The WP Minute

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

It’s the WP Minute!

This episode is brought to you by FooGallery, check out their latest WooCommerce integration to start selling images right through WooCommerce, head on over to Foo.Gallery for more information!

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

The News

Sarah Gooding at the WPTavern covered the go/no-go deadline for features in WordPress 5.9. The date was set for October 12th but got pushed back. Josepha Hayden from the core leadership team published the modified schedule and emphasized that many of the features are still in progress. The core team shared the recording of the go/no-go deadline and the new dates around the WordPress 5.9 release. Volunteers are still needed in the capacity of Triage Leads and Release Coordination. Head on over to make.Wordpress.org if you can help. 

Rank Math hit a 1+ million (or is it 1 million + ) installs in the WordPress Plugin Repository. Rank Math is another SEO tool to attract traffic to a website. Obviously, many people are using this on their sites and this plugin grabbed the best SEO designation in the plugin repository for SEO.

TechCrunch has an interesting set of articles this week in the rebranded TC-1 about Automattic and how they are still in the media game as an open-source company. There have been four articles that show how Automattic will be effective in the long run. You’ll need to set aside a good 30 minutes to enjoy these articles, but it is worth your time to understand the long game…and the last 18 years of it thus far.

WooCommerce

Aaron Douglas tweeted about his team over @WooCommerce. The team released the in-person credit card payments. You can start accepting payments in person for orders placed online – perfect for products with curbside or local pickup options. 

Events

The  Page Builder Summit is still happening this week. It has been a great lineup of speakers so far. There is still time to catch a presentation if you would like to participate.

From Our Contributors and Producers

Kirki 4,  a plugin to customize WordPress, is now in beta. You can install the plugin and test it with your Theme. During this month, the team will work closely together with the community on GitHub.

Ronnie Burt tweeted that he is moving to @automattic to help grow Sensei LMS. His last days with Edublogs have passed and he is looking forward to working with a new team.

Aaron Jorbin wrote about his return from Headless WordPress to a traditional WordPress website. His feeling was that it was an interesting experience moving to the Headless WordPress setup but it was a mistake. His article shares the experience and may save you from making some of the same mistakes he did. Well worth the read.

Rebekah Kohlhepp shares an article on why she moved her blog from WordPress.com to WordPress.org. Her site went through a natural growth with followers and her article addresses the confusion and frustrations that new users of WordPress experience. 

The proposal to rename “reusable blocks” to “synched blocks” in Gutenberg on Github got a lively discussion going in our membership group. Be sure to sync up with that Github issue to learn more.

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

• Paul Lacey
• Kathy Zant
• Daniel Schutzsmith
• Jeff Chandler

Speaking of members, we welcome new members this week Nigel Bahadur and Spencer Forman who will offer a hand in sharing the news in the WordPress space. 

One Minute Segment – All About Gutenberg

Birgit Pauli-Haack, cohost on the Gutenberg Times Changelog Podcast shares the one-minute segment. If you want to know more about how to build block themes, there are now over 20 block themes in the WordPress.org repository which you can use to get up with the latest Gutenberg plugin to test the new way to edit a website called Full Site Editing. You can level up your knowledge by listening to theme builders and Anders Norwin, Ellen Bauer, and Caroline Nymark discuss how they went from building classic themes to building block themes on the recent Gutenberg Times live Q&A. Lot’s of resources are available on Gutenberg Times. For more details on current development subscribe to the Gutenberg Changelog podcast.

Thank you to all of the members who have supported The WPMinute project by going to buymeacoffee.com/mattreport. Join the Private Discord and share in the WordPress news every week.

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

It’s the WP Minute! I’m Helen Hou-Sandi, filling in for Matt.

This episode is brought to you by FooGallery, check out their latest WooCommerce integration to start selling images right through WooCommerce, head on over to Foo.Gallery for more information!

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

Let’s get into the News

Video Press announced that they have a new refreshed player that offers creators an intuitive design that puts their content in the spotlight. Video Press is fully integrated into WordPress so neither you nor your audience need to be redirected to external apps.  You may already be familiar with VideoPress which is included in the Premium, Business, and eCommerce plans on WordPress.com and powers WordPress.tv. If you are a self-hosted site, you can get VideoPress through Jetpack, now available as a standalone product.

The brand new default theme Twenty Twenty-Two is targeted to be released with WordPress 5.9 in December.

This flexible default theme for WordPress takes advantage of the Full Site Editing and Global styles features, which we have seen recently. Kjell Reigstad, the lead designer covers the customizations nicely over on make WordPress.org where they are looking for community involvement. Head over to get involved and weigh in on the future of default themes. 

