Daniel Schutzsmith and Matt Medeiros return for a new WP Minute Rewind! Daniel and Matt will choose 3 of their favorite WordPress news headlines from the previous month to share and expand upon. Join us as they go deeper in this longer format show. If you love WordPress news, like _really_ love WordPress news, this episode is for you! Please share this on social media and tell others to tune in. Important Links & Takeaways The WP Minute is now sponsored by MasterWPMatt is looking for a WordPress news writer. Contact us if that's you.WP Minute is now in Slack (no more Discord)What's the difference between WP Minute and other WP groups?An inside look at community journalism in the WP https://joost.blog/cms-market-share/https://www.hubspot.com/company-news/hubspot-introduces-a-powerful-and-free-drag-and-drop-website-builderhttps://www.squarespace.com/websites/fluid-enginehttps://news.shopify.com/changes-to-shopifys-teamhttps://wptavern.com/wordpress-com-ends-recent-pricing-experiment-reverts-to-previous-modelWP Minute interview with Dave Martinhttps://instawp.com/What if GoDaddy had it's own WordPress?WordPress Accessibility DayPress the IssueAmber Hinds on selling her pluginWP Lift sold for 160k USDSitecare acquires Maintain from WDSEasy Support VideosDaniel on TwitterMatt on TwitterSupport the show ★ Support this podcast ★

Guest host, Amber Hinds is sharing with us her POV on Equalize Digital's first "exit." "This post tells the story of how WP Conference Schedule came to be and why we ultimately ended up selling it before even launching the paid version of the plugin."Amber Hinds Links Amber Hinds Equalize Digital Sells WP Conference Schedule Amber Hinds Blog ★ Support this podcast ★

Leading off this week is Joost de Valk’s semi-annual CMS market share analysis. WordPress maintains a 43% share, the equivalent of AT&T’s wireless market share, within the CMS space. Shopify, WordPress’ closest competitor on the chart chimes in at 4.2% Shopify also shocked the industry by laying off 1,000 employees via email, penned by the companies CEO, Tobias Lütke. Juxtaposed to the the layoffs, a report from McKinsey & company, shows that 41% of workers surveyed quit their jobs due to lack of career development and advancement. Squarespace, which is holding on to the 4th spot at 2% market share, has launched their new website building experience: Fluid Engine. WordPress.com is going back in time…to their former pricing. Sarah Gooding from WP Tavern reports the .com team have ended their pricing experiment. The WordPress mobile app is shedding it’s Jetpack features, in an effort to simplify the experience: “The hope is that this change will simplify much of the UX and design of the WordPress apps for users who don’t want or need Jetpack services and tools. The WordPress apps will continue to be maintained and updated, ensuring that users can publish content from anywhere just as they can today. “ Meanwhile, the Jetpack team plans on improving the Jetpack app as they transition these features out of the core app. Have any predictions on how the Jetpack app will change over time? Tweet at us @thewpminute OR Join our members-only Slack group for $79/year. Help Josepha find a better name for Full Site Editing (FSE): Giving FSE a More User Friendly Name – Make WordPress Core. The terms “full site editing” and “full site editor” (also abbreviated as FSE) were developed to easily refer to a collection of features and now that those features are integrated into our daily WordPress experience, how can we best update the wording to be more user friendly?” This year’s Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship recipients are Margherita Pelonara, Simona Simionato, and Pooja Derashri! Simona is the COO at a consulting company that focuses on digital learning and splits her time between Valencia, Spain and Milan, Italy. Simona Simionato’s high-profile studies include a Degree in Statistics, a Master’s in International Tourism Management, and graduation in coaching – in a School officially recognized by the ICF – which enriched her professional profile as a specialized Brief Coach. Pooja Derashri hails from Ajmer, India. She started using WordPress in 2013. Pooja and her husband Anand co-founded WPVibes, a WordPress plugin development agency. Her initial involvement was as a developer. Currently, she is transitioning towards SEO and Content Marketing. Margherita Pelonara lives in Santa Maria Nuova, Italy with her husband, two sons (25 and 15 years old), two cats, and has an insane addiction to lipstick (and WordPress, of course!). Margherita helps women freelancers who want to take their businesses and their lives to the next level: she builds websites with WordPress, fixes them, updates them, and teaches women how to use them. From the Grab Bag! StellarWP launches a WordPress events site WP.Events - wp.eventsWP Minute community member Davinder Singh Kainth was interviewed on Torque Torque News Drop: Davinder from The WPWeekly | @thetorquemagWP Minute producer Justin Ferriman of LearnDash fame is relaunching nofilter.fm as a podcast NoFilterFM Pre-LaunchSitecare buys Maintainn from WebDevStudios Next up: Michelle Frechette with the WP Community Minute! Thanks to all of the producers this week: Davinder Sing Kainth (for voting his own article - I see you)Eric KarkovackDaniel SchutzsmithMichelle Frechette ★ Support this podcast ★

