The WP Minute

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With no major acquisitions, events, or feature releases this week, we can all take an exhale of relief. Today’s theme is: Reflection. 

WP Minute Contributor Joe Casabona reflects on the State of the Word hosted by Matt Mullenweg. He shares strong opinions on how you might give back to WordPress by taking care of yourself, first. 

“When I was in college, I learned about Saint Ignatius and the idea of Cura personalis, or care of the entire person. I’d like to think of contributing more like this”

WP Minute Producer Michelle Frechette represented Post Status in an interview with Matt Mullenweg about acquisitions in the WordPress ecosystem. Matt says Automattic is participating in all parts of the ecosystem from investment to purchasing companies. 

Nexcess shares 22 WordPress predictions to look forward to in 2022. WP Minute Producer Daniel Schutzsmith was quoted on his take of the Full Site Editing Knowledge Gap.

David Bisset asks us to reflect on what we think the biggest news items for WordPress are this year. Send him your message to be included in the round-up.

Reflecting on all of the…awards? 

The WP Weekly Awards for 2021 concluded.

Elementor claimed the most voted page builder, Yoast won for best SEO plugin, and I…came in 4th place for the Matt Report podcast with the WP Minute ever so slightly behind, holding down the 15th spot. 

I can’t wait for next year!

And speaking of audio…

@Francisco on WP Slack has shared an update about Openverse and where the next iteration is leading us. He shares some mockups of what searching and discovering audio + images might look like on the platform. 

From the grabbag

• Daniel Schutzsmith started a WordPress Twitter community
• Protocol asks if Matt Mullenweg can save the internet 

• Treehouse was sold

Contributor audio segments by:

• Michelle Schulp
• Michelle Frechette

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

• Jeff Chandler
• Joe Casabona
• Michelle Frechette
• Daniel Schutzsmith

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In the News

State of the Word 2021 happened this week. If you would like to hear the complete audio or read through the transcript from the live event check out the link over on the WPMinute. There is even a mega-thread of our favorite clips over on Twitter.

GoDaddy covered the event as well including their own timestamps for the video stream.

I have three takeaways from the event that I think are important: 

1. WordPress still wants more volunteers and contributors
2. Gutenberg is bigger than WordPress 
3. The acquisition train is fueled by the influx of the larger tech economy 

Speaking of acquisitions:

You may want some insight on how to approach selling your company. Check out Freemius’ Gamechangers —  where videos of some of the largest acquisitions in the WordPress space have occurred. The first interview in the series (from December 8th) is with Syed Balki from Awesome Motive. 

WPMinute Contributor Kim Coleman, co-founder of Paid Memberships Pro received 27 likes on her Twitter question on the Freemius account when they announced it: Is this the total list or are there any women in your series?

I asked Vova for a comment leading into the inclusion of this article in today’s episode: 

We are not happy about it either and take full responsibility for this mistake. We are going to rectify it. We already have Marieke from Yoast to join and are waiting to hear from additional female founders.

The growth of WordPress

Is Elementor the hero we asked for?

Joost de Valk published the sixth iteration of his CMS market share analysis on his blog and found that the W3Techs tracked Elementor. It appears that much of the new growth for WordPress as a CMS is tied to Elementor since they are dependent on each other. 

Elementor sites cannot exist without WordPress, so they are tied to each other. But I think the conclusion is fair that of all those new sites being built with WordPress, a very large portion of them, is being built with Elementor.

Events

WordCamp US 2022 will be held in San Diego this September. No dates have been announced but you can sign up to be an organizer now.

From Our Contributors and Producers

WP Minute ecommerce correspondent Dave Rodenbaugh published his latest ecommerce minute discussing the issues with the supply chain. If you are waiting for products this week and want to understand the crisis better, go check out that episode.  

Can you still make a living building WordPress sites? This Tweet from Jack Forge got some traction on Twitter and many people responded about how WordPress is great for enabling people to make a decent living. There are some fantastic stories in that thread.

Eric Karkovack does a recap of 2021 on SpeckyBoy. He covers the foundational shifts that we have seen in WordPress. These shifts include the changes to WordPress 5.9, acquisitions, and how all of this will lead to something bigger in the new year.