Joost de Valk tweeted this week that he is excited about the news of a proposal also over on make WordPress.org from Ari Stathopoulos proposing the creation of a team focused on the performance and speed of WordPress. It seems that in comparison to some other platforms, WordPress is falling behind. A team will bring more organization and visibility to this effort. Check out the proposal and get involved if this is your area of expertise.

Davinder Singh Kainth over at the WPWeekly is running the WP Awards 2021 event. You can vote for your favorite WordPress Plugins, Themes, Tools, and Services at the WP Awards 2021 event. Nominations are open now. Voting begins November 1st with results in December. Be sure to send over your nominations or become a sponsor.

WPMainline wrote an interesting piece about being honest with users and hidden fees. The article covers a tweet from Mark Zahra mentioning that he had been contacted by someone in the WordPress community who was working on a post that would list some of the best plugins to use. What set this email exchange apart from others is that the author told him that in order to be included in the post, he would need to pay a fee. Yes, pay-to-play. Jeff’s article is a good review about transparency when money is being exchanged. This is a good reminder when working in the WordPress community.

How about WooCommerce?

WooCommerce continues to be one of the world’s most popular e-commerce solutions, processing billions of dollars in transactions. However, integrating and managing in-person sales with a WooCommerce online store hasn’t always been seamless and can be time-consuming and difficult for website developers and business owners alike. 

Back in September, GoDaddy launched GoDaddy Payments’ new point of sale (POS) hardware with industry-low credit card transaction fees, which rounds out their commerce solutions. And now GoDaddy Payments’ POS is fully integrated with the WooCommerce online store to make in-person payments quick and simple. This is a great addition to manage in-person and online transactions in the Payments hub of the WooCommerce dashboard. Congratulations on the new launch!

And now, from the grab bag!

Heropress launched its multi-project portal. Topher and Cate DeRosia created the hub to display the newest items from the HeroPress network as well as other news from the community. This portal combines all of their work in a single space and has a beautiful new design.

Jill Binder tweeted that the first 2 #WordPress #WPDiversity programs of 2021-2022 are well underway, and now the focus is on the 3rd program. Jill leads the program for speaker diversity and let’s support her in this effort.

And there is another effort for you to support centered around plugins. It’s Matt Cromwell’s ticket on WordPress.org for dynamic sharing images.

Finally, if you enjoyed my talk at WordCamp US a couple of weeks ago, I’ll be showing off way more of the actual editorial experience of the White House in a couple of weeks at Clarity, the premier design systems conference. It’s entirely online and you can still grab a ticket, although fair warning, it’s a conference with conference pricing, not a camp.

We have a new segment this week by Bob Dunn and DoTheWoo and your one-minute Woo experience. One-click solutions are coming out to address the perfect checkout process. You can listen to the check-out processes on the Do The Woo roundtable.

This was another exciting week for new members joining the community. We welcome WPMainline, Brad Williams, Justin Ferriman and Seth Goldstein who will offer a hand in sharing the news in the WordPress space.  If you want your hand in the weekly news, head to buymeacoffee.com/mattreport. You can buy Matt a coffee to support the show or join as a member for $79 for the year to get access to the private Discord server.

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 tell your friends how cool this episode was with me was and jump on the mailing list at thewpminute.com.

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

It’s the WP Minute! 

This episode is brought to you by FooGallery, check out their latest WooCommerce integration to start selling images right through WooCommerce, head on over to Foo.Gallery for more information!

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

News

This week Project Huddle has joined the Brainstorm Force family. Project Huddle is a very popular tool that lets you use sticky note-style feedback on your web project and it is platform-independent working with Drupal, Joomla, and Shopify. Sujay Pawar,  of Brainstorm Force, covers the acquisition in his video.

If you are selling WordPress products, you may want to take a look at how Appsero has integrated with Gumroad for providing seamless connection while selling your product in Gumroad. You can track selling data of plugins or themes on Gumroad through the Appsero dashboard. 

Felix Arntz over on WordPress.org writes an update on his results of why jQuery is the most common JavaScript-based performance problem in themes. Felix ran an analysis using the PageSpeed Insights API, gathering performance reports for the most popular 100 WordPress themes according to the WordPress.org Themes API.  To read all the analysis jump over to his review. But the short story is that if you are a theme developer relying on jQuery, start looking into migrating away from jQuery in your themes. It will be a great step forward to make your themes more performant along with enhancing user experience for all the sites that use your themes.

The WPMinute often covers news that comes from the WPTavern. Many of our community members look to WPTavern for fair coverage of news in WordPress. We interviewed Sarah Gooding this week on the WPMinute on WordPress journalism and on where she gathers her information and decides how to cover a story. You can always tell your newsworthy story to the WPTavern with their help to get it ready for publication.

Justin Ferriman’s name had been circulating over the past couple of weeks with the acquisition of Learn Dash. Justin covers his personal decision on why he sold in his recent blog post. Go check it out for his take on why it was time for him to make a change. 

