The WP Minute

Thanks Pressable for supporting the podcast! What hosting should feel like...nothing! https://pressable.com/wpminute Matt Cromwell and Kim Coleman are back with their second episode of WP Product Talk! They're joined by Lesley Sim, of Newsletter Glue, to discuss the decision-making around building a new product. You could be at the crossroads of launching a new major feature or pivoting your whole WordPress product business. Don't miss this episode! 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 There is a new demo to try out on make.wordpress.org where you can run WordPress directly in the browser without a PHP server. Although it is not fully stable yet, it is a major breakthrough that could transform learning, contributing, and using WordPress. Go check out the post to learn more about how you can test it out. Jesse Friedman, Director of innovation at Automattic was interviewed on the WP Minute about the wp.cloud initiative. If you would like to know more about this, go listen to that interview. WooCommerce WooCommerce Blocks 8.6.0 was released with support for a new block that displays cross-sells for products that are based on the current product in the customer’s cart. Sarah Gooding covers the details over at the WP Tavern. From Our Contributors and Producers Nyasha Green, the Editorial Director over at MasterWP was further encouraged to write “Enough with this woke stuff: and other racist speech you can unlearn” after WP-Tonic’s co-hosts died on a hill attempting to deconstruct racism in the workplace, following an article regarding Twillio layoffs. The episode has since been removed from their podcast feed and YouTube channel. To hear an archived clip, Cameron Jones shared an article from Tom Finley that discusses racism as a weed and this type of speech does not represent WordPress. Further, Allie Nimmons has announced a “How to be an Ally” workshop. It kicks off on October 4th at 3PM.  If you want to try out a visual collaboration tool with your clients, the Atarim plugin is now available in the WordPress Repository. This is a great tool to use when you have more than one person making changes to a website that you are working on. Have questions about WordPress? Daniel Schutzsmith shared a link for  Ask.wp. This is a project by Terry Tsang to act as a "Super Brain" for the WordPress community using a chat bot. Want to start your week with a little motivation? Kathy Zant and Michelle Frechette have teamed up with a new podcast called WP Motivate.  You can listen to their first podcast to…get motivated.  Want to learn more about monetizing free WordPress products? Go check out the episode on the WP Minute with Kim Coleman and Matt Cromwell with their new WP Product Talk Twitter Space. Canva is jumping into the website building game citing that 2 million websites were made with their beta release of their web builder software. Jamie Marsland recorded a YouTube video about this and It will be interesting to see if Canva impacts WordPress in the future. Is there “angst” in the page builder community with the direction of Gutenberg and WordPress core? Paul Lacey shares an article from David Waumsley about how the direction of WordPress is forcing him to take a look at other products. David’s article on researching Jamstack is an area of website building to explore. New Member: This week we welcome Lesley Sim to the #linksquad crew. Cape Dave has donated 3 coffees this week. Thanks, Dave! If you’re not a member yet, go to buymeacoffee.com/mattreport to join. Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:  Birgit Pauli-HackEric KarkovacCameron JonesAndrew PalmerJohn LockeDaniel ShutzsmithMichelle FrechetteJustin FerrimanPaul Lacey 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 Today's episode is a recording of Kim Coleman's and Matt Cromwell's WP Product Talk Twitter Space. The duo share their professional WordPress updates and talk WordPress product pricing. The good, the bad, of offering free WordPress products. Make sure to give them a follow and tune in to their Twitter Space happening today with Lesley Sim. Listen here. 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 If you missed Matt Mullenweg's address at WordCamp US 2022, he snuck in a mention of the new hosting infrastructure without much context around it. Could Automattic be building out the next WordPress hosting company behind the scenes? What if you wanted to launch a WooCommerce specific hosting company? Possibly a solution that end users didn't even know was running WordPress? I reached out to Jesse Friedman, Director of innovation at Automattic, now leading the WP.cloud product with a series of questions to explore this new topic a bit further. 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 Adobe set to acquire Figma If you’re a designer or UI specialist in the WordPress world, chances are you already know about the Adobe/Figma deal. A $20 Billion dollar deal in cash and stock – 40 times Figma revenue – shocked us and launched more memes, probably using Photoshop, than we’ve in the tech space since…well about 4 months ago. 4 Years ago, Figma donated an organizational membership to WordPress.org. Will you continue to use Figma? Tweet at us. In Mullenweg’s recent WCUS address, he snuck in the mention of Automattic’s new cloud service – wp.cloud. It looks to be infrastructure for cloud providers wanting to serve up some WordPress hosting, leveraging .com’s sprawling CDN & other technology. Products like Jetpack already use .com’s CDN as part of their services, as I’m sure other products like VideoPress do.  I reached out to Jesse Friedman, who leads the wp.cloud initiative, for an interview. Here’s a sneak peek of that, which airs next week – subscribe so you don’t miss it! Hosting news continues with WP Engine jumping into the WordPress flavor hosting with a new WooCommerce offering. While Siteground surprises us with their Easy Digital Downloads speciality hosting. Next up (listen to the podcast for more): Michelle Frechette with the Community Minute & Amber Hinds with the Accessibility Minute! Links you shouldn’t miss There’s a handful of other links you shouldn’t miss this week. These links should help you stay informed around the moving and shaking of WordPress: Matt Mullenweg WCUS Address This is a direct recording of his livestream session. If you missed it or want to hear the audience Q&A round, click to tune in. Why WordPress and Wix will Always Be Worlds Apart The WP Minute’s Eric Karkovack, breaks down a detailed comparison on how much WordPress & Wix differ.  