The WP Minute

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In the News 

WordPress.org was in the news again. This time there was a lot of confusion about WordPress rejecting plugin submissions with the WP prefix. They said this was to address potential trademark abuse. As you can imagine, this sparked some interesting debate (read: controversy) on Twitter and Slack channels. This information ended up being misinterpreted as WPSteward reported, but it generated responses across the entire Community in record time.

People legitimately freaked out because of how the information from WordPress.org has been handled in the past. We all have kind of felt this. There has been a track record for this type of communication and folks generally feel as though they are not being heard. 

Sarah Gooding over at WPTavern and Jeff Chandler over at WPMainline went into further detail about how this was “making mountains over molehills”. Go check their articles out for different perspectives on this news flash.

This is also time for a joke. Like what happens when two train conductors walk into bar…ok.

Gutenberg keeps chugging right along with the roadmap to WordPress 5.9 and Gutenberg 11.3. Birgit Pauli-Haack and Grzegorz Ziolkowski discuss the preliminary roadmap on the 50th episode of the Gutenberg Times Changelog podcast. Congratulations on number 50!

As more and more of us are being asked to pay attention to the changes in the Block Editor in Gutenberg, go check out what Iian Poulson writes. He sees the negative talk turning into more optimism. There is a great long post for developers over at Delicious Brains to review. 

Getting back to business

Immerseus founder Jack Kitterhing tweeted that Immerseus had been acquired in full. His eight-month-old company generated $100k in sales from apparently a single Facebook group marketing channel…and he has a day job…and like 5 other products. I think I should have him on the Matt Report to give us the map to this gold mine…

Events

WordPress meets education at WPCampus online September 21 and 22nd. Although the conference is advertised for Web Accessibility, go and check out the schedule. There are many panel discussions and general lectures that can help you in your agency.

The second annual WPMRR (WP Monthy Recurring Revenue) Virtual Summit will run online-only this year from September 21 – 23. Joe Howard is hosting the event alongside guest host Brian Richards, the organizer behind WordSesh and WooSesh. Justin Tadlock covers all the details over on WPTavern.

From the Grabbag

Are you seeing yourself leaning towards unhealthy habits in 2021?  David Bisset and Cory Miller talk about developer overload on the latest podcast of Post Status. With so much to learn today, it’s not just WordPress but the entire internet leading to so much information to process. 

The Random Show with Brad and Matt was back last week with great information on NFTs and Podcast streaming satoshis. If you want to find out how to make money with Crypto and NFTs jump over and listen to one of the best episodes.

Longtime WordPress product maker Brian Gardner raised eyebrows recently with his newest venture, Frost. He’s now made it publicly available for purchase. Find the pricing page over at FrostWP.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

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In the News 

Everyone in the WordPress world is talking about the acquisition of Yoast to NewFold Digital. Yoast SEO, the well-known plugin for WordPress with over 12 million active installs, is the flagship product of Yoast. 

I interviewed Joost de Valk on the WPMinute. The most important takeaway was that despite all of the speculation, the feedback has been mostly positive. Like many other WordPress concerned citizens, Jeff Chandler shares his initial thoughts on the acquisition on his podcast over at WP Mainline.

As with all acquisitions, people are afraid that stuff will change for the worst — especially in ads or upsells. At this time, the Yoast product will not be adjusting free or premium features or adding in any other pesky upsell ads.

Also keeping up with the news, Matt Mullenweg discusses the funding rounds from Automattic since last February. Automattic closed a primary funding round of $288M, bringing in some new partners including BlackRock, Wellington, Schonefeld, and Alta Park. Matt covered the buyback of $250M shares that were primarily targeted at current and former employees. Matt’s article also discusses the hiring challenge that Automattic has right now. Welcome to the club. There are lots of jobs available over at Automattic. Go check them out if you’re interested.

Riad Benguella writes a new blog post about the difficult task of monitoring performance with Gutenberg and looks at the cost of several WordPress plugins – particularly loading time with blocks. Since the performance is measured with blocks by extendibility, the repository for blocks has been growing like crazy. This can often make your typical WordPress site have over 12 (or more) plugins installed. These plugins can impact performance and Riad does a great job of testing plugins with Gutenberg and reporting his findings. View the results along with the methods over on his blog. The average load times of the most popular are…well I can’t show you the graph in audio…but you have to take a look. The three top offenders are Yoast, Jetpack, and WooCommerce.

