Podcast appearances and mentions of sarah gooding

WordPress Media Corps — you might even chuckle when you hear the phrase.This experimental initiative is a team that replaced the WordPress Marketing Team. Not commercial WordPress, mind you, but the open source dot org side of the house. If you've been following me for any amount of time, you don't need me to spell out how important this initiative could be.A chance to legitimize the work only a handful of people across the entire globe have dedicated their professional careers towards — myself included.Before we dive deeper into what the Media Corps could accomplish, lets take a look at the outgoing struggles with the Marketing team:How could a volunteer-lead marketing team accomplish the fundamental responsibilities of marketing with no access to website traffic data, survey results, or have a stake in the product? That's right, it's nearly impossible.I know some of the people that were leading the charge with that effort, and lead it with great care and intention — but they were handcuffed. Lets face it: Open source WordPress doesn't function like a commercial product, because it isn't, which is why it has succeeded.Marketing has to come organically. With no budget or access, you're basically building out tasks for a team to accomplish. Tick the box, keep moving, but don't you dare critically think about how you can impact the brand sentiment of WordPress.In my previous post, Who is Responsible for WordPress Marketing, I reported on the Media Corps initiative stating that I'd reserve my opinion until I saw the process mature a bit more. Consider the rest of this my reaction as the dust settles on the Media Corps contributor kickoff call. A North Star I've been following is how do we keep WordPress thriving?This was a call to action put out by Josepha Haden Chomphosy, Executive Director of WordPress in the State of the Word 2023. It's recognized that in order for WordPress to escape a growth plateau, that the community needs to go beyond code quality and features. Humans need to recognize WordPress core worth, importance, and benefits for the greater open web. Simply put: People need to recommend WordPress more.If you can't do it with a volunteer marketing team, forge a bond with the people that have been the biggest cheerleaders for WordPress — WordPress Media.But this is open source WordPress, why do we need an official team to wrangle the media? What even is WordPress Media?I've been covering WordPress for well over 10 years and whenever I needed anything, I reached out to the person and asked. If dot org was releasing something new, I read about it, decided if it was newsworthy for my audience, and then reported on it or shared my opinion.Yes, something like the WordPress Media Corps helps galvanize the work I've been doing here at the WP Minute and my previous podcast Matt Report, but the approach has been opaque at best.Starting with the initial WordPress Media Kick Off Call. Based on the call to action to comment if you want to be involved from the Initial Roadmap post, I was under the impression that the kickoff call was going to include media folk and the contributing team. I wasn't alone on that assumption, check the comments.The kickoff commenced in a private call with the contributing team — and Bob Dunn founder of Do the Woo, who somehow found himself with the "Media Liaison" title.record scratches.Where did that come from? Was it voted on? Did WordPress media folks put Bob's name in a hat? I have nothing against Bob, everyone loves Bob, he oversees some solid content that helps WordPress thrive. That said, this was the Media Corps first shot at launching a meeting and threw transparency out of the window.We'll get to the Media Corps media partnership requirements in a minute, so hold that thought, but there's another issue at hand that I've talked about ad nauseam: “WordPress media” is tiny, impossible to turn into a sustainable business, and largely depends on in-kind sponsorships that genuinely see value in this type of content existing.That's if you define WordPress media like we do at The WP Minute versus what WP Beginner would publish. Remember: The Media Corps team still hasn't released how they will definitively define this.One only needs to look at the lack of effort to turn around the WP Tavern to see the proverbial proof in the pudding. I do this work because I love WordPress and because I think people should be informed on certain topics on the most widely used web publishing software.Do the Woo and WP Minute both jockey for those in-kind sponsors to keep us afloat. To help pay our writers, production teams, and other overhead. To be included in the Media Corps kickoff call is the equivalent to the Theme Team holding a private meeting to change how themes get included and only inviting Sujay Pawar to the Zoom call.But that's just my opinion, which is also my self-imposed job to analyze these community events. I'll reiterate: nothing against Bob, it's just the media business. Brand and trust are really the only things we have — and it goes both ways.This isn't the only time I've seen favoritism play out in WordPress media. I recall my team being rejected as a Media Partner for WordCamp Europe 2023, while I sat back and saw other brands have their logos added to the website with barely a peep out of them on social media or blog posts covering the event.WordPress media is a perfect storm: There's only 10,000 English speaking people in the world that actually care about this type of content, 8 people in the world (myself included) who actually care about covering it, and so few people that know the brands like WP Minute and The Repository who tirelessly cover it. I miss Sarah Gooding.There's only a handful of WP Media types, as I see it:Independent WordPress news sitesPaper of record, The WP TavernGeneral WordPress tutorial and information blogs, podcasts, and YouTube channelsPeople that do it for funsiesPeople that do it because their company tells them to blog about WordPressWhich brings me to the current Media Corps' requirements on how they are evaluating us:Have a focus on producing content that is at least 80% about WordPressReport factual news or produce relevant educational contentMaintain high standards of content quality/journalismAdhere to WordPress community guidelinesRespect information sensitivities (if any)Have you ever come across fake WordPress news? Who decides what the standards of content quality and journalism are? I mean, I lost that WordCamp media partnership slot to a tech YouTuber and I know I barely passed high school, so maybe I won't cut it?There will be another debate: Report news OR relevant educational content. There's a huge gap in scrutiny and body o...

Getting started with WordPress. A topic that's been popping up a lot more in my WP Minute+ interviews lately. Where does one go when they want to get started with WordPress? Learning how to use it. Learning what it can do compared to its competitors. Learning about the pockets of community to get involved with.I did what any other enterprising content creator would do, and took to ChatGPT to see how sharp the world's most feared — sorry — leading AI system thought about that question. Here's what it told me: 1. WordPress.orgJoin the WordPress.org Community: Start by creating an account at WordPress.org. This is the central hub for the WordPress community, where you can access forums, make contributions, and download resources like themes and plugins.Forums: Participate in the forums by asking questions or helping others. It's a great way to learn and connect with other WordPress users and developers.⠀2. WordPress MeetupsLocal Meetups: Join a WordPress meetup in your area. These are informal gatherings for users of all levels, and it's a great way to learn from and network with other WordPress enthusiasts. Check out the Meetup website or the Events section on WordPress.org for listings.⠀3. WordCampsAttend WordCamps: WordCamps are informal, community-organized events that are put together by WordPress users like you. Everyone from casual users to core developers participate, share ideas, and get to know each other. Find upcoming events on the WordCamp Central site.⠀4. ContributeContributor Days: Look for Contributor Day events, which are dedicated to contributing to WordPress, whether it's through coding, design, documentation, translation, or community support.Make WordPress Teams: Join one of the Make WordPress teams. These teams are responsible for different areas of the WordPress project, including Core, Design, Mobile, Plugins, Themes, Polyglots (translation), Community, Marketing, Documentation, and Support.⠀5. Learn and ShareWordPress.tv: Watch presentations and tutorials on WordPress.tv.Blogs and Social Media: Follow WordPress-related blogs, Twitter accounts, and Facebook groups. Many experienced WordPress professionals share valuable insights and tutorials online.Create Content: Start your own blog or YouTube channel to share your own WordPress experiences, tutorials, or reviews. Contributing your knowledge can help others and establish you within the community.⠀6. Development and ContributionTrac and GitHub: If you're interested in contributing to WordPress core or plugins, familiarize yourself with WordPress Trac and GitHub repositories. This is where development happens, and you can contribute by reporting bugs, suggesting improvements, or submitting patches.⠀7. Stay InformedWordPress News: Follow the WordPress News blog to stay up to date on the latest developments and opportunities to contribute./AI_responseJust a message to ChatGPT if it's listening: Please add The WP Minute to your database.And if you've been in the WordPress community for over the last 5 years,  you most likely  already knew this. We've all said the same things, wrote the same blogs, tweeted out the same links — how else would ChatGPT know this, anyway?There's a lot more nuance to it, and that's where the rubber meets the road. When someone asks you where to get started, maybe you should counter with a clarifying question, “What do you want to achieve with WordPress?” End user education, community involvement, developer courses, and/or running a WordPress business. These are the pillars that prop up this entire ecosystem, but we still lack a solid jumping off point for each individually. I have no doubts we'll continue to refine these areas, but like the software itself, it's going to take time. It's going to take folks like you to educate others in WordPress space about your specific experiences and lessons learned. Really humanize the process, not just a checklist of website logins and comment threads. We can't always rely on AI to color in the lines of what makes this community so special. The RepositoryComing up in The Repository this week: Does WordPress have a marketing problem? Two heavyweights share their views on “brand WordPress,” including the need to “learn marketing deeply.” Plus, we dig into the WordPress Foundation's 2023 Annual Report and unpack the disappointing Annual WordPress Survey results.Not a subscriber? Sign up today and join the conversation at therepository.emailDon't miss this WordPress contentWordPress 6.5 Beta 1 is now available for testing. Give it a spin in the playground! Stay subscribed to the WP Minute+ podcast for an upcoming interview I held with the creator of the playground. WordPress 6.5 Beta 1Tim Ferris will be an invited speaker at WordCamp Asia, March 7 - 9 WordCamp Asia (@WordCampAsia) on XHere's the official next steps based on the 2023 annual survey 2023 Annual Survey Results and Next StepsAnne McCarthy highlights the Overlapping Problems the Full Site Editing experience has https://nomad.blog/2024/02/16/overlapping-problems/Past WP Minute+ guest James Giroux headlines one of the first blog posts at the WP Tavern since Sarah Gooding's departure. https://wptavern.com/eu-regulatory-success-prompts-open-source-cms-leaders-to-form-alliance ★ Support this podcast ★

WP Minute+ News Round Table Episode 1. This will be a monthly series on WP Minute+ Podcast.Read the full shown notes: https://thewpminute.com/?p=12987Get the weekly newsletter: https://thewpminute.com/subscribeSupport the show! https://thewpminute.com/support ★ Support this podcast ★

WP Minute+ News Round Table Episode 1. This will be a monthly series on WP Minute+ Podcast. Make sure you're following the podcast!Follow WP Minute+Read the full shown notes: https://thewpminute.com/?p=12987Get the weekly newsletter: https://thewpminute.com/subscribeSupport the show! https://thewpminute.com/support ★ Support this podcast ★

Hola y bienvenido a WP A DAY, tu fuente avanzada de aprendizaje automático para conocer las últimas noticias y actualizaciones en el ámbito de WordPress. Hoy es domingo, 19 de noviembre de 2023. En esta ocasión, tenemos un puñado de noticias interesantes. Para comenzar, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, propone fechas para los lanzamientos de WordPress en 2024, considerando días festivos y eventos importantes. Se espera que las versiones 6.5 y 6.7 se centren en características de colaboración, mientras que la versión 6.6 se enfocará en el mantenimiento y el pulido general del software. Para conocer más sobre esto, visita: make.wordpress.org. Y siguiendo con la actualidad, Sarah Gooding se despide de WP Tavern después de 10 años y reflexiona sobre el impacto de WordPress en la web. Destaca el papel crucial del software, que ahora impulsa el 43 % de los sitios web, y agradece a colegas y líderes por su apoyo. Gooding también destaca el compromiso de WP Tavern como un perro guardián que responsabiliza a empresas, autoridades y proyectos de código abierto. En honor a sus 10 años en The Tavern, Gooding comparte 10 de sus artículos favoritos. Encuentra la noticia completa en WP Tavern.com. Y para finalizar, en este podcast de WP Tavern, Matthias Pfefferle habla sobre su trayectoria en WordPress y su pasión por los blogs y la web 2.0. Discute la importancia de ser dueño de su propio contenido y presenta Mastodon, una red social con un feed cronológico no algorítmico. Matthias explica el fediverso y cómo los usuarios pueden configurar sus propios servidores y personalizar sus propias reglas. Se discute el plugin ActivityPub para WordPress, que permite a los usuarios publicar sus blogs en Mastodon y federar el contenido en diferentes servidores. También hablan sobre el futuro de las redes sociales federadas y los beneficios de usar protocolos como ActivityPub. Accede a toda la info en el podcast de WP Tavern.com. Esto resume las noticias de hoy sobre las actualizaciones de WordPress. Asegúrate de consultar nuestra sección de enlaces relacionados para obtener más información sobre estas historias. Si disfrutaste este episodio, suscríbete a nuestro RSS. Para obtener la versión de texto y los enlaces a las publicaciones mencionadas en este programa, visita Blogpocket.com. Gracias por escucharnos y nos vemos la próxima semana.