Help Test WordPress 6.1 The WordPress 6.1 Beta is out! Remember, don’t complain…explain…your issues by testing the latest version before it's released.  From the grab bag Some of these links might interest you – dive in! ACF 6.0 is releasedWebP pulled from 6.xSyed Bahlki makes an interesting prediction about the future of WordPressMatt Cromwell launched WP Product Shop Talk Twitter Spaces. Subscribe to The WP Minute as this show will be exclusively syndicated through our podcast feed. Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:  Eric KarkovackDaniel ShutzsmithRaquel LandefeldCameron JonesBirgit Pauli-HackMichelle FrechetteAngela Bowman 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 Today's episode is a recording from the official WCUS 2022 livestream found in this video. We've extracted the Matt Mullenweg session which includes some of his outlook on WordPress 6.1, community, and a Q&A session from the audience. If you had a chance to attend WCUS, send us a tweet about your favorite session or experience. Photograph by 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 Our episode is recorded this week by Michelle Frechette. News  Sarah Gooding over at the WP Tavern posted an article asking Gutenberg Contributors to test block-based templates in WordPress Classic Themes. During Matt Mullenweg’s Q&A session at WordCamp last week, there was a discussion about helping with block adoption. If you would like to see what this is all about and help test, jump over to make.wordpress.org. Did you know that the WordPress Plugins Directory crossed 60,000 plugins? Sarah Gooding tweeted about this incredible milestone. Security Eric Karkovack shared the PSA to update the WordPress Two-Factor plugin ASAP. There are two security fixes that are available on GitHub. Events WordCamp Nepal 2022 is scheduled for the 5th & 6th of November 2022 at the Chitwan Garden Resort (CGR), Bharatpur Nepal. It was announced that the  Ujwal Thapa memorial scholarship will be available to 7 eligible candidates who want to attend this WordCamp. The 2023 WordCamp US will be held in National Harbor, Maryland from August 23-25, 2023. The announcement was made at WordCamp US last week. From Our Contributors and Producers Still thinking about going out on your own? Justin Ferriman, who ran LearnDash shares in his blog that it is important to keep an eye on reviews to find market share opportunities. Justin shares a great list to get started with software reviews and shares some third-party suggestions. Chris Weigman introduced Kana, which is a simple and powerful WordPress development environment. If you are looking for a local development environment you can get started by visiting Chris’ website. After seeing many great photos from WordCamp US, Brad Williams shared this tweet with the job board. Matt Medeiros listed the 35 companies hiring over at the WP Minute. CNBC Make It showed that WordPress is number 10 for hiring on the work-from-anywhere and most in-demand jobs.  GoDaddy is launching a preview of Managed WooCommerce Stores to US-based customers. It is the largest investment to date in eCommerce. If you are looking for a solution to multichannel selling for your customers, you may want to go check out the tools being offered. A report in SEO journal announced that Bluehost unveiled a new WordPress eCommerce solution that simplifies creating a store with a point-and-click interface. Amber Hinds tweeted from WordCamp US that @photmatt says there's a challenge getting assistive technology users to test Gutenberg and provide feedback. Only if you expect them to do it for free. Budgeting to pay people with disabilities for their time will solve this and is the right thing to do. This has been the challenge for WordPress.org without a great solution yet. Cameron Jones tweeted: If you are using Paypal to pay for Delicious Brains products, WPEngine announced that you need to change your method of payment on the website. They are no longer supporting Paypal as a payment method. Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:  Eric KarkovackJustin FerrimanDaniel SchutzsmithRaquel LandefeldCameron Jones 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 Editor's note: How I imagine the background music to WordCamp US 2022 News The new default theme, Twenty Twenty-Three, will be a stripped-down base theme with many style variations built by the WordPress design community. This theme is being released to make theme development exciting again. Jump over to the Gutenberg times to read about variations and see the latest on the “good and bad”.  WordPress.com has announced that they can build and design a website for new business owners, in four business days or less. If you are on a budget, the cost is $499, plus an additional purchase of the WordPress.com premium plan. It will be interesting to see how this will grow and if it has any impact on the WordPress professional freelance community.  Security Wordfence PSA: on September 6, 2022, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team was alerted to the presence of a vulnerability being exploited in BackupBuddy, a WordPress plugin that has around 140,000 active installations. This vulnerability makes it possible for unauthenticated users to download arbitrary files from the affected site which can include sensitive information. There is minimal sharing about the details of this vulnerability as it is still an active threat. If you are interested in reading more jump over to the Wordfence website. Sarah Gooding over at WPTavern wrote an article that WordPress’ Security Team announced it will be dropping support for versions 3.7 through 4.0 on December 1, 2022.  