The WP Minute

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Whoever thought that Apache web server would be de-throned in it’s prime? Hello NGINX. We see you Cloudflare. Red Hat and Fedora linux showed up, but then the world went faster together with Ubuntu.

Intel dominated the chip space forever. Still does, technically, but AMD and Apple are going after their lunch including the paper bag it’s packed in.

Sprinkle in the open source coding languages, tooling, and protocols over the last 30 years and everyone shouts open operability — until they get control — and then it’s “our way is better than your way, see ya later.”

Probably for all of the reasons you do too.

I love the software, it affords me a career, a specific lifestyle, and it puts food on the table. I think WordPress is the best piece of software around to help drive a technical workforce.

First, because of its flexibility. Second, because it’s open source. But not open source like Swift — which is locked into Apple. WordPress can run and do a lot more than other “closed” open source projects.

The open source software could be powerful for local community programs that train, spread awareness, and deploy solutions around WordPress which leave real impacts on society.

An approachable solution to publish and consume local government topics which are crucial to a town’s population. Non-profit and news that sorely need a low-cost solution to democratize publishing. Understanding how programming, the internet, and technology works for a young (or old!) demographic.

I want WordPress to win because of that, not because it makes a prettier website than Wix.

If you love open source, you have to love the fact that you’re not in control.

It’s going to be dealing with the ups and downs, letting humans settle the issues at hand. You hate a feature? Too bad, wait for someone to change it. Your favorite part of code just got shipped? Now stand and defend its existence in each future version.

Not in control? Fork it.

Me? No. You? Doubt it.

But GoDaddy could. It wouldn’t be easy.

None of this is easy. Who said it would be?

Open source is giving up direct control, knowing that you have to deal with the wait: volunteering, funding, resources, project direction, etc. It means dealing with the flaws of humans or herding cats, as some call it.

Otherwise you put someone in control, let them decide all the things, and you get something that isn’t open source. It’s called Apple, where they build a great commercial product but only release a sliver of it through open source.

It’s the brittle timeline of WordPress we’re living in now. On one hand, we need a leader like Matt, on the other he’s a benevolent dictator that doesn’t want to leave.

On one hand, he needs the community to rally around the cause, volunteer at all the things, and generally drive innovation for good. On the other hand, he can walk into any board room with his 43% of the pie, and raise enough money to do it all himself — WordCamps and all.

But he’d still have his kryptonite: Time.

I don’t envy his position, plus I think he does way too much.

.org release lead, CEO of Automattic and the dozen+ products it has, Tumblr guy, investor, I think philanthropist, and then he has to live a life.

My gut tells me that none of this is moving fast enough for him.

WordPress competing with other platforms, WooCommerce being more real, and exercising this desire to weave open source (through WordPress) into the fabric of web technologies.

And that last part, is what got us into this recent mess.

I’m not going to link up his tweets or screenshot them, you can check out this article by MasterWP if you want to see an archive of his “WP Deplorables” moment.

The straw that broke? Was a tweet in reference to Newspack.pub and Matt’s urge to defend the importance of open source + WordPress in journalism. Specifically for local journalism. Which as I stated above, I’m 100% in favor of.

The cost of running a media business is already high enough, we don’t need fees and software to be the blocker to publishing stories that impact a society.

And it was in this moment replying to a GoDaddy employee that Matt summoned his Will Smith impersonation and slapped an entire group of humans for no reason at all.

Well, there is a reason, and one I’ll talk about in a moment, but it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair to GoDaddy, it wasn’t fair to their employees that do give back, and it wasn’t fair to us as a community to see our leader break like that.

I mean, I Am Legend was one of my favorite movies.

They’d have no choice but to give back to to the project 100x what they do now.

There are a lot of great people building things for WordPress at GoDaddy these days. Even if you include my fanny-pack wearing ex-boss that lets more bad tweets fly than good. They’re employing a lot of people that help usher WordPress along.

In fact, when it comes to supporting the community, GoDaddy is great. They reach out to me and my content creating colleagues to see if there are ways to support us. You might even hear a sponsorship spot from GoDaddy on a future podcast episode.