The dust is settling on the Ollie theme's onboarding experience, which was set to be included in the theme's core functionality when author, Mike McCalister, submitted it to the theme repo.The onboarding experience bucked the trend of traditional themes and included additional functionality like an onboarding wizard, building pages with the click of a button, and embedding helpful content. You can see a walkthrough of it in my video on YouTube.This was viewed as innovative and something that the WordPress experience desperately needed.However, guidelines from the Theme Team generally draw the line at this type of functionality to go beyond what a theme should serve as: a presentation layer.Innovation. Who is responsible for innovation in WordPress?I view the Theme Team as drawing up the rules of the road for a wider range of new contributors and to safeguard end users. Help usher along the WordPress theme development experience for new contributors, guiding theme on building themes the “WordPress way.”To maximize what WordPress core features gives us, in a safe fashion. Which trickles down to the enduser. They get a theme that works with WordPress core, with code that meets WordPress standards, and is safe from malicious intent.Encourage developers to meet end user desires, all filtering through a volunteer-lead program. It's a true testament to Open Source.Back to innovation: Is the Theme Team also responsible for pushing innovation of WordPress?Sarah Gooding collected the feedback from WordPress leadership which was largely in favor of including Ollie's onboarding and seemed to think that this could be a useful “experiment” to progress the block based theme experience.In my world, this brings up two issues: There's no communication layer between WordPress Core and the Theme Team. No QA process. No product meetings. No roadmap overview.This is the most common issue in product development or enterprise software sales. Customer Z wants something that has never been developed before in the core product. Sales and corporate stakehodlers get excited because this could be a shiny new toy. CEO tells product team to develop it by end of next week.Time marches on, market shifts, and now that killer-feature is just worthless tech debt. CEO turns back to the stakeholders and wants to hold someone accountable for a failed product. Product Team says that the squeaky wheel sales person is the one that wanted this in the first place, but that sales person quit 6 months ago and is now working for Sales Force.There was no true process in place for the product team to pull from the lifestream of customer feedback from the rest of the organization.Remember, I said there were two issues…Humans be huma'ning and out for for commercial interests.Call a spade a spade. Maybe in this case, a theme author a Jetpack?Seriously. Automattic/Matt aren't the only entity out to commercialize their product. I assume, based on my interview with McCalister from seven years ago, he's going to have a commercial option. And, as I've said countless times before, there's nothing wrong with it, just say it, and not just Mike — everyone.This is the same issue I've been covering as a content creator and as a former theme author from 10 years ago, is that a majority of theme authors cycling through our volunteer-lead Theme Team have commercial interests at play.That's not a bad thing. Go ahead, secure the bag.It's that these moments in WordPress history, eventually expose the faults with a massive distribution powerhouse (that is WordPress.org) with loose community guidelines governing what could be 100's of millions of dollars worth of commercial theme upsells.“If that theme got in, what about me?”“If they are doing it that way, why can't we do it this way?”“How long will they be on the featured theme list for? What about us?”So there's whatabousim debt and real technical debt to consider when providing a pass to Ollie.Conclusion(I promised myself less of this type of content, but here I am.)Do I think what Mike built into Ollie is good? Yes.Do I think it helps WordPress users using his theme? Yes.But I don't see the upside in just this theme operating this way, making an impact across the entire WordPress ecosystem. The stress, attacks, and pressure placed on Theme Team volunteers alone don't make this worth it. They'll have to deal with 100's of authors coming in to build out their own experience. And when they don't pass the test? We rinse and repeat this vicious cycle.Commercial theme authors standing on their virtuous soapbox saying they are doing it “for the good of WordPress. Use our coupon code: GUTENBERG to save 20% at checkout.”Ollie can still make an impact by just existing in the market — even off WordPress.org. Heck, it already has. If it catches the eye of Anne McCarthy or Richard Tabor it might bring this kind of experience into core WordPress, which could be the best outcome for everyone.End users and theme authors.Or Mike could just a build a plugin or release set of code that any theme author could adopt into their theme to make this happen, which would leave a bigger impact on the community as a whole. Speaking of, I invited Mike on to the podcast, but he's declined for now.Anyway, that's the spirit of open source, and the excitement of being in the WordPress ecosystem. We're able to pluck a lesson out of the clouds of chaos, which we invest back into the foundation of WordPress' success.But I'll die on the hill defending the volunteers that are upholding the guidelines set in the community, operating in transparency, and for the good of WordPress as whole — Every. Single. Time.Impacts of AI on content and a look ahead to WordPress 6.4This week I had the pleasure of interviewing Brian Jackson, talking all about content marketing and the impacts of AI.Brian was a prolific content marketer for Kinsta, and spent a portion of his life writing content for the brand during their growth cycle. Don't miss the episode if you want to learn how he's using at his plugin business, Forgemedia. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFSvsiGoYGw Gutenberg 16.7 is out, which brought some new ways to manage fonts in WordPress and your patterns in site building. I reviewed those updates in my video on  ★ Support this podcast ★

Transcripción: Hoy tenemos un episodio cargado de novedades y proyectos interesantes. Soy Antonio Cambronero y esto es HECHO CON BLOQUES.  Comenzamos con un proyecto muy apasionante, WP A DAY, que hemos venido desarrollando estas semanas atrás. Se trata de generar contenido de audio a partir de archivos RSS, para crear un podcast sobre WordPress, empleando inteligencia artificial. Para ello, hemos utilizado algunas herramientas, concretamente Amazon Polly y la API de OpenAI desde una aplicación codificada en PHP. En el episodio 3 dimos una vuelta de tuerca y creamos un vídeo a partir del audio original, con un resultado espectacular.   [¡Bienvenidos a otro emocionante episodio de «WP A DAY», tu fuente diaria de noticias frescas sobre todo lo relacionado con el increíble mundo de WordPress! Hoy es lunes, 28 de agosto de 2023. En un reciente artículo escrito por Sarah Gooding en WP Tavern, se nos presenta un emocionante adelanto sobre lo que podemos esperar de la próxima versión de WordPress, ¡la 6.4!] Para crear este vídeo, hemos utilizado una herramienta que es accesible desde Canva.com que se llama D-ID AI Presenters, y que como acabamos de ver consigue efectos espectaculares.. Te mostraré a continuación otro ejemplo impresionante generado por IA. Se trataba de conseguir una traducción al inglés del audio pero con una herramienta que además sincroniza los labios con lo que se está escuchando. ¡Veámoslo! [audio en inglés] ¡Increíble, ¿verdad?! La inteligencia artificial está abriendo nuevas fronteras en la creación de contenido con WordPress. Si deseas saber más sobre WP A DAY, asegúrate de visitar nuestro sitio web, Blogpocket.com, donde podrás obtener más detalles y demos adicionales. Puedes suscribirte al podcast WP A DAY, tanto en el blog como en Spotify.  En otro orden de cosas, la semana pasada tuvimos el emocionante lanzamiento del plugin de WordPress ActivityPub versión 1.0. ActivityPub es la tecnología detrás de la interconexión de redes sociales, blogs y el fediverso. Ahora, con la versión 1.0 del plugin, la estabilidad y funcionalidad están aseguradas. Entre las novedades de esta versión, además de una optimización en el funcionamiento, destaca la inclusión de dos bloques: uno, que permite mostrar la opción para seguir tu blog en el fediverso. Y otro para explorar la lista de los seguidores de tu blog. ¡Una perspectiva fascinante! Parece que la interconexión en el fediverso se vuelve aún más emocionante con ActivityPub 1.0. Obtén la transcripción completa en https://www.blogpocket.com/tag/videopodcast Minutaje: 00:00 - Intro 00:15 - WP A DAY 02:49 - Plugin Activity Pub 1.0 03:41 - El Club RSS 04:22 - WordPress 6.3 y la infografía con todos los músicos de jazz de las versiones de WordPress. 05:21 - La frase inspiradora de la semana de la mano de Lisa Simpson 05:36 - Epílogo

¡Bienvenidos a otro emocionante episodio de "WP A DAY", tu fuente diaria de noticias frescas sobre todo lo relacionado con el increíble mundo de WordPress! Hoy es lunes, 28 de agosto de 2023. En un reciente artículo escrito por Sarah Gooding en WP Tavern, se nos presenta un emocionante adelanto sobre lo que podemos esperar de la próxima versión de WordPress, ¡la 6.4! El artículo nos brinda una visión detallada del trabajo que se está llevando a cabo para esta versión de la mano de Anne McCarthy.  Esta versión, que se espera sea lanzada el 7 de noviembre de 2023, marca la tercera versión principal de este año y se caracteriza por ser liderada por un equipo diverso en género, lo que representa un importante paso en la inclusión en la comunidad de WordPress. Uno de los aspectos emocionantes que se espera en esta versión es la introducción de funciones de gestión de tipografía. Esto incluye una Biblioteca de Fuentes y generación de CSS @font-face en el servidor para impresión. ¡Imagina poder explorar una biblioteca de fuentes directamente desde el panel de administración, al igual que administras tus medios! Y lo mejor de todo, esta biblioteca no estará limitada al tema activado, sino que será extensible para los desarrolladores de plugins. El equipo de desarrollo también tiene una serie de otras características emocionantes en la hoja de ruta para la versión 6.4, como revisiones para plantillas y partes de plantillas, nuevos bloques como la Tabla de Contenidos, Tiempo de Lectura y Marquesina de Desplazamiento, y la funcionalidad de Lightbox para bloques de imagen individuales. Además, se esperan mejoras en la experiencia de escritura, en la interfaz de control de enlaces y muchas otras actualizaciones en las herramientas e interfaces. Pero hay más noticias en este episodio de WP A DAY:  Descubre el revolucionario Asistente de Incorporación del tema WordPress Ollie en el video de Jamie Marland. Configura tu sitio sin esfuerzo en un minuto, con creación práctica de páginas y gestión sencilla de contenido. Ollie es gratuito, pero su disponibilidad podría variar debido a las políticas de WordPress.org. Y continuando con más noticias, en el dinámico mundo digital, los blogueros afrontan el reto de mantener y ampliar la interacción con sus lectores. Además del contenido de calidad, la clave está en construir y conservar una comunidad leal. El artículo de Manolo Rodríguez, titulado “¿Qué pueden hacer los blogueros para interactuar más con sus lectores?” ofrece estrategias para mejorar la interacción. Para finalizar, no te olvides de probar la nueva versión 16.5 del plugin Gutenberg que agrega nuevos elementos a la paleta de comandos. Y eso es todo por hoy en WP A DAY. ¡Si te encantó este episodio, compártelo con tus amigos y colegas apasionados por WordPress! Para acceder a la versión escrita y enlaces a los artículos mencionados, dirígete a Blogpocket.com. ¡Gracias por sintonizar y nos vemos pronto!

