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In the News

WordPress 5.9 (RC3) is here. 5.9 is slated for next week and you still have time to help with testing. Go over to make.wordpress.org to see how you can still help with this important release.

WooCommerce

The WooCommerce development team announced that they have started working on an implementation of custom tables for orders. Sarah Gooding over at WPTavern covers the details of how this long-awaited improvement for the custom tables will be developed. The release is scheduled for Q3. You can check out her article for the details.

Events

The WordCamp Birmingham Organizing Team has unanimously decided to postpone WP Y’all until a future date in April or May when we can safely hold the event for our attendees. Nathan Ingram has a Twitter thread and he will share the updates as they become available.

From Our Contributors and Producers

Have you started using Blocks in your workflow? Nick Diego forked the core social block and created the Social Sharing Plugin. Justin Tadlock over at WPTavern covers how Nick created the social sharing block by forking the social block from WordPress core 5.9. 

Speaking of blocks, Tadlock wrote an article covering Wicked Plugins Block Builder 1.0. (Hey, Vinny’s a producer here at The WP Minute) If you would like to see how Justin created “resource block cards” using the plugin, click the link in the show notes.

Do you interact with the WordPress database? The Wizard’s Collection: SQL Recipes for WordPress is an ebook that is available right now. It is a great resource If you need to update your database skills.

Would you like to recognize the people that contribute to WordPress? Aurooba Ahmed has made a repo on GitHub to list all WordPress people that can be sponsored on the platform. If you know someone, take a minute to add them to the list. 

Andrew Palmer shared a recent interview with Marieke van de Rakt over on the Freemius channel. Marieke, the previous CEO of Yoast shares insights of the acquisition of Yoast to Newfold. Quick tip: It seems like it helps to have a broker and a banker when you need to negotiate. This interview is definitely worth a few minutes of your time.

Not exactly WordPress -  but worth mentioning

Happy 21st birthday to Drupal. 

Wow! Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard for nearly $70 billion.  Remember, less than a year ago Microsoft acquired Bethesda with a loot chest filled with games like: Elder Scrolls, Doom, Fallout, and more. 

IMO this frames Microsoft as “Universe Builders.” I wouldn’t be surprised if you saw them competing with Disney on all fronts within a decade. They do open source stuff too, link in the notes.

Next up: 

The Block Editor Dev Minute w/Aurooba Ahmed

The Transcript

Hi, this is Aurooba and this is your Block Editor Dev Minute! Here’s a cool feature you should know about: WordPress 5.9 is landing soon and with it, so does block support for multiple stylesheets. If you haven’t already adopted block-specific stylesheets, now is the time.

Registering per-block stylesheets means that unnecessary styling is never loaded. This is great for performance and fantastic for maintainability. Being able to add multiple stylesheets per block means you can create more atomic styles. Let’s say you have a custom block that includes a button, instead of creating new styles for the button in this block, you can simply pull in the stylesheet for the regular Button block for consistency and efficiency.

I think this is going to be pretty handy. Read more about this and the other fantastic features coming to WordPress 5.9 in the Field Guide on make.wordpress.org. Thanks for listening!

The Gutenberg Minute w/ Birgit Pauli-Haack

Transcript

Happy New Year! My name is Birgit Pauli-Haack. Here is your Gutenberg Minute. Next week, Tuesday, WordPress 5.9 will be released. Theme, plugin developers, and site builders are already testing their products against release candidate 3.

5.9 is the biggest release since the block editor’s debut in WordPress 5.0. As it ties all the pieces, dare I say blocks together into a new and powerful site-building experience.

Learn.WordPress.org has a new self-paced course “Simple Site design with Full Site Editing” meant for site builders and owners. You’ll learn how to create a personalized site design without any coding. Shorter workshops are also available: “How to Style Your Site with Global Styles' or How to use the List view”.

On the WordPress Social Learning space on Meetup.com, you find dozens of events covering Theme development, Color Styling, and a lot more. If you need to educate users, clients, or meetup members on the latest Gutenberg features, Anne McCarthy has created a list of talking points and resources to learn more for presenters and trainers. Keep up with Gutenberg updates, via the Gutenberg Changelog podcast at gutenbergtimes.com/podcast.

Links:

Release Candidate 3 WordPress 5.9 https://wordpress.org/news/2022/01/wordpress-5-9-rc3/

Simple Site Design with Full Site Editing https://learn.wordpress.org/course/simple-site-design-with-full-site-editing/

WordPress Social Learning on Meetup

So you want to talk about full site editing? 5.9 Edition https://nomad.blog/2022/01/15/so-you-want-to-talk-about-full-site-editing-5-9-edition/

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

• Daniel Schutzsmith
• Vinny Mckee
• Andrew Palmer
• Jeff Chandler
• Aurooba Ahmed
• Birgit Pauli-Haack

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