The WP Minute

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Spencer Forman of WPLaunchify is back to explore the future of the WP stack and how it might impact you as an agency owner or WordPress freelancer.

It wasn't too long ago that HTML/CSS and some PHP knowledge was all that you needed to develop moderately advanced sites, now, the future looks a bit different.

Will you leverage React, Gutenberg, FSE and all of the new technology in as WordPress advances? Spencer's hopeful for the future of WordPress and shares his opinions in today's episode.

Read our related article: What does full site editing mean for WordPress freelancers?

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News

Matt Mullenweg recently announced that he would be personally running Tumblr for a while. Tumblr lost their CEO and Matt is making this his top priority within Automattic for the immediate future. Keep an eye open for improvements in the community.

Are you or your clients using Wordpress.com? Wordpress.com is now making it possible to purchase certain plugins directly on the plugin page. 

The plugins that are available right now are for WooCommerce subscribers with a Business or eCommerce plan. Keep an eye out for more paid plugins appearing in 2022.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy on make.wordpress.org shared the potential release timing for 2022 of WordPress. This release looks like this right now:

6.0 – Late May

6.1 – Mid October

If you have project management skills or can lend a hand on these next major releases, contact the release team.

The Preliminary Roadmap for Gutenberg 6.0 has also been published by Matias Ventura on make.wordpress.org.  There are four phases outlining the long-term roadmap.

Events

The schedule of WordCamps is published over on WordCamp central. Many are in the early stages of planning and don't have a date yet. WordCamp US has been scheduled September 9-11, 2022 in San Diego, CA.

From Our Contributors and Producers

To celebrate Black History Month Underrepresented in Tech will tweet about a black tech innovator/inventor every day in February.

Google is burying FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) in its sea of abandoned experiments. Sarah Gooding over at the WPTavern writes that Google’s FLoC ran in limited markets and received overwhelmingly negative feedback from the tech industry that left Google with an uphill battle to get enough buy-in to proceed. So now Google is proposing topics. Stay tuned for the feedback on this new proposal.

Squarespace rolled out an expansion of their Member Areas program. This allows publishers to earn money selling instructional and other kinds of content online through private members-only sections of their Squarespace website.

Would you like to see block standardization across the web? Joel Spolsky has an interesting blog post asking what if blocks were interchangeable and reusable across the web? He suggests a non-proprietary, block protocol that will be open and free. His article is an interesting one to read.

The WPMinute Contributor spotlight is on Aurooba Ahmed this week. She has created a new plugin called the superlist block for WordPress. This is Aurooba’s first publicly released plugin on WordPress.org. The plugin lets you add other blocks within the list items essentially making it supercharged.

Listen to Joe Casabona’s Creator Toolkit on Creator Clock Minute

Transcript:

Hey everybody, Joe Casabona here and you are on the Creator Clock. Over the last few weeks, I've spent a bunch of time putting together what I call creator toolkits. This is based on a podcast I had several years ago, but it's all about tools that you can use to build specific WordPress sites.

If you want to see more creator toolkits, you can head over to creatorcourses.com/toolkits. Or you can continue the conversation with me over on Twitter @jcasabona.

New Members:

Thanks to our new member Svilena Peneva from NitroPack. 

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

• Birgit Pauli-Haack
• Michelle Frechette
• Daniel Schutzsmith
• Davinder Singh Kainth
• Joe Casabona
• Jeff Chandler

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

Support our work at https://thewpminute.com/support
Get the newsletter at https://thewpminute.com/subscribe

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

We hosted our first WP Minute Live Twitter Space covering learning WordPress.

It was Bring Your Own Link (BYOL) style where our guest panelists brought a link to share with the audience. Here were the guests that appeared on the live show:

• Hauwa Abashiya, Freelance Project Manager transitioning into the WordPress space; Board Member and Volunteer at Big Orange Heart including WordFest and one of the Make Training Team Reps.
• Joe Casabona, Joe started his career almost 20 years ago as a freelance web developer before realizing his true passion, which is sharing his years of knowledge about website development, podcasting and course creation to help creators, and business owners.
• Birgit Pauli-Haack,  Birgit is the curator of the Gutenberg Times and co-host of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast with Greg Ziolkowski. Automattic sponsors her work as a full-time developer advocate for WordPress. 
• Daniel Schutzsmith, Web Manager at Pinellas County Government, one of the Producers at The WP Minute, maintainer of WP Livestreams Directory, and soon to be launched WP Developer’s Toolbox.
• Matt Medeiros, Director by day at Castos.com; Creating community contributed news and journalism at thewpminute.com part of Matt Report media network. 