Events

WordCamp US will be back online October 1st. There is a call for Sponsors along with Speakers and talk ideas.

Since there aren’t enough female-identified speakers in India this time, GreenGeeks is teaming up with the lead of the Diverse Speaker Training group in WordPress #wpdiversity, Jill Binder, to develop trainers who can teach others how to run the workshops at their local WordPress meetups all over India. This is happening September, 24 & 25.

From the Grabbag

Don’t get nervous about all the WordPress changes. Many entrepreneurs are feeling a little squeezed in the plugin space but no need to worry just yet. Go listen to the latest podcast on the Matt Report with Nathalie Lussier, founder of AccessAlly a LMS plugin for WordPress shows how you can stand apart and still grow your business by knowing your perfect customers and maturing your product.

Joe Casabona is at it again this week over on YouTube.  He covers a little-known feature in Gutenberg called the “Move To” menu item for blocks. He shows you how it works and when the best time to use it in this short tutorial.

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

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

In the News 

Titan, a professional e-mail service, raised $30 million from Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com. This investment deal takes the company’s valuation to $300m. Titan will use the funds, the single largest investment made by Automattic, to expand its range of products, the professional email platform said on Wednesday. It did not disclose any details on the new products.

Here’s a clip from CNBC-TV18 featuring the CEO of Titan.

Professional #email platform @TitanEmail raises $30 M from Automattic, the parent company of @wordpress.com, and is valued at $300 MN@MugdhaCNBCTV18 finds out from serial entrepreneur @bhavintu on how he plans to take on #Google & #Microsoft in this space pic.twitter.com/C0EZAIJTgL

All of this leads to the question…

How do the new products get integrated into the Automattic ecosystem? 

Justin Tadlock, from WPTavern, reviewed a new theme by Automattic called Quadrat, a Block-Based Podcasting WordPress Theme. In addition to the great color scheme and headers, Quadrat includes nine custom patterns. The focus for most of the patterns are on podcasting, but some are general-purpose enough for other use cases, such as “Media and text with button”. Justin felt that the development team missed a prime opportunity with its podcast-related patterns. Instead of integrating with a podcasting solution, this theme uses simple, static blocks from core WordPress. With Automattic’s recent fundraising with Castos, it would have made sense to integrate this theme with the podcasting company’s plugin, Seriously Simple Podcasting (SSP). Ahem…I work for Castos.

Many others are seeing the changes in the developer community

Chris Weigman, a well-known developer in the WordPress community started a lively discussion on Twitter about how the WordPress ecosystem is not as welcoming as it used to be. The barrier to entry, which was once so low, seems to be evaporating.

The simplicity of WordPress is gone. Since Gutenberg has been the direction, WordPress is almost unrecognizable from what it used to be. The ability to extend WordPress is limited without the knowledge and experience. This means that projects that could once easily be imagined and built by a small group of people are now funded by big corporations that have money to do the development.  New developers in WordPress will have rewarding careers working for hosts and other larger, more established companies in the space. 

The thing to keep an eye on in the next few years is to see how new careers will not be built on developing plugins and themes. Smaller contributors will be able to create courses and share their skills in the WordPress community by writing and speaking at events.

Bob Dunn from Do The Woo believes that there will not be much development with new plugins and themes, but you will still be able to easily build sites with WordPress. He covers additional conversations and perspectives on his blog post.

From the Grabbag

Congrats to Milana Cap for receiving funding from Yoast Diversity Fund for leading WordPress 5.8 Docs.

Travis Lopes just made the leap from full-time at Rocket Genius — the makers of Gravity Forms — to run his software business, forgravity.com.  Check out my interview with Travis on the Matt Report.

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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Joe Casabona is filling in for Matt this week, who’s on assignment. 

In the News 

Jeff Chandler has opened up subscriptions to WP Mainline. Subscribing to this site will eventually get you the most recent content about WordPress. At the moment you will provide financial support to Jeff as he publishes and produces audio content in the WordPress ecosystem.

Mode Effect, LLC, a full-service e-commerce consulting, development and management agency recently acquired Amplify Plugins, a WooCommerce and WordPress plugin development company to expand its plugin solutions to existing and prospective customers.

Termly, the GDPR Cookie Consent Banner is one of the easiest, most effective, and popular cookie consent plugins available for WordPress with over 200,000+ downloads. Just remember after upgrading, you will need to sign up for a Termly account from within the plugin, or on the site app.termly.io, then enable the consent banner again.