Bienvenidos a un nuevo episodio de "WP A DAY", tu fuente semanal de las últimas novedades sobre WordPress. En este capítulo del 21 de agosto de 2023, recopilamos emocionantes noticias. Empezamos con el lanzamiento del segundo tema comunitario de WordPress, Blue Note, que rinde homenaje al legendario sello discográfico de jazz "Blue Note Records" y del que nos informa Sarah Gooding en WP Tavern. Prepárate para descubrir cómo este versátil tema está cambiando el panorama de la creación web en WordPress.  El equipo de Temas de WordPress lanzó su iniciativa "Community Themes" a principios de año, con el objetivo de reunir a colaboradores para construir temas basados en bloques durante todo el año, de manera similar a los temas por defecto que son construidos y respaldados oficialmente.  Ahora, el equipo ha presentado su segundo tema comunitario llamado Blue Note, inspirado en el sello discográfico de jazz estadounidense "Blue Note Records". Este tema es muy versátil, ya que puede ser utilizado para escribir blogs, sitios web personales, portfolios, organizaciones sin fines de lucro, memorias, eventos y otros tipos de páginas de destino. En este episodio de "WP A DAY", queremos destacar también el artículo "Cómo instalar tu tema de WordPress correctamente”, publicado en WP Marmite. El artículo se adentra en el proceso de instalación de temas de WordPress, una tarea crucial tras encontrar el tema ideal. El autor comparte la experiencia de la emoción y la búsqueda para finalmente descubrir un tema adecuado. Sin embargo, tras esta etapa, se enfrenta a la instalación del tema elegido.  El artículo tiene como objetivo brindar una guía detallada para instalar un tema de WordPress paso a paso, tanto para aquellos que lo hacen por primera vez como para los que desean cambiar su tema actual. Al seguir estos pasos, los usuarios podrán dominar esta técnica sin problemas. Y terminamos informando de que la empresa ucraniana Crocoblock organiza el evento "WordPress Web Agency AI Summit" del 28 al 30 de septiembre de 2023. Con más de 24.000 miembros en su comunidad de Facebook, esta cumbre virtual gratuita abordará casos prácticos de uso de inteligencia artificial en desarrollo, marketing, diseño y gestión de agencias web. Incluye presentaciones, talleres y paneles de discusión con oradores experimentados que explorarán cómo la IA impacta en el ecosistema de WordPress. El evento, dirigido a autónomos y agencias web, promete valiosos conocimientos sobre la aplicación de IA en la creación de sitios de WordPress.  ¡Y con esto finaliza el resumen de noticias de hoy! Recuerda consultar la lista de enlaces relacionados para obtener más detalles sobre cada historia. Si te gustó este episodio, cuéntaselo a tus amigos. Para obtener la transcripción y los enlaces a los artículos mencionados en este episodio, visita blogpocket.com. Gracias por escucharnos y nos vemos la próxima semana.

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.  ★ Support this podcast ★

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 MissWordPress 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 SchutzsmithOutroThanks 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/supportOr join the #linksquad membership for $79/year to support the show and become a producer of the WP Minute at thewpminute.com/supportThat'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. ★ Support this podcast ★

Today is a little bit of a departure for the podcast. It's an episode all about the last 20 years of WordPress. You're going to hear a round table discussion with four WordPressers talking about their thoughts on the last 20 years. It features Sarah Gooding, Aurooba Ahmed, Masestro Stevens and Jess Frick, with David Bisset as the discussion moderator. They cover many topics including memorial WordPress release, a WordCamp or WordCamp experience, the most notable State of the Word announcement. It's great to hear so many varied opinions about what's been of importance in the evolution of WordPress.

Today is a little bit of a departure for the podcast. It's an episode all about the last 20 years of WordPress. You're going to hear a round table discussion with four WordPressers talking about their thoughts on the last 20 years. It features Sarah Gooding, Aurooba Ahmed, Masestro Stevens and Jess Frick, with David Bisset as the discussion moderator. They cover many topics including memorial WordPress release, a WordCamp or WordCamp experience, the most notable State of the Word announcement. It's great to hear so many varied opinions about what's been of importance in the evolution of WordPress.

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 MissA 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 BagNow 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 WeekAdam Weeks ★ Support this podcast ★

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 MissSEO 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 BagNow 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. ★ Support this podcast ★

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 MissSEO 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 BagNow 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. ★ Support this podcast ★

It's the WP Minute! Support independent WordPress news like this, join the Slack membership, or purchase a classified listing in the weekly newsletter at thewpminute.com/support  And now a word from our sponsor. 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.Most ImpactfulThe 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 MissIf 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 BagNow 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 FerrimanOutroThanks 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/supportOr join the #linksquad membership for $79/year to support the show and become a producer of the WP Minute at thewpminute.com/supportThat'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. ★ Support this podcast ★

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!Links You Shouldn't MissAI 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 ★ Support this podcast ★

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 MissWordPress 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.Classifieds listings buy yoursBuddyBoss 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 BagNow 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 WeekAnne-Mieke Bovelett, follow @BovelettIf 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 ChandlerCourtney Robertson ★ Support this podcast ★

well-represented. Over at WP Tavern, Sarah Gooding reports that a Hackathon event has led to some innovative WordPress projects.For instance, there's an in-browser development environment that uses the VS Code editor and allows developers to see changes in real-time. Meanwhile, the Wapuugotchi project uses the familiar Wapuu character to display notifications and unlock features. On the more serious side, Eco-mode for WordPress aims to reduce outgoing server traffic, thus saving energy.But that's not all. March 20 saw the first-ever WordPress Day event. Several presentations were given on topics ranging from security and performance, to “The Automattic advantage”.Links You Shouldn't MissOrganizational changes are underway at SEO development firm Yoast. CEO Thijs de Valk announced that he has stepped down from the role, effective March 16. de Valk has been with the company since 2012 and is leaving to pursue “other dreams”. The search for the next CEO has begun.A few weeks ago, we reported on ThemeKraft's open letter critiquing the WordPress plugin review process. This time around, WordPress developer Alan Fuller has posted a letter thanking plugin reviewers for their “hard work and dedication in reviewing new plugins and ensuring the security of WordPress websites”. Fuller also points out steps that plugin developers can take to ensure a smoother process, while acknowledging the challenges reviewers face.Mika Epstein of the WordPress Plugins team posted a reminder regarding the use of AI-generated code. Any code hosted on the official plugin repository, regardless of how it was written, still needs to be GPL compatible. As more developers are using tools like ChatGPT to generate plugins, this is becoming a relevant issue. Epstein noted that AI tools may simply be copying code from an existing plugin without crediting the original author.From the Grab BagNow it's time to take a look at some other interesting topics shared by our contributors.The final countdown to WordPress 6.2 is underway. The last scheduled Release Candidate (#3) is now available for testing.Congratulations to WordPress community member Michelle Frechette on being named as a finalist for the RochesterFirst.com Remarkable Women awards. Frechette holds many roles, including the Director of Community Engagement at StellarWP, along with co-founder of Underrepresented in Tech.As part of WordPress' 20th anniversary celebration, volunteers have been busy triaging old Trac tickets. You're invited to take part in the next session, happening on Thursday, March 23.The WordPress Documentation team needs your help writing docs for WordPress 6.2. A call for volunteers has been published that details how to get involved.Talent recruitment website The Org recently published its list of the 50 Most Transparent Companies. WordPress.com owner Automattic was included at #27.Developer Nico Mercado wrote an opinion piece on the complex relationship between WordPress and PHP. Mercado opines that WordPress is a driver of PHP's market share, but may not be providing the best developer experience.How hard should it be to cancel a WordPress plugin subscription? WebDevStudios CEO Brad Williams tweeted a product flowchart that might just blow your mind.Is WordPress giving too much layout control to end-users? There's a lively debate on Reddit worth checking out.Building a successful WordPress product team is challenging. TeamWP's James Giroux joined the Do the Woo podcast to discuss the subject.ChatGPT's new GPT-4 model can pass standardized tests. But does that make it any closer to replacing human professionals? Not so fast, says one essay.The WP Minute+ Interview: Zack KatzSubscribe at https://thewpminute.com/plusZack Katz of GravityKit & TrustedLogin joins the show to talk about running multiple products in the WordPress space. The conversation explores the ups-and-downs of doing a product rebrand, plus, what it's like to build a business in the Gravity Forms (and WordPress!) ecosystem.Listen at:https://wpminuteplus.transistor.fm/episodes/gravitykit-rebranding-a-wordpress-product ★ Support this podcast ★

WordPress 6.2 is slated for release on March 28. Among its most impactful new features will be the integration of the Openverse media search. This will allow users to add images, audio, and video that are available via a Creative Commons license.While Openverse integration adds a layer of convenience, there was some debate about how the feature initially worked. As Sarah Gooding of WP Tavern reports, the first iteration (released in version 15.1 of the Gutenberg plugin) simply hotlinked to images, rather than uploading files to the user's website by default.Users had the option to upload the image via the WordPress Media Library. However, the default hotlinking behavior meant that some users would inevitably leave things as they are. This could run afoul of privacy regulations like GDPR in the European Union.Meanwhile, WordPress core contributor Jeremy Herve created a ticket that called attention to the potential issue. Others have since raised questions regarding usage rights - including the right to crop or otherwise modify media.The debate has led to a change in plans. WordPress contributors reacted swiftly and now the feature will upload Openverse images by default. A fallback has also been implemented that warns users when an image couldn't be uploaded. Check out WP Tavern's follow up for more details on how things evolved.Links You Shouldn't MissThere are more acquisitions to report in the WordPress space. First, Caseproof, makers of the MemberPress plugin, have acquired rival MemberMouse. In the announcement, MemberPress Creator and CEO Blair Williams says both products have different audiences and thus will remain separate offerings.Next up, Syed Balkhi announced that tutorial service WP101 has been acquired by Awesome Motive. Balkhi notes that the acquisition furthers his goal of creating the “best class-room style WordPress training videos to help WordPress grow in enterprise, government agencies, as well as at the school and collegiate level.”The democratization of publishing is a stated goal of WordPress. To see proof of it in action, look no further than the Prison Journalism Project. Sarah Gooding profiled the organization and its use of WordPress to help incarcerated writers to connect with the outside world.From the Grab BagNow it's time to take a look at some other interesting topics shared by our contributors.The popular All in One SEO plugin recently patched two security vulnerabilities. It's recommended that users upgrade to the latest version as soon as possible. Security firm Wordfence provided further detail on their blog.Back in July 2022, we reported that WordPress blog WPLift was sold to an undisclosed buyer. It's been revealed to The WP Minute that Boston-based agency UnlimitedWP is the new owner.A new proposal aims to display more topic-based meetups in the WordPress News & Events dashboard widget.Take in the sights of the recent WordCamp Asia with BobWP's recap of the event.With so many recent changes to WordPress content creation and theming, web designers need to adjust. Justin Tadlock explored the topic on the WordPress Developer Blog.Speaking of themes, developer Anders Norén announced that his collection of free block themes are now compatible with features added in WordPress 6.1.If you're looking for some inspirational stories, People of WordPress has you covered. Recent profiles Hauwa Abashiya and Daniel Kossmann are worth a read.Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today: Jeff ChandlerAmber HindsAbha Thakor ★ Support this podcast ★

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. Classifieds listings buy yours 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.

