The WP Minute

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Was Gravatar hacked or not? It depends on what you have read or what your definition of “hacked” is I suppose. The password breach monitoring service HaveIBeenPwned alerted users to a large-scale data leak by Gravatar, an add-on service for user profiles owned by Automattic.

In October 2020, a security researcher published a technique for scraping large volumes of data from Gravatar, the service for providing “globally unique avatars," HaveIBeenPwned warned. This technique allowed the details of just under 114 million users to get into hackers' hands.

Sarah Gooding over at WPTavern wrote that Automattic said they were not hacked. The Gravatar service gives you control over what you want to share online through their API.  So this information can be made public and somebody can scrape that data and use it nefariously. 

Jeff Chandler pointed out that this has been an issue since 2009 and shared the information from developer.it. Security researchers and privacy advocates have warned about privacy attacks on Gravatar for years.

Gravatar did not send out notices about the breach and left it to the user to accept the risk or use something other than Gravatar.

WordPress updates

There is a new directory for FSE block themes. Over on make.WordPress.org during the run-up to the release of 5.9 developers should note that the directory names for templates and template parts are being changed.  With the release of 5.9 these will instead be:

templates

parts

It's pretty straightforward.

Events

Ellen Bauer will be sharing a twitter space with Justin Mahinyala discussing #Freelance opportunities for developers, designers, writers, and marketers in the #WordPress ecosystem. They will share advice and tips on how to get started. DM any questions you want them to talk about.

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Our inaugural Member Sunday Spotlight is here and we’re honored to highlight Daniel Schutzsmith.

A thrice WordCamp organizer, now carving out a niche for WordPress livestreams with his latest project, WP Livestreams. With a passion for livestreams throughout the pandemic, Daniel stumbled into a real need for livestream creators and viewers.

With so much great WordPress content being streamed, he hopes to make his website the go-to destination for the community to find new content across YouTube, Twitch, Twitter spaces and whatever technologies come next. Quite a natural direction for someone who thought he’d hang his hat on radio broadcast before getting into programming.

It was a real treat to listen to this interview lead by former WP Minute Managing Editor, Paul Lacey. Don’t forget to say hi to Daniel in the WP Minute Discord server or on Twitter.

If you enjoyed today’s episode, please share it on social media.

Consider becoming a WP Minute member too! Join our annual membership including access to the Discord server, getting Producer rights to this very news channel and take part in the the #linksquad. We’re nearly 50 strong, so why not join us? Grab your membership at buymeacoffee.com/mattreport

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This episode is brought to you by Mindsize. If you’re looking for monthly WooCommerce support, look no further than Mindsize.com

You know how it goes, everything I mention here will be linked up in the newsletter and the blog post. Check out thewpminute.com for the links.

In the News

There was a lot of excitement this week around LTDs (LifeTime Licensing Deals). There were several posted reactions to the email sent from Delicious Brains, the new owners of Advanced Custom Fields. The email was not well-received (to say the least) by some users that have had Lifetime Licensing because it was asking for a part-time donation for the product. Twitter exploded with reactions and many in the WordPress community responded as well.

We covered this on the WPMinute and Sarah Gooding also wrote about both perspectives — positive and negative —  in her article over on the WPTavern. 

The bottom line is that the lifetime licenses are tough, and very few still remain in the WordPress space. ACF (read: Brad) will continue to honor the pricing for legacy customers.

With the recent delay of WordPress 5.9 the team is looking for testers for Beta 1. Angela Jin posted the link for the helpful testing guide. Feel free to participate and let them know how you “broke” it. Testing is very important for a successful release. 

A JSON Schema for theme.json and one for block.json are now available to help with building block-based themes. The schema can be used by code editors to provide things like tooltips, autocomplete, and validation while editing theme.json or block.json.

The WP Live Streams Directory pick of the week

“Building Modern WordPress Plugins With Plugin Machine (Part 2)*” presented by Josh Pollock, formerly of WPCaldera, on December 7th at 11pm UTC / 6pm EST / 3pm PST. In Part 1 of his talk, Josh laid the foundation of the mess that modern tooling has become for plugin development.

In Part 2, Josh will show us a demo of Plugin Machine, a new app he’s building that helps developers create plugins and add features to them easily. You can catch this by registering for the Pittsburgh WordPress Developers and Designers meetup.

Other News From Our Contributors

Shopify Engineering announced that they had their biggest Black Friday Cyber Monday ever in 2021. They were proud of the uptime and traffic across the infrastructure along with their partner Google Cloud.

Liam Dempsey shared this post by Andy Stitt thanking WordPress for helping him find Digital Accessibility. This is a great article of how WordPress helped Andy advance and allow him to concentrate on accessibility now.  

Giving Tuesday

And now, I’d like to introduce you to Mary Job, who’s leading the Uwani Hub building project. If you feel compelled to support their efforts, consider clicking on the link to donate.

Quote/Transcript for show notes:

Thank you Matt for the opportunity to speak briefly about the Uwani Hub Building Project on the WP Minute Podcast.

I started this building project this year so that we would have a better chance of achieving our vision 2030 WordPress goals, we currently have 9 workstations in our current space, we need at least 30 of those which is what the building allows us the opportunity to have. We are giving ourselves a 10 year, now 9-year timeframe because we do not want to stretch our volunteers too thin, and because this is not just about numbers, but making an actual impact on each individual we teach WordPress program.