Sara Gooding reports over on WPTavern that PublishPress, makers of the PublishPress and PublishPress Blocks plugins, have adopted the Organize Series plugin from Darren Ethier. Organize Series is a 15-year-old plugin for organizing and displaying posts in a series, useful for novel writers, educators, magazine sites, and anyone breaking their longer content up into a series.

From the Grabbag

The first release candidate is now available for WooCommerce 5.6. WooCommerce is on track for the planned release for August 17th. Bob in his weekly Do The Woo podcast covers the highlights.

Travis Smith on the StudioPress blog writes about how you can quite simply pre-populate a “post” (regardless of post type) with the classic editor. So you don’t need to add the Classic editor plugin any longer.

The latest Beaver Builder newsletter has a great WordPress checklist to use for your agency. If you’re a web designer, you’re probably skilled at the launching phase. However, it’s still important to make sure you’re covering all of your bases. To help you do that, you can use this website launch checklist.

If you are interested in linking a section of a page in WordPress, David Hayes from WPShout has created a quick guide on how to link page content and then how to add that link to a WordPress Navigation Menu. The quick guide shows you how to link users to a specific heading within an article.

And finally, after a couple of months of hard work, I’m happy to announce my new “Master Full Site Editing” course. It covers all of the new features of the block editor, and what you can do with Full Site Editing. You can get it now at 50% off by going to masterfse.com. Get it today and get free, lifetime updates. If you want to learn more about me, you can head over to casabona.org. 

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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Now that WordPress 5.8 is here, what’s next? 

Many people have been using WordPress 5.8 since the release last week. Joe Casabona does a great review on his YouTube channel which covers improvements in the block editor, embedded pdfs and table improvements. 

Justin Tadlock over at WPTavern does a rundown of plugins that test the theory that many features of WordPress 5.8 can be disabled until you are ready to address them yourself.

And the fun won’t stop…Hector Prieto tells us What’s next in Gutenberg stating:

Full Site Editing is the lighthouse goal for Phase 2 of Gutenberg. As such, it’s good to remember it is a collection of projects that allow site editing with blocks, bringing powerful capabilities for a smooth editing experience.

Don’t get left behind (and don’t complain) about the features being shipped when you can see a lot of the conceptual work being done around Full Site Editing on make.wordpress.org. 

Patterns all around me

WordPress.org/patterns might be the most exciting “release” around WP 5.8 for me, anyway. A browsable collection of block patterns that you can literally copy/paste into your WordPress page is really exciting. 

I’m looking forward to seeing what others contribute to the directory when it’s available.

WordPress on the rise…but not plugins? 

David Bisset, Post Status chief curating officer, alerted us to a recent decline in active plugins through the year 2021. In contrast to the growth of WordPress, David reached out to others in the community to help draw a pattern: 

There’s no reason to panic but plugin authors and business owners should be aware of the trend and keep an eye on it. I think the sudden dip is what caught my (and others) eye. While noteworthy, the ecosystem could be “adjusting” as other industries are going through similar trends.

Pull up the post on Post Status for more visuals, including riveting graphs. 

A win for accessibility + WordPress

Also over at WPTavern, Sarah Gooding covers the recent decision for Colorado to become the First State to Require State and Local Government Websites to Meet Accessibility Standards. 

Colorado has more than 4,268 active local governments using WordPress and those responsible for local sites will need to begin the process of creating a plan to ensure they are accessible before July 1, 2024.

The WordPress.org Themes Team announced an open discussion and a date for a Zoom meeting with theme authors. This meeting is scheduled July 28th at 2:00 p.m. The team is proposing a new set of guidelines that reduces and simplifies what is currently in place.

The BuddyPress team released their block widgets 9.0. The new BP Widget Blocks are Legacy Widgets, rebuilt as BP Blocks. You can also access them in the Block Editor for use in your posts or pages.

Events

WordCamp US 2021 will be a one-day event scheduled for October 1st with networking opportunities, speaker sessions, workshops, and more. This was proposed after COVID cases are on the uptick again in the US.

From the Grabbag

Rich Tabor has made a new block plugin for adding markdown comments that only display while editing a post with Gutenberg. If you decide to test it, just remember the block only renders within the editor. For developers reading this, that means there’s no save function.

Gravity Forms adds a new reCAPTCHA Add-On with their newest launch. They are providing Support for Google reCAPTCHA. With the new Add-On, all Gravity Forms customers can now integrate Google reCAPTCHA v3 in any or all of their forms.

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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