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. Classifieds listings buy yours 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

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. Classifieds listings buy yours 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

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. Classifieds listings buy yours 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 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

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. 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. 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

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

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. F

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

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

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 CompanyDan Knauss at Post Status asks WooCommerce vs. Shopify: Why Do We Make It So Hard?WP Motivate explores

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

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.

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.

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 Frechette with 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

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-HaackEric KarkovackAndrew PalmerSam MunozDaniel Shutzsmith

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

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

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

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

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

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 N

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: 1. Celebrating wins publicly and calling out individuals by name 2. Adding to their LinkedIn profiles 3. Introducing them to your network Next Up: Simplified Business Minute by Sam Muñoz The Case for Not Automating Client Interac

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 KarkovackDaniel SchutzsmithBirgit Pauli-HaackRaquel Landefeld

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

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

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 ChandlerBirgit Pauli-Haack

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

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-HaackRaquel LandefeldThomas MaierMatt Cromwell

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 ChandlerBirgit Pauli-HaackDaniel SchutzsmithMichelle Frechette ★ Support this podcast ★

About this episode. On the podcast today we have Chris Lubkert and Rich Tabor, from Extendify. Extendify is a library of block patterns and full page layouts which you can use inside of the Block Editor. Chris and Rich, as you will hear, decided a few years ago that they were going to dedicate themselves to working with blocks. They each had their own projects, but Rich recently joined the team because his vision aligned well with Chris'. That vision is to provide designs which you can import directly into WordPress with just a few clicks. From there you can edit them in your own way. Although it's become more common to use blocks, a few years ago, the future of blocks, and whether or not they would be widely adopted, was still in doubt. So it was a brave move at the time to focus entirely on blocks. Whilst the promise of easy website creation is broadly the goal of blocks, they're not always easy to create and style. And that's where Extendify comes in with their library of designs which all work with core WordPress blocks. You pick a design, and it's immediately pulled into your site and is editable. And that's the thrust of the podcast today. What is Extendify? How does it work? What can you achieve with it? What do they plan to build in the future? If you'd like to find out more you can read Sarah Gooding's article entitled - Extendify Launches New Pattern Library Plugin.

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, announced that Howard Development & Consulting has acquired the publication.  From Alex Denning Some news: after 5 years and 249 issues, @BinaryMoon and I have written our final issue of http://MasterWP.co. @howarddcweb have acquired MasterWP, and will be taking over bringing you insightful, quality WordPress news and analysis from next week. Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:  Jeff ChandlerBirgit Pauli-HaackEric Karkovack If you would like to contribute news, especially in the WooCommerce space please find us @thewpminute or use our contact form at thewpminute.com and reach out to us. New Members We would like to welcome our new member this week Lawrence Ladomery from convesio.com. ★ Support this podcast ★

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 and you are on the Creator Clock. Over the last few weeks, I've spent a bunch of time putting together what I call creator toolkits. This is based on a podcast I had several years ago, but it's all about tools that you can use to build specific WordPress sites. For example, I have a toolkit for creating online courses or creating a podcast website. So how did I come up with these recommendations? Well, I've been using WordPress for a very long time. I've tried a bunch of tools and I've picked my favorite. So I want to highlight one of these toolkits and it is the creating online courses toolkit. I would recommend Nexcess' managed WordPress hosting for this because you're going to be accepting payments. The Kadence theme with Kadence Pro is a fantastic theme for this. For the LMS plugin, I recommend LearnDash. LearnDash and Kadence work very well together. For list-building, I recommend ConvertKit, and to tie it all together to everything you use outside of WordPress, I would recommend, Uncanny Automator as the automation plugin. If you want to see more creator toolkits, you can head over to creatorcourses.com/toolkits. Or you can continue the conversation with me over on Twitter @jcasabona. New Members: Thanks to our new member Svilena Peneva from NitroPack.  Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:  Birgit Pauli-HaackMichelle FrechetteDaniel SchutzsmithDavinder Singh KainthJoe CasabonaJeff Chandler Thanks to you, dear listener, for tuning in to your favorite 5-minutes of WordPress news every Wednesday. ★ Support this podcast ★

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-HaackMichelle FrechetteDavinder Singh KainthAndrew 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.  ★ Support this podcast ★

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 SchutzsmithVinny MckeeAndrew PalmerJeff ChandlerAurooba AhmedBirgit Pauli-Haack Thank you, dear listener, for tuning in to your favorite 5-minutes of WordPress news every Wednesday. ★ Support this podcast ★

