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

News

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

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

Security

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

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

Events

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

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.

Vito Peleg, Atarim’s founder, recently led the first angel fundraising round for their agency collaboration tool. He and Matt Medeiros had a great interview right here on the WP Minute. 

Anders Norén has a new WordPress theme Björk that he announced on Twitter. Björk is built for the Site Editor and Global Styles features introduced in WordPress 6.0, with 15+ block patterns and seven different theme styles that you can switch between with the click of a button.

Ganga Kafle (KafleG), a representative of the WordPress theme team and a member of WordPress Nepal has an open letter to Matt Mullenweg suggesting that the next WordPress release be named in honor of Mr. Ujwal Thapa, an important member of the WordPress Community who lost his life to COVID. We have not been able to locate a response from Matt Mullenweg at this time.

Mark Zahra, a WP Minute member, shares his opinion on his website about the state of WordPress blogs. Today we see a mix of older blogs with a solid reputation, newer blogs with unclear intentions, and some that are putting money ahead of everything else. Go spend a few minutes of your time reading about where Mark thinks this is all headed.

A big congrats to WordCamp Kathmandu on their 10th anniversary! Sunita Rai shared on Twitter what an incredible experience it was joining the organizers' team as a speaker wrangler.

Alan Edwards tweeted about being up all night producing an epic AI-powered Gutenberg block to generate beautiful images from a text prompt in seconds and inserting them into your WordPress posts and pages. If you would like to test it out, sign up to get the instructions emailed to you.

learn.wordpress.org needs help with setting the priorities for learning WordPress. They would like to have users complete the Individual Learner Survey to help the team with analysis. Please take a couple of minutes of your time to complete this survey.

Next Up

Amber Hinds with the Community Minute - “TWMP on Deaf Awareness Month: “Captions” 

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

• Jeff Chandler
• Andrew Palmer
• Eric Karkovack
• Brian Coords
• Birgit Pauli-Haack
• Daniel Shutzsmith
• Michelle Frechette
• Mark Zahra
• Amber Hinds