From the grab bag!

Paul Lacey shared this redesign of Castos. The refreshed website has a clean look with a beautiful user interface. ps: built on Generate Press with Generate Blocks. It’s a fantastic fast loading website. Check it out.

Justin Tadlock wrote an interesting article over on the WPTavern this week about how the Next Web published a hit piece titled Developers hate WordPress — and so should marketers. The claim was that, despite its current 40% market share, folks should start looking at alternatives for a better experience. The Next Web article seemed to be sponsored by Storyblok and you can read it to see if it changes your mind about WordPress.

Many of us know Tammie Lister and she tweeted that she has started a new position at @XWP.  She is producing a block pattern a day during the month of October as well. It has been something fun to follow so far. You can see the daily code posted at patternsnspiration.

Birgit Pauli-Haack shared the Women in WordPress list on Twitter. It is a great group to follow and exciting to see all these women in WordPress. Thanks Birgit!

Matt Prichett is looking to sell his WordPress Plugin. You can reach out to him through Twitter if you are interested in learning more.

That’s it for today’s news. Don’t forget to join our private Discord server and be part of the WPMinute news community.

We are really excited to welcome the new folks that joined the community this week. A warm welcome to Akshat Choudhary, Joe Howard, John Locke, David Mainayer, and Andrew Palmer.  We look forward to working with you as you share the news in the WordPress space. If you want to get your hand in the weekly WordPress news head over to buymeacoffee.com/mattreport. You can buy me a coffee to support the show or join the membership for $79 a year.

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

It’s the WP Minute! 

This episode is brought to you by FooGallery, check out their latest WooCommerce integration to start selling images right through WooCommerce, head on over to Foo.Gallery for more information!

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

News

It was a blast keeping up with the breaking news last week and things are still shaking. 

Alex Denning writes an interesting post about Awesome Motive’s marketing machine powering millions of dollars in revenue. He explores how it all works as separate products in a decentralized network. Go check out his take on Awesome Motive’s value of products under one umbrella.

The Matt Report also has a great interview with Syed Balkhi, to recap his point of view on the acquisition of Sandhills development.

All the acquisitions…

It was announced that WPLandingKit is joining Themeisle. WPLandingKit is a popular plugin that lets you map domain names to individual WordPress pages within your site. Themeisle will look to incorporate this plugin with their Neve and Otter products to provide a solution for managing landing pages for WordPress. Keep your eyes peeled for new offers coming from them.

Keanan Koppenhaver announced on Twitter that he acquired @WP_Pusher and @thisisbranch. In his blog, he talks about why this acquisition is so thrilling to him. WP Pusher is solid, supporting a multitude of workflows. It allows one to deploy to every WordPress host in existence. 

Keenan states:

As a fellow developer, I’m overjoyed at the idea of helping WordPress developers deploy their code more easily, no matter where they’re hosted and without having to resort to FTP.

All this acquisition talk seems to be causing angst (or not) in the WordPress Community.  Mark Zahra covers a lot of what WordPress Entrepreneurs may be feeling in his recent blog post about there being a future for small WordPress businesses. WordPress feels like it is fragmented and it is a good time for larger companies to be buying the smaller ones. Can anyone continue to compete in this situation? 

Then we get Chris Wiegman’s view about what keeps people working in WordPress. It often isn’t for the technical power of the product but the communities that keep us connected. Check out his article on the four communities of WordPress and how that ties small business owners together.

IF you want to get out there in the WordPress scene you may want the world to know about it. WPMainline has a recent blog post about how the small fry can get the exposure they need by using the website WPHunts. This site, an idea of Ben Townsend, is in the early stages and it will be interesting to see the discussion and support from the community as it gains traction.

Events

It looks like October is shaping up to be a busy month.

WordCamp US is online this Friday, October 1st. The WPMinute is a media sponsor and we can’t wait to see you there!

Woosesh the 4-day virtual conference is scheduled for October 12th – October 15th. This conference is full of sessions for WooCommerce store builders. Each event is highly curated to provide you with the absolute best possible experience.

The PageBuilder Summit returns and is back October 18th – 22nd as well. Many people that have been highlighted in the news here at the WPMinute are scheduled to speak. So jump over to get on the waiting list so that you don’t miss this one.

WooCommerce News

WooCommerce celebrates year 1 – 0. The big 10. Go check out this blog post by Paul Maiorana for a trip down memory lane…

WooCommerce released a security patch last week to address a server configuration setup used by some hosts, which under the right conditions may make some analytics reports publicly available. You should update your store right away if you do not have auto-updates turned on for your site do it now!

From the grab bag!

Paul Lacey shares this YouTube video by Jamie Marsland on how to build a WordPress Gutenberg Full Site Editing Starter Theme in just 10 minutes with no coding. There are just 8 steps to create your full site editor starter theme. He based the tutorial on a great article by Alfredo Navas from WebDevStudios. 

