page builder templates available for download. In addition, a marketplace allows users to both buy and sell. Templates can also be stored in the cloud and shared with team members.

A couple of popular commercial plugins have released critical security fixes. Elementor Pro patched a vulnerability that impacted sites running the page builder in conjunction with WooCommerce. Meanwhile, Advanced Custom Fields PRO patched a PHP object injection vulnerability. If you use either plugin, be sure to update to the latest version.

The name iThemes has long been recognizable in the WordPress ecosystem. The maker of popular plugins like BackupBuddy and iThemes Security Pro has undergone a name change. In order to better reflect their products, the company has announced a rebrand to SolidWP. iThemes customers shouldn’t notice any pricing changes or support disruption during the transition.

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March 28th was supposed to mark the release of WordPress 6.2. But a date formatting bug has delayed release for a day. The new target is Wednesday, March 29 at 1pm EST.

The issue could potentially impact core features like date-based permalinks. But it might also negatively affect other functionality that relies on the correct date – think event bookings and eCommerce transactions. Over at WP Tavern, Sarah Gooding provided a summary of the issue and the ensuing discussion it stirred among developers.

When WordPress 6.2 is released, you’ll find plenty of new features to experiment with. The Block and Site Editors will receive a boost with the Style Book, support for sticky blocks, and an easier to use Navigation block.

For more details on WordPress 6.2, check out the official Field Guide, and a handy reference provided by Dan Knauss over at iThemes.

Links You Shouldn’t Miss

WordPress developers are starting to implement artificial intelligence (AI) into their products and using it to write code. That has raised a few concerns. Last week, we reported on the WordPress Plugin Review Team’s reminder that AI-generated code must be GPL compatible. Sarah Gooding recently dove further into the subject at WP Tavern. Even though we’re in the early stages of this AI revolution, Gooding says “it’s not too early to establish some best practices for using code generators.”

The ever-popular Yoast SEO plugin is looking to reduce the web’s carbon footprint. This week they integrated their crawl optimization feature into the free version of the plugin. The WP Minute’s Eric Karkovack spoke with Yoast’s Taco Verdonschot about the feature and how bot traffic negatively impacts the environment.

MasterWP’s Rob Howard published a look at WordPress plugin pricing over a six month period. Howard tracked a handful of popular plugins by taking daily screenshots of their pricing pages. The report shows that some plugins may be using deceptive pricing practices. For instance, stating that a product is on sale when it may have never been sold at the quoted “regular” price. Howard also shared some disagreement with The WP Minute’s recent editorial regarding tactics used by development firm Awesome Motive.

WordPress Developer and core contributor Nick Diego recently announced that his Block Visibility plugin is now completely free. As of version 3.0, all premium features have been merged into the free version. Be on the lookout for more coverage of this story from The WP Minute.

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BuddyBoss Brace yourself for an exciting update to WordPress! Big changes are coming, and you won’t want to miss it. Stay tuned for the big reveal!
CastAsync Too Busy to produce audiobooks, podcasts, or any audio content? With CastAsync, you can do it by spending only 5 minutes per day.

From the Grab Bag

Now it’s time to take a look at some other interesting topics shared by our contributors.

Gutenberg project head Matias Ventura has outlined the next phase of development: collaboration.
Development firm iThemes is set for a rebrand. They recently posted a teaser video on Twitter and are set to make an announcement in the near future.
The WordPress Community Team has shared highlights from its Contributor Working Group Inaugural Mentorship Chat. The group’s focus is to develop a project-wide mentorship program.
Looking for a new block theme to experiment with? Mike McAlister of tutorial site Ollie has released a free theme of the same name.

New Members This Week

Anne-Mieke Bovelett, follow @Bovelett

If you’re not a member yet, go to thewpminute.com/support/ to join.

Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:

Jeff Chandler
Courtney Robertson

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During the 2022 State of the Word event, Matt Mullenweg announced that the WordPress.org theme and plugin repositories would allow authors to categorize their entries as “Commercial” or “Community” products. Not long after, the feature became active.

As Sarah Gooding reports for WP Tavern, authors are starting to opt-in. Examples include Automattic’s Akismet and Jetpack plugins, which are designated as “Commercial”. Meanwhile, default themes such as Twenty Twenty-Three are designated as “Community”.

WordPress developer Ronald Huereca has written a summary of the feature, including the differences between the available categories. Also included is a guide for developers who’d like to opt-in.

Next up (listen to the podcast for more): WordPress Maintenance Minute by Austin Ginder!

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As one of the oldest WordPress form plugins, Contact Form 7 boasts over 5 million active installs. But it has tended to lag behind competitors when it comes to user interface. Developer Munir Kamal recently announced a third-party extension, CF7 Blocks, that adds block-based functionality. Longtime users will finally have an easy way to integrate their forms into the Block Editor.

StellarWP’s Matt Cromwell has developed a Zapier automation that will provide the daily number of downloads for a plugin residing in the WordPress.org repository. The stats are compiled in a Google Sheet document. Cromwell also breaks down the value of this data in a separate blog post.

2022 was a busy year for WordPress core. Core team representative Jb Audras shared a plethora of relevant data on Twitter to prove the point. For example, there were 2,597 commits made by a total of 988 contributors during the year. The thread features several charts that demonstrate how much work goes into building and maintaining the project. The complete review is available over on make.wordpress.org.

That’s not the only year-in-review worth mentioning. Several other WordPress community members have shared their own wrap-ups, including:

Syed Balkhi (Founder and CEO of Awesome Motive)
Carrie Dils (WordPress developer and LinkedIn Learning instructor)
Katie Keith (Barn2 Plugins)
Alex Standiford & Family (WordPress developer)
Wombat Plugins

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From the Grab Bag

Now it’s time to take a look at some other interesting topics shared by our contributors.

Which AI platform is better at writing a WordPress plugin? Keanan Koppenhaver pitted GitHub CoPilot and ChatGPT against each other to find out.
Justin Ferriman looks at why blocks may play a key role in the next WordPress gold rush.
With many WordPress community members moving to Mastodon, Antonio Cambronero has written a guide for integrating with the decentralized social platform.
Over at The Verge, Monique Judge asks for a return to the days of personal blogging.
WordCamp US will take place from August 24-26, 2023 in National Harbor, MD. The event has recently posted an open call for organizers.

Video of the week

Subscribe at youtube.com/@wpminute

Social media is a mess and walled gardens are a risk. Given the current situation, The WP Minute breaks down why WordPress is the most important piece of software for 2023.

Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:

Matt Cromwell
Justin Ferriman
Keanan Koppenhaver

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Attn: Creators and small brands

Buy a domain. Get some hosting. Install WordPress.

Don’t bemoan about bloated software, legacy code, or that WordPress is too complicated. Start learning the software all over again. Invest time into it. Play with it in the browser before you do anything else if you want to see what you’re getting into.

We’re watching another social media platform burn. Ashes comprised of our followers and years of content. My business of publishing WordPress news is getting hit with a steady decline of referral traffic from, what was, a major source of readers.

I’m forced to be on Mastodon, LinkedIn, and Facebook — again.

How many lessons must we learn about rented land? Feeding platforms that want our content to run a cash machine for advertising profits.

No more excuses. It’s time to learn WordPress, invest in open source, and become part of the community.

We took open source for grantedIt’s easy to look back at the last 5 years and point fingers at Gutenberg or FSE for piloting us all in a direction we originally didn’t want to go in.

Or to be cautions when there’s only one VERY influential person calling the shots. Especially when he’s also the CEO of two large tech companies, and responsible for a dozen other products.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy recently restated the Four Freedoms of WordPress, in the 2022 State of the Word:

“the freedom to run the program for any purpose, the freedom to study how the program works and change it so that it does your computing, as you wish.

The freedom to redistribute copies so that you can help your neighbor and the freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions, giving the community a chance to benefit from those changes.”

Josepha Haden ChomposyRead our recap of State of the Word 2022.

Name a bigger piece of open source software that has the presence of WordPress, with a more diverse set of users. From engineers, to mom-and-pop pizza shops, WordPress touches a lot of humans.

A community-driven effort, that for the most part, is 99% made in public accessible channels. Slack, GitHub, WordPress.org, meetups, WordCamps, etc. When was the last time you rang Tim Cook about your struggles with iOS? Elon about Twitter Blue?

Not perfect, but It’s the closest thing humanity has to a town meeting for a “utility app” that empowers us to broadcast to the world.

Twitter exodus should be the last warning you need to invest in a blog, a podcast, a newsletter, and RSS.

The flaws you don’t likeYes, WordPress is complex for a large percentage of the user base.

It costs money in licenses, hosting, and professional services. On the other hand, thousands of people contribute to it, make awesome stuff for it, and create educational material to support it.

An amalgamation of plugins & themes to solve one problem, a thousand different ways. Everyone has a way of doing WordPress. It’s no different than getting a second opinion on a bathroom remodel. “That’s not the way I’d do it!” the contractor would shout.

The messiness is the beauty we share in WordPress.

Adopting changeIf I could only reclaim all of the hours I spent trying some shiny new CMS only to come back to WordPress because of Gravity Forms, the baked-in user management, or the flexibility of content management.

There’s a comfort in this app. What’s old is new again, except for maybe the users.

The next two years will cement a place for the blue collar digital workers. The “handy person” of WordPress.

Elite programmers and RISD design graduates aren’t going to be happy, but we are the next generation of builders in the WordPress space.

This new generation might not love the software or the community like us, but they will look at WordPress as a necessary tool to build an online presence decentralized from the legacy social media sites.

Like QR codes in the last few years, RSS feeds will have a massive resurgence in educating a group of people on how your content can be accessed across the web, on a protocol level.

The key to escaping the walled gardens.

Why I love WordPress (and you should too!)This isn’t a competition over which blogging experience is better or which code base uses less compute power.

It’s about a piece of software, when invested in, shields you from the downfall of the social silos scrambling to absorb our art for profit.

Build a blog, a portfolio, or a web app for free. Head to a WordCamp and meet others. Take part in open slack meetings.

This community is the best part of WordPress. Your investment will be in the most important piece of software for humanity throughout the next decade.

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Matt Mullenweg held court at the annual State of the Word event on December 15. Several topics were touched, including the use of Gutenberg outside of WordPress, the return of in-person Meetups and WordCamps, and the announcement of a Community Summit set to take place in 2023.

Mullenweg also detailed a change to the WordPress.org Plugin and Theme repositories. Taxonomies have been added that allow authors to categorize their products as “commercial” or “community” - among other labels. The goal is to help users better understand the purpose of and level of support provided by theme and plugin authors. The feature is opt-in, and it’s already being put to use by some products.

As usual, the event was packed with insight and information. The WP Minute has a handy summary of key moments, along with a full transcript. It’s accompanied by a video highlight package that condenses the entire event down to just over 16 minutes.

You’ll also want to check out State of the Word recaps from both Sarah Gooding at WP Tavern and Courtney Robertson at GoDaddy.

Links You Shouldn’t Miss

There’s a new competitor in the WordPress email newsletter space. WordPress.com Newsletter was announced this week. The feature allows users to publish new posts as email newsletters, collect subscribers, and design a template. Monetization features are in the works with details forthcoming. Meanwhile, our own Matt Medeiros offers his analysis of the product via a new video.

The subject of WordPress nostalgia seems to be popular these days. The WP Minute’s Eric Karkovack looks at why that is and how it could help us shape the future of the community.

Security firm Wordfence has released a free vulnerability database API. Hosting companies, security researchers, and individual users will have access to a continuously updated repository of vulnerabilities. The company hopes that the community “will turn this data into free and commercial security products that will improve the security of the WordPress community.”

What does the future look like for ClassicPress? The open source project is a fork of WordPress that retains the TinyMCE-based Classic Editor. A new poll asks users whether the content management system should be “re-forked” to WordPress 6.0 or continue along its current path, based on WordPress 4.9.

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TweetGrab crawls your site and turns any embedded Tweets into screenshots with the click of a button.
ZipMessage Record and swap messages asynchronously with clients and others using video, screen, audio or text + Embed video intake forms in WordPress.
MainWP 4.3 includes Client Management, a new default theme, and an easy way to organize clients & sites from a single dashboard.
Corey Maass is selling his Social Link Pages WP plugin It creates social landing pages a la linktr.ee or carrd. 1000 active installs. $200 MRR. 30 active subscriptions. 45 lifetime licenses. Asking $5000.

From the Grab Bag

Now it’s time to take a look at some other interesting topics shared by our contributors.

Block Protocol is a project aimed at creating a universal block system. And although there is no official collaboration with WordPress, the project has announced plans for a WordPress plugin to be released in 2023.
As users continue to wrestle with leaving Twitter, the subject of what happens to embedded tweets has become a hot topic. Developer Keanan Koppenhaver has launched TweetGrab, a WordPress plugin that will turn embedded tweets into images.
Gutenberg is continuing to branch out beyond WordPress. Drupal Gutenberg 2.6 was recently released, improving block-based content building for the open-source CMS.
The WordPress Training team has posted an Individual Learner Survey and is asking for public feedback. The results will help to shape the materials provided on the Learn WordPress website.

Video of the week

Subscribe at youtube.com/@wpminute

The WP Minute explores the new WordPress.com newsletter offering, which looks very Jetpack-ish. Because it is.

Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:

Justin Ferriman
Courtney Robertson

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State of the Word 2022 has just completed another hybrid presentation.

A mix of livestream on the official WordPress YouTube channel and in-person attendees traveled to NYC to watch Matt Mullenweg and others update us on all things WordPress. We'll cover some of the highlights in today's post. Tune in to listen to the complete recording of the event on our podcast or in the player above.

Thanks for being a WP Minute reader/listener/viewer! Consider supporting us through a virtual coffee or joining our membership.

Video highlights

Key takeaways

Gutenberg will be bigger than WordPress itself. To mobile apps and the web.
bbPress forms now have Gutenberg
Using Blocks Everywhere plugin. Will be embedded in BuddyPress.
PEW Research using Gutenberg
Day One App using Gutenberg in web app
Mobile Gutenberg is dual-licensed GPL & MPL
Tumblr using Gutenberg
500 meetups doubled their events in 2022
1 WordCamp in 2021 to 22 in 2022
Community Summit is coming back
WordPress is turning 20 next year
Doing a new 10 year update to the "Milestones Book"
12,000 People took a Learn.WordPress course
New blog and showcase pages on WordPress.org bringing Jazz design languages over
22 million images. 1.1 million audio files. OpenVerse scours the web for Creative Commons images & other media. Now launched audio."Not fully embedded into WordPress yet"
Create themes just using blocks & style variations
We're at the end of Phase 2 of Gutenberg initial development
Create block theme "plugin" allows you to make themes from blocks
Zen mode is a new writing experience
Showing off "locked-in patterns." A way for consultants to pass sites off to clients.
1399 Release contributors
New core contributors to WordPress. "Think of them like the Wikipedia super-editors"
WordPress is what it is because of community
"Think of WordPress.org as an App Store for WordPress"
Matt likes to think of the community as fractal
Allow theme & plugin developers to self-identify as what their project goals are through a new taxonomy. Will be launching this month.
Phase 3 Gutenberg: Collaboration. Improvements for editorial workflows. Also bringing in OpenVerse.
Share your experience with the WordPress 2022 survey
Matt was excited about OpenAI and Stable Diffusion
WordPress Playground. A way to experience the entirety of the WordPress stack in the browser, without installing dependencies. 100% in the browser using web assembly.
How can we make WordPress that is a gift to the world for decades to come?
"WordPress belongs to all of us, but really we're taking care of it for the next generation."

Important links

wordpress.tumblr.com
Engineawesome.com using Gutenberg
communitysummit.wordpress.org/2023
WP20.wordpress.net
learn.wordpress.org
wordpress.org/openverse
https://wordpress.org/plugins/create-block-theme/
Make.wordpress.org
https://developer.wordpress.org/playground
photomatt.tumblr.com
https://distributed.blog

Future Predictions

Gutenberg will be bigger than WordPress (Said in 2021)
OpenVerse will make its way in to WordPress app
Create entire "themes" with blocks. See: "Create Block Theme" plugin
WordPress Playground. Opportunities to test WP, plugins, and themes in a browser without installing

Questions from the Q&A round

Last year at SoTW you announced the photo directory. 5,500+ photos. Where do we go from here? Can we provide stats to creators?
What do you think our biggest challenge WordPress is facing right now? What can we do as a community to lovingly address those challenges?
Can we do another all-female release squad in 2023?
What's the plan to full support of WordPress 8 (at least on the charts of .org)?
Will WordPress be a thing in the future?
Why are certifications on the roadmap for Learn?
Are we going to get to one universal theme?
Any thoughts on integrating GPT AI models into WordPress?
How do we keep the younger generation interested in WordPress?
Will WordPress have backwards compatibility for PHP

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What’s a web hosting provider’s role in content moderation? WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg recently weighed in.

Mullenweg was a guest on The Verge’s Decoder podcast and discussed the issue as it relates to WordPress VIP hosting. Specifically, he commented on a controversial story that was published in 2020 on the New York Post website. The Post is a WordPress VIP client.

The story covered material allegedly recovered from a laptop owned by Hunter Biden, the son of U.S. President Joe Biden. Debate over the origins of the material saw both Facebook and Twitter temporarily restrict links to the story.

Mullenweg says Automattic reviewed the matter but ultimately decided not to take action. Automattic has policies in place for content moderation, and Mullenweg referred to them as a “starting point” for looking deeper into a specific case.

Links You Shouldn’t Miss

Theme developer ILOVEWP published a report on the most popular WordPress plugins released in 2022. The report uses publicly available data for plugins in the official WordPress.org repository. In all, nearly 4,200 plugins have been added so far this year. Out of that, only 7 have achieved at least 50,000 active installations.

Did publishing platform Substack use unattributed code from open source competitor Ghost? Ghost’s founder and CEO John O’Nolan makes a case in a recent Twitter thread. In a response thread, Substack co-founder and CEO Chris Best says the whole thing is a misunderstanding. Rather, Substack’s custom theming API is merely compatible with Ghost. There’s a lot here to digest. Therefore, reading the threads from both parties is recommended to see where each side is coming from.

What will WordPress freelancers face in 2023? The WP Minute’s Eric Karkovack offered some predictions. Upgrading to PHP 8 and navigating an uncertain economic environment are among them.

Development firm Awesome Motive has introduced SendLayer, an email delivery service aimed at WordPress website owners. It requires a free API key and works in conjunction with the WP Mail SMTP plugin. Paid plans are being offered.

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TweetGrab crawls your site and turns any embedded Tweets into screenshots with the click of a button.
ZipMessage Record and swap messages asynchronously with clients and others using video, screen, audio or text + Embed video intake forms in WordPress.
MainWP 4.3 includes Client Management, a new default theme, and an easy way to organize clients & sites from a single dashboard.

From the Grab Bag

Now it’s time to take a look at some other interesting topics shared by our contributors.

The Block Editor is coming to the WordPress.org support forums. According to Sarah Gooding at WP Tavern, the WordPress.org Meta Team is experimenting with a basic implementation.
Popular form plugin Gravity Forms announced a release candidate for version 2.7. The new version includes a form template library, theme and block styling, along with improved spam protection.
Have an extra €1.6M to spend? Then you might be a candidate to purchase the Mailchimp for WordPress plugin. WP Tavern reports that plugin founder Danny van Kooten has expressed interest in selling via a post on Hacker News. The plugin is not officially affiliated with Mailchimp, but has over 2 million active installations.
Looking to improve the performance of your theme? The WordPress Developer Blog details how using theme.json and per-block styles can help.
The latest release of Gutenberg features a color coding for the WordPress Site Editor and an experimental split control UI for individual block settings.
Twitter recently announced plans to shut down its newsletter tool aimed at journalists, Revue, just one year after acquiring it. Users are set to lose access on January 18, 2023.

Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:

Birgit Pauli-Haack
Justin Ferriman
Courtney Robertson
Daniel Schutzsmith

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It’s a familiar refrain: the WordPress project needs contributors. But getting involved can be difficult for individuals who aren’t corporately sponsored. A new nonprofit organization is hoping to address this ongoing challenge.

The WP Community Collective looks to offer community-funded fellowships to financially support contributions to WordPress. Founded by Sé Reed, Katie Adams Farrell, and Courtney Robertson, the WPCC seeks both individual donations and corporate partnerships.

In its official announcement, the organization vows to promote transparency, community representation, and governance. Its first initiative involves the creation of an Accessibility Fellowship.

The WPCC says it plans to create a formalized organizational structure within the next year.

Next up (listen to the podcast for more):Michelle Frechette with the Community Minute!

Links You Shouldn’t Miss

The latest episode of WP Product Talk covers what happens when your business starts to scale. Matt Cromwell spoke with Jason and Kim Coleman about the process of budgeting and forecasting for WordPress products.

It’s time once again for the annual WordPress Survey. You are encouraged to share your thoughts and let the WordPress team know how you use the software. The survey will remain open throughout the rest of 2022.

ChatGPT, a chatbot powered by artificial intelligence, has surpassed 1 million users. The app claims the ability to answer follow-up questions and take instructions from humans. And, as WP Tavern reports, it also generated a WordPress plugin on demand. Web developer Johnathon Williams shared a recording of the process in action.

A proposed bill before the United States Congress has Facebook’s parent company Meta threatening to pull news-oriented content from its platform. The bill would allow news outlets to collectively bargain with social media companies for a larger percentage of ad revenue. A similar bill was passed last year in Australia.

Another WordPress-related acquisition is in the books. Development firm Strategy11 has acquired the WP Tasty and Nutrifox suite of plugins. The company also owns Formidable Forms, among other popular plugins.

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TweetGrab crawls your site and turns any embedded Tweets into screenshots with the click of a button.
ZipMessage Record and swap messages asynchronously with clients and others using video, screen, audio or text + Embed video intake forms in WordPress.
MainWP 4.3 includes Client Management, a new default theme, and an easy way to organize clients & sites from a single dashboard.

From the Grab Bag

Now it’s time to take a look at some other interesting topics shared by our contributors.

No-code tool Brizy announced that it has raised $2.4 million seed investment to create a multi-platform website builder.
WordPress developer Jos Velasco has proposed an option that would allow users to opt into security-related automatic theme and plugin updates.
Not sure if Black Friday sales are right for your WordPress company? A recent Twitter thread has emerged that features arguments both for and against them.
Google and parent company Alphabet are the target of a lawsuit filed by a group of 130,000 businesses in the United Kingdom. The claim alleges anti-competitive practices relating to its online advertising model.
Some social media users continue to migrate from Twitter to open platforms like Mastadon. Recently, tech philosopher Dr. Johnathan Flowers pointed out potential barriers for communities of color to make the move on the Tech Policy Press podcast.
Want to give back this holiday season? Then check out #WPGivesAHand and the WebDevStudios Charity Challenge for some initiatives involving the WordPress community.
Keeping with that generous spirit, website translation tool Weglot announced that they raised €52,000 for charity during their recent Giving Tuesday effort.

New Members This Week

Dennis Dornon, follow @dennisdornon, @MyMainWP
WPMarmite, follow @wpmarmite_en

If you’re not a member yet, go to thewpminute.com/support/ to join.

Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:

Justin Ferriman
John Locke

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Could you run your entire WordPress product business from a single spreadsheet? Today's WP Product Talk covers what happens when your business starts to scale. From a few hundred dollars, to a few hundred-thousand dollars, this conversation is jam-packed with a wealth of. bean counting knowledge.

Links

Kim Coleman
Jason Coleman
Matt Cromwell
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Welcome to a special edition of the WP Minute! Rather than our usual five minute roundup of WordPress news, we’ve recorded an expanded episode this week. Matt Medeiros and Eric Karkovack got together to discuss their picks for November’s most interesting and impactful stories.

Here’s a rundown of links mentioned in the show:

The new WordPress Developer Blog seeks to bridge the information gap between developers and changes to core. Hopefully it proves to be a one-stop shop to learn about new features, deprecated code, and more.

Elegant Themes announced that their Divi page builder will undergo some major changes under the hood. Version 5.0 will eschew shortcodes and become more tightly integrated with Gutenberg.

WordPress 6.1 said goodbye to the venerable “Just Another WordPress Site” tagline. New installs will feature an empty tagline, though the phrase will live on as placeholder text.

Mike McAlister’s concept for an OpenPress plugin sparked a lot of discussion. It would turn WordPress into a microblogging platform and allow other websites to subscribe to your content.

When it comes to WordPress, Eric Karkovack has a few simple hopes for 2023. Hint: they’re more about community than fancy new features.

The WordPress community spoke up, and Meetup.com listened to concerns about its use of an accessibility overlay. Now, they’re working together in an effort to make the platform accessible by tackling problems at their roots.

If you’re a fan of the puzzle game Wordle, check out WordlePress. Ross Wintle’s creation mixes the fun of the original and challenges your knowledge of core WordPress PHP functions.

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TweetGrab crawls your site and turns any embedded Tweets into screenshots with the click of a button.
ZipMessage Record and swap messages asynchronously with clients and others using video, screen, audio or text + Embed video intake forms in WordPress.

New Members This Week

Dennis Dornon, follow @dennisdornon, @MyMainWP
WPMarmite, follow @wpmarmite_en

If you’re not a member yet, go to thewpminute.com/support/ to join.

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The annual State of the Word event has been scheduled for December 15, 2022 from 1:00 - 2:30pm EST. WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg will take to the microphone to discuss the year that was and what lies ahead.

The event will take place in New York City and will also be live streamed. If you’d like to attend in-person, there’s a survey available to fill out.

Meanwhile, you can also submit questions to Mullenweg ahead of time by emailing ask-matt@wordcamp.org or during the event via YouTube’s chat feature.

Links You Shouldn’t Miss

The WP Minute’s Eric Karkovack has a wish list of things he’d love to see from WordPress in 2023. More than any technical enhancements, his hopes include better communication, collaboration, and more opportunities to get together for in-person events.

Tom McFarlin contributed to The WP Minute with an in-depth tutorial on working with multiple user metadata queries. He takes us step-by-step through the process of retrieving a custom set of user records.

WordPress.org is launching a blog aimed at developers. Sarah Gooding of WP Tavern reports that the project is currently in beta testing. The focus will be on new features that impact theme and plugin developers.

According to WP Tavern, the Divi page builder will undergo some major changes in 2023. Version 5.0 isn’t slated to see new features, rather a complete rewrite of its underlying framework. The revamp will be built using React and aims to improve compatibility with the Gutenberg Block Editor.

Last week, we reported on Mike McAlister's concept for OpenPress, a plugin that would turn a WordPress install into a syndicated microblogging platform. This week, Alex Standiford expands on the idea and wonders if WordPress might one day have a bidirectional relationship with social media platforms.

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Equalized Digital Get 50% off Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker November 20-30 with coupon code BlackFriday22 and start making your website accessible.

From the Grab Bag

Now it’s time to take a look at some other interesting topics shared by our contributors.

WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg announced that Tumblr will soon add support for ActivityPub, an open and decentralized protocol for connecting to Mastodon and other social media platforms. The announcement comes as more users are contemplating Twitter alternatives.
Speaking of Tumblr, Nyasha Green at MasterWP looks at the platform’s recent resurgence.
Sell Courses Online have

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Lots has changed for the WordPress website building experience over the last 4 years and today's WP Product Talk has been on the frontlines of it.

Richard Tabor joins the podcast to talk about the major changes in Gutenberg, Site Editing, and the future of WordPress. Looking for a healthy dose of what's under the hood of your favorite CMS? Don't miss this episode.

Links

Kim Coleman
Richard Tabor
Matt Cromwell
Paid Memberships Pro
GiveWP
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Hiring is probably the hardest thing to do in any business.

There's so much that needs to go into the interview process, onboarding, and we haven't even begun to think about the actual job description! Lucky for us, Kim Lipari joins WP Product talk to give us all the advice we need to become better employers in the WordPress ecosystem.

If you enjoyed today's episode, please share it on social media and say thanks to the hosts!

Links

Kim Coleman
Kim Lipari
Matt Cromwell
Paid Memberships Pro
GiveWP
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The 6th episode of WP Product Talk featuring Zach Tirell of WP Events Calendar.

Listen in to find out how to hire and manage contractors for your WordPress product (or agency!) business. If you're a WordPress freelancer, this is a fantastic episode to listen to and reverse engineer to better position yourself with employers.

If you enjoyed this episode, please say thanks to the hosts and consider sharing this on social media!

Links

Kim Coleman
Zach Tirrell
Matt Cromwell
Paid Memberships Pro
GiveWP
Support the WP Minute

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The idea of using WordPress to power a social networking site isn’t new. The BuddyPress plugin has offered this functionality since 2009. But Elon Musk’s recent takeover of Twitter (and the ensuing chaos) has WordPress community members taking another look at what’s possible.

Mike McAlister recently shared a concept for OpenPress, a plugin that would turn your WordPress install into a microblogging platform. Your site’s content can then be connected with, and followed by, other sites using OpenPress.

The aim is to build a network of related content that allows creators to maintain ownership. As McAlister puts it, the network “is powered by individuals, but connected as a community.”

Who knows where the OpenPress concept will go. But it’s an interesting proposition for those looking to ditch Twitter and other corporately-owned communities.

Links You Shouldn’t Miss

The WP Minute’s Eric Karkovack is intrigued by the potential of managed WooCommerce hosting. He took a look at what it can and can’t do to simplify the eCommerce platform.

In an effort to decrease the barriers to contributing to WordPress core, project lead developer Helen Hou-Sandí has proposed using GitHub Codespaces. The tool allows for the rapid setup of a development environment. Sarah Gooding has the details at WP Tavern.

In a tongue-and-cheek effort to compete with Twitter’s new account verification system, Tumblr is selling two “useless” checkmarks for a one-time fee of $7.99. Yes, that’s one penny less than Twitter’s service. The microblogging platform is owned by Automattic. To paraphrase CEO (and WordPress co-founder) Matt Mullenweg’s tweet, two checkmarks are cooler than one.

What’s your top WordPress-related story for 2022? The WP Minute wants to know! Share your thoughts with us on Twitter.

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From the Grab Bag

Now it’s time to take a look at some other interesting topics shared by our contributors.

WordPress 6.1.1 was released on November 15 and fixes a total of 50 bugs.
If you missed out on WordCamp Italia 2022, a nearly 9-hour recording of the event is available for viewing.
How would you like the WordPress Site Editor to work? What pain points would you like to see resolved? The project has put out a call for user feedback.
It’s been a long time coming, but WooCommerce 7.1 is finally adding the ability to store orders in a

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Feed drop time! Feed drop is when an entirely new podcast shows up in a podcast feed...just like this one!

I'm sharing my friend, Matthew Bliss' Dead Drop podcast with you. It's just like the WP Minute, short form news, but for the video game industry. From the casual gamer to the sweaty l33t, this podcast has it all for your gaming needs.

Links

Matthew Bliss on Twitter
Dead Drop Podcast
Want to feed drop your podcast? Contact us.
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The advent of WordPress Full Site Editing (FSE) has sparked plenty of discussion within the community. But it’s not just the technical aspects that have received attention. Giving the feature a more user-friendly name has also been a hot topic.

On November 4, 2022, WordPress project Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy announced that the feature will be simply referred to as the “Site Editor”.

Simplicity was only one consideration, however. Haden Chomphosy notes that the term can also be effectively translated into hundreds of languages. Given WordPress’ considerable international user base, a consistent name is desirable.

Paired with the Block Editor, the Site Editor name should provide users with a clearer distinction between editing environments.

Links You Shouldn’t Miss

When we discuss the challenges facing WordPress, we often focus on WordPress core. However, The WP Minute’s Eric Karkovack says that the WordPress Ecosystem Needs Closer Scrutiny. He opines that what happens in the world of themes and plugins can be just as consequential.

The phrase “Just another WordPress site” should be familiar to anyone who has installed the software. It’s been the default setting for the Site Tagline for years - but no more. Sarah Gooding at WP Tavern reports that, as of WordPress 6.1, the tagline is now blank. For the sake of nostalgia, the phrase does stick around in the form of placeholder text.

In the wake of WordPress.org’s removal of active install growth data from the plugin repository, developers are still looking for relevant information. In response, the folks at AyeCode have launched wp-rankings.com. The site scrapes the repository’s popular plugin data and shows historical comparisons for active installations. WP Tavern has more details on the project.

If you couldn’t make it to Spain for WordCamp Sevilla this past weekend, the event has published a virtual tour using the Spatial metaverse platform. Visitors can create an avatar, walk around the space, and access a stream of the event.

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See your ad in this space!

From the Grab Bag

Now it’s time to take a look at some other interesting topics shared by our contributors.

Designer Anders Norén has released Oaknut, a WordPress block theme that lets users create a profile page similar to that of Linktree.
Big Orange Heart have announced that their WordFest Live event has been rescheduled to Friday, December 16, 2022.
If you run a WooCommerce store and use Stripe for payment processing, be on the lookout for fraudulent orders.
Wordfence takes a look at a security flaw in the Blog2Social WordPress plugin

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WordPress 6.1, “Misha”, was released on November 1. The new version features more than 120 enhancements and fixes over 240 bugs.

Performance was a focus in this release, including increased efficiencies within WP_Query and the REST API. Query caching is said to provide a significant speed boost. WordPress core contributor Jonny Harris has tweeted test results to back up the claim.

Also of note are multiple accessibility enhancements, a myriad of improvements to the block editor, the ability to use block-based template parts within “Classic” themes, the introduction of the Twenty Twenty-Three default theme, and a whole lot more.

Check out the WordPress 6.1 Field Guide for a full rundown of what’s new. And if you’re interested in who contributed to the release, Jean-Baptiste Audras has put together some detailed contribution statistics.

Links You Shouldn’t Miss

The 2022 Web Almanac reports that 72% of WordPress-powered mobile pages may be overusing native lazy loading on images, resulting in a negative impact on performance. Sarah Gooding at WP Tavern offers more details and some possible reasons for this surprising number.

Gutenberg project lead Matías Ventura recently highlighted some improvements to the block editor’s writing experience. Meanwhile, a blog post at Make WordPress Core has further details and demos to check out.

eCommerce platform (and WooCommerce rival) Shopify saw rapid growth during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, many of the online stores opened during that time didn’t last.

Classifieds listings buy yours

See your ad in this space!

From the Grab Bag

Now it’s time to take a look at some other interesting topics shared by our contributors.

Eric Karkovack and Dan Knauss discussed ideas for improving the WordPress user experience on the Post Status Excerpt.
The Bertha AI Writing Assistant has introduced the ability to generate images based on artificial intelligence (AI) from within WordPress.
Elon Musk’s controversial purchase of Twitter has been finalized. And while some people have vowed to leave the platform, Sarah Gooding reports that many WordPress community members are planning to stick around.
The new Missing Menu Items plugin adds hard-to-find block and site editor links to the WordPress Appearance menu. WP Tavern recently took a look at what it does.
Matt Mullenweg shared thou

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The saga of WordPress.org active install data continues as more details trickle out. At WP Tavern, Sarah Gooding reported on an appearance by WordPress contributor Samuel Otto Wood on the WPwatercooler podcast.

Wood says the decision to remove the data originated from a private Slack conversation amongst contributors that was started by WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg back in May.

It has also been revealed that the removal was not due to security or privacy issues, as previously indicated. According to Wood, the data chart was removed because “by and large, nobody was using them”.

Regardless of the reasoning behind the decision or worthiness of the data, no official outreach appears to have been made by project leadership to the developer community.

Meanwhile, WordPress community members continue to voice concerns via a Trac ticket started by RebelCode CEO Mark Zahra. The ticket was created on September 30 and has over 100 comments.

Links You Shouldn’t Miss

The first ever WordPress Documentation team Contributor Day took place on Tuesday, October 25. The virtual event was held to help team members catch up on tasks and onboard new contributors.

Development agency Human Made has published 1001 ways to implement Gutenberg blocks. The guide includes a handy flowchart for determining what blocks to use and when to use them.

The inaugural WPWealthBuilder Summit has put a call out for speakers and sponsors. The virtual event focuses on building personal wealth through WordPress and takes place on February 3, 2023.

Sarah Gooding of WP Tavern reports that the Openverse Audio Catalog now boasts 800,000 files that are available free of charge. Formerly known as Creative Commons Search, Openverse is now part of the WordPress project.

Classifieds listings buy yours

WebDevStudios WebDevStudios is seeking a full time, remote Engineering Manager candidate interested in joining our growing team.
Sitewide Sales Are you literally losing sleep on Black Friday? Schedule your WordPress site's Black Friday sale so you can sleep off Thanksgiving dinner.
GapScout Sign-Up for Early Access - AI that scans reviews (on WordPress.org or elsewhere), revealing to you the most profitable opportunities!
WP Mayor Reach a larger, targeted audience of WordPress users with your Black Friday and Cyber Monday offers. Get them listed on WP Mayor.

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In today's episode of WP Product Talk, we'll explore the methods organizations go through to level up entry-level WordPress developers on their team.

This is a fantastic discussion with your weekly hosts Kim Colemen & Matt Cromwell. Today's guest is Courtney Robertson, Web Design Dev Advocate at GoDaddy Pro.

If you enjoyed this episode, please re-share it on social media and follow the hashtag #wpproducttalk on Twitter.

Links

Kim Coleman
Matt Cromwell
Courtney Robertson
Paid Memberships Pro
GiveWP
Support the WP Minute

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Discussion rolls on within the WordPress community regarding the removal of active install growth data from the WordPress.org plugin repository - but still no firm resolution is in sight. As we reported last week, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg said that adding some form of stats for plugin developers is “doable”. We’ll have to wait and see where the discussion goes from here.

Meanwhile, The WP Minute’s Eric Karkovack wrote about what plugin developers should realistically expect from the WordPress project and its leadership. It might be that the project simply isn’t there to help developers make money. Instead, their focus is likely trained on providing us with a platform to build upon. How a developer monetizes their product is ultimately up to them.

And Alex Denning of Ellipsis argues that WordPress.org is an ineffective place to distribute plugins. He provides some key data to back up this point. On the other side of the coin, Liquid Web’s Matt Cromwell respectfully disagrees.

Next up (listen to the podcast for more): Matt Cromwell discusses distributing plugins via WordPress.org

Links You Shouldn’t Miss

Security is the focus of WordPress 6.0.3, which was released on October 17. Be sure to update your websites, as this release patches several vulnerabilities.

If you’d like a rundown of the vulnerabilities involved in WordPress 6.0.3, Patchstack offers a full analysis.

Users of the Shortcodes Ultimate plugin will also want to update to the latest version. Sarah Gooding of WP Tavern reports that a fix for an undisclosed security issue was recently added.

Registration is now open for WordPress Accessibility Day. The 24-hour virtual event will take place from November 2-3 and will feature a bevy of presentations that aim to demystify the subject.

From the Grab Bag

Now it’s time to take a look at some other interesting topics shared by our contributors.

WordPress 6.1 Release Candidate 2 is now available for testing.
Designer and software engineer Mike McAlister announced his new project, Ollie - an educational hub for WordPress creators.
Development agency 10up has published a guide to Gutenberg Best Practices.
Sarah Gooding provides details on the new Plugin Dependencies feature plugin that is available for testing. It’s an effort to help developers specify plugin dependencies via WordPress core.
Devin Walker introduces himself as the new General Manager of iThemes, and hints at some changes coming to the longtime WordPress development company.
Jetpack Social has added a

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Have you started a WordPress theme or plugin that didn't quite succeed like you had hoped it would? It might be time to sunset your WordPress product.

There's 2 major things to consider: your mental health & your existing customers/users. When I spun down my first go at WordPress themes, it was embarrassing. The crazy thing was, the embarrassment was only in my head. I didn't want to give up, I wanted to keep going. Shutting it down felt like a failure. It took me years to realize that shutting down, provided me more clarity and the best lessons in marketing I've ever learned.

But how do you relay this to your customers? Especially if the recently paid you? Today's episode of Product Talk featuring Kim Coleman, Devin Walker, and Matt Cromwell will touch on all the points I just mentioned.

Be sure to follow them and tune in to their Twitter Space every week!

Links

Kim Coleman
Devin Walker
Matt Cromwell
Paid Memberships Pro
GiveWP
Support the WP Minute

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The recent pushback regarding WordPress.org’s removal of active install growth data shouldn’t be too surprising. It’s not the first time that a decision made by WordPress leadership has ruffled some feathers.

But perhaps the people most directly impacted by the move – plugin developers – were a bit unexpected. After all, a thriving plugin ecosystem is key to keeping WordPress growing and relevant. It’s fair to wonder why anyone would want to upset this particular apple cart.

Logic tells me that you’d want to do everything possible to keep this group happy. That in turn encourages developers to continue to invest in the platform. By contributing their products, and perhaps being part of the Five for the Future program, there are numerous opportunities to make a positive impact.

However, it’s not quite that simple. The above assumes that: a) everyone’s on the same page, and b) all involved parties have purely altruistic motives. That’s just not the reality of WordPress – or any other community on this planet.

There’s always going to be some push-and-pull between plugin developers and WordPress. The question is: what should plugin developers realistically expect from the platform and its leadership?

The Limited Partnership between Developers and Leadership

On the surface, the partnership between plugin developers and WordPress leadership is mutually beneficial. At their best, these entities can help each other thrive. And each deserves gratitude for the role they play.

But there are limits. Even though the WordPress project is open-source and not-for-profit, money is still at stake. Many plugin developers and service providers (including Matt Mullenweg’s Automattic) are for-profit businesses. And while most want to provide benefit to others, they’re still obliged to consider their needs first.

This brings us to the issue of active install growth data for plugins. In a competitive landscape, entrepreneurs will undoubtedly use available data to their advantage. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – it’s just the way business works.

Yet sometimes how that data is leveraged will go against the grain. It could impact the WordPress community and project in ways that leadership isn’t comfortable with. Not everyone is interested in a level playing field. And we’ve seen instances where companies have used dark patterns and questionable marketing tactics to get ahead.

Meanwhile, WordPress.org has made these stats publicly available for years. Plugin authors have made it clear that the data is useful to them. However, no rule says WordPress must continue doing so. Fair or not, they can add or subtract metrics as they see fit.

The optics of the decision were decidedly unflattering. And there has been plenty of debate on whether removing the data was justified. Still, this friction is a prime example of the relationship’s limitations.

WordPress Doesn’t Have to Help Developers Make Money

Whether you’re a plugin developer or a freelancer serving clients, it’s possible to make a good living with WordPress. The software provides a solid foundation on which to build your business. Odds are that this narrative describes many people’s journeys to some degree.

We can also admire the WordPress community’s history of being relatively open and its willingness to share knowledge. It’s something we see at WordCamps, on social media, and within walled gardens such as Post Status and The WP Minute.

Indeed, the software is wonderful and so are many of the people involved. But we shouldn’t confuse them with the goals of the WordPress project and its leadership.

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The conversation regarding the removal of WordPress plugin active install growth data has continued this week. The data chart was officially removed from the WordPress.org plugin repository back on September 29, 2022.

Even as plugin authors and other community members have asked for the chart’s return, no formal reason has been given for its removal. The possibilities of privacy and security issues have been brought up, but there’s been no official announcement from WordPress leadership.

Over at WP Tavern, Sarah Gooding reports on a Trac ticket discussion started by Mark Zahra. WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg has chimed in and said that adding relevant statistics for plugin authors “...will take some work but it’s doable.” Mullenweg also responded to a tweet from Zahra stating, “We’ll add something new for small plug-in devs.”

Meanwhile, the community continues to express concern. Investor and artist Jean Galea wondered if WordPress is entering a “death spiral”. And MasterWP’s Rob Howard says WordPress may be turning away its biggest fans.

Next up (listen to the podcast for more): Michelle Frechette with the Community Minute!

Links You Shouldn’t Miss

MasterWP’s WordCamp travel sponsorship program plans to keep on rolling in 2023. It aims to enable a diverse group of people to attend events by defraying travel costs. This year, the program helped seven recipients head to WordCamp US in San Diego, California.

Rob Howard wrote about the reasoning behind and the impact of the program. There’s also a form for anyone interested in receiving a travel stipend to attend WordCamp US 2023 in National Harbor, Maryland.

Howard also put out a call for potential sponsors. For our part, the WP Minute has made a $1,500 contribution.

From the Grab Bag

Now it’s time to take a look at some other interesting topics shared by our contributors.

