The WP Minute

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A major update coming to WordPress 5.8. Beta release 2 is available for testing now.

This release expands WordPress’ site building capabilities, along with improvements to features users have enjoyed since the launch of the block editor. The release will also include WebP support which 95% of the web browers worldwide use.

Check out the WordCamp Europe 2021 Gutenberg demo narrated by Beatriz Fialho. WordPress Taverns’ Sarah Gooding recaps a discussion with Matt Mullenweg and Matias Ventura “The Block Editor Gets Ready to Become a Site Builder”

A quote from Matt:

For me, 2020 was the year that really felt like people started to see the vision of Gutenberg from four or five years ago, when it was very abstract and they saw it as kind of like the old WYSIWYG editor with some extra lines on it or something,” Mullenweg said. “The first 17 or 18 years of WordPress democratized people putting text into a box. Now we’re democratizing design, allowing people to control the boxes.”

This has been another huge project for the WordPress contributors and developers. Josepha Hayden Chomphosy is very transparent on the WP Briefing podcast about how difficult it is to run a large open source project and offers suggestions on how to get a big group of people to come to consensus.

Eric Karkovick Editor, Writer & WordPress Expert at Speckyboy covers what WordPress acquisitions says about the future and states that the WordPress ecosystem is maturing and consolidating.

“Frankly, it’s becoming a lot harder for solo entrepreneurs or small development shops to manage a popular plugin. Supporting a large userbase while also focusing on the future could become overwhelming.
Thus, it’s not surprising to see that some of these products are being sold off to larger firms. We saw something similar happen with internet providers back in the early 2000s. The more mature the market, the harder it became for a small company to carry out its mission. Pretty soon, they were just about all bought up by corporate interests”.

Alex Denning along with Iain Poulson tweeted last week that they have created FlipWP and For $300/year the duo will help connect WordPress product companies for sale, with would-be buyers.

If all this talk about acquisitions every day has your brain tangled up, Chris Lema posted a straight forward Twitter thread to bring some clarity to this fast-paced space.

There are a lot of discussions about companies (and hosts) acquiring folks in the #WordPress space. Now, new marketplaces are getting created to help you sell your company. All of this is great. But not all buyers are the same, and it's not always about the $$$.

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Jetpack gave us all a boost by pushing out a forced update patching a vulnerability in the Carousel feature. Tony Perez illustrated his point of view on how forced updates, in the hands of bad actors, could be a risk for the software.

Brandon Kraft, part of the Jetpack team, tweeted that the forced update was justified by the meta/security team since 18% of Jetpack sites were affected.

We weren't part of the discussion. Provided details and got the response, but I wouldn't expect a security convo to be public. But, yes. Single feature impacted. A few things need to be all true for it to matter on a site, which looked like qualified about 18% of sites IIRC.

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Today is an interview with Brad Touesnard, founder of Delicious Brains, talking about his recent acquisition of Advanced Custom Fields. A series of questions I’ve provided him, where he’s recorded answers to via audio.

I hope you enjoy today’s episode and learn more about one of WordPress’ most historic acquisitions.

Check the transcript at the bottom of the post and please share this episode out on your social media channels!

