The WP Minute

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Liquid Web is acquiring again, this time in the popular WordPress LMS plugin space.

Justin Ferriman, Founder of LearnDash, penned the acquisition statement on the company blog. I invited him on to share what the process looked like from an owner’s perspective and how it impacts his day-to-day responsibilities.

Chris Lema also makes a shift through this acquisition, becoming the General Manager of Learn Dash under the Liquid Web umbrella.

He’ll share what that role means to the product, along with some outlook on how Liquid Web approaches platform solutions.

We’ll spend some time talking about e-commerce and WooCommerce opportunities for the WordPress industry.

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It’s the WP Minute! This is Michelle Frechette 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.

It was a busy week for News 

Sarah Gooding at the WPTavern covers the push toward Full-Site Editing and the announcement of a new Default Theme for WordPress 5.9. This is the last scheduled release for 2021. WordPress 5.9 is starting to take shape as Josepha Haden Chomphosy published a planning roundup at the end of last week with a tentative schedule and scope. Head over to the get involved page on WordPress.org to see the schedule and participate in this important release.

Jetpack has acquired Social Image Generator, a WordPress plugin founded by Daniel Post. The Social Image Generator automatically creates social image shares for your content, saving hours of tedious work. It creates images for all major social networks including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, VK, WhatsApp, iMessage, and Reddit. Simply share your content as you normally would, and the images will automatically appear. Daniel will be joining Jetpack to continue the work on the Social Image Generator and integrating it with Jetpack’s social media features. If you are interested in influencing the future of the product, you can schedule time with Jetpack research for a chat.

Alex Denning shared a tweet about his interesting post on the getelipsis blog and what the future of WordPress searches will look like after COVID-19. The headline takeaways from the research showed average monthly searches in Jan-Jul 2021 compared with the averages for 2020 to be:

• Overall WordPress searches are down by -6.4%
• WooCommerce searches are down by -8.8%
• Theme searches are down by -16.7%

To see this fascinating research, jump over to the blog post to cover the nuances around WordPress searches.

Luis Herranz tweeted that it has been a couple of weeks since the official announcement of Frontity and Automattic. If you would like to see his perspective and excitement about this move check out his blog post.

Keeping up with Ful-site Editing (FSE)

If you’re a curious mind wanting to keep up with how full site editing is evolving, Mattias Ventura proposes a look to global styles in the user interface with what we might expect in future WordPress versions. 

Elements like how global typography, colors, and layout spacing options are all shown in the Github issue tracker.

From the Grabbag

Intuit announced that they will buy email marketing company Mailchimp for $12 billion in cash and stock. That’s billion with a B. Matt covers this with Leslie Simm in a separate podcast on The WP Minute.

How do we deal with all the changes in WordPress as an entrepreneur? Cory Miller and David Bisset have a great discussion on the PostStatus podcast about resilience working in this environment. It is important to have a team of support around you so you do not feel like you are working in a vacuum.

Speaking about PostStatus, I have a recent post on Diversity vs. Inclusion: Why Tokenization is Harmful. This will be a series to follow to see how you can become better at inclusion.

In addition to the work I do at GiveWP, I’ve recently joined Post Status as a contributing writer and podcaster. My areas within the organization will cover job seeking and hiring within the Get Hired podcast and blog, as well as inclusion and representing underrepresented populations within technology. Be sure to visit PostStatus.com for more, and underrepresentedintech.com for the unrepresented in tech issues as well.

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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I’ve invited Lesley Sim, co-founder of Newsletter Glue (hey! they power this newsletter!) to share her opinion on the recent Mailchimp acquisition by Inuit for $12 Billion dollars.

Mailchimp is almost as synonymous with WordPress as Yoast is, so I’m sure many of you have some mixed feelings about this.

I was delighted to hear her opinions on the software, community feedback, and what comes next for a product like NG which integrates so closely with large platforms like Mailchimp.

Click the podcast player to hear the episode and don’t forget to share this with others!

Mailchimp alternatives mentioned (but also, don’t drop Mailchimp):

• MailerLite
• Campaign Monitor
• Sendinblue
• Sendy
• Mailco
• Buttondown
• EmailOctypus
• flodesk
• Klaviyo