WordPress news is hard. I mean, it's hard to turn it into a real business. I get away with covering WordPress here on the Matt Report because our guests share lessons on how they built their business or spend time telling us how they navigated the community, until they found their way. But news? Well, that's why The WP Tavern has been the only name in town for a while, loaded with two critical components: A dedicated staff and they are funded. If you want to make it, you do things differently, you do things like Rae Morey‘s The Repository newsletter. Today we'll chat about building her WordPress news newsletter, background as a journalist, and explore what it really takes to make all of this work. Thanks goes out to Malcare today for sponsoring a month of Matt Report and The WP Minute. You can help us by visiting buymeacoffee.com/mattrpeort Episode transcript [00:00:00] Rae: It's a completely not in the WordPress world at all. So our processes is, as you said, an experiential design and creative technology company, and we develop experiences for cultural and tourism organizations. [00:00:14] So, you might go into a gallery or museum and experience an audio tour and we create immersive experiences where you can. Wander around a space and he audio that that's designed, especially for that space. It moves with you around, around the gallery or exhibition. We do precinct technology, virtual queuing, augmented reality experiences, and we do exhibition design in. [00:00:40] A lot of different spaces, for example we're doing a a brand new exhibition smack bang in the middle of Montana at the moment for there for first street project there. We do we do the audio guide for the Getty in Los Angeles. So that's an example of the kind of thing I do for my, my day job. [00:00:58] There is communications manager. So I look after Publicity marketing anything to do with words, I guess, on the website? Yeah. That's, that's kind of what I do for a day.  [00:01:09] Matt: Does anybody ever give you like a side eye when maybe a customer comes in and they're like, we have a WordPress website that they look at you and be like, Hey, we think we know somebody who kind of knows this to implement whatever project we might have. [00:01:23] Rae: I don't know. I, I, to be honest, I kind of played down what to do with WordPress, because I don't want to be that person that people kind of like go to asking for, help me with my website. Yeah. [00:01:33] Oh, I I hate to say, but our website and our process is actually uses Drupal. So I've had to learn that this year not, not my decision, but yeah, it's been interesting seeing what the competitions.  [00:01:44] Matt: Yeah, that was the, the second, most serious application I used to build websites was Drupal before or slightly after a front page. [00:01:51] Well, I guess throw Dreamweaver in there too, but we went front page Dreamweaver and then Drupal and then WordPress triples, fantastic platform. I think I wouldn't use it today, but I th I still think it's a very powerful  [00:02:04] Rae: platform using it compared to WordPress at the moment. Very different platforms. [00:02:10] Matt: How do you find time to to do the repository and works by birds and you have a family? How do you, how do you structure your day with all of this stuff?  [00:02:20] Rae: The honest answer is I have no idea. [00:02:21] I, I think over the past couple of years I don't know if you're aware, but Melbourne where I live here in Australia has been the most locked down city in the world. We've had the most restrictions lockdowns out of everywhere. It's just the circumstances I guess, here, but it's given me a lot of time to look at. [00:02:36] To spend on side projects, I guess. So when so the, the repository I started that with came guest star from male poet back in November, 2019. And that was just before the pandemic. And so I guess the repository in a way became a bit of a handy pandemic passion project that I was working on while in locked down and has continued through to now. [00:02:59] And. [00:03:00] Yeah, I was, I was also on maternity leave from my day job throughout 2020. So that gave me a lot of time and focus on building up the newsletter and yeah, since returning to my day job part-time I've, I've just I guess structure my week so that, Part time work and also have the repository for a Dane half a week. [00:03:21] So just try to split up the weight to fit everything in. And also I'm very fortunate to have a partner who. Who I cope? Well, shouldn't say co-parent with where to very much together, but we split our parenting duties 40, 50, 50, which is we're very modern family in that respect. So yeah, we both prioritize our careers, but also our son. [00:03:44] So, yeah. So there, there is a way for moms with a lot of things on to, to do all the things that they are passionate.  [00:03:53] Matt: Do you have a certain structure and I can, I can share mine as well for, for the WP minute, but you have a certain structure that you would, you wouldn't mind sharing on how you keep track of all of the news. [00:04:05] And this obviously is happening throughout the week. Are you jotting things down and the to-do lists in a notion document. And then at the end you go to write up the email and you just sit down with all of those notes in front of you. How does this all come curated?  [00:04:18] Rae: Yeah, look, there's no pulling back the curtain. [00:04:21] There's no special, fancy way that I do it. My background is, is in journalism. I studied journalism at uni and so I naturally just do a lot of note-taking all the time because I'm just every time I see something, I think, oh, that's really cool. And I use apple notes on my my medical kit or my iPhone, I'm an apple person and everything sinks. [00:04:44] And so I'm constantly taking notes. And I guess with the repository I use feedly.com to track something like 70 or 80 different websites and blogs. And so I go through that periodically throughout the week just to track what what's happening and keep on top of everybody's latest updates. I'm also checking Twitter all the time on my phone. [00:05:06] And it's a bit harder to save tweets, so I have to yeah. Finding a way to do that really well, but I'm always checking Twitter, whether I'm No throughout the day or in the evening while I'm watching TV, having having a scroll. And that's mostly, I guess my research for the pository just between those two, just seeing what's going on. [00:05:27] And I guess also just catching up with people throughout the week in the WordPress community, whether it's just aiming on on Twitter or chats over emails and Coles. Those are the kinds of ways that I keep in touch with what's going.  [00:05:42] Matt: Sure the the newsletter there's. So there's a, you just said that there, you're probably tracking 70 to 80 sources of, of news or at least new news that you can throw into an RSS feed and put into. [00:05:53] Feedly probably 20% of them. I would reckon are [00:06:00] our newsletters or have a newsletter component to them. Your newsletter is unique to, to me, by the way, or listen, let me take a step. I'm honored for you to be here. I'm not a journalist, I'm not a great writer. I struggled with words, in fact and I look at your piece as something that is it's fantastic. [00:06:19] It's unique. It's creative. I look at it as a conversation that, that ends up in my inbox. Before I knew who you were. I had some other voice in my head, but then I realized that then I found out who you were. And I was like, oh, now it's your voice. Every time I read the newsletter, like I'm hearing it with this Australian accent. [00:06:37] And it's fantastic. But it's, it's much more of to me anyway, like a S a conversation, maybe a story. Was that on purpose? Is that a strategy? I don't want to slap strategy on art, but is that a strategy of yours to make it different than.  [00:06:53] Rae: When when Kim and I originally started the repository, or at least before, actually before we started the repository and we were talking about ideas because Kim and I are both journalists in previous life. [00:07:05] And we wanted to bring something to the WordPress community. Then I guess, in a way there was an ulterior motive of showing off male poet platform, but also. Well, as, as former journalists, we just wanted to put something together that brought the WordPress news in a way that was, I guess, a lot of new stories in WordPress tend to include a lot of opinion, but we wanted to bring other people's opinions to the fore as well. [00:07:27] We wanted to increase the diversity in the news, but not just by having lots of different new sources, but bringing people's opinions that you might. You might not otherwise see. So the, the format that we came up with and, we still have to this day was looking for looking at a particular issue from a lot of different perspectives. [00:07:52] So we, like a story recently, like I know the word, it's not just the actual state of the word video, but lots of different blog posts in opinions, from different people and what they make. Of the state of the word. So you can kind of, read about read about a new story, but also get the context of where that story fits within the WordPress world and then varying opinions on what people thought about that. [00:08:15] So, you can get that kind of more nuanced viewpoint from, from different people and, and have that way of understanding any issue. From different viewpoints because not everybody looks at things the same way. It's nice to kind of read something, but then understand where, where it fits in the ecosystem. [00:08:31] And that's, that's the approach that we were going for.  [00:08:34] Matt: This is a huge question and I'll let you dissect it and define it and pull pieces out of it as you see fit.  [00:08:41] WordPress news, like what is somebody with a journalistic background? What does that really mean? Or what should it really mean? And maybe even before you answer that, can you help clarify, like what at journalists [00:09:00] produces versus let's say an opinion piece or a commentator might produce, because to be honest with you I didn't discover this recently, but for many years I was just like, oh, I don't know the difference. [00:09:12] I didn't know that you, that a journalist doesn't really put opinion into their, into their piece. And there are certain guidelines that one should approach journalism with versus, I would say like somebody like a Kara Swisher, who's what I would say is maybe a celebrity journalist, but no longer a journalist I think is much more on the commentator side. [00:09:33] For probably many different reasons, but anyway, could you help us define what journalists means to you should mean in the WordPress space?  [00:09:41] Rae: Yeah, it's interesting because there's definitely. Of everything in the WordPress community. I worked in, in newspaper journalism, and so it was very, and I guess the newspaper I worked for, it was very straight in that it was, new stories to get one report on one side of the debate and the other side. [00:09:58] Of the debate. You make sure you have balanced views on a topic and you present that and that's purely without any kind of opinion. And you try to be as objective as possible in the way that you present it. So that's, I guess, very traditional old fashioned old school journalism. That's kind of where my background is, I guess, in that, in the WordPress community. [00:10:22] I don't really have anything, I guess the closest to that would probably be Sarah Gooding at WP Tavern. And even then some of her pieces can have some opinion inserted here and there for, for her context. She's, she's been in the community for a really long time. So her opinions, I, I find it fairly valid, but but yeah, that's not really, I guess, old school journalism as, as a lot of people would say it And then you get. [00:10:47] Yeah, I think blog, blog posts and things like that, where people offering an opinion that's I wouldn't really class that as news, so much as it's opinion and people adding their perspectives to the debate. It's, it's an interesting one in the WordPress community. We don't have a lot of new sources. [00:11:03] A lot of people have tried to start WordPress news over the years. Haven't been, haven't been that successful because it's. It's not a business that is profitable as we've seen more broadly in, in the news industry with the rise of the internet and, the fighting for advertising and paywalls and, and all of, all of that kind of thing. [00:11:23] In in WordPress, we could, we could definitely use more new sources, that the greater diversity you have with news the more accountability businesses have to have to operate in this environment. The more and more scrutiny, the better, I think, in terms of, businesses operating and, and making sure that they're operating above board It would certainly be nice to have more new sources. [00:11:45] It's, it's certainly great that there are a lot of people who, who blog and share their opinion. But yeah, I think there's definitely room for, for more harder news in the WordPress community, particularly, over the past year, how we've had so many [00:12:00] acquisitions, right. And we were going from an ecosystem full of, I guess, small to medium businesses to, we've got big corporates and multinationals, I guess, like Google that are operating in, in our in our ecosystem. [00:12:12] And, we want to keep those businesses to. No, around what they're doing. And I, I'm not saying way to, to scare them, that they shouldn't be in our ecosystem, but, just to, people want to know what's what's going on and, and, and make sure that they're operating in a, in a fair. [00:12:27] Matt: Let's say news article or piece or research even if you went to an acquisition that happened a year, two years ago we might be checking in on, let's say something like an eye themes was probably the one that I can think of at least off the top of my head, that dates pretty far back, big company getting picked up by a hosting company. [00:12:46] And now Corey who started that company now runs both status. One might say. Let's take a look at what happened with these acquisitions in terms of employment. Are the people still there? Is the products. What it was when they acquired it. What is the price point look like? Have these, big hosting companies, which catch a lot of heat because they are big hosting companies. [00:13:08] Did they just roll it into their mega solution? And the once artismal piece of themes is just gone and it's just another toggle, it's just another toggle on the dashboard, right? Is that a fair assessment to say that's the kind of news that we were journalism that we would want to see in the space, or at least maybe you would want to see in the space, not trying to put words in your mouth, but  [00:13:30] Rae: yeah, I think that kind of journalism would be good. [00:13:32] I guess, It's interesting because we work in a space with some really big companies and there are lots of acquisitions going on. It's it's it's, that would be interesting to say, the, the, the the quality and the end product that's offered to, to users is that being maintained, as I know there's been a bit of angst with also motive of buying out people plugin, Sandhills development it'd be interesting to go back in, as you say, in 12 months time. [00:13:56] And from looking at that story as a journalist, you'd probably want to Find long-term users and get their perspectives, whether that's on the record or as background for a story and maybe speak to stuff. If they're happy to speak, even anonymously, get their, their views on how they think the. [00:14:16] Transition has been yeah, those are the kinds of interesting stories that we're not really seeing so much, we're saying the, the, the acquisition and the sale, but we're not really seeing the I guess the journey of how acquisitions are tracking. We're not seeing what's happening to, particularly with automatic buying out so many distances, what are happening to those businesses? [00:14:36] They bought quite a few in the, in the past year and the past few years have been interesting to say, what's, what's happened to the end product house has been absorbed into it, automatic and wordpress.com and, and it has it, has it been for, I guess, the greater good in supporting those employees and, and the businesses, but also providing a a more polished product for the end user. [00:14:57] If that, if that was the purpose of the, of the equity.[00:15:00]  [00:15:01] Matt: I think another, another topic would be something like a core, core contributors, which companies are funding core contribution to the WordPress core. I think in Matt's state of the word, which I do have the slides on the WP minute. [00:15:15] So I'll try to link up in the show notes. I think he showed a graphic of automatic somewhere in the seventies. Person, mark a Yoast coming in again, this is just off the top of my head. I think second place with maybe 14 people. And then it's like GoDaddy who just acquired Pagely who's a multi-billion dollar publicly public. [00:15:36] Are they publicly traded? I better not see, this is what, this is what makes a real journalist. They don't just say things like, I think they're a publicly traded company. If they're not, they're really big. And they've got billions and billions of dollars, but I think only four or five people. Actually contributes to core and word press is a massive part of their business. [00:15:53] Why aren't they doing? Why aren't they doing more for, for WordPress what's, what's the reason. And how much are they really benefiting off of open source? I think a lot of people give Matt an automatic, a lot of heat around the fact that, well, this is an open source product and, and this is just all funneling to the top of wordpress.com to make wordpress.com more money, but it's oh, by the way, There are billion dollar hosting companies leveraging this to who are not giving back. [00:16:20] Yeah. And don't  [00:16:21] Rae: forget Google as well. They're, they're pretty massive company. And, and I'm not sure exactly how many people they've contributed to the, how are they contributing to WordPress 5.9. But. Yeah, it'd be interesting, but you also mentioned Yost in there and I wonder if they'll increase their contributed the numbers now that new fold digital has acquired them. [00:16:39] It'd be interesting to say, how that contribution space changes and, and also in the state of the word Matt shared how he liked to see that landscape of contribution change in the coming years. So, Yeah, it would be, it would be great to see those big businesses putting back more in as far as five for the five, five for the future goes it's great to see so many smaller individuals and businesses contributing. [00:17:04] But also another interesting story I think is over the, over the past year, there's been a drop in, in volunteers and contributors to the project. And an automatic is picked up the lion's share of that work, which, you can't fault automatic for, stepping in and, and supporting the project in that way. [00:17:22] It would be great to say. Nice. Some of the bigger businesses stepping in and putting out resources for that too. I was really pleased to say XW pays as has, has put up contributors for the performance team and it'd be great to see more businesses like that who have that kind of expertise to be able to, to. [00:17:39] Could contribute their people to different parts of the project. Would that help? Because it's not really just