Events WordCamp US has started!  Michelle Frechette writes about how to make the most of your Wordcamp US experience with fewer participants and dealing with COVID restrictions. Use the official #WCUS hashtag to follow the online WCUS conversation. If you are there, say hi to Raquel Landefeld who is our community lead at the WP Minute. If you are a new camper, go listen to the Matt Report and Gina Marie Innocent to get more ideas on how to make the most of your WordCamp experience. From Our Contributors and Producers Phil Crumm has a thread on Twitter that the WordPress community is uneasy about the growing pace of acquisitions. His hot take may be correct as the news that GridPane has completed a seed round of funding, including a significant strategic investment from Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com, WooCommerce, WordPress VIP, and Jetpack.  Another acquisition Rocketgenius, the company behind Gravity Forms, has acquired Gravity Flow and Gravity Experts. The acquisition will help the Gravity Forms community by strengthening the portfolio of WordPress product offerings. Vito Peleg, Atarim’s founder, recently led the first angel fundraising round for their agency collaboration tool. He and Matt Medeiros had a great interview right here on the WP Minute.  Anders Norén has a new WordPress theme Björk that he announced on Twitter. Björk is built for the Site Editor and Global Styles features introduced in WordPress 6.0, with 15+ block patterns and seven different theme styles that you can switch between with the click of a button. Ganga Kafle (KafleG), a representative of the WordPress theme team and a member of WordPress Nepal has an open letter to Matt Mullenweg suggesting that the next WordPress release be named in honor of Mr. Ujwal Thapa, an important member of the WordPress Community who lost his life to COVID. We have not been able to locate a response from Matt Mullenweg at this time. Mark Zahra, a WP Minute member, shares his opinion on his website about the state of WordPress blogs. Today we see a mix of older blogs with a solid reputation, newer blogs with unclear intentions, and some that are putting money ahead of everything else. Go spend a few minutes of your time reading about where Mark thinks this is all headed. A big congrats to WordCamp Kathmandu on their 10th anniversary! Sunita Rai shared on Twitter what an incredible experience it was joining the organizers' team as a speaker wrangler. Alan Edwards tweeted about being up all night producing an epic AI-powered Gutenberg block to generate beautiful images from a text prompt in seconds and inserting them into your WordPress posts and pages. If you would like to test it out, sign up to get the instructions emailed to you. learn.wordpress.org needs help with setting the priorities for learning WordPress. They would like to have users complete the Individual Learner Survey to help the team with analysis. Please take a couple of minutes of your time to complete this survey. Next Up Amber Hinds with the Community Minute - “TWMP on Deaf Awareness Month: “Captions”  Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:  Jeff ChandlerAndrew PalmerEric KarkovackBrian CoordsBirgit Pauli-HaackDaniel ShutzsmithMichelle FrechetteMark ZahraAmber Hinds 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 Dave Rodenbaugh, founder of Recapture.io, shares a fascinating anecdote with Angela Bowman, WordPress Meetup organizer and podcaster (Women in WP), about a relatively new WordPress user (Dave’s daughter) who had built a WordPress site with Dave’s help last year but struggled to get another one launched on her own this summer.  Dave’s daughter and her boss, who very much wanted to use WordPress, spent five weeks trying to get WordPress to work for them. They finally gave up and gave Wix a try. One week later, they had a finished, professional-looking site.  Angela and Dave talk about the reasons behind this not-so-successful WordPress story which led to the $64,000 dollar question, Who is WordPress for Anyway?  With different camps forming around WordPress, can we come back together again? Since the announcement of Gutenberg in 2015, the speed at which the page builder plugins have evolved has not slowed down. If anything, they are growing faster and stronger than ever. And it makes sense! The Block Editor can be quite confusing and in Dave’s words “janky”. The on-boarding process with WordPress requires a learning curve that is pretty steep. But it’s not just about getting hosting set up or being initiated into how to set the Front Page in the Reading Settings. In this use case, simply working with the Block Editor created a major hurdle in getting content laid out without a great deal of frustration. What do you think about who WordPress is for? Please share your thoughts. What will it take to make WordPress easier for DIYers? And in the words of the Beatles, will we ever “Come Together” again? 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 You'd be hard pressed to find a business, both online and brick-and-mortar, that didn't invest in their website over the last three years. With WordPress marketshare showing only a sliver of marketshare decline since pandemic heights, it's still a force to be reckoned with. Putting page builders and coding tools to the side: The client + agency collaboration process of designing a website can be one of the most costly parts of any new WordPress project. Atarim aims to solve this issue using their software aimed at WordPress professionals. Vito Peleg, Atarim's founder, recently lead their first angel fundraising round. While he didn't share the total value of the deal with me, it does provide a solid year and a half of runway, according to his prediction. If you enjoyed today's episode, please consider sharing this post on social media and supporting or joining our membership here. Support our work at https://thewpminute.com/supportGet the newsletter at https://thewpminute.com/subscribe ★ Support this podcast ★