Anne McCarthy also shares a great YouTube Video on exploring the Query Loop block in WordPress.

Check out these Videos. It is a great way to spend 10 minutes of your day.

Gravity Forms did a beautiful redesign of their Website. If you use their product you will like the flow and look of the site.

That closes out the week in the WPMinute.

We have lots of folks to thank this week for joining the membership at buymeacoffee.com/mattreport becoming producers and getting involved with the weekly WordPress news. First up, @schutzsmith on Twitter.

Always loved the podcast. Thanks for keeping us informed with the best info and interviews in WordPress and no code.

Tony Cosentino says:

Excited to join the gang and be part of more conversations with the amazing people that are part of this membership.

Thank you, Tony.

Paul Lacey says

The beard is looking strong.

Paul? Thanks for joining the membership.

Last but certainly not least is Liam Dempsey.

Thanks for your hard work to keep folks informed about the comings and goings in the WordPress Community. Keep fighting for the digital blue collar worker.

That I will my friend. Liam? Thanks for joining the membership.

If you want to be a member and take part in the weekly news WordPress news go to buymeacof...

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

It’s the WP Minute! This is Kathy Zant and I’m filling in for Matt.

This episode is brought to you by Easy Support Videos. Support your WordPress users by embedding videos and screencasts right inside the WordPress admin. Learn more at EasySupportVideos.com! 

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

News time!

If you thought the WordPress acquisition train was safely tucked away at the station, think again, it’s full-steam ahead! 

Breaking news announced earlier this morning, AwesomeMotive has acquired one of the — if not the most — highly regarded brands in WordPress: SandHills Development, widely known for Easy Digital Downloads. 

Pippin Williamson penned an excellent summary of the events sharing what led him to the decision. 

Every business owner knows (or will eventually learn) that there are three possible fates for their business:

1. It will one day be passed on to someone else, perhaps through family inheritance

2. It will slowly or rapidly decline and at some point be shut down entirely

3. It will be sold to a new owner for one reason or another.

If you’re a business owner, his post is absolutely worth the time.

Liquid Web announces another top-tier brand is being added to their stack, one of the most popular LMS plugins for WordPress: LearnDash. 

LearnDash will join the Liquid Web Family under the StellarWP brand, which is the umbrella for our premium WordPress software solutions and includes well-known and respected WordPress leaders such as iThemes, The Events Calendar, GiveWP, Restrict Content Pro, Iconic, and Kadence WP.”

You can learn more about how the acquisition went down in our interview with Justin Ferriman and Chris Lema. Highlights include:

• How long the process took
• What you should do if you want to get acquired
• Speculation on WooCommerce and the ecommerce space

Speaking of WooCommerce, they’ve announced the acquisition of extension maker SomewhereWarm who currently has seven products available in the marketplace. 

“This is a huge opportunity for us to help shape the future of WooCommerce, having a clearer view of the path ahead, more resources than ever before, and the support of like-minded people.”

DeliciousBrains did a stealth acquisition of the ACF Blocks plugin, picking it up from the folks at Extendify. Extendify acquired EditorsKit earlier this year and the Redux framework last year. 

The fantasy league of WordPress

We’re thinking about starting a fantasy league of WordPress business & All-Star community members with all of this news!

• Carole Olinger is now the Social Media Manager at XWP
• Chris Lema changes his title to GM of LearnDash
• Richard Tabor joins the Extendify team
• Brian Gardner is back at WPEngine as Principal Developer Advocate
• Kathy Zant joins the team at NinjaForms to lead content marketing

From the grab bag!

Check out the new Tove theme by Anders Noren. You must have Gutenberg installed to activate + for Full Site Editing features.

Fabien Kaegy rebuilt his site using a block-based theme, developers pay close attention to this article.

We’re excited to be Media Partners for the upcoming WordCamp US kicking off on October 1st! Go grab your FREE virtual tickets today!

Vito Peleg and Andrew Palmer announced Bertha.ai, “the fastest way to create content for your WordPress website.”

Josepha Haden shares an update to WordPress 5.9 in the latest episode of WP Briefing.

That’s it for this week’s weekly dose of WordPress news in less than 5 minutes.

Join our private Discord server and be part of the news community.

Some folks to thank this week. Bob Dunn, Lisa Sabin-Wilson, and Brad Williams for joining the membership as producers to help contribute to the news. If you want your hand in the weekly news buymeacoffee.com/mattreport. You can buy me a coffee to support the show or join the membership for $79 for the year.

I also have an interview with Pippin Williamson who announced this morning that SandHills Development was acquired by Awesome Motive over on the Matt Report. Check that out if you want to hear the conversation with Pippin who ran one of the most respected WordPress businesses in the space for the last decade.