The WP Minute

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Welcome back to the WPMinute's Special Edition interviewing our new community lead, Raquel Landefeld. Raquel is the event coordinator at Elegant Themes and will be coordinating content and interviews for the WPMinute.

A Little History on Raquel

Raquel manages the Meetup Pro Community for Elegant Themes. There are over 50 Divi chapters all over the world. Raquel coaches Meetup organizers on how to human where the emphasis and focus is on human connection. She also helps manage the Elegant Themes Facebook group with over 70K members and coaches the moderators on how to moderate the group with kindness.

Raquel discusses how there are rules in the Facebook group to address new users of Divi and where users can be directed for specific help.

With so much WordPress news, the challenge is centered around channels supporting independent content on the Discord server for the WPMinute. Matt and Raquel discuss the mission of the WPMinute, how the news is curated and how members interact.

The WPMinute brings the human voice from the group presenting in a short form podcast. Raquel shares her great ideas of sharing short video clips and when we can meet in person, hosting a small WPMinute group meeting at a conference.

If you want to become a member of the WPMinute and you want to take part in the weekly WordPress news, join our merry band of "WordPress newsies" and chat it up, get yourself mentioned in the newsletter and get credits in the show, become a contributor or producer of the show!

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In the News

The release of WordPress 5.9 is coming this month. There are many performance enhancements that will be part of this release. In addition to editor and front-end performance enhancements, lazy loading images changed, resulting in a 30% faster page load - in some cases. Go over to make.wordpress.org to check out the numbers.

Sarah Gooding, over at the WPTavern covers the new API in Gutenberg that will be released with WordPress 5.9. This new API will allow you to lock individual blocks and override template locking which had been the only way to lock blocks.

Events

As WordPress 5.9 comes out at the end of January, there is a Mega Meetup to provide information that WordPress professionals should know about. You can sign up for the meetup which will be held Thursday, January 20, 2022. Look for some great exploration of Blocks and what to expect around design changes. 

WooCommerce Updates

Heads up. Starting with version WooCommerce 6.5 (scheduled for release in May) WooCommerce will require PHP 7.2 or newer to work. PHP is rapidly changing and it was determined that PHP 7.2 was the version that still had a significant number of WooCommerce active installs running. If you have an older version of PHP running it will still work, but you will not be able to continue to update this plugin. You also risk the usual performance and security issues by running older versions.

From Our Contributors and Producers

There are several more 2021 “year in reviews” from the WordPress community. 

Brad Touesnard from Delicious Brains shares a nice post about how the company's growth has tripled and how the team is growing.  He also covers the ACF (Advanced Custom Fields) acquisition along with other updates. The article is worth a few minutes of your time to read.

WPCloudDeploy shares the blogpost of how they had 10 versions of their product released in one year. They rolled out more than 50 new and improved features last year. This is a pretty impressive post representing a lot of work from that company. 

There is also an update from Rich Tabor. He announced that WP Experts has acquired his Login Designer plugin.

Did you know that NFT marketplace aggregator Flip, co-founded by UpOnly podcast host Brian Krogsgard (yes the guy from Post Status), has raised $6.5 million in a seed funding round?

What is Flip you ask? Flip aggregates NFT marketplaces under one roof on its platform, allowing users to easily navigate through available NFTs to buy. 

Ever wonder why competing with Google search is next to impossible? Well, a new search engine needs an index of the web. And many sites don’t welcome any web crawler that isn’t Google or Bing. This article from Fast Company covers the challenges of competing with search that crawls sites with automated software.

Brave, which is a privacy-focused web browser, had seen continued growth in 2021 with 50 million users. The Brave browser does not track your searches or share any identifying data with third-party companies. If you would like to break free from the big companies, you can give them a try.

WordPress News is hard to turn into a real business. This week over on the Matt Report Rae Morey shares how she built The Repository newsletter with her background as a journalist.

Two Great Segments:

The Learn Minute with Hauwa Abashiya Transcript

Happy New Year. It's Hauwa Abashiya here from the Make training team here with your Learn WordPress minute.

If you're not familiar with Learn WordPress, it is a learning resource on .org for anyone who wants to learn how to use, build for and contribute to WordPress.

The Make training team wrangles all the content on Learn and we use the Sprint methodology to determine what we are working on and our timeframe for delivery. This month we are focused on creating content for 5.9 and need your help.

We have identified a number of existing lesson plans and workshops that need to be revised, as well as the new features coming to 5.9 that need a corresponding lesson plan and workshop. For the full list see our January 2022 Sprint post on .org, links provided in the show notes.

If you're interested in helping create content, leave a comment on the post or drop us a message in the training team Slack channel. We also have some great workshop videos that you can follow.

As a reminder, workshops are practical on-demand videos that show viewers what they can do with WordPress. Lesson plans are guides for facilitators to use while presenting at events or within educational environments.

Visit make.wordpress.org/training for more information and check out learn.wordpress.org

The WooMinute with Bob Dunn Transcript

Hey, it's BobWP from Do the Woo, here's your 1-minute of WooCommerce The innovation we see happening with WordPress will reflect directly on WooCommerce. When I asked Matt Mullenweg at the State of the Word to give me some Woo, he said "in 2022, the thing I'm most excited about is embracing Gutenberg and the block interfaces for everything with Woo. Woo still has some ways of doing things which are more tied to the Classic Editor, or shortcodes, or other ways of creating pages. There are some plugins and experiments around Gutenberg and blocks. And I think that I would love if Woo was one of the best plugins in the world for embracing how to use Gutenberg.