A hosted WooCommerce package will be coming to WordPress.com in 2023.
Carl Alexander took a look at the ups and downs of contributing to WordPress outside of the official project.
Matt Cromwell and Kim Coleman sat down with AccessAlly founder Nathalie Lussier to discuss outlining a WordPress product roadmap.
WordPress 6.1 will see a performance boost, thanks to the addition of database query caching.
A familiar name is listed in Newsweek’s “America's 100 Most Loved Workplaces 2022” rankings. Automattic, owner of WordPress.com and founded by Matt Mullenweg, came in at #31 this year.
Open source search engine Meilisearch recently

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WP Product talk is back with co-hosts Matt Cromwell and Kim Coleman sitting down to discuss outlining a WordPress product roadmap. Nathalie Lussier joins the crew to chat about how she and her team plan the AccessAlly course software development.

Follow Matt & Kim on Twitter to participate in the weekly WP Product talk Spaces. Stay subscribed here to catch the edited recording!

Links

Kim Coleman
Nathalie Lussier
Matt Cromwell
Paid Memberships Pro
AccessAlly
GiveWP
Support the WP Minute

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The WordPress plugin ecosystem has been a big topic of discussion recently. WP Mayor’s Mark Zahra started things off with an in-depth article regarding deceptive marketing practices. Zahra provides specific examples of questionable tactics used by WordPress plugin developers. He also calls on the community - himself included - to think about the potential harm to WordPress’ reputation.

Zahra didn’t stop there. He also noted that the WordPress.org plugin repository has removed the active install growth chart. This feature allowed plugin developers to gauge how their products performed over time. Over at WP Tavern, Sarah Gooding reports that there’s been no clear indication of why the metric was pulled. Zahra also expanded on the topic over at MasterWP.

And if you’re interested in learning how to monetize your own WordPress product, be sure to listen to Kim Coleman and Matt Cromwell’s WP Product Talk Twitter Space.

Links You Shouldn’t Miss

The WordPress themes team has decided to delay the inclusion of locally-hosted Google fonts in legacy default themes until version 6.2. As Sarah Gooding reports at WP Tavern, the move was originally scheduled for version 6.1. This has some community members concerned, as a German court recently ruled that remotely-hosted fonts are a violation of the European Union’s GDPR laws.

The 2022 Web Almanac was released by HTTP Archive. The report aims to point out trends in the industry. As you may have guessed, WordPress once again has the top spot in CMS usage, with a reported 35% market share.

Last week’s story covering the controversial, racially-tinged remarks on a now-removed episode of the WP-Tonic podcast continues to spark discussion. WP Watercool took on the topic of microagression, while Allie Nimmons and Michelle Frechette of Underrepresented in Tech looked at the idea of reverse racism.

From the Grab Bag

Now it’s time to take a look at some other interesting topics shared by our contributors.

WordPress 6.1 Beta 3 is now available for testing.
WordCamp Phoenix has been scheduled for March 24-25, 2023. Outside of WordCamp US, it's the only stateside camp confirmed for 2023.
Jonathan Wold discusses Using The Loop To Grow A WordPress Product Company
Dan Knauss at Post Status asks WooCommerce vs. Shopify: Why Do We Make It So Hard?
WP Motivate explores

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Matt Cromwell and Kim Coleman are back with their second episode of WP Product Talk!

They're joined by Lesley Sim, of Newsletter Glue, to discuss the decision-making around building a new product. You could be at the crossroads of launching a new major feature or pivoting your whole WordPress product business. Don't miss this episode!

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There is a new demo to try out on make.wordpress.org where you can run WordPress directly in the browser without a PHP server. Although it is not fully stable yet, it is a major breakthrough that could transform learning, contributing, and using WordPress. Go check out the post to learn more about how you can test it out.

Jesse Friedman, Director of innovation at Automattic was interviewed on the WP Minute about the wp.cloud initiative. If you would like to know more about this, go listen to that interview.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce Blocks 8.6.0 was released with support for a new block that displays cross-sells for products that are based on the current product in the customer’s cart. Sarah Gooding covers the details over at the WP Tavern.

From Our Contributors and Producers

Nyasha Green, the Editorial Director over at MasterWP was further encouraged to write “Enough with this woke stuff: and other racist speech you can unlearn” after WP-Tonic’s co-hosts died on a hill attempting to deconstruct racism in the workplace, following an article regarding Twillio layoffs. The episode has since been removed from their podcast feed and YouTube channel.

To hear an archived clip, Cameron Jones shared an article from Tom Finley that discusses racism as a weed and this type of speech does not represent WordPress.

Further, Allie Nimmons has announced a “How to be an Ally” workshop. It kicks off on October 4th at 3PM.

If you want to try out a visual collaboration tool with your clients, the Atarim plugin is now available in the WordPress Repository. This is a great tool to use when you have more than one person making changes to a website that you are working on.

Have questions about WordPress? Daniel Schutzsmith shared a link for

Ask.wp. This is a project by Terry Tsang to act as a "Super Brain" for the WordPress community using a chat bot.

Want to start your week with a little motivation? Kathy Zant and Michelle Frechette have teamed up with a new podcast called WP Motivate. You can listen to their first podcast to…get motivated.

Want to learn more about monetizing free WordPress products? Go check out the episode on the WP Minute with Kim Coleman and Matt Cromwell with their new WP Product Talk Twitter Space.

Canva is jumping into the website building game citing that 2 million websites were made with their beta release of their web builder software. Jamie Marsland recorded a YouTube video about this and It will be interesting to see if Canva impacts WordPress in the future.

Is there “angst” in the page builder community with the direction of Gutenberg and WordPress core? Paul Lacey shares an article from David Waumsley about how the direction of WordPress is forcing him to take a look at other products. David’s article on researching Jamstack

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Today's episode is a recording of Kim Coleman's and Matt Cromwell's WP Product Talk Twitter Space.

The duo share their professional WordPress updates and talk WordPress product pricing. The good, the bad, of offering free WordPress products. Make sure to give them a follow and tune in to their Twitter Space happening today with Lesley Sim. Listen here.

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If you missed Matt Mullenweg's address at WordCamp US 2022, he snuck in a mention of the new hosting infrastructure without much context around it.

Could Automattic be building out the next WordPress hosting company behind the scenes? What if you wanted to launch a WooCommerce specific hosting company? Possibly a solution that end users didn't even know was running WordPress?

I reached out to Jesse Friedman, Director of innovation at Automattic, now leading the WP.cloud product with a series of questions to explore this new topic a bit further.

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Adobe set to acquire Figma

If you’re a designer or UI specialist in the WordPress world, chances are you already know about the Adobe/Figma deal. A $20 Billion dollar deal in cash and stock – 40 times Figma revenue – shocked us and launched more memes, probably using Photoshop, than we’ve in the tech space since…well about 4 months ago.

4 Years ago, Figma donated an organizational membership to WordPress.org. Will you continue to use Figma? Tweet at us.

In Mullenweg’s recent WCUS address, he snuck in the mention of Automattic’s new cloud service – wp.cloud.

It looks to be infrastructure for cloud providers wanting to serve up some WordPress hosting, leveraging .com’s sprawling CDN & other technology. Products like Jetpack already use .com’s CDN as part of their services, as I’m sure other products like VideoPress do.

I reached out to Jesse Friedman, who leads the wp.cloud initiative, for an interview. Here’s a sneak peek of that, which airs next week – subscribe so you don’t miss it!

Hosting news continues with WP Engine jumping into the WordPress flavor hosting with a new WooCommerce offering. While Siteground surprises us with their Easy Digital Downloads speciality hosting.

Next up (listen to the podcast for more): Michelle Frechette with the Community Minute & Amber Hinds with the Accessibility Minute!

Links you shouldn’t miss

There’s a handful of other links you shouldn’t miss this week. These links should help you stay informed around the moving and shaking of WordPress:

Matt Mullenweg WCUS Address

This is a direct recording of his livestream session. If you missed it or want to hear the audience Q&A round, click to tune in.

Why WordPress and Wix will Always Be Worlds Apart

The WP Minute’s Eric Karkovack, breaks down a detailed comparison on how much WordPress & Wix differ.

Help Test WordPress 6.1

The WordPress 6.1 Beta is out! Remember, don’t complain…explain…your issues by testing the latest version before it's released.

From the grab bag

Some of these links might interest you – dive in!

ACF 6.0 is released
WebP pulled from 6.x
Syed Bahlki makes an interesting prediction about the future of WordPress
Matt Cromwell launched WP Product Shop Talk Twitter Spaces. Subscribe to The WP Minute as this show will be exclusively syndicated through our podcast feed.

Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:

Eric Karkovack
Daniel Shutzsmith
Raquel Landefeld

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Today's episode is a recording from the official WCUS 2022 livestream found in this video.

We've extracted the Matt Mullenweg session which includes some of his outlook on WordPress 6.1, community, and a Q&A session from the audience. If you had a chance to attend WCUS, send us a tweet about your favorite session or experience.

Photograph by Daniel Schutzsmith

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Our episode is recorded this week by Michelle Frechette.

News

Sarah Gooding over at the WP Tavern posted an article asking Gutenberg Contributors to test block-based templates in WordPress Classic Themes. During Matt Mullenweg’s Q&A session at WordCamp last week, there was a discussion about helping with block adoption. If you would like to see what this is all about and help test, jump over to make.wordpress.org.

Did you know that the WordPress Plugins Directory crossed 60,000 plugins? Sarah Gooding tweeted about this incredible milestone.

Security

Eric Karkovack shared the PSA to update the WordPress Two-Factor plugin ASAP. There are two security fixes that are available on GitHub.

Events

WordCamp Nepal 2022 is scheduled for the 5th & 6th of November 2022 at the Chitwan Garden Resort (CGR), Bharatpur Nepal. It was announced that the Ujwal Thapa memorial scholarship will be available to 7 eligible candidates who want to attend this WordCamp.

The 2023 WordCamp US will be held in National Harbor, Maryland from August 23-25, 2023. The announcement was made at WordCamp US last week.

From Our Contributors and Producers

Still thinking about going out on your own? Justin Ferriman, who ran LearnDash shares in his blog that it is important to keep an eye on reviews to find market share opportunities. Justin shares a great list to get started with software reviews and shares some third-party suggestions.

Chris Weigman introduced Kana, which is a simple and powerful WordPress development environment. If you are looking for a local development environment you can get started by visiting Chris’ website.

After seeing many great photos from WordCamp US, Brad Williams shared this tweet with the job board. Matt Medeiros listed the 35 companies hiring over at the WP Minute.

CNBC Make It showed that WordPress is number 10 for hiring on the work-from-anywhere and most in-demand jobs.

GoDaddy is launching a preview of Managed WooCommerce Stores to US-based customers. It is the largest investment to date in eCommerce. If you are looking for a solution to multichannel selling for your customers, you may want to go check out the tools being offered.

A report in SEO journal announced that Bluehost unveiled a new WordPress eCommerce solution that simplifies creating a store with a point-and-click interface.

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Editor's note: How I imagine the background music to WordCamp US 2022

News

The new default theme, Twenty Twenty-Three, will be a stripped-down base theme with many style variations built by the WordPress design community. This theme is being released to make theme development exciting again. Jump over to the Gutenberg times to read about variations and see the latest on the “good and bad”.

WordPress.com has announced that they can build and design a website for new business owners, in four business days or less. If you are on a budget, the cost is $499, plus an additional purchase of the WordPress.com premium plan. It will be interesting to see how this will grow and if it has any impact on the WordPress professional freelance community.

Security

Wordfence PSA: on September 6, 2022, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team was alerted to the presence of a vulnerability being exploited in BackupBuddy, a WordPress plugin that has around 140,000 active installations. This vulnerability makes it possible for unauthenticated users to download arbitrary files from the affected site which can include sensitive information. There is minimal sharing about the details of this vulnerability as it is still an active threat. If you are interested in reading more jump over to the Wordfence website.

Sarah Gooding over at WPTavern wrote an article that WordPress’ Security Team announced it will be dropping support for versions 3.7 through 4.0 on December 1, 2022.

Events

WordCamp US has started! Michelle Frechette writes about how to make the most of your Wordcamp US experience with fewer participants and dealing with COVID restrictions. Use the official #WCUS hashtag to follow the online WCUS conversation. If you are there, say hi to Raquel Landefeld who is our community lead at the WP Minute.

If you are a new camper, go listen to the Matt Report and Gina Marie Innocent to get more ideas on how to make the most of your WordCamp experience.

From Our Contributors and Producers

Phil Crumm has a thread on Twitter that the WordPress community is uneasy about the growing pace of acquisitions.

His hot take may be correct as the news that GridPane has completed a seed round of funding, including a significant strategic investment from Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com, WooCommerce, WordPress VIP, and Jetpack.

Another acquisition

Rocketgenius, the company behind Gravity Forms, has acquired Gravity Flow and Gravity Experts. The acquisition will help the Gravity Forms community by strengthening the portfolio of WordPress product offerings.

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Dave Rodenbaugh, founder of Recapture.io, shares a fascinating anecdote with Angela Bowman, WordPress Meetup organizer and podcaster (Women in WP), about a relatively new WordPress user (Dave’s daughter) who had built a WordPress site with Dave’s help last year but struggled to get another one launched on her own this summer.

Dave’s daughter and her boss, who very much wanted to use WordPress, spent five weeks trying to get WordPress to work for them. They finally gave up and gave Wix a try. One week later, they had a finished, professional-looking site.

Angela and Dave talk about the reasons behind this not-so-successful WordPress story which led to the $64,000 dollar question, Who is WordPress for Anyway?

With different camps forming around WordPress, can we come back together again? Since the announcement of Gutenberg in 2015, the speed at which the page builder plugins have evolved has not slowed down. If anything, they are growing faster and stronger than ever. And it makes sense! The Block Editor can be quite confusing and in Dave’s words “janky”. The on-boarding process with WordPress requires a learning curve that is pretty steep. But it’s not just about getting hosting set up or being initiated into how to set the Front Page in the Reading Settings. In this use case, simply working with the Block Editor created a major hurdle in getting content laid out without a great deal of frustration.

What do you think about who WordPress is for? Please share your thoughts. What will it take to make WordPress easier for DIYers? And in the words of the Beatles, will we ever “Come Together” again?

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You'd be hard pressed to find a business, both online and brick-and-mortar, that didn't invest in their website over the last three years. With WordPress marketshare showing only a sliver of marketshare decline since pandemic heights, it's still a force to be reckoned with.

Putting page builders and coding tools to the side: The client + agency collaboration process of designing a website can be one of the most costly parts of any new WordPress project. Atarim aims to solve this issue using their software aimed at WordPress professionals. Vito Peleg, Atarim's founder, recently lead their first angel fundraising round. While he didn't share the total value of the deal with me, it does provide a solid year and a half of runway, according to his prediction.

If you enjoyed today's episode, please consider sharing this post on social media and supporting or joining our membership here.

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News

WordPress continues to work on core template changes to refine the creation experience. Many more options will be released with WordPress 6.1 that will continue to improve website building. You can explore the enhancements now in the Gutenberg plugin.

Sarah Gooding over at WPTavern wrote an article about how the WP-Optimize plugin was being accused of cheating their page speed performance tool. Before the dust settled, there was a follow up article covering the details about WP-Optimize denying the cheating allegations. If you are interested in the specifics around the performance gathering and analyzing the techniques both articles are worth a read.

Sarah Gooding was writing a lot about performance last week. She had another article about how WordPress is placing WebP by default on hold for WordPress 6.1. There were many objections from lead developers and the image upload has been controversial since it was announced.

WooCommerce

If you are a WooCommerce user, there is a Store Editing Roadmap update for Q3. A lot of work has been going on for the last few months and you can quickly see what is coming Now, Next and Later.

Events

WordCamp US is right around the corner. Make sure you look for Raquel Landefeld who will be representing the WP Minute and don’t forget that you can sign up for the live stream if you are not attending in person.

The speaker call for WordCamp Buffalo is open. This WordCamp will be an in-person event and held October 22, 2022. Submissions must be in by September 11th, 2022 for speaker slots.

Next up!

Michelle Frechettewith the Community Minute - “Attending a post-covid WCUS”

Richard Tabor teases his upcoming WCUS talk: A New Era of WordPress Themes is Here: Block Themes

From Our Contributors and Producers

Sam Munoz shares that the WP Engine Builders have become a community that is unique and special. Go check them out on Twitter and become part of the builder team.

Tom Mcfarlin has written a post about using the block editor as a developer. It has not been the greatest experience. Most of the frustration comes from standards that are not in place and documentation that is scarce. This often happens with major changes and updates in WordPress. Take a few minutes to read his article. It is organized and steps you through what you will need to develop blocks and it has many great reference links.

Can we please stop saying “Gutenberg’ now? Fränk Klein’s post on the HumanMade website makes a good point of how Gutenberg is confusing. Is it a project? Is it a plugin? Is it an editor? Not for developers? Some kind of historic timeline in the multiverse that is human history? The bottom line is to be specific when r

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News

WordPress 6.0.2 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) is available for testing. Testing is so important with this release so please go over to make.wordpress.org to help.

There are also a lot of exciting things happening with the block editor. Birgit Pauli-Haack shared that there is a new call for testing by Anne McCarthy for Full-site Editing and another one by Justin Tadlock for the Fluid Typography in themes. Go check out the Gutenberg Times table of contents to see all the new things.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is bringing back the sandbox environment that makes it easy for a customer to test extensions before purchasing them. Select extensions can be loaded up on a private test site for 30 days before the site self-destructs. Sarah Gooding covers all the details over at WPTavern.

From Our Contributors and Producers

Digital Ocean Holdings Inc. will acquire Cloudways. The purchase will enhance offerings for small to medium-sized businesses. Under the terms of the transaction, DigitalOcean will acquire Cloudways for $350 million in cash, including a significant portion of the consideration to be paid over a 30-month period following the closing. It will be interesting to see how all the implementations will occur as some of the competitors are going to now be on the new host.

Matt Medeiros interviews Yaw Owusu-Ansah over on the Matt Report. Yaw says that:

there's something nice and freeing about [owning] an agency, being able to make your own decisions and call your own shots.

If you’re creating content for your WordPress website and need to try something different, go check out Bertha AI. There is a new pricing model and you can pay as you go with a subscription.

WP Minute member Sam Munoz is having live conversations with Brian Gardner over at WPEngine about the WordPress community, the future of Full Site Editing, and how it all impacts business owners. It is called Build Mode live and worth a visit.

Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:

Birgit Pauli-Haack
Eric Karkovack
Andrew Palmer
Sam Munoz
Daniel Shutzsmith

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News

A new WordPress homepage and download page is live but was it done quickly enough? Mullenweg’s perception of how long a layout should take started a lot of discussion about the timing of the release, the number of volunteers on the project…to well…you name it. The comments to the controversy ran the gamut.

Mullenweg’s comments were posted in an article in Search Engine Journal about using the Block Editor. He said:

it’s such a basic layout, it’s hard to imagine it taking a single person more than a day on Squarespace, Wix, Webflow, or one of the WP page builders.

Brian Coords wrote an opinion piece on MasterWP that there may be a leadership problem surrounding the project. This captures how people have felt about the WordPress Community for years. The bottom line is that there are many contributors that want to make WordPress better and need guidance in the project to get there. They want to be a part of the next iteration and keep the community growing and moving forward.

There is a new Twenty Twenty-Three default theme in development and there are many variations that are being proposed. Sarah Gooding over at WPTavern reviews what has been proposed and reviewed what submissions look like. This project will close on August 31st to prepare for the October 25, 2022 release.

Gutenberg

Gutenberg designers are considering replacing the current welcome guide with a new onboarding experience. This idea is to show the features available upfront. You should go and check out the design changes proposed and provide feedback over at make.wordpress.org.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce has submitted a Request for Change (RFC) to reduce the size of the woocommerce plugin archive. If you are using WooCommerce you should review how this change could impact debugging your workflows.

Events

There is still time to nominate your favorite WordPress products over at the WP Weekly. This is the second year for the awards and a fun way to support your favorite products.

From Our Contributors and Producers

The Newsletter Glue plugin on the repo is now permanently closed. The WP Minute member, Lesley Simm tweeted:

Took us long enough. The Newsletter Glue plugin on the repo is now permanently closed.

We last made a legit update to it over a year ago. 5 months ago, we added a notice to say we would close it in May 2022, then just didn't.

Cameron Jones writes in his blog why he is not sold on ‘Five For The Future". His personal experience about the way to contribute may be shared by others and it should be paid attention to if the WordPress community is to get through this time of growing pains.

A new proposal, published by Automattic-sponsored contributor Adam Zielinski, calls for c

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This week we bring you a guest post by Winstina Hughes. Read on as she shares about a very important movement.

The WordPress community has expressed tremendous support for the call to action to sponsor underrepresented/minority WordCamp speakers by removing the financial burden of their travel and lodging expenses. But who made the call, and what inspired it? Listen in to learn who made the call to action, what inspired her, the goal of the initiative, and where to seek support or offer sponsorship.

Links

Four Freedoms

Community Team

Inclusion Initiatives

Support Inclusion In Tech

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Gutenberg News

Last week there was a bunch of new stuff with Gutenberg 13.8.0. Birgit Pauli-Haack discusses all the new features with Grzegorz Ziolkowski over on the changelog podcast. You can hear about Fluid Typography, updates to Block APIs, and WordPress 6.1 Planning.

The Gutenberg Editor is testing On Tumblr and Day One Web Apps. Sarah Gooding over at WPTavern writes about the details of using the betas on Tumblr and Day One. Check that out.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce 6.8 has been released. Smart Shipping for new sites has been added to this release. You can see all of the recent updates by checking out the WooCommerce site.

Events

WordCamp Asia sold out of tickets on their first batch of standard and micro sponsor tickets in just 1 day. The second batch of tickets will be available soon.

From Our Contributors and Producers

The Free Rider topic around WordPress got a lot of discussion going in the WP Minute Slack channel. Joe Casabona published a podcast episode on why free riders are necessary and really not a problem that needs to be solved. If you really want to democratize publishing, then you can’t expect everyone to contribute. You have to accept and welcome the free riders. Eventually, they may want to contribute and be part of the open source community. Joe was also interviewed by Brian Coords over on MasterWP.

WordCamp US is right around the corner. If you are an introvert that will be attending, you may want to listen to the Matt Report podcast with Ken Elliott. Ken is a self-described “networking introvert” that built a WordPress agency with his co-founder and he will be emceeing WordCamp US next month. WordCamp US is sold out but you will be able to live stream for free.

The first beta release of Advanced Custom Fields PRO 6.0. is now available. It has improved performance for Repeater fields with large datasets, and a new generation of ACF Blocks with block JSON support. Go check that out if you are interested.

Marie Comet shared on Twitter a little experiment of bulk converting Classic WordPress posts to Gutenberg posts. You can check out this tool for converting classic posts to blocks and provide feedback.

Wordfence has looked at the threats to Ukrainian websites since the invasion of Russia. This cyber-war has been going on since mid-March and this blog post shows the statistics for the threats.

For WordPress developers that have been using Desktop Server for many years, it was sad to see ServerPress is closing. If you are a Premium Subscriber, you will have support until your subscription is up. Check out the just-released int

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The talk around the WordPress open source and the free rider problem has been discussed by the community since May with strong opinions on both sides of the contributing fence. Josepha Haden Chomphosy wrote an article over on make.wordpress.org about the issue with Open Source (the Tragedy of the Commons) and the Free Riders.

Could it be that we are concentrating on multiple things to discuss one single problem? Josepha makes the point that the discussion should be focused on making the software as best as it can be for everyone using it.

WebP, an image format developed by Google, which is intended to replace JPEG, PNG, and GIF file formats, will soon be generated by default for new JPEG images uploaded in WordPress. WebP conversion is coming to WordPress 6.1 and it doesn't look like there will be a UI-based option to turn this off. Sarah Gooding over at the WPTavern writes about the opt-in option in depth and it seems like a ticket for this will remain open to see if this option remains as the default.

Gutenberg

What happens when a theme registers a pattern with a third-party block? If the user has the block plugin installed, it appears as it should. If you want to read more about how WordPress handles registering patterns in themes with third-party blocks jump over to the Gutenberg Times to read this article by Justin Tadlock.

Events

WordFest Live is scheduled for November 18, 2022. This is a 24-hour online festival focusing on Wellness for remote workers and sponsored by the Big Orange Heart. Submissions for volunteer speakers are open for the event. The deadline to register to be a speaker is August 15, 2022.

WordCamp US will be coming up in a little less than a month. They have Announced the Round 7 speaker panel which is Matt Mullenweg. You can find all the updates on their site. We will be a contributing media partner so look for Raquel (part of the WP Minute team) at WordCamp US.

From Our Contributors and Producers

Speaking of the value of contributing to WordPress, our WP Minute community member, Sam Munoz wrote an article posted over on Torque that covers her appreciation of WordPress and shows where you can contribute even without knowing code. All contributions matter.

If you have missed the exciting topics in the WordPress news space you can catch up on the last three months by listening to the WP Minute Rewind on the WP Minute with Matt Mederios and Daniel Schutzsmith.

In this supper club episode of Syntax, Wes Bos and Scott Tolinski talk with Syed Balkhi about his experiences blogging and developing plugins in the WordPress ecosystem. Sidenote: It always perplexes me that people outside of the WordPress space don't understand the size of Awesome Motive and the accomplishments that Syed and his team have built under that brand.

The latest project updates for the WordPress.org Homepage and Download page are available. These mockups look great and these designs will begin immediately in a new block theme on the WordPress.org website.

New Mem

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Daniel Schutzsmith and Matt Medeiros return for a new WP Minute Rewind!

Daniel and Matt will choose 3 of their favorite WordPress news headlines from the previous month to share and expand upon. Join us as they go deeper in this longer format show. If you love WordPress news, like _really_ love WordPress news, this episode is for you!

Please share this on social media and tell others to tune in.

Important Links & Takeaways

The WP Minute is now sponsored by MasterWP
Matt is looking for a WordPress news writer. Contact us if that's you.
WP Minute is now in Slack (no more Discord)
What's the difference between WP Minute and other WP groups?
An inside look at community journalism in the WP
https://joost.blog/cms-market-share/
https://www.hubspot.com/company-news/hubspot-introduces-a-powerful-and-free-drag-and-drop-website-builder
https://www.squarespace.com/websites/fluid-engine
https://news.shopify.com/changes-to-shopifys-team
https://wptavern.com/wordpress-com-ends-recent-pricing-experiment-reverts-to-previous-model
WP Minute interview with Dave Martin
https://instawp.com/
What if GoDaddy had it's own WordPress?
WordPress Accessibility Day
Press the Issue
Amber Hinds on selling her plugin
WP Lift sold for 160k USD
Sitecare acquires Maintain from WDS
Easy Support Videos
Daniel on Twitter
Matt on Twitter
Support the show

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Guest host, Amber Hinds is sharing with us her POV on Equalize Digital's first "exit."

"This post tells the story of how WP Conference Schedule came to be and why we ultimately ended up selling it before even launching the paid version of the plugin."

Amber Hinds

Links

Amber Hinds

Equalize Digital Sells WP Conference Schedule

Amber Hinds Blog

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Leading off this week is Joost de Valk’s semi-annual CMS market share analysis. WordPress maintains a 43% share, the equivalent of AT&T’s wireless market share, within the CMS space.

Shopify, WordPress’ closest competitor on the chart chimes in at 4.2%

Shopify also shocked the industry by laying off 1,000 employees via email, penned by the companies CEO, Tobias Lütke.

Juxtaposed to the the layoffs, a report from McKinsey & company, shows that 41% of workers surveyed quit their jobs due to lack of career development and advancement.

Squarespace, which is holding on to the 4th spot at 2% market share, has launched their new website building experience: Fluid Engine.

WordPress.com is going back in time…to their former pricing. Sarah Gooding from WP Tavern reports the .com team have ended their pricing experiment.

The WordPress mobile app is shedding it’s Jetpack features, in an effort to simplify the experience:

“The hope is that this change will simplify much of the UX and design of the WordPress apps for users who don’t want or need Jetpack services and tools. The WordPress apps will continue to be maintained and updated, ensuring that users can publish content from anywhere just as they can today. “

Meanwhile, the Jetpack team plans on improving the Jetpack app as they transition these features out of the core app. Have any predictions on how the Jetpack app will change over time? Tweet at us @thewpminute OR Join our members-only Slack group for $79/year.

Help Josepha find a better name for Full Site Editing (FSE): Giving FSE a More User Friendly Name – Make WordPress Core.

The terms “full site editing” and “full site editor” (also abbreviated as FSE) were developed to easily refer to a collection of features and now that those features are integrated into our daily WordPress experience, how can we best update the wording to be more user friendly?”

This year’s Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship recipients are Margherita Pelonara, Simona Simionato, and Pooja Derashri!

Simona is the COO at a consulting company that focuses on digital learning and splits her time between Valencia, Spain and Milan, Italy.

Simona Simionato’s high-profile studies include a Degree in Statistics, a Master’s in International Tourism Management, and graduation in coaching – in a School officially recognized by the ICF – which enriched her professional profile as a specialized Brief Coach.

Pooja Derashri hails from Ajmer, India. She started using WordPress in 2013. Pooja and her husband Anand co-founded WPVibes, a WordPress plugin development agency. Her initial involvement was as a developer. Currently, she is transitioning towards SEO and Content Marketing.

Marghe

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WordPress support company Sitecare acquires Maintainn, excluding the team, from WebDevStudios.

Hear from the founders in today’s interview to learn how the deal went down, what to look for in good acquisitions, and what the future of WordPress support companies look like.

The landscape of monthly WordPress support companies has certainly changed since these two OG’s launched in 2012-2013. Sitecare plans to double-down on their packaged monthly services while WedDevStudios continues to expand their enterprise WordPress business.

Links

Ryan Sullivan

Brad Williams

Sitecare

Maintainn

WebDevStudios

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Where is the concentration on performance and other goodies in new releases of WordPress? Sarah Gooding over at the WPTavern covered how WordPress contributors have been discussing adding SVG support for more than nine years. The SVG module is currently one of the items that the Performance team contributors have identified for WordPress 6.2 as a goal for proposing the module for core. Anyone who wants to contribute can join their efforts on GitHub.

Eric Karkovack wrote about the issue recently on the WP Minute. It seems that the concentration of WordPress core updates has been directly related to the Gutenberg block editor. To some members of the community, those developments have come at the expense of letting other areas of the software slip. Eric’s article makes the point that Security and Data Organization could also use some attention and he is looking for balance across the core in future releases of WordPress.

If you are a Jetpack user, you will be happy to know that Jetpack AP Bot for Telegram will now let you automatically share blog posts from any Jetpack-powered WordPress site (including any site hosted at WordPress.com) directly to a Telegram channel. This free tool saves time sharing content to Telegram, where readers can subscribe to read your posts just as easily as they would via email or social media.

Acquisitions:

Acquisitions stay front and center for 2022. WPLift.com sold for $160k. It previously sold in 2016 for $205k. Matt Medeiros interviewed Daan Tol 6 years ago and writes about how running a media company is difficult but well worth it on the WP Minute.

Events

There was a call to speak at the largest WordPress event in Asia - WordCamp Asia. They are looking for speakers that can talk about relevant #WordPress topics. Check out the site to see the categories for inspiration and sign up for this huge event being held in Bangkok on Feb, 17-19, 2023.

Raquel Landefeld wrote about her recent experience at WordCamp EU and the power of attending WordCamps in person. Check out her article on the WP Minute and look for her at WordCamp US this September.

As a reminder: The Gutenberg Times will host a Live Q & A July 22, 2022 with the Pew Research Center. They used a mix of Core and Custom Blocks to streamline their publishing process, and create powerful charts and quizzes. You can register over on the Gutenberg Times website.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce 6.7 was released along with WooCommerce Blocks 7.8.3. There is also a Release Cadence update. You can review the latest on the WooCommerce site.

From Our Contributors and Producers

Hubspot announced the launch of a free CMS drag and drop tool to empower business builders to create reliable websites. This is an interestin

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Five for the Future is back on the radar, surfacing more clarification and criticism. Here’s snack pack of links from around the community addressing various opinions on the subject:

Five for the Future’s True Intentions by Josepha Haden Chomphosy
Sarah Gooding summarizes the link above
Joe Casabona compares 5FTF to the Creator Economy
Rob Howard warns of “toxic scorekeeping.”

Gettin’ Guten with it

Gutenberg Times will host a livestream July 22nd featuring PEW Research Lead Developer and Director of Digital Strategy on how they use WordPress core + custom blocks.

Want to know where FSE is headed with all things media? Anne McCarthy posted the FSE Program All Things Media Summary.

Product updates

LearnDash has taken to the clouds with its latest hosted version of the popular WordPress LMS plugin.

SpotlightWP has launched a new analytics dashboard for those of you posting to WordPress and the gram.

Pure HTML and CSS WordPress builder LiveCanvas has launched their builder version 3.

Product acquisition

Amber Hinds' Equalize Digital has sold their WP Conference Schedule plugin to Events Calendar:

“Earlier this year, we realized that continuing to support WP Conference Schedule no longer made sense,” said Hinds, “It was a distraction from our mission to improve accessibility in WordPress and took development and marketing time away from Accessibility Checker.”

Events

A call for organizers has been placed by the WordCamp Euorope 2023 team.

The Grab bag!

Call for sponsors for WordPress Accessibility Day 2022
See what it looks like for a hacker to attack a WordPress wesbite.
Congrats to WordPress Historian Jeff Chandler for taking on a new role at WP Engine.
Part 2 with Corey Maass on Matt Report, Building Amazing Products.

Next up!

Michelle Frechette with the Community Minute!

New Members

This week we welcome two new members to the #linksquad crew: Jonathan Wold and Juan Hernando!

You can meet them in the Slack group and if you’re not a member yet, go to buymeacoffee.com/mattreport to join.

Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:

Joe Casabona
Birgit Pauli-Haack
Daniel Schutzsmith
Eric Karkovack
Amber Hinds

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Guest host Andrew Palmer is back to address the topic of collaboration.

His company Bertha recently collaborated with Yoast to forge a powerful combination of AI + SEO for WordPress. If you've been on the fence about collaborating with others, there's no better time than now to start! Enjoy Andrew's -- or it is Bertha's? -- take on collaborating in WordPress!

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You’d have to be living under a rock to miss the recent WP drama unfold on Twitter.

In some quickly deleted fever-induced tweets, Mullenweg likened GoDaddy to a “parasitic company” that is an “existential threat” to WordPress. Explore more of the debate in the following articles:

Matt Medeiros’ take on What would GoDaddy’s WordPress look like?

WP Tavern recaps the Mullenweg twitter thread.

MasterWP’s Rob Howard weighs in.

Finally, GoDaddy responds to (almost) the whole shebang in a Sarah Gooding interview.

Moving and shaking at Post Status

Long-time Post Status news anchor David Bisset announces his departure from the position. David will be taking on the role of Product Development for WP Charitable at Awesome Motive, after the company announced the acquisition of the plugin.

Michelle Frechette highlighted some of the assholes in the WordPress space. She recalls her first-person experiences in the community in Misogyny in WordPress is Real.

From our contributors and producers

Rae Morey explores the Australian WordPress vibe after WP Minute Producer Cameron Jones sparked the debate on Twitter.

WP Lift, long-time WordPress blog, is for sale over on Flippa.

How do you like your Classic Press? Shaken, stirred, on the rocks?

“Recent turbulence in the ClassicPress community has resulted in the directors resigning and new leadership installed. The WordPress fork is run under a non-profit organization called the ClassicPress Initiative. “

Sarah Gooding summarized the events at the Tavern.

Events

WordCamp US tickets will go on sale tomorrow, June 30th 2022. Visit the WordCamp US website for more information.

The Grab bag!

Twitter announced a longform writing feature.

The Lexman artificial podcast creates a completely original interview podcast…with itself…in different voices.

I enjoyed the outline of how Basecamp built the new “Bubble up” feature in HEY email.

Our very own Raquel Landefeld was on the Women in WP podcast number 86. We’d never 86 the Raquel!

Eric Karkovack highlights 10 Lesser-known WordPress plugins

Matt Report talks life after selling a plugin business with Corey Maass

Next up!

Get the Pulse on WordPress with Raquel Landefeld

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Whoever thought that Apache web server would be de-throned in it’s prime? Hello NGINX. We see you Cloudflare. Red Hat and Fedora linux showed up, but then the world went faster together with Ubuntu.

Intel dominated the chip space forever. Still does, technically, but AMD and Apple are going after their lunch including the paper bag it’s packed in.

Sprinkle in the open source coding languages, tooling, and protocols over the last 30 years and everyone shouts open operability — until they get control — and then it’s “our way is better than your way, see ya later.”

Why I want WordPress to win

Probably for all of the reasons you do too.

I love the software, it affords me a career, a specific lifestyle, and it puts food on the table. I think WordPress is the best piece of software around to help drive a technical workforce.

First, because of its flexibility. Second, because it’s open source. But not open source like Swift — which is locked into Apple. WordPress can run and do a lot more than other “closed” open source projects.

The open source software could be powerful for local community programs that train, spread awareness, and deploy solutions around WordPress which leave real impacts on society.

An approachable solution to publish and consume local government topics which are crucial to a town’s population. Non-profit and news that sorely need a low-cost solution to democratize publishing. Understanding how programming, the internet, and technology works for a young (or old!) demographic.

I want WordPress to win because of that, not because it makes a prettier website than Wix.

The desire for open source should not be the desire for control

If you love open source, you have to love the fact that you’re not in control.

It’s going to be dealing with the ups and downs, letting humans settle the issues at hand. You hate a feature? Too bad, wait for someone to change it. Your favorite part of code just got shipped? Now stand and defend its existence in each future version.

Not in control? Fork it.

Me? No. You? Doubt it.

But GoDaddy could. It wouldn’t be easy.

None of this is easy. Who said it would be?

Open source is giving up direct control, knowing that you have to deal with the wait: volunteering, funding, resources, project direction, etc. It means dealing with the flaws of humans or herding cats, as some call it.

Otherwise you put someone in control, let them decide all the things, and you get something that isn’t open source. It’s called Apple, where they build a great commercial product but only release a sliver of it through open source.

It’s the brittle timeline of WordPress we’re living in now. On one hand, we need a leader like Matt, on the other he’s a benevolent dictator that doesn’t want to leave.

On one hand, he needs the community to rally around the cause, volunteer at all the things, and generally drive innovation for good. On the other hand, he can walk into any board room with his 43% of the pie, and raise enough money to do it all himself — WordCamps and all.

But he’d still have his kryptonite: Time.

In defense of Matt Mullenweg

I don’t envy his position, plus I think he does way too much.

.org release lead, CEO of Automattic and the dozen+ products it has, Tumblr guy, investor, I think philanthropist, and then he has to live a life.

My gut tells me that none of this is moving fast enough for him.

WordPress competing with other platforms, WooCommerce being more real, and exercising this desire to weave open source (through WordPress) into the fabric of web technologies.

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We have switched over to Slack from Discord.

News

There has been a lot of feedback for full site editing in the latest release of WordPress. The team over on make.wordpress.org is looking for people to sign up for usability testing by June 24th. This outreach program is going to try something new and pair up members of the program with community designers. Once paired, they will then find time between June 20th and July 1st to record a 15-minute call on Zoom going through one of two tasks: Creating & applying a new header, and using and customizing patterns.

WordPress.org is now strongly recommending that theme authors switch to local hosted webfonts. Sarah Gooding writes over on WPTavern that a recent German court case fined a website using Google-hosted webfonts. In order to comply with GDPR - Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation - WordPress themes should switch to locally hosted webfonts.

Are you still recovering from WCEU? There are two reviews from media supporters that you may want to check out. Bob Dunn and Matt Medeiros recorded their experiences.

And there are nearly 3000 event photos. If you would like to see those you can view the photo album from WCEU on Flickr.

Andrew Palmer reviews his WCEU experience right here on the WP Minute.

Nathan Wrigley interviews Matt Mullenweg on the Jukebox podcast hosted at the WPTavern. Mullenweg shares his reflections on WordPress and the changes to come in the future.

WooCommerce:

WooCommerce 6.6 was released and you can find the complete changelog over on the WooCommerce site for the recent changes.

From Our Contributors and Producers

Eric Karkovack writes about the CMS landscape (including WordPress) on the latest at the WP Minute. Eric makes a good argument about why a freelancer would not choose WordPress for building a website.

What’s with the WordPress vibe? Changes and Acquisitions seem to be published weekly now. Acquisitions in #WordPress have created some concern among smaller businesses and entrepreneurs as we compete with bigger companies with much larger budgets. Mark Zahra has a little survey on Twitter asking if you had to double down on one area in the next 6 months with the goal of generating growth, what would it be?

There were several layoffs reported lately from Elementor and Envato.

James Giroux tweeted about the status of @envato and @elemntor announcing significant redundancies in the last week. You can help those affected by:

Celebrating wins publicly and calling out individuals by name
Adding to their LinkedIn profiles
Introducing them to your network

Next Up:

Simplified Business Minute by Sam Muñoz

The Case for Not Automating Client Interac

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In this episode, Andrew Palmer of Bertha.ai reflects on his time at WordCamp Europe.

If you were stuck at home to watch from afar like me, your FOMO was probably running at 110%. Unlike Andrew, I missed out on the awesome talks, after parties, and the ever important hallway track. Missing friends and colleagues in one of the most beautiful places in the world! I'm happy to see it was a successful event.

If you had a great time, or appreciate their hard work, say thanks to the WCEU Organizing Team.

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Strattic was acquired by Elementor. Miriam Schwab, co-founder of Strattic writes:

“Life is interesting – sometimes outcomes are obvious, and sometimes what ends up happening kind of blows our minds. When we set out to build Strattic, we expected to follow the usual path: raise Pre-Seed, Seed, A rounds etc. An exit was always on the table, but who knows when that would be or how that would look? It was hard to imagine.”

Miriam Schwab

Well, imagine no more as her team brings Jamstack to Elementor. A move that should add a lot of value and expertise to the cloud offering of Elementor. Stay subscribed to hear an interview with Miriam on this podcast.

Julien Melissas tweeted that his company Craftpeak was acquired. Craftpeak is complete with web solutions for craft breweries.

Good news! If you’ve been struggling with FSE, WordPress 6.1 is set to improve that experience, writes Sarah Gooding on the Tavern. See the roadmap for 6.1 and learn what’s ahead…all the way to 2025?!

Brian Coords continues to challenge the WordPress status quo over on MasterWP in two featured posts today. First, When the Cathedral Owns the Bazaar, a fresh take on the age-old dilemma: Automattic, a WordPress agency, and an open source ideology walk into a bar.

Capping off his second post right here on The WP Minute, where he asks Where will the WordPress middle class go? Rebooting a concept that I wrote about a while back about the blue collar digital worker.

Matt Cromwell and Lesley Sim have officially announced Glam That Plugin! Check out the announcement YouTube video where Lesley looks great and Matt…well he’s Matt.

The grab bag is back! And it’s filled with threads!

Kim Coleman co-founder of Paid Memberships Pro has an interesting thread on taking a product focus sabbatical.

Matias Ventura added more commentary to the WCEU fireside chat with Mullenweg and Josepha Haden Chomposy. He also extended these thoughts around the admin experience in a Make WordPress post.

Alan Sschlesser urges that theme.json is not the replacement we’re hoping for in WordPress themes.

Phil Crumm chops the head off of headless WordPress solutions. Stating that in terms of headless, “it’s (WordPress) falling short.”

Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:

Eric Karkovack
Daniel Schutzsmith
Birgit Pauli-Haack
Raquel Landefeld

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Spencer Forman from WPLaunchify has a creative way to find new WordPress customers that may just surprise you!

Find an existing community of non technical people that have websites (like bookkeepers or copywriters)

Then look at any of these three things...

Above the Fold: Do they have the three things any site needs when visitors first arrive? (hint: What's the Pain? | How do they Solve the Pain? | What's the Call To Action to get the Solution?)
Ways To Contact: Do they have the BIG 3 ways listed clearly in a way that is easy to find? (hint: Phone | Email | Social ). It's amazing how many companies don't list a phone number, when a virtual number is almost no cost today with Google Voice and similar.
Add To List: Do they have a way for visitors to the site to add their email to a list (hopefully one that is for marketing automation and not just collecting dust). It costs virtually nothing in time or money for them to implement this feature, just like a fishbowl in the old days for folks to drop their business card to win a prize. It's the only way for them to avoid losing potential leads.

Once you've looked at any or all three of these, email them with FREE advice on how to fix their problems, and preferably setup a 15 minute call to speak with them on Zoom and learn more about what they do, how they do it, and whether they have someone who currently helps them with their WordPress website.