With Full Site Editing coming late in January 2022, you may want to experiment with David Gwyer’s first release of theme.json theme generator. If you're interested, you can sign up over on themegen.app.

There was a lot covered in the State of the Word and Security was discussed (as usual). If you are interested in monitoring all your WordPress sites for security vulnerabilities found in plugins, themes, and WordPress core there is a new security product that you can check out over on Product Hunt.

If you are a community member who publishes course content and may have missed this, you can now publish on WP Dev Academy. If you would like to know when this platform is available from Alex Standiford you can sign up over on WP Dev Academy.

FINALLY not WordPress related but still notable

Apple launched a redesigned open source website. You can explore some of the projects built on open source. It is pretty interesting stuff.

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

• Jeff Chandler
• Birget Pauli-Haack
• Eric Karkovack
• Dave Rodenbaugh
• Daniel Schutz Smith

New Members:

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State of the Word 2021 just concluded in NYC.

Just over 2 hours of updates around the community, the software, and the vision of Matt Mullenweg. This episode is an entire recording of the livestream broadcast over YouTube including audience + listener questions.

If you enjoy content like this, please consider giving back to WordPress or donating to this publication.

Episode Transcript

oh, but really, really, um, welcome to everyone. Thank you all for being here. This is very exciting. Um, I am excited to see all your faces. It's been many years since I've seen some of you, um, in case you have not noticed we are changing our hashtag this year. It is state of the word written out, but remember to do your capitalization for people using reading.

Assistive technologies, readers, screen readers. I got it. Uh, there is going to be a Q and a portion after this. It will be here from our live audience, but also some folks at home. Um, uh, he's the at-home portion for us right now. So if you have any questions, get them ready. If you're here, there's a microphone here that you will be able to ask your questions at.

Or if you are watching at home, you can head on over to the YouTube embed of this, uh, live stream. And we are monitoring the chat there for questions as well. Um, that is all that I have to say. Um, and I think that's probably all that you want to hear from me anyway. And so tonight giving our annual state of the word where we talk about everything we've done this year and everything we hope to do next year is of course WordPress project.

Co-founder Matt Mullenweg.

Wow. Wow. We're really here. So, uh, welcome everybody. And I've been told to ask if folks over here can just move up one row. Um, if you don't mind where we're going to try to fill out the front and bed that. This is so exciting and so honestly fulfilling to be together again. Oh yeah. I guess everyone's starting to cascade

for those joining us live. We are here in New York city. It is, the sun is setting. We've got a few invited community members from all of the world. Thank you all for coming.

We had people joined by plane, train and automobile. How long was the train ride? Two and a half day train ride to get here. So that is definitely the most interesting. I actually am also came a, probably a two and a half day trip, but all the way from Antarctica. So if you notice a little bit of a raccoon tan, that was because I had very strong sunglasses and I guess not strong enough sunblock as that's me have some penguins.

And while there I read a lot of books and learned a lot about Antarctica and one that particularly stood out actually a leader who's inspired me for a long time was Ernest Shackleton. And I knew a lot about his endurance journey where ship crashed or got stuck. And then they sent back. Basically they saved every person who was on that journey, but a story I didn't know about him, which I learned about was.

Journey's to the south pole. He turned away only 97 miles away from reaching the pole, which is pretty darn close if you've ever tried to get, I think I flew, like if you add it all up, like almost 7,000 miles back. So the turnaround of the last 97 and actually as this was happening, as I was reading about this, I was thinking about the version 5.9 release.

So you might know that today was a scheduled or right around today was the scheduled originally scheduled date for the WordPress 5.9 release. And we made a very, very unusual decision for WordPress to delay that release for about a month. So we're going to release it in January, but it felt like we were so close and we decided to turn around.

And, but very, I believe it was entirely the right decision as it was for Shackleton. He made it back alive. I think his saying was better to be alive, donkey than a dead lion So we don't want full site editing, which is coming in 5.9 to be a dead lion But it was also I think, a moment for reflection, because of course we talk about and the philosophy part of WordPress, how deadlines are not arbitrary and whatever we were making that decision, which wasn't that long ago, I just delayed the release.

