The WP Minute

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You'd be hard pressed to find a business, both online and brick-and-mortar, that didn't invest in their website over the last three years. With WordPress marketshare showing only a sliver of marketshare decline since pandemic heights, it's still a force to be reckoned with.

Putting page builders and coding tools to the side: The client + agency collaboration process of designing a website can be one of the most costly parts of any new WordPress project. Atarim aims to solve this issue using their software aimed at WordPress professionals. Vito Peleg, Atarim's founder, recently lead their first angel fundraising round. While he didn't share the total value of the deal with me, it does provide a solid year and a half of runway, according to his prediction.

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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 referencing Gutenberg.

Abha Thakor tweeted "One of my favorite things to support has been this photography celebration with the new #WordPress Photo Directory. It will be so wonderful to enjoy views from across the world and discover where existing and new contributors are located."

WP Minute members have continued the discussion of FSE, building websites, CSS, and how relevant WordPress will be in the near future. Brian Coords shared the article from Geoff Graham about not being sure how to WordPress anymore and Lesley Sim tweeted that WordPress is still very complicated and may be 3 to 5 years away from being seamless.

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

• Michelle Frechette
• Joe Casabona
• Daniel Shutzsmith
• Brian Coords
• Sam Munoz
• Lesley Sim

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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-Haack
• Eric Karkovack
• Andrew Palmer
• Sam Munoz
• Daniel Shutzsmith

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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 contributors to stabilize APIs before merging them into core. The Gutenberg plugin has been the safe place to experiment but suggests that these APIs being put into core is a real problem. Adam is looking for feedback on this until September 7th. 

Winstina Hughes has a guest post this week on the WP Minute about sponsoring underrepresented & minority WordCamp speakers. We encourage you to read or listen to the podcast episode.

New Member

This week we welcome Cory Miller from Post Status to the #linksquad crew.

If you’re not a member yet, go to buymeacoffee.com/mattreport to join.

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

• John Locke
• Cameron Jones
• Daniel Shutzsmith

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

This week we bring you a guest post by Winstina Hughes. Read on as she shares about a very important movement.

The WordPress community has expressed tremendous support for the call to action to sponsor underrepresented/minority WordCamp speakers by removing the financial burden of their travel and lodging expenses. But who made the call, and what inspired it? Listen in to learn who made the call to action, what inspired her, the goal of the initiative, and where to seek support or offer sponsorship.

Links

Four Freedoms

Community Team

Inclusion Initiatives

Support Inclusion In Tech

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