Remember:

There was a world of people doing business BEFORE social media and paid online advertisement. It still exists... it's called "The Golden Rule" ;-)

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News

Big acquisition news happened last week when Delicious Brains, owned by Brad Touesnard, sold five of its plugins to WPEngine. You may use one or all of these plugins starting with Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), WP Migrate, WP Offload Media, WP Offload SES, and Better Search Replace. Some of the product teams will be moving to WPEngine and the other support teams and developers will continue as usual as issues are escalated to them. Listen to Brad’s interview with Matt Medeiros right here on the WPMinute.

Other ecommerce News

DTC Patterns, an ongoing Barrel research project has compiled over 100 articles where their teams buy real products from brands many of us are familiar with. They highlight interesting and effective ecommerce user experiences and marketing interactions. These observations are called “patterns” where over 100+ articles were written showcasing various ways brands engage with customers before, during, and after the purchase process.

Events

WordCamp EU is over and it looks like many in the WordPress community had a great time getting together in person and talking about all the new things arriving in WordPress 6.0, Gutenberg and the future of WordPress.

It was announced that WordCamp EU will be in Athens, Greece. The WPMinute’s writer, Eric Karkovac wrote about the feelings of WordCamps and David Bisset shares his takeaways from WordCamp EU.

I donated $100 to A Big Orange Heart for 20 selfies taken with Matt Cromwell out in Porto. He matched the $100 along with Michelle Frechette’s WPCoffee Talk and StellarWP. I challenge you to match a $100 donation too!

If you are using a Pagebuilder with WordPress this is a heads up that the Pagebuilder Summit is right around the corner June 20 - 24 2022. Registration is open for this event.

From Our Contributors and Producers

John Locke shared this Podcast episode from MasterWP about Capitalizing the “P” in WordPress. Nyasha Green and Rob Howard discuss this article about why the capital P in WordPress is such a big deal and why this one letter influences how some people think about it when hiring developers.

Speaking of hiring developers, Rachel Cherry is looking to fill a 20/hr a week developer position at Cornell University College of Business. Check out the Tweet for more detail.

Community Segments this week by:

WP Security Minute by Chris Wiegman

Learn WP minute by Hauwa Abashiya

New Members

We would like to welcome Austin Ginder as a Producer and Brian Coords to the WPMinute Community.

Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:

Joe Casabona
John Locke

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If you haven't heard, Brad Touesnard has sold his suite of Delicious Brains plugins to WP Engine.

In this interview, I ask him the following question:

The million-dollar question: Why sell a suite of WordPress popular, profitable and beloved plugins -- of which was ACF which you only acquired merely a year ago?
The multi-million-dollar question: How much did WPE acquire the set of software for?
Who approached who first and how long did the deal take?
What made this deal, aside from the buy-out #, feel so much different than other deals you've done in the past?
Is part of the DB team going to WPE? What does a restructure look like if any is happening?
SpinupWP becomes the main focus, until you sell _that_ to WPE in the future, does this sale help extend the runway or will you seek more traditional funding routes?
Dive into the business builders mind: What kind of clarity or relief (if any) does this give you?
Do you think you'll ever transition to a proper WP host with standard support protocols and hosting fees? (Don't lie there's big money there)
Any regrets so far?
Any parting words of advice, promos -- the platform is yours.

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News

WordPress turned 19 this year on May 27th. Sarah Gooding over at WPTavern wrote an article covering the beginning when Matt Mullenweg partnered with Mike Little and released the first version of WordPress based on the b2/cafelog software. The highlight of this year’s anniversary celebration was on the wp19.day website which has video blogs from people all over the WordPress community about how WordPress has changed their lives and how much the community has played a part in its growth.

Is WordPress getting more difficult? Lesley Sim has many responses over on her Twitter thread. It is weird that many responses do not include WooCommerce - which has a lot of catching up to do.

Jetpack announced that it’s breaking up…it’s modules, anyway. You can now install the most popular Jetpack modules like Backup, Protect, Boost, Social, Search, and CRM.

WooCommerce

The first release candidate for WooCommerce 6.6 is now available and currently on track for the planned release date of June 14, 2022. If you would like to check out the changes and test the latest go ahead and download the release from wordpress.org.

Events

WordCamp EU officially starts this week, June 2 - 4. There are many informal updates occurring on Twitter right now. The WPMinute is donating $5 for every selfie with Matt Cromwell (up to $100) with @learnwithmattc. You can share on this thread at #WCEU to @aBigOrangeHeart.

From Our Contributors and Producers

Last week the WPMinute reported that the new WordPress Starter plan is available for just $5/month on WordPress.com. This interview with a few questions to Dave Martin, CEO of Automattic, covered the refactoring and pricing of the new WordPress.com. Go check out the interview and provide your feedback on Twitter.

If you've been using InstaWP to launch sandbox WordPress websites, things are about to heat up for that platform led by Vikas Singhal. In an exclusive interview with WPMinute producer, Daniel Schutzsmith and Vikas shares how he landed a seed funding round from Automattic and how he plans on using the funding for his company.

Are you looking for a WordPress database management plugin or maybe a way to just see what's in your database? Delicious Brains launched the SQL buddy plugin and it is available in the repository. If you are currently using phpMyAdmin and looking for a lightweight plugin, it may be worth checking out this plugin for database management.

Oxygen 4.0 was released with many fundamental changes to the builder. The shortcodes are now converted to json. You can check out the latest update on their YouTube video.

Joost de Valk shared this Tweet about a potential new search engine from Apple. @Scobleizer says Apple will introduce a new search engine at WWDC. Joost noticed that there has been increased crawling with applebot over the last few months and it will be interest

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If you've been using InstaWP to launch sandbox WordPress websites, things are about to heat up for the platform lead by Vikas Singhal.

In an exclusive interview with Daniel Schutzsmith, Vikas shared how he landed a seed funding round from Automattic and how he plans to use the funding in the company. If you like today's interview, please share it on social media and consider supporting the show!

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After some spotty patches announcing new pricing, WordPress.com released a new $5/month Starter plan.

I had the chance to send some questions to Dave Martin, CEO of Automattic, about the announcement, plus, some other areas of .com that I was interested in knowing more about. The questions are posted below. I'd love to hear your feedback on Twitter.

Questions (This audio interview was done asynchronously)

Congrats on refactoring and relaunching the new entry-level price point at WordPress.com. Will we see more plans come to pricing page in the future?
I notice higher up in the features list that the $5/mo plans come with payments for subscriptions/donations etc -- this is usually associated with the creator economy. Is the creator class community high on your priority of customer segments?
My running theory is your new plans are in preparation for a proper WooCommerce vs Shopify showdown. Can we expect to see competitively positioned WooCommerce hosting plans this year?
I'm curious to learn if there are any partnership channels or programs being developed for premium theme/plugin authors to work more closely with .com customers? Again, something that one might see from Shopify partnership programs.
If I take the biggest offering of Jetpack, it costs me 509.36 after tax for year one, then 1,199.40 pre tax every year after.

.com is 191.50 after tax every year. Both are Automattic offerings, so I'm curious, is this Automattic's way of saying .org sites are really expensive to manage and maintain come to .com or is there room for both to serve a large set of customers?

Can you comment on the services side of .com and potentially how big that line of business is? Specifically the "we'll build your website for $499" offering. Having run an agency for 10 years, I know how complicated things can be when you try to productize a service
True or false "WordPress.com is the best place to experience WordPress"
I have to keep you honest here: The H1 of WordPress.com reads: "Welcome to the world's most popular website builder

"43% of the web is built on WordPress. More bloggers, small businesses, and Fortune 500 companies use WordPress than all other options combined. Join the millions of people that call WordPress.com home."

That's taking some creative freedom in the wording to say the least since other hosts + .org version is what makes up the 43% part. How do you see the division of .org vs. .com and sharing the spotlight?

I think VideoPress might be one of my favorite features of Jetpack and .com, can you share in any other really interesting features coming to .com that other platforms would struggle to compete with?
My audience will be furious if I don't ask: Will we ever see a .com Super Bowl ad or _any_ consistent advertising on YouTube/Podcasts like your competitors? Hint hint wink wink, there are a lot of WordPress podcasts that you could sponsor :)

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News

WordPress 6.0 "Arturo" was released. This release was named for the Latin jazz musician and director Arturo O'Farrill. With nearly 1,000 enhancements and bug fixes, the second major release of 2022 is here. You can watch the official release over on YouTube. It is a minute and a half of great jazz and cool features.

There were some interesting numbers on Gutenstats.blog of what blocks are used for with .com and Jetpack. The stats are interesting showing 76.6 million active installations and it is exciting to see where all the common blocks are being used. If you are interested to see where Gutenberg is headed, make sure you keep updated at make.wordpress.org.

Are you interested in starting a new site with your idea or small business? WordPress Starter is a new, beautifully pared-back plan designed to put that idea center stage. For just $5/month you get fast WordPress managed hosting, unlimited site traffic, and reasonable startup prices. This is the new price point for WordPress.com that Sarah Gooding, over at the Tavern, and I have been waiting to hear about for some time. I’ve reached out to Automattic for a comment.

Events

WordCamp EU will be happening next week. There is an interesting panel discussion with the global lead Taeke Reijenga on “Acquisitions in WordPress”. The WPMinute has been covering these acquisitions individually over the past year but you may want to check out this panel to hear their takes on some of the major changes and takeovers within the community over the past year.

From Our Contributors and Producers

Speaking of acquisitions, Adrian Tobey of GroundHoggWP tweeted that his team has acquired Scott Bolinger’s plugin, HollerWP. Bolinger exited the plugin space recently joining the team at GoDaddy.

Would you like to see a practical use of Gutenberg in the digital news space? Check out this Twitter thread by Seth Rubenstein where he explains how he has gone all in on block development and what is possible in Gutenberg.

Tom McFarlin shares his perspective of WordPress as an application. He goes beyond the latest published newsletters, tweets, blog posts, podcasts, etc., around Full Site Editing and Headless options. He points out that we may be forgetting the fact that WordPress is far more malleable than FSE and Next.js.

The WPTavern jukebox recently interviewed Ana Segota and Kelly Choyce-Dwan about how the WordPress pattern creator works. If you want to hear how you can submit your patterns and the constraint challenges around the submission, go take a listen to that episode.

Joost de Valk warns us to optimize crawling to save the environment:

Every time they find a URL, they crawl it and if it’s interesting to them, they’ll keep crawling it basically forever. The bigger your site, the more URLs you have, the more likely every individual URL is to be hit multiple times per day.

Speaking of the environment: Over on the Matt Report, “Can WordPress save the planet?” Hannah Smith talks to Matt about how web sustainability can save the planet. This is a very unique approach for a

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How much thread could a Twitter thread thread if a Twitter thread could thread thread

Carolina Nymark shares some of the trends she’s seeing with Full Site Editing themes in the repo. Data like, common block styles include button, post-title, and site-title. Check the Twitter thread for more.

Allie Nimmons has a new role at MasterWP as their Digital Producer.

Devin Walker, founder of GiveWP and WP Minute Producer, got the conversation going about the high-cost to sponsor WordCamp US by asking the question “Would you spend $30-60k to sponsor and only reach 650 people in person? “

See sponsorship rates here.

(I have an answer: sponsor the WP Minute for a year instead!)

Captain Macho Pirate Mick Rackham real name Michael, pondered that Matt Mullenweg should purchase the Mozilla or at least become the primary funder, to which Mullenweg replied “Would happily do it.”

Christina Warren penned a fantastic tweet thread in a response to last week’s “WordPress losing market share” that Joost wrote about.

Is WP really shrinking?

Alex Denning wrote that a .4% drop doesn’t matter. “We had no idea why the market share was growing, and we accordingly have no idea why it’s shrinking.”

Eric Karkovack aggregated a collection of articles on Authory, The Changing Landscape of WordPress.

In other news

Justin Tadlock leaves his position as 1 of 2 writers at the WP Tavern. In his farewell address he shares that he’s published 647 articles during his tenure and also reveals, there’s no one behind the proverbial green curtain:

“From the day I arrived until today, I have had complete independence to thrive or fail by the result of my work. It felt like our small team had been left on an island to fend for ourselves at times. We must go through the same channels as other publications for information and have never been given special treatment.”

Over on our blog, Eric Karkovak wrote that Freelancers are Caught in the Middle of WordPress Licensing Woes. If the recent MemberPress debacle had you feeling uneasy – this post is for you.

Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:

Daniel Schutzsmith
Jeff Chandler
Eric Karkovac
Raquel Landefeld
Brad Williams
Joe Casabona

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News

Want to find the latest with Gutenberg? You can quickly find the updates on the Gutenberg Hub. where can check out the latest resources or tutorials. Maciek Palmowski tweeted this resource where you can create a Gutenberg page quickly by using the builder.

Not WooCommerce related by very interesting

Bloomberg Technology reported that Shopify Inc. shares plunged below their pre-pandemic level after the company missed revenue and profit estimates, prompting some analysts to dramatically change their outlook on the Canadian e-commerce company.

Shopify fell 14.7% to $413.64 on the New York Exchange, bringing this year’s decline to 70%. The stock is now 2% below where it closed on the day in March 2020 that the World Health Organization called Covid-19 a global pandemic.

Events

Wordsesh is scheduled for next week May 16–20, 2022. This is one of the first virtual, free seminars for WordPress professionals and has some great speakers scheduled. Head on over to the site to get signed up.

From Our Contributors and Producers

Lemon Squeezy just became free. Instead of a monthly cost, there will just be a larger percentage of each transaction kept by Lemon Squeezy. They have announced two major releases on their Lemon Drop. According to their website, if you already have a subscription, you will be grandfathered in.

There has been a leadership change announced over at Yoast. After joining Newfold Digital in August 2021, they have seen a lot of growth. Thijs de Valk picked up a new role as CEO after Marieke van de Rakt decided to step back from this position. You can see the updates over on the Yoast blog.

WPSiteSync reported that they will no longer be updating the plugin and its Premium Extensions. There are plans to integrate some of its functionality into DesktopServer. Currently, if you use WPSiteSync for your workflow, the current plugin and its Premium Extensions will be free to the public.

Vikas Singhal tweeted that the Chrome Extension for @insta_wp is now a little more powerful. After you install the extension, you will be able to launch instances “without” registration for any wp.org plugin or theme.

Ellen Bauer announced on Twitter that a new FSE (full site editing) theme, Kori has been released. It is a cool one-page theme for resume websites. You can read the blog and try it out on ainoblocks.com.

Ines van Dijk, was interviewed on the Matt Report. Go check out this episode to get some great ideas on how to help WordPress product owners get better at customer support. This interview covers many issues that come up with support and may be familiar to you. But if you need help you can hire her team or get support templates from her site Quality in Support.

Joost De Valk wrote on his blog that the WordPress market share appears to be shrinking over the past few months. Could it be that WordPress is being out-innovated or could it be site speed? You can

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News

With the release of WordPress 6.0 RC1, it is time to explore the 97+ enhancements that have been made. Milana Cap over at make.wordpress.org has shared the field guide where developers can read about the high-level changes in WordPress 6.0. The field guide also covers changes in accessibility, blocks, UI, and more for the non-developers out there.

Birgit Pauli-Haack has done a great review in the Gutenberg times newsletter of what is new in the latest Gutenberg Plugin 13.1. Go check out the updates along with how to switch your website to a FSE theme by Carolina Nymark. Carolina’s long post covers the benefits and cautions about third-party plugins that may not yet be updated.

Events

David Bisset shared in a tweet that the 19th anniversary of #WordPress is coming on May 27th. Go to wp19.day to share a few words, a photo (direct or via Twitter w/ #wp19 #wp19day) or a video short via @ZipMessage on the website. It's a global event and you can already check out some of the submissions posted to the site.

From Our Contributors and Producers

If you are concerned that WordPress can still compete in the CMS market you may be interested to find out that searches for WordPress terms hit over 10 million per month for the first time. Alex Denning wrote a post about what might be going on over his website at Ellipsis. There has been the largest volume of search traffic for WordPress yet, with a growth of 25% in absolute volumes from Q3 to Q4. If search data indicates interest and growth then WordPress still has some validity in the CMS market space.

It looks like LearnDash is creating a “circle-esque” solution by providing a modern community plugin with just the core essentials for WordPress LMS. Head over to wptribe.io to try this new plugin.

Automattic acquired Clipisode in January 2022. Brian Alvey shut down the social video platform and is now the CTO of WordPress VIP.

Sarah Gooding reported on WPTavern that James Kemp acquired ReplyBox. The system can be embedded on any website, including static HTML pages to add dynamic commenting. It integrates with WordPress through a connector plugin that is available on WordPress.org. It is great to know that this system will now be maintained and updated on a regular basis.

Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:

Jeff Chandler
Birgit Pauli-Haack

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News

WordPress 6.0 Beta 3 is now available for testing. These releases are moving along and testers are needed for the most recent release. If you would like to check out the release schedule you can go over to make.wordpress.org.

It was just announced that Matt Mullenweg will be speaking at WordCamp Europe in Porto, Portugal June 2-4 2022. If you plan on attending this event you may want to listen to a podcast from Delicious Brains that gives some great ideas on how to make the most of your WordCamp visit.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce has released 6.5 RC2. This puts them on track for the May 10, 2022 release date. Testers are needed for this release as well.

From Our Contributors and Producers

Sarah Gooding over at WPTavern writes about how the WordPress subreddit blew up this week with reports of MemberPress locking users out of the plugin’s admin if they do not renew their subscriptions. MemberPress is a popular membership plugin for WordPress that does not have a free version available. They do clearly outline the subscription policy but cutting off access to the plugin’s admin screens leaves users without the ability to manage the membership functions of their sites once their subscriptions lapse. It will be interesting to see if this “change” impacts their customer base.

David Vongries tweeted that he is looking for a new home for Kirki. If you are looking to venture into the Gutenberg product market this may be a great opportunity for you. Reach out to David if you're interested.

Amber Hinds also tweeted about two plugins that need to be rehomed. They have become a distraction from the main focus on accessibility. Go check out the thread on Twitter and reach out to Amber if you're interested in her plugins.

MasterWP has announced their WordCamp US 2022 Travel Sponsorship Program. Rob Howard explains how to apply. Go check out his blog post to apply to be a speaker to WordCamp US and possibly receive sponsorship.

If you would like to contribute to helping send somebody to WordCamp you can head on over to DonateWC.

Chima Mmeje was interviewed over on the Matt Report about how and why to raise your freelance rates. Go listen to this interview to discover how entrepreneurs can raise rates through grit, perseverance, confidence, and ultimately discovering self-worth.

Next up:

Block Editor Dev Minute by Aurooba

Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:

Daniel Schutzsmith
Eric Karkovack

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Recently on the WPMinute, I was able to have another interview with Eric Karkovack a producer at the WPMinute about his view of the Freelancer in WordPress.

Eric has been a freelancer since 1999 and knows how the changes and ups and downs can impact your business. Eric started organically in the WordPress world by coding and writing on his own blog. He had the opportunity to blog for Speckyboy for additional income. This is easy to do if you understand concepts and can contribute through documentation or a tutorial. Blogging allowed Eric to get his opinion out there and connect with people. As a freelancer, you can try this same approach with your area of expertise.

There have been many topics recently in the WordPress space. For example, Plugin ownership has impacted freelancers. When the plugin changes ownership how does that impact the freelancer? How will you convert sites and determine how much to spend on maintaining these plugins? The other big area making an impact recently has been WordPress core.

The challenge for WordPress freelancers has been the difficulty of navigating and following what is happening in the WordPress space. There is a big barrier with how the freelancer can educate the customer when it can take hours to navigate the updates from WordPress and other channels. When you are impacted as a freelancer in many areas, it helps to write and post about it to keep others informed. Just get out there by practicing writing and posting on social media.

This is a great interview with Eric. If you take his advice, you may be able to expand a side project as a freelancer.

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WordPress 6.0 Beta 2 is now available for testing. The call continues to be made for testers and if you would like to contribute to this cycle jump over to make.wordpress.org.

The WordPress Performance Group has a stable release of their plugin. The Performance Lab plugin is a collection of modules focused on enhancing performance of your site. This plugin allows you to enable and test the modules before they become available in WordPress core.

Other news from the WordPress Performance team…the WebP by Default proposal is currently on hold after the community voiced critical feedback and significant technical concerns.

Over on make.wordpress.org Phi Phan Launched a Separator Block With an Icon Option. Justin Tadlock covers the options of this plugin in his article over on the WPTavern.

From Our Contributors and Producers

Open source Calendly rival Cal.com has raised $25 million in a series A round of funding and launched what it calls an “app store for time” so developers can build their own apps on top of Cal.com’s scheduling infrastructure.

Google Analytics Universal Analytics will be sunsetted on July 1, 2023. Google is providing a conversion migration tool for Google Analytics 4. Search Engine Land covers how you can convert your goals without having to recreate them.

Rob Howard shared his opinion on paying WordCamp speakers over on his MasterWP publication.

“Paying for speakers’ lodging and airfare is a cost that could be recouped through sponsorships from Automattic and the other large companies that are bringing in millions of dollars in annual revenue while riding on the good name of the WordPress open-source community.”

With all the changes being made to WordPress core, many of our listeners may want some ideas on how they should build their next WordPress project. Eric Karkovack has an article on the WPMinute when considering early adoption or sticking with your legacy business. This article is worth checking out.

“Why are the #wordpress .org make blog emails now branded with a Jetpack logo and powered by Jetpack?” asks Tom Nowell over on Twitter. See this link for the trac ticket for the source.

Privacy focused Brave wants to de-AMP the web. The browser team announced that Brave will skip AMP rendered web pages and direct the visitor to the original de-AMP’d page.

Featured segments today:

Learn WP minute by Hauwa Abashiya

Creator Clock by Joe Casabona

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Daniel and Matt are back to discuss the week in WordPress news.

They'll cover some of the important stories that came across The WP Minute news desk like:

TinyPress
WordPress.com Makes Major Unannounced Pricing Changes, Slashes Free Storage Limits
Matt's Twitter survey
Jetpack vs .com pricing
Daniel's theory on WP as a better no-code tool

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News

There is a call for WordPress users to help with the upcoming release of WordPress 6.0. This release is scheduled for May 24, 2022. There have been over 400 updates and 500 bug fixes since the last release and they could really use everybody’s help to test. Jump over to make.wordpress.org to join the core slack channel and get involved.

WooCommerce

The WooCommerce blocks roadmap has been released. There are a lot of cool things happening over at WooCommerce with most of the work taking place right now in the WooCommerce Blocks repository with store editing. Take a look at the ways you can contribute. The plan is to release quarterly updates.

From Our Contributors and Producers

If you missed it, go check out the latest eCommerce minute, on the WPMinute with Dave Rodenbaugh. He provides additional news and perspective on the owner of FAST, the one-click checkout provider.

Jodie Fiorenza wrote a great article on Omnichannel marketing over at WebDevStudios. With an omnichannel strategy, the customer becomes the focus of the campaign. Take a minute to read Jody’s article and see if you can consult with a customer using multi-channel marketing in your business.

The Admin Bar community created an anonymous WordPress Agency survey for all of their community members to ask them questions about their revenue, and various focuses (including accessibility, SEO, hosting, etc.). The results were very interesting and worth checking out.

The first issue of Tiny Press went out this week by our contributor Daniel Schutzsmith. The article covers 3 WordPress design and development links.

There is also a great interview of Chris Coyier from css-tricks.com by Nathan Wrigley on the WPTavern podcast about his sale of CSS Tricks to Digital Ocean. This is a great podcast to learn about Chris’ journey.

Friend of the show Scott Bolinger is seeking a buyer for his pop-up plugin Holler Box.

New Members:

We would like to thank Courtney Robertson for buying a coffee this week and joining as a monthly member.

Next up:

Simplified Business Minute with Sam Muñoz

“Block Editor Dev Minute” by Aurooba Ahmed

Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:

Lisa Sabin-Wilson
Birgit Pauli-Haack
Daniel Schutzsmith
Dave Rodenbaugh
Liam Dempsey

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One Click Checkout provider Fast, headed by Domm Holland, shut down unexpectedly this week after attempting to secure a down round of funding to deal with their financial obligations. What obligations you might ask? Well, according to their pitch deck, their monthly burn rate was over $10M dollars for their 500 plus employees.

And to top it off, their company was making about 50,000 dollars a month, or around $1200 per employee. These stats are pretty depressing for a company of that size and certainly must be frustrating to the investors who put in over $100 million over several rounds.

The news came fast and along with it, a barrage of folks linking to articles that point out Domm’s shady past. In 2010, Domm purchased a domain that would be useful to the Australian airline Qantas and then redirected traffic from it to a direct competitor. By way of threat he sold the squatted domain to Qantas for 1.3 million.

After that, he started the Uber of Towing and ended up in a $15 million dollar legal dispute about cars no one cared about. Holland threatened to release the private bank account and driver’s license data of 21,000 drivers. When the Supreme Court refused, he shut down the company with no notice to any of its employees and notified them via text message.

Not content to cause problems in his country, he moved to Silicon Valley and started Fast in 2019, a one-click checkout competitor to Bolt, Apple Pay, Shop Pay and others. He hired a team of contractors from Nigeria to build the initial version of Fast and acquired funding for it. Three months in, he fired all Nigerian contractors and took full credit for their work in subsequent press releases. Again, with no notice.

These are only some of the stories that came from this very chaotic startup. In the last few months, Domm’s social media account had been uncharacteristically quiet in comparison to last year as they went on a hiring spree. When word leaked about his financial problems, the startup went to an abrupt death spiral and imploded here on Tuesday April 5.

Some of the 500 employees found out about the troubles while attending the Shoptalk conference in Las Vegas, NV. Salespeople and project managers found their corporate credit cards stopped working mid-conference. As they starting asking coworkers what was happening, the word got out and there was a brief attempt to shop the company to save it.

Given Domm’s chaotic and troubled history, it’s not surprising he was unable to secure any funding under those circumstances. My heart goes out to the employees who lost their jobs in such a demeaning way.

Fast’s destruction puts the future of one-click checkout into some doubt. Originally a feature patented by Amazon, once the patent expired a number of competitors have sprung up in the space, including Bolt, Rally and our own WP-based solution PeachPay that has been funded by the good folks at WooCommerce and Automattic.

In other news, one-click competitor Bolt has acquired a crypto startup for 1.5 billion dollars according to the Wall Street Journal today. This could be a signal of a pivot in the space given Fast’s quick and painful demise. Crypto buyers and sellers both suffer from terrible experiences in the checkout process, from the exchange to using it directly in the real world. This appears to be a step in changing that experience for the better.

That’s the ecommerce wrap for this week. Have something you want us to cover about ecommerce? Tweet us! This is Dave, signing off until next time.

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Spencer Forman from WPLaunchify has some important reasons why we should consider HOW we are moving forward with Full Site Editing, Blocks and Themes.

We are all facing a fork in the road for WordPress, where we can remedy the mistakes of the past and finally create a unified framework to be used by any designers, plugins authors or service providers offering free or paid solutions.

Look to Legos for an example of how a standardized framework benefits creativity and promotes a gigantic market for innovation.

Instead of repeating the mistake of incentivizing folks to publish one-use FSE themes and duplicate core blocks, with willy-nilly CSS style sheets…we could instead create a unified framework that anyone could extend to create new design "kits" or plugins or services. This would ensure that all of the new components work together, don't break each other, and provide a clearer understanding of where profitable opportunities exist for a more profitable and easy-to-understand WordPress ecosystem.

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News

Julia Golomb over at make.wordpress.org has posted a new Proposal with Steps to Integrate #WPDiversity into organizing WordPress events. All new WordCamp and meetup organizers would automatically receive an invitation as they are onboarded to make sure the diversity consideration is addressed.

Could it be lucky #13 for testing FSE (Full Site Editing)? Anne McCarthy over on make.wordpress.org posted that testers are needed and you can follow the instructions to create a template for author pages and learn how to unlock the UI for blocks. You have until April 21, 2022 to provide feedback.

Anne also answers questions from the FSE Outreach Program. The post provides answers gathered through the program that started on March 16th and ended on March 30th.

Sarah Gooding over on WPTavern wrote about the most recent changes made on WordPress.com. There were major unannounced pricing changes along with the 500 mb free storage change. It took many by surprise and frustrations were expressed by users on Twitter and other forums.

WooFunnels, the popular sales funnel and automation plugin was added to the WPBeginner business through their Growth Fund. Syed Balkhi announced that he will be advising the team on how to expand their WordPress Product business.

WooCommerce

Beta 1 for the April 2022 release of WooCommerce is available for testing. You can either download it directly from WordPress.org or install it in the WooCommerce Beta Tester Plugin.

From Our Contributors and Producers

WP Migrate DB Pro is Now WP Migrate. WP Migrate dropped the “DB Pro” in their plugin to better reflect what the product does. The latest release of WP Migrate 2.3 gives you the choice to include or exclude the database. Migrate just the database, just your files, or both. No more workarounds required.

David Lockie announced that he has joined the Automattic family as a Web3 Lead in the WooCommerce Transact team.

Fast tweeted an announcement that they will be closing their doors. Fast had stood out in the crowded field of one-click checkout startups after it landed a $102 million infusion of cash in a fundraising round last year led by payments giant Stripe. It appears that the product was generating very little revenue.

Check out the latest episode of the Matt Report with Joe Howard where we learn you can find someone else to run your business. Joe is stepping aside but is still a majority owner of the business. He is now focused on a new SaaS startup.&n

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News

I'm sure you've been paying attention to the war. A pro-Russian war plugin appeared in the WordPress plugin repository resulting in a lot of heated conversation on the Internet. It was finally removed by the plugin team in the WordPress repository. Heather Burns covers a non-US perspective in her article.

Weglot, a popular WordPress multilingual plugin, has raised €45M from Partech Partners. Sarah Gooding, over at the WPTavern writes how this is the first time that Weglot has taken outside capital to expand its translation services.

The WordPress Performance Team has published a feature proposal that would enable WebP images by default into WordPress 6.0 core. The performance team has published their proposal over on make.wordpress.org.

Events

WordCamp Asia is tentatively back on the schedule of in-person WordPress events with new dates: February 17-19, 2023 in Bangkok, Thailand. It will begin with a Contributor day, followed by two conference days.

From Our Contributors and Producers

There is a technical discussion over on WordPress Gutenberg GitHub on the Dynamic replacement of server-provided content in blocks and in HTML attributes. The proposal uses Dynamic tokens which read like Shortcodes 2.0 but with a much better interface.

If you need to manage photo/image source attributions and licenses in WordPress go check out the premium version of Image Source Control. This plugin manages and displays image credits which have been an issue for years. If you enjoy founder stories, the article is worth a couple of minutes of your time to read.

Jamie Marsland submitted his 100th YouTube video on Gutenberg. If you are in search of a charity form for Gutenberg blocks for your site go check out his video.

Do you want to know how Crocoblock is doing in Ukraine? Lana Miro has a video on YouTube that you should go watch while they continue to work during this frightening time.

WP Minute Writer Eric Karkovack wrote a new Freelancer’s View: Overcoming the Challenge of Selling Clients on WooCommerce.

Listen to the latest podcast on buying a WordPress media property with Rob Howard on the Matt Report. Matt and Rob explore building an agency, how to hire, and Rob’s latest purchase of MasterWP.

Joe Howard took to Twitter to state that he’s working on a new product that isn’t the company he founded, WP Buffs. Stay tuned to the Matt Report for a full interview.

Next up:

Block Editor Dev Minute by Aurooba Ahmed

WP Accessibility Minute” by Amber Hinds

Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:

Birgit Pauli-Haack
Raquel Landefeld
Thomas Maier
Matt Cromwell

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Hosts Matt Medeiros and Daniel Schutzsmith recap some of their favorite WordPress news stories from the last month. We'll get a recap of Daniel's #WPTalks Twitter spaces and a possible podcast series.

Articles mentioned

Block Museum
Master of WP

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News

It was announced that the Pattern Directory will be open for submissions from the public on make.WordPress.org. The Pattern Creator page will allow designers and content creators to build, edit, and submit their best block patterns. You can learn more about the pattern directory because the code is public and available on GitHub. Birgit Pauli-Haack tested the submission process and reported that it was a great experience for her in the Gutenberg Times.

Events

If you are a Page Builder user you will be happy to know that the Page Builder Summit is back June 20-24. If you want to be the first to know when tickets are available you can register on the website.

WordCamp US has made the call for speakers up until April 17, 2022. You can submit your application for up to three topics over on their website.

From Our Contributors and Producers

The 2022 acquisitions keep happening as predicted. Yith, specializing in developing and selling themes for WordPress and WooCommerce, joined Newfold Digital.

Matt Mullenweg treats us to two more appearances on podcasts.

First, with the Verge. He is interviewed on why he bets on small companies and reveals how WordPress and Tumblr are keeping the internet weird. Second, with Guy Raz on How I Built This, sharing a genesis story of his career & WordPress.

The US Court affirms it's false advertising to claim software is Open Source when it’s not. The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit recently affirmed a lower court decision concluding what we’ve always known: that it’s false advertising to claim that software is “open source” when it’s not licensed under an open-source license. Neo4j, Inc. had been through several releases of its software and several license choices along the way, ending with what the court called “the Sweden Software License,” because the licensor was a Swedish subsidiary of the plaintiff. You can check out the details on the open-source initiative.

Listen to Spencer Forman's latest take on why multilanguage is critical for your WordPress business on our episode here on the WP Minute.

Next up Joe Casabona and the Creator Clock Minute

Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:

Dave Rodenbaugh
Birgit Pauli-Haack
Amber Hinds

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Spencer Forman from WPLaunchify has some important reasons why you should be using Multilanguage on your WordPress sites (or those of your clients) today!

With a global online economy and potential customers for a WordPress business existing in countries that speak languages other than English, it is imperative that you provide automatic translation for your content, but more specifically for your Sales Funnels, including all products, sales pages, checkouts, upsells, order bumps, thank you pages and more.

Only by providing these in a prospective buyer's native language can you ensure a "personalized journey" that results in higher conversion rates and more profit.

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It’s the WPMinute! I am Birgit Pauli-Haack with the following news and updates.

This episode is brought to you by the WPMinute. This is a great place to be a part of the community, get access to the private Discord server and be part of the news.

You know how it goes, everything I mention here will be linked up in the newsletter and the blog post. Check out thewpminute.com for the links.

News

Does WordPress need more than one Block Theme? Justin Tadlock over at the WPTavern wrote a recent article covering different opinions of having thousands of Block Themes when Full Site Editing is really becoming a thing. There are strong opinions for having one theme or having many. Do you provide one block theme that builders can expand on OR do you offer many themes to provide a site for new users to fill in their custom information? Go read the article to understand each approach.

If you would like to test out a block theme with FSE check out the article by Misha Rudrastyh on Learning Full Site Editing with the Kubrick Block Theme. It is a great basic tutorial that clearly explains.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce started rolling out automatic updates with patches for WooCommerce 3.5–6.3. This fix contains important security improvements for the PayPal Standard payment gateway (deprecated since July 2021). Please make sure to update your site if you don’t get the update automatically.

Events

Buddy Works is having a Webinar on How to Automate Gutenberg block development in WP projects on March 23rd, 2022 at 5:00 PM UTC. If you are interested in how to start WordPress block development head on over to their website to register.

From Our Contributors and Producers

Voting for Torque’s 2022 Plugin Madness is now open. In its seventh year, this bracket-style competition pits the best plugins from around the community against each other.

CSS-Tricks has been acquired by DigitalOcean. Chris Coyier will still be working at CSS-Tricks so you can expect things to pretty much remain the same with DigitalOcean continuing to produce high-quality content on front-end development.

Ronald Huereca wrote a detailed article for WordPress plugin development with a table of contents over at Media Ron. He covers the Tips, Tricks, and Guidelines for Navigating WordPress.org.

Tim Ferriss and Matt Mullenweg are in Antarctica on the most recent podcast of the Tim Ferriss Show. They explore personal fears, discuss bucket lists, grief and craft some life missions. You can even hear Tim’s Best Penguin Impressions (#578). This is a long podcast full of interesting tidbits and you get to hear Matt in an informal setting.

There is a new update for LearnDash. The onboarding wizard in 4.0 automatically installs plugins like Certificate Builder, WooCommerce, and Course Grid depending on what options you select. To check out all the new features, jump over to LearnDash.com.

Apologies to Joe Casabona for not including his "Podcast Plugin" in the recording this week. We look forward to his Creator Clock Minute in the WPMinute next week.

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It was recently reported that you can purchase six popular Automattic plugins right from your WordPress.com dashboard. Donna Cavalier shares what’s coming for plugins, themes and services that will be additionally available for purchase right through the WordPress.com dashboard to expand your options. You can sign up over on WordPress.com for early access if you would like to know what is coming.

The Museum of Block Art MOBA is a cool pop up site of virtual [block] art. This site was recently created by community members in the WordPress world. With WordPress 5.8 and WordPress 5.9 coming out with nifty design tools, members decided to show what can be created. It is worth your time to check out the site for beautiful block ideas and see how to create your own new designs.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce 6.3 was released. The updates include changes to WooCommerce Blocks, WooCommerce Admin, and the Product attributes lookup table. You can check out release posts for 6.8.0 and 6.9.0 to see what’s new. This release should be backwards compatible with the previous version.

Security

Patchstack released their State Of WordPress Security In 2021

The Highlights:

New WordPress security vulnerabilities were up 150% compared to the previous year.
29% of WordPress plugins with critical vulnerabilities received no patch.
99.42% of vulnerabilities originated from Plugins and Themes (compared to 96.22% in 2020)

From Our Contributors and Producers

Jonathan Bossenger has released a plugin in the WordPress repository that displays a customized banner and link on your site to show solidarity for Ukraine. You can check out an example of how he has used

StandWithUkraine.

Wordfence has been standing with Ukraine by blocking lots of malicious requests aimed at their sites. They deployed their commercial real-time threat intelligence for free, to all Ukrainian websites with the .UA top-level domain.

Jeff Golenski announced the facelift of WPScan. WPScan joined the @automattic family last year.

The latest issue of the Gutenberg Times covers a lot of the new features of blocks and patterns in Gutenberg 12.7. There are many March social learning events listed in this issue if you would like to participate and keep up with the latest developments.

The WPMinute discussion continued this week about the retirement of WordPress Multisite. Chris Weigman wrote a great article on where Multisite shines. His article is worth checking out.

Next up a Simplified Business Minute by Sam Muñoz!

Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:

Jeff Chandler
Daniel Schutzsmith
Michelle Frechette
Birgit Pauli-Haack
Eric Karkovack

Thanks to Mary Job for purchasing us a virtual coffee this week!

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I had the chance to sit down with Amber Hinds of Equalize Digtial to discuss her role as a Contributor at the WP Minute.

Some of the questions we covered:

What is real WordPress journalism?
How can business owners contribute without burning bridges?
How does this get funded?

I hope you enjoy this lengthier WP Minute discussion. If you do, please share it on social media!

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News

Is it finally time to retire WordPress Multisite?

Rob Howard wrote an article over on MasterWP that Multisite is a solution to a problem that no longer exists. The cool things that Multisite offered like sharing themes and single sign on just don’t seem as important to developers these days.

Rachel Cherry tweeted a response that it may just be too early to consider removing Multisite as there is still a big audience in higher education that would be impacted by this.

(p.s. Subscribe to Matt Report to hear an upcoming interview with Howard, new owner of MasterWP.)

Early in February the community had many discussions about Diversity in WordCamps and Meetups. Allie Nimmons wrote a great post on MasterWP about a better journey to diversity. Go read Allie’s important article to help get a better understanding on how to approach and discuss diversity.

Sarah Gooding over on the WPTavern writes that Strattic has acquired the WP2Static plugin. Strattic plans to relaunch the plugin on WordPress.org to improve its discovery, installation, and update process.

From Our Contributors and Producers

Jetpack has released a new way to build your own Jetpack. Release 10.7 includes My Jetpack, a brand new dashboard for managing your Jetpack products and plans in a single place.

With all of the nervous watch on the war in Ukraine, it seems that Namecheap is kicking out their Russian customers, with a 6 day notice. Konstantin Kovshenin tweeted the news.

Andrew Palmer was recently on the Matt Report discussing Artificial Intelligence for WordPress. If you want to check out the exciting direction of AI you can download the bertha.ai plugin from the repository and listen to this podcast to see what’s next in WordPress & Gutenberg.

Ryan Breslow continues the Shopify discussion this week on how they are eating their ecosystem. This is another interesting thread/perspective on Shopify’s end-to-end commerce platform.

Next Up You are on the Creator Clock with Joe Casabona

“YouTube Thumbnails” by Joe Casabona

Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:

Jeff Chandler
Birgit Pauli-Haack
Daniel Schutzsmith
Michelle Frechette

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Spencer Forman from WPLaunchify has a compelling introduction to the future of WordPress as it relates to large SMB and Enterprise.

Unlike the predominantly consumer or solopreneur user that has helped WP gain 43% or more of the Internet CMS market, Spencer shares a vision for WP that is focused on the amazing opportunities for software authors, agencies, and others to fulfill the needs of Enterprise customers.

This is a huge category that has otherwise not been provided with the type of support and packaging they need or are used to receiving from other software ecosystems. Because the opportunities are huge for all of us going forward, you'll definitely want to have a listen to today's episode.

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WordPress.org is sporting a new design. This redesign leans on the aesthetics of jazz (of course) and leaves more space for content, new typefaces and color palettes. Go check out the new look.

The second major release of WordPress 6.0 is scheduled for beta on April 12th. This release will follow the same cadence as 5.9 and will aim to refine and iterate on the customization tools introduced earlier this year. The full proposed schedule is now available on make.wordpress.org.

The WordPress Training team is looking for volunteers for the Faculty Program. The Structure proposal has been published and more people are needed. You can help out in four different ways right now and feedback is being encouraged.

WooCommerce

The WooCommerce shipping and tax extension plugin (previously referred to as WooCommerce Services) is available. This plugin helps get your store ready to sell as quickly as possible with new products. They take care of tax calculation, payment processing setup, and shipping label printing.

WooCommerce has set up a developer survey looking for feedback on making the platform better. If you work with WooCommerce and have some suggestions or insights, jump over to the site and participate.

From Our Contributors and Producers

Shopify stock closes down 16% after it warns that pandemic boost will fade. It blamed a deceleration in eCommerce spending after the coronavirus pandemic, the end of government stimulus and consumer spending. This twitter thread by Moiz Ali follows the shopify “cheap facebook” tailwinds and gives us his take on the new war.

If you have a passion for Blockchain and NFTS you will want to take a few minutes to listen to the Do the Woo episode on these subjects. Brad Williams said he could see a world in the not too distant future (maybe even this year) while attending a WordCamp you will get an NFT. The possibilities are wide open.

WPMinute producer, Justin Ferriman wrote a great post about putting a website on WordPress.com instead of self hosting. Justin makes a great case for doing this when you do not need a lot of options and want to use built in features.

Would you like to be compensated for speaking at an event this year? Atarim is holding their Free Online Agency Summit April 26th-29th, 2022. Vito Peleg made some changes after a discussion with Joe Casabona about speaking engagements. There are now two ways to be compensated and it should be a great event with many speakers.

Richard Tabor launches a new block based theme, Wabi, for writers and publishers. You can see his announcement tweet and download the theme for free on WordPress.org.

Enjoy our contributed segments today by:

“Woo Minute” by BobWP
“Mind & Body” by Michelle Schulp
“Gutenburg Minute” by Birgit Pauli-Haack

Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:

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Like a lot of entrepreneurs, I'm constantly filled with self-doubt.

Will this experiment work? Can I make it a sustainable publication?

There aren't that many people who _care_ about WordPress news, let alone care to contribute to it. This is a topic I unpacked in my interview with Kim Coleman on funding a WordPress news website. So many have come and gone in this space -- I can see why.

I am grateful, however, when folks like Eric Karkovack step up to become contributors. I'm enjoying his series about the impact WordPress is having on freelancers:

Part 1: What does Full Site Editing mean for freelancers?

Part 2: Is WordPress pushing freelancers away? (published today)

You'll get to hear Eric in today's short interview. If you're interested in becoming a contributor of content, please reach out to me.

The Gutenberg Minute

Birgit Pauli-Haack shares some Gutenberg updates as well. Here are the important links mentioned:

Curated experiences with locking APIs & theme.json

38333 Global Styles: Saving style variations

Call for Testing: WordPress Media

Italian

Japanese

Gutenberg Developer Hours 2/22 on Meetup

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News

There have been a lot of people working with the latest 5.9 WordPress release and reporting their successes and failures. Tammie Lister wrote a post about the features in the editor and would like people to quit using the term FSE - Full Site Editing in 2022. The release is not an all-or-nothing proposal yet.