I wasn't thinking so much about what's happening right then the kind of month before. But what did we do? 3, 4, 5 months before. So I think it's an excellent time to reflection for reflection. And actually some of this has started on Anne McCarthy's blog. We started talking to her comments section, uh, in public, of course, has everything happens on WordPress about what we can learn from this that we can start putting into effect, not just for the release coming next month, which will be fine, but for the big 6.0, which is coming next year, I've even heard some rumblings that 20, 22 might be a year.

We aim for four releases instead of just three, but let's not get too crazy just yet. Where are the beginning of the state of the board? Not the end. Um, uh, we had a very, very exciting 20, 21 and really it was quite fulfilling to be part of it after such. Well, it's still part of a very challenging time in humanity.

One of the things I want to highlight first was our eight new core committers, both the core and themes. So let's do a round of applause.

for Kelly, David, William, Isabel, Johnny, Jeff JB, and Tanya. I'm so excited, uh, that they now have ability to change the code that runs 43% of the internet. Um, another update is we, we focused a lot this year on wordpress.org. And, uh, one I'd like to highlight to start is around the new sites and this, we do have.

Some guests audio. We weren't able to get people from around the world all to New York, but we have some audio that working in the redesign of the news page in wordpress.org, the general inspiration was last year's state of the word presentation and overall jazz aesthetics, because the blog doesn't have much imagery.

We took some time to explore shapes, typography, layout, and colors, to get a successful result that expresses the playfulness of jazz.

I really designed this. Might've been like WordPress 3.0, so it was exciting to start to loop back to some things and wordpress.org. Another thing we were able to launch on wordpress.org was open verse, which I swear we named before Facebook decided to pivot

open versus a surgeon openly licensed to search for an image, download and put it on your site,

give attribution to the creator

and that's it.

So open verse is part of we've started to expand how we think about our mission from just being about the code and the tools to allow people to publish to actually what they're publishing. So open verse was originally called creative common search was actually part of the creative commons, nonprofit, but sort of cost and running it's.

Um, they decided they were going to shut it down or put it somewhere. And we found a home for it on wordpress.org, which I'm very, very excited about. We have over 600 million creative commons images licensed through it, and we're going to have audio coming up at the end of January. There'll be 2 million audio clips there.

And, you know, applying open source to content is a little tricky, but the creative commons of course has a long legacy there, I think 20 years now. And so we're very, very excited to continue carrying that torch forward, to create as much open content on the web as possible. Another thing we got on WordPress dot o...

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WP Minute producer Dave Rodenbaugh of Recapture.io discusses what the supply chain issue is with eCommerce and why it is still an issue.

To address this issue, local laws have been modified to allow containers to be stacked higher, but they are not moving quickly enough. About 80,000 jobs are still open and that’s why items are still not moving. For example, cars and car parts are sitting in containers and can’t get to where they are needed. 

According to Bloomberg from December 4th the average waiting time for a ship to be unloaded is 20.8 days! It used to be 6 days - pre pandemic. And the cost of shipping containers has also risen dramatically the past two years as well. The freightos index shows that the current cost is about 14K but the goods that may be on that container are impacting small businesses.

So this is the issue in a nutshell. Until we can move that freight completely from all points in the journey, we are going to continue to see small shortages and price increases everywhere. This will probably continue for months.

If you have other eCommerce topics you would like Dave to talk about, tweet at the WPMinute and he will put it on the show.

Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash

It's the WP minute. This episode is brought to you by mind size. If you're looking for monthly WooCommerce report, check out mind size.com. Today's episode is written and produced by Dave Rodenbach [email protected]. It's his returning episode on the e-commerce minute discussing the.

At the supply chain, if you're out there going, man, am I going to get my presence? This holiday season for my kids? They will kind of give us a little insight into that and, and the impact the supply chain has on the e-commerce world. We really hope you enjoy today's episode with Dave. If you do thank him on Twitter.

If you want to think the WP minute support the WP minute, by going to buy me a coffee.com/matt report, that's buy me a coffee.com/matt report support WordPress media and independent. Like this. Okay. Let's get into today's episode. Hello again, Dave, Rodenburg here with the e-commerce minute. This episode comes to you right after black Friday, cyber Monday 2021.