• Hauwa Abashiya: https://learn.wordpress.org/| https://make.wordpress.org/training/2021/08/08/who-can-learn-help/ | https://learn.wordpress.org/social-learning/
• Joe Casabona: https://wplearningpaths.com | https://maven.com 
• Birgit Pauli-Haack

Episode transcript

[00:00:00] Matt: This event is brought to you by malware and blog vault. Check out mal care.com and blog vault.net, helping you secure and restore your WordPress websites. Quite literally thank them without them. I wouldn’t be able to be doing the WP minute live and Daniel wouldn’t have that nice new gold chain around his neck.

[00:00:18] Moving forward. I’d ask all of you to join the link squad, hashtag link squad, producers, and contributors, and the discord server share, vote and discuss their newsworthy links with others. When you’re part of the link squad, you’re part of making weekly word, press news. And we’re talking about one of the, one of the biggest topics, 5.9, and learning a little bit more about 5.9, Daniel, your segments.

[00:00:46] Daniel: Yeah. And really what we’re doing here too, for folks that don’t know the w the WP minute is that it’s contributor, sourced news. We provide links basically every week of what we see out there in the industry. And so we often have discussions around those links, similar to what you’d see in a newsroom.

[00:01:04] It’s just done a discord. And so we’re, we’re talking with each other and talking about the various things we like about a link or whatnot 

[00:01:11] Matt: WVU minute live is bringing you that discussion right here on Twitter spaces and streaming platforms across the internet, someday discuss hashtag link squad topics with us live and follow at the WP minutes.

[00:01:23] Stay. 

[00:01:25] Daniel: Yeah, given the, the new release of WordPress 5.9, we’re going to focus on this week’s topic, being, learning WordPress. And so everyone’s brought at least one link, perhaps two or three that that share a little bit about learning WordPress. And so we’re going to go through once and we’re going to see how that goes and how long that takes.

[00:01:43] But first, let me introduce our folks here. We already know kind of Matt, Modaris our fearless leader here, director by day at dot com. Creating community contributed news and journalism at the WP minutes. Part of the Matt report media network. We also have how ABA Shaya freelance project manager transitioning into the WordPress space, a board member and volunteer at big orange heart, including word Fest, and one of the make training team reps.

[00:02:10] Thank you for being here. How all the way from London, I believe. Yep. That’s right. Alright. Joe, Casabona coming straight to us from Pennsylvania. Punxsutawney Phil come up soon. Joe started his career almost 20 years ago as a freelance web developer before realizing his true passion, which is sharing his years of knowledge about website development, podcasting, and course creation to help creators and business owners.

[00:02:38] And I’m subscribed to seven of his podcasts. They’re all amazing. So checking out a peer get ball. They have. Beer is the curator of the Gutenberg times and co-host of the Gutenberg changelog podcast with Greg Koski automatic sponsors for work as a full time developer advocate for WordPress[00:03:00] 

[00:03:01] and my cell phone, Daniel should Smith, a mild-mannered web manager at Raquel’s Pinellas county government down here in Florida by day. But I’m also one of the producers at the w few minutes and a maintainer of WP live streams directory, which you may have heard me talk about before. And since we launched WP developers toolbox, so let’s get to it.

[00:03:23] We’re going to go through each person. They’re going to share a link. We’re going to tweet out that link. So as you’re going along to speakers, let me know if you’ve already tweeted it out and I’ll go into your profile and find it last year. How you’re up first? 

[00:03:39] Hauwa: So I’ve just tweeted my now. And of course I have to tweet out the.wordpress.org, because I think it should be the number one tweet that goes out anyway, resource for everybody coming to learn about WordPress.

