Thanks Pressable for supporting the podcast! What hosting should feel like...nothing! https://pressable.com/wpminute 

In the News

State of the Word 2021 happened this week. If you would like to hear the complete audio or read through the transcript from the live event check out the link over on the WPMinute. There is even a mega-thread of our favorite clips over on Twitter.

GoDaddy covered the event as well including their own timestamps for the video stream.

I have three takeaways from the event that I think are important: 

1. WordPress still wants more volunteers and contributors
2. Gutenberg is bigger than WordPress 
3. The acquisition train is fueled by the influx of the larger tech economy 

Speaking of acquisitions:

You may want some insight on how to approach selling your company. Check out Freemius’ Gamechangers —  where videos of some of the largest acquisitions in the WordPress space have occurred. The first interview in the series (from December 8th) is with Syed Balki from Awesome Motive. 

WPMinute Contributor Kim Coleman, co-founder of Paid Memberships Pro received 27 likes on her Twitter question on the Freemius account when they announced it: Is this the total list or are there any women in your series?

I asked Vova for a comment leading into the inclusion of this article in today’s episode: 

We are not happy about it either and take full responsibility for this mistake. We are going to rectify it. We already have Marieke from Yoast to join and are waiting to hear from additional female founders.

The growth of WordPress

Is Elementor the hero we asked for?

Joost de Valk published the sixth iteration of his CMS market share analysis on his blog and found that the W3Techs tracked Elementor. It appears that much of the new growth for WordPress as a CMS is tied to Elementor since they are dependent on each other. 

Elementor sites cannot exist without WordPress, so they are tied to each other. But I think the conclusion is fair that of all those new sites being built with WordPress, a very large portion of them, is being built with Elementor.

Events

WordCamp US 2022 will be held in San Diego this September. No dates have been announced but you can sign up to be an organizer now.

From Our Contributors and Producers

WP Minute ecommerce correspondent Dave Rodenbaugh published his latest ecommerce minute discussing the issues with the supply chain. If you are waiting for products this week and want to understand the crisis better, go check out that episode.  

Can you still make a living building WordPress sites? This Tweet from Jack Forge got some traction on Twitter and many people responded about how WordPress is great for enabling people to make a decent living. There are some fantastic stories in that thread.

Eric Karkovack does a recap of 2021 on SpeckyBoy. He covers the foundational shifts that we have seen in WordPress. These shifts include the changes to WordPress 5.9, acquisitions, and how all of this will lead to something bigger in the new year.

With Full Site Editing coming late in January 2022, you may want to experiment with David Gwyer’s first release of theme.json theme generator. If you're interested, you can sign up over on themegen.app.

There was a lot covered in the State of the Word and Security was discussed (as usual). If you are interested in monitoring all your WordPress sites for security vulnerabilities found in plugins, themes, and WordPress core there is a new security product that you can check out over on Product Hunt.

If you are a community member who publishes course content and may have missed this, you can now publish on WP Dev Academy. If you would like to know when this platform is available from Alex Standiford you can sign up over on WP Dev Academy.

FINALLY not WordPress related but still notable

Apple launched a redesigned open source website. You can explore some of the projects built on open source. It is pretty interesting stuff.

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

• Jeff Chandler
• Birget Pauli-Haack
• Eric Karkovack
• Dave Rodenbaugh
• Daniel Schutz Smith

New Members:

Support our work at https://thewpminute.com/support
Get the newsletter at https://thewpminute.com/subscribe