about developers. It's also about marketing and design and mobile. There, there are a lot of different end-to-end education. There are a lot of different spaces that need country. [00:17:54] Matt: And what we've I've hoped we've just done is illustrate how important WordPress news [00:18:00] is and could be if there was more funding in the space. So how do we make money doing this? Ray, I wanna, I wanna pivot and talk about that a little bit because you, you, you have. The, what I'm going to say, the only vehicle for content you put out for WordPress is the newsletter, the repository. [00:18:17] You're just sending out email. You're not doing a blog, you're not doing a YouTube channel. You're not doing a podcast yet. And you monetize that through through sponsorship. It's. Well, I'll let you, I'm not, you don't have to say any numbers. It's not a full-time job for you. In other words, it's not supporting you. [00:18:34] Full-time compared to your day job. Maybe one day will like, what do you think it's going to take to make the repository of full-time job? Is there another. Of an audience in the WordPress news space to build a true air quotes, air quotes business, or should it be selling NFTs to support this  [00:18:55] Rae: maybe, but who knows how long that's going to be around for? [00:18:58] To be honest, I don't see their positories a full full-time job for me. I started it as a bit of a side gig. I thought that would take four, maybe four hours a week. And, and how it's more like a donor. So it does take a bit of time to put together because it's, it's solo single stories, reading everything. [00:19:16] And in making sure that, I don't want to just pick any, tweets to include in the newsletter. I want to make sure that I'm trying to find as many views as possible. And the ones that I'm including in the newsletter, a representative of, of the, of the views that you know, are in the community as well as any of that. [00:19:32] It might be a bit unusual. The, I think that it's an interesting one funding. I'm very lucky to have GoDaddy in element or sponsor sponsoring the newsletter this year. They'd been fantastic sponsors. One thing I do is when I enter into an agreement with a sponsor, I make it clear that. [00:19:52] If that, I want to retain editorial independence. So if there are any stories that involve them good or bad, I'm going to include them in the newsletter. Even earlier in the year when automatic mail poll was sponsoring the newsletter for the all of last year and, and And that was fantastic. [00:20:10] It allowed the newsletter to really great. But then when automatic bought out male poet automatic began took over sponsorship of the newsletter for the first quarter of 2021. And that was part of the agreement as well. I made sure that any stories involving automatic rules, you were going to report on those. [00:20:28] I think it's really important. If any publications have sponsorship agreements of that type, that it is very clear that editorial independence is important and, and that's separate from sponsorship. There are lots of other different models as we've discussed before as well, of the podcast. [00:20:48] There are lots of different models for, for funding use. It's, it's a bit of experimentation, I think there's philanthropy as we've seen that philanthropic or philanthropic funding [00:21:00] model. There are a crowdsourced kind of funding models. It's, it's an interesting one because at the end of the day, P everybody wants news, but not everybody's willing to pay for it. [00:21:10] And that's, that's the struggle is real there. It's really hard to overcome that because for a long time, these is. Well, my speed. Well, it's been free on the internet. It's easy to find sources. A lot of people think that they can find it themselves, but the convenience of having a newsletter letter, like the repository brings it all together and makes it more accessible. [00:21:30] Yeah.  [00:21:31] Matt: How do we encourage, ah, I'll I'll fall on this grenade. You don't have to agree with me. Okay. I'll be, I'll be the guy who says it out loud, but. How do we encourage better content? To be made. And I say content specifically, because I know not every, not everyone doesn't want to cover the inside baseball of, of WordPress. [00:21:58] They don't want to dive deep into stories. I get it because it's a very small audience. And maybe we'll talk about that in a moment. Like it's kind of a small audience who really cares about this stuff versus like, how do I build this element or site to make a thousand dollars a month? That's a much larger audience who cares. [00:22:16] Again, air quotes cares about WordPress. How do we encourage others to create better content? Or do you have any, any words of wisdom on how to create better content so that we all the content creators in WordPress, whether it's a journalist, a, an opinion piece, or maybe even a tutorial. That businesses take us a little bit brands that sponsor us or donate to us. [00:22:39] Take us a little bit more serious because I've overseen. I've. What I've seen is the over-saturation of asking for like donor donations and sponsorships, and then the content never gets made. And what I feel like is that kind of hurts us. Maybe not, I don't know, but it kind of hurts us where we knock on that, that brand's door. [00:23:02] And we say, Hey, we got this great thing. We're pouring so much effort into it. And they go, yeah, that other person burned me for $5,000. And they didn't really, they didn't do the ad read. Right. Or they didn't create the amount of content that we thought, or, the content didn't bring us that much traction. [00:23:18] So, you have this, I'm giving you 5,000. I want 5,000 in one. Any words of wisdom for elevating the quality of content or is it just like survival of the fittest?  [00:23:29] Rae: Yeah, that's a really interesting topic. In the good question. The only way I guess I can answer that is, is from my own experience. [00:23:36] When. I started the ripples of trails or, really fortunate that I guess I was the writer for the project. It was a collaboration between myself and Kim. So I was writing, Kim was basically bankrolling. He didn't, he was, running his own company, didn't have the time. So, there was a collaboration between the two of us. [00:23:53] We talked, discussed the news and, and made the website and we kicked it off with, I think, seven subscribers. I [00:24:00] can't remember in the first issue, not many And we got, got up to about a hundred subscribers and it kind of just plateaued for a while, but we kept on going and slowly and it snowballed, but it took probably a good year of, of the newsletter to really get into. [00:24:21] To really start growing our subscribers. I think by that stage, we might've had two or 300 subscribers by the end of the first year, we were a bit deflated. We thought we'd have more subscribers. And we were trying to try to, become more well known and, and get more people reading. But it's a, it's a pretty hard thing. [00:24:39] And so. When it, when it came time for came to step away when male Paul was acquired and then automatic finished sponsoring after they acquired male poet. I was kind of in a spot where I didn't know where I was going to go next with sponsorship. And it was that, that good year of very slow growth and just focusing on writing something quality that attracted GoDaddy to, to sponsor they would, at their hour, they were our first sponsor who really saw what we were, what we were aiming for with the newsletter or by that stage. [00:25:14] No. I was really luckily. So, Laura Nelson, who works at a male poet in their marketing, she's now at world commerce. She was absolutely critical in helping develop that relationship. She's a fantastic member in the WordPress community, so she helped introduce us and yet he's still a sponsor and it's, it's there. [00:25:34] Adam and Courtney and their belief in the newsletter and, and, and wanting to, they also have a sponsor section in the newsletter that allows them to share events and, and, and other pieces with the community. That's, that's been critical in the, the ongoing. Publishing of the newsletter. [00:25:51] Yeah, these kinds of projects can't really can't happen without money family to support. So it's, it's an interesting one in terms of, how do we keep these kinds of things afloat? And as far as going back to your question about quality content, I think I think a lot of people want to make money really quickly. [00:26:10] And yeah, of course, who doesn't, everyone wants to make money, but sometimes it does take a slow burn and working on something with the aim of producing something high quality. Is going to make some money in the end. And I'm happy to say the, and happy to share that. Then the repository is profitable for me. [00:26:27] It's not going to be a full-time job, but for what it, what it is at the moment. And I don't have plans for, major expansion, but it is not well, I, I don't have big plans to have a podcast or a big website and do lots of reporting. People subscribe the same, pretty happy with what it is at the moment. [00:26:48] And, and I am happy to share that in, in the new year, Allie Emmons is coming on board to help with community outreach and in increasing the number of voices that are in the newsletter. That's really important for me to make sure we not just, rinse [00:27:00] and repeating the same voices over and over again, the newsletter. [00:27:03] We want to make sure that people. Who are doing awesome things and they might not be as vocal. We want to make sure that they're included as well. And, and I want the newsletter to be a source of, of amazing work that's happening across the community, not just the same things over and over again as can happen in, in some spaces. [00:27:22] Yeah. Other than  [00:27:25] Matt: one of the things that I think is a challenge is, is that I think. What we want is we want the, maybe not even average WordPress user, but maybe above average WordPress user to want to turn into the news, like turn excuse me, tune into the news. Right? Because Hey, maybe the above average WordPress user is an it professional and she manages a hundred multi-sites for a university. [00:27:53] And. Not in the WordPress community, but my God, wouldn't you like to know when awesome motive buys those, the suite of plugins that you use, and suddenly you're like who the heck is awesome motive. And if I was tuning into a news coverage, maybe somebody doing a piece on who automotive is and the background and the history, et cetera, et cetera Yeah. [00:28:13] I don't know if you've thought about this. I don't know if this is something that maybe you even plan to go into with the newsletter is like, how do we, how do we dip into that segment of the reader of the demographic? I think of a local newspaper, all of a sudden. We're doing fashion week and it's I know what's going on here. [00:28:32] Right? One, you have advertisement that to hope. You're, you're hoping that you're doing fashion week and you're getting some new eyeballs on the, the, the baseline publication, maybe at that it raises more readers in the long run. Is there something like that that we can do without, selling ourselves to affiliate links  [00:28:49] Rae: in? [00:28:50] That's a tough question. How do you, how do you broaden your own. It's a hard one because we're pressing uses so smaller niche and how you reach that kind of other level of, of, users is a, is a tough one. I don't know if I have any answers today. I'd be interested to hear from other people who might've done it successfully, because I can't think of how it, it just feels like there's a, almost like a Seton barrier between. [00:29:18] The people who, who read S I guess, serious WordPress knees that, core contributors and developers and small business owners and people who are very involved in the community. And then everybody else, it just seems like a big step. And Yeah, I don't know. I just don't feel that they're that necessarily interested in, in how WordPress comes together or if people who you use a platform like that, every will be. [00:29:47] That's a, that's a really interesting area to explore.  [00:29:50] Matt: I'm going to say, I'm going to say something in hopes that Sarah Gooding is listening to this and she, and she uses this in the, in the headline. But I think that the cap on the audience [00:30:00] and you could probably. Again, you don't have to reveal anything from your side, but I think the cap on the audience of people who really care about the inside WordPress news is probably right around 3000 human beings on the face of this earth is the number that I would say of people who actually care about. [00:30:21] What Matt says in the state of the word and how it impacts WordPress, for, for, for years, I was gonna say most months, years to come or really care about, themes getting acquired. I think my number is about 3000, maybe on a good day, 3,500, but I'd say 3000 is the global reach of WordPress news. [00:30:41] Yeah, I can use that, Sarah, if you want.  [00:30:45] Rae: Well, I'll tell ya. I don't have that many subscribers to the newsletter. It's it's, it's an interesting one. Like how, how many people are really interested in WordPress news because I've spoken to. People who work at automatic and some other WordPress businesses who work with the community, but aren't necessarily interested in the community or kind of want to be kind of that stick away because they don't want to be too involved in it. [00:31:12] So it, it, it is an interesting number, but also, we've got the English speaking people who are involved in the community, and then we've got the non-English speaking people who have communities in other parts of the world. So who knows, if I assume that number, you're thinking probably English speakers. [00:31:29] So if we think about the people who are non-English speakers and are very involved in WordPress, like you can see all the amazing work that Mary job is doing in Africa. And, The amazing word camp that was held would would camp Spain recently, and the community's just so passionate over there that they even produce a live late night a late night show pre recorded. [00:31:52] But. There, there are people really passionate about WordPress and the community. Oh WordPress the recent word camp in in Portugal, Portugal recently. Yeah, looking at just their their daily schedule of, of, of. Throughout the the two days it was all very community-based and the events I had on day two, where, where everybody getting together and doing things in person together the whole cop that, that whole event was around community and nurturing, connections with people. [00:32:22] And, and so there. You, it could be 3003 and a half thousand people who are really just in WordPress and, and know knowing more about WordPress news. But I would say that number would be. A lot bigger. Once we start thinking about non-English speakers. And I think that's an interesting area to explore that. [00:32:42] How do we kind of bring the, those communities together, the English non-English speakers? How do we bring those people? As just, people who interested in WordPress regardless of language, and that'd be an interesting one to explore the next year or two, as we get closer to exploring when, [00:33:00] when language and translation becomes the, the dominant focus of the program. [00:33:06] Matt: Piggyback off of this conversation of how many max amount of audience I might have the WB minute who has only been around for about six ish months. The biggest piece that it saw was big story that it, so I was Paul Lacey story about Gutenberg and how that Gutenberg has impacted himself, but also his, his opinion on how it impacted. [00:33:25] The community at one saw about 2200 2300 views to the, to the article and about almost 400 downloads to the podcast episode. And of course, anything that you bring up around Gutenberg and. It's impact on whatever mean Gutenberg's impact on whatever the community, the software performance is always going to get a look or view. [00:33:51] Are there any other hard hitting topics you think that might be that we haven't explored yet? By the time this episode goes out, it will be 20, 22 something this year you think, which is kind of interesting that folks should be paying attention to, or the next time.  [00:34:07] Rae: Oh, yeah. I'm interested to see how the acquisition train goes next year in terms of more acquisitions in the space. [00:34:16] And also you can't really get away from Gutenberg. That's going to be a big focus of next year. It really jumped out at me during the state of the word. When Matt was saying, we only have a handful of, of block themes and you'd like to see 3000 by the end of next year. So, interesting to see, I, I guess one of the interesting stories will be how, how blockchains become more commercialized as well. [00:34:39] Are we going to see. More, same authors once w 5.9 comes out are they going to feel ready to really explore that space? We're going to see a lot more of those themes on, on ThemeForest and other kinds of Marketplaces like that. Be interesting to say how that rolls out next year, because after that Matt was talking about, venturing into collaboration as the focus of the next phase of the roadmap for, for WordPress. [00:35:03] So are we going to see blocks wrap up next year or continue, kind of fall into the, into the following year? Yeah. And I, I think the, the other thing is also probably most seriously thinking about volunteers and contributors to WordPress, that was a big focus of the state of the word. [00:35:18] And, and with the lack of volunteers, thanks to you, the pandemic, that'd be an interesting thing to watch next year. Where are we? It's, it's mostly sponsored people who are contributing to WordPress. We, we see a lot, a lot of that. I was going to say, more of a drive to have more sponsored people working on the project, or, we're trying to recruit more people who, who aren't sponsored. [00:35:40] That'd be interesting thing to watch next year, as far as contributions go and how that increases or potentially decreases, I guess.  [00:35:49] Matt: Gutenberg everywhere blocks. Give me all the blocks. Ray, this has been a fantastic conversation. I really can't. Thank you enough. I could go on for another hour, but I'm sure you're sick and sick and tired of hearing me. [00:35:59] Where can folks [00:36:00] go to sign up to the newsletter and say, thanks online.  [00:36:03] Rae: Well, if you interested in joining the repository, it's it comes out every Friday, go to the repository.email to sign up. Thank you so much for having me on the podcast. Matt. I've been listening for years and yeah, it's, it's really an honor to, to  [00:36:18] Matt: be feeding. [00:36:19] No, I, I, I, it's a pleasure and an honor having you here as well. I also love the repository. Go sign up the show. The links will be in the show notes. Hey, if you want to support independent WordPress news or content number one, sign up for the repository. And if you are a big business and you've got some bucks, make sure you knock on raised door to say, Hey, I'd love to sponsor the news. [00:36:44] And then when you're done with her, she will send you my way to spend $79 to join the WP minute membership. Get your hand in the weekly WordPress news in our private discord interact with folks like Ray and others who produce the show@buymeacoffee.com slash Matt report. We'll see you in the next episode. ★ Support this podcast ★

