A Block, a scotch, and a Liam Dempsey for your WordPress news

Nov 10, 2021

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It’s the WPMinute! I am Liam Dempsey with the following news and updates.

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 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

Jetpack is acquiring WPScan. WPScan is being used across the WordPress ecosystem to identify vulnerabilities in WordPress core, themes, and plugins. Besides creating an outstanding security offering, Jetpack’s goal for this acquisition is to make malware data and APIs more open source. As part of the acquisition, two of the WPScan founders, Ryan Dewhurst and Erwan Le Rousseau, will be joining Automattic to continue their work improving security for the WordPress ecosystem. WPScan will continue to operate independently in the near term and may be integrated into Jetpack Scan in the future.

There has been a lot of news around core updates on make.wordpress.org. There is a core editor improvement with a new view that lets folks have a space to focus specifically on editing a single template part (like the header or footer). You will be able to access this mode in a few ways once Gutenberg 11.9 is released. If all goes well, then in WordPress 5.9.

Around the FSE program (Full Site Editing that is) the team went into round three of questioning that was gathered through the FSE outreach program. There were many questions around themes, the customizer and fonts. Keep your eyes open for a round four.

Paul Lacey recently spoke with Vikas Singhal of Express Tech & InstaWP on the WPMinute about his company’s upcoming FSE (Full Site Editing) Theme Launch. It was interesting to see a practical implementation of FSE design. The theme is called Guten and launches in December. You can check this out on the WPMinute to get a review of the FSE Theme implementation and design.

Spencer Forman also at the WPMinute spends time talking about how many more theme years are we going to see? Are we ready for a default theme that flexes Gutenberg’s block-based approach over a designed theme like Twenty Twenty? Go listen to Spencer’s take on the release of styled themes with major WordPress releases.

Justin Tadlock, at the WPTavern, wrote a great blog post on the third-party plugin WooCommerce and asked the question Where are the Block Themes for WooCommerce? WooCommerce is a third-party plugin and is unrelated to the core WordPress and Gutenberg projects. But as we know, WooCommerce is owned by Automattic. So, one can assume that there is some crossover among developers. For a deeper look at what is ahead, read Peek into the WooCommerce Blocks Roadmap, which is developer-specific. You may come to the realization that the size and scope of WooCommerce Block integration is not simple and far off for FSE.

SEO

Google has announced that it’s renaming Google My Business to Google Business Profile. Google has explained that the existing Google My Business web experience will eventually transition to primarily supporting large multi-location businesses. Local SEO experts have been quick to react to the update. If SEO is included in your WordPress space go check out the changes that are coming.

In other SEO news….RankMath, with over a million installs annonces Content AI to take the hassle out of writing. That is a great idea for many who are writing that specific content for organic SEO. RankMath will hold your hand while you write content to see if it is worthy of Search Engine Rankings.

Events

Wordfest Live is back in March 2022. The deadline for the call for speaker submissions is December 6, 2021, at midnight UTC. The organizers will start to notify speakers from December 16, 2021, onward. Wordfest is seeking proposals on a wide variety of topics. Go check out the details on their site if you are interested.

WooCommerce

BobWP announced his first Do the Woo partnership with PostStatus. Bob has been friends with Cory Miller for a long time and it made sense at this time to partner with somebody he mentions a lot in the WordPress space on his podcasts. Congratulations Bob and Cory!

From Our Contributors and Producers

We have been reporting for weeks how different it is for developers and writers coming into the WordPress space with the changes to core and the addition of Gutenberg. Tom McFarlin shares his perspective about both on his blog. Tom is an experienced WordPress developer and you may have followed his writing over the years. He writes that although WordPress is a different set of technologies now, it’s not very different for somebody getting started in programming in any discipline. Developers need to learn different technologies and make them work. He shares several points in his post and it is definitely worth it to take the time to read.

Speaking of WordPress development, Aaron Jorbin shared his development toolchain while he was building the Post Format Block. Aaron covers three tools (wp-scripts being his favorite) in his post that can improve the quality of your code and allow you to focus on things that matter instead of the repeatable tasks that happen in the world of development.

Over on the WPTavern, Nathan Wrigley interviewed Tara King. Tara has recently started working for Automattic in a developer relations role. Tara will lead a newly formed team who will get out and try to understand the pain points that people are having with the new Block Editor and Full Site Editing. She is encouraging developers toward a Gutenberg future and wants to hear from you.

The WebDevStudios team was over on PostStatus discussing the Legend of the H...