[00:03:53] So if you don’t know about it, it’s a resource that’s been built by the community and we have got lesson plans, workshops, and courses, and we also have social learning spaces on that. 

[00:04:11] Daniel: That’s great. And what what kind of things can we find there specifically, like on courses and such as it, is it like Courses around full site editing and things like that, or, 

[00:04:20] Hauwa: yeah, so we as part of a 5.9, the training team, so I’m one of the reps on their make training team, along with Courtney Robinson and Pooja discharge.

[00:04:31] And we took an undertaking to actually get content out ready for 5.9. First time we’ve done it and, please see that we did get some contacts out there. And one of them has been a course that was done by Roxy and it’s about full site editing. So it’s from a user’s point of view and it’s the first part.

[00:04:49] And I believe the second part should be coming out later this month. And we do have a couple of workshops and lesson plans are out there as well, that are like 0.9.

[00:04:59] I’m just going to tweet out that ...

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News

WordPress 5.9 - Joséphine was released this week. There is a lot of good stuff to check out on blocks and themes. If you would like an understanding of how this major release with Full Site Editing (FSE) will impact you as a freelancer, you should read Eric Karkovack’s article right here on the WPMinute. You can learn some new features and consider how these changes will fit into your business.

While reporting on the updates of 5.9 there was a lot of concern about the Customizer going away with this release. Anne McCarthy explains all you need to know about the new site editor and the Customizer. Go check out her review on YouTube.

Sarah Gooding reported over on WPTavern that the WordPress Community Team will relieve volunteers of the burden of COVID 19 enforcement for WordCamps and Meetups scheduled with 50+ attendees. The Guidelines were posted over at make.wordpress.org.  

The big picture goals for WordPress 2022 were published on make.wordpress.org. The goals are broad right now and there are many teams which you can join and contribute to. There is still a lot of work to be done so go check out the areas where you can help.

Speaking of the future of 2022, WordPress 5.9 sets a strong foundation for so much more for the future of WordPress. There is a post on the  Gutenberg times that paints a picture of the future that this WordPress release provides. There is a table of contents to jump to the areas of immediate interest.

Before the dust settles on WordPress 5.9, the roadmap for WordPress 6.0 is published on make.wordpress.org. This is a high-level overview and the aim is to consolidate and expand the set of customization tools introduced in 5.9. 

WooCommerce

WooCommerce 6.1.1 is available. This release resolves a bug introduced in 6.1.0, rolls back the deprecation introduced in 6.1.0, and improves WooCommerce’s support for WordPress 5.9.

Events

Post Status is having their first-ever career summit scheduled for April 8, 2022 (9:00am – 5:00pm CDT). The conference is for job-seeking and hiring in WordPress. If you are interested in speaking at this conference you can sign up on the WP Career Summit Site.

Join @schutzsmith - Daniel Schutzsmith (January 31st 3pm EST / 8pm UTC) as he hosts WP Minute Live: Learning WordPress. Roundtable guests will be @hauwazhiya - Hauwa Abashiya, @bph - Birgit Pauli-Haack, and @jcasabona - Joe Casabona.

From Our Contributors and Producers

Helen Hou-Sandi (who many know as the lead developer on the WordPress open-source project) has joined GitHub this week. This is an exciting opportunity for Helen and we wish her the best. 

Elementor published their 2021 Wrapup with an impressive statistic of over 10 million active websites. 

Lesley Sim wrote a really thoughtful and researched article over on Post Status about WordPress as a Commons. There has been a lot of discussion on Twitter and different Slack channels concerning WordPress since the State of the Word talk this year. This article is worth reading to help frame an open discussion around WordPress - the open-source project.

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

• Birgit Pauli-Haack
• Michelle Frechette
• Davinder Singh Kainth
• Andrew Palmer from Bertha.ai

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

The WP Minute is an experiment in community journalism for WordPress. If you want to support WPminute, the team, and all of those that contribute – head on over to buymeacoffee.com/mattreport.

Buy us a digital coffee for as little as $5 OR better yet! Join our community of WordPress newsies, get access to our Discord server, private podcast, behind the scenes on how the news is made, and get your voice heard on the podcast. 

Support our work at https://thewpminute.com/support
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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...