The WP Minute

Thanks Pressable for supporting the podcast! What hosting should feel like...nothing! https://pressable.com/wpminute Matt Mullenweg held court at the annual State of the Word event on December 15. Several topics were touched, including the use of Gutenberg outside of WordPress, the return of in-person Meetups and WordCamps, and the announcement of a Community Summit set to take place in 2023. Mullenweg also detailed a change to the WordPress.org Plugin and Theme repositories. Taxonomies have been added that allow authors to categorize their products as “commercial” or “community” - among other labels. The goal is to help users better understand the purpose of and level of support provided by theme and plugin authors. The feature is opt-in, and it’s already being put to use by some products. As usual, the event was packed with insight and information. The WP Minute has a handy summary of key moments, along with a full transcript. It’s accompanied by a video highlight package that condenses the entire event down to just over 16 minutes. You’ll also want to check out State of the Word recaps from both Sarah Gooding at WP Tavern and Courtney Robertson at GoDaddy. Links You Shouldn’t Miss There’s a new competitor in the WordPress email newsletter space. WordPress.com Newsletter was announced this week. The feature allows users to publish new posts as email newsletters, collect subscribers, and design a template. Monetization features are in the works with details forthcoming. Meanwhile, our own Matt Medeiros offers his analysis of the product via a new video. The subject of WordPress nostalgia seems to be popular these days. The WP Minute’s Eric Karkovack looks at why that is and how it could help us shape the future of the community. Security firm Wordfence has released a free vulnerability database API. Hosting companies, security researchers, and individual users will have access to a continuously updated repository of vulnerabilities. The company hopes that the community “will turn this data into free and commercial security products that will improve the security of the WordPress community.” What does the future look like for ClassicPress? The open source project is a fork of WordPress that retains the TinyMCE-based Classic Editor. A new poll asks users whether the content management system should be “re-forked” to WordPress 6.0 or continue along its current path, based on WordPress 4.9. Classifieds listings buy yours TweetGrab crawls your site and turns any embedded Tweets into screenshots with the click of a button. ZipMessage Record and swap messages asynchronously with clients and others using video, screen, audio or text + Embed video intake forms in WordPress. MainWP 4.3 includes Client Management, a new default theme, and an easy way to organize clients & sites from a single dashboard. Corey Maass is selling his Social Link Pages WP plugin It creates social landing pages a la linktr.ee or carrd. 1000 active installs. $200 MRR. 30 active subscriptions. 45 lifetime licenses. Asking $5000. From the Grab Bag Now it’s time to take a look at some other interesting topics shared by our contributors. Block Protocol is a project aimed at creating a universal block system. And although there is no official collaboration with WordPress, the project has announced plans for a WordPress plugin to be released in 2023. As users continue to wrestle with leaving Twitter, the subject of what happens to embedded tweets has become a hot topic. Developer Keanan Koppenhaver has launched TweetGrab, a WordPress plugin that will turn embedded tweets into images. Gutenberg is continuing to branch out beyond WordPress. Drupal Gutenberg 2.6 was recently released, improving block-based content building for the open-source CMS. The WordPress Training team has posted an Individual Learner Survey and is asking for public feedback. The results will help to shape the materials provided on the Learn WordPress website. Video of the week Subscribe at youtube.com/@wpminute The WP Minute explores the new WordPress.com newsletter offering, which looks very Jetpack-ish. Because it is.  Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:  Justin Ferriman Courtney Robertson Support our work at https://thewpminute.com/supportGet the newsletter at https://thewpminute.com/subscribe ★ Support this podcast ★