This week. I want it to talk about an ongoing crisis in e-commerce that you've probably heard a bit about, but you're likely confused as to why it's still a problem. And that would be the supply chain issue. So we've been hearing about supply chain delays since the beginning of the pandemic here in the U S.

You probably suffered through some shortages of consumer goods, like toilet paper buying, fresh meat, like chicken or beef. And now you're probably seeing those items on your shores store shelves again, but everyone keeps talking about supplier, June issues, supply chain issues doesn't make sense. Right. So let's unpack that.

First of all the United States imports over 41% of its consumer goods from China. There's some smaller amounts that come from Vietnam, India, and Germany. The total is about 56% of, of its total consumer goods come from overseas. That figure has remained fairly consistent for the last four years.

According to jungle scout. So 40% of all those imported goods pass through one of two ports in the United States, either the port of Los Angeles or the port of long beach, for those that know their California geography, that basically means the greater Metro area of Los Angeles is responsible for 40% of all consumer goods coming to the United States.

That's huge. Now let's spice that up a bit during COVID. Consumer online spending increased dramatically. So those goods started. Over in containers. Once they arrive, the workers would unload the containers and then move them to trucks or railroad cars for further distribution in the United States. But before the pandemic even started, there was already a truck driver and warehouse workers shortage to the tune of about 61,500 jobs, which under the pandemic skyrocket at another 33% higher to 80,000 jobs.

And no. Fill them. So without these essential workers to move freight, the containers just stacked up at the ports. And eventually the ports build up causing the ships with new containers, to idle in the Harbor, waiting to be unloaded, which then created a line of ships all the way out into the Pacific ocean at its high point of over 96, unloaded ships that.

The number today. So recently the local laws in California, specifically in long beach, long beach and Los Angeles were changed to help get some of the ships to unload by stacking containers higher than was previously allowed by. But there's still a bottleneck of moving that freight from port to its final destination.

Those 80,000 jobs are still open right now. And that's why we're seeing some items on shelves remain unstopped or very low stock. And you see emails from stores to say shop early. So we still have stock during the holiday. That's also why things like cars have increased in price, both new and used ships that are required in every vehicle.

Now are simply sitting at sea and can't get to their final destination parts to prepare cars are sitting in containers at port and can't get to the garages that need them. My own repair garage told me a story about holding one of their cars for five months because they couldn't source a part to repair.

Anywhere in the United States at any price, they were willing to pay anything. Still couldn't do it. That story is unfortunately a very common. According to Bloomberg from December 4th, the average waiting time for a ship to be unloaded has reached an all-time high of 20.8 days almost 21 days. The average for most of the summer before September was about six.

Days. So it's more than tripled. And the cost of shipping containers themselves has risen dramatically over the last two years, pre pandemic the cost of a shipping container hovered somewhere between one thousand five hundred and two thousand five hundred a container at peak. This summer containers from China to the west coast, ran over 20 found.

Dollar's a container currently we've dropped to a much lower point of about 14,000 9, 34 as of December 3rd on the FBX, which is the Freightos Baltic index that talks about the current prices of shipping containers. But for a container that likely has between 30 and $40,000 worth of goods on average, that is a terrible cost increase for most small businesses.

So that's the supply chain issue in a nutshell, until we can move that freight completely from all points in the journey, we're going to continue to see small shortages of things everywhere and price increases for almost everything. And it's going to keep going on for months to come and for. I hope that was helpful for you this week.

If you have other e-c...

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After appearing on the Post Status State of WordPress News roundtable, I felt like I had a bit more to say about my experience with WordPress news.

WordPress news isn't a heavily trafficked topic on the web. How does a publisher build more than just a side gig from putting out WordPress news? How do we define WordPress news?

I asked Kim Coleman, co-founder of Paid Memberships Pro, to see if she had any questions around the topic and if she had any interest in recording a podcast episode about it. Thankfully she was willing to chat and share her questions and her opinions on how we do WordPress news.

If you enjoy today's episode, please say thanks to Kim on Twitter or consider becoming a supporting Producer here at The WP Minute!

[00:00:00] Matt: It's the WP minute, a special WP minute because I am joined by a special coat. Co-host the title of this episode is called challenges of a WordPress news business. I have my great friend here, the lovely Kim Coleman, Kim, welcome to the program.