Then back in September when we had WooCommerce CEO Paul Maiorana on the podcast, he added his insights, "because as we're able to see things like full site editing coming around the corner for WordPress itself, and as we are able to take some of the lessons learned from that and apply them to WooCommerce as a whole, we're going to be able to utilize the lessons learned in just the FSE experience in general, for making that experience great for store owners earlier." So I can safely say, hang on to your hats with Woo in 2022 as I'm sure we are going to see some very cool things playing out. And you can find these conversations and moreover on DotheWoo.io. Thanks for listening.

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

• Birgit Pauli-Haack
• Liam Dempsey
• Nigel Bahadur

Support our work at https://thewpminute.co...

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It's the WP Minute Shopping Show!

I'm your host Matt and I am delighted to share 5 great WordPress products with you this week.

What's the WP Minute Shopping show all about?!

You'll get to hear from WordPress product owners pitch their product in 1-minute or less. If you're interested in their product, please visit their store. The better they pitch, the better chance they have that you might be buying -- maybe even spice things up for you with a discount code.

You'll have to keep listening to find out.

For product owners, it's a great way to talk about your cool new feature, version, or add-on. Want to support The WP Minute project and get your pitch heard? Buy 3 spots on the WP Minute Shopping Show!

Tune into the WP Minute Shopping Show each time you see it on the feed to learn more about products, their owners, and what deals they might have in store for us.

WordPress products on the show today:

• WP Pusher
• Wicked Block Builder
• NewsletterGlue
• Recapture
• Easy Support Videos

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 

In The News

The first Release Candidate (RC1) for WordPress 5.9 is now available! Your feedback helps the community check that nothing is missed. Given the tens of thousands of plugins, themes and differences in how millions of people use the software, now is a good time to test.

To really understand the year in core, you can dig deeper into contributor data with a lot of numbers and charts over on make.wordpress.org. It is an amazing amount of work that everyone can be proud of. But it should be noted that the data does not include contributions on GitHub repositories like Gutenberg.

Angela Jin shared the proposal for the Block Pattern Directory. It will soon be live and ready to accept custom Block Pattern submissions! In anticipation of this new directory, questions have been raised around the best practices for submitting Block Patterns. Before you submit your block pattern, make sure that you have some basic automated checks in place. If the submitted Block Pattern passes the checks, it will be published immediately or it will be flagged for manual review. You can comment up until January 14, 2022.

Did you hear that Yoast is headed to Shopify? There will be an online event held on Thursday, January 20, 2022. It starts at 4:30 pm CET / 1:30 pm EST.  Joost de Valk, shares on his blog the business reasons that Yoast was built for Shopify, which is not open source.

Events

Post Status is having their first-ever Twitter Conference. They are picking up the torch from Hey Pressto and carrying forward with an All-on-Twitter Conference to be held Tuesday, May 24, from 9 am – 4 pm EST. Check the link on how to apply and present in 15 tweets.

From Our Contributors and Producers

WSForms posted Website Resolutions for 2022. This article is a good reminder to review your current website and make adjustments if you do not have all the innovative things to make it awesome in 2022.

If you would like to stay focused in 2022 and need motivation there are several blogs that review the past year. Syed Balkhi shares his year in review that includes many acquisitions in the WordPress space. One data point of note: Awesome Motive is now 200+ team members strong.

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

• Birgit Pauli-Haack
• Michelle Frechette

Next up: The Creator Clock, with Joe Casabona

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 

WordPress 5.9 Beta 4 was released this week. Sara Gooding over at the Tavern wrote that there are a few important changes to note in this release regarding how the WordPress admin will direct users who are exploring block themes. There is an incompatibility message for redirection depending on whether the theme is using blocks or the customizer. 

The release team has determined that a 5th beta will not be necessary and the official release is scheduled for January 25, 2022.

Events

The call for speakers is now open for WordCamp Europe 2022. We will have to keep an eye on how this in-person event will be safely organized. It appears that you will also be able to participate online.

From Our Contributors and Producers

A software vendor has lost a civil case in a first-time ruling by Italian courts on open source licensing. The case involved Ovation’s GPL licensed Dynamic.ooo software, which is a plugin for the open-source Elementor platform for building WordPress websites. 

The software was distributed without including acknowledgment of the original work, including information about changes tthat he defendants had made to the software, and with no mention of the software’s copyright holders. 

There is a fine levied against the defendants every day until the software is brought into compliance. 

WPCS.io, an Amsterdam-based provider of the world’s first multi-tenant WordPress cloud platform to create SaaS solutions with WordPress, announced that they are raising a substantial seed investment from Arches Capital.

WPEngine announced on their blog that they have acquired the Frost theme, adding to their open-source cache of WordPress solutions. 

This theme was created by Brian Gardner and focuses on block editing and the full site editor. Gardner re-joined WPEngine in late September of this year as Principal Developer Advocate.

This ended his “gap year” after staying with WPEngine during a transition period of the hosting company acquiring StudioPress, a company he was a partner in previously.

WPEngine will be issuing full refunds to active customers.

Matt Mullenweg lays out a debate over the future of the internet. Mullenweg, Automattic CEO and WordPress founder, joins ‘TechCheck’ to discuss the future of their internet. The WordPress developer explains the difference between open vs. closed platforms and which will see the most growth. This will be interesting to watch next year.

Interesting TikTok news

Is it possible that TikTok brought more traffic than Google this year? The viral video app seems to be on a high, finishing the year with the most cumulative internet traffic of any domain in the world — more so even than Google, which typically holds the number-one spot. Cloudflare reviewed how the Internet went for TikTok in 2021. 

Next up Michelle Frechette with a year-end wrap-up.

Don’t forget to read Michelle’s contributor post: In-person events: The good, the bad, and the fearful.

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

• Jeff Chandler
• Nigel Bahadur
• Dave Rodenbaugh
• Daniel Schutzsmith

New Members:

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