Thanks Pressable for supporting the podcast! What hosting should feel like...nothing! https://pressable.com/wpminute State of the Word 2022 has just completed another hybrid presentation. A mix of livestream on the official WordPress YouTube channel and in-person attendees traveled to NYC to watch Matt Mullenweg and others update us on all things WordPress. We'll cover some of the highlights in today's post. Tune in to listen to the complete recording of the event on our podcast or in the player above. Thanks for being a WP Minute reader/listener/viewer! Consider supporting us through a virtual coffee or joining our membership. Video highlights Key takeaways Gutenberg will be bigger than WordPress itself. To mobile apps and the web. bbPress forms now have Gutenberg Using Blocks Everywhere plugin. Will be embedded in BuddyPress. PEW Research using Gutenberg Day One App using Gutenberg in web app Mobile Gutenberg is dual-licensed GPL & MPL Tumblr using Gutenberg 500 meetups doubled their events in 2022 1 WordCamp in 2021 to 22 in 2022 Community Summit is coming back WordPress is turning 20 next year Doing a new 10 year update to the "Milestones Book" 12,000 People took a Learn.WordPress course New blog and showcase pages on WordPress.org bringing Jazz design languages over 22 million images. 1.1 million audio files. OpenVerse scours the web for Creative Commons images & other media. Now launched audio."Not fully embedded into WordPress yet" Create themes just using blocks & style variations We're at the end of Phase 2 of Gutenberg initial development Create block theme "plugin" allows you to make themes from blocks Zen mode is a new writing experience Showing off "locked-in patterns." A way for consultants to pass sites off to clients. 1399 Release contributors New core contributors to WordPress. "Think of them like the Wikipedia super-editors" WordPress is what it is because of community "Think of WordPress.org as an App Store for WordPress" Matt likes to think of the community as fractal Allow theme & plugin developers to self-identify as what their project goals are through a new taxonomy. Will be launching this month. Phase 3 Gutenberg: Collaboration. Improvements for editorial workflows. Also bringing in OpenVerse. Share your experience with the WordPress 2022 survey Matt was excited about OpenAI and Stable Diffusion WordPress Playground. A way to experience the entirety of the WordPress stack in the browser, without installing dependencies. 100% in the browser using web assembly. How can we make WordPress that is a gift to the world for decades to come? "WordPress belongs to all of us, but really we're taking care of it for the next generation." Important links wordpress.tumblr.com Engineawesome.com using Gutenberg communitysummit.wordpress.org/2023 WP20.wordpress.net learn.wordpress.org wordpress.org/openverse https://wordpress.org/plugins/create-block-theme/ Make.wordpress.org https://developer.wordpress.org/playground photomatt.tumblr.com https://distributed.blog Future Predictions Gutenberg will be bigger than WordPress (Said in 2021) OpenVerse will make its way in to WordPress app Create entire "themes" with blocks. See: "Create Block Theme" plugin WordPress Playground. Opportunities to test WP, plugins, and themes in a browser without installing Questions from the Q&A round Last year at SoTW you announced the photo directory. 5,500+ photos. Where do we go from here? Can we provide stats to creators? What do you think our biggest challenge WordPress is facing right now? What can we do as a community to lovingly address those challenges? Can we do another all-female release squad in 2023? What's the plan to full support of WordPress 8 (at least on the charts of .org)? Will WordPress be a thing in the future? Why are certifications on the roadmap for Learn? Are we going to get to one universal theme? Any thoughts on integrating GPT AI models into WordPress? How do we keep the younger generation interested in WordPress? Will WordPress have backwards compatibility for PHP Support our work at https://thewpminute.com/supportGet the newsletter at https://thewpminute.com/subscribe ★ Support this podcast ★