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-HaackLiam DempseyNigel Bahadur ★ Support this podcast ★

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.

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

Josh Pollock, a co-founder of Caldera forms, shared how he was able to have a career in development because of WordPress. He writes about all the extra work needed to build a plugin now and how that is impacting the learning curve in WordPress. Josh is working on a new product called Plugin Machine. He has always been interested in helping developers and this looks like an exciting opportunity for new developers coming into the WordPress space. Go check out what is planned for Plugin Machine and sign up for early access. Sarah Gooding at the WP Tavern shared the latest on the antitrust lawsuit against Google. The Lawsuit claimed AMP was created for the purpose of pushing publishers away from “header bidding.” The full text of the newly unredacted complaint, which was unsealed by a federal judge last week, references research from internal Google documents. It states that internal Google communications identified header bidding as an “existential threat.” We will keep an eye on Sarah's reporting as this concern should continue to be a priority for the WordPress Community. Jetpack is finally formalizing its approach to agency licensing with a new portal launched this week. The program is aimed at streamlining product setup and account billing records for agencies and professionals who use Jetpack on client projects. Sarah was very busy writing about this as well this week. Birgit Pauli-Haack shared this blog post from lead architect of the Gutenberg project Matías Ventura, reviewing theme.json and what's on the horizon for it. Theme.json allows themes to control various aspects of the block editor, from presets to settings to the appearance of blocks and was introduced in WordPress 5.8. Matias covers the cool things that can be done with it already and what will be unlocked in the future. As we have been reporting, WordPress 5.9 is full steam ahead towards the December 14, 2021 release date. The make.wordpress.org is still showing the raised hand emoji where contributors and volunteers are needed. Also over on make.wordpress.org there is a redesign of the Gutenberg page. You can review the proposed updates and if you want to get involved, volunteers are welcome. Search Engine Journal reported that WordPress took a bit of a beating by sharing the

It's the WP Minute! This episode is brought to you by FooGallery, check out their latest WooCommerce integration to start selling images right through WooCommerce, head on over to Foo.Gallery for more information! You know the drill, everything I mention here will be linked up in the newsletter and the blog post. Check out thewpminute.com for the links. News This week Project Huddle has joined the Brainstorm Force family. Project Huddle is a very popular tool that lets you use sticky note-style feedback on your web project and it is platform-independent working with Drupal, Joomla, and Shopify. Sujay Pawar,  of Brainstorm Force, covers the acquisition in his video. If you are selling WordPress products, you may want to take a look at how Appsero has integrated with Gumroad for providing seamless connection while selling your product in Gumroad. You can track selling data of plugins or themes on Gumroad through the Appsero dashboard.  Felix Arntz over on WordPress.org writes an update on his results of why jQuery is the most common JavaScript-based performance problem in themes. Felix ran an analysis using the PageSpeed Insights API, gathering performance reports for the most popular 100 WordPress themes according to the WordPress.org Themes API.  To read all the analysis jump over to his review. But the short story is that if you are a theme developer relying on jQuery, start looking into migrating away from jQuery in your themes. It will be a great step forward to make your themes more performant along with enhancing user experience for all the sites that use your themes. The WPMinute often covers news that comes from the WPTavern. Many of our community members look to WPTavern for fair coverage of news in WordPress. We interviewed Sarah Gooding this week on the WPMinute on WordPress journalism and on where she gathers her information and decides how to cover a story. You can always tell your newsworthy story to the WPTavern with their help to get it ready for publication. Justin Ferriman's name had been circulating over the past couple of weeks with the acquisition of Learn Dash. Justin covers his personal decision on why he sold in his recent blog post. Go check it out for his take on why it was time for him to make a change.  From the grab bag! Paul Lacey shared this redesign of Castos. The refreshed website has a clean look with a beautiful user interface. ps: built on Generate Press with Generate Blocks. It’s a fantastic fast loading website. Check it out. Justin Tadlock wrote an interesting article over on the WPTavern this week about how the Next Web published a hit piece titled Developers hate WordPress — and so should marketers. The claim was that, despite its current 40% market share, folks should start looking at alternatives for a better experien

In the News You’re in luck for 2021 if you are dragging your feet using Gutenberg and the block editor. The Classic Editor Plugin was published in 2018 to help with the transition to the block editor with support through the end of 2021. Now the Classic Editor plugin will be supported through the end of 2022. It may be a good time to re-think your transition plans on your websites. Frontity has been acquired by Automattic. Even though Frontity is a React framework, it doesn't mean that they are going to push React to the WordPress frontend. Matt Mullenweg wrote in his recent blog post that there's still a lot that: We can learn from decoupled systems and we can incorporate those learnings into WordPress itself as we emphasize performance, flexibility, and ease of development.I look forward to Frontity joining WordPress and channeling their efforts into the WordPress APIs, documentation, and Gutenberg's full-site editing tools.” Sarah Gooding over on WPTavern updated the community about the progress on the block-based Navigation editor screen. The screen got a status check last week as part of a Hallway Hangout meeting. Once the Navigation screen is available by default in the Gutenberg plugin, the team working on the feature will be able to gather more feedback. Matias Ventura provides a quick overview of the main areas and features currently underway for 5.9 in Gutenberg. Some are in more advanced stages than others, but together they paint a picture of what this will look like. Some News Around Security On August 13, 2021, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team responsibly disclosed two vulnerabilities in Nested Pages, a WordPress plugin installed on over 80,000 sites that provides drag and drop functionality to manage your page structure and post ordering. If you have any friends or colleagues using this plugin, please share this announcement with them and encourage them to update to version 3.1.16 (or newer) of Nested Pages as soon as possible. On August 3, 2021, the same team initiated the disclosure process for two vulnerabilities discovered in the Gutenberg Template Library & Redux Framework plugin, which is installed on over 1 million WordPress sites. One vulnerability allowed users with lower permissions, such as contributors, to install and activate arbitrary plugins and delete any post or page via the REST API. A second vulnerability allowed unauthenticated attackers to access potentially sensitive information about a site's configuration. Please go ahead and update that as soon as possible. WooCommerce news They are planning to raise the minimum WordPress and PHP requirements needed to use the Action Scheduler plugin. This change will impact any plugin or theme that includes the

In the News WordPress.org was in the news again. This time there was a lot of confusion about WordPress rejecting plugin submissions with the WP prefix. They said this was to address potential trademark abuse. As you can imagine, this sparked some interesting debate (read: controversy) on Twitter and Slack channels. This information ended up being misinterpreted as WPSteward reported, but it generated responses across the entire Community in record time. People legitimately freaked out because of how the information from WordPress.org has been handled in the past. We all have kind of felt this. There has been a track record for this type of communication and folks generally feel as though they are not being heard. Sarah Gooding over at WPTavern and Jeff Chandler over at WPMainline went into further detail about how this was “making mountains over molehills”. Go check their articles out for different perspectives on this news flash. This is also time for a joke. Like what happens when two train conductors walk into bar…ok. Gutenberg keeps chugging right along with the roadmap to WordPress 5.9 and Gutenberg 11.3. Birgit Pauli-Haack and Grzegorz Ziolkowski discuss the preliminary roadmap on the 50th episode of the Gutenberg Times Changelog podcast. Congratulations on number 50! As more and more of us are being asked to pay attention to the changes in the Block Editor in Gutenberg, go check out what Iian Poulson writes. He sees the negative talk turning into more optimism. There is a great long post for developers over at Delicious Brains to review. Getting back to business Immerseus founder Jack Kitterhing tweeted that Immerseus had been acquired in full. His eight-month-old company generated $100k in sales from apparently a single Facebook group marketing channel…and he has a day job…and like 5 other products. I think I should have him on the Matt Report to give us the map to this gold mine… Events WordPress meets education at WPCampus online September 21 and 22nd. Although the conference is advertised for Web Accessibility, go and check out the schedule. There are many panel discussions and general lectures that can help you in your agency. The second annual WPMRR (WP Monthy Recurring Revenue) Virtual Summit will run online-only this year from September 21 – 23. Joe Howard is hosting the event alongside guest host Brian Richards, the organizer behind WordSesh and WooSesh. Justin Tadlock covers all the details over on WPTavern. From the Grabbag Are you seeing yourself leaning towards unhealthy habits in 2021? David Bisset and Cory Miller talk about developer overload on the latest podcast of