WordPress support company Sitecare acquires Maintainn, excluding the team, from WebDevStudios. Hear from the founders in today’s interview to learn how the deal went down, what to look for in good acquisitions, and what the future of WordPress support companies look like. The landscape of monthly WordPress support companies has certainly changed since these two OG’s launched in 2012-2013. Sitecare plans to double-down on their packaged monthly services while WedDevStudios continues to expand their enterprise WordPress business. Links Ryan Sullivan Brad Williams Sitecare Maintainn WebDevStudios ★ Support this podcast ★

Where is the concentration on performance and other goodies in new releases of WordPress? Sarah Gooding over at the WPTavern covered how WordPress contributors have been discussing adding SVG support for more than nine years. The SVG module is currently one of the items that the Performance team contributors have identified for WordPress 6.2 as a goal for proposing the module for core. Anyone who wants to contribute can join their efforts on GitHub. Eric Karkovack wrote about the issue recently on the WP Minute. It seems that the concentration of WordPress core updates has been directly related to the Gutenberg block editor. To some members of the community, those developments have come at the expense of letting other areas of the software slip. Eric’s article makes the point that Security and Data Organization could also use some attention and he is looking for balance across the core in future releases of WordPress. If you are a Jetpack user, you will be happy to know that Jetpack AP Bot for Telegram will now let you automatically share blog posts from any Jetpack-powered WordPress site (including any site hosted at WordPress.com) directly to a Telegram channel. This free tool saves time sharing content to Telegram, where readers can subscribe to read your posts just as easily as they would via email or social media. Acquisitions: Acquisitions stay front and center for 2022. WPLift.com sold for $160k. It previously sold in 2016 for $205k. Matt Medeiros interviewed Daan Tol 6 years ago and writes about how running a media company is difficult but well worth it on the WP Minute. Events There was a call to speak at the largest WordPress event in Asia - WordCamp Asia. They are looking for speakers that can talk about relevant #WordPress topics. Check out the site to see the categories for inspiration and sign up for this huge event being held in Bangkok on Feb, 17-19, 2023. Raquel Landefeld wrote about her recent experience at WordCamp EU and the power of attending WordCamps in person. Check out her article on the WP Minute and look for her at WordCamp US this September. As a reminder: The Gutenberg Times will host a Live Q & A July 22, 2022 with the Pew Research Center. They used a mix of Core and Custom Blocks to streamline their publishing process, and create powerful charts and quizzes. You can register over on the Gutenberg Times website. WooCommerce WooCommerce 6.7 was released along with WooCommerce Blocks 7.8.3. There is also a Release Cadence update. You can review the latest on the WooCommerce site. From Our Contributors and Producers Hubspot announced the launch of a free CMS drag and drop tool to empower business builders to create reliable websites. This is an interesting offer to check out for building a website while you are working on your brand and growing your business. I always thought that Hubspot would have purchased WPEngine. It's a running theory of mine over the years. Hey! It is never too late. Daniel Schutzsmith shared the latest on how popular theme designs are now available on the WordPress.org Figma account. Users can now explore the designs for popular themes such as Stewart, Archeo, Pendant, and Wei. If you’d like to add your own theme design, you can get started using the Theme Template file. Speaking of themes, there is a proposal from the Make WordPress design team for a new kind of default theme. The discussions have started concerning the release of a new default theme (or a curated set of styled variations) with 6.1 and there is a call for comments on style suggestions. Go check out make.wordpress.org to get involved. Another new theme to investigate is Poe by Anders Norén. It is a clean and minimal block theme built with portfolios and blogs in mind and named after Edgar Allen Poe.  Mike Oliver has opened his GeneratePress @podia community. There is a lot planned for the rest of this year. You can visit his landing page at Website Builders Collective to see all the exciting things planned for the new design. P.S. If you are a product owner with something launching, let us know at the WPMinute.com/contact. James Baldacchino wrote an article over at Ellipsis about the current climate surrounding WordPress. His overall analysis showed that WordPress Year to date had a 10.4% decrease but the climate remains good.  EDD - Easy Digital Downloads 3.0 has arrived with many improvements. Jump over to their blog to see the latest. New Members This week we welcome two new members to the #linksquad crew: Patrick Gallagher and Mark Zahra. You may have reached out to them already in the Slack group. 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:  Eric KarkovackDaniel SchutzsmithRaquel LandefeldBirgit Pauli Haack ★ Support this podcast ★