Matt Medeiros created a video on the future of page builders with Gutenberg when a discussion on Discord started with Justin Ferriman, a WPMinute producer. Go check out that video to see if you agree with the future of Gutenberg.

Anne McCarthy writes about some practical ways to lock your projects for clients and users that can make changes to a WordPress website. The new template locking API that was released in 5.9 along with newer tools like theme.json continues to be modified to adapt to the user experience.

The WordPress Photo Directory recently hit 1,317 photos and continues to grow. There has been a new Slack Channel created and the team is looking for volunteers and moderators to work on a new site being set up on the make network. The team needs help working through issues in the coming months.

So…

As we head into the iterative part of Gutenberg’s phase 2, there will be changes for the community of users as they continue to look at WordPress. Josepha Haden Chomphosy writes that the Theory of Technology adoption that will come in three parts. Keep visiting make.wordpress.org to continue to get the latest updates.

Security

PHP Everywhere, a utility for web developers to be able to use PHP code in pages, posts, the sidebar, or anywhere with a WordPress Gutenberg block has Remote Code Execution vulnerabilities. WordFence reported that there are three critical vulnerabilities in PHP Everywhere all leading to remote code execution in versions of the software below 2.0.3.

There was a patched version of the plugin rolled out so if you are using this make sure that you are up to date as soon as possible to keep your WordPress site...well up to date.

From Our Contributors and Producers

Justin Tadlock over at WPTavern wrote a recent article about the Clarity AdBlocker for WordPress. Ads and upsells have been showing up in WordPress dashboards and many in the community have been complaining about it over the past few years. For many that get that exposure through the WordPress dashboard, this announcement was not well-received (to say the least).

If the default full-screen editing mode and welcome guide in WordPress is annoying when you first visit the edit interface, you can jump over to GitHub to grab the drop-in snippet to disable it.

Some may say that PHP is dead (or dying). There is a comprehensive article over at Kinsta that per W3Techs, PHP is used by 78.1% or almost 4 out of 5 websites. PHP seems to be very much alive and faster than before when updated to the latest release. You can go check out this article for the latest benchmarks.

Are you one of those people who hate working through your inbox and approach it with dread? There

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News

Matt Mullenweg, founder and CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, made the news again (this time with the Wall Street Journal). He talks about ‘asynchronous work’ and why he thinks hybrid models will die out. Automattic employees are already living the work from anywhere model and are able to adjust their work schedules as needed.

Anne McCarthy is back with another round of testing this time for the WordPress Photo directory. By adding your photos here, they will automatically appear in Openverse, a search engine for openly licensed media. Volunteers are needed to test and provide feedback on media-related features in WordPress. Anyone is welcome to contribute, and feedback is open until February 23.

Eric Karkovac wrote a post on the WordPress photo directory. If you would like an understanding of how licensing images came about and to see an early review of WordPress media go check out his article.

From Our Contributors and Producers

Many in the WordPress community have been feeling the weight of growth and change and frankly everything over the last couple of years. Cory Miller shared an update on his “crash and burn”. Many of us are not alone in this area and support Cory along with his team over at PostStatus.

The organizers of WordCamp Europe 2022, were called out recently for a lack of diversity on the Organizing Team. They are addressing that now citing the team cares deeply about diversity, equity, and inclusion. Click the link to read their updated communication.

Angela Jin has started an open discussion on diversity as well over on make.wordpress.org. Make sure to participate in this very important discussion and provide feedback.

Eric Mann wrote a post on his first month using WordPress 5.9 from an experienced WordPress contributor perspective. If you would like to see the good, the bad and the future of WordPress this post is worth a few minutes of your time.

Sarah Gooding over at the WPTavern covered the latest with the German court fining a website owner for violating the GDPR by using Google-Hosted Fonts. If you are using Google fonts and are subject to European regulations, you may want to review how you are using them to be in compliance.

Sarah’s colleague Justin Tadlock wrote an article stating that Block Editor Sidebar Panels are the new Admin Notices. Product marketers will be interwoven with the editing experience for the foreseeable future. Or until an official mechanism for products to notify users of upgrades is offered in core, as WP Minute correspondent Spencer Forman comments.

Business news!

Convesio Raises $5M in funding to further develop its scalable WordPress Hosting Platform. This funding will help to deliver a consistently fast experience with their customers.

MasterWP.co, a newsletter for WordPress professionals,

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Spencer Forman of WPLaunchify is back to explore the future of the WP stack and how it might impact you as an agency owner or WordPress freelancer.

It wasn't too long ago that HTML/CSS and some PHP knowledge was all that you needed to develop moderately advanced sites, now, the future looks a bit different.

Will you leverage React, Gutenberg, FSE and all of the new technology in as WordPress advances? Spencer's hopeful for the future of WordPress and shares his opinions in today's episode.

Read our related article: What does full site editing mean for WordPress freelancers?

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News

Matt Mullenweg recently announced that he would be personally running Tumblr for a while. Tumblr lost their CEO and Matt is making this his top priority within Automattic for the immediate future. Keep an eye open for improvements in the community.

Are you or your clients using Wordpress.com? Wordpress.com is now making it possible to purchase certain plugins directly on the plugin page.

The plugins that are available right now are for WooCommerce subscribers with a Business or eCommerce plan. Keep an eye out for more paid plugins appearing in 2022.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy on make.wordpress.org shared the potential release timing for 2022 of WordPress. This release looks like this right now:

6.0 – Late May

6.1 – Mid October

If you have project management skills or can lend a hand on these next major releases, contact the release team.

The Preliminary Roadmap for Gutenberg 6.0 has also been published by Matias Ventura on make.wordpress.org. There are four phases outlining the long-term roadmap.

Events

The schedule of WordCamps is published over on WordCamp central. Many are in the early stages of planning and don't have a date yet. WordCamp US has been scheduled September 9-11, 2022 in San Diego, CA.

From Our Contributors and Producers

To celebrate Black History Month Underrepresented in Tech will tweet about a black tech innovator/inventor every day in February.

Google is burying FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) in its sea of abandoned experiments. Sarah Gooding over at the WPTavern writes that Google’s FLoC ran in limited markets and received overwhelmingly negative feedback from the tech industry that left Google with an uphill battle to get enough buy-in to proceed. So now Google is proposing topics. Stay tuned for the feedback on this new proposal.

Squarespace rolled out an expansion of their Member Areas program. This allows publishers to earn money selling instructional and other kinds of content online through private members-only sections of their Squarespace website.

Would you like to see block standardization across the web? Joel Spolsky has an interesting blog post asking what if blocks were interchangeable and reusable across the web? He suggests a non-proprietary, block protocol that will be open and free. His article is an interesting one to read.

The WPMinute Contributor spotlight is on Aurooba Ahmed this week. She has created a new plugin called the superlist block for WordPress. This is Aurooba’s first publicly released plugin on WordPress.org. The plugin lets you add other blocks within the list items essentially making it supercharged.

Listen to Joe Casabona’s Creator Toolkit on Creator Clock Minute

Transcript:

Hey everybody, Joe Casabona here a

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We hosted our first WP Minute Live Twitter Space covering learning WordPress.

It was Bring Your Own Link (BYOL) style where our guest panelists brought a link to share with the audience. Here were the guests that appeared on the live show:

Hauwa Abashiya, Freelance Project Manager transitioning into the WordPress space; Board Member and Volunteer at Big Orange Heart including WordFest and one of the Make Training Team Reps.
Joe Casabona, Joe started his career almost 20 years ago as a freelance web developer before realizing his true passion, which is sharing his years of knowledge about website development, podcasting and course creation to help creators, and business owners.
Birgit Pauli-Haack, Birgit is the curator of the Gutenberg Times and co-host of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast with Greg Ziolkowski. Automattic sponsors her work as a full-time developer advocate for WordPress.
Daniel Schutzsmith, Web Manager at Pinellas County Government, one of the Producers at The WP Minute, maintainer of WP Livestreams Directory, and soon to be launched WP Developer’s Toolbox.
Matt Medeiros, Director by day at Castos.com; Creating community contributed news and journalism at thewpminute.com part of Matt Report media network.

Links shared from the guests

Hauwa Abashiya: https://learn.wordpress.org/| https://make.wordpress.org/training/2021/08/08/who-can-learn-help/ | https://learn.wordpress.org/social-learning/
Joe Casabona: https://wplearningpaths.com | https://maven.com
Birgit Pauli-Haack Gutenberg Developer Hours 2/8 WordPress Social Learning Spaces. https://fullsiteediting.com/block-theme-generator/ Block Theme Generator
Daniel Schutzsmith: https://make.wordpress.org/training/2022/01/18/training-team-goals-for-2022/ “Especially certification!”

Episode transcript

[00:00:00] Matt: This event is brought to you by malware and blog vault. Check out mal care.com and blog vault.net, helping you secure and restore your WordPress websites. Quite literally thank them without them. I wouldn’t be able to be doing the WP minute live and Daniel wouldn’t have that nice new gold chain around his neck.

[00:00:18] Moving forward. I’d ask all of you to join the link squad, hashtag link squad, producers, and contributors, and the discord server share, vote and discuss their newsworthy links with others. When you’re part of the link squad, you’re part of making weekly word, press news. And we’re talking about one of the, one of the biggest topics, 5.9, and learning a little bit more about 5.9, Daniel, your segments.

[00:00:46] Daniel: Yeah. And really what we’re doing here too, for folks that don’t know the w the WP minute is that it’s contributor, sourced news. We provide links basically every week of what we see out there in the industry. And so we often have discussions around those links, similar to what you’d see in a newsroom.

[00:01:04] It’s just done a discord. And so we’re, we’re talking with each other and talking about the various things we like about a link or whatnot

[00:01:11] Matt: WVU minute live is bringing you that discussion right here on Twitter spaces and streaming platforms across the internet, someday discuss hashtag link squad topics with us live and follow at the WP minutes.

[00:01:23] Stay.

[00:01:25] Daniel: Yeah, given the, the new release of WordPress 5.9, we’re going to focus on this week’s topic, being, learning WordPress. And so everyone’s brought at least one link, perhaps two or three that that share a little bit about learning WordPress. And so we’re going to go through once and we’re going to see how that goes and how long that takes.

[00:01:43] But first, let me introduce our folks here. We already know kind of Matt, Modaris our fearless leader here, director by day at dot com. Creating community contributed news and journalism at the WP minutes. Part of the Matt report media network. We also have how ABA Shaya freelance project manager transitioning into the WordPress space, a board member and volunteer at big orange heart, including word Fest, and one of the make training team reps.

[00:02:10] Thank you for being here. How all the way from London, I believe. Yep. That’s right. Alright. Joe, Casabona coming straight to us from Pennsylvania. Punxsutawney Phil come up soon. Joe started his career almost 20 years ago as a freelance web developer before realizing his true passion, which is sharing his years of knowledge about website development, podcasting, and course creation to help creators and business owners.

[00:02:38] And I’m subscribed to seven of his podcasts. They’re all amazing. So checking out a peer get ball. They have. Beer is the curator of the Gutenberg times and co-host of the Gutenberg changelog podcast with Greg Koski automatic sponsors for work as a full time developer advocate for WordPress[00:03:00]

[00:03:01] and my cell phone, Daniel should Smith, a mild-mannered web manager at Raquel’s Pinellas county government down here in Florida by day. But I’m also one of the producers at the w few minutes and a maintainer of WP live streams directory, which you may have heard me talk about before. And since we launched WP developers toolbox, so let’s get to it.

[00:03:23] We’re going to go through each person. They’re going to share a link. We’re going to tweet out that link. So as you’re going along to speakers, let me know if you’ve already tweeted it out and I’ll go into your profile and find it last year. How you’re up first?

[00:03:39] Hauwa: So I’ve just tweeted my now. And of course I have to tweet out the.wordpress.org, because I think it should be the number one tweet that goes out anyway, resource for everybody coming to learn about WordPress.

[00:03:53] So if you don’t know about it, it’s a resource that’s been built by the community and we have got lesson plans, workshops, and courses, and we also have social learning spaces on that.

[00:04:11] Daniel: That’s great. And what what kind of things can we find there specifically, like on courses and such as it, is it like Courses around full site editing and things like that, or,

[00:04:20] Hauwa: yeah, so we as part of a 5.9, the training team, so I’m one of the reps on their make training team, along with Courtney Robinson and Pooja discharge.

[00:04:31] And we took an undertaking to actually get content out ready for 5.9. First time we’ve done it and, please see that we did get some contacts out there. And one of them has been a course that was done by Roxy and it’s about full site editing. So it’s from a user’s point of view and it’s the first part.

[00:04:49] And I believe the second part should be coming out later this month. And we do have a couple of workshops and lesson plans are out there as well, that are like 0.9.

[00:04:59] I’m just going to tweet out that actually you said I can only do one thing. Can I have the link to the course? Sure.

[00:05:06] Daniel: We can do

[00:05:09] Matt: more

[00:05:09] Daniel: speakers, feel free to ask any questions or give any thoughts to these things. The I’m looking at the workshops here and I don’t know how I missed this, that there’s so many workshops.

[00:05:19] Hauwa: The workshops work came about just around during the pandemic. So we’d always have lessons and obviously the lesson plans have been there to help meet up organizers. You couldn’t get it. Speaker didn’t know what to talk about and you could just go and get a lesson plan and walk through that during your meetup.

[00:05:39] And I believe some people have used it in training general training of law students as well in bootcamps and things like that. I know Courtney’s used it quite a lot as a resource and she has contributed quite a lot. And then she’s in here listening. Yeah. And then yeah, workshops. So workshops, you can watch one of the videos and you can join a social learning space to [00:06:00] discuss it.

[00:06:00] And I know we’ve been doing a lot more with social learning spaces now. So the formats of those could slightly change. It’s experimenting with different ways of delivering special learning spaces.

[00:06:15] Joe: I know that a other kind of core space like websites that have a lot of WordPress stuff have the notion of different. Tracks, I guess like UTA at word camps is, are there plans for that@learndotwordpress.org? Because I know that you cover a wide range of topics. It says here from first-time blogger to seasoned developer will, there’ll be some guidance coming down the pike on if you’re a first-time blogger, where do you go versus if you’re a seasoned developer, where do you,

[00:06:41] Hauwa: yeah, so we’ve just sending out the latest course now we have been doing some work or the Sierra on looking she started last year in terms of defining what our goals are.

[00:06:53] And I do believe dining, you might be bringing out a link up or on but we’ve been looking at what our goals are in terms of the training team. So one of the things that Courtney has done, she did a high level roadmap, which looked at it. So it’s essentially, you could possibly think about it as planning your own.

[00:07:10] If you are starting from a user or you’re starting from a developer, it’s a one room that you could look at

[00:07:19] Daniel: that shit.

[00:07:23] I didn’t even realize there’s quizzes on here. Yep. You can take an actual

[00:07:28] Hauwa: quiz, test you to make sure that you’re doing it properly now. Just checking. Yeah, there are quizzes on there. Each of them have quizzes a week within the lesson plans. We also have exercises that people can follow as well.

[00:07:41] Yeah.

[00:07:44] Matt: How does one apply to be a teacher, somebody to present one of these workshops, so

[00:07:51] Hauwa: on Mary with me, we do have, and I will take you to, I wish I could type as fast as I talk.

[00:08:02] Okay. So I would just share it out the link for the high level roadmap that Courtney did. So on. We do have a way that you can contribute and get involved. That link is right on land, but I will share it. And so if you want to be a facilitator and submit your workshop or create a social learning space, there are some guidelines, but essentially you just walk through and submit your application and the team reviews it and just puts you in.

[00:08:44] Daniel: That’s pretty cool. I know there’s a few folks in the community that have said they were at least helping proofread and things like that. And to, technically read to make sure things were correct. And they were put together the past few weeks. So it sounds sounds like I need to get involved, actually [00:09:00] do some

[00:09:00] Hauwa: stuff.

[00:09:02] Every month we, as a team, we discussed what we were going to do for that month. So we’re looking at, we essentially, we run a sprint every month and we post out on make what we’re actually working on for that month. So anyone came on, they would have seen what we were working on for January. And a lot of it was geared towards five point.

[00:09:23] We’re going to continue with that for February, and also look at some of the things that we identified during our team goal setting. That we’re going to target for this month as well. So that should cause tomorrow, February, so we should be releasing that out tomorrow, but I will post the link just in terms of, if anyone wants to know what we’re working on.

[00:09:44] This is what we’re working on.

[00:09:48] Daniel: Great. Let’s let’s move on to the next Joe you’re you’re on

[00:09:53] Joe: deck. All right. I, this feels like shameless self promotion, but it’s something that I think about hopefully as evidenced by my question to how it’s my website, WP learning paths.com where I break down.

[00:10:07] Resources based on where you are in your WordPress journey. So I’ve got three resources for beginner, two resources per site builder, and then three resources for a developer. The reason I built this and the most lacking section is actually the site builder section. I don’t, I haven’t come across a lot of resources specifically for the site builders, the no code WordPress folks.

[00:10:35] I was asked in another event the go WP, happiness hour last week who is full site editing for. And I think it’s for a whole sect of no code people who can now make their way to work. ’cause you don’t just need to know a page builder or you don’t just need to know a specific theme to build sites without code.

[00:10:56] I put this resource together. I actually I’m going to be, I’m going to see how far I can get with full site editing with just full site editing, even though I’m a developer. So I’ll be using 2022 to customize this as much as possible without code. So it’ll be my learning journey being built in real life, but it’s also a resource for people who are looking to learn WordPress.

[00:11:21] Daniel: Fantastic. And I mean that, this is awesome.

[00:11:26] Matt: The ban testing,

[00:11:30] Joe: this is this is

[00:11:31] Daniel: something that I’ve been tweeting a lot about in the past week or two. And I hear it. In your podcast to how you mentioned some of the same things and it’s that it’s that path. It just doesn’t, it doesn’t exist for some folks that are coming from outside of the space.

[00:11:48] If you’re not, and if you’re not understanding the WordPress vernacular, if our jargon even the fact that.org.com are different, these are all things to people when they first come in. So [00:12:00]

[00:12:01] Joe: it’s definitely, I’ve definitely made it a mission for 2022 to get some more pers perspective swapping.

[00:12:11] I’m going to say between inside and outside the WordPress space, because I think you’re right. People coming from outside the WordPress space the straw man is probably people who write WordPress with a lowercase P but it’s the people who don’t fully know the terms. They don’t really know what to look for on the same token, the people who have been entrenched in WordPress for almost 20 years, I started using it in 2004.

[00:12:32] Probably can learn a lot from people who have just started in the no-code space or who’ve been using Squarespace or something like that. So I think my mission is to connect the two this year and help them learn from each other, which hopefully makes a more rich community in both places.

[00:12:53] Daniel: Yeah. Matt, did you have some say some? Did you have something you want to say?

[00:12:58] Matt: Yeah. I was, there’s actually, and a question for Holly as well as which profile and I think Joe started to address it, but which profile of end-user. Do you, what do you see both of your the official learn path or Joe’s path?

[00:13:12] What type of WordPress user is this? I guess more specifically for how it’s like WordPress sees every type of WordPress user. How do you even begin to prioritize the type of content or the type of educational content that you create, but show first to you developer, web professional end user, like, how are you categorizing your type of

[00:13:49] Birgit: how to use one

[00:13:53] Hauwa: to get involved? Great bye. Make

[00:13:57] Daniel: cool. I know there’s a few folks in the community that have said they were at least helping proofread and things like that. And I guess technically read to make sure things were correct. And they were put together the past few weeks. So it sounds sounds like I need to get involved and actually do some stuff.

[00:14:15] Hauwa: Every month we, as a team, we discussed what we were going to do for that month. So we’re looking at, we essentially, we run a sprint every month and we post out on make what we’re actually doing. This is awesome.

[00:14:28] Joe: The ban, some more rich community. How do they use WordPress training teams

[00:14:34] Daniel: most I know you need people.

[00:14:36] I know you need people to keep making content, but it’s also, I think it’s a marketing thing too. I’m like

[00:14:42] Joe: how do I learn it?

[00:14:49] How do you how to use WordPress? Or it could be the official learn path pers perspective actually developer, so great.

[00:14:59] Daniel: [00:15:00] Let’s let’s move on to the next Joe, you’re on

[00:15:02] Joe: deck. All right. I, this feels like shameless self promotion, but it’s something that I think about hopefully as evidenced by my question to how it’s my website, WP learning paths.com where I break down resources based on where you are in your WordPress journey.

[00:15:20] So I’ve got three resources for beginner, two resources per site builder, and then three resources for a developer. The reason I built this and the most lacking section is actually the site builder section. I don’t, I haven’t come across a lot of resources specifically for the site builders, the no code WordPress folks.

[00:15:44] I was asked in another event the go WP happiness hour last week who is full site editing for. And I think it’s for a whole sect of no code people who can now make their way to WordPress, because you don’t just need to know a page builder or you don’t just need to know a specific theme to build sites without code.

[00:16:05] I put this resource together. I actually I’m going to be, I’m going to see how far I can get with full site editing with just full site editing, even though I’m a developer. Using 2022 to customize this as much as possible without code. So it’ll be my learning journey being built in real life, but it’s also a resource for people who are looking to learn WordPress.

[00:16:29] Daniel: Fantastic. And I mean that, this is awesome.

[00:16:33] Joe: The fan

[00:16:35] Matt: testing,

[00:16:38] Joe: this is this is

[00:16:39] Daniel: something that I’ve been tweeting a lot about in the past week or two. And I hear it in your podcast too, how you mentioned some of the same things. It’s that past. It doesn’t exist for some folks that are coming from outside of the space.

[00:16:54] If you’re not, if you’re not understanding the word, press vernacular, if our jargon even the fact that.org.com are different. Like these are all things to people when they first come in. So

[00:17:07] Joe: it’s definitely, I’ve definitely made it a mission for 2022 to get some more pers perspective swapping.

[00:17:17] I’m going to say between inside and outside the word space, because I think you’re right. People coming from outside the WordPress space the straw man is probably people who write WordPress with a lowercase P but it’s the people who don’t fully know the terms. They don’t really know what to look for on the same token, the people who have been entrenched in WordPress for almost 20 years, I started using it in 2004.

[00:17:40] Probably can learn a lot from people who have just started w in the no-code space or who’ve been using a Squarespace or something like that. So I think my mission is to connect the two this year and help them learn from each other, which hopefully makes a more rich community in both places.[00:18:00]

[00:18:01] Daniel: Yeah. Matt, did you have some say some? Did you have something you wanted to say?

[00:18:06] Matt: Yeah, I was, it was actually a question for Holly as well as which profile and I think Joe started to address it, but which profile of end user do you, what do you see both of your the official learn path or Joe’s path?

[00:18:19] What type of WordPress user is this? I guess more specifically for how it’s like WordPress sees every type of WordPress user. How do you even begin to prioritize. The type of content or the type of educational content that you create, but Joe first to you developer, web professional, and user, like how are you categorizing your type of your

[00:18:44] Joe: yeah.

[00:18:44] My, I mean like the courses that I create, or this site specifically that we’re talking about now, this site specifically yeah, so I’m I’m going to say I’m optimizing it in search, but I don’t know really how to do that properly. But I want this to answer the question, how do I learn WordPress?

[00:19:01] This could be somebody who for a beginner, right? If they’re like, I have no idea how to use WordPress or it could be the developer. Who’s like, how do I make a WordPress theme? So I guess my target audience is people from outside the WordPress space who don’t necessarily know.

[00:19:18] Where to look to find something to learn. I wouldn’t to say that this is probably not somebody who’s like already a LinkedIn learning member, because they’re probably just going to go there. Or not necessarily even somebody who who already knows who I am or my Gutenberg courses, because they’re just trying to answer this question.

[00:19:36] WordPress was dropped in my lap. How do I learn it?

[00:19:40] Matt: Gotcha.

[00:19:40] Hauwa: Yeah, it’s it just brought me to where I just tweeted out who can learn help. Cause we looked at this a while ago back August because the vision for land leasing and the training team is huge because you can impact so many different people. So you do have your users. Your extended, whether that is freelances or designers or developers.

[00:20:01] And you’ve also got your contributors and your leaders as well. So it’s highlighting, there are many different paths. And I think that roadmap that I shared earlier breaks down in terms of the sort of people that we think learn can help and the different pathways that they could go through or they could come from.

[00:20:20] And to add to that, part of, like I said, when we had our goal team goal setting is looking at well, what are we actually going to focus on? Because it’s so huge and it’s looking at well, we need to have a needs analysis and determine what it is that people want. And by people, just not just our users, but also our employers, what are they actually seeking for in terms of the skills that they want to actually see candidates coming to them have.

[00:20:47] Daniel: There’s so much, there’s so much content to it learn, but it’s almost I know you need people. I know you need people to keep making content, but it’s also, I think it’s a marketing thing too. Like getting [00:21:00] people really to understand that exists there and in a way that, a similar thing that Joe has and here’s the path that you should follow.

[00:21:09] And I do see you have some things laid out like that there.

[00:21:15] Hauwa: Yeah. In terms of, we, we do need a lot of bodies to help. So yeah, we need everyone really. It’s not, the developers, the marketers, the designers, because, at the moment when you look at that and I know after the needs analysis, and there was a UX audit that was done last year, so that look and feel of learning and also change because obviously at the moment, when you go into it, it’s just, you just see lesson plans and workshops.

[00:21:42] So there is work on that needs to be done. But the training team is a small team at the moment. And so shout out to anybody wants to come and join and help me be more than happy to have you.

[00:21:54] Daniel: And I put a beer, gets link up top there to, for folks to who are interested in becoming a facilitator.

[00:22:03] Matt: It’s funny. I was on a webinar the other day for a piece of software called de script, which was very popular. And in the podcasting space, basically trans transcribed your audio when you edit audio through texts, instead of visually through wave forms and the CEO does this webinar, maybe once a quarter or something like that.

[00:22:22] And I think it’s one of the better pieces of software that I use fairly straightforward, pretty easy to use and understand there’s a slight learning curve like everything else, but it’s not tremendously difficult. And they have a ton of content and a ton of content. That’s actually in the context of the app.

[00:22:40] So wherever you’re in the app, you can always get access to a knowledge base, article, a video. It’s a tutorial and they do webinars all the time. At least two or three a month according to my inbox. And the CEO pulls up a person from the audience to ask questions. And that person says, gee, I wish you could sh I wish you could create more content around using this piece of software.

[00:23:05] And I could see in his eyes, he just wanted to be like, do we not create enough already? And it’s just, every person is going to want to learn it a different way. This particular person was like, yeah, but I want to start from scratch. And he’s there’s a whole course over here. There’s an academy over there.

[00:23:22] There’s this three hour long video on YouTube. And it’s, every person is always going to want something different. And even for an app like de script, the challenge for WordPress is just, wow, there’s just, it’s just a big challenge, I think for WordPress, but you guys are the team and everything is just doing an amazing job.

[00:23:46] Daniel: Yeah. And to be fair too, there is a. Because I’m doing the WP live streams directory. I’m seeing all the different things that are coming across my feeds that I’m putting into our calendar and the social learning team there. They must [00:24:00] have at least four or five webinars a week, basically.

[00:24:04] That’s our kicking out. So it’s been very fast and furious and they look like really good, attended webinars too. We’re talking like, 70 plus people almost every time. So when people are interested in it,

[00:24:19] Matt: Hey, if you’re just tuning in, this is the first WP minute live session on Twitter spaces. WP minute is an experiment in community journalism and reporting news for WordPress. You can find us at the WP minute. It’s hosted by Daniel shoot Smith. He’s your navigator today. And the hashtag is hashtag w.

[00:24:42] I am the creative genius behind that hashtag that is the value that I bring to the show.

[00:24:51] Daniel: Absolutely. And it works well. Beer

[00:24:57] Matt: let’s hear from you.

[00:24:58] Birgit: I’m going right into the social learning spaces, which is a meetup group, and it’s also on the longest learn. There’s a social calendar. But a lot of these social learning spaces, or actually there, I’m here to share a link to the first event of the Gutenberg developers hours an event where developers can bring their the problems, the questions, the code, that demos to an expert panel and then get answers from the various people and February 8th event, we’ll have Nick Diego developer advocate at WP engine and plugin developer and theme developer, and then also Fabiana Kagy who books 10 up and has done quite some Gutenberg demo.

[00:25:48] Development and also some great apps around and always keeps the conversation flowing. And then the third panelist will be Tammy Lista, who is one of the designers of the Gutenberg project. And also now works for SWP and trains developers there and has some interesting ideas on gradual adoption of Gutenberg depending on your skill level.

[00:26:15] So that’s what we’re going to going to discuss on February 8th 11:00 AM Eastern and 1600 UTC. And that’s all on the the repressed learning, social learning group on a meetup, you can do that, or there is also a post on the make blog. Because I put a proposal together to actually rally some experts together who wanted to be participating.

[00:26:40] This is only the first of four events. We will do it every other Tuesday. So it will be a February 8th, then February 22nd, March 8th, and then March 22nd. And we will have a changing panel. And also after that, we do a recap with the [00:27:00] panelists, with the participants and see how we can improve the event.

[00:27:03] And then continue doing that also in an Asia Pacific. Comfortable time zone because this is in the middle of a night for them. So that’s my link today. And I’m just yeah, totally amazed. How far the learn dot WordPress team came with all the content that they put out just about for WordPress 5.9.

[00:27:27] Yeah. There’s a lot of yeah. How to use the navigation, navigate a blog, how to use drop patterns, how to use all those on the site too, there are some great events coming up.

[00:27:39] Daniel: That sounds great. And that is quite a lineup is so that I hear you. So that’s the lineup for the first one on that changes each session.

[00:27:47] Is that right?

[00:27:48] Birgit: Yes. Yes. Yeah. Some of them are repeaters. I said, okay, I will do all four. Yeah. We will also have George mama dish villain. Is there also Joni Halabi and I forgot, sorry.

[00:28:04] Daniel: Oh, that’s great. And next here in the audience. So hello, Nick. The so at this, it looks like you can actually bring your questions that you might have.

[00:28:13] So if you’re trying to figure something out, if you’re looking to get more clarification on something, like actually getting the folks that do this regularly to walk you through it, that’s pretty awesome.

[00:28:24] Birgit: Yeah. And I think that’s a missing piece on the parts because we develop us, we are mostly trying to figure it out themselves.

[00:28:32] Get some examples, go out in stack overflow or wherever, but there is not a whole lot of there’s a lot of documentation out there, but never for that specific use case. And sometimes you just need have an expert kind of walk you through an approach. Like I want to do this kind of blog or block, what would what would be necessary?

[00:28:50] I do I use the sidebar. Do I use a tube Quantway extend the core block or do I create my own block? Can I do this what I’m doing with custom fields, what I’m doing with custom post types, all these kinds of questions. And yeah, those panelists will have some answers for you that you can make a better decision on how to approach things.

[00:29:09] Because of course there are always 15 ways to skin the cat. But what is the best one for you? Is hard to find out something.

[00:29:18] Daniel: Yep. And that’s where I’m at as a developer. Like I’m the, yeah, I’m still the PHP based HTML developer. I didn’t hate anyone’s warning to learn JavaScript mowers though. I’m playing catch up as we go along most my, and

[00:29:39] I think it goes back to what Joe was saying before, too, about, the different pathways and people coming to WordPress. I also feel, the questions around JavaScripts specifically in react and how we can use it in the block editor and also FSC I think is really important as well.

[00:29:53] So to have folks that have actually worked on this a bit to give that clarification that’s true. [00:30:00]

[00:30:00] Birgit: Yeah, that feeds right into, if I may, she has taken link, which is a block seam generator that Carmelina NEMA she has been on the representative for a long time. Also has a website called full site editing and she just published a block theme generator.

[00:30:20] And you can create different levels of the theme that you want to try out. And if you want to have an empty seam, you get the six normal templates like index single page archive for four and search the theme, Jason file. And that. Yeah. No patterns, no block style. If you want to have a more elaborate theme that you want to learn from then you can get the basic theme, which also has a custom template.

[00:30:46] Has two template parts three block patterns, and then also custom block styles that you can put in the sidebar as well as additional styles for the form elements. And the theme gees on that comes with it has quite a few different variations there that you can adopt there, be it custom colors or being dual tones or being stylings for for specific blocks on a general basis.

[00:31:12] And the best one to learn from is probably the advanced theme that you can download there. That has seven templates has four. Templates for pages and posts, but also seven block patterns. Custom styles shows you how to include Google funds, how to create a unregistered block styles and patterns, and also how to ha have filters on there.

[00:31:36] That’s a quite learning tools when you know how to code, but you also want to look at code and see, okay that’s interesting how she does that, or that’s interesting. I’ve never thought that would work. Yeah. But here it works. And these are great examples.

[00:31:52] Daniel: That sounds great. I’m going to check that out.

[00:31:53] Matt, did you want to say something?

[00:31:56] Matt: Yeah. So just quick question, maybe maybe you’re just using zoom for now, but I’m curious because of the lack of WordCamps and meetups around the world. Is there a different tool being used other than let’s say just the zoom of screen-sharing something that is more geared to, when I think back to work camps, when obviously when the most powerful thing is being in person, but I would just see people, sitting side by side laptop.

[00:32:18] Side-by-side, here’s how you code this, pointing to that. Obviously in person, much easier to do that. Is there a different tool in place for this sort of like side-by-side coding, learning, or maybe not yet? And just sort, just zoom sharing for now?

[00:32:31] Birgit: No fun for now though. You mean you couldn’t work developer hours?

[00:32:35] Those are zoom meetings. They’re not webinars so we can see each other. Everybody can share when they want to. And but it’s relatively informal, but it’s not a kind of sit next to me and to coding, what you, what is out there are several Twitch streams. I know Ryan Welsh. Has Ryan Welches, R Y a N w E L C H E R.

[00:32:59] On [00:33:00] Twitch. He does every Thursday morning at 10 30 Eastern. A livestream about two hours where he codes certain yeah. Problems. So yeah. Approach a certain things. Here’s done yeah, block, how you create a meme block or how you create a poll block and how to yeah. Walks through on the Gutenberg release kind of thing.

[00:33:21] So it’s and it’s interesting to see how he approaches every project pretty much the same way. And then leads down. Okay. Yeah. For this blog we need we need to enter some PEX controls. We need some we need to add work with data. We need to display something like for a poll you need to display some hierarchy some bar charts and all that.

[00:33:41] There are quite a few interesting Streams out there they’re recorded. And then he puts them up on the YouTube channel on his YouTube channel. If you follow the Gutenberg times weekend edition, I most, most of the time I have his link in there. So you can go to the Gutenberg times the last Saturday, a weekend edition, and you will see a few links that you can follow on the Twitch stream.

[00:34:06] I know Helen who Sandy did a Twitch stream on where she tried to figure out full site editing for own blog. It was last summer, so there were still a few bugs in there, but there was an interesting of yeah. Follow along. So that kind of thing is out there right now. Yeah,

[00:34:27] Joe: one of the things. That I think going going back to learning JavaScript and code one of the things that excites me a lot about full site editing, especially as we look at the preliminary roadmap for 6.0, is that I feel like we’re getting back to basics, right? Justin Tatlock had a really good article on the, on WP Tavern.

[00:34:53] This is, if this is modern WordPress theme development, sign me up where he was happy that he didn’t have to spin up no JS or whatever, anything. And that, that really excites me too. Cause like I’m a. I had Pippin Williamson on my podcast like ages ago and something, he said that stuck with me. And it’s like the thing that I carried through as a developer is if he dropped his laptop in a lake, he wanted to be able to walk into an apple store, buy a new one and have it up and running in an hour or less.

[00:35:27] And with some of these developer tools, I don’t know if that’s possible. So it’s cool. That theme development is getting easier. I think it’s going to decrease the the learning curve, especially for first-time WordPress theme developer.

[00:35:41] Birgit: Yeah, I totally agree, Joe. There is no built step in there.

[00:35:45] There is no note jazz. There is no big rap pack kind of thing. It’s really relatively clean in HTML CSS and maybe a little bit PHP for the functions PHP, if you need it. But other than that, you [00:36:00] could do this. You could even create a theme in the full site editor, the site editor on once you log into WordPress and then export that and then use that same on another page or site Rather it’s not completely perfect yet.

[00:36:15] Of course, it’s the first first version that’s I don’t think it’s ready for production. And it still has the beta level beta label. But it’s going there. It does not need the full JavaScript on, but it also means that theme the, a lot of themes have a lot of plugins territory in their theme packed in like custom post types and additional custom fields and all that kind of build into their themes.

[00:36:44] So this method of theme developing is more for. Let the theme be a seam and everything else goes in plugins a way. And that’s right. Yeah. Joe, you got it. It’s back to basics. That’s what a seam theme supposed to be.

[00:37:01] Joe: Yeah. I love that. That’s something I thought too, is that this is, I think this is the next step in the, the great decoupling, the true decoupling of themes and plugins and layout and functionality, which is great, which is absolutely.

[00:37:14] Daniel: It’s a big a big proponent. I love the whole MVC framework, the whole concept of you have the model, you have the view viewer, and then you have the control and basically it’s separating those different pieces to it. And we always had that with WordPress, but not completely, but now it really feels that we’re going into that direction, that you truly could separate, the functionality from the design especially with what we’re seeing with the Jason and all that.

[00:37:38] So it’s a very, it’s a very exciting time to be working with that. You get, was

[00:37:42] Birgit: there something else you want to mention?

[00:37:46] Any questions?

[00:37:47] Hauwa: No. I just had one thing to add to when I think Joe was asking about, or maybe it was UMAT about the different streaming platforms. We do have a post out that is asking for guidance on that. We recognize that, it’s not just that when people do want to use Twitch and whatever other platform you want to use.

[00:38:06] So there is a person I think Courtney’s shared it out on the space. So if anybody wants to contribute to that, so things that we just need to consider around, if you’re using your logo use and subscribing asking people to subscribe, that sort of stuff, but just the different platforms that people want to actually use.

[00:38:23] Birgit: Just a comment from Courtney Robinson that she would love to see learned over P kind of work with code spaces and be as code and have a way to actually have code along that line. I think that’s an interesting idea. Fabulous. Yeah. And I know that Favian, Peggy was also working on a tool that lets you when you do a tutorial that lets you embed some code with all the yeah.

[00:38:49] Where you can change it on the browser. And then copy paste that into your own environment, but you don’t have to just to do the example, you don’t have to spin up all the things that you need [00:39:00] even for block development, but he’s working on it. And I talked about it on the latest, a change log because he was.

[00:39:07] I guess on there. And it’s a very promising development there. He got the inspiration from the react documentation beta that they have published right now. And that is definitely going these places. Yeah. Thanks for the reminder, Courtney.

[00:39:26] Daniel: No, while we’re, while you’re mentioning it too, I think react is another area that I just keep thinking has so much potential to bring in a flood of new folks into WordPress.

[00:39:38] And I figured this, something around that to me is very interesting and almost exciting about the fact that it’s this wide open frontier, but, we really haven’t had any, large as far as they know any large, JavaScript agencies come in or any of the larger movement other than, the, we.

[00:39:59] The whole concept of Gutenberg around react. But now it’s if you think about opening it up to people who were doing other types of status apps and the types of things out there, and they realize the potential that they can do inside of WordPress with what they already know about react, that’s where I’m, to me, I really hope that we can attract those audiences as well and bring them over into the fold.

[00:40:19] They’re

[00:40:26] very

[00:40:26] Birgit: exciting.

[00:40:26] Daniel: Let’s see. We just had me left. Matt, did you want to reset the room? Are we good?

[00:40:32] Matt: Let’s reset. Because we’re professionals around here. This is the WP minute alive Twitter space talking about learning WordPress with WordPress 5.9. That happened last week. There’s less alert and we’re excited to have three great panelists on to to help us learn WordPress.

[00:40:50] You can expect to see us maybe once a month around here doing some live Twitter spaces with Daniel shoot Smith at the helm. Join the hashtag link squad@thewpminute.com. The WP minute.com. Your experiment in WordPress, community, journalism and news. I think now, if anyone has any questions about learning WordPress or any reactions responses to what our panelists have shared today, feel free to raise your hand request to speak.

[00:41:20] And as long as you don’t come at us like crazy folks in the movies on. We’ll bring you up on stage.

[00:41:30] Daniel: Yup. No pitchforks. And also too, if you have a link that you’d like to share, feel free to tweet that out and then hop on here to ask the speak. I’ll go and do mine now. So share mine.

[00:41:40] And I got to preface this by the fact that none of us talked about our links ahead of time. It just so happens that a lot of shows like that were from the make team and the specifically learn WordPress team mine as well. So mine was specifically about the training team goals. And again, you’ll hear [00:42:00] her name mentioned a lot, but Courtney was the one who showed this to me.

[00:42:04] And I think it was maybe even yesterday or the day before that That the trading team goals for 2022 there’s some really great things in here talking about the represent representation of stakeholders and making sure they have the right the right people at the table to be able to be involved.

[00:42:18] Also talk about the different methods and priorities and what obstacles they’re dealing with. But one of the things that really stood out to me, and it was almost a footnote that I heard was the whole concept of certifications that that we are experimenting, or looking into kind of certifications in Q4 20, 22 around around learned WP.

[00:42:38] And this is something I think that’s, everyone has their own opinions about certification. The reality is people do get attracted to having certifications, especially if it’s done by a body that, that everyone sees as the expert or the lead, body and whatever that industry is.

[00:42:52] And so to me, it just opens up another avenue of just, professionalism and also just the that capability there to attract, those folks coming from other industries and other areas where they’re focusing on web development to now realize that they can do this type of thing over here.

[00:43:07] I know it’ll be a slow roll and it’ll be something that’ll have to be done over time. But I think it’s just very exciting to see that coming, seeing that as a possibility here and putting things together. And Courtney is actually requesting, go ahead, Joe.

[00:43:22] Joe: I just want to provide a little bit of context for this cause I’m sure Courtney you’ll probably remember, but.

[00:43:29] Actually, I don’t, I can’t remember if you were at the 2015 community summit, but we we talked about certification, like official certifications. At the community summit where you there Courtney? I

[00:43:42] Courtney: was, yes. And so community summit, if people are listening that aren’t familiar community summit happens every few years before one of the international level word camps, I would say.

[00:43:56] So for a continental level, they’ve held it in us. And also EU I was not present for EU and I was petrified my mind during that conversation. And there are those that have spoken about WordPress governance that were very involved with. That was terrifying me at that point in my journey. I will be the first to tell you as a side note I later went on to teach at a bootcamp and my bootcamp organizers, where I advised how much PHP individuals would need even front end devs seeking beginner entry-level roles in the WordPress product space and that involved sufficient amount of PHP for plugin troubleshooting type of things.

[00:44:40] And we went through a course about underscores and learn the template hierarchy and template tags, but the students still were not yet at a skill level where they would be able to. Apply and pass the tech screening questions for one of the plugin companies. I’m not [00:45:00] naming names in this one, but they wouldn’t have been able to pass that exam.

[00:45:03] And I told my bootcamp, organizers, look, this is problematic. If we’re tacking WordPress development onto a front end bootcamp. And they’re like we need some official direction or guidelines for that. And I am very thankful and fortunate that my role now means helping create some of those resources for outside of the WordPress bubble.

[00:45:25] Those that would do that training.

[00:45:29] Joe: Yeah. Yeah. I was. I remember I remember everything that you spoke about. I was pretty warmed up at that point because we also talked about dropping the B this is the first time that we had like a real community discussion. Banning certain venues for word camps, local word camps.

[00:45:45] And I was pretty heated about that. So this was like a cakewalk for me. But I know the big question was who would be the the kind of arbiter of certification, right? Because automatic was ruled out because this was more of a open source community thing. And there was no real arm or a governing body, to use maybe not the best term, but there was no arbiter for that.

[00:46:11] It looks like, learned that WordPress is the thing that could serve in that capacity as the place that can determine what is certification and it’s backed by the open source project and the foundation. But I know there were a lot of concerns around. Who’s going to be the person who says that this is a certificate, right?

[00:46:28] Cause like Microsoft can give out certificates for Microsoft CIP systems and Oracle can give out certificates for Oracle systems, but who’s going to say this is an official certificate for the open source project.

[00:46:41] Daniel: Yeah. So

[00:46:43] Courtney: in that context, learn is a great segue for that and why the training team will be conducting first a needs analysis and then forming a curriculum advisory board.

[00:46:57] And then further down the road, we’re only talking in Q4 about doing discovery and discovery would look like learning what has worked and what did not work from other open source and proprietary organizations that have pursued certification or what was great and what was not great. And. Tapping into other places that have navigated those waters and also hearing the concerns for instance of web development related careers, the training programs for those.

