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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 ★ Support this podcast ★