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Josh Pollock, a co-founder of Caldera forms, shared how he was able to have a career in development because of WordPress. He writes about all the extra work needed to build a plugin now and how that is impacting the learning curve in WordPress. Josh is working on a new product called Plugin Machine. He has always been interested in helping developers and this looks like an exciting opportunity for new developers coming into the WordPress space. Go check out what is planned for Plugin Machine and sign up for early access.
Sarah Gooding at the WP Tavern shared the latest on the antitrust lawsuit against Google. The Lawsuit claimed AMP was created for the purpose of pushing publishers away from “header bidding.” The full text of the newly unredacted complaint, which was unsealed by a federal judge last week, references research from internal Google documents. It states that internal Google communications identified header bidding as an “existential threat.” We will keep an eye on Sarah’s reporting as this concern should continue to be a priority for the WordPress Community.
Jetpack is finally formalizing its approach to agency licensing with a new portal launched this week. The program is aimed at streamlining product setup and account billing records for agencies and professionals who use Jetpack on client projects. Sarah was very busy writing about this as well this week.
Birgit Pauli-Haack shared this blog post from lead architect of the Gutenberg project Matías Ventura, reviewing theme.json and what’s on the horizon for it. Theme.json allows themes to control various aspects of the block editor, from presets to settings to the appearance of blocks, and was introduced in WordPress 5.8. Matias covers the cool things that can be done with it already and what will be unlocked in the future.
As we have been reporting, WordPress 5.9 is full steam ahead towards the December 14, 2021 release date. The make.wordpress.org website is still showing the raised hand emoji where contributors and volunteers are needed.
Also over on make.wordpress.org there is a redesign of the Gutenberg page. You can review the proposed updates and if you want to get involved, volunteers are welcome.
Search Engine Journal reported that WordPress took a bit of a beating by sharing the Core Web Vitals Technology Report that combines two usage datasets to compare the CMS technologies.
Events
Sara Gooding, over at the WPTavern, wrote this week about WordCamp US seeking a new host city for 2022. Unlike previous years, community leadership plans to conduct its own city search using a professional events management team.
Buddy is hosting a webinar on How to update WordPress plugins with Git Updater on November 17th. You can learn how to seamlessly release your in-house plugins without the need of using the official plugin repository.
WooCommerce
BobWP did a total rebrand over at Doo the Woo with WebDevStudios. If you keep up with the WooCommerce news this site is a beautiful redesign that has great navigation to find the all the things you are looking for. Congratulations Bob!
Pagebuilder News
Elegant themes announced on their blog that they have released Full Site Front-End editing for Divi. Now You Can Edit Your Theme Builder Templates And Post Content At The Same Time From Within The Visual Builder. Check out their video for more information.
Security
Wordfence covered a very disturbing remote work scam and presented it as a PSA to the community because it is impacting a lot of folks. An attacker will post a job advertisement on a job board for a position and after you reach out, the scammers pose as people in a company doing the hiring. You may go out and purchase equipment for the job which you were just offered (from a fake company) and then you are left hanging for the costs of the equipment after you have provided personal information. There are several recommendations in the article to protect yourself, but do not apply for jobs through a job board and make sure that the company has a legitimate job posting on their website.
We had some great finds this week from Contributors and Producers
Stencil joins Namecheap, the second-largest domain registrar in the world. It is only going to get better as Namecheap shares many of the core values as Stencil.
Amber Hinds Tweeted that an accessibility @a11y test engineer, Joyce Oshita has offered to test (free audit) and provide feedback for a #WordPress plugin or theme.
In the latest ReadME Podcast, lead @WordPress