[00:00:00] Matt: It’s the WP minute today’s special episode is brought to you by easy support videos, support your WordPress users, right inside your WordPress admin. Using embeddable videos to show them what to do. Check out easy support videos.com today’s special episode. Is hosted by Leslie SIM. One of the co-founders of newsletter glue, a fantastic email newsletter plugin that integrates with WordPress. It delivers this.
[00:00:27] Email that goes out for the WP minute today’s episode. She breaks down her take on the MailChimp acquisition.
[00:00:34] I invited Leslie to share her opinion on the acquisition since she works so closely. Well, not only with MailChimp, but with email, with newsletters, with customers. Leveraging these platforms. Okay. Let’s dive into Leslie’s episode about the MailChimp acquisition for nearly half the total value of the world’s banana industry.
[00:00:59] Lesley: I’m super happy for the team. I believe they’ve worked on MailChimp for over 20 years and that’s a long, long, long time to be working on anything. And if they want to move on, then that’s great. It’s a very large amount of money, so I’m glad that they were able to have such a great name.
[00:01:19] Not all companies, are able to have amazing exits, not all companies want to exit. But I can see, or I can imagine if, the founding team gets tired of stuff like their options are we sell the company or we transition out and hire a CEO CEO to work on top.
[00:01:39] For, we know we, they considered that and chose to exit and, they could liquidate some of their ownership and that’s great.
[00:01:46] Sometimes, with acquisitions of this size there it’s, it can be kind of polarizing. So I saw a tweet this morning from Ruben Gomez and yeah. Funny, I’ve seen completely opposite takes on MailChimp acquisition plus bootstrapping.
[00:02:03] The first being this proofs, bootstrapping is dead good riddance. And the second, this proofs bootstrapping works for building very big companies. So I’m on team. This proofs boot shopping works for very big companies. Yeah, they were bootstrapped. They got a gigantic exit. So that’s great.
[00:02:23] The other kind of polarizing take that I saw online for this was the founders got all the money because the employees didn’t have equity because this was a privately held company that the employees kind of, didn’t get a big win as well.
[00:02:37] And I kind of have some opinions on this. It said in the press release that I think the, the employees got like a 300 million RSU restricted stock options
[00:02:47] so it’s not like the, the employees came away with nothing, but also having said that, if you’re joining Coca-Cola or. Pepsi or PNG, you don’t join with the intention of getting equity from the company. I feel like that’s kind of a quirk of the tech startup wall and it’s not really something to be expected.
[00:03:10] Also let’s not forget the reason why a lot of these startups give equity in the first place. The reason being. At the beginning, this, these companies can’t afford to pay their employees a four week. And so the supplement, a smaller wage with stock options on the promise slash bet that the company grows big.
[00:03:33] So, so people forget that as well. They forget that so many of these startup, no matter what they promise, they end up going bust and, It’s where it doesn’t matter, like, that you had all those stock options, like you’re now out of a job. Right. And you stock means nothing.
[00:03:49] So I feel like some of that conversation is kind of that conversation and that unpleasantness is, kind of misplaced.
[00:03:57] Matt: Does the MailChimp acquisition. Have any effect on newsletter glue
[00:04:02] Lesley: MailChimp has some of the best public APS on the market and excellent, excellent documentation as well. I don’t think that it will get worse even if they don’t maintain it properly or whatever. It’s still, already industry-leading. And I mentioned the EPA is because that’s how we knew that the glue connects MailChimp to WordPress. No impact on us there.
[00:04:25] Matt: I’ve seen this reoccurring trend throughout the years of evaluating and using software where a great piece of software serves a very strong utility in the early days. And everyone loves it. Because it’s doing exactly what they need. And as that company grows. The software starts to scale into something of a larger platform. MailChimp is a perfect example of this. It used to send just newsletters and then it became an automation tool, an e-commerce tool.
[00:04:56] A landing page tool, and so many other things, probably under the hood. Do you have any words of wisdom for scaling a piece of software? For those of us who are out there? Uh building our own software tools
[00:05:08] Lesley: I don’t have any legitimate words of wisdom seeing as how I’ve never scaled any software from utility to a larger platform plea newsletter guru is still very much in the utility space.
[00:05:21] I do kind of see why software or why a company would do this.
[00:05:26] At some point you kind of, reach a market situation. Most people know about you. You’ve mostly put insight your possible users in a market have already used you. And there’s only so much more growth. You can act out.
[00:05:39] A specific feature. And so people start moving breadth ways rather than depth. So rather than building like deeper and deeper for a customer set, they start moving breadth ways to get new customers. And I guess like the ultimate breadth plea is to become a platform. MailChimp was trying to move into e-commerce for, I think the past two or three years, they moved into landing pages as well. And a lot of that didn’t really get much traction maybe because of their name, they have mail baked into their name. And so, it’s hard to become a e-commerce landing page builder if your name is mill Chimp.
...

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

It’s the WP Minute! This is Carrie Dils and I’m filling in for Matt, who’s tweeting about podcasting.

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.

Let’s get to the News

Stay tuned for the direction of block development in the next few months.

Justin Tadlock over on the WPTavern wrote about whether block development is merely a templating system with no build process. Since there still is a big concern around the direction of block development, he went ahead and reviewed where the React-based WordPress block editor (sometimes referred to as Gutenberg) had been hitting speed bumps for WordPress developers who have been more PHP Centric.