Thanks Pressable for supporting the podcast! What hosting should feel like...nothing! https://pressable.com/wpminute What’s a web hosting provider’s role in content moderation? WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg recently weighed in. Mullenweg was a guest on The Verge’s Decoder podcast and discussed the issue as it relates to WordPress VIP hosting. Specifically, he commented on a controversial story that was published in 2020 on the New York Post website. The Post is a WordPress VIP client.  The story covered material allegedly recovered from a laptop owned by Hunter Biden, the son of U.S. President Joe Biden. Debate over the origins of the material saw both Facebook and Twitter temporarily restrict links to the story. Mullenweg says Automattic reviewed the matter but ultimately decided not to take action. Automattic has policies in place for content moderation, and Mullenweg referred to them as a “starting point” for looking deeper into a specific case. Links You Shouldn’t Miss Theme developer ILOVEWP published a report on the most popular WordPress plugins released in 2022. The report uses publicly available data for plugins in the official WordPress.org repository. In all, nearly 4,200 plugins have been added so far this year. Out of that, only 7 have achieved at least 50,000 active installations. Did publishing platform Substack use unattributed code from open source competitor Ghost? Ghost’s founder and CEO John O’Nolan makes a case in a recent Twitter thread. In a response thread, Substack co-founder and CEO Chris Best says the whole thing is a misunderstanding. Rather, Substack’s custom theming API is merely compatible with Ghost. There’s a lot here to digest. Therefore, reading the threads from both parties is recommended to see where each side is coming from. What will WordPress freelancers face in 2023? The WP Minute’s Eric Karkovack offered some predictions. Upgrading to PHP 8 and navigating an uncertain economic environment are among them. Development firm Awesome Motive has introduced SendLayer, an email delivery service aimed at WordPress website owners. It requires a free API key and works in conjunction with the WP Mail SMTP plugin. Paid plans are being offered. Classifieds listings buy yours TweetGrab crawls your site and turns any embedded Tweets into screenshots with the click of a button. ZipMessage Record and swap messages asynchronously with clients and others using video, screen, audio or text + Embed video intake forms in WordPress. MainWP 4.3 includes Client Management, a new default theme, and an easy way to organize clients & sites from a single dashboard. From the Grab Bag Now it’s time to take a look at some other interesting topics shared by our contributors. The Block Editor is coming to the WordPress.org support forums. According to Sarah Gooding at WP Tavern, the WordPress.org Meta Team is experimenting with a basic implementation. Popular form plugin Gravity Forms announced a release candidate for version 2.7. The new version includes a form template library, theme and block styling, along with improved spam protection. Have an extra €1.6M to spend? Then you might be a candidate to purchase the Mailchimp for WordPress plugin. WP Tavern reports that plugin founder Danny van Kooten has expressed interest in selling via a post on Hacker News. The plugin is not officially affiliated with Mailchimp, but has over 2 million active installations. Looking to improve the performance of your theme? The WordPress Developer Blog details how using theme.json and per-block styles can help. The latest release of Gutenberg features a color coding for the WordPress Site Editor and an experimental split control UI for individual block settings. Twitter recently announced plans to shut down its newsletter tool aimed at journalists, Revue, just one year after acquiring it. Users are set to lose access on January 18, 2023. Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:  Birgit Pauli-Haack Justin Ferriman Courtney Robertson Daniel Schutzsmith Support our work at https://thewpminute.com/supportGet the newsletter at https://thewpminute.com/subscribe ★ Support this podcast ★

Thanks Pressable for supporting the podcast! What hosting should feel like...nothing! https://pressable.com/wpminute It’s a familiar refrain: the WordPress project needs contributors. But getting involved can be difficult for individuals who aren’t corporately sponsored. A new nonprofit organization is hoping to address this ongoing challenge. The WP Community Collective looks to offer community-funded fellowships to financially support contributions to WordPress. Founded by Sé Reed, Katie Adams Farrell, and Courtney Robertson, the WPCC seeks both individual donations and corporate partnerships. In its official announcement, the organization vows to promote transparency, community representation, and governance. Its first initiative involves the creation of an Accessibility Fellowship. The WPCC says it plans to create a formalized organizational structure within the next year. Next up (listen to the podcast for more): Michelle Frechette with the Community Minute! Links You Shouldn’t Miss The latest episode of WP Product Talk covers what happens when your business starts to scale. Matt Cromwell spoke with Jason and Kim Coleman about the process of budgeting and forecasting for WordPress products. It’s time once again for the annual WordPress Survey. You are encouraged to share your thoughts and let the WordPress team know how you use the software. The survey will remain open throughout the rest of 2022. ChatGPT, a chatbot powered by artificial intelligence, has surpassed 1 million users. The app claims the ability to answer follow-up questions and take instructions from humans. And, as WP Tavern reports, it also generated a WordPress plugin on demand. Web developer Johnathon Williams shared a recording of the process in action. A proposed bill before the United States Congress has Facebook’s parent company Meta threatening to pull news-oriented content from its platform. The bill would allow news outlets to collectively bargain with social media companies for a larger percentage of ad revenue. A similar bill was passed last year in Australia. Another WordPress-related acquisition is in the books. Development firm Strategy11 has acquired the WP Tasty and Nutrifox suite of plugins. The company also owns Formidable Forms, among other popular plugins. Classifieds listings buy yours TweetGrab crawls your site and turns any embedded Tweets into screenshots with the click of a button. ZipMessage Record and swap messages asynchronously with clients and others using video, screen, audio or text + Embed video intake forms in WordPress. MainWP 4.3 includes Client Management, a new default theme, and an easy way to organize clients & sites from a single dashboard. From the Grab Bag Now it’s time to take a look at some other interesting topics shared by our contributors. No-code tool Brizy announced that it has raised $2.4 million seed investment to create a multi-platform website builder. WordPress developer Jos Velasco has proposed an option that would allow users to opt into security-related automatic theme and plugin updates. Not sure if Black Friday sales are right for your WordPress company? A recent Twitter thread has emerged that features arguments both for and against them. Google and parent company Alphabet are the target of a lawsuit filed by a group of 130,000 businesses in the United Kingdom. The claim alleges anti-competitive practices relating to its online advertising model. Some social media users continue to migrate from Twitter to open platforms like Mastadon. Recently, tech philosopher Dr. Johnathan Flowers pointed out potential barriers for communities of color to make the move on the Tech Policy Press podcast. Want to give back this holiday season? Then check out #WPGivesAHand and the WebDevStudios Charity Challenge for some initiatives involving the WordPress community. Keeping with that generous spirit, website translation tool Weglot announced that they raised €52,000 for charity during their recent Giving Tuesday effort. New Members This Week Dennis Dornon, follow @dennisdornon, @MyMainWP WPMarmite, follow @wpmarmite_en If you’re not a member yet, go to thewpminute.com/support/ to join. Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:  Justin Ferriman  John Locke Support our work at https://thewpminute.com/supportGet the newsletter at https://thewpminute.com/subscribe ★ Support this podcast ★