[00:47:31] So whether people take a pathway of design, develop content marketer, factoring in what the needs are for guidance from those types of organizations, what do they need to get their trainees up to jobs, sufficient, ready to apply. And I think that’s a really big area to consider. And I always say you could get the jobs, whether you have gone through and gotten the degree or taken a couple [00:48:00] of Demi courses, LinkedIn learning courses are great to books, whatever method it is that you learn, you can still get jobs without these certifications, but I see certification as more of a framework for here is what would help someone be proficient in various.

[00:48:16] John pathways.

[00:48:18] Joe: Yeah. It almost goes back to answering the question that we opened this whole space with. Which is what, who are you? And where do you go to learn? What? If you have a certification path, then all right, I want to be a WordPress content editor. Here’s the path I want to be a WordPress developer.

[00:48:35] These are the things that according to the open source project, or according to whomever that you should know to be a proficient WordPress developer, I think that’s, I love seeing that on the roadmap for the learn team or the training team.

[00:48:49] Courtney: Yeah, but we’re interchangeable, but I, again, a huge, thanks.

[00:48:53] I see quite a few people that drop in through the training team. And Joe, I know that you were part of the training team in those early years, too. We were a group that was centrally based out of DC and all of those areas. So it’s been exciting to see the work that this team has put in and the meetings that took place to form that goal-setting were three weeks, three hours ish, each time.

[00:49:20] So there was a lot of work. I want to make sure that others are credited and attributed to that. That’s not just Courtney sat down and whipped out a post. That was a lot of effort across at least a dozen people there in the meetings.

[00:49:38] Daniel: That’s great. That’s, if it’s things like that, that I think it’s really exciting to know that. There are folks that are interested in this kind of thing. And if any of you are interested in this, we talked a lot about learning WP here, and we’ve put different links up top there that you can also get involved with some of those things.

[00:49:56] Matt Madeiros any final parting thoughts?

[00:50:01] Matt: No, this has been fantastic. I learned a lot as I normally do. It’s pretty easy for me to learn from smart folks that come together on Twitter and in the WordPress space. So I appreciate a beer get Joe and how how I can’t wait for you to start a podcast because you have the podcast voice.

[00:50:16] It’s about time. You start the podcast. But I appreciate everything that you do there. Everything you share on the WP minute same with you, a beer get with all of your Gutenberg knowledge Joe give or take, but Daniel, thanks for hosting today. It was fantastic. Everyone follows. Daniel beer, get Joe and Howard on Twitter and follow us@thewpminute.com.

[00:50:40] Daniel. Thanks again for everything you do here.

[00:50:44] Daniel: Oh,

[00:50:48] Joe: thanks everybody.

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News

WordPress 5.9 – Joséphine was released this week. There is a lot of good stuff to check out on blocks and themes. If you would like an understanding of how this major release with Full Site Editing (FSE) will impact you as a freelancer, you should read Eric Karkovack’s article right here on the WPMinute. You can learn some new features and consider how these changes will fit into your business.

While reporting on the updates of 5.9 there was a lot of concern about the Customizer going away with this release. Anne McCarthy explains all you need to know about the new site editor and the Customizer. Go check out her review on YouTube.

Sarah Gooding reported over on WPTavern that the WordPress Community Team will relieve volunteers of the burden of COVID 19 enforcement for WordCamps and Meetups scheduled with 50+ attendees. The Guidelines were posted over at make.wordpress.org.

The big picture goals for WordPress 2022 were published on make.wordpress.org. The goals are broad right now and there are many teams which you can join and contribute to. There is still a lot of work to be done so go check out the areas where you can help.

Speaking of the future of 2022, WordPress 5.9 sets a strong foundation for so much more for the future of WordPress. There is a post on the Gutenberg times that paints a picture of the future that this WordPress release provides. There is a table of contents to jump to the areas of immediate interest.

Before the dust settles on WordPress 5.9, the roadmap for WordPress 6.0 is published on make.wordpress.org. This is a high-level overview and the aim is to consolidate and expand the set of customization tools introduced in 5.9.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce 6.1.1 is available. This release resolves a bug introduced in 6.1.0, rolls back the deprecation introduced in 6.1.0, and improves WooCommerce’s support for WordPress 5.9.

Events

Post Status is having their first-ever career summit scheduled for April 8, 2022 (9:00am – 5:00pm CDT). The conference is for job-seeking and hiring in WordPress. If you are interested in speaking at this conference you can sign up on the WP Career Summit Site.

Join @schutzsmith – Daniel Schutzsmith (January 31st 3pm EST / 8pm UTC) as he hosts WP Minute Live: Learning WordPress. Roundtable guests will be @hauwazhiya – Hauwa Abashiya, @bph – Birgit Pauli-Haack, and @jcasabona – Joe Casabona.

From Our Contributors and Producers

Helen Hou-Sandi (who many know as the lead developer on the WordPress open-source project) has joined GitHub this week. This is an exciting opportunity for Helen and we wish her the best.

Elementor published their 2021 Wrapup with an impressive statistic of over 10 million active websites.

Lesley Sim wrote a really thoughtful and researched article over on Post Status about WordPress as a Commons. There has been a lot of discussion on Twitter and different Slack channels concerning WordPress since the State of the Word talk this year. This article is worth reading to help frame an open discussion around WordPress – the open-source project.

Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:

Birgit Pauli-Haack
Michelle Frechette
Davinder Singh Kainth
Andrew Palmer from Bertha.ai

Thank you, dear listener, for tuning in to your favorite 5-minutes of WordPress news every Wednesday.

The WP Minute is an experiment in community journalism for WordPress. If you want to support WPminute, the team, and all of those that contribute – head on over to buymeacoffee.com/mattreport.

Buy us a digital coffee for as little as $5 OR better yet! Join our community of WordPress newsies, get access to our Discord server, private podcast, behind the scenes on how the news is made, and get your voice heard on the podcast.

That’s it for today’s episode, if you enjoyed please share it on your social media, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser. Don’t forget to share share share this episode with others and jump on the mailing list

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In the News

WordPress 5.9 (RC3) is here. 5.9 is slated for next week and you still have time to help with testing. Go over to make.wordpress.org to see how you can still help with this important release.

WooCommerce

The WooCommerce development team announced that they have started working on an implementation of custom tables for orders. Sarah Gooding over at WPTavern covers the details of how this long-awaited improvement for the custom tables will be developed. The release is scheduled for Q3. You can check out her article for the details.

Events

The WordCamp Birmingham Organizing Team has unanimously decided to postpone WP Y’all until a future date in April or May when we can safely hold the event for our attendees. Nathan Ingram has a Twitter thread and he will share the updates as they become available.

From Our Contributors and Producers

Have you started using Blocks in your workflow? Nick Diego forked the core social block and created the Social Sharing Plugin. Justin Tadlock over at WPTavern covers how Nick created the social sharing block by forking the social block from WordPress core 5.9.

Speaking of blocks, Tadlock wrote an article covering Wicked Plugins Block Builder 1.0. (Hey, Vinny’s a producer here at The WP Minute) If you would like to see how Justin created “resource block cards” using the plugin, click the link in the show notes.

Do you interact with the WordPress database? The Wizard’s Collection: SQL Recipes for WordPress is an ebook that is available right now. It is a great resource If you need to update your database skills.

Would you like to recognize the people that contribute to WordPress? Aurooba Ahmed has made a repo on GitHub to list all WordPress people that can be sponsored on the platform. If you know someone, take a minute to add them to the list.

Andrew Palmer shared a recent interview with Marieke van de Rakt over on the Freemius channel. Marieke, the previous CEO of Yoast shares insights of the acquisition of Yoast to Newfold. Quick tip: It seems like it helps to have a broker and a banker when you need to negotiate. This interview is definitely worth a few minutes of your time.

Not exactly WordPress - but worth mentioning

Happy 21st birthday to Drupal.

Wow! Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard for nearly $70 billion. Remember, less than a year ago Microsoft acquired Bethesda with a loot chest filled with games like: Elder Scrolls, Doom, Fallout, and more.

IMO this frames Microsoft as “Universe Builders.” I wouldn’t be surprised if you saw them competing with Disney on all fronts within a decade. They do open source stuff too, link in the notes.

Next up:

The Block Editor Dev Minute w/Aurooba Ahmed

The Transcript

Hi, this is Aurooba and this is your Block Editor Dev Minute! Here’s a cool feature you should know about: WordPress 5.9 is landing soon and with it, so does block support for multiple stylesheets. If you haven’t already adopted block-specific stylesheets, now is the time.

Registering per-block stylesheets means that unnecessary styling is never loaded. This is great for performance and fantastic for maintainability. Being able to add multiple stylesheets per block means you can create more atomic styles. Let’s say you have a custom block that includes a button, instead of creating new styles for the button in this block, you can simply pull in the stylesheet for the regular Button block for consistency and efficiency.

I think this is going to be pretty handy. Read more about this and the other fantastic features coming to WordPress 5.9 in the Field Guide on make.wordpress.org. Thanks for listening!

The Gutenberg Minute w/ Birgit Pauli-Haack

Transcript

Happy New Year! My name is Birgit Pauli-Haack. Here is your Gutenberg Minute. Next week, Tuesday, WordPress 5.9 will be released. Theme, plugin developers, and site builders are already testing their products against release candidate 3.

5.9 is the biggest release since the block editor’s debut in WordPress 5.0. As it ties all the pieces, dare I say blocks together into a new and powerful site-building experience.

Learn.WordPress.org has a new self-paced course “Simple Site design with Full Site Editing” meant for site builders and owners. You’ll learn how to create a personalized site design without any coding. Shorter workshops are also available: “How to Style Your Site with Global Styles' or How to use the List view”.

On the WordPress Social Learning space on Meetup.com, you find dozens of events covering Theme development, Color Styling, and a lot more. If you need to educate users, clients, or meetup members on the latest Gutenberg features, Anne McCarthy has created a list of talking points and resources to learn more for presenters and trainers. Keep up with Gutenberg updates, via the Gutenberg Changelog podcast at gutenbergtimes.com/podcast.

Links:

Release Candidate 3 WordPress 5.9 https://wordpress.org/news/2022/01/wordpress-5-9-rc3/

Simple Site Design with Full Site Editing https://learn.wordpress.org/course/simple-site-design-with-full-site-editing/

WordPress Social Learning on Meetup https://www.meetup.com/wordpress-social-learning/events/

So you want to talk about full site editing? 5.9 Edition https://nomad.blog/2022/01/15/so-you-want-to-talk-about-full-site-editing-5-9-edition/

Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:

Daniel Schutzsmith
Vinny Mckee
Andrew Palmer
Jeff Chandler
Aurooba Ahmed
Birgit Pauli-Haack

Thank you, dear listener, for tuning in to your favorite 5-minutes of WordPress news every Wednesday.

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Welcome back to the WPMinute's Special Edition interviewing our new community lead, Raquel Landefeld. Raquel is the event coordinator at Elegant Themes and will be coordinating content and interviews for the WPMinute.

A Little History on Raquel

Raquel manages the Meetup Pro Community for Elegant Themes. There are over 50 Divi chapters all over the world. Raquel coaches Meetup organizers on how to human where the emphasis and focus is on human connection. She also helps manage the Elegant Themes Facebook group with over 70K members and coaches the moderators on how to moderate the group with kindness.

Raquel discusses how there are rules in the Facebook group to address new users of Divi and where users can be directed for specific help.

With so much WordPress news, the challenge is centered around channels supporting independent content on the Discord server for the WPMinute. Matt and Raquel discuss the mission of the WPMinute, how the news is curated and how members interact.

The WPMinute brings the human voice from the group presenting in a short form podcast. Raquel shares her great ideas of sharing short video clips and when we can meet in person, hosting a small WPMinute group meeting at a conference.

If you want to become a member of the WPMinute and you want to take part in the weekly WordPress news, join our merry band of "WordPress newsies" and chat it up, get yourself mentioned in the newsletter and get credits in the show, become a contributor or producer of the show!

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In the News

The release of WordPress 5.9 is coming this month. There are many performance enhancements that will be part of this release. In addition to editor and front-end performance enhancements, lazy loading images changed, resulting in a 30% faster page load - in some cases. Go over to make.wordpress.org to check out the numbers.

Sarah Gooding, over at the WPTavern covers the new API in Gutenberg that will be released with WordPress 5.9. This new API will allow you to lock individual blocks and override template locking which had been the only way to lock blocks.

Events

As WordPress 5.9 comes out at the end of January, there is a Mega Meetup to provide information that WordPress professionals should know about. You can sign up for the meetup which will be held Thursday, January 20, 2022. Look for some great exploration of Blocks and what to expect around design changes.

WooCommerce Updates

Heads up. Starting with version WooCommerce 6.5 (scheduled for release in May) WooCommerce will require PHP 7.2 or newer to work. PHP is rapidly changing and it was determined that PHP 7.2 was the version that still had a significant number of WooCommerce active installs running. If you have an older version of PHP running it will still work, but you will not be able to continue to update this plugin. You also risk the usual performance and security issues by running older versions.

From Our Contributors and Producers

There are several more 2021 “year in reviews” from the WordPress community.

Brad Touesnard from Delicious Brains shares a nice post about how the company's growth has tripled and how the team is growing. He also covers the ACF (Advanced Custom Fields) acquisition along with other updates. The article is worth a few minutes of your time to read.

WPCloudDeploy shares the blogpost of how they had 10 versions of their product released in one year. They rolled out more than 50 new and improved features last year. This is a pretty impressive post representing a lot of work from that company.

There is also an update from Rich Tabor. He announced that WP Experts has acquired his Login Designer plugin.

Did you know that NFT marketplace aggregator Flip, co-founded by UpOnly podcast host Brian Krogsgard (yes the guy from Post Status), has raised $6.5 million in a seed funding round?

What is Flip you ask? Flip aggregates NFT marketplaces under one roof on its platform, allowing users to easily navigate through available NFTs to buy.

Ever wonder why competing with Google search is next to impossible? Well, a new search engine needs an index of the web. And many sites don’t welcome any web crawler that isn’t Google or Bing. This article from Fast Company covers the challenges of competing with search that crawls sites with automated software.

Brave, which is a privacy-focused web browser, had seen continued growth in 2021 with 50 million users. The Brave browser does not track your searches or share any identifying data with third-party companies. If you would like to break free from the big companies, you can give them a try.

WordPress News is hard to turn into a real business. This week over on the Matt Report Rae Morey shares how she built The Repository newsletter with her background as a journalist.

Two Great Segments:

The Learn Minute with Hauwa Abashiya Transcript

Happy New Year. It's Hauwa Abashiya here from the Make training team here with your Learn WordPress minute.

If you're not familiar with Learn WordPress, it is a learning resource on .org for anyone who wants to learn how to use, build for and contribute to WordPress.

The Make training team wrangles all the content on Learn and we use the Sprint methodology to determine what we are working on and our timeframe for delivery. This month we are focused on creating content for 5.9 and need your help.

We have identified a number of existing lesson plans and workshops that need to be revised, as well as the new features coming to 5.9 that need a corresponding lesson plan and workshop. For the full list see our January 2022 Sprint post on .org, links provided in the show notes.

If you're interested in helping create content, leave a comment on the post or drop us a message in the training team Slack channel. We also have some great workshop videos that you can follow.

As a reminder, workshops are practical on-demand videos that show viewers what they can do with WordPress. Lesson plans are guides for facilitators to use while presenting at events or within educational environments.

Visit make.wordpress.org/training for more information and check out learn.wordpress.org

The WooMinute with Bob Dunn Transcript

Hey, it's BobWP from Do the Woo, here's your 1-minute of WooCommerce The innovation we see happening with WordPress will reflect directly on WooCommerce. When I asked Matt Mullenweg at the State of the Word to give me some Woo, he said "in 2022, the thing I'm most excited about is embracing Gutenberg and the block interfaces for everything with Woo. Woo still has some ways of doing things which are more tied to the Classic Editor, or shortcodes, or other ways of creating pages. There are some plugins and experiments around Gutenberg and blocks. And I think that I would love if Woo was one of the best plugins in the world for embracing how to use Gutenberg.

Then back in September when we had WooCommerce CEO Paul Maiorana on the podcast, he added his insights, "because as we're able to see things like full site editing coming around the corner for WordPress itself, and as we are able to take some of the lessons learned from that and apply them to WooCommerce as a whole, we're going to be able to utilize the lessons learned in just the FSE experience in general, for making that experience great for store owners earlier." So I can safely say, hang on to your hats with Woo in 2022 as I'm sure we are going to see some very cool things playing out. And you can find these conversations and moreover on DotheWoo.io. Thanks for listening.

Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:

Birgit Pauli-Haack
Liam Dempsey
Nigel Bahadur

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It's the WP Minute Shopping Show!

I'm your host Matt and I am delighted to share 5 great WordPress products with you this week.

What's the WP Minute Shopping show all about?!

You'll get to hear from WordPress product owners pitch their product in 1-minute or less. If you're interested in their product, please visit their store. The better they pitch, the better chance they have that you might be buying -- maybe even spice things up for you with a discount code.

You'll have to keep listening to find out.

For product owners, it's a great way to talk about your cool new feature, version, or add-on. Want to support The WP Minute project and get your pitch heard? Buy 3 spots on the WP Minute Shopping Show!

Tune into the WP Minute Shopping Show each time you see it on the feed to learn more about products, their owners, and what deals they might have in store for us.

WordPress products on the show today:

WP Pusher
Wicked Block Builder
NewsletterGlue
Recapture
Easy Support Videos

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In The News

The first Release Candidate (RC1) for WordPress 5.9 is now available! Your feedback helps the community check that nothing is missed. Given the tens of thousands of plugins, themes and differences in how millions of people use the software, now is a good time to test.

To really understand the year in core, you can dig deeper into contributor data with a lot of numbers and charts over on make.wordpress.org. It is an amazing amount of work that everyone can be proud of. But it should be noted that the data does not include contributions on GitHub repositories like Gutenberg.

Angela Jin shared the proposal for the Block Pattern Directory. It will soon be live and ready to accept custom Block Pattern submissions! In anticipation of this new directory, questions have been raised around the best practices for submitting Block Patterns. Before you submit your block pattern, make sure that you have some basic automated checks in place. If the submitted Block Pattern passes the checks, it will be published immediately or it will be flagged for manual review. You can comment up until January 14, 2022.

Did you hear that Yoast is headed to Shopify? There will be an online event held on Thursday, January 20, 2022. It starts at 4:30 pm CET / 1:30 pm EST. Joost de Valk, shares on his blog the business reasons that Yoast was built for Shopify, which is not open source.

Events

Post Status is having their first-ever Twitter Conference. They are picking up the torch from Hey Pressto and carrying forward with an All-on-Twitter Conference to be held Tuesday, May 24, from 9 am – 4 pm EST. Check the link on how to apply and present in 15 tweets.

From Our Contributors and Producers

WSForms posted Website Resolutions for 2022. This article is a good reminder to review your current website and make adjustments if you do not have all the innovative things to make it awesome in 2022.

If you would like to stay focused in 2022 and need motivation there are several blogs that review the past year. Syed Balkhi shares his year in review that includes many acquisitions in the WordPress space. One data point of note: Awesome Motive is now 200+ team members strong.

Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:

Birgit Pauli-Haack
Michelle Frechette

Next up: The Creator Clock, with Joe Casabona

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WordPress 5.9 Beta 4 was released this week. Sara Gooding over at the Tavern wrote that there are a few important changes to note in this release regarding how the WordPress admin will direct users who are exploring block themes. There is an incompatibility message for redirection depending on whether the theme is using blocks or the customizer.

The release team has determined that a 5th beta will not be necessary and the official release is scheduled for January 25, 2022.

Events

The call for speakers is now open for WordCamp Europe 2022. We will have to keep an eye on how this in-person event will be safely organized. It appears that you will also be able to participate online.

From Our Contributors and Producers

A software vendor has lost a civil case in a first-time ruling by Italian courts on open source licensing. The case involved Ovation’s GPL licensed Dynamic.ooo software, which is a plugin for the open-source Elementor platform for building WordPress websites.

The software was distributed without including acknowledgment of the original work, including information about changes tthat he defendants had made to the software, and with no mention of the software’s copyright holders.

There is a fine levied against the defendants every day until the software is brought into compliance.

WPCS.io, an Amsterdam-based provider of the world’s first multi-tenant WordPress cloud platform to create SaaS solutions with WordPress, announced that they are raising a substantial seed investment from Arches Capital.

WPEngine announced on their blog that they have acquired the Frost theme, adding to their open-source cache of WordPress solutions.

This theme was created by Brian Gardner and focuses on block editing and the full site editor. Gardner re-joined WPEngine in late September of this year as Principal Developer Advocate.

This ended his “gap year” after staying with WPEngine during a transition period of the hosting company acquiring StudioPress, a company he was a partner in previously.

WPEngine will be issuing full refunds to active customers.

Matt Mullenweg lays out a debate over the future of the internet. Mullenweg, Automattic CEO and WordPress founder, joins ‘TechCheck’ to discuss the future of their internet. The WordPress developer explains the difference between open vs. closed platforms and which will see the most growth. This will be interesting to watch next year.

Interesting TikTok news

Is it possible that TikTok brought more traffic than Google this year? The viral video app seems to be on a high, finishing the year with the most cumulative internet traffic of any domain in the world — more so even than Google, which typically holds the number-one spot. Cloudflare reviewed how the Internet went for TikTok in 2021.

Next up Michelle Frechette with a year-end wrap-up.

Don’t forget to read Michelle’s contributor post: In-person events: The good, the bad, and the fearful.

Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:

Jeff Chandler
Nigel Bahadur
Dave Rodenbaugh
Daniel Schutzsmith

New Members: We welcome a new member this week, Jennifer Bourn to the WPMinute.

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With no major acquisitions, events, or feature releases this week, we can all take an exhale of relief. Today’s theme is: Reflection.

WP Minute Contributor Joe Casabona reflects on the State of the Word hosted by Matt Mullenweg. He shares strong opinions on how you might give back to WordPress by taking care of yourself, first.

“When I was in college, I learned about Saint Ignatius and the idea of Cura personalis, or care of the entire person. I’d like to think of contributing more like this”

WP Minute Producer Michelle Frechette represented Post Status in an interview with Matt Mullenweg about acquisitions in the WordPress ecosystem. Matt says Automattic is participating in all parts of the ecosystem from investment to purchasing companies.

Nexcess shares 22 WordPress predictions to look forward to in 2022. WP Minute Producer Daniel Schutzsmith was quoted on his take of the Full Site Editing Knowledge Gap.

“As block-based themes and full site editing take over the WordPress landscape, they may create a knowledge gap among WordPress users,”

David Bisset asks us to reflect on what we think the biggest news items for WordPress are this year. Send him your message to be included in the round-up.

Reflecting on all of the…awards?

The WP Weekly Awards for 2021 concluded.

Elementor claimed the most voted page builder, Yoast won for best SEO plugin, and I…came in 4th place for the Matt Report podcast with the WP Minute ever so slightly behind, holding down the 15th spot.

I can’t wait for next year!

And speaking of audio…

@Francisco on WP Slack has shared an update about Openverse and where the next iteration is leading us. He shares some mockups of what searching and discovering audio + images might look like on the platform.

From the grabbag

Daniel Schutzsmith started a WordPress Twitter community
Protocol asks if Matt Mullenweg can save the internet
Treehouse was sold

Contributor audio segments by:

Michelle Schulp
Michelle Frechette

Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:

Jeff Chandler
Joe Casabona
Michelle Frechette
Daniel Schutzsmith

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In the News

State of the Word 2021 happened this week. If you would like to hear the complete audio or read through the transcript from the live event check out the link over on the WPMinute. There is even a mega-thread of our favorite clips over on Twitter.

GoDaddy covered the event as well including their own timestamps for the video stream.

I have three takeaways from the event that I think are important:

WordPress still wants more volunteers and contributors
Gutenberg is bigger than WordPress
The acquisition train is fueled by the influx of the larger tech economy

Speaking of acquisitions:

You may want some insight on how to approach selling your company. Check out Freemius’ Gamechangers — where videos of some of the largest acquisitions in the WordPress space have occurred. The first interview in the series (from December 8th) is with Syed Balki from Awesome Motive.

WPMinute Contributor Kim Coleman, co-founder of Paid Memberships Pro received 27 likes on her Twitter question on the Freemius account when they announced it: Is this the total list or are there any women in your series?

I asked Vova for a comment leading into the inclusion of this article in today’s episode:

We are not happy about it either and take full responsibility for this mistake. We are going to rectify it. We already have Marieke from Yoast to join and are waiting to hear from additional female founders.

The growth of WordPress

Is Elementor the hero we asked for?

Joost de Valk published the sixth iteration of his CMS market share analysis on his blog and found that the W3Techs tracked Elementor. It appears that much of the new growth for WordPress as a CMS is tied to Elementor since they are dependent on each other.

Elementor sites cannot exist without WordPress, so they are tied to each other. But I think the conclusion is fair that of all those new sites being built with WordPress, a very large portion of them, is being built with Elementor.

Events

WordCamp US 2022 will be held in San Diego this September. No dates have been announced but you can sign up to be an organizer now.

From Our Contributors and Producers

WP Minute ecommerce correspondent Dave Rodenbaugh published his latest ecommerce minute discussing the issues with the supply chain. If you are waiting for products this week and want to understand the crisis better, go check out that episode.

Can you still make a living building WordPress sites? This Tweet from Jack Forge got some traction on Twitter and many people responded about how WordPress is great for enabling people to make a decent living. There are some fantastic stories in that thread.

Eric Karkovack does a recap of 2021 on SpeckyBoy. He covers the foundational shifts that we have seen in WordPress. These shifts include the changes to WordPress 5.9, acquisitions, and how all of this will lead to something bigger in the new year.

With Full Site Editing coming late in January 2022, you may want to experiment with David Gwyer’s first release of theme.json theme generator. If you're interested, you can sign up over on themegen.app.

There was a lot covered in the State of the Word and Security was discussed (as usual). If you are interested in monitoring all your WordPress sites for security vulnerabilities found in plugins, themes, and WordPress core there is a new security product that you can check out over on Product Hunt.

If you are a community member who publishes course content and may have missed this, you can now publish on WP Dev Academy. If you would like to know when this platform is available from Alex Standiford you can sign up over on WP Dev Academy.

FINALLY not WordPress related but still notable

Apple launched a redesigned open source website. You can explore some of the projects built on open source. It is pretty interesting stuff.

Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:

Jeff Chandler
Birget Pauli-Haack
Eric Karkovack
Dave Rodenbaugh
Daniel Schutz Smith

New Members: We would like to welcome new members to the WPMinute Discord group Scott Murcott and Andres Armeda this week to the WPMinute. They have already contributed to the news this week. Thank you very much!

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State of the Word 2021 just concluded in NYC.

Just over 2 hours of updates around the community, the software, and the vision of Matt Mullenweg. This episode is an entire recording of the livestream broadcast over YouTube including audience + listener questions.

If you enjoy content like this, please consider giving back to WordPress or donating to this publication.

Episode Transcript

oh, but really, really, um, welcome to everyone. Thank you all for being here. This is very exciting. Um, I am excited to see all your faces. It's been many years since I've seen some of you, um, in case you have not noticed we are changing our hashtag this year. It is state of the word written out, but remember to do your capitalization for people using reading.

Assistive technologies, readers, screen readers. I got it. Uh, there is going to be a Q and a portion after this. It will be here from our live audience, but also some folks at home. Um, uh, he's the at-home portion for us right now. So if you have any questions, get them ready. If you're here, there's a microphone here that you will be able to ask your questions at.

Or if you are watching at home, you can head on over to the YouTube embed of this, uh, live stream. And we are monitoring the chat there for questions as well. Um, that is all that I have to say. Um, and I think that's probably all that you want to hear from me anyway. And so tonight giving our annual state of the word where we talk about everything we've done this year and everything we hope to do next year is of course WordPress project.

Co-founder Matt Mullenweg.

Wow. Wow. We're really here. So, uh, welcome everybody. And I've been told to ask if folks over here can just move up one row. Um, if you don't mind where we're going to try to fill out the front and bed that. This is so exciting and so honestly fulfilling to be together again. Oh yeah. I guess everyone's starting to cascade

for those joining us live. We are here in New York city. It is, the sun is setting. We've got a few invited community members from all of the world. Thank you all for coming.

We had people joined by plane, train and automobile. How long was the train ride? Two and a half day train ride to get here. So that is definitely the most interesting. I actually am also came a, probably a two and a half day trip, but all the way from Antarctica. So if you notice a little bit of a raccoon tan, that was because I had very strong sunglasses and I guess not strong enough sunblock as that's me have some penguins.

And while there I read a lot of books and learned a lot about Antarctica and one that particularly stood out actually a leader who's inspired me for a long time was Ernest Shackleton. And I knew a lot about his endurance journey where ship crashed or got stuck. And then they sent back. Basically they saved every person who was on that journey, but a story I didn't know about him, which I learned about was.

Journey's to the south pole. He turned away only 97 miles away from reaching the pole, which is pretty darn close if you've ever tried to get, I think I flew, like if you add it all up, like almost 7,000 miles back. So the turnaround of the last 97 and actually as this was happening, as I was reading about this, I was thinking about the version 5.9 release.

So you might know that today was a scheduled or right around today was the scheduled originally scheduled date for the WordPress 5.9 release. And we made a very, very unusual decision for WordPress to delay that release for about a month. So we're going to release it in January, but it felt like we were so close and we decided to turn around.

And, but very, I believe it was entirely the right decision as it was for Shackleton. He made it back alive. I think his saying was better to be alive, donkey than a dead lion So we don't want full site editing, which is coming in 5.9 to be a dead lion But it was also I think, a moment for reflection, because of course we talk about and the philosophy part of WordPress, how deadlines are not arbitrary and whatever we were making that decision, which wasn't that long ago, I just delayed the release.

I wasn't thinking so much about what's happening right then the kind of month before. But what did we do? 3, 4, 5 months before. So I think it's an excellent time to reflection for reflection. And actually some of this has started on Anne McCarthy's blog. We started talking to her comments section, uh, in public, of course, has everything happens on WordPress about what we can learn from this that we can start putting into effect, not just for the release coming next month, which will be fine, but for the big 6.0, which is coming next year, I've even heard some rumblings that 20, 22 might be a year.

We aim for four releases instead of just three, but let's not get too crazy just yet. Where are the beginning of the state of the board? Not the end. Um, uh, we had a very, very exciting 20, 21 and really it was quite fulfilling to be part of it after such. Well, it's still part of a very challenging time in humanity.

One of the things I want to highlight first was our eight new core committers, both the core and themes. So let's do a round of applause.

for Kelly, David, William, Isabel, Johnny, Jeff JB, and Tanya. I'm so excited, uh, that they now have ability to change the code that runs 43% of the internet. Um, another update is we, we focused a lot this year on wordpress.org. And, uh, one I'd like to highlight to start is around the new sites and this, we do have.

Some guests audio. We weren't able to get people from around the world all to New York, but we have some audio that working in the redesign of the news page in wordpress.org, the general inspiration was last year's state of the word presentation and overall jazz aesthetics, because the blog doesn't have much imagery.

We took some time to explore shapes, typography, layout, and colors, to get a successful result that expresses the playfulness of jazz.

I really designed this. Might've been like WordPress 3.0, so it was exciting to start to loop back to some things and wordpress.org. Another thing we were able to launch on wordpress.org was open verse, which I swear we named before Facebook decided to pivot

open versus a surgeon openly licensed to search for an image, download and put it on your site,

give attribution to the creator

and that's it.

So open verse is part of we've started to expand how we think about our mission from just being about the code and the tools to allow people to publish to actually what they're publishing. So open verse was originally called creative common search was actually part of the creative commons, nonprofit, but sort of cost and running it's.

Um, they decided they were going to shut it down or put it somewhere. And we found a home for it on wordpress.org, which I'm very, very excited about. We have over 600 million creative commons images licensed through it, and we're going to have audio coming up at the end of January. There'll be 2 million audio clips there.

And, you know, applying open source to content is a little tricky, but the creative commons of course has a long legacy there, I think 20 years now. And so we're very, very excited to continue carrying that torch forward, to create as much open content on the web as possible. Another thing we got on WordPress dot of is the patent directory.

The word pattern directory, similar to the plugin and theme is a site that features submitted patterns that anyone can copy and use with WordPress 5.9 we're preserved members will be able to sign in and submit patterns, be added to the directory. As you can see in this flow, this is a huge opportunity for desire to contribute to the overall WordPress ecosystem, without having to know how to code plugin or a theme.

If you've used patterns and WordPress lately, you know, they make it easy to add uniquely outs to your site quickly. How imagine helping others create beautiful content from testimonials, headers galleries, and more with your own. Once submitted patterns will be set to pending, and you'll be able to see all your patterns in one place.

So maybe patterns can also be resized around the page to give a better understanding of how our pattern will be displayed at different sizes. And since parents are really just texts, they can be copied to devices, clipboard, just like any other texts, just paste the pattern into any block it, or incorporate it into your site.

Catch that. So the copy pattern button on wordpress.org, you just press that. Then you go over to your Gutenberg paste and you get whatever was there. So this is a very, very exciting way, you know, with the first version of Gutenberg, the phase one are really creative as all the fundamental building blocks.

Um, almost like, uh, that you can build pretty much anything out of much unlike, uh, Legos or, you know, strands of DNA. Uh, but with patterns, we now have the ability for really anyone, whether you with no-code or low-code, uh, to be able to create and share complex, uh, presentations of what you can do with.

Another thing. I was really, really proud about our progress in 2021 was what we call the polyglots. If you don't know, polyglot is a word for someone who speaks a lot of languages, I speak barely one. So these folks always impressed me quite a bit. Uh, we had a 76% improvement and the language packs that are being created for plugins and core.

And we're up to now 15,900 active translators that work we've been able to take the number of locales that WordPress has translated to at time of release to 71.

71 that could name 71 languages. It's pretty impressive. The other thing we've been able to do is for those who don't know, our translation system is actually powered by an open source project called Glock press and in glob. Uh, we're able to add a lot of new projects, including open verse, learn WordPress, the pattern directory and patterns.

So these are now all part of what we're translating open verse, which we just heard about is translated into 17 languages already learned. Our WordPress is in 24. Patterns are in 24 and the patent directory is in 25 different locales. So in our mission of democratizing publishing, of course, we're not doing it just for people who speak English and this presentation, everything we're trying to translate into as many languages as possible.

So this is widely accessible as possible. And speaking of that, there's also been some exciting developments around diversity and WordPress. So we created this new diverse speaker program and speaker support program that have had 135 participants go through it so far and 66 cities and 16 countries around the world.

Uh, this is, uh, basically a program to help people who might not have spoken at a work camp or to WordPress event before, um, basically get some guidance on how to do so. Uh, they already have the skills and everything like that. This is I would love to grow this number quite a bit. And if you would like to get involved in one of these trainings in the future, the URL Joseph is make.wordpress.org/community.

Make that wordpress.org/community and the magical WordPress Twitter account. We'll put that out shortly. Probably the correct answer there. Some of these slides were changing until literally minutes ago, part of making WordPress more accessible as well as about the learning. And so last year I talked a lot about learn.wordpress.org, which is this idea of how do we teach more people the power of how to learn WordPress, teach them how to fish.

We've had 186 social learning spaces, which are basically like cohorts of people going through the different classes. We have 73 workshops and 70 different lesson plans that teachers college professors, elementary school teachers can adopt and teach to their students. This is all available in 21 languages.

And so far, we have two courses that people can go through, which are like full collections of lessons and plans and things like that. This is pretty nascent as well. We've only had about a thousand people go through through this so far, but as the content gets better and better, as it gets iterated on the people working on this kind of improve it with every single iteration.

So when a class goes through, they say, okay, this was easy to understand. This was harder. And of course it all gets translated. If you are looking for a way to contribute to WordPress, by the way, hosting a workshop is a very, very easy way because it's just a few hours of time to be there with folks. That are attending the workshop.

And certainly if you're listening to this, you have more than enough knowledge to be able to share with someone new, to work breasts, as this grows and develops, we're going to make it a much more prominent part of what, what you see when you visit wordpress.org. Because so many people coming there who might put their powered by WordPress or proudly powered by WordPress on a site, um, I'd be curious and learning what it is.

And so I think this is actually one of our biggest opportunities to just expand the knowledge of really what WordPress is, and also define to a new audience, what WordPress is through these courses. We had a pretty good year for growth as well. So in the distribution of WordPress, and I'm proud to announce that according to w through texts, we now power 43% of the website

We also had, uh, we doubled the number of themes that were being added to the directory, huge amount of work there from everyone who works on the moderation theme directory. And we had the most downloads of the software ever. And this isn't including updates. This is fresh downloads of the software. Uh, so pretty much by every metric, it was a bit of a, a great year, which is impressive because like many online services, we experienced a big COVID bump.

So to actually lap everything that happened last year, it was pretty great. But that 43% and perspective it's actually 43.1%, but we went from 4 39 0.1 to 43.1 in the past year. And this is a list of the other top five. So, uh, the number two right now is Shopify, which went from 3.1 to 4.4. Wix is number three, which went from 1.5 to 1.9%.

Squarespace went from 1.4 at 1.8%. And the only other open source project that's still in the top five is Joomla, which actually shrunk from 2.2%. 1.8% in general, the CMS has, are not taking market share from each other. So what we're taking market share from as a w three texts calls nun, which is, uh, basically websites that are running a not discernible content management system, which most likely means it's custom or something that was kind of bespoke for that site.

So it was seen as a huge shift. This used to be over two thirds of sites, uh, running some sort of custom CMS of the sites and the top 10 million, a huge shift of them were running to CMS. But one thing that's concerning to me here is the top three used to be WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla, which are all great because we're all GPL.

So as those grow, it means that there's more and more open source on the web, but we've seen these three proprietary systems pass up all the other open source. Other than WordPress. Now, the good news is WordPress is still growing pretty fast in this market share analysis. We actually grew to entire waxes this year, which is a new unit of measurement.

And to put that in perspective, we're still 10 times larger than number two out there, but this doesn't happen for free. And we shouldn't take any of this for granted. Um, there are in the history of software and certainly the internet. There are many services that were once dominant that now we need museums to remember what they were so to maintain.

And in fact, it's celebrate this growth, which it did in 2021. We really need to one stay humble and stay close to users and iterating the software as quickly as possible. One thing that's been in the news quite a bit lately is also security. And I'm proud to say it was a good year for WordPress security.

We had over 30 people of which a third of them were first time contributors contributing security patches in our security reporting system. 71% of the reports ended up being closed as not applicable and about five points has produced look at. So this means that someone had reported them already.

Security is a process. Anyone who says they are perfectly secure is tempting fate, but as a process and the investments that we've put into. Um, and basically in partnerships with the host where we work with both hosts, NCD, and CloudFlare, to whenever we are aware of something, we actually work with them first to protect WordPress sites often at the network edge or at the host or data center edge.

In addition to being able to push auto updates to the vast majority of WordPress sites in the world. And this is incredibly important as we go forward and continue to grow again, security is a process, not an end point. So our ability to be one of the most secure platforms in the world is a hundred percent a result of how much we're going to be able to update sites because humans are fallible something.

I fundamentally believe all our code is written by humans, as far as I know. So that means our code is fallible. So that means as somewhere in the WordPress, many hundreds of thousands of lines of code, that's something that could be improved or some sort of bug, which might have a security implication.

So it's really key. There is not is how we're going to be able to update it. Uh, in terms of updates, changes, improvements. We also that a lot of the block themes. So this is last year. We only had two of these in the world. Now we're up to three. Now we're up to 30. So we have a 10 X, but this is nothing compared to what it's going to be in the future block themes are basically themes that are built from the ground up to be customizable entirely with a Gutenberg block editor 2022, which is the new default.

Which we'll actually launch in 2022 with the release of 5.9 uses all of our new tools, including blocks themes about Jason and the new design tools. I'll talk a little bit about later and a little bit next, uh, in this presentation, we also finally got to one of the, uh, as you know, like there's a limited number of developers for WordPress.

So we kind of work on different things at different times, which means sometimes there's parts of it that haven't had attention in a while. And if you have recently updated widgets in your sidebar, you might've seen one of those parts, but coming up or, or actually now you can now manage widgets with the block editor that's purpose 5.8.

You can now manage your widgets box, allowing you to visually edit more parts of your site. This is actually really cool, kind of showing off how deep customization can go with a combination of tools. Starting with layering two blocks to create a neat effect. As you can see, be able to use blocks opens up tons of new creative possibilities from no code mini layouts to tapping into the best library or third grade blocks to create content.

That's the focal point change. Keep in mind that you will have the same controls. Nicole started perfective placement and the opacity go a step further and how to do a talk filter to create an even more compelling experience. Enjoy the familiar experience of drag and drop to get the details just right before saving, checking out your awesome creation on your site.

That was a little bit of a. Widgets and blocks demo, but also some really cool Gutenberg stuff that we're going to talk more about later. The other block, maybe the most complex block ever created is called a query block. So imagine WP underscore query. Now a block Akash and 5.8. You can now easily display your posts and pages with box.

As you can see here, this advanced block comes built in with various layouts that you can switch between till you find the one that you liked from there. You can go a step further to customize your featured images, thanks to new design tools coming 5.9. It includes dimension controls and various scale options.

So you can tweak it to your heart's content. Again, that was like a pretty fancy demo. I'll mention a few things. Now you got to the block and navigator, which is a very exciting way and accessible way to navigate through blocks. And I dunno if you saw it, but what Anne was doing in that demo, when she was changing, the size was actually, she clicked and then moved her mouse up and down, which actually increases it.

And finally, one of the things that we're still not sure how to describe exactly, but we're very excited to be part of the design tools of WordPress is duo tone filters can be used in even more places like the featured image block. It's a great way to bring character to your photos and perhaps in the future, your videos, this means you can transform your images without touching any code or photo editor.

If you look, I'm going to try to go back to the beginning of that. She might start talking again. But if you saw those images were all kind of different colors and they didn't really match what duotone allows is imagine duotone being like gray scale, but instead of just going between white and black, you get to choose the two colors that it goes between.

So essentially what this can do is create a really cool, consistent aesthetic throughout all the images. And what we're having here is, is actually being used in the query block. So, and, and updates one of them to kind of crossfade the highlights or shadows, which you can choose. It actually updates every single post in that block.

So that's why they all in outlook cool and consistent. This is a pretty cool tool. It's hard to explain, but really fun to play with. So you're going, uh, get, uh, one of the latest block themes, including you can download the 20, 20 tool one from betas. Oh, we got a little feedback there and play with this. It is really, really cool.

And another cool thing is that themes can, of course define that a fault gradients that are suggested through themes that Jason,

all of this is possible because of literally thousands of people that contribute to WordPress. So just like we did in the beginning, thinking committers, I do want to thank and highlight at the very least the faces, if not all the names of some of the contributors to our last releases. So the 5.7 release was named for the amazing jazz bassist Esperanza Spalding, and we had 481 contributors.

Of which 24% were brand new. This is all other faces.

5.8 was named for the virtuostic pianist, our Taten. Um, one of my favorites check out Tatum recordings. They will blow your minds. And, and that we had 530 contributors, again about 25% new. Uh, and this is all of them that, that, uh, and for 5.9

your face could be up here still. I mean, not right now, but for 5.9, we've already had 580 contributors, the core software. But if you watch your avatar up here, uh, for the release post, uh, there's still a few weeks, so you can test submit patches or otherwise contribute to WordPress 5.9. Um, and this is the folks who have already showed up.

So cheers to them.

Contributor to show up for all sorts of reasons. It's to give back to the project that helped them send out work and socialize with like-minded people to support and learn from entrepreneurs and other professionals to gain valuable skills that are really, really useful work alongside some of the best developers in the world.

And if you have another reason, drop us a tweet. So we're using the state of the word tag, but we're also gathering lots of feedback during this, during this live stream. And for whoever's watching this later, so use the state of the word hashtag, and we're going to check that out and actually highlight some of them on the blog later block editors and visual editors have been around for a long time, but one of the things really unique about WordPress and one of the reasons it's taken us so much work to get to where we are today with Gutenberg is we are committed to doing this in a web standards based way and a way where the code is very, very clean, which also means it's more accessible and highly performance.

If you're having a look up some of the benchmarks of Gutenberg versus any other page builder generally has much higher scores and much lighter code. We are on the cusp of finally coming to five point. It looks like an apple slide, right? It's kind of cool. It's got duo tone, improved gallery, which you can drag and drop block spacing with a single control border bark, flexible layouts, themes, and patterns.

