Episode 73: MergeBot and WordCamp US Updates

Today’s episode is sponsored by Post Status. It’s a great resource for news, updates, and other things happening in the WordPress ecosystem. You can subscribe to the site to get additional resources, like interviews, podcasts, posts, and even a Slack channel where you can talk to others about all types of topics. Members also get an email that is perfect for busy people who want to see the most important information and astute observations. Go check it out at poststatus.com.

Some of the topics you’ll hear about today include:

Brad’s trip to Scotland to meet up with the UK contingent of the Delicious Brains team. He got to go to a local WordPress meetup in Edinburgh.

Brad’s updates: Feedback on the beta version of Mergebot has been good, but the public launch is still a ways off. Also, Brad attended contributor day at WordCamp US and started hacking away at a plug-in to relegate image resizing to a background process.

Pippin’s updates: They’re hoping to launch a few updates next month. There have been some nuances in the way that category-level restrictions and redirects work in Restrict Content Pro that will be changed in the 2.7 update, for example. They’ve also released Zapier for AffiliateWP, and Brad and Pippin discuss Zapier’s uses. EDD 2.7 will also hopefully be released in January.

Announcements that came out at WordCamp US: One of the most important was that WP is not doing scheduled releases anymore. Instead of updates being released every three months, there will not be any more set dates for major version updates.

Brad and Pippin discuss some concerns about the Calypso dashboard.

Links and Resources:

Mergebot

WordCamp US 2016

Image resizing plug-in

Zapier

Calypso

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Transcript

INTRO: Welcome to Apply Filters, the podcast all about WordPress development. Now here’s your hosts, Pippin Williamson and Brad Touesnard.

PIPPIN: Welcome back to Episode 73. This time Brad and I are going to go over some updates and then talk a little bit about some things that were announced at WordCamp US last month in Philadelphia, or actually earlier this month in Philadelphia. But first–

This episode is sponsored by Post Status. Post Status is a project by Brian Krogsgard and is a resource for news, updates, and other things happening in the WordPress ecosystem. It is a wonderful website to kind of pay attention to what’s going on.

Brian also has a members’ only section where you can subscribe to the site and get access to special resources that include video interviews, additional podcasts, blog posts, as well as a Slack channel where you can jump in and talk with other members of the Post Status community on everything from development to e-commerce to life and health and many, many other subjects. It’s one of my favorite resources for WordPress news, updates, and conversations.

Brad, I believe you’re also a member, aren’t you?

BRAD: I am. I am a member, and I love Post Status. I love the emails that Brian sends out to club members so that we can get — it basically just condenses all the news down to, like, little bite sized pieces that you can consume quickly, and so it just saves you from having to kind of troll through all of the WordPress news sites and figure out and separate kind of the noise from the signals.

PIPPIN: Yeah, when time is a premium, which it always is, those summaries are awesome.

BRAD: Yeah. It’s good to get his, like, viewpoint on things too. I really appreciate that.

PIPPIN: Yeah. Brian has been around for a long time, so he’s got some pretty astute observations and pays really close attention to what’s going on.

One thing I did want to mention real quick is that Brian just posted an interview that he did with Matt Mullenweg shortly after WordCamp US and talked a little bit about a new WordPress development cycle, the WordPress Rest API