Thanks Pressable for supporting the podcast! What hosting should feel like...nothing! https://pressable.com/wpminute Could you run your entire WordPress product business from a single spreadsheet? Today's WP Product Talk covers what happens when your business starts to scale. From a few hundred dollars, to a few hundred-thousand dollars, this conversation is jam-packed with a wealth of. bean counting knowledge. Links Kim Coleman Jason Coleman Matt Cromwell Paid Memberships Pro GiveWP Support the WP Minute Support our work at https://thewpminute.com/supportGet the newsletter at https://thewpminute.com/subscribe ★ Support this podcast ★

Thanks Pressable for supporting the podcast! What hosting should feel like...nothing! https://pressable.com/wpminute Welcome to a special edition of the WP Minute! Rather than our usual five minute roundup of WordPress news, we’ve recorded an expanded episode this week. Matt Medeiros and Eric Karkovack got together to discuss their picks for November’s most interesting and impactful stories. Here’s a rundown of links mentioned in the show: The new WordPress Developer Blog seeks to bridge the information gap between developers and changes to core. Hopefully it proves to be a one-stop shop to learn about new features, deprecated code, and more. Elegant Themes announced that their Divi page builder will undergo some major changes under the hood. Version 5.0 will eschew shortcodes and become more tightly integrated with Gutenberg. WordPress 6.1 said goodbye to the venerable “Just Another WordPress Site” tagline. New installs will feature an empty tagline, though the phrase will live on as placeholder text. Mike McAlister’s concept for an OpenPress plugin sparked a lot of discussion. It would turn WordPress into a microblogging platform and allow other websites to subscribe to your content. When it comes to WordPress, Eric Karkovack has a few simple hopes for 2023. Hint: they’re more about community than fancy new features. The WordPress community spoke up, and Meetup.com listened to concerns about its use of an accessibility overlay. Now, they’re working together in an effort to make the platform accessible by tackling problems at their roots. If you’re a fan of the puzzle game Wordle, check out WordlePress. Ross Wintle’s creation mixes the fun of the original and challenges your knowledge of core WordPress PHP functions. Classifieds listings buy yours TweetGrab crawls your site and turns any embedded Tweets into screenshots with the click of a button. ZipMessage Record and swap messages asynchronously with clients and others using video, screen, audio or text + Embed video intake forms in WordPress. New Members This Week Dennis Dornon, follow @dennisdornon, @MyMainWP WPMarmite, follow @wpmarmite_en If you’re not a member yet, go to thewpminute.com/support/ to join. Support our work at https://thewpminute.com/supportGet the newsletter at https://thewpminute.com/subscribe ★ Support this podcast ★