You can edit your site logo easily, including make the logo bigger. Some designers have heard that someone got that one, the list view, which is super, super cool. It allows you to navigate between relatively complex hierarchies of blocks, very, very easily. And finally, the integrated pattern directory, which is probably the easiest way to essentially contribute code to WordPress that has ever existed.

We've got a few demos here of what's in 5.9, and these are honestly some of the coolest demos we've ever shown in the state of the world. The 5.9 release marks the introduction to the next generation of themes that allows greater customization and simpler building themes can now be created entirely with blocks, meaning you get all the familiar editing tools and the same blocks you use when creating posts and pages to allow you to edit all parts of your site, including your header and footer.

All the templates from the theme can be edited using the block editor like the homepage, your blog archive, or single pages. One to zoom in on just your header, easy using the top toolbar, select your header and switch into a dedicated mode to do exactly that. Once that you can explore the new navigation block that comes with built-in responsive and keyboard accessible.

We've over 30 theme blocks, the ability to customize and create every part of your site has never been easier and do it in a fully responsive ways to just shop with moving from desktop to mobile views. Now I've got styles, introduce a quick and intuitive way to change all the visual elements of your site globally.

From topography to colors, to various aspects of how blocks appear. All of this allows you to achieve distinct looks by modifying the style presets. Here's an example from the 2022 theme showing how drastically different the theme can be with tweaks to the styling options. You can change anything, but there must always be birds.

It's called the hatchery thing. I mean, you're kind of stuck with it. And then finally we improved how patterns work patterns can be used to create different sections like headers and footers in a few clicks. You can make a brand new header without changing your theme. Open the inserter, switch to the patents tab and select explore to see what's available.

All these new features help you get where you want to go faster

time and time again, as we look towards the future of WordPress is probably my favorite slide, um, or finally achieving one of the things that WordPress set out to do. Uh, 18 years ago now I feel a little old saying that, uh, I think starting well, actually now I've worked on WordPress more than half my entire life.

I helped to work on it the rest of my life, if y'all still let me.

And this is why we started the Gutenberg project. When we first introduced Gutenberg a few years ago, all the way to when we first showed the first mock-ups and ideas of it in 2013, we said this was going to be the foundation and what the new versions of Gutenberg was, what the new versions of WordPress were built on what our next 10 years would be.

And, uh, not only are we enabling folks to express themselves and ideally uniquely on the web, unlike the cookie cutter that all the social sites try to put you into the cookie cutter looks, um, we're doing it a way, which is standards-based interoperable, uh, based on open source increases the amount of freedom on the web, uh, which is very key, certainly to me and the most important thing, uh, that I work on.

Um, as we're renewing our commitment to the open web as a whole, it's also been kind of an exciting time, just be following technology news, because a lot of people have been talking about web three and the decentralized web. Um, I'm not gonna dig super deep into defining web. Because I don't think anyone really knows what it means, but it is a buzzword it's now being talked about on NPR wall street journal has being talked about in the context of global standards.

And to me, what, what three embodies is two essential ideas, decentralization and individual ownership. And for me, those are both things that WordPress is both well poised to be already doing and to continue doing for some time to come stuck about decentralization and ownership, WordPress in specific, but open source in general, you can participate in it from anywhere there's 30 of us here, but the WordPress community, as we saw is thousands of thousands of people, 15,900 translators.

You can host a site anywhere on any infrastructure that you like. You can create your own forks or WordPress. Any person here could create a penguin press or whatever you want to call it, take the code and take it on new time. And you're really only limited by your time and creativity, which is also an aspect of at least my favorite website projects.

The other key is individual ownership. So in WordPress as with some of the best web three products, you own your own content, the code, everything to run it without any payment to WordPress, you can move your content from one site to. Easily. In fact, WordPress is export format has become the de facto standard for all of their CMS system.

So even like a Squarespace and kudos to Squarespace for doing this supports, when you export from Squarespace, they actually export in the WXR w XR format, which is basically just something we did like 15 years ago, which is take RSS to an add on a few extra XML fields to create a standards-based WordPress export format.

And you have the four freedoms of open source and the GPO, which allow for ownership for every individual, including every person in this room, or every person watching this owns WordPress, just as much as myself or Mike Little do and it individual individuality of expression. Uh, keep this in mind. And I would say apply the filters of everything in web three, the NFP space, et cetera.

There's been incredible amount of innovation. I think this has also attracted some hucksters and some folks kind of hustling things that aren't truly open. So you all are very familiar with WordPress. So for every project, which is asking for your money dollars, or for you to pay the cost of a house for a picture of an ape, you should ask, does it apply the same freedoms which WordPress itself does, and how closely does it Hugh to and apply to increasing your individual agency and freedom in the world?

Ownership has also been a fun topic in WordPress this year, because we've had a lot of acquisitions.

There are 42 logos and slides on this logos on this slide, which represent acquisitions. I was able to track for those on the live streams. Something just crashed. We don't know what it was. Hopefully everyone's okay. Over there sites like post status has been a joke number of days since acquisition constantly reset to zero.

And I spent a lot of these and I probably miss some in his logo side, so I apologize, whatever I missed. Um, so some people have been saying that there's been some sort of unusual trend in WordPress or something crazy happening in our community. So one thing I like to do and the state of the words as also put whatever we're doing in the context of what is more broadly happened and the technology and world ecosystem out there.

So I've got a few slides to share to you technology and macro economic trends. So this from definitive is the number of deals and M and a happening in just the technology space. So you can see over there, big roll up. It doesn't look like almost anything that happened before. So maybe 2000, 2001, I don't have any comments there.

Um, but this is going to well over 10,000 transactions, uh, and just the first nine months of 2021 alone. And if you were to broaden it to the global M and a landscape, not just technology, we've seen over 45,000 different acquisitions. This is up over 24% from last year, which is already a huge year and represents $3.6 trillion of different mergers and acquisitions.

The United States in particular is leading the pack and the stats there show 139% increase year over year from last year, this is driven by another trend, which I found utterly shocking to learn and understand, which is a capital inflows to stocks, or is it just this, the chart says, come and get them while they're hot.

Um, I'll counter that with a Warren buffet quote, which is to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful. So basically what this is showing is dollars and billions of money moving from other assets in the public equities. So you can see, for example, kind of, oh two through oh seven, it's kind of plus or minus 10, 20, 30, $60 million go in and out of.

We had some bumpy years and 13 and 17 with 252 and $295 billion coming into public equities. We'll look at it. Why that graph so far, the estimate for 2021 is, let me make sure I get this correct. $1.6 trillion of capital inflows to public equity markets. So if you see valuations going crazy, mergers and acquisitions going crazy, I believe this to be the root source of what's happening in the broader economic market.

There's obviously a source before this. I will not venture to guess what it is around stimulus or governments or something like that. But this also my point here is that these trends are not unique to work for us. So our 42 deals is not that bad compared to what's going on in the world. Um, there's also been something that's been talked about in context of this, that the larger the company, the greater of the influence they are on the WordPress world.

And I would like to counter that as well and invite more companies to contribute. So this is a graph for WordPress 5.6 of the contributors. Um, you can see one of the biggest bubbles on there is a company I always like to highlight and say the word. Yoast is three times larger than a few others. They're clean some hosts like GoDaddy WP engine, even though it has one fifth in the case of the WP engine and like one 80th in the case of the GoDaddy number of employees.

So the impact the company has on the future of WordPress is not at all related to the size of the company. Uh, what I would love this graph to look like in the future. It's more like this. There's no reason that if we really take to heart, what's made us successful so far that we can't get more companies participating in the commons of what's happening.

Uh, so when a company benefits from WordPress, when they put something back into the core, whether that's your translations community volunteering or co code as this particular graph is representing, um, it kind of ensures that it's something left in the future for WordPress it to be there. Um, you can't run Wix or Squarespace on GoDaddy.

That's an example. Uh, so what I really feel has gotten us here is the spirit of we, what we call, um, five for the future, which some of you all familiar with. Um, but I would like to expound a little bit for those who are maybe new to hearing about this or in other communities, because when we hear about things like you, might've seen this, a security bug that's going around was a library called log for.

Who's ever heard of log for J before two, three people before Twitter recently, but it's caused as very real RCE, which stands for remote code exploitation, vulnerability, and basically every major internet service in the world for trillions of dollars of market cap from apple, the mine grafts have been impacted by this.

And gosh, I wish I had a slide for this, but have you seen the X, C K XKCD graphic? We'll tweet it out later. Or maybe now there's this fun comic. One of the coolest comics in the world, by the way, that shows like a very complicated structure. And this is like the global economy and there's a one little thing holding it all up is an open source product maintained by three random people in Missouri.

That's kind of log for J fortunately, we don't have this problem in WordPress because we have tons of folks sponsor, and we've been really key about fire for the future, but it turns out that the folks working on law for two, there's like three people making the person who's fixed the bug. So they got a sponsorship of $16,000 per year fixing these sorts of things.

So how do we avoid this and WordPress, what have we done? That's made us successful so far and what do we need. Uh, pay even more intention to in the future as more and more companies become commercially successful, as amazing businesses are tapa built on top of the WordPress ecosystem as well. Post get millions of millions of sites, customers paying millions of people, paying hundreds of dollars per year, running WordPress as their CMS.

So what five for the future is it says that basically the idea is whatever you get from WordPress, take 5% of that and try to put it back into the comments. I am familiar with the concept of the tragedy of the comments. It's an old economics paper from actually forever ago. So they is able to use with sheep.

And the idea was if, if there were a lot of different shepherds, I guess, was sheep and there was kind of a commonly owned area of grass and the countryside, but didn't really belong to anyone. If all of the shepherds had their sheep eat as much of the grass as possible, or as much as the sheep wanted, um, the grass would die.

And this thing which belonged to the community, the commons would deplete because of essentially over utilization by actors acting in their own self-interest short-term, but against the self-interest in long-term, uh, some of you might think this parallels to this of climate change or other things that are happening in humanity, um, and the digital world, at least I think it's possible to have an abundance of the commons.

So the more people that use a program like. The better. It gets in so many ways more bugs get reported, more translations happening, more, more plugins, get developed, more themes get developed. And so the more people that use WordPress WordPress doesn't get any worse for any of you. In fact, the more people that use it, the better it gets.

But part of that is some percentage of the people who essentially directly benefit from WordPress, putting something back into the comments, fertilizing the soil, planting some more grass. However you want to think about it. Have you ever seen the take a penny, leave a penny, a little things. It does still exist, even though we still have pennies know, they've been trying to get rid of them for awhile.

Funny story. Actually, I used to participate in his macro economics competition because I was a really cool high schooler. And I got to meet at the time, the treasurer of the United States because we won the competition a few different levels and I'm a high school kid. And so I apologize, the name is escaping me right now, but the treasure of the United States, I was like, cool.

You know, you're the treasurer, what's the thing you most want to do. And her answer was, get rid of the penny. And that was amazed. So the treasurer of the United States, if you don't know, actually signs all the dollars, all the dollar bills, I mean, not literally, but if you, if you looked at a dollar in your pocket, you would see was a virtual signature or a printed signature from whoever's the treasurer, but apparently pennies cost more to produce than they do to you.

So it's kind of a funny thing that we still have pennies United States, at least weird aside,

uh, commons, sheep, pennies

that y'all know where I was going with. That it's been a while since I talked to in front of people,

um, five for the future is we launched this in, I think 2014, where we first started talking about this, but in reality, it's been embedded in many of the companies, including Yoast as an example, and automatic that contributed WordPress almost from the very beginning, because we had this sense that what we're creating together, um, wasn't something that happened for free.

That would happen automatically. It was a freedom that required the diligence effort of all the people that were putting in their free time and their hard earned, uh, talent into this thing that we were creating together. And not unlike the Wikipedia could become something that's far greater than the sum of its parts.

A WordPress can not be written by one person or even one company. The quality, the robustness, everything of the software is. Of everyone who's contributed contributed to it, not just in the most recent releases, which we highlighted some of those, but all the way, going back, even the predecessor to WordPress B, to every line of code, there represents a little bit of someone putting a penny and take a penny, put a penny, a jar.

I have studied actually in many platforms over the years, whether it's open source platforms or successful sort of desktop platforms like windows. And there typically tends to be this 20 to one ratio that if the ecosystem is benefiting kind of 20 times more than whatever's in the center of that ecosystem, it works at the 0.1 whatever's in the center of the ecosystem.

It takes more than that. Kind of all breaks down as two recent examples, they used to be something called a Facebook platform. The Facebook platform mostly benefit to Facebook. And when a company got too big on top of it, often Facebook would change the rules or pull the rug out under whether that's a company, zinger, others that were benefiting from it.

If you go all the way back as you remember the release of windows 95, wow. I'm impressed. So for those who don't, I'll paint a picture, you know, that people stand in line to get a new iPhone. They used to do that for a box of windows. Which came in on a CD and you'd wait at like a best buy or something.

And I think rolling stones recorded a song, really release a windows. 95 was basically like a world event that was covered by every single major media and everything. And, and reading books written at the time and media. One of the funny things I found Microsoft saying was that for every dollar that windows would make $20 would be made in the windows ecosystem.

This ratio kept coming up over and over again and different platforms I studied. And so that's how we got to the five for the future. It's basically a one to 20 ratio when the 19, depending on an account of what is and the core versus what is happening in the community, the WordPress community is larger than ever.

Uh, some estimates put it at over $10 billion per year. So how do we get to that 5% of things being put back into the core? The beautiful thing about five for the future is can be unique if you're an individual that 5% put back into the core of a 40 hour work week is two hours a week. So two hours of the 168 that you have in a week, put it back into something with core.

And we'll talk about it. Some ways you can get involved and contribute, not only makes you part of defining the future of the web and the future of the open web for humanity, but gets you contributing back to this thing that if you hope. It's still relevant. If I'm here with much grayer hair, 10 or 20 years from now, given the state of the word, hopefully a suit still.

Um, it's because we all put something back into it and we all work together beyond any individual or any single company coming together to create this thing we call WordPress and the foundations of what we're doing today. Also set the stage for what's going on tomorrow. It's funny because actually, you know, WordPress is 18 years old.

The idea of democratizing publishing is probably 17 years old, came on pretty early in our lifetime. Now every single startup raising money talks about democratizing. They want to democratize ice cream, et cetera, et cetera. But what this means to us is the software. The core thing that makes WordPress again belongs just as much to you as it does to me or any other developer of WordPress.

It means you can use WordPress for any purpose. It means we strive to create it available in as many languages as possible available to people regardless of economic activity and available. To people with assistive needs as accessible as possible. Um, this has been the core of what we've been trying to do with WordPress and particularly the people in this room, they invited community members.

Uh, I want to thank you all for being part of that. Every single one of you is a five for the future contributors. So thank you

and if you're streaming, you could be in this room in the future, contributed a big part of what we've been trying to do. And reinventing WordPress has been through Gutenberg. Uh, software is hard to change and the more successful software is the harder it is to change because there's so many built-in workflows and everything.

So everything that we've been doing with Gutenberg now, when I got on stage a few years ago, to introduce it, I said, this is going to be a backwards compatibility break, meaning that a plug and written for the old editor will probably need to be updated to work with Gutenberg. Um, WordPress was famous for its backwards compatibility facts still to this day, a theme that was written for WordPress 1.2, which was the release to introduce themes in 2005 will still work and WordPress 5.9 coming up in January, 2022.

Uh, so we're really serious about backwards compatibility. Um, for Gutenberg, we said, there's something new that's coming, which is going to be hashtag worth it. Hashtag state of the word, uh, to remind you, we laid out a plan many years ago, which we're still falling today at around the four phases of Gutenberg.

Uh, just to remind everyone, 2018, we started the first phase of Gutenberg watch was, uh, around easier editing. This was the introduction of the block editor and the idea that the block editor will be able to edit everything inside the postbox. So we were thinking inside the post, inside the box with blocks, uh, we're currently in the middle, uh, phase two of good Berg, which were originally started in 2019, but is all around customization.

This is thinking outside of the postbox, all the things I showed you earlier, while you to edit your entire site using this concept of blocks is a happening now. And what's beautiful about this is one, all the plugins and things that used to have conscious and the interfaces, which are now being built on the Gutenberg framework, uh, inherit all of the work we put into accessibility, keyboard, navigation, everything that's built in the Gutenberg, they clean code, et cetera.

Um, also when new users come to WordPress or new existing WordPress users or learning Gutenberg, they only have to learn things. And used to be that the way to edit a widget or create something using a short code and a post, there were like four or five ways to essentially do the same thing inside of WordPress.

And we're now consolidating this all to this one block interface inside of the blocks are like Lego blocks. And that, that can be used anywhere, uh, with 5.9, which is coming out next month. We are, I would say at the MVP, the minimum viable product of this customization phase of Gutenberg. Uh, so I want to remind you of the next two phases that we're heading into.

The third phase of Gutenberg is going to be around collaboration note. I listed this started 20, 23 and not next year it's because I think we don't want to leave phase two too early because there's still so much to do. Um, I'm forgetting the number, but how many block themes were there? It was like 38, 28.

That needs to be 5,000. Like we need to really invest a lot in creating patterns and themes that take advantage of all these blocks. It's the new standard thing. If you look at what block editor block editor plugins have been doing, and it was kind of a balkanized proprietary way, uh, we now have a standard way to do within WordPress and the more we can invest into that, the more they'll enable people to create really unique web presences.

And then finally, which we don't have a year attached to. And it worked camp year Europe. I get a really hard time for is the idea of. So we want to take everything we just talked about and essentially allow you to publish sites in multiple languages with a workflow. That makes sense. Um, because you have, the world is multi-lingual is basically the best way to put it.

So if you were thinking about how to contribute, I would love for y'all to get involved and join the journey of Gutenberg by talking about our contributing patterns, block themes styles, or if you're a musician or a photographer or videographer to take some of that work and put it into the open verse, not the metaverse open verse, which is basically this incredible commons we have of content, which has the same freedoms, like the GPL available for any of us to use any of us to modify remix and refresh.

We've got the very first version of the open. First. Now we're running on wordpress.org by really one thing I'm very excited about is actually building that into the WordPress admin. Is that when you upload a new image or video or anything like that, you'll be able to choose to creative commons licenses, maybe under open license, like CC zero, which would allow us to index it and the open verse, uh, or maybe on a more restrictive license that's okay.

Whatever floats your boat. It's cool. It's all about creators having the control and autonomy that she was a licensed their content, however possible. And for those that choose to put into the. That then becomes a part of what is shared in humanity and allows us to grow and create cool things together.

And that kind of usage and remix economy over time. I also want to build a full image directory and to WordPress, and I think we missed it here, but WordPress out of our slash photos. So if you want to learn more about fire for the future, go to wordpress.org/five F I V E. And one thing we launched also is the wordpress.org photo directory, which is an idea for a CC zero, which means basically totally open imagery, which is available to be used on any sites for commercial and non-commercial uses.

And we're going to be building that CC zero directory ends a WordPress core. So that means that regardless of what's in your media library, if you set up a site for someone new, they could click on the media library, click open verse and say search for puppies or coffee or whatever it is that they are looking for image for.

And then be able to insert that just with one click in their posts. And we can do that really nicely saw some of the open verse attribution. We still copy and paste. We're going to make that. So that just happens when you insert the image. So by default it'll have attribution for content creators. People could always remove it if they like, especially if it's easier image, but I think it's kind of cool to have credit going.

So the photographers and people possible. So if this is something that you think would be interesting or that you have some cool content and. Uh, check out the open verse. There are so many ways to contribute and like I talked about it, uh, it could be 40 hours a week or four hours a month. You know, anything helps and, you know, contributing money is great, but actually time is the most valuable thing in the WordPress ecosystem could be through design code, contributing to the community or organizing meetups, uh, helping the learning.

If you have any background in educational, uh, what's the word for that educational development, educational development. Thank you. Um, that would be amazing for our learn dot WordPress that our project training or documentation. Um, there's a number of ways to contribute solo or with groups. Um, companies have started to organize contributor days for the whole company might take like a Friday once a month and I'll get involved on the wordpress.org, make.wordpress.org, the slack, everything, everything that happens with WordPress happens in the open and any of you can be involved with pretty easily, which is kind of interesting because in your code, your image, your something can show up in what, uh, happens for 43% of the web.

If you are listening to this live or in person, if you want to look at your phone right now, we're very curious how WordPress has helped grow your story. So another hashtag from the state of the word one, if you tag that, I love WP. This is actually the tag that we're creating the new testimonial page and WordPress from.

So if there's something where WordPress or the WordPress community has an influence on you, as you tow for here, I want to call it an amazing cycled hero press, as well as a hero, press.com. Yeah,

here we're pressed.com is an amazing site, which Chronicles and documents people's story. In fact, if you have an amazing story as well, tweet it out, but also talk to Tofor later. It could be cool to get on there. I think once a month, we highlight those on the WordPress news blog. So what a year? Sorry. I'm out of breath.

Um, I'm also really, really excited to announce that, uh, just happened our first in-person work camp and several years

we're at camp Seville or fulfilling lucky, severe, uh, was the first in-person work camp after 21 months of virtual word camps. So they got together 101 people, 17 speakers. And that was, uh, all the reports I've heard back from it. That was very, very exciting. Um, so. Both to be talking to talking to the folks who are here virtually, but also hanging out with the folks here in person afterwards, after we wrap this up.

Um, but I'd love to see also more of the WordPress community. And so my one more thing for this presentation is that we've actually locked in the city for work camp, us 2022

and God willing, we'll be in San Diego, California,

uh, dates and more to come, but roughly around September in San Diego, California, uh, San Diego is good all parts of the year. It's one of those magical cities. Uh, but particularly in San and September, it should be really, really nice. And I'm looking forward to seeing all the phases here again, but also everyone who's listening now or in the recording later, hopefully we can start tickets together.

Again, it's funny because, uh, WordPress itself has always been massively global. And actually my company automatic has always been really distributed from the very beginning. We're 1800 people now, but really from the start, we were across many different cities. So the pandemic started, everyone came to me and to, to automatic being like, how do you do it?

How do you. And it was funny because they were asking how to work together in a distributed way, which we have some opinions on, we have some experience with and tools like , which is built on WordPress. And so we did our best to share as much as, as possible, but the secret sauce, I think of both automatic and the broader work Fest community has always been these times when we get together in person, these meetups, these work camps, these events like this.

Uh, so, uh, the offices default to be 95% in person and 5%, you know, virtual free pandemic, uh, WordPress always did the opposite. They were like 95% virtual within 5% of the year. We get together in person. And I'm excited to get back to that because the relationships learning that everything that happens when we meet each other is so, so powerful.

So thank you.

thank you to everyone who came via plane, train and automobile. Just show up here and live in New York city, uh, for this very special state of the word, most special to me that I think we've ever done. And thank you to all tuning in on the live stream now. We have the questions and answers. If you'd like more from me, my WordPress has made ITT.

I've got a podcast on distributed work@aschubert.blog, and I'm at, Fotomat on Tumblr, Twitter and Instagram. But now is the portion where we go to Q questions and answers. Yes, I'm, I'm moving around. So I'm masking. I am our mobile microphone, but we have a standard microphone. Also. We have people all over the place in the world at home, and we also have a resident question asker, uh, right here.

So this is going to represent the online questions. Right. And also, so you all know, I do not know what any of the questions are in advance. I will be hearing them all for the first time. Which also means I might not know the answer, Jen, sorry. I might pass it to someone in the audience or sometimes I just don't know.

So that's what happens with these. That's my job as the passing. Um, all right, so we can kind of start wherever you want. We can start with in-person. We can start with some pre-submitted. We can start with some currently submit. We have an in-person it looks like we have a hand right here. You might come over to the microphone.

Just so folks in livestream can hear. And if you have also a question, feel free to go up and line up, or we're going to prioritize, of course, those of you who came on a train for two and a half days to B and a, and then I think Paul will be reading some of the ones that are coming in via the social channels, YouTube, Twitter, et cetera.

So we'll have a mix of. And then we'll have food and drinks. So thanks so much for the presentation. Very exciting stuff. Looking forward to the future. My question is, um, and I wonder if you could speak a little bit about the safety measures that have been thought about, or will need to be thought about in terms of the content that is uploaded there, uh, will exit data be removed from photos that are uploaded that, that, uh, that's my question.

That's a great question, actually. Uh, so first I do not know if we've thought of exit before, so you actually just raised something really great that we should write down and look at it later. Um, I will say that. So there's two things there. There's open verse, which is, think of it like a search engine. So it's crawling literally the whole web and looking for things that are creative commons license and providing a directory of them.

So what people publish their own websites is kind of the state of responsibility there, but it's kind of like a Google, but for creative commons license content, um, that is separate from the wordpress.org/photos directory that we've created, which is kind of like a, uh, get a year and Unsplash or everything, but all CC zero licensed forever, and ever, by the way, we're not going to change that on you.

Like some other photo directories have,

uh, that goes through. If you want to submit to something there, you'll see that right now. Uh, it says, Hey, one of the check boxes after certifies, of course, one that you have rights to the photo, please don't upload other people's home, only your own. Uh, but two that it doesn't have any human faces or other copywritten material in the photo itself.

Uh, so this first phase of the photo directory really focused on things that can truly be CC zero all the way. Um, something we've all been learning is that's a little complicated is, uh, with, uh, humans and like a picture of, let's say you had a picture of a piece of art, um, that might have a copyright embedded.

So even if the image is in CC zero, it might something in, it might be copywritten. And so we're working on what is, what is an open source, GPL, CC zero model release. And what does that look like? And that is a very open, uh, set of lawyers working on things. But once we have it, I think that's actually really exciting.

Um, maybe someone could license their likeness as well to be in the open verse, maybe regenerate something with GP T3 that replaces faces in it. And then that's the thing that's open. Or maybe someone even says maybe one more live. I don't want my likeness use, but maybe on my death I'd be quit my likeness to this open comments that belongs to humanity.

There's lots of different ways this could work kind of is fun to think about and imagine, uh, but that's how that's working right now. Um, we'll probably, you know, what makes sense is something that maybe shows the X of data you upload before it goes into the thing, at least for our photo directory. So it's just aware of everything that's being put in there.

Location is actually a fantastic to have, like if I have a picture of Stonehenge, the location where I took that picture is kinda awesome. Um, but other metadata which could be contained in the exit, probably people should be aware of. Right. So we'll work on getting that added to the photo uploader and by the way, awesome question.

Thank you very much strong, open to think about. Thank you. Well, did we cover everything you think is important there or anything else? Okay. Awesome. Matt, Bob, before you ask your question, can you share how you got here? Um, my train out of Seattle, uh, from Seattle. Yeah, Seattle that's on the other side of the country, right?

That's the other side of the country and spending about six days on the train two days here and yeah, it's, it's been an adventure. So I've come all this way. Give me some mood for 2020. Woo woo. Commerce is going to do in 20, 22 in your eyes. Sure. So woo. Spelled w O for those who don't know is a plugin for WordPress, uh, which, uh, creates, um, commerce functionality and WordPress.

It's one of the 55,000 plugins that exist, but it is a very popular one and important one, especially as we look at things like you saw Shopify coming up on that usage graph, a WooCommerce is an open-source Shopify, and we hope that it can do to democratizing commerce. What WordPress has done to democratize and publishing in terms of what's coming for WooCommerce in 2022.

Um, the thing I'm most excited about that's most relevant for this audience is I would say embracing Gutenberg and the block interfaces for everything with w so right now, Wu still has, um, uh, ways of doing things which are more tied to the classic editor or shortcodes, or other ways of creating like checkout blocks, products, everything like that.

Uh, there are some plugins and experiments around, uh, Gutenberg and blocks. And I think that I would love if Lou was one of the best plugins in. For embracing how to use Gutenberg. And I think the team's been working really hard on that. It is an amazing team, um, that both includes a lot of community and a lot of folks sponsored by automatic to work on that.

And, uh, I would say that's what, 20, 22, the thing that's most relevant for this audience, I have a excited about is more good. Bergen will, uh, we also have the CEO of WooCommerce here. Does that sound give me a thumbs up? That sounds good. All right. Sounds good. So more Gutenberg as kind of the answer to everything is more Gutenberg it's it's like, um, Cal bell, you can always have more Cabo.

You can always have more Gutenberg, 6,000 miles.

cool. All right. Shall we move to online question or, oh, wait, we got one in person and then next that's doing online one just to make sure we have everything from those folks. Sweet. Um, so my question is about styles. Um, I think, you know, the theme styles and or variants, I think they were called initially as a very innovative idea that less people paint their sites.

Uh, it's great for developers, designers and everyday users. Um, so I understand that, I think, um, what could be interesting and I wonder if you've thought about this as perhaps there's a style directory, like we have a pattern directory. Is that something. And the thought of, I know that there's a couple other concerns, you know, we'd have to have a standardized way that themes are being made, which we're moving towards already.

So I don't dunno. I think that's an interesting way to empower people to also give back to the directory or into WordPress, just like patterns. Like if you can save a pattern, can you save a style and then anybody, can you say a style? Is that something on that? Um, I'm going to fast forward a little bit here in to basically a science fiction, but if you could imagine us getting a really great repository of truly like CC zero creative commons, zero license stuff, around images, fonts, et cetera.

Um, that opens up a lot of possibilities for creating essential GPL compatible styles. Like you talk about if you've ever watched or help the friends set up WordPress or watch your user test or something. One of the most heart, most heartbreaking things is when someone chooses a theme based on the image and the demo.

And I learned this myself. So on one of the previous themes is like 2010 or 2011. There wasn't a lot of open source, licensed imagery in the world. And so I just took all my photos and GPL licensed them. And so one of these old themes, I think it's 2010. There's a picture from Ireland of some sheep on a road.

And we would literally do user tests where people are like, I like the sheep. So I chose this theme

and it's like, yes, I like the Jeep too, but you could put any image in the world there. It doesn't just have to be a sheep theme. It's really, uh, it's a, yeah. You know what I'm talking about, um, styles right now are tied to themes and it's tied to theme Jason. And so I think theme Jason is, um, theme dot J S O N, which I, I called Jason.

I don't know how you pronounce it, but that's how I call it as the number one thing. If you're a theme developer, I interested in developing themes, look up that learn as much about a theme Jason as possible. So right now it's, it's specific to the theme. Um, but over time, particularly for things like topography, which is a passion of mine, I actually, my very first open-source code I ever created, which was a contribution to be to the predecessor WordPress, uh, was texturize, which was, I had learned a ton about typography and I wanted all posts to have proper typography.

So instead of a, a prime mark in between like a where like that's, which did that and this, I wanted it to be a proper curly quote. And so this first code I ever contributed to open source was texturized and very passionate about this. I would love for people to be able to see the incredible transformations that can happen to a site through updating the and particularly pairings of type where you might have.

I really awesome. Sarah paired with a really awesome San Sarah for the body text or something like that. And I think how themes evolve a little bits, actually, I'm not sure entirely healthy homes evolve, but to be honest, but it's pretty exciting that the theme can almost be a little bit like, um, honestly it reminds me of jazz.

Um, I, I grew up playing jazz. That's why we name every WordPress released after a jazz musician. Um, jazz are often based on something called standards. So like a good chunk of all popular jazz songs are built on rhythm changes, which has at a core changes actually from, I think, a musical song called I got rid of them.

I got rid of them. I got music, really cool chord changes. They're really awesome bridge. And you can, people have written lots of other songs on top of that. Uh, what's cool is the chord changes? I think, um, I'm a little outside of my realm of expertise here, but the core changes themselves are essentially open source meaning and we can use those core changes.

Now, the melody you talk right on top of it might be proprietary, might belong to a specific thing, but that kind of underlying structure is open. And so I think themes become that kind of underlying structure. And then when people take on top of it, it's the core changes. And then when people create on top of it could be as varied and unique as all the things written.

People have written on top of the rhythm changes as they're called in jazz, um, which is incredible thousands of songs. Countless millions of like performances and solos. So that's my hope for what happens with themes. And, uh, hopefully we can get more, like we don't have a ton of CC zero license spots yet, so hopefully we can develop more and more of that content in the open verse slash metaverse that is available to all WordPress users.

And the cool thing about open versus well is API is totally open because that's available to Drupal users, Joomla users, everyone else works, user Squarespace users, anyone who wants to access this content, um, it is something the WordPress community is creating for benefit to the world. So, uh, if you contribute to that year, essentially you're contributing to humanity's repository of cool open stuff that's available for anyone to use it any way.

So, um, I'm very excited about what the future of open first will be. We have the very first, we basically just got the code ported over and the surgeons report it over and not even the audio yet it's coming in January. And, uh, I could not believe more in the mission of that. So. Sweet. Thank you. Thank you.

Cool. And you can line up behind her if you also have a question, but come on in, what's your name by the way, Allie. Hi Allie. Hi Matt. Um, so I created a lot of content around WordPress before. The people who are looking at WordPress in front of them for the first time looking to build something with it, having never used it before.

Um, and I think a lot about the young people who are looking at WordPress as a, as a path to something as a path to improving their life or, or brightening their future, whatever that might be. And I know that we have in the live stream right now, a lot of young people watching and learning and, and being inspired by this.

What advice would you have to those young people who are looking to, to, um, inherit this world that we're leaving them and, and w what advice can you give them as far as using WordPress as a tool to improve what we're leaving them? No pressure. That's a cool one

in my life. One of the most influential things I ever realized was that everything I was using, every piece of technology, every piece of furniture, every chair, everything was created by someone who wasn't that much different from me or people I knew. And so that's crafts that can be developed when you focus on an area.

And in fact, with the internet, there's more and more of the. Through YouTube Wikipedia, online blogs, et cetera. There's so much you can learn about pretty much any area that you're passionate about. And I think for me, and it might be Steve jobs. Someone also talks about this, but just this idea that the things that I use in love or created people by people, not that much different for me was really powerful.

And that's part of what got me contributing to open source. In the beginning, when I was, again, I got started on the forums of B2. So B2 was a predecessor to WordPress. Um, it had some forums probably run by like PHP, BB or something. And I just start, I first I was asking questions and then later I saw questions.

I had already asked, been asked by other people and I started answering them. I didn't know anything. I couldn't, I cannot overemphasize how ignorant I was. Um, as a 17, 18, 19 year old kid in Houston, Texas who had no formal training, no university courses, et cetera. So I think what's exciting about the digital economy is that in this open verse that we're trying to create together, um, it doesn't matter who you are, where you're from or anything like that.

It matters what you contribute and learning to contribute is never been more accessible and more open source, more open, um, The other advice I give is that, um, when you're younger, you have a lot more time than you realize. And so try to invest that time with, is anyone young listening to this? Um, and what's your passion is, you know, if you feel drawn to a particular area, um, I was actually shocked both in my own experience and in seeing many other successful folks since then and how the w being a world expert in X, Y, Z, whatever XYZ is, um, is maybe a hundred hours of work in some areas, maybe 200 hours of work.

But when you're young, you have a lot more hours than folks who, uh, maybe are providing for the family or a full-time jobs or other things. So really embrace that opportunity of both school, education, literature, available to et cetera, to try to consume and absorb as much of as possible. Um, I feel so much, uh, my, one of my only regrets as a, almost 38 year old is that I didn't pay as much attention when I was in school.

And I went to all public schools in Houston, but I had some amazing teachers like it, the text I was given the literature, et cetera, like was free or inexpensive and was really passionate from these teachers of some of the best things that humanity is great. It's so far. So check that out. And the code equivalent of that is WordPress and a lot of ways, meaning that again, you can, um, think of the other largest internet services in the world, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, et cetera.

You can't go and look at how they work. You can't suggest a change to how the Google homepage works or the Facebook algorithm or anything like that. Those are all proprietary with things like Wikipedia and WordPress is all open source, which means that you could suggest to change of the WP admin homepage, which hundreds of thousands, billions of people see and in backs a lot of folks.

Um, so open source for me was a huge enabler, again, not growing up in the bay area or the traditional like Seattle or other traditional like centers of technology. Um, it was really a second for me. So, um, I'll start with that. Hopefully, I guess folks and maybe younger folks like something to start with, and it's such a separate raise your hand.

So maybe you have something to add there. I also have an additional thing. Can I introduce you really quick? So just SEFA is the lead of wordpress.org. So she

she is all of the coal things we talked about around like the directories, et cetera. Joseph was in charge of that. So she really leads a community development of wordpress.org, everything around that. So thank you, Josepha. And now, and now this, so, um, I think also one of the most important things, where am I looking when I'm gonna look at you, man?

Um, I think also one really important thing to remember for people who are getting started with WordPress for the first time is that the open source nature of it does mean that we also have really active and passive ways to learn some of the most vital 21st century skills that the workforce of the future will need.

We need it now, but not all of us actually are any good at it at it in the world. Word pressers are generally really, really good at it. And there's a reason for it. It's because we do it every day. And so like that in the immediate, in my immediate advice that I can give to people, that is the number one thing is like, observe the way that this works, because it's going to be relevant from here until they're done wanting to work.

Yeah. Anything else in the audience? Cause we have an unusual audience here. Here we go. Do you mind introducing yourself really quick? And I'm with a stellar WP, but I also do a whole bunch of other stuff for the community, which is fun. So my question is actually off of those two responses as well is we have a ton of education out there, right?

So whether it's through learn dot WordPress, whether it's people who have YouTube, all this opportunities to learn about it, what are we doing to bring the next generation in, to help, continue to grow? I'm watching the age of people I see at WordPress continue to grow, but not a ton of people coming in with, I don't know, I'm looking around.

This is a very useful group. Well, I'm one of the older here I had met that, but, but what are we doing to bring, I mean, I tweeted, uh, last week, uh, Olivia Bessette she's in middle school, had a hackathon. I think I tagged you in my tweet. And she herself with her sister pull up, put on a huge hackathon of all middle schoolers, but that's a usual.

So what are we doing to make sure that the next generation of kids is going to want to contribute the way that the people in this room Derrick you stole my answer? Cause I was going to talk about David and Olivia beset. David besets one of the most prolific tweeters about WordPress. Hi David. I will post a lot of gifts from this talk.

Um, Olivia says his daughter and already started to be really active in the WordPress community. Um, I would put that back to everyone in this room and everyone listening here as well. Um, you know, the old adage, like you teach a person to fish or you teach a person and you give a person a fish, you feed him for a day, you teach a person to fish, you feed them for the lifetimes.

Um, I think it just give a person a blog or even worse, a social media account. You feed them for a day. You teach them how to create the web, which is in many ways, in my opinion, the most amazing actualization of shared humanity and knowledge, like how do we create something that lasts beyond our own individual lifetimes?

It's the web? How do we create something that lasts beyond us? A legacy, a true legacy. It's adding to the information. That's part of what hopefully goes forward for future generations and then becomes, allows us to sort of fast, skip all the mistakes, skip all the learnings, um, to what's latest. It's upgrading the clock speed and version of humanity.

Um, so for anyone who's listening, um, mentoring and guiding someone younger than yourself and to participate in the WordPress community is, uh, you get like a, what is it? Um, a mitzvah. You get, you get like an extra special bonus and sort of like the history of open source in the world. If you bring someone new into it.

So I'd highly encourage you. And there's so many, if you look at some of the biggest contributors to WordPress over the, over the years around unborn or an ACE and et cetera, part of their legacy beyond just all the code they wrote is all the people they brought in. And the folks who felt like they knew a lot, but they weren't able to contribute or something.

And they said, no, you got it. You can be of core committed. You can be someone who patches a core bug. You could be someone who translates into WordPress into an entirely new language or preserves a language for posterity. Like there's so much you can do using WordPress as the launch pad for contributing something positive.

So humanity. And so that is I think, a real key. Um, so I don't know what is perfect for the young people because I'm not one of them anymore. I was when WordPress started. Um, but to the extent you have anyone in your lives, both here in the audience or broader in the folks watching this, um, that has that desire to have an impact.

Teach him how to be involved with open source and whether that's WordPress with some other open source project, I think is the best way to contribute to the future of humanity. So thank you. What's that? More kids camps. Yeah, we do have some kid camps. So very specifically we have kids' camps that places like where camp was it?

Orlando, Miami, Miami, which David Biss had helped organize. So, um, let's all be more like David, if you have kids, why aren't they contributing like that? I wouldn't put that on anyone because I have kids do the opposite of what you ask them. So like tell them don't contribute to WordPress and then maybe they will take your kids to work.

Take your kids to WordPress day actually is an awesome idea. Oh, okay. We'll talk later.

Cool. Should we do one from online? Uh, this is a question from I plus the name, but it was essentially, there was a couple of references to the metaverse and I think like sort of a joking way, but, um, prompts on WordPress in virtual reality, WordPress in virtual reality.

That's fast to Mike really quick. He wanted to say something, Hey, no, we got one. We got one. Here you go. Again. The intelligence in this audience is far greater than what I have. So I want to push us back as much as possible. Uh, Boston did do that. If not earlier this year, last year they had a virtual reality word camp and it was last year.

Thank you. Just, yeah. Um, that's a tricky one. I don't know how to answer that to be totally honest, because like the internet is virtual reality. It's just kind of text-based. And then when you think of other ways of interfacing with virtual reality, like VR headsets or AR et cetera, um, one good thing worked for WordPress is great at dealing with contents.

So it's, don't build on top of WordPress if you're building like a messaging system or real-time game or something like that. But if you're making something that like essentially is people inputting content and putting that to the world, you should probably be building it on WordPress. Well, it's real estate records, almost anything it's content going in and out that should be one word WordPress.

Um, one companies nameless should talk about this idea of a metaverse. Uh, they often talk about the interoperability, this idea. Contents or items that you created in one metaverse is available in all of them. If I imagine my most Saifai thoughts of the future, um, science fiction, uh, I, it's hard for me to imagine that if humanity interacts more and more in a virtual space, that will be controlled by one company.

I really think it'll look more like the web, like a place where people can register domains. We actually had a joke in here. I forgot to tell. So you get it now. What if there were something like a Dao, a distributed autonomous organization that ma that manage a namespace, which you could pay to own a part of.

And in fact, there's no gas fees for that owning part of it. The fees are born by the merchant that would essentially be buying a domain with a credit card or an any registrar. Um, so we have things already that any person listening to this can have true ownership of like a domain that's they're like home on the internet.

Internet is the best murderers were created so far. And part of that's because of the interoperability and the open standards that these things are built on patent free standards as well, which I'll emphasize, um, To the extent that things will be, I don't know exactly what it'll look like. Nothing I've seen so far is that compelling, but isn't that there are fun.

Content-driven things that are going to be part of the next generations of the web. We have three, four of a five or 10 I expect to WordPress will be at the center of it. We've got an in-person question. Okay, please introduce yourself. Hi, my name is bud Krauss. We've never had the pleasure to meet, but I've heard you speak at several of these.

Thank you. And welcome to New York. So I want to know is that this is a brand new space. Are you that for the people who aren't here, but this is a brand new space. What are you going to be doing here? And can we use it to the people that have lived with urea? Um, yeah. Uh, so for those who are watching online, we're in this cool space in the know-how, which means north of Houseton, which is a New York incorrect way to pronounce Houston.

Well, it's just the city where I'm from, um, neighborhood and it's cool neighborhood. It's near a lot of public transit and it's a cool space. Um, a company I'm involved in CEO of automatic, uh, when we purchased a company called Tumblr, um, got the space. And so we have this until 2025, uh, Not coincidentally, a lot more of the people working on tumbler and everything we do have gone more distributed.

So there's not many people in this particular space as they used to be. Um, but we try to create this in a way that much like tonight could be a place that people use for events and other community things. So if you're interested in doing that for something particularly open source driven within the community, uh, we're happy to open up this space for anything in the future.

And a cool kind of a side is all the art in the space, including what's behind me is from, uh, people on tumbler. And so these are all publishers on Tumblr. So all of the art that will be in this space. And eventually right now we have this wall covered. We're going to cover every single wall here. So we have many thousands of square feet to cover still.

It's all going to be people who publish on word, present template, and in the future, tumbler will be powered by WordPress. So that'll happen. So it'll all be the same thing. So it's kind of cool that it'll all be artists that use open source publishing to put their content into the open purse.

Um, I met, uh, my name is Danielle and I have a curiosity question. Um, you mentioned about Gutenberg phase three, uh, which will be collaboration. So I'm curious, uh, what can we expect, uh, at that phase of good invoke under collaboration? That's a good question. 'cause I talked twice as long as last year, but maybe this, that particular point.