As you may well have heard in the News, my country Nigeria is lacking in lots of basic infrastructures, we can’t boast of consistent electricity, by choosing to do WordPress in our community, we are looking at impacting our participants not only with a tool useful for their personal empowerment but also one they could export career-wise without necessarily leaving our country shores. For us at the hub, those 5000 people would not just be a number, but people with faces we are going to build the WordPress community with, together.

WordPress is central to this cause because it is one tool that I have come to know so well enough to teach to others, and more importantly because the future of WordPress lies in the hands of the coming generation (our current & future teenagers). If we can make them see what we all see when asked “Why WordPress?”, then we would be leaving a mark, not just today, but also tomorrow.

Folks can go to support us at Uwani.org or on our Open Collective page, we sincerely hope our programs get well underway from the year 2022 if we can finish the building before the end of January 2022.

Continuing our Giving Tuesday coverage with a note from Dan Maby on his success with his campaign yesterday at the Big Orange Heart.

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

• Birget Pauli-Haack
• Daniel Schutzsmith
• Liam Dempsey
• Nigel Bahadur

Thanks to the new Contributing Members that joined this week: 

• Mary Job
• Ellen Bauer
• Sam Munoz
• Hauwa Abashiya 

Thanks to supporting members

• Joe Casabona who bought me 3 coffees saying “Thanks for everything you do in the WordPress space!”

Speaking of coffee, you can buy Me a coffee to support the show or join as a member for $79 for the year to get access to the private Discord server. Become part of our merry band of WordPress newsies and get involved in the weekly WordPress news like everyone I mentioned above.

That’s it for today’s episode, if you enjoyed please share it on your social media, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser. Don’t forget to share share share this episode with others and jump on the mailing list

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It seems a year can’t go by without the pesky lifetime WordPress license topic popping up to spice up the holiday conversation.

A struggle dating back 7 years ago to the month when Jeff Chandler covered, now defunct, Sidekick.pro where then owner Ben Fox shared his pricing experiments.

When Brad Touesnard purchased Advanced Custom Fields back in June, he was swiftly reminded how hard lifetime license pricing really is. I mean, he did his due diligence, he knew what he was getting into. But the lifetime license woes lingered well before the new owners arrived. Elliot Condon wrestled with it, “get it all for one price forever” that is, until he finally revised pricing for 2020 to build the business a better runway.

Lifetime license holders will get **all** ACF Pro software updates forever. They won’t be required to pay for version 6.0 or any other major or minor releases in the future. They signed up for updates for life, so we’ll continue to deliver on that promise forever. 8/10

Amidst a fumbled start, Brad, did bless all lifetime license holders with access — forever. It’s on Twitter, so it’s permanent in my book.

This isn’t the first pricing rodeo for Brad and company.

When asked about lessons learned with pricing in a 2018 interview with Joe Howard on the WPMRR podcast, Brad had this to say:

“I think the biggest thing that people don’t do is experiment with their pricing.

When I launched Migrate DB Pro, I think the developer license was, $99 per year.

In December of that year, I doubled the pricing. Which would have been totally uncontroversial, except that I changed all the prices for the existing customers as well. I didn’t grandfather it.

And there was definitely quite a bit of blowback. I’d regret doing it because I feel like at that point, it wouldn’t have hurt us to like grandfather those people in but I don’t believe really in grandfathering people in forever.

That’s the same aversion I have to like unlimited things and “lifetime this and that.”

Pricing is challenging, no doubt, and lot has already been said about lifetime licenses.

Should you offer them as a product owner? Clearly the data (and the community) is pointing to a firm “no” at this point. Should the customer expect that a lifetime license actually means a lifetime of free…everything? Read Chris Lema’s take, On Lifetime Licenses.

Paul Charlton of WPTuts posted a reaction video to a recent e-mail sent from Delicious Brains, the new owners of Advanced Custom Fields. In the video, Paul shares his frustration with the ask of lifetime license holders to “pitch in” to keep the development of the popular plugin alive.

Paul was one of the first in line to question what would happen to lifetime license holders when Delicious Brains acquired ACF back in June.

From the current events: Agency Principal, Alex J Vasquez doesn’t seem to have an issue with the ask, stating “ Could this have been said differently? Sure, a better crafted msg would go a long way but I have zero issues with the ask.”

Could this have been said differently? Sure, a better crafted msg would go a long way but I have zero issues with the ask.

Where for folks like Charlton, it “sticks in his throat” that customers are almost feeling guilted into supporting the product. Charlton has no problem if users want to support their favorite software, but is not entirely thrilled when a brand requests it.

After reaching out to Paul for a post-publishing lay of the land, he responded:

“My biggest takeaway is the complete silence from them to be honest. They’ve been tagged in many replies and spin off comments and nothing at all has come back from them.

As for learning anything new, it’s pretty much radio silence across the board. Just speculation and frustration from most commenters.”

UPDATE: An updated quote from Paul after the recent ACF tweet

It’s good to hear Delicious Brains are going to honour the LTD, but maybe it would be a good idea to run future emails through a competent PR company first to avoid confusion.

The ACF Twitter account tweeted:

“Lifetime license customers: We are still firmly committed to honoring lifetime licenses and all future emails. We will reaffirm this commitment. So there is no confusion. Signed, Brad Touesnard.”

When I asked Brad for a comment, that was the tweet he shared and pointed to his previous thread, posted back in June.

Some of our WP Minute Producers have expressed their thoughts in our Discord server:

“Well, Brad is in a tough spot here—there are a ton of these “lifetime deals” with ACF that he inherited and their something of a liability from a business perspective.”

“Brad should save himself a lot of LTD headache in the long term and just stop supporting the...