Jetpack recently passed at a sponsorship opportunity with me. I never heard from anyone at WordPress.com, you never see a WordPress ad anywhere. Either because they don’t need it, or they don’t realize they need it.

This is where Matt will start to lose ground. Connecting with the community.

But let’s cut straight the chase: While GoDaddy spends on marketing and showing up at WordCamps, it’s not like they directly employ 40 people to commit to WordPress core.

I’m not as smart as Mullenweg, but GoDaddy’s current market cap is just north of $11 Billion dollars. Back of the napkin math tells me that half a million a bucks a year to ensure the open source software which nets you a few billion a year, is not a hard pill to swallow.

This seeming lack of dedication to re-invest back into the open source project by a company with a fiduciary responsibility to get shareholders paid, would send any Fresh Prince into a tailspin.

And it’s not just GoDaddy, it’s every company. It’s Matt’s Five for the Future.

Just imagine if GoDaddy called Mullenweg’s bluff and threw a million dollars of salary to WordPress core every year. If Matt really wanted to be in control, as we all like to pontificate, what would Automattic do?

Call it? Raise it? Fold?

Along with not being as smart as Matt I’m not an Anthropologist either, but imagine the dynamics of a jousting match like Automattic and GoDaddy investing resources into WordPress core?

Maybe in that timeline you’d love Full Site Editing? Maybe I wouldn’t want to rip my face off trying to set up a new menu item.

And as these two titans clash to click the commit button, other organizations from around the globe start to weigh in too. I mean, we don’t want Automattic and GoDaddy to be the ONLY ones...

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We have switched over to Slack from Discord.

News

There has been a lot of feedback for full site editing in the latest release of WordPress. The team over on make.wordpress.org is looking for people to sign up for usability testing by June 24th. This outreach program is going to try something new and pair up members of the program with community designers. Once paired, they will then find time between June 20th and July 1st to record a 15-minute call on Zoom going through one of two tasks: Creating & applying a new header, and using and customizing patterns.

WordPress.org is now strongly recommending that theme authors switch to local hosted webfonts. Sarah Gooding writes over on WPTavern that a recent German court case fined a website using Google-hosted webfonts. In order to comply with GDPR - Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation - WordPress themes should switch to locally hosted webfonts.

Are you still recovering from WCEU? There are two reviews from media supporters that you may want to check out. Bob Dunn and Matt Medeiros recorded their experiences.

And there are nearly 3000 event photos. If you would like to see those you can view the photo album from WCEU on Flickr.

Andrew Palmer reviews his WCEU experience right here on the WP Minute.

Nathan Wrigley interviews Matt Mullenweg on the Jukebox podcast hosted at the WPTavern. Mullenweg shares his reflections on WordPress and the changes to come in the future.

WooCommerce:

WooCommerce 6.6 was released and you can find the complete changelog over on the WooCommerce site for the recent changes.

From Our Contributors and Producers

Eric Karkovack writes about the CMS landscape (including WordPress) on the latest at the WP Minute. Eric makes a good argument about why a freelancer would not choose WordPress for building a website.

What’s with the WordPress vibe? Changes and Acquisitions seem to be published weekly now. Acquisitions in #WordPress have created some concern among smaller businesses and entrepreneurs as we compete with bigger companies with much larger budgets. Mark Zahra has a little survey on Twitter asking if you had to double down on one area in the next 6 months with the goal of generating growth, what would it be?

There were several layoffs reported lately from Elementor and Envato.

James Giroux tweeted about the status of @envato and @elemntor announcing significant redundancies in the last week. You can help those affected by:

1. Celebrating wins publicly and calling out individuals by name

2. Adding to their LinkedIn profiles

3. Introducing them to your network

Next Up:

Simplified Business Minute by Sam Muñoz

The Case for Not Automating Client Interactions

New Members

We would like to welcome Mark Westguard to the WP Minute community and thank Sarah Gooding and Carrie Dils for buying a digital coffee to the WP Minute.