So the collaboration phase, um, collaboration, sorry. Phase three of Gutenberg, um, is imagine Google docs is probably the best analogy. You know how, when you're in a Google doc, when, you know, when someone else is editing at the same time, you see exactly what they're doing, where they're changing. So imagine every single thing in WordPress updating real time as other people edit it.

So there's no more version conflicts or anything like that. Literally WordPress represents the kind of real time source of truth for whatever the content, whether it's again, post pages or other is in real time. And then there's both a real-time awareness and workflows around editing that. And so the real-time awareness is kind of the easy part actually, is that part where, when someone else is editing at the same time and you're editing it, you see what's happening.

So there's no conflicts. The workflow is a little trait, a trickier, and that's what I'm actually more excited about working on where workflow is a word we used for. Um, someone edits it, someone approves it, someone like there's different stages of different forms of content, which is also very relevant for.

Um, someone writes the contents, let's say in English, and then maybe it gets translated into another language. Uh, I realized this personally to share another weird story, like the economics thing, um, on wordpress.com, we use glob press and allowed anyone to translate any string on wordpress.com. And for a while on every, I forget what the language was, but let's just call it Italian.

Instead of saying, leave a comment on every Italian blog hosted on wordpress.com. It said happy birthday. So someone obviously is, was like trolling us and said like, instead of leave a comment, it'll say happy birthdays. That was actually pretty funny. Whoever did that, I'll buy you a beer. Uh, but, um, ideally there would have been a workflow or someone else who speaks Italian would have said, this says happy birthday.

How do you even say that in Italian? Does anyone know? Uh, I know obviously say saved the least we died. How do you say like happy birthday and Merry Christmas? What is the happy birthday? Was that Bruno tally. Okay. Okay. We'll go there. Uh, someone would have seen that and said that doesn't mean leave a comment and we shouldn't put this on the homepage of every single Italian WordPress in the world.

Um, so that workflow, I think is key to phase four of. Which is why it's part of phase three. So collaboration is the fun part, which will be easy and hard to do at the same time, which is that kind of realtime co-editing and there's some cool new standards in browsers that allow us to do this in a de-centralized way, which I'm really excited about using essentially features built in the Chrome and others that allow us to connect multiple, who will editing a page or posts at the same time using just the browser and open-source technology.

But, uh, the more like approval, et cetera, is a little bit more of the later phase three. So 20, 23 we'll work on that for now, contribute to open verse block patterns, blocks, and block themes. That is the key for 2022. Again, if I get onstage next year and say there's 30, we've gotten to 40 block themes, utter failure, please throw fruit at me or something else.

Um, I hope that we have 300 or ideally 3000 of these block enabled themes and that both that's updating existing themes and creating new ones, a lot of people to express their creativity online through the Gutenberg editor. Again, right now, if you look, what social networks do they try to really narrow you into is a very limited expression of CRE.

Why because they want to serve ads against your profile and what you're grading. They want to target you. That's not what we're trying to do with WordPress. So we want you to create the most unique, cool stuff online as possible and blocks labeled. We will do that and I'm looking forward to more and more of it.

Does that answer the question? Yes. Thank you. Cool. Thank you.

So someone stand up over here was that okay.

You have preempted, so many of the questions that were submitted oh, where we're getting you one though, somewhat related to the, uh, what you were just speaking to. The question is so soon we'll have blocks that allow you to drag everything everywhere. We'll soon have a ton of free images, patterns, et cetera.

How are we going to make all of that easy to understand and use for users? Um, Hm. Yeah, that's our problem. So this is what it's going to be. I think the focus of core WordPress iterations over 5.9, 6.0 6.1 and beyond is, um, I'll, I'll say it in an abstract sense, which is things like user tests. And we do run these and we publish them on our make WordPress style blogs, which is where we'll ask them.

Who's never used WordPress before. Please try it out. And this is something proprietary software companies do all the time, but in WordPress we actually publish these. And so you can see them, you can learn from them and you can see what someone who's never used. WordPress before has trouble with using a, not using things that might be very, very intuitive to people in this room because we've been using WordPress for five or 10 years.

I'd be very challenging. Someone entirely new the concepts or they've distractions that we use. Um, the other example, which I hope everyone listening to this does, because real listening to this, you were like a WordPress, oh gee, it's helping a friend use WordPress. Right? I hear a laugh in the front row.

It's like that whole thing. Like friends, don't let friends publish on Wix. Like you say, it takes someone who's building a website and you say, all right, I'm going to help you set this up. And while you're doing that, you're probably going to learn a lot of things that are tough in WordPress. And hopefully that helps you then contribute a bug or an improvement or something into the core software that makes it easier for everyone else to use by the way, to set WordPress again.

That's, what's amazing about it to me is when you look at that 10 times larger than the second in the marketplace, by the way, Shopify as a company valued at like $140 billion, how do we do that? How do we be 10 times larger than that? It's just. People helping other people. I CA can't put it more simply than that.

It's how WordPress has had basically no marketing dollars through its whole history. It's friends telling friends like, Hey, you want a website? Let me help you set it up. And then when they have trouble coming back to a cool WordPress make site or something else and saying, Hey, my friend has trouble with X, Y, Z can.

I think if we move this around or change this widget or made this button, or we're prominent or something like that, that it would be more intuitive for folks. And the, the beauty of a project like WordPress. And there's a few other open source projects, which are similar, is we can simultaneously become more intuitive for new users at the same time that we become more powerful for power users.

Uh, that's not easy. I think it only happened in digital realm, like an SLR camera with like 80 buttons can also become simultaneously easier for like people just taking the first photo, but in the digital world, we can do that. And that's actually really, really exciting. So that's part of what excites me about WordPress.

And I hope as a part of what people contribute in the future,

another, from the, uh, Questions. Let's see. Um, this is from Sarah Gooding. What can WordPress do to protect small publishers from the threat of big tech companies, greed and hostility to the open web? Oh my goodness. Um,

big tech companies, or was it hostility to the open web greed and hostility to the open web? Oh my goodness. We're dealing with all of the seven deadly sins. Um, first I'll say that this some giant tech companies whose greed and hostility is somewhat aligned with the open web meaning that, uh, Google who is indexing the web is, uh, probably more aligned with the mission of WordPress then, uh, Facebook, which is trying to create an alternative to the open web or other companies fill in the blank there.

So that's something to keep in mind. Um, the number one thing I think we can do is create an alternative. So it's easy to forget that someone starting a WordPress might not want the thing they wake up in the morning think about is not like I want to make more open-source software in the world. They might be thinking, Hey, I want more customers in my restaurant.

All right, one more visitors. This myself. Or I want more reader is, uh, my novel landmarks. You not like whatever it might be. And that the beauty of WordPress is there's so many things you can do on top of it is that WordPress is a means to an end. And this is our strength and our weakness. Um, um, third-party measuring services like, uh, a quant cast or a Nielsen or something like that.

Like a facebook.com or google.com shows up as one domain. And WordPress is in many ways like the dark matter of the web. And that it's a thing that comprises the majority of the universe, but doesn't show up on one domain by definition, it's across millions, tens, hundreds of millions of different domains and represents each person on the domain owning a piece of the web.

It belongs to them, literally domains. I'm not going to pitch domains here. Domains are like the most web three thing you could create. It really belongs to you far more than almost anything else. Um, so I think what we can do is, well, I'll tell you the biggest thing I've learned, which goes a little back to your question.

Um, what is a thing to talk about to the youth or people that are creating things? Um, early on, I was like a slash dot reading Zilla reading. Like I was like, ah, Microsoft and bill gates are evil. I had a very like black and white view of. Where I saw, uh, open source is good and anything proprietary is bad.

And it was a binary. As you mature, you learned that things are not binary, it's gray scale, it's dual tone and there's, um, things that are both simultaneously good and bad and things that are, is just on the spectrum. And over time, I've chosen to devote more of my life to things that I feel like are on the side of the spectrum that I want future generations, if I ever have children or grandchildren, them to experience at the web.

Um, but that the, everything exists on the spectrum. Um, I would say that for pure philosophy does not win, meaning that for folks maybe like here in the room or some of the folks watching live stream, the idea of owning your content, owning the software that powers it and everything like that is very compelling.

That's probably compelling for like one or 2% of humanity. We're at the very end of the bell curve of like folks who care about those things for the rest. If we want a majority of the web, hopefully I hope a majority, or even like 85 or 90% of the web be powered by open source for them. We need to create the best user it's.

Maybe it needs to be the easiest and it's the way the most intuitive, it needs to be the thing that gets them towards their goals. The fastest, for many people, that means WordPress will be invisible and that's okay. We don't need people to even know what WordPress is. If they're using WordPress open source, open API, open data, everything to get to where they're going, that is infinitely better than using proprietary software to get from a to B.

So we need to create as many use cases, as many, uh, worker and usability as much as possible to create that. So that is my learning and something. I hope we can all work together. The great, because, um, even if someone doesn't realize that using open source and making the web more open, if by creating the website, creating the restaurant, creating their online service, selling something online, they are doing so in a way that makes the web even just the smidgen more open.

That's cool. That's good for humanity. That's the part I want future generations grew up in, so thank you.

okay. We got two minutes, two questions. Okay. Well, how I taught that could take 20 minutes.

So I'm giving you five, okay. Five minutes for each question. Apparently. So.

Hi, Matt. My name is Erin Jordan. Um, I probably came the shortest distance because I live like three blocks away. Um, a couple of times tonight, you've talked about the GPL, the importance of the GPL, the importance of the four freedoms of the GPL. Over the last year, there's been an effort to dual license, the Gutenberg repository, and thus allow people to use the WordPress code in ways that would not confer those four freedoms onto future users, support price.

I'm wondering how that lines up with your ideas of the four freedoms and why I, as a contributor to WordPress should support my code being relicensed to remove the four freedoms from future users. That's such a good question. So thank you, Anne, for asking that and also thank you for being someone else who makes me not the only person in the room with a suit

and Erin looks great. So thank you very much for that. Hopefully we get that on camera. Um, so this isn't strange. So the GPL was created in the eighties and nineties and had no concept of essentially delivery over the web. So the GPL says that if you share something. Distributed, which was historically means distributed the source code over like floppy disc or CDs or things like that.

You must confer the same freedoms. Um, but it didn't count if you were just running your website, which is good and bad. Um, it's good in that, like your password file on your WordPress site is not GPL, right? You don't need to share that to the world. Uh, there are licenses like the Affero GPL and others that say like, you need to share everything, but it also creates a loophole.

So technically like wordpress.com doesn't need to share any of its code back to the world. It does those folks work really hard and putting improvements back into WordPress, but that required too because delivery and distribution through SAS services does not confer the distribution and what's GPL was intended with, um, it practice.

We do it, but in letter of law, it's not required. Um, mobile apps are whole new worlds and they, again, there is the ideal thing and there's a pragmatic thing. Prag. Ideally I would love to use a mobile device which had firmer hardware and everything involved with it. That was fully open. Pragmatically, I need to use an Android or iOS device probably from apple or Samsung.

That works, that has good battery life, that everything like that. Um, so I've always thought of myself as a pragmatic open source evangelist, um, Gutenberg. Now, how do we bring this to Gutenberg? So Gutenberg is trying to create a pan CMS or pan creation standard for things I blocks we think, right. I think that in Gutenberg, if we can create a standard interface for things like adding an image or the basic things that you do within a block interface, that is good for the web and humanity.

So part of that is that I would really like to see even proprietary systems adopt Gutenberg blocks. I think that would be a win, you know, I've made fun of some systems like Wix and Squarespace or MailChimp or others. I think they, I would love, I would be thrilled if they all use Gutenberg and Gutenberg is licensed under a way that if you use it, you don't have to make the rest of your software also open source.

So the way the GPL is is this what's called a viral license. So if you use part of it, everything else that links, it also has to be open source, which I like for WordPress. I like for everything I do, but I also recognize that maybe in, let's say a mobile app, I might want to have an open source based editor that uses the standards and code of Gutenberg.

But the rest of the app might not be open source. Maybe it's the MailChimp app. Just manage them as an example. I don't have any relation to MailChimp so I can start to talk about, but MailChimp's awesome. Very successful. Just sold it and do it for like a $10 billion or whatever. If you look at what they're doing with their newsletter, crater, it's blocks.

If you look at what they're doing and like, and they don't actually have a great mobile app yet, so it'd be cool. So when we took our mobile apps, which means developing Gutenberg three times with the developer, for the web, I was an Android, which is a lot of work. Um, we are relicensing the mobile versions of Gutenberg as MIT, which means that they can be embedded in mobile apps, which are not also open source.

Um, this gets into another weird thing, which is all mobile apps are mediated by app stores. I don't love that for the record, but it's the reality. You're either going through Google or apple to the Schubert on an app store to the majority of humans. And you have to, when you distribute your app, you kind of have to, you, don't kinda, you have to agree to their terms of services and licenses, which are sort of compatible with open source.

Actually, WordPress has been a pioneer there. Um, apple originally did not allow GPL applications to be distributed on the apple store and WordPress fought for that and we want it essentially. And in fact, apple has used WordPress code in demos. So we kind of got the unofficial blessing that like our GPL app was okay to be on the apple store, but like that's still a process which we fight and we go for it.

But most famously was it last year that it happened with the either last year or earlier this year, it all blends together, all blends together. I don't know, like post COVID everything's a real mix, but, um, that apple issued an incredibly rare apology, which apple and overdose, where they had sort of told the WordPress open source app, they needed to do something that seemed a little outside of the requirements and the license.

And they, someone higher up realized that and walked it back. So not often that happens with a $2 trillion company, but it happened with repressing apple, and that was exciting. So we will continue fighting wherever we can. Getting these app stores to open up a little bit. We will also be pragmatic in that in reality, everyone who has an apple or iOS device means he goes through the app stores to reach them.

So, and I think it's actually a flaw of, if we think of why Drupal or Joomla hasn't done as well, I think they need apps and I've encouraged as communities create great apps because they need them. Um, why we're expanding the license of, of Gutenberg in particular to be both GPL and MIT is that I would like WordPress blog, our Gutenberg blocks to become a standards that are larger than, than just WordPress.

And, um, there is a Drupal version of Goldberg, et cetera. But I think part of that is that it blocks can become standards across every proprietary system. I make fun of Wix. I think it's fair. They've earned it, but if they adopted Gutenberg, I would toast them and take them out to beers. I think that would be awesome.

Um, Gutenberg is something even bigger than WordPress, which is basically saying how do we edit and create the web? And can we get as many people, both proprietary and open source collaborating that as possible. So that is a bet we've made. Maybe it's correct. Maybe it's incorrect. I hope that you, as a contributor still are excited about being part of Gutenberg, even.

It's Gutenberg and, and MIT, which are both open source licenses, but MIT of course allows proprietary licensing. I understand that. Um, the majority of open-source software in the world is, well, I think majority is GPO, but there's a big chunk that she, uh, non GPL, uh, I think what we're doing folks in this room, you and I are creating more of that open source stuff.

If for prior to the people use it along the way to create a more open source. I think that's great. And okay. Thank you. And thank you for wearing a suit and thank you for coming tonight.

someone asked me earlier, why wear a suit? And it's actually, uh, one of my favorite, uh, folks is Frank Sinatra and he talked about, uh, someone asked why they wore a tux every night to perform. And he said to the other band members, he said, well, if we were performing for the king or queen, what would we wear?

We dress up, we wear a tux to perform for them. And, uh, he said, well, every single night that this band performs, there might be someone in the audience who saved up two months to be there or a waitress or someone like that who really worked to be there. And so guess what, we're going to dress up for them and perform for them, or they are the king or queen of England's Royal.

Every person in the audience is royalty. So that's why I wear a suit every year. If you're wondering, this is like the only suit I wear during the day, but I wear it because I consider every member of the WordPress community to be royalty and just up for y'all. So thank you.

all right. This is the last question I'm so excited. You bring his home. I think it's a short question. Hopefully it wasn't already asked. Can you introduce yourself? Hi, I'm Rachel Winchester. Most people know me as when I'm here for representing digital cube. Um, and I'm just curious if the topic of internet art has made it on your radar.

And if it's something of interest to you, tell me more about internet art. How would you define their net? Art is browser art or web based art, but it's art that uses the internet as a medium. So it works with WordPress because WordPress is that paintbrush. Hm. I will also call out that you have an amazing easy Miyaki purse.

Who's one of my favorite designers of all time. So, uh, thank you for bringing that to the, the microphone as well. Um,

what do you think about the open versus internet art? Like this idea that people could maybe even contribute to internet art, the open first, the idea of, of making publicly accessible images, more accessible. I love that idea. Yeah. Th this is, it's an interesting tension, right? Because uh, artists create things and they want to earn a living from the things they creates and people create things and want to contribute it to the commons of humanity.

That becomes part of what we remix part of what we build on part of the foundation of what creates the next generations, the next versions of what happens and in copyright law, which I would say is popularly epitomized. Since the United States copyright law, you have an ability to do that. You know, uh, rest in peace, Virgil Abloh like would talk about his 3% rule where he would take an existing thing, modify 3% and create something new.

Um, incredible, right. One of the great artists of our generations in so many ways, the effect of popular culture that affected art, the fed so many things, um, through that, taking something as this, the modifying it. So, um, I don't know. I think that's, it pitted me of open source. I would say that WordPress is limitation is before that was basically all of the code and language realm.

It was all about the plugins, the theme, a little bit of design and the translations that were opensource. Um, if you had to define what's next. It's expanding through the open verse through things like that are more content driven, images, video, audio art. I I'm a photographer. My username is photo mat. So I consider photographs to be art.

And, uh, I hope to put more and more of the art I create and hopefully others into that commons. So that is the basis for what generation screen in the future. So thank you so much. I appreciate the question

and with that, I think we might be, I mean, just, I was going to say you notes for everyone because I would naturally, number one, there were a lot of questions that were asked beforehand and also in the live stream chat that we did not get to, but just like last year we will have a blog post up where we can get those answered for you all.

Don't worry. Um, and my final final thing, let's have a round of applause for the folks who put this event together and for our excellent slide makers.

all right. So that's it for the live stream for this year's 20, 21 state of the word. And now I hope if you're watching at home, you can go enjoy yourself. And for those who are here in person, let's go grab a drink and some food. All right. Thank you all. Appreciate it. They could just SEFA then get to the team.

Like it's been amazing. All right.

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WP Minute producer Dave Rodenbaugh of Recapture.io discusses what the supply chain issue is with eCommerce and why it is still an issue.

The US imports over 41% of its consumer goods from China and these imports come in through two ports - Long Beach, CA or Los Angeles, CA. During COVID people were buying online at a skyrocketing rate and those goods were coming in containers and unloaded. However, there was already a shortage of truck drivers and port workers and with the pandemic this problem has escalated. This means that containers stacked up at the ports and ships waited in the harbor. Today, that record is 96 ships waiting.

To address this issue, local laws have been modified to allow containers to be stacked higher, but they are not moving quickly enough. About 80,000 jobs are still open and that’s why items are still not moving. For example, cars and car parts are sitting in containers and can’t get to where they are needed.

According to Bloomberg from December 4th the average waiting time for a ship to be unloaded is 20.8 days! It used to be 6 days - pre pandemic. And the cost of shipping containers has also risen dramatically the past two years as well. The freightos index shows that the current cost is about 14K but the goods that may be on that container are impacting small businesses.

So this is the issue in a nutshell. Until we can move that freight completely from all points in the journey, we are going to continue to see small shortages and price increases everywhere. This will probably continue for months.

If you have other eCommerce topics you would like Dave to talk about, tweet at the WPMinute and he will put it on the show.

Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash

Episode transcription It's the WP minute. This episode is brought to you by mind size. If you're looking for monthly WooCommerce report, check out mind size.com. Today's episode is written and produced by Dave Rodenbach producer@thewpminuteownerofrecapture.io. It's his returning episode on the e-commerce minute discussing the.

At the supply chain, if you're out there going, man, am I going to get my presence? This holiday season for my kids? They will kind of give us a little insight into that and, and the impact the supply chain has on the e-commerce world. We really hope you enjoy today's episode with Dave. If you do thank him on Twitter.

If you want to think the WP minute support the WP minute, by going to buy me a coffee.com/matt report, that's buy me a coffee.com/matt report support WordPress media and independent. Like this. Okay. Let's get into today's episode. Hello again, Dave, Rodenburg here with the e-commerce minute. This episode comes to you right after black Friday, cyber Monday 2021.

This week. I want it to talk about an ongoing crisis in e-commerce that you've probably heard a bit about, but you're likely confused as to why it's still a problem. And that would be the supply chain issue. So we've been hearing about supply chain delays since the beginning of the pandemic here in the U S.

You probably suffered through some shortages of consumer goods, like toilet paper buying, fresh meat, like chicken or beef. And now you're probably seeing those items on your shores store shelves again, but everyone keeps talking about supplier, June issues, supply chain issues doesn't make sense. Right. So let's unpack that.

First of all the United States imports over 41% of its consumer goods from China. There's some smaller amounts that come from Vietnam, India, and Germany. The total is about 56% of, of its total consumer goods come from overseas. That figure has remained fairly consistent for the last four years.

According to jungle scout. So 40% of all those imported goods pass through one of two ports in the United States, either the port of Los Angeles or the port of long beach, for those that know their California geography, that basically means the greater Metro area of Los Angeles is responsible for 40% of all consumer goods coming to the United States.

That's huge. Now let's spice that up a bit during COVID. Consumer online spending increased dramatically. So those goods started. Over in containers. Once they arrive, the workers would unload the containers and then move them to trucks or railroad cars for further distribution in the United States. But before the pandemic even started, there was already a truck driver and warehouse workers shortage to the tune of about 61,500 jobs, which under the pandemic skyrocket at another 33% higher to 80,000 jobs.

And no. Fill them. So without these essential workers to move freight, the containers just stacked up at the ports. And eventually the ports build up causing the ships with new containers, to idle in the Harbor, waiting to be unloaded, which then created a line of ships all the way out into the Pacific ocean at its high point of over 96, unloaded ships that.

The number today. So recently the local laws in California, specifically in long beach, long beach and Los Angeles were changed to help get some of the ships to unload by stacking containers higher than was previously allowed by. But there's still a bottleneck of moving that freight from port to its final destination.

Those 80,000 jobs are still open right now. And that's why we're seeing some items on shelves remain unstopped or very low stock. And you see emails from stores to say shop early. So we still have stock during the holiday. That's also why things like cars have increased in price, both new and used ships that are required in every vehicle.

Now are simply sitting at sea and can't get to their final destination parts to prepare cars are sitting in containers at port and can't get to the garages that need them. My own repair garage told me a story about holding one of their cars for five months because they couldn't source a part to repair.

Anywhere in the United States at any price, they were willing to pay anything. Still couldn't do it. That story is unfortunately a very common. According to Bloomberg from December 4th, the average waiting time for a ship to be unloaded has reached an all-time high of 20.8 days almost 21 days. The average for most of the summer before September was about six.

Days. So it's more than tripled. And the cost of shipping containers themselves has risen dramatically over the last two years, pre pandemic the cost of a shipping container hovered somewhere between one thousand five hundred and two thousand five hundred a container at peak. This summer containers from China to the west coast, ran over 20 found.

Dollar's a container currently we've dropped to a much lower point of about 14,000 9, 34 as of December 3rd on the FBX, which is the Freightos Baltic index that talks about the current prices of shipping containers. But for a container that likely has between 30 and $40,000 worth of goods on average, that is a terrible cost increase for most small businesses.

So that's the supply chain issue in a nutshell, until we can move that freight completely from all points in the journey, we're going to continue to see small shortages of things everywhere and price increases for almost everything. And it's going to keep going on for months to come and for. I hope that was helpful for you this week.

If you have other e-commerce topics, you'd like me to talk about tweet at the WP minute and I'll put it on the show until next time. Thanks Dave. Thanks listener. If you want to go to Twitter, thank Dave for his contribution to the WP minute. This. And join as a producer, just like Dave, contributing to WordPress content all around the world@buymeacoffee.com slash Matt report.

That's buy me a coffee.com/matt report. Thanks for listening. And we'll see you in the next episode. .

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After appearing on the Post Status State of WordPress News roundtable, I felt like I had a bit more to say about my experience with WordPress news.

WordPress news isn't a heavily trafficked topic on the web. How does a publisher build more than just a side gig from putting out WordPress news? How do we define WordPress news?

I asked Kim Coleman, co-founder of Paid Memberships Pro, to see if she had any questions around the topic and if she had any interest in recording a podcast episode about it. Thankfully she was willing to chat and share her questions and her opinions on how we do WordPress news.

If you enjoy today's episode, please say thanks to Kim on Twitter or consider becoming a supporting Producer here at The WP Minute!

Episode Transcript [00:00:00] Matt: It's the WP minute, a special WP minute because I am joined by a special coat. Co-host the title of this episode is called challenges of a WordPress news business. I have my great friend here, the lovely Kim Coleman, Kim, welcome to the program. [00:00:18] Kim: Hi, thanks for having me, Matt. I'll. I want to add who I am before we get too deep, because Everybody knows you. [00:00:25] Nobody knows me, maybe. Well I've been working in WordPress as the line goes from the WordPress rep since I used to rock the Kubrick theme. So I'm a really OJI community member. I spend a lot of time doing site development and moved into products. [00:00:39] And now most notably a WordPress membership plugin paid memberships pro. [00:00:45] Matt: I want to talk about how you and I ended up in this moment of time first. I did. Post status state of the WordPress news. I think they called it and it was a great Twitter space. I'm not a fan of Twitter spaces. Dave, if you're listening, I'm an old school podcast. I like things to be recorded. [00:01:02] I like to sit in our little recording room that we're in now and I don't have to use my phone. So I wanted to, once I was done with that conversation, which again was a fabulous conversation six or seven of us from around the WordPress news space, fantastic conversation. But I felt like I really only scratched the surface on what it's like to, I don't know. [00:01:20] I hate to say run a WordPress news business, but that's the phrase that comes into my head. And Kim, I know that well I've known you for years, right? Ever since I was running my studio, you running your studio, we go way back. But I saw you chatting up others in the WordPress new space on Twitter with some great points, some strong opinion. [00:01:38] I was like, Kim's the perfect person to sit down with to talk about this stuff. And that's how we've ended up in this room today. Is that a fair state? [00:01:45] Kim: Totally fair. Yes. I struggle with opinionated verse. Not because my product does work with a lot of other plugins out there and businesses. So, who you are as an individual and who you are as your business face are an interesting part of these conversations, but yeah, I'll, I'll do my best juggling. [00:02:03] Matt: Kim burying the lead right out of the gate. We're going to talk, we're going to talk about that stuff. So it's Kim I don't wanna say interviewing me, but we, we chatted on some points that we thought were really important to share about news in the WordPress space. And there's so many of us are blogging about WordPress. [00:02:20] We have our opinions, we want to share it. And then there's like a small percentage of us that say, okay, I'm going to do this for a living. Like I'm gonna write about WordPress, whether it's tutorials, development, tutorials, training stuff, or, inside WordPress news. And I know there's a few of you out there especially in the discord server that. [00:02:38] Yeah, that's what you do for a living. You create content around WordPress whether it's eat, soft content, like the tutorial or more of the hard hitting stuff, like the news, you want to figure out how to do it. I've got some opinions to share. And I think Kim has a couple of questions for me [00:02:53] Kim: I want this to be your build in public moment where we talk about Matt report media and what you're doing with the news. And like we said, the title of the show, what are the challenges that we're facing as a community? And what are those things? So I think that's a good kickoff is let's establish, why is it important? [00:03:09] Why is news important in WordPress? We're a multi-billion dollar industry made up of many big and fewer and fewer huge and then thousands of tiny, tiny companies. So why is news important to you? [00:03:23] Matt: I'll give you my, why it's important to me from, from the heart first is because look, it is a, it's a big space. And one of the very first things that I saw coming into the WordPress space was, looking at some colleagues that were, that they were getting the connections, they were getting the projects, they were, selling the plug-ins and the themes. [00:03:47] And I'm talking 50. Plus years ago. And I was just curious, like how, how does this all work? Like as a newcomer into the space, as big as WordPress is today, there's new new people coming in right now, like 70 is installing WordPress probably for the first time, literally, right when we're saying this and they might be thinking, I want to start an agency, I want to do this thing. [00:04:07] Or I just want to know what's happening here. And it was very important for me to be able to quickly learn that and just get a feel for, for the land. And on the surface. That's why it's important for your average WordPress user. Who do I turn to? Where do I go in this WordPress space for the business owner? [00:04:26] Yeah. You want to have somebody who's out there covering, well, this year, specifically acquisitions investments, who's doing what? With products and services you want to have that sort of pulse on, on the. To really know, where your business and what your opportunity is in the, in the marketplace, whatever a CNBC approach of, analyzing the market, but for WordPress and that's something that's interesting, to me, as, as somebody who's in the business side of it. And then I think there's a third leg of, just accountability and transparency. [00:04:59] It, it is a multi-billion dollar industry largely covered on the, under the umbrella of automatic and Matt Mullenweg. And there needs to be just a a critical eye on how things roll out because in an open source community, we're all giving up our time and investing in WordPress. And that's an awesome thing. [00:05:26] Open source is, and WordPress is, it's an awesome thing, but to have folks like Sarah Good. Who really dives deep into some of these stories and analysis to, to, to illustrate the picture to us, to let us decide on whatever heavy topics it might be in the community and the contributor space again, automatic or GoDaddy, like having that critical eye on the space, I think is important. [00:05:52] As narrow as this space really is it drives business for a lot of us, and I, I think that news or content around it is, is important. And that's what it means to me. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that or. [00:06:06] Kim: yeah, I think when I reflected on this question, I thought about my customers and I thought about. They're very little involvement in the WordPress community, which we call it the WordPress community. It's the faces you see, on Twitter, maybe in other communities you're in you see them in the hallway track, you see them in in-person or virtual meetups related to WordPress. [00:06:27] I call those people, the WordPress community. But when I look at my users, I think they're not interested in WordPress news. They're building their business, using WordPress as a tool. So you know, what is the size of the audience of people that are affected by WordPress news and, and who is interested? [00:06:44] Who are we reporting to? You talked about like the business owners and the people who are part of the community, but who do you identify with when you're preparing your news? [00:06:52] Matt: I don't think there's many of us doing any real hard hitting journalism or writing in the space set aside Sarah Gooding. [00:07:00] I don't think there's anyone else really doing it diving deep into, into real deep stories. And I think that that's something that I want, I don't even necessarily want to do myself. I wanna be able to empower others to do or at least just like encourage others to do through the work that I'm doing. [00:07:13] So when I sit aside, when I set aside time to do the WP minute on the news side of it, it's very much the WordPress professional that I think. The business owner, the product owner, the freelancer it's still not dipping into the average user, although the way that the whole premise of the WP minute is to get it in five minutes. [00:07:37] And I think that that is at least the only thing that I can think of that that could ever attract, your average Jane user. She started a WordPress site because she sells gluten-free cupcakes down the block, and this is her small little, WooCommerce site or whatever that she's built to like power her business. [00:07:53] Maybe she would tune into five minutes of, of news just to hear like where WordPress is going with a new release or something like that. And five minutes is, is, enough for her to, to consume or just enough for her to consume. But so when I write my do my content, it's generally the, the WordPress professional. [00:08:10] And I would say that largely everyone else in the space, it's the same thing. I have. Done plugin tutorial content, which does far better in terms of, eyeballs, traffic search terms one does not set out to create a scalable business covering WordPress news AF after nearly a decade of interviewing people in the WordPress business space, I have enough lessons and, and enough case studies to say, Matt, this is foolish. [00:08:42] Like you don't run a business. Like there's no such thing as a business with this WordPress news. It's a nice sort of lifestyle income on the side. Sure. If you, if you want it to be, but you're not covering you're not going after like that WP beginner model with this, which is, is like, if you're just listening to this and you want to shut it off right now, like how do I make money making content. [00:09:02] I'm telling you it's the WP beginner style, whereas tutorials it's lessons, it's education, it's search terms. That's what people want. That's what the vast majority of people want. The people who really care about the WordPress news. My estimate is 2,500 people tops really care about what's happening in the WordPress industry, business community, and otherwise, like who really care about like the directions and the analysis of it. [00:09:31] That's my, that's my guess. I could be way off on that. But that's my guess. [00:09:36] Kim: It was interesting your point about hard hitting news, because I think that I've been in conversations where what would be hard hitting news is being discussed, but it's in our private group with our doors closed and not going, mainstream with it, I would say. , it's cool that you are looking to create a platform for people to share that and whether it's you or someone else if that's what the WP minute becomes, I think that's a good segue to introduce. [00:10:02] The concept of it and with any business there's, what's your product and how are you making money with it? So we can dig into both of those sides of, of this business. What is the WP minute, and then let's start with how you're making it a business, how it's being funded. [00:10:17] Matt: Yeah. So, WP. Again, five minute podcast covering WordPress news. The biggest headlines that I feel like me and my staff want to pull out, every week that people would be interested in. So you won't get every point release a piece of information. You won't get every vulnerability that's published. [00:10:36] It's just too lengthy to do that, in five minutes. And that is a challenge to really condense to, to con condense the podcast in the podcasting world is very easy to create a podcast where you just go on zoom, you hit record it's hour long, but nobody wants that same thing over again, the real challenge and the real money comes in the edit of a podcast and how you edit a show and, and a text piece as well. [00:10:59] So really condensing it down to five minutes. It's very important to me. And then one of the challenges of this, because people don't need to hear from me anymore. Like I want to build a platform that removes. And put me in a position that I think that I'm halfway decent at, which is getting some exposure and asking for money, right? [00:11:21] Like being able to knock on somebody's door and say, Hey, this thing needs some money. Can you fund it? We got some awesome people , here, creating news and creating content in the WordPress space and how I'm funding it now is small annual membership donation. It's $79 for the year. You become a producer of the show. [00:11:42] And the technology that connects us is right now, anyway, discord, which I know everyone has a love, hate relationship with, but everyone has a love, hate relationship with slack too. So I, I can't figure anything else out. That's going to work. [00:11:54] So you make the $79 donation. You get your hand in the weekly WordPress news and you can, chat about the news with others that want to chat about the news. You can drop links in the discord. Where my executive producer and I use it to write the actual script of the show and you get a call out, you get credit. [00:12:13] It's a fun little game where people get to submit their links and I have a counter and I keep track of how many people are the account that people contribute links for. So it adds like this little game of vacation and value, and you get your name out there through the podcast, through the newsletter and the blog posts. [00:12:29] So that's one way of funding it. And the other way of funding, it is the traditional sponsorship route. I'm fairly lucky to be able to get sponsors fairly easily in the WordPress space. And I saw that as an actual opportunity to be able to maybe even pass that to somebody else. [00:12:48] This is a topic that came up the other day core contributors in the WordPress space, largely in the wordpress.org core, largely from the automatic team. What is the impact of WordPress and the long game when it's mostly automatic, but only a handful of people from GoDaddy. [00:13:02] Boy, don't you think GoDaddy should be able to afford a little bit more on that team and what would happen if there was a, this balance of this mix of other corporate entities who really leverage WordPress and make a lot of money with WordPress giving back, so hard hitting stories like that would be awesome to hear. [00:13:18] And I hope to build a platform that can pass that revenue onto somebody else. Give somebody else the ability to tell these stories, use the WP minute as a platform. And I'm just the guy who goes and gets the money. That's all I want to do hear from other people. That's the long game right now, the way it's funded is through this. [00:13:37] Potential donations of folks want to donate, but then also I'll go after traditional sponsorship as well. [00:13:42] Kim: Do you, do you feel like with the corporate sponsorship route that there's a case to be made, that it could influence your objectivity or your ability to be opinionated or I don't know. I think that's a curious thing. If you are having other businesses, contributing their money, is there an expectation that you'll be reported on favorably? [00:14:01] I, should anything negative ever happen? I I'm a member of post status. I think that if they publish something very negative about my business, that my whole team is subscriber to, that would, that would hit hard for me. [00:14:12] Matt: That's a great, it's a great question. Something to really unpack. I think that news is valuable for all of us, for, for many different, for many different reasons. And if we set aside the. The biases towards a corporate sponsor or your example where they write something bad about PM, paid memberships, pro how would it affect you and how would it affect your dollars? [00:14:36] I think that when you encourage or when you support news outlets, again, like the WP minute and others, when you're, what you're doing is your you're amplifying the whole you're, hopefully you're amplifying the whole market and the opportunity for everyone. And this is gonna sound so cliche, but, rising tide lifts, all boats. [00:14:59] It's the same argument that Matt, Matt Mullenweg has obviously contributing to WordPress makes WordPress better for everyone. And I think if news is funded more in the WordPress space, it raises the whole, it raises it for everybody on a more respected level, right? I mean, how many years have went by for, for a decade where tech crunch. [00:15:19] Not that I'm a fan of this anymore, but TechCrunch would always say like a WordPress is, wordpress.com or WordPress with a lowercase P. And like, you have thousands of people who are like, that's not how you say it, where it's not how you say it. Tech crunch, or WordPress is greater than wordpress.com. [00:15:34] And I think that if corporate entities fund it more, we have a chance to elevate our game a little bit. post statuses, I don't think as much more of a news thing now that Brian has left. I think that really the only news game in town of record would be again, what Sarah Gooding is doing over at the Tavern. [00:15:52] And the team over there was doing at the Tavern that's funded by Audrey capital. So if you could bring in other players into that space, now you have competing is not the right word because the space is only, still so small on topics, but you have the ability to cover more stuff. Again, putting the. [00:16:13] Objectivity aside like of Audrey capital or let's say paid memberships, pro funded all of WP minute. And I would never talk bad about the paid membership pro ever again, putting that stuff aside, you have the ability to cover more stories. And I think that that's where a challenge becomes is a WordPress business. [00:16:34] That people want the wins. They want to be able to say, I'm going to give a thousand dollars over here and I'm going to get $1,001 in return. I can totally understand it because we're not all super big businesses. So the money has to, you have to carefully think where you put your money. [00:16:48] But being able to tell stories and be able to share the stuff that's happening in the WordPress space and say that you support it I think is, is a win across the board because we just get more stuff. And maybe we can be respected more, once you hit, once you go above the tech crunches of the world, they'll start to look at this space as more than just a bunch of freelancers that have this, piece of software that gets hacked all the time. [00:17:11] Because that's largely what everyone thinks, when you, when you're not looking at WordPress news internally. I don't know if that fully answers your question, but that's just a bunch of thoughts that came to mind with that is it's not just about, who's funding it and whatnot, but as the opportunity to tell, more stories, it's an ancient problem. [00:17:29] Being able to to fund that, to fund news for that exact reason. Everyone can like, if you look at local. At least in mice, my local area, which I'm sure it probably happens in your local area. And everyone listening to this people always complain about the local news. Oh, they only care about this mayor and that city council person, and they'll never talk about this. [00:17:52] So I won't pay a dollar a month to get the digital news from them, but then when something happens, they're like CNN didn't cover that. Well maybe if you supported your local news a little bit more, you'd have local journalism to cover this thing that was so important to you. Oh. But all you did was complain that they don't come, you need to, you need to support them so that there's more writers. [00:18:16] It's an ancient problem. And I don't know if we can solve it, but I'm, I'm happy to just like, give it a shot. [00:18:23] Kim: no, I mean, I'm excited about the capacity of, of a news outlet like yours and more if they crop up to amplify small news in the WordPress space because, five years ago, what was small news is now the acquisition, of a $10 million or who knows that we can speculate at. So, But on that same flip side do you think there's a version in the future where WordPress news is mainstream is covered on, any, CNN channel? [00:18:51] I, think people talk about the project as a whole. They talk about, like you said, automatic and wordpress.com incorrectly often, but you know, are there stories that are happening that are big news? [00:19:00] Matt: I I hope so. I think that part of me for the reason of doing this is so that, so that yeah, we can get exposure and, and say that. Well, it's funny, like my, I have a local podcasts that I do. I'm tucked in between like my, where I live. I'm tucked between Boston and Providence, Rhode Island. [00:19:21] So two capitals of two states and my local podcast is called. We are here to tell the world that we are here because everyone always leaves and goes to either Boston or Providence for all the awesome stuff. We have the south coast of Massachusetts and the whole premise is , we are here. [00:19:38] And it's funny because I almost said the same thing. Like I'm doing this to, so that people know that we are here too. And I think one of the things I've always criticized Mullen wagon is the fact that yes, core contributors, people who write the code, the project needs to exist a hundred percent. [00:19:55] But there's a ton of people who, I've said before I, I refer to myself as, as well, like that digital blue collar worker, somebody who just wants to use WordPress. Just build a good product, whether that's a small plugin or a services shop and just do good work at good for good people for good prices. [00:20:13] Like people aren't trying to buy the Lambo. But they're also not, they're trying to respect their craft and their value. And I feel like there's so many of us out there that really prop up WordPress and yeah, I would love to see somebody in the news cover like in larger media maybe if you sold, paid memberships pro to web flow, so something like that would certainly break the barrier and suddenly like, oh my God, like they bought a WordPress plugin, but integrated that into web flow. [00:20:41] Oh, that's an interesting thing that would break the barrier of like your typical tech cover. But then there's, I think WordPress has a tremendous opportunity for education and career at the local level. I think one of the reasons why I really love WordPress and why I'm still such a strong proponent for WordPress is, is that you can give this piece of software to somebody. [00:21:07] They can learn it, not even master it, but master to what they need to know how to do like to build a small website. And now they can go and try to do that same thing for other. And dig themselves out of, a job that they lost or site income so that they can provide for their families, or, I think about it all the time, like homeless folks that I see throughout my community. [00:21:28] Like if you, if we could gather them together and teach them software like this, like WordPress is a gateway to empower somebody. And that's really awesome. Like that's what I really love about it. So on the news side, yeah. Stories like that would really win. We will never win on like where WordPress is going, because it's, it will always win by automatic. [00:21:50] Is this that's just how it's going to happen. So if we can win in other areas, that would be great. I don't know if that, again, it's weird being on this side of [00:21:56] Kim: No it's conversational. It's okay. No, I, when I I think about what you just said, I think about a recent I, a job listing I had and the number of people I interviewed that were being pushed by their educators. Even these were people either in like a technology program or kind of a, a two year degree type thing learning new technology, modern technology, and being pushed into other coding languages and other methods that were not WordPress and they weren't learning that foundation. [00:22:26] So I think it's interesting to come to that realization myself, that if mainstream media isn't somewhat clued into WordPress, even, a sub category of people talking about modern technologies, if WordPress isn't in those conversations, We aren't interesting to young people learning new trades and careers, and we're not thought of as vibrant or interesting, and it can have a long-term negative effect on, market share and use from everyone getting more business for their agencies, for their plugins. [00:22:57] All of it. So scary how it's intertwined when you, when you go down that hole. [00:23:01] I want to go to like, maybe this is a boring topic, but we did talk about these articles. You brought them up [00:23:06] Matt: We're not burning any headlines down by covering WordPress news already. Kim [00:23:10] Kim: Okay [00:23:11] Matt: we've already passed that. [00:23:12] Kim: Yeah. So you talked about articles. So. what is the mix of how you're delivering news and what do think is how, how are people consuming it? [00:23:20] And do you just have to spread a wide net what's going on? [00:23:23] Matt: The WP minute stuff is an interesting experiment has been an interesting experiment. The, the reason why it's called the WP mint and why I keep it the five minutes is one to be different. But two, because I don't have any time. So when a defender from the WP weekly convinced me to do this I was like, well, I have to do something. [00:23:42] That's going to be short form and that I can build a process for and repeat. Now, last week I live streamed the entire process of me recording, editing, and uploading the weekly episode, which includes the contributors who contribute their a one minute clip every week. That whole process took takes me anywhere between, well, in that particular case, it took me almost 40 minutes to produce the five minute show. [00:24:09] One, because I was live streaming and I was talking about it, but two recording it and editing it editing is what takes the most amount. And I have pat and she writes the weekly script for me. what we do is we collect the links from the discord group. It's called hashtag link squad. If you're a part of the discord you go and you drop in your link and the links only chat. [00:24:27] You say hashtag link squad and hashtag link squad gives me the ability to track all of that in a database. And then pat and I, we pull that out at every Tuesday when we start to curate the links and then we build the script around that. And then pat writes the script and I read the script. I'll edit the script. [00:24:44] Sometimes she'll have, have some questions for me, some reminders of things to say and include. And then I record it and then upload it to the website. I'm telling you what the process is, is because how, what we deliver is the audio recording. Obviously the blog post, which is a transcript of the audio recording and the newsletter, which is the entire training. [00:25:06] Sent an email, right? And because it's only five minutes, whatever, it's a, it's quite literally a five minute read, or if you read faster than me, then it's two and a half minutes. And I feel like that's a nice balance. So you can either go to the website and just check on it really quick. Every Wednesday, what's going to come in your inbox, you can read it and scan it. [00:25:25] And what might be interesting to you is I don't have time for either of that. I'll throw Matt on in the background and it'll just play for five minutes and I'll get the top headlines that I want. So it's the same thing delivered in three different outlets and how I've been trying to spice it up and get community involved is to get folks to either read the transcript for me. [00:25:47] So guest readers No, I've had a whole bunch of folks carry deals. Helen from 10 apples, she was from 10, but she just retired from TenUp a whole bunch of folks from around the community, read the script. And now we have folks who syndicate content into it. And what that is is a one minute clip of something that you think is really awesome about whatever it is that you do. [00:26:09] And Michelle shelf did something, which I thought was amazing, which was health and wellness or health and fitness, health, and wellness, both the same thing. She did a one minute clip on that. Michelle for chef has done things on community. Dave wrote and Baba e-commerce Bob Dunn, do the woo. So we have like these recurring folks who contribute just a one minute clip of audio, which makes it a nice variety. [00:26:31] So you, you might listen for the news, but you all, you also might listen because I want to hear this cool one minute thing that somebody has to say. So hopefully a nice balance for the listener and for the community to get something in. Because again, as much talking as I do, I, I want somebody else. [00:26:49] Somebody else take the microphone. You don't need to [00:26:51] hear me. [00:26:52] Kim: I was just going to say it's, it's good because it's open source news, but curated. So there is a person saying like, this is news, this is a tutorial or how to this doesn't belong here. Cause there's lots of news aggregators. Like if anyone here uses Reddit, there's a WordPress sub Reddit, there, there are subreddits for lots of things. [00:27:11] And other communities like the startup community, they have, hacker news where, where they go that's their go-to source. It doesn't feel like WordPress has a single. Hub, I guess I would say. And that could be just, we're so diverse. All the people are just deeply diverse for this community. [00:27:28] So it's a challenge for you. [00:27:30] Matt: Yeah. I mean, and also look, I mean, we're press headlines are still very dominated by. Develop from the developer crowd, right? It's still like, people want to hear things on the development front, much more than they care about, the business side or, heck even the community side, [00:27:50] the headlines still win on, the code, the lines of code, the new frameworks, all that stuff, the battle between react and view and all this stuff that I don't understand, people still like largely just consume that because it's largely development crowd and I totally get it. [00:28:04] There are pockets of people doing some interesting things. Like I know my check from WP owls he started that, that program through just his local community in Poland. So he like had a lock on the Polish literally the country of that content. Like if you were bullish and you were looking for work. [00:28:25] News or highlights or interviews. He had a lock on that and it's not until we opened it up to the U S he still runs the polar side of it, but now he does the U S or not the U S I shouldn't say that the global side of it. He has the global side of it, and that's all more of the English version. So that is more of an audience for it. [00:28:43] So there are people who are winning, but yeah, I agree with you. There's not that one place to just get all like the cool headlines other than like the code stuff. [00:28:53] Kim: Definitely the, the code stuff and the acquisition stuff. [00:28:56] because that's what we've all been facing so much. I think a conversation about news would be remiss without talking. For a very small moment about scoops, about being the news outlet to break a piece of news, that's mainstream media and, and the biggest scandal from the white house. [00:29:13] And then in WordPress, it's the, the next company that liked me and my husband kinda said, take the wheel, give us the money and we'll give you the thing we've worked on for 10 years. Goodbye. So what's your take on scoops in WordPress. [00:29:25] Matt: I don't know if people really gonna like this answer because my answer is companies or freelancers y'all have to do a better job. I said this on the post status Twitter space. I'll have to do a better job reaching out to folks like me and heck even probably the Tavern in, in post status and stuff like that. [00:29:46] , and give us that story, tell us, what's happening, why are doing it? One of the things I've been doing with the WP minute is reaching out to a lot more people doing some interesting things on Twitter, and I'm like, Hey, I'd love to interview you. You can, you have plenty of options. [00:30:03] You can literally give me one minute of what you want to say about this thing that you're working on. You can give me a five to 10 minute audio monologue. Like if you want to just talk about whatever it is you want to talk about to send it to me, I can send you questions and you can record it, or I can send you questions and you can just write the answers to them. [00:30:22] I can give you a bunch of options to do this stuff. And like the uptake on that is probably 40% people are just like in this space, there are people who are simply either too shy or just not confident enough about their thing, whatever that thing is that they're working on. And at the end of the day, hopefully like seeing what I do encourage somebody to do it is like, look, you don't have to be smart to do this. [00:30:52] Like look at this guy who just turns on a microphone and hits record. It's very easy. So do a better job reaching. And heck, even if you have some really good story, you can hit us all up, hit us all up and just say, Hey, here's this great story. Here's my press release. It doesn't have to be so stuffy, like a real PR organization might do for you, something fun and interesting or whatever, give us that, that scoop. [00:31:17] Otherwise it's, it's just relationships, which is still how the world works. Whenever I do talk to real journalists, it's about the relationships that they have, the connections that they have, the sources that they have, and that's how they get the stories and the content and the scoops and stuff like that. [00:31:32] And that's cool. I mean, hopefully some of that stuff happens now that this discord, I think I'm up to about 50 ish people so far. And hopefully that stuff starts to happen more, but I really think that people have to be able to , get their story out more to us and not. Hope to get a tutorial or a review or something like that out. [00:31:51] And hopefully the WB men, it gives people a different format to deliver that on. But again, knock on the door of the Tavern, Sarah and post status and et cetera, et cetera. [00:31:59] Kim: when I think about these acquisitions, I see the people who were acquired, stepping out as thought leaders as personal brands in some ways a few of them in, in the, in recent times. And I think what you're advocating for is do that. Now do that as you're running your business, being not outspoken, but. [00:32:17] A comment about something that's public participating in contributing to the news through the WP minute. These are ways that you not detach yourself from your business, but establish a personal brand, which isn't a bad thing. There are many personal brands in WordPress. [00:32:32] Matt: right. Yeah. A hundred percent. [00:32:35] Kim: Cool. That wraps up my questions, but I want to give you a chance to, speak freely or kick something more, more around [00:32:42] Matt: let's just talk about diversity in WordPress news. Kim recently we were chatting about my friend volva from freemiums has a panel. I think I forgot what it was called. [00:32:53] Kickstarters start a fight Firestarters game-changers it certainly was a Firestarter it was a panel of all men and certainly got some, some blow back there for that. I had messaged him cause he was like, Hey, can you include this on the WP minute? I'm like, sure. I will link it up in our events section. [00:33:10] But what are your thoughts? On getting, more women, more diversity on these panels in the future. And he said that he recognized that they're going to work towards it in the, in the future. But you own your business with your husband. I'm sure you have some thoughts around [00:33:26] Kim: definitely. Yeah. So we, personal story time, we began this business. And got into the product space right around the time I had our first child. So as we were becoming more noticed in the WordPress space, I was taking a deep back seat, working very hard at odd hours and also raising children. [00:33:45] And I think as my children have gotten older, I've become more vocal, more of a face for our business and our product. And with that, I think I followed conversations about diversity, diversity, and technology diversity in this WordPress community. But never really spoke out about it until the screenshot of that game. [00:34:03] Changers covers just struck me. It struck me because I'm in a mastermind with only women in WordPress. And I'm also in a slack community of only women in WordPress. So to me, I, I knew personally people that could have been included in that. And it's probably the first time I've spoken publicly. And said like, Hey, this just doesn't feel right to me. [00:34:25] And I certainly was nervous as it took off as a conversation because I didn't want to be lumped into, a version of people who are just complainer's because I appreciate the news that Volvo was trying to push out and the support he wanted to give other business owners, on either side of the acquisition table, which I think is the goal of, of that series. [00:34:44] But at the same time, it's embarrassing to me as a woman that nobody catches this in someone's team. My team myself, we are seven women, eight men, and, and partially a woman women founded. So, it doesn't seem hard to me to build a team of half women. I didn't do it with deep intention, but it, it happened. [00:35:07] So, and it wasn't challenging. So it was a very awkward thing where I just opened my eyes to, this is not a diverse panel of people. [00:35:14] Matt: , do you, if somebody knocks on your door and says, Hey, you want to be on a podcast? And let's, let's say it's your typical, bros startup podcast. And I've been guilty of that too. It's just like the headlines. It's like how this person sold their business for a million dollars kind of thing. [00:35:30] Do you evaluate that and say, I don't want to contribute content to that type of show or do you have any recommendations for how people should ask you to be on a show? And not just covering quota for lack of a [00:35:46] Kim: yeah, I don't think that women should be offended by being a token member of something. If that's how it's perceived. 'cause it's it's, progress, I guess, in, in any state of things. If a bro podcast contacted us and said, we want someone from stranger studios to talk, I would put Jason on. [00:36:04] I would say, Jason, this one's for you. This is not the one for me. I'm not going to relate to these people, if they didn't have a specific preference, I would say I would send him on it. I wouldn't, I'm not like I'm deeply outspoken person. And I don't know that I find. And maybe I should find more value in, in my role as leading a path for women and women founders. [00:36:29] But Yeah. [00:36:29] I would say, even if you are a token, it's okay. They asked and you're present and, and I think, WordPress has found value in seeking to have more diverse panels of speakers and presenters. It's, retuned the conversations that we're having. We're not only talking about code, we're talking about all the aspects of remote work and working in WordPress in, in new ways. [00:36:52] I think because of that diversity. [00:36:54] Matt: Yeah. The, when Pagely announced their Gaudet acquisition from our GoDaddy. Pagely, there's a lot of praise, of course, the Josh, because Josh spends a lot more time on, on Twitter than Sally does for sure. But having worked at the camp myself, worked at the company for nearly three years. Like Sally is a force and like, she's the one who keeps Josh in line. [00:37:18] And the rest of like, the the fabric of that, the real, like family fabric of that brand and organization in place. Again, at least from the time that that I was there. And it's very easy, in WordPress and look, we're here talking about the news it's also, and this is not an excuse by any stretch of the imagination, but it's also easy to just be like, oh, I see this person talking all the time on Twitter. [00:37:40] Certainly they are that person of that company. So, okay. Here comes another acquisition. I'm going to start pounding the keyboard and like, oh yeah. Josh, of course. And yeah, it's, it's short-sighted to not know, do not go deep. And really understand the brand, so I'm not making excuses for my work in the past or even stuff at like freemium, but it's very easy for somebody who's like marketing play, let's go and get headline and just grab a bunch of names. [00:38:07] And let me just scoop all this stuff together, shuffled it onto a page. And just like last this thing out, like you really, to me, this is actually going to parlay into a deeper conversation right now. But like, I really care about WordPress content. If I wasn't doing sponsorship stuff or running a business out of it, I do it because I actually love creating the content. [00:38:30] And that is the advice I give to people at my day job at Castillo's is if you're going to start a podcast, you got to do it because you love it. Don't just do it as like this B2B marketing play or this headline play, or you're going to get rich kind of play because it's not going to happen. And you're only going to hit things on the server. [00:38:49] And these are the pitfalls of just doing things on the surface, purely for marketing, purely for clicks. In my opinion, you do it for the craft as you love it. I mean, maybe if I was a TMZ competitor, the game would be totally different. And in the WordPress space, I care about the craft. I, I care about it more and I've been trying to reach out to as many folks as I possibly can to keep the contribution of news as diverse as possible. [00:39:18] Or I shouldn't even say news, but the con the diversity of content. Yeah. Cause like Michelle stuff on, on health and fitness, that's not really news, but I look at it as she's got something awesome to say, not about WordPress, let's get that out there. Like, so to me, that's, that's interesting. And I hope stuff like that work. [00:39:35] So I've been spending a lot of time knocking on the Twitter doors of folks that I've never talked to before. And sometimes I'm like, I feel like, oh God, what are they going to say about the bearded white guy who wants them to be on a podcast? Because I just feel like everyone, it's just like, it's the common trend and nobody needs to hear from me or see me doing this a hundred percent of the time. [00:39:57] So, I will I will try my best, to work in that direction as best as I possibly can. [00:40:03] Kim: Women of WordPress. We'll try to come out of our private communities and interact with the white men with beards more. We'll try our best. Now. I can't speak for everyone, but it is nice to, we do have a community of our own, and it's a nice. And it's interesting and it's different. It's much more about, like you said, health and fitness and interesting things. [00:40:23] I just wrote an article where I asked for some tips about relaxation and, and the two tips I got from men were very work-focused and every tip I got from women was about how to make food preparation for your family, your extended family, a little less painful over the next two weeks. And I, at first part of me chuckled about it, but then I thought like, that is actually what I'm most stressed about. [00:40:44] So I appreciate that perspective the most. So [00:40:47] Matt: Yeah, let me guess the white, the guys were like, oh, a time block your calendar, probably and automate your to-do list. [00:40:56] Kim: pretty much. And also like lock up your device, which is a, not a new idea, but an interesting and true idea for sure. But the other ones were like order Chinese takeout. I was like, yes, that is smart. [00:41:11] Matt: One of the other questions I wanted to cover was that of finding journalists, paying journalists in the WordPress space, my particular challenge with it. To find folks to create content. And I've had a handful of air quotes interviews with a very poorly written job description, which was literally like eight bullet points in a video that I did just trying to find somebody who really cares about WordPress news, who wants to publish WordPress news and, and get their name out there, but can also do it I don't want to say inexpensively, but inexpensively for a publication that, that doesn't make much money. [00:41:49] And when you look at, the money I do make back of the napkin math, cause it's all public, paid memberships pro has been a sponsor of the Matt report before. And you simply go to a WooCommerce site, you buy the product and you, you check out and that's how I sell sponsorship. I put it out in a tweet it's done in a lottery fashion on purpose because I want to get. [00:42:11] I want to get as much random opportunity in there, like brands that don't necessarily get a chance to sponsor stuff. It's not a very cheap price. It's not a very high price. I think for a month it was 15. At the time when I was doing that, it was 1500 bucks. I've since moved it up a little bit for premium sponsorships. [00:42:27] But at the end of the day, the revenue that I can pull in or that I have pulled in from 2021 is roughly about 40 grand for the year. Fantastic side hustle does not make a business of employees. So how do I hire writers? How do I get people through the door that hasn't been a particular challenge? Everybody wants to be valued. [00:42:51] Yes, myself included the audience for WordPress news is very, very small. Very difficult to get a balanced approach from that. Like how do you pay somebody really well for a piece that's going to get very few eyeballs so that when a sponsor looks at it, they go, boy, I don't get much recognition from this because it's very a small piece. [00:43:13] Views. It's been a challenge. I don't expect you to have an answer or [00:43:17] really to [00:43:18] Kim: I'm wondering [00:43:19] If instead of looking for writers, you should be looking for bad people who have opinions, who could write words on paper and get a good editor [00:43:29] I think to find a writer that also has a viewpoint and an opinion, and has been in this business long enough to write credibly about something is different than, myself expanding on the conversation we had about diversity in written form. [00:43:47] And you just knowing that you had someone to take a pass over it and make it. Readable proper SEO friendly, if that is important to you and distilled down into part of your things. So I wonder if it's a, maybe it's that you're, you're maybe attracting people who want to write and are looking for a byline more so than an, an opinionated journalist, [00:44:11] Matt: Yeah. [00:44:13] Kim: I think you, you will find those people. , but you know, the news should be, you, you can't stop me from publishing. You can't stop me from saying. And that's the energy that you were probably looking for and, what are we six months in, on, on this? [00:44:28] So not, we, I mean, I'm, I'm saying that I'm part of it because I'm here today, but I'm no part of this at all, other than a listener. So Yeah. [00:44:35] I think it it's just time. There are other places in WordPress that are publishing people's stories for free for them and not giving them any contribution for it. [00:44:44] So, it's just finding the right people that have the opinion and the passion, [00:44:50] Matt: All right, Kim, that was a fantastic conversation. I really appreciate you coming on to to interview me and talk about the WordPress news. Get some of your own feelings out there. Get some of your own thoughts around WordPress news. Where can folks go to say thanks. [00:45:05] Kim: Sure. On Twitter Coleman, K 83, you can also reach out to me through paid memberships, pro.com. It's an open source WordPress membership plugin for content restrictions. I'm in charging a recurring subscription for access. [00:45:22] Matt: Everyone else. It's a WP minute. You can support the WP minutes. If you'd like by going to a non WordPress website, buy me a coffee.com/matt report to buy me a coffee.com/matt report and subscribe there for $79 for the year. You get access to the discord. Get connected to the community. Get your hand in the weekly WordPress news every week. [00:45:50] If you want to contribute content reach out to me, DME, or use the contact form on the WP minute.com. If you want to be a contributor, I have two. Putting some minimum requirements to be a contributor. If you want to be a contributor, this is what it looks like. You can read the weekly script which is the podcast five minutes script. [00:46:11] We prepare the script for you. You simply read it and then you get a little call to action for yourself, promote your stuff. That's cool. You can contribute a one minute audio clip, which goes into that weekly news every Wednesday. If you have a bigger topic and you're like, Hey, man, I want to talk about something longer. [00:46:28] I give you five to 10 minutes on the podcast. Pitch me your idea, and you can record your five to 10 minute monologue about whatever. I have examples. If you want to listen to them, you can contribute that as well. Or you can write. If you just want to write, you can do that reach out to me and you can become a free contributor to the discord community. [00:46:48] I don't want to just open it up for everybody. Everybody's like, well, why don't you just open up now, if I just open it up to everybody, then it's just trolling and people hanging out and nothing happening. Like we want people committed to the news. There's 50 of us in there now just about so if you want to contribute, reach out and let me know the WP minute.com. [00:47:06] Thanks for listening. We'll see you in the next episode.