[00:00:01] It’s the WP minute. This episode is brought to you by easy support videos, support your WordPress users by placing videos right in the WordPress admin. Get [email protected].
[00:00:12]Today is an interview with Brad two Nard, founder of Delicious Brains, and talking about his recent acquisition of advanced custom fields, a series of questions he’s recorded answers to via audio. Let’s dive right in.
[00:00:24]Can you give us a sense of how you vetted a product company like ACF? What was attractive besides the obvious..
[00:00:29] Revenue, especially recurring revenue, definitely looked at that right away. I looked at the customer base and what their expectations were.
[00:00:40]there is obviously more to it with due diligence, . In terms of verifying all those numbers and making sure everything was accurate , and legit, but the accountants and lawyers handled most of that anyway and just provided reports.
[00:00:57]ACF’s pretty simple company Elliott set up a really kind of simple thing for 10 years by himself. There weren’t a lot of moving parts , to really vet , in this deal, in terms of what was attractive, obviously…
[00:01:10]ACF isa great product that has a passionate and large community of users and customers. The thing that particularly appealed to me is that the customers are the same as our customers.
[00:01:24]I think the thing that was the most attractive, it was like, this is a way for us to really kind of step into more mainstream WordPress world, I think. And that seems to be, I’m definitely feeling that over the last few days as the, after the announcement , was made, the, it was really, it’s almost overwhelming how much noise has been kicked up on Twitter especially around lifetime licenses.
[00:01:53]How do you weigh this decision amongst the existing product lineup at Delicious Brains?
[00:01:58] I’m confident that we can hire folks and handle ACF and scale up what we’ve been doing all these years with our existing products. And, we’ve added, within the last few years we’ve doubled our products.
[00:02:11]this is just an extension of where we’ve been already going. It makes complete sense. It’s kind of a supercharging, right? If we were adding two new products over the next, three years, that’s a lot different than adding, a massive product, overnight. it is a big jolt to the business.
[00:02:30]Can you hint at the size of the deal?
[00:02:32] Nope. Moving on
[00:02:34]Will pricing and existing licenses be honored for customers.
[00:02:38] Yes. We made that very clear in the announcement posts that we won’t be changing pricing anytime soon.
[00:02:46] And if we do in the future existing customers, won’t be impacted.
[00:02:50]Then of course we made the mistake of totally not mentioning lifetime licenses and totally missing that and that was a mistake. I wrote a tweet thread yesterday, everyone seems happy with what we’ve decided to do with lifetime licenses.
[00:03:07]Is this Delicious Brains way of investing in Gutenberg and a potential theme product in the future.
[00:03:12] Definitely not a theme product. That’s not really been something on my mind. I’m not going to write off any ideas, but yeah, it’s just not something we’ve really considered at this point.
[00:03:24]Investing in Gutenberg, that’s a bit of a different question.
[00:03:27]I can see that. ACF blocks is a huge part of ACF and I think it’s a huge part , of the WordPress block editor space.
[00:03:36]I love what Elliot has done there, he’s built a bridge really between, the kind of old school, WordPress developers, the PHP and jQuery, and those developers and, the react folks. It’s very challenging to level up on react.
[00:03:53]We’ve been doing it ourselves and it’s, very tough. I very much sympathize with folks who are struggling to kind of make that leap from, J query to react. That’s a huge leap. Anyhow, I think I think there’s lots more opportunity there to help folks extend the block editor, make custom blocks using ACF. So we’ll definitely, we’re definitely pumped to work on that project, but also I don’t think Gutenberg is necessarily the best tool for every job inside of WordPress either.
[00:04:26]there’s lots of cases where you might want to basically create a database of something. A database of books, a database of staff people or whatever it is. And Gutenberg’s UI is for building websites, but building pages, it’s not, , it’s a layout engine, it’s not designed for entering data.
[00:04:46] So I think that’s also where ACF has shined, right? it’s been a wonderful UI for for entering information. And I think that’s where ACF can continue , to shine inside of WordPress.
[00:04:59]What immediate challenges does a product like this present to delicious.
[00:05:03] The biggest one , is hiring. We’ve been hiring like crazy this year. I think in the last 12 months we’ve doubled the size of the team. We’ve really ramped it up in the last three or four months though, because we knew this was coming.
[00:05:18]The good news is we’re pretty much staffed up. we’ve hired pretty much all the developers we need , for ACF at this point. We’re in really good shape.
[00:05:29]One challenge that we’re facing is scaling management leadership around our products and adding ACF to the mix here it’s going to put a strain on that some more. So I’m looking at that, adding more leadership management resources to the team, considering even having someone like a COO role.
[00:05:52]Someone working with me to scale a company essentially.
[00:05:56]Last question to wrap up. What are you most excited about with acf now joining your suite of Delicious Brains products?
[00:06:04] Bringing our strengths our user experience and UI strength to ACF and improving that UI, making things, just all that much better. Making the developer experience better. Even improving, the backend code. Elliot , would be the first to admit that there’s areas of the code that are old and dusty that could use some attention.
[00:06:28] I’m really excited to ship that stuff to the community. It’s going to be so exciting to push out our first release or our first few releases and see how people react , to the work we’ve been doing.
[00:06:43]Thanks for taking the time to do the interview. Brad, if you’ve not seen Delicious Brains before check out Delicious Brains.com and all of the amazing tools they have there. And of course, if you’ve never, ever heard of ACF before, check out advanced custom fields.com, don’t forget to subscribe to the WP mi...

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In a surprise tweet overnight (at least here in the US timezone), somewhere in Australia Elliot Condon announced the acquisition of his iconic WordPress plugin, Advanced Custom Fields by the Delicious Brains software company. 

WordPress News: ⁦@dliciousbrains⁩ acquires ⁦@wp_acf⁩ | 10 Years of ACF – A truly wonderful time https://t.co/ytgpkcQ0l8

Delicious Brains of course famous for WP DB Migrate Pro and DIY WordPress hosting, SpinupWP.