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

• Eric Karkovack
• Raquel Landefeld

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In this episode, Andrew Palmer of Bertha.ai reflects on his time at WordCamp Europe.

If you were stuck at home to watch from afar like me, your FOMO was probably running at 110%. Unlike Andrew, I missed out on the awesome talks, after parties, and the ever important hallway track. Missing friends and colleagues in one of the most beautiful places in the world! I'm happy to see it was a successful event.

If you had a great time, or appreciate their hard work, say thanks to the WCEU Organizing Team.

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Strattic was acquired by Elementor. Miriam Schwab, co-founder of Strattic writes: 

“Life is interesting – sometimes outcomes are obvious, and sometimes what ends up happening kind of blows our minds. When we set out to build Strattic, we expected to follow the usual path: raise Pre-Seed, Seed, A rounds etc. An exit was always on the table, but who knows when that would be or how that would look? It was hard to imagine.”

Well, imagine no more as her team brings Jamstack to Elementor. A move that should add a lot of value and expertise to the cloud offering of Elementor. Stay subscribed to hear an interview with Miriam on this podcast. 

Julien Melissas tweeted that his company Craftpeak was acquired. Craftpeak is complete with web solutions for craft breweries. 

Good news! If you’ve been struggling with FSE, WordPress 6.1 is set to improve that experience, writes Sarah Gooding on the Tavern. See the roadmap for 6.1 and learn what’s ahead…all the way to 2025?!

Brian Coords continues to challenge the WordPress status quo over on MasterWP in two featured posts today. First, When the Cathedral Owns the Bazaar, a fresh take on the age-old dilemma: Automattic, a WordPress agency, and an open source ideology walk into a bar.

Capping off his second post right here on The WP Minute, where he asks Where will the WordPress middle class go? Rebooting a concept that I wrote about a while back about the blue collar digital worker.

Matt Cromwell and Lesley Sim have officially announced Glam That Plugin! Check out the announcement YouTube video where Lesley looks great and Matt…well he’s Matt.

The grab bag is back! And it’s filled with threads!

Kim Coleman co-founder of Paid Memberships Pro has an interesting thread on taking a product focus sabbatical.

Matias Ventura added more commentary to the WCEU fireside chat with Mullenweg and Josepha Haden Chomposy. He also extended these thoughts around the admin experience in a Make WordPress post.

Alan Sschlesser urges that theme.json is not the replacement we’re hoping for in WordPress themes.

Phil Crumm chops the head off of headless WordPress solutions. Stating that in terms of headless, “it’s (WordPress) falling short.”

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

• Eric Karkovack
• Daniel Schutzsmith
• Birgit Pauli-Haack
• Raquel Landefeld

Support our work at https://thewpminute.com/support
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Thanks Pressable for supporting the podcast! What hosting should feel like...nothing! https://pressable.com/wpminute 

Spencer Forman from WPLaunchify has a creative way to find new WordPress customers that may just surprise you!

Then look at any of these three things...

1. Above the Fold: Do they have the three things any site needs when visitors first arrive? (hint: What's the Pain? | How do they Solve the Pain? | What's the Call To Action to get the Solution?)

2. Ways To Contact: Do they have the BIG 3 ways listed clearly in a way that is easy to find? (hint: Phone | Email | Social ). It's amazing how many companies don't list a phone number, when a virtual number is almost no cost today with Google Voice and similar.

3. Add To List: Do they have a way for visitors to the site to add their email to a list (hopefully one that is for marketing automation and not just collecting dust). It costs virtually nothing in time or money for them to implement this feature, just like a fishbowl in the old days for folks to drop their business card to win a prize. It's the only way for them to avoid losing potential leads.

Once you've looked at any or all three of these, email them with FREE advice on how to fix their problems, and preferably setup a 15 minute call to speak with them on Zoom and learn more about what they do, how they do it, and whether they have someone who currently helps them with their WordPress website.

Remember:

There was a world of people doing business BEFORE social media and paid online advertisement. It still exists... it's called "The Golden Rule" ;-)

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