Thanks Pressable for supporting the podcast! What hosting should feel like...nothing! https://pressable.com/wpminute The annual State of the Word event has been scheduled for December 15, 2022 from 1:00 - 2:30pm EST. WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg will take to the microphone to discuss the year that was and what lies ahead. The event will take place in New York City and will also be live streamed. If you’d like to attend in-person, there’s a survey available to fill out. Meanwhile, you can also submit questions to Mullenweg ahead of time by emailing ask-matt@wordcamp.org or during the event via YouTube’s chat feature. Links You Shouldn’t Miss The WP Minute’s Eric Karkovack has a wish list of things he’d love to see from WordPress in 2023. More than any technical enhancements, his hopes include better communication, collaboration, and more opportunities to get together for in-person events. Tom McFarlin contributed to The WP Minute with an in-depth tutorial on working with multiple user metadata queries. He takes us step-by-step through the process of retrieving a custom set of user records. WordPress.org is launching a blog aimed at developers. Sarah Gooding of WP Tavern reports that the project is currently in beta testing. The focus will be on new features that impact theme and plugin developers. According to WP Tavern, the Divi page builder will undergo some major changes in 2023. Version 5.0 isn’t slated to see new features, rather a complete rewrite of its underlying framework. The revamp will be built using React and aims to improve compatibility with the Gutenberg Block Editor. Last week, we reported on Mike McAlister's concept for OpenPress, a plugin that would turn a WordPress install into a syndicated microblogging platform. This week, Alex Standiford expands on the idea and wonders if WordPress might one day have a bidirectional relationship with social media platforms. Classifieds listings buy yours Equalized Digital Get 50% off Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker November 20-30 with coupon code BlackFriday22 and start making your website accessible. From the Grab Bag Now it’s time to take a look at some other interesting topics shared by our contributors. WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg announced that Tumblr will soon add support for ActivityPub, an open and decentralized protocol for connecting to Mastodon and other social media platforms. The announcement comes as more users are contemplating Twitter alternatives. Speaking of Tumblr, Nyasha Green at MasterWP looks at the platform’s recent resurgence. Sell Courses Online have published a study of 240,000 WordPress websites that run a learning management system (LMS). The data shows the most popular LMS plugins, average monthly tech spending, and more. Automattic’s Jetpack has announced its “Build your own Jetpack” offering, which consists of 7 individual plugins. Functionality includes backup, security, performance, and a CRM. Storipress, a competitor to Automattic’s Newspack platform, has secured a $500,000 investment. Jean Galea breaks down the current state of WordPress and wonders what comes next. New Members This Week David Bell, follow @Cape_Dave Jess Frick, follow @renewabelle If you’re not a member yet, go to thewpminute.com/support/ to join. Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:  Cameron Jones Justin Ferriman Raquel Landefeld Jeff Chandler Support our work at https://thewpminute.com/supportGet the newsletter at https://thewpminute.com/subscribe ★ Support this podcast ★

Thanks Pressable for supporting the podcast! What hosting should feel like...nothing! https://pressable.com/wpminute Lots has changed for the WordPress website building experience over the last 4 years and today's WP Product Talk has been on the frontlines of it. Richard Tabor joins the podcast to talk about the major changes in Gutenberg, Site Editing, and the future of WordPress. Looking for a healthy dose of what's under the hood of your favorite CMS? Don't miss this episode. Links Kim Coleman Richard Tabor Matt Cromwell Paid Memberships Pro GiveWP Support the WP Minute Support our work at https://thewpminute.com/supportGet the newsletter at https://thewpminute.com/subscribe ★ Support this podcast ★

Thanks Pressable for supporting the podcast! What hosting should feel like...nothing! https://pressable.com/wpminute Hiring is probably the hardest thing to do in any business. There's so much that needs to go into the interview process, onboarding, and we haven't even begun to think about the actual job description! Lucky for us, Kim Lipari joins WP Product talk to give us all the advice we need to become better employers in the WordPress ecosystem. If you enjoyed today's episode, please share it on social media and say thanks to the hosts! Links Kim Coleman Kim Lipari Matt Cromwell Paid Memberships Pro GiveWP Support the WP Minute Support our work at https://thewpminute.com/supportGet the newsletter at https://thewpminute.com/subscribe ★ Support this podcast ★

Thanks Pressable for supporting the podcast! What hosting should feel like...nothing! https://pressable.com/wpminute The 6th episode of WP Product Talk featuring Zach Tirell of WP Events Calendar. Listen in to find out how to hire and manage contractors for your WordPress product (or agency!) business. If you're a WordPress freelancer, this is a fantastic episode to listen to and reverse engineer to better position yourself with employers. If you enjoyed this episode, please say thanks to the hosts and consider sharing this on social media! Links Kim Coleman Zach Tirrell Matt Cromwell Paid Memberships Pro GiveWP Support the WP Minute Support our work at https://thewpminute.com/supportGet the newsletter at https://thewpminute.com/subscribe ★ Support this podcast ★