Now that WordPress 5.8 is here, what's next? Many people have been using WordPress 5.8 since the release last week. Joe Casabona does a great review on his YouTube channel which covers improvements in the block editor, embedded pdfs and table improvements. Justin Tadlock over at WPTavern does a rundown of plugins that test the theory that many features of WordPress 5.8 can be disabled until you are ready to address them yourself. And the fun won't stop…Hector Prieto tells us What's next in Gutenberg stating: Full Site Editing is the lighthouse goal for Phase 2 of Gutenberg. As such, it's good to remember it is a collection of projects that allow site editing with blocks, bringing powerful capabilities for a smooth editing experience. Don't get left behind (and don't complain) about the features being shipped when you can see a lot of the conceptual work being done around Full Site Editing on make.wordpress.org. Patterns all around me WordPress.org/patterns might be the most exciting “release” around WP 5.8 for me, anyway. A browsable collection of block patterns that you can literally copy/paste into your WordPress page is really exciting. I'm looking forward to seeing what others contribute to the directory when it's available. WordPress on the rise…but not plugins? David Bisset, Post Status chief curating officer, alerted us to a recent decline in active plugins through the year 2021. In contrast to the growth of WordPress, David reached out to others in the community to help draw a pattern: There’s no reason to panic but plugin authors and business owners should be aware of the trend and keep an eye on it. I think the sudden dip is what caught my (and others) eye. While noteworthy, the ecosystem could be “adjusting” as other industries are going through similar trends. Pull up the post on Post Status for more visuals, including riveting graphs. A win for accessibility + WordPress Also over at WPTavern, Sarah Gooding covers the recent decision for Colorado to become the First State to Require State and Local Government Websites to Meet Accessibility Standards. Colorado has more than 4,268 active local governments using WordPress and those responsible for local sites will need to begin the process of creating a plan to ensure they are accessible before July 1, 2024. The WordPress.org Themes Team announced an open discussion and a date for a Zoom meeting with theme authors. This meeting is scheduled July 28th at 2:00 p.m. The team is proposing a new set of guidelines that reduces and simplifies what is currently in place. The BuddyPress team released their block widgets 9.0. The new BP Widget Blocks are Legacy Widgets, rebuilt as BP Blocks. You can also access them in the Block Editor for use in your posts or pages. Events

Its the WP Minute! This episode is brought to you by Search WP. Improve WordPress search by visiting SearchWP.com You know the drill, everything I mention here will be linked up in the newsletter and the blog post. Checkout thewpminute.com for the links. Sshh…no major acquisitions this week. WordPress 5.8 is slated for release on July 20. In just over a month, many users will get their first experience of the template-editing mode. This can be exciting for users allowing them to create custom templates without ever leaving the post-editing screen. New powerful blocks like the Theme blocks and Query blocks will be introduced. Beta 3 of 5.8 is available today for testing. If you're looking for an alternative to Google Maps, Sarah Gooding from WordPress Tavern breaks down some of the recent happenings with the MapLibre Project. Citing she even opened a ticket for Jetpack to consider using it in a future release.  Chris Lema shares his thoughts from the lens of Nexcess/LiquidWeb and other hosting companies on the future success of WordPress. It seems Nexcess might have their own Membership website experience coming for WordPress hosting soon. WPEngine's Summit 2021 dubbed “The Digital Breakthrough Conference” launches tomorrow June 24th.  From the Grabbag The WPWeekly hit the 50 issue milestone, congrats Davinder. Joe Casabona shows you how to submit to the WordPress Block Pattern Directory without code.WebDevStudios is now a VIP Gold Partner with proven excellence implementing WordPress at scale.Gravity Forms celebrate the Gravity Forms Certified Developer Program (Look for more of this from major plugin vendors in the future).I enjoyed this conversation with WPBuffs founder Joe Howard and Nathan Hirsh on his podcast about starting FreeUp.net a home for hiring WordPress freelancers.  If you're a creator in the WordPress or web tech space, I talked about how you can get a job leveraging your existing content over on the latest episode of the Matt Report. 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 at thewpminute.com 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 jum

A major update coming to WordPress 5.8. Beta release 2 is available for testing now. This release expands WordPress' site building capabilities, along with improvements to features users have enjoyed since the launch of the block editor. The release will also include WebP support which 95% of the web browers worldwide use. Check out the WordCamp Europe 2021 Gutenberg demo narrated by Beatriz Fialho. WordPress Taverns’ Sarah Gooding recaps a discussion with Matt Mullenweg and Matias Ventura “The Block Editor Gets Ready to Become a Site Builder” A quote from Matt: For me, 2020 was the year that really felt like people started to see the vision of Gutenberg from four or five years ago, when it was very abstract and they saw it as kind of like the old WYSIWYG editor with some extra lines on it or something,” Mullenweg said. “The first 17 or 18 years of WordPress democratized people putting text into a box. Now we're democratizing design, allowing people to control the boxes.” This has been another huge project for the WordPress contributors and developers. Josepha Hayden Chomphosy is very transparent on the WP Briefing podcast about how difficult it is to run a large open source project and offers suggestions on how to get a big group of people to come to consensus. Eric Karkovick Editor, Writer & WordPress Expert at Speckyboy covers what WordPress acquisitions says about the future and states that the WordPress ecosystem is maturing and consolidating. “Frankly, it's becoming a lot harder for solo entrepreneurs or small development shops to manage a popular plugin. Supporting a large userbase while also focusing on the future could become overwhelming.Thus, it's not surprising to see that some of these products are being sold off to larger firms. We saw something similar happen with internet providers back in the early 2000s. The more mature the market, the harder it became for a small company to carry out its mission. Pretty soon, they were just about all bought up by corporate interests”. Alex Denning along with Iain Poulson tweeted last week that they have created FlipWP and For $300/year the duo will help connect WordPress product companies for sale, with would-be buyers. If all this talk about acquisitions every day has your brain tangled up, Chris Lema posted a straight forward Twitter thread to bring some clarity to this fast-paced space. There are a lot of discussions about companies (and hosts) acquiring folks in the #WordPress space. Now, new marketplaces are getting created to help you sell your company. All of this is great. But not all buyers are the same, and it's not always about the $$$.

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Future Funk & Vaporwave news for the Week of April 21st - May 3rd, 2019Music Used in this episode:Cityman 900 - Consumer history Xdesert sand feels warm at night - pink lemonadeDucat - Cake FactoryDucat - Easy Going for outro NewsSoda City Funk: Now with Visuals! Tim Legend-Soda City Funk Animated by RDRhttps://twitter.com/burgerbr0s/status/1123819040919760898 Yung bae’s music is in a Pac Sun commercial6 years of business casual I’m working with MiddleClassComfort on a couple of videos talking about these past 6 years. Look forward to that this month. https://twitter.com/HMVrs_shibuya/status/1123197118896836608 Today if you’re in Japan, HMVRecords selling a huge collection of MACROSS 82-99 and Neon City Records and cassettes. https://twitter.com/MirrorKissesVA/status/1123471482624118784 brakes ankle and becomes a legendHe reached out to his fans to see if anyone had a wheelchair, @ivnmgna comes to the rescue and the mad lad continues the concert. The concert was streamed live Thanks to @sarahgooding (Sarah Gooding) for the photoshttps://twitter.com/TUPPERWAVEMUSIC/status/1123630727071801344 Tupperwave had a baby boy But that doesn’t stop him from keeping the auction for the Australian Children's Music Foundation - ACMF Part 2 starting on eBay with a signed TUPPERWAVE green vinyl, Private Suite Magazine Issue 5 and a @tvvinpinezm4ll cassette https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2019/04/26/entertainment-news/first-museum-dedicated-japanese-folklore-monsters-opens-near-hiroshima/#.XMroRC-B3GJ Japanese folklore monsters museum Physicalhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0lC43xIWqM YOU ARE ALREADY DEAD coming out on cassette todayThey came out with an awesome promo video on youtube for ithttps://twitter.com/Seikomartjapan/status/1123609468887953409 Cassette Tape Drops 5.9 11PM(EST)/5.10 12PM(JST)!! desert sand 2 cassette release seikomart First re-press from Seikomartjapan Plug the interview Ducat releasing with @coraspect his new album “New Retro” on cassette https://twitter.com/DUCATMUSIC/status/1114216406797754374 Digitalhttps://twitter.com/Neon95vibes/status/1122676739711406081

Welcome to the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and via RSS for your favorite podcatcher. This episode of Post Status Draft is hosted by Sarah Gooding -- another WordPress journalist -- and Brian Krogsgard. In this episode, Sarah and Brian discuss how they do WordPress news, manage working remotely, and handle family life. Links WP Tavern opinion Sponsor This episode is sponsored by Valet. Valet helps keep your clients happy & coming back. They offer expert services and keep the websites they manage functioning flawlessly. They offer preventative care that provides peace of mind around the clock. For more information, check out their website and thank you to Valet for being a Post Status partner.  

Sarah Gooding is an Editorial Ninja at Audrey Capital. When not writing about WordPress, she enjoys baking, knitting, judging beer competitions and spending time with her Italian Greyhound. The post Episode 077: Press Publish appeared first on DradCast.

For this Snippet, we discuss 7 Deadly Sins of WordPress Development by Sarah Gooding. (http://www.pagebreakpodcast.com/snippets/wordpress-development-mistakes)

There are millions of people online and looking to connect. Are they doing the best they can do to attract and meet people? Maybe not, and we have Sarah Gooding, Dating Coach and Product Manager for Plenty of Fish, here to tell us the tips and tricks to making the most out of your online […] The post The Naked Truth About Dating – Love in a Digital World – Finding Love Online! appeared first on WebTalkRadio.net.

Einstein Music Journal is one of my favourite New Zealand music websites. It's run by Aucklanders Nick Fulton and Sarah Gooding. Their blog showcases indie and alternative music from New Zealand and around the world. Recently Nick and Sarah visited Waiheke Island and i asked them along to the radio station where we recorded a live episode of Counting The Beat. I asked Nick and Sarah to select some of their current kiwi favourites.Download the Counting The Beat - CTB meets EMJ podcast