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WP Minute Producer and SEO correspondent, John Locke of Lockdown Design discusses Google Search and what is important for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). John is a member of the WPMinute community and participates regularly in WordPress and SEO. He has helped customers with their website workflow, boost their sales, and rank higher in Google. John’s channel on YouTube has so much information on SEO, Marketing and Web Design. It is worth checking out.

In 2008 Google first published its blueprint for SEO success and it was that brands were the solution. In order to retain market share for the future, Google needed to have trusted brands on their side forever. John covers the “unspoken” part about brands in this episode. To maximize the content on your website for SEO you need to think about scalable ways in which Google measures your brand characteristics.

One of Google’s important measurements appears to be that large brands will sometimes rank with secondary content. How does duplicate content appear under that brand and not yours? Well, Google ranks duplicate content with the most authoritative site (big brand).

Google looks for characteristics of big brands. Large brands work across several channels and social profiles. They often have the budget for a site that is designed for optimization. They have the staff to do that work and often post on job boards when they need additional staff. When customers find these larger brands on social sites it triggers that they are happy.

So what do you do as a small brand to improve your rankings? You need to act like a big brand. Work across social channels so that you become recognized as a prominent brand. In order for you to rank in the 2020s, you need the right content for your target keywords and keep appearing as large as a brand as possible so that the signals are picked up by Google search. Work with an expert to review your site design to help move you up in the rankings.

If you enjoyed today’s episode, please share it on social media.

Consider becoming a WP Minute member too! Join our annual membership including access to the Discord server, getting Producer rights to this very news channel and take part in the the #linksquad. We’re nearly 50 strong, so why not join us? Grab your membership at buymeacoffee.com/mattreport.This episode helps uncover what is going on behind the scenes with Google’s brand search. Don’t forget to say hi to John on the WP Minute Discord server or on Twitter.

Episode transcript Back in 2008 in one simple statement, Google gave out the blueprint for SEO success and revealed what their long-term goals were for the ranking. On that note worthy day, then CEO, Eric Schmidt stood in front of a room of media advertisers and said, brands are the solution. Not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.

Schmidt was referring to the dilemma of algorithmically sorting through trillions of webpages and delivering the best search results. So Google could retain market share through the foreseeable future. His analogy was having prestigious and trusted brands on one side and everyone else. On the other side, he went on to say that brands are an important signal that a website’s content could be trusted.

Every tweak to the algorithm since then has had this mission statement in mind to maximize the SEO of content on your website. You should think about scalable ways in which Google might measure the characteristics of a brand. Let’s look at one example of how Google favors large brands in the present day in a 2021, Google hangout, Google representative, John Mueller was.

How Google determines the original author of a piece of content in a question regarding duplicate content Mueller’s answer is that Google will sometimes rank a piece of copied content from a secondary source, not the original source material. He said that sometimes it makes sense to show meaning rank that content instead of the original, because.

Does not only measure quality by the text on the page. He also said that Google looks at design and presentation of information as factors. One unspoken part of this is that in reality, when other factors are equal, Google usually ranks duplicate content from the most authoritative site, meaning that site has the strongest link pro.

This is the page that will almost always win the rankings in a case of word for word, duplicate content, big brands that are authoritative tend to have very robust link profiles and are linked from sites from within their industry. The characteristics of a large and trustworthy brand aren’t limited to links alone.

When I first considered how far reaching the statement about brands was I was watching a presentation by Wil Reynolds of sear interactive. He was talking about a concept called real company stuff or RCS. Now, what does this mean? Google evaluates, whether a brand is large or a small mom and pop shop by looking at many different types of external and internal factors.

Real companies we’ll do real company stuff. If a company exhibits characteristics of a global or national brand, then it looks like a quote real company, unquote to Google. What are characteristics of large brands that can be measured easily by Google? Well for one, a large brand looks to do customer acquisition in a variety of channels.

They don’t want to pass up any opportunities to raise brand awareness and acquire new customers. And to do that, they’re going to have to be on all of the top social platforms, brick and mortar businesses. We’ll have a Facebook page in most cases, but many don’t have all of the major social profile. Real companies have a LinkedIn company, page, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, because these are platforms where many of their potential customers hang out and a small brand will not bother with these because they have enough leads already.

A large brand is also looking to hire new people all the time. They may have a careers page on. And have a job listings on all the major job platforms because they are growing and replacing outgoing employees. Smaller brands do not hire new employees very often, and they have no presence on job boards.

Now, global rants also use content publishing on their website to market, to potential customers. See the top middle and the bottom of the.

When customers find these webpages, they send measurable signals that they’re happy with what they’re reading or consuming and small mom and pop shops do not have these marketing systems in place. Large brands need to be constantly attracting new customers and moving them down. A marketing and sales funnel.

And despite what anybody tells you, getting links from industry sites and maintaining a steady link. Velocity is also a sign of large brand global brands have earned thousands. If not millions of links to their website, through their content and brand awareness. This is a sign for Google’s algorithm that it should trust.

Brand’s at Google trusts have links that are a short distance from what are known as seed sites. And these are old and or highly authoritative sites that have established their credibility. These sites have astronomical authority and getting a link from them or from a site that they link to is a hallmark characteristic of a prominent.

Now more recently, Google seems to favor websites that have good design, and I’m not necessarily talking about information architecture though. That helps too, but simply good aesthetically pleasing design. Google seems to have a means of measuring user satisfaction with the. And you can, Conject conjecture about what that might be, but the results are pretty obvious.

If you watch the search results over a long enough timeline, you will notice it that over time sites that have superior design will rise in rankings. When all other factors are comparable, the signals that are the hardest to fake, like user satisfaction. Brand mentions link profiles and specifically links from prominent sites within your industry that have integrity are going to be the best signals for determining the influence of a given brand, because they must be earned.

And at the end of the day, Google must make a choice between trusting your website and hundreds of. For any given search query and it will usually choose the sites that exhibit characteristics of large brands in conclusion, in the 2020s, SEO comes down to the right content for your target keywords, having those on the page, the right content and appearing to be as large of a brand.

I was possible.

Photo by Maarten van den Heuvel on Unsplash

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Was Gravatar hacked or not? It depends on what you have read or what your definition of “hacked” is I suppose. The password breach monitoring service HaveIBeenPwned alerted users to a large-scale data leak by Gravatar, an add-on service for user profiles owned by Automattic.

In October 2020, a security researcher published a technique for scraping large volumes of data from Gravatar, the service for providing “globally unique avatars," HaveIBeenPwned warned. This technique allowed the details of just under 114 million users to get into hackers' hands.

Sarah Gooding over at WPTavern wrote that Automattic said they were not hacked. The Gravatar service gives you control over what you want to share online through their API. So this information can be made public and somebody can scrape that data and use it nefariously.

Jeff Chandler pointed out that this has been an issue since 2009 and shared the information from developer.it. Security researchers and privacy advocates have warned about privacy attacks on Gravatar for years.

Gravatar did not send out notices about the breach and left it to the user to accept the risk or use something other than Gravatar.

WordPress updates

There is a new directory for FSE block themes. Over on make.WordPress.org during the run-up to the release of 5.9 developers should note that the directory names for templates and template parts are being changed. With the release of 5.9 these will instead be:

templates

parts

It's pretty straightforward.

Events

Ellen Bauer will be sharing a twitter space with Justin Mahinyala discussing #Freelance opportunities for developers, designers, writers, and marketers in the #WordPress ecosystem. They will share advice and tips on how to get started. DM any questions you want them to talk about.

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Our inaugural Member Sunday Spotlight is here and we’re honored to highlight Daniel Schutzsmith.

A thrice WordCamp organizer, now carving out a niche for WordPress livestreams with his latest project, WP Livestreams. With a passion for livestreams throughout the pandemic, Daniel stumbled into a real need for livestream creators and viewers.

With so much great WordPress content being streamed, he hopes to make his website the go-to destination for the community to find new content across YouTube, Twitch, Twitter spaces and whatever technologies come next. Quite a natural direction for someone who thought he’d hang his hat on radio broadcast before getting into programming.

It was a real treat to listen to this interview lead by former WP Minute Managing Editor, Paul Lacey. Don’t forget to say hi to Daniel in the WP Minute Discord server or on Twitter.

If you enjoyed today’s episode, please share it on social media.

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This episode is brought to you by Mindsize. If you’re looking for monthly WooCommerce support, look no further than Mindsize.com

You know how it goes, everything I mention here will be linked up in the newsletter and the blog post. Check out thewpminute.com for the links.

In the News

There was a lot of excitement this week around LTDs (LifeTime Licensing Deals). There were several posted reactions to the email sent from Delicious Brains, the new owners of Advanced Custom Fields. The email was not well-received (to say the least) by some users that have had Lifetime Licensing because it was asking for a part-time donation for the product. Twitter exploded with reactions and many in the WordPress community responded as well.

We covered this on the WPMinute and Sarah Gooding also wrote about both perspectives — positive and negative — in her article over on the WPTavern.

The bottom line is that the lifetime licenses are tough, and very few still remain in the WordPress space. ACF (read: Brad) will continue to honor the pricing for legacy customers.

With the recent delay of WordPress 5.9 the team is looking for testers for Beta 1. Angela Jin posted the link for the helpful testing guide. Feel free to participate and let them know how you “broke” it. Testing is very important for a successful release.

A JSON Schema for theme.json and one for block.json are now available to help with building block-based themes. The schema can be used by code editors to provide things like tooltips, autocomplete, and validation while editing theme.json or block.json.

The WP Live Streams Directory pick of the week

“Building Modern WordPress Plugins With Plugin Machine (Part 2)*” presented by Josh Pollock, formerly of WPCaldera, on December 7th at 11pm UTC / 6pm EST / 3pm PST. In Part 1 of his talk, Josh laid the foundation of the mess that modern tooling has become for plugin development.

In Part 2, Josh will show us a demo of Plugin Machine, a new app he’s building that helps developers create plugins and add features to them easily. You can catch this by registering for the Pittsburgh WordPress Developers and Designers meetup.

Other News From Our Contributors

Shopify Engineering announced that they had their biggest Black Friday Cyber Monday ever in 2021. They were proud of the uptime and traffic across the infrastructure along with their partner Google Cloud.

Liam Dempsey shared this post by Andy Stitt thanking WordPress for helping him find Digital Accessibility. This is a great article of how WordPress helped Andy advance and allow him to concentrate on accessibility now.

Giving Tuesday

And now, I’d like to introduce you to Mary Job, who’s leading the Uwani Hub building project. If you feel compelled to support their efforts, consider clicking on the link to donate.

Quote/Transcript for show notes:

Thank you Matt for the opportunity to speak briefly about the Uwani Hub Building Project on the WP Minute Podcast.

I started this building project this year so that we would have a better chance of achieving our vision 2030 WordPress goals, we currently have 9 workstations in our current space, we need at least 30 of those which is what the building allows us the opportunity to have. We are giving ourselves a 10 year, now 9-year timeframe because we do not want to stretch our volunteers too thin, and because this is not just about numbers, but making an actual impact on each individual we teach WordPress program.

As you may well have heard in the News, my country Nigeria is lacking in lots of basic infrastructures, we can’t boast of consistent electricity, by choosing to do WordPress in our community, we are looking at impacting our participants not only with a tool useful for their personal empowerment but also one they could export career-wise without necessarily leaving our country shores. For us at the hub, those 5000 people would not just be a number, but people with faces we are going to build the WordPress community with, together.

WordPress is central to this cause because it is one tool that I have come to know so well enough to teach to others, and more importantly because the future of WordPress lies in the hands of the coming generation (our current & future teenagers). If we can make them see what we all see when asked “Why WordPress?”, then we would be leaving a mark, not just today, but also tomorrow.

Folks can go to support us at Uwani.org or on our Open Collective page, we sincerely hope our programs get well underway from the year 2022 if we can finish the building before the end of January 2022.

Continuing our Giving Tuesday coverage with a note from Dan Maby on his success with his campaign yesterday at the Big Orange Heart.

Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:

Birget Pauli-Haack
Daniel Schutzsmith
Liam Dempsey
Nigel Bahadur

Thanks to the new Contributing Members that joined this week:

Mary Job
Ellen Bauer
Sam Munoz
Hauwa Abashiya

Thanks to supporting members

Joe Casabona who bought me 3 coffees saying “Thanks for everything you do in the WordPress space!”

Speaking of coffee, you can buy Me a coffee to support the show or join as a member for $79 for the year to get access to the private Discord server. Become part of our merry band of WordPress newsies and get involved in the weekly WordPress news like everyone I mentioned above.

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It seems a year can’t go by without the pesky lifetime WordPress license topic popping up to spice up the holiday conversation.

A struggle dating back 7 years ago to the month when Jeff Chandler covered, now defunct, Sidekick.pro where then owner Ben Fox shared his pricing experiments.

When Brad Touesnard purchased Advanced Custom Fields back in June, he was swiftly reminded how hard lifetime license pricing really is. I mean, he did his due diligence, he knew what he was getting into. But the lifetime license woes lingered well before the new owners arrived. Elliot Condon wrestled with it, “get it all for one price forever” that is, until he finally revised pricing for 2020 to build the business a better runway.

Lifetime license holders will get all ACF Pro software updates forever. They won’t be required to pay for version 6.0 or any other major or minor releases in the future. They signed up for updates for life, so we’ll continue to deliver on that promise forever. 8/10

— Brad Touesnard (@bradt) June 3, 2021

On Delicious Brains acquiring Advanced Custom Fields Amidst a fumbled start, Brad, did bless all lifetime license holders with access — forever. It’s on Twitter, so it’s permanent in my book.

This isn’t the first pricing rodeo for Brad and company.

When asked about lessons learned with pricing in a 2018 interview with Joe Howard on the WPMRR podcast, Brad had this to say:

“I think the biggest thing that people don’t do is experiment with their pricing.

When I launched Migrate DB Pro, I think the developer license was, $99 per year.

In December of that year, I doubled the pricing. Which would have been totally uncontroversial, except that I changed all the prices for the existing customers as well. I didn’t grandfather it.

And there was definitely quite a bit of blowback. I’d regret doing it because I feel like at that point, it wouldn’t have hurt us to like grandfather those people in but I don’t believe really in grandfathering people in forever.

That’s the same aversion I have to like unlimited things and “lifetime this and that.”

Brad Touesnard

Pricing is challenging, no doubt, and lot has already been said about lifetime licenses.

Should you offer them as a product owner? Clearly the data (and the community) is pointing to a firm “no” at this point. Should the customer expect that a lifetime license actually means a lifetime of free…everything? Read Chris Lema’s take, On Lifetime Licenses.

WordPress, the only billion dollar software industry that has us begging for money Paul Charlton of WPTuts posted a reaction video to a recent e-mail sent from Delicious Brains, the new owners of Advanced Custom Fields. In the video, Paul shares his frustration with the ask of lifetime license holders to “pitch in” to keep the development of the popular plugin alive.

Paul was one of the first in line to question what would happen to lifetime license holders when Delicious Brains acquired ACF back in June.

From the current events: Agency Principal, Alex J Vasquez doesn’t seem to have an issue with the ask, stating “ Could this have been said differently? Sure, a better crafted msg would go a long way but I have zero issues with the ask.”

Could this have been said differently? Sure, a better crafted msg would go a long way but I have zero issues with the ask.

— Vah–skezz (@alexjvasquez) November 27, 2021

Where for folks like Charlton, it “sticks in his throat” that customers are almost feeling guilted into supporting the product. Charlton has no problem if users want to support their favorite software, but is not entirely thrilled when a brand requests it.

When the dust settles After reaching out to Paul for a post-publishing lay of the land, he responded:

~~“My biggest takeaway is the complete silence from them to be honest. They’ve been tagged in many replies and spin off comments and nothing at all has come back from them.~~

~~As for learning anything new, it’s pretty much radio silence across the board. Just speculation and frustration from most commenters.”~~

UPDATE: An updated quote from Paul after the recent ACF tweet

It’s good to hear Delicious Brains are going to honour the LTD, but maybe it would be a good idea to run future emails through a competent PR company first to avoid confusion.

The ACF Twitter account tweeted:

“Lifetime license customers: We are still firmly committed to honoring lifetime licenses and all future emails. We will reaffirm this commitment. So there is no confusion. Signed, Brad Touesnard.”

When I asked Brad for a comment, that was the tweet he shared and pointed to his previous thread, posted back in June.

Some of our WP Minute Producers have expressed their thoughts in our Discord server:

“Well, Brad is in a tough spot here—there are a ton of these “lifetime deals” with ACF that he inherited and their something of a liability from a business perspective.”

Dave Rodenbaugh

“Brad should save himself a lot of LTD headache in the long term and just stop supporting them.”

Joe Casabona

“I think it would be very bad form for Delicious Brains to abandon lifetime license holders without some kind of very sweet yearly deal (maybe like 75% off for the first three years.)”

Liam Dempsey

“I think it’s great that they still /are/ honoring the lifetime deals, they’re just asking if anybody would like to offer additional support, so I think they’re toeing the line the best they can.”

Keanan Koppenhaver

Arpad Szucs, A WPTuts viewer, suggests the following:

“they should have suggest one-off donations instead of recurring payments, with a marketing copy something like:

“Thank you for being an early adopter! As an LTD license holder you will NEVER need to pay again for ACF PRO, however if you’d like to continue supporting us, buy us a coffee. We would really appreciate it (you know developers run on coffee right?). ”

The challenge ahead for all of us To be clear, Delicious Brains — the company — is a few orders of magnitude larger than a single Elliot Condon, who founded the ACF plugin.

Does a company that spans across five very popular products require a donation approach, to keep a product like A CF, afloat?

If so, we better start getting better at pricing and voting with our dollars.

Reading into the email sent over one of the largest holiday sales of the year: Maybe this was all just bad marketing copy gone wrong.

We know lifetime deals are (mostly) bad for product owners. It rarely spells “sustainable” for most. As consumers, we want what we were paid for and for brands to honor their promises.

Imagine if coca-cola asked you to donate to them “just cuz you like it.” Or if Comcast came knocked on your door with a tin cup in hand saying, “don’t ya just love the internet?”

I say this with half my foot in my mouth seeing as I run a content site that relies, partly, on donations. But hey, if only I could start a business with SaaS-like margins…we’d be in a different boat.

Maybe selling some merchandise or premium support would have been a better route.

Either way, expecting lifetime updates for one price coupled with a part-time donation strategy, is bad for both the consumer and the business. I don’t see any other major markets operating this way, but if you know of one, please let me know.

In the end, WordPress might be the only multi-billion dollar industry that plays the tune of a poor freelancer, the supporting donor, and pioneering capitalist all at the same time.

Unfortunately, only one can prevail.

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Gobble gobble!

WordPress 5.9 will not be released until the beginning of 2022. There were some major blockers identified with the Beta Release and the team thought it best to delay the release instead of pushing through the holidays. Beta 1 was originally scheduled to release last week. Now the overall schedule will be updated to reflect the new date, January 25, 2022 (edit: We said 22nd in the podcast, but have revised it here.)

This will give contributors more time to collaborate further on the release. There is a new video posted on Facebook that covers responsive editing and customization for 5.9. Check this out to see all the new features that are coming.

Justin Sainton shared how he got the new brand for pagely.com launched with full site editing in WordPress. This article shares how the project was started in January of 2021 but was quickly finished in 8 weeks for the merger and acquisition with GoDaddy. Justin covers some of the pain points of Full Site Editing in Gutenberg that you should be aware of in case you decide to follow this accelerated timeline yourself.

Events

As I mentioned last week the State of the Word will be live-streamed from New York City. That means that you can join the fun either online or in person, on December 14, 2021, between 5 and 7 pm EST! You can join with your local Meetup for a watch party and now you can participate in person in New York City by filling out the registration by Sunday, November 28, but be aware that not all requests will receive a seat due to the venue capacity – set at 50.

Sabrina Zierden shared the first plans for the largest venue for WordCamp Europe 2022. To work on the plans, they have reopened the Call for Organizers again. It looks very exciting to have live conferences scheduled in 2022. That video looks pretty amazing as an in-person venue.

Security

We should maybe be getting used to seeing Security breaches happen but when it does, it is still so disturbing. This time in a disclosure to the Securities and Exchange Commission, GoDaddy revealed that they had been hacked. This was not the first time the company was compromised. GoDaddy stated that it has discovered that an “unauthorized third party” had accessed a managed WordPress hosting environment. Up to 1.2 million users were compromised. According to this document, GoDaddy believes that the first breach occurred around September 6, 2021, and investigations are currently underway. Go change all your WordPress passwords if you have accounts with GoDaddy.

From Our Contributors and Producers Block Building

Do you want to create your own custom block? The Wicked Block Builder is in the WordPress plugin directory. There’s no setup required and you can build blocks in as little as a few minutes. The block builder is still in beta so please make sure you have a backup in place before you give this plugin a try.

The Automattic Theme team has been working on a plugin to help you create a Blockbased child theme. You can use the existing tools to make changes to a Blockbase theme, and then export a bundle of templates and theme.json as a new child theme. Once the theme has been created then unzipped to your WordPress site, you can modify it further. It is a cool tool to go check out.

In the continued discussion around custom blocks, Matt Watson wrote a nice in-depth article about creating Gutenberg blocks over on the WPOwls. The challenge was to build a typical “Owl-Link” Gutenberg “Block” using JavaScript and React style syntax. Matt does a great job of reviewing how to build and apply a block pattern in Gutenberg.

If you are not interested in learning blocks at all, you can check out Webflow’s approach to creating Websites with no code.

BobWP shared that this will be year 11 for him in the WordPress space. His post reflects on people leaving WordPress recently and how the community has been important to him over the years.

The PHP foundation has been created as an open collective to help maintain the knowledge that has been developed over its 26-year history. The language has been actively developed by a huge number of people and in order to have this stick around for another evolution, the foundation has been established. Many companies have joined forces to keep PHP alive, including Automattic.

Mind and Body Minute

As we are all busy around the holidays while trying not to eat all the pies so…enjoy the clip submitted by Michelle Schulp!

It is a great reminder to take care of yourself, set realistic wellness goals, and approach the season with mindfulness.

Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:

Birget Pauli-Haack
Dave Rodenbaugh
Daniel Schutzsmith
Bob Dunn
Jeff Chandler
Vinny McKee
Maciek Palmowski

New Members:We would like to welcome Vinny from Wicked Plugins and Patrick Garman from Mindsize. They were quick to contribute this week in the news, and we appreciate it!

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The WP Minute WooCommerce merchants estimated to process more than $840 Million dollars over BFCM deals

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Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 00:07:27 | Recorded on November 22, 2021

Today’s episode is hosted by Dave Rodenbaugh of Recapture.io.

WooCommerce is the sleeping giant in the ecommerce world. Dave illustrates an estimated $840 Million dollars to be processed by WooCommerce merchants through the Black Friday & Cyber Monday deals alone.

Wrestling with the sheer gravity of the space? Looking for an opportunity? Look no further than WordPress + WooCommerce + the ecommerce minute!

If you enjoyed today’s episode please share it on social media and consider supporting content like this by joining our annual membership.

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The WP Minute PageDaddy

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Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 00:06:51 | Recorded on November 17, 2021

The BIG news this week is that Pagely joined GoDaddy. Pagely, a large managed WordPress host owned by the Strebels, joined with GoDaddy to help grow and cover a larger segment of the market. Josh Strebel writes that his successful company always took the uncompromising position that employees and customers come first. This acquisition will allow GoDaddy to become more like Pagely. The annual Pressnomics conference will continue as well…but may look a little different moving forward.

Congratulations Josh, Sally, team and GoDaddy!

Liquid Web has acquired Modern Tribe to complement its family of WordPress businesses. Modern Tribe will operate as an independent group and act as an innovation team serving the Liquid Web Family of Brands. The Events Calendar, also a Modern Tribe product, was acquired by Liquid Web in 2020. Both teams are excited to be under the same roof again, this time as standalone teams, but coworkers again.

Over on make.wordpress.org, there was an announcement of the core committers for 2021. Two major releases have been released and a final one is underway. There were several new people added who are actively reviewing and merging contributions. They have helped the project move forward with great speed. A big thanks goes out to all the committers this year.

Pagebuilder and other Block Builder News

Elementor launched a new big production campaign highlighting “web creators”. This looks to be a commercial on par with Webflow or Squarespace. Is this their first step towards autonomy from #WordPress?

Kadence Conversions 1.0, announced the release of a robust plugin to give site builders a no-code interface to create lightweight and performant popups, modals, slide-ins, and banners. Kadence Conversions is the only no-code option that leverages the native WordPress block editor in order to create attention-grabbing appeals and offers that convert.

Events

The State of the Word was announced for this year. It will be live streamed December 14th beginning at 10:00 a.m. EST. Since 2020, the state of the Word has been online and will be live streamed this year from New York City. Join Matt as he provides a retrospective of 2021, discusses the latest trends he’s seeing, celebrates the community’s amazing wins, and explores the future. You can expect to hear about a range of topics, from WordPress 5.9 and Openverse to Web3 and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

Also, you can participate in the annual WordPress survey. The 2021 WordPress survey helps those who build WordPress understand more about how the software is used, and by whom. This survey helps leaders in the WordPress open source project learn more about contributors’ experiences. Jump over to make.wordpress.org to get your experience counted.

WooCommerce Engineering Highlight

Would you like to know how WooCommerce Blocks render interactive blocks in the frontend? As Gutenberg is starting to experiment with rendering interactive blocks on the front end (ex: using React) they have shown how this is currently being done. This documented approach is not the only way of doing it, and it will probably evolve once APIs with the same purpose are added upstream to Gutenberg. However, it’s a system that proved to be solid and is giving good results in real life stores.

From Our Contributors and Producers

Jason Bahl was recently discussing Gutenberg on the Decode podcast over on WPEngine. Jason shares the challenges of the Gutenberg block editor in the WordPress Headless environment. Check out this discussion for the current challenges and progress of Gutenberg blocks.

Birget Pauli-Haack shared an article explaining Theme.json for WordPress Block Themes. If you have been dragging your feet on understanding how themes will be built for WordPress, this article is worth the time reading to understand the structure of the three main parts of the theme.json file.

Jason Coleman shared his 2020 Transparency report in his recent Business Update over on his site. This report took a while to publish, but he launched his own membership frontend login and profile pages for Paid Memberships Pro. People had often asked for or just expected this out of a membership plugin. Now this is available instead of the WordPress plugin that he recommended in the past. It’s an interesting read, especially learning how a plugin company survived through COVID.

and I will quote this line:

At year end our revenue was up 50% from $800k in 2019 to $1.2m in 2020.

There were a lot of people starting membership sites through COVID.

Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:

Birget Pauli-Haack
Daniel Schutzsmith
Kathy Zant
Davinder Singh Kainth
Matt Medeiros

New Members:We would like to welcome our new members this week Adam Warner and Dave Rodenbaugh. We are looking forward to their participation in the weekly news!

You can buy Me a coffee to support the show or join as a member for $79 for the year to get access to the private Discord server.

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