I have reached out to both Brad Touesnard, founder of DB and Elliot for comment, I hope to have those replies back to publish a blog post soon. 

Rob Howard, CEO of Howard Development & Consulting announced the acquisition of the Understrap theme framework, ironically in a Medium post. Reportedly a $50,000 investment. 

It’s the first time I’ve heard of Understrap: 

“The UnderStrap package allows you to quickly and easily build search engine optimized websites with WordPress.”

“I anticipate one of our first steps will be the addition of a Bootstrap 5 version (which has already been started as an offshoot project), since that’s been one of the most important roadmap items for a while now.”

Not to be outdone on acquisitions, Chris Lema tweets that LiquidWeb has acquired Iconic, makers of a suite of WooCommerce plugins. 

Ok, this one is one of the ones I've been waiting for. I'm so thrilled to welcome @iconicwp to the @liquidweb / @stellarwp family.https://t.co/04Lmjw9oe8

“With Liquid Web backing us up, we’ll have more fuel to add to our fire. Our existing team is sticking around and so is our customer-focused ethos. “

WordPress turned 18 this week.But like any other rebelling teenager coming of age, not without its difficulties. When announced the illustrated timeline omitted Mike Little from the lineage of events, but was corrected by Josepha a short time after blowing out the candles. 

Get to the blocka!

Gutenberg 10.7 updates are out. This release introduces the first iteration of responsive menus in the Navigation block. Anne McCarthy published a call to test Full Site Editing by way of challenging you to build a portfolio page. 

I think this is a great opportunity for non-developers to partake in the development of WordPress with a low barrier to entry. I enjoy the work Anne is doing in this space. 

Speaking of full site editing, WPMarmite produced a report on data found surveying 127 WordPress theme shops and their adoption of Gutenberg + FSE. 

• 57% of theme shops feature their Gutenberg compatibility.
• Only 17% of theme shops offer custom Gutenberg blocks.
• 3% of theme shops provide block patterns.
• 17% of theme shops write about Gutenberg (posts about WordPress 5.0 release excluded).
• 65% of theme shops updated or released a theme in the last 3 months.

Automattic launches a block based parent theme. Could this be an indication of a future base theme for WordPress proper moving forward, or just a developer tool for Automatticians. Read Justin Tadlock’s post on the WordPress Tavern.

Product announcements

• Formidable Forms looks to shift focus to WordPress users needing a “custom application development” experience with their forms plugin. 
• Former StudioPress founder Brian Gardner has launched Frost.
• Friend of the show Joe Casabona has refreshed the Podcast Liftoff website.

Food for thought

Jonathan Wold, Community lead for WooCommerce at Auotmattic, expresses a potential need for an independent “app store” for WordPress. I assume thoughts do not reflect his employer on this one.

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Post Status founder Brian Krogsgard has sold the remaining half of his ownership of the WordPress media brand to his partner, Cory Miller.

Kicking off his his farewell post, A New Era for Post Status, Brian states:

“It has been an extreme privilege to create and run this community — and see it blossom into a wonderful entity with its own identity. In the last few years, I’ve worked to bring more voices and more talent into the fold, and I’m confident that I leave Post Status in very able hands.”

I had a chance to Interview Cory Miller about the transition, and here’s what he had to say. (Hit play on the podcast, reader!)

You can gain more insight from Cory’s announcement on the website and his Draft podcast episode.

The Blocksy Theme, was covered on the Tavern recently highlighting all of their investments into the theme + Gutenberg. It’s better for all of WordPress when we see a privately owned theme company growing these days.

Stackable Gutenberg page builder founder Benjamin Intal was interviewed on the WP Jukebox podcast delivering his outlook on the now competitive Gutenberg block landscape as compared to his start back in 2018. Note the use of the phrase, “Gutenberg page builder” a noteworthy and intentional title in his pitch about the company.

Affiliate Royale has re-branded to EasyAffiliate. You can see the whole new brand and website at EasyAffiliate.com. It’s a CaseProof owned company which includes PrettyLink and MemberPress, both of which owner Blair Williams entered into the Awesome Motive accelerator WP Beginner Growth Accelerator program, a Syed Balkhi owned initiative.

Oldies but goodies

The Query Block received some enhancements back in the Gutenberg 10.6 update. Pay close attention to the Query Block. I think it’s important to how users experience pulling content out of WordPress and displaying it on the front-end and will be crucial in the full-site editing experience.

How do you feel about presenting your vaccination status at the next WordCamp? A proposal including comments from around the community was posted back on May 12th.

I interviewed Brian Casel founder of ZipMessage over on The Matt Report podcast.

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

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