Helen Hou-Sandi also published on her blog how she spent the last 8 months telling anybody she talked to about custom WordPress block development. They were way less scary and much easier than she thought they were going to be for somebody with minimal React experience. She said that a big game-changer for adoption and shifting thinking would be to find a way to unify templating between the front-end and the editor, essentially swapping the places where you output content with the corresponding editor component. 

My personal opinion: “That sounds amazing”!

Helen says:

“these are experiments and there will likely be many failed paths”, and that the focus remains on the problem to be solved during the research and experimentation phase, not on the implementation details.

If you want the scoop on React and the possible direction of block development make sure you check out her post and follow updates on Twitter.

For you plugin developers seeing plugin changes on WordPress.org:

Mika Epstein reported on WordPress.org that inaccurate stats were adjusted for 100 plugins recently because of a stats gathering change. This means those plugins had their active install stats seemingly adjusted downward. She wants you to understand this was painful for a number of developers and they held off on announcing this as they were still doing a bit of triage and making sure it was blocked. Sorry about that confusion and it is corrected now.

Let’s Talk about WooCommerce

If you follow Bob Dunn for WooCommerce news, he announced that his Twitter handle changed for all things Woo. Jump over to @DotheWoo for updates and news.

Moving on to the Grabbag

If you are a runner, walker, or crawler this one is for you. WordPress has a virtual 5k scheduled for October 1 through October 30. This race is virtual and “virtually” anyone can participate in the race with the possibility of completing the 5k race. You can track your route on your favorite app or record the 5k off the grid. And you can register for the WordPress 5k or just donate if you cannot participate. We are looking forward to seeing your progress and success. Just tag #wwwp5k.

And…Congrats go out to Jonathan Wold for joining Cory Miller over at Post Status. Keep your eyes peeled for good things coming from them.

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 at thewpminute.com.

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

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 

You’re in luck for 2021 if you are dragging your feet using Gutenberg and the block editor. The Classic Editor Plugin was published in 2018 to help with the transition to the block editor with support through the end of 2021. 

Now the Classic Editor plugin will be supported through the end of 2022. 

It may be a good time to re-think your transition plans on your websites.

Frontity has been acquired by Automattic. Even though Frontity is a React framework, it doesn’t mean that they are going to push React to the WordPress frontend.  

Matt Mullenweg wrote in his recent blog post that there’s still a lot that:

We can learn from decoupled systems and we can incorporate those learnings into WordPress itself as we emphasize performance, flexibility, and ease of development.

I look forward to Frontity joining WordPress and channeling their efforts into the WordPress APIs, documentation, and Gutenberg’s full-site editing tools.”

Sarah Gooding over on WPTavern updated the community about the progress on the block-based Navigation editor screen. 

The screen got a status check last week as part of a Hallway Hangout meeting. Once the Navigation screen is available by default in the Gutenberg plugin, the team working on the feature will be able to gather more feedback. Matias Ventura provides a quick overview of the main areas and features currently underway for 5.9 in Gutenberg. Some are in more advanced stages than others, but together they paint a picture of what this will look like.

Some News Around Security 

On August 13, 2021, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team responsibly disclosed two vulnerabilities in Nested Pages, a WordPress plugin installed on over 80,000 sites that provides drag and drop functionality to manage your page structure and post ordering. If you have any friends or colleagues using this plugin, please share this announcement with them and encourage them to update to version 3.1.16 (or newer) of Nested Pages as soon as possible.

On August 3, 2021, the same team initiated the disclosure process for two vulnerabilities discovered in the Gutenberg Template Library & Redux Framework plugin, which is installed on over 1 million WordPress sites. One vulnerability allowed users with lower permissions, such as contributors, to install and activate arbitrary plugins and delete any post or page via the REST API. A second vulnerability allowed unauthenticated attackers to access potentially sensitive information about a site’s configuration. Please go ahead and update that as soon as possible.

WooCommerce news

They are planning to raise the minimum WordPress and PHP requirements needed to use the Action Scheduler plugin. This change will impact any plugin or theme that includes the Action Scheduler as one of their bundled vendor libraries. It also impacts any sites where Action Scheduler is installed as a standalone plugin. In these cases, before updating Action Scheduler to 3.3.0 or higher, it is important to perform some basic safety checks.

From the Grabbag

People are moving and grooving in and about the WordPress Space. Congrats to Birgit Pauli-Haack who has run the Gutenberg Times and Changelog Podcast. She has started as a developer advocate over @Automattic.

So many of us are familiar with Andrea Middleton’s work and know her personally from WordCamps.

Andrea made the announcement on Twitter and her blog that she is moving to Reddit after contributing to WordPress for nearly ten years.

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

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