Five for the Future is back on the radar, surfacing more clarification and criticism. Here’s snack pack of links from around the community addressing various opinions on the subject:  Five for the Future’s True Intentions by Josepha Haden ChomphosySarah Gooding summarizes the link aboveJoe Casabona compares 5FTF to the Creator EconomyRob Howard warns of “toxic scorekeeping.”  Gettin’ Guten with it Gutenberg Times will host a livestream July 22nd featuring PEW Research Lead Developer and Director of Digital Strategy on how they use WordPress core + custom blocks. Want to know where FSE is headed with all things media? Anne McCarthy posted the FSE Program All Things Media Summary. Product updates LearnDash has taken to the clouds with its latest hosted version of the popular WordPress LMS plugin. SpotlightWP has launched a new analytics dashboard for those of you posting to WordPress and the gram. Pure HTML and CSS WordPress builder LiveCanvas has launched their builder version 3. Product acquisition Amber Hinds' Equalize Digital has sold their WP Conference Schedule plugin to Events Calendar: “Earlier this year, we realized that continuing to support WP Conference Schedule no longer made sense,” said Hinds, “It was a distraction from our mission to improve accessibility in WordPress and took development and marketing time away from Accessibility Checker.” Events A call for organizers has been placed by the WordCamp Euorope 2023 team. The Grab bag! Call for sponsors for WordPress Accessibility Day 2022See what it looks like for a hacker to attack a WordPress wesbite.Congrats to WordPress Historian Jeff Chandler for taking on a new role at WP Engine.Part 2 with Corey Maass on Matt Report, Building Amazing Products. Next up!  Michelle Frechette with the Community Minute! New Members This week we welcome two new members to the #linksquad crew: Jonathan Wold and Juan Hernando! You can meet them in the Slack group and 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:  Joe CasabonaBirgit Pauli-HaackDaniel SchutzsmithEric KarkovackAmber Hinds ★ Support this podcast ★

Guest host Andrew Palmer is back to address the topic of collaboration. His company Bertha recently collaborated with Yoast to forge a powerful combination of AI + SEO for WordPress. If you've been on the fence about collaborating with others, there's no better time than now to start! Enjoy Andrew's -- or it is Bertha's? -- take on collaborating in WordPress! ★ Support this podcast ★

You’d have to be living under a rock to miss the recent WP drama unfold on Twitter.  In some quickly deleted fever-induced tweets, Mullenweg likened GoDaddy to a “parasitic company” that is an “existential threat” to WordPress. Explore more of the debate in the following articles: Matt Medeiros’ take on What would GoDaddy’s WordPress look like?  WP Tavern recaps the Mullenweg twitter thread. MasterWP’s Rob Howard weighs in. Finally, GoDaddy responds to (almost) the whole shebang in a Sarah Gooding interview. Moving and shaking at Post Status Long-time Post Status news anchor David Bisset announces his departure from the position. David will be taking on the role of Product Development for WP Charitable at Awesome Motive, after the company announced the acquisition of the plugin. Michelle Frechette highlighted some of the assholes in the WordPress space. She recalls her first-person experiences in the community in  Misogyny in WordPress is Real. From our contributors and producers Rae Morey explores the Australian WordPress vibe after WP Minute Producer Cameron Jones sparked the debate on Twitter. WP Lift, long-time WordPress blog, is for sale over on Flippa. How do you like your Classic Press? Shaken, stirred, on the rocks? “Recent turbulence in the ClassicPress community has resulted in the directors resigning and new leadership installed. The WordPress fork is run under a non-profit organization called the ClassicPress Initiative. “ Sarah Gooding summarized the events at the Tavern.  Events WordCamp US tickets will go on sale tomorrow, June 30th 2022. Visit the WordCamp US website for more information. The Grab bag! Twitter announced a longform writing feature.  The Lexman artificial podcast creates a completely original interview podcast…with itself…in different voices. I enjoyed the outline of how Basecamp built the new “Bubble up” feature in HEY email. Our very own Raquel Landefeld was on the Women in WP podcast number 86. We’d never 86 the Raquel!  Eric Karkovack highlights 10 Lesser-known WordPress plugins Matt Report talks life after selling a plugin business with Corey Maass Next up!  Get the Pulse on WordPress with Raquel Landefeld New Members Welcome back Seth Goldstein for re-upping his WP Minute Producer membership.  Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:  Cameron JonesSam MunozDaniel SchutzsmithRaquel Landefeld ★ Support this podcast ★

Whoever thought that Apache web server would be de-throned in it’s prime? Hello NGINX. We see you Cloudflare. Red Hat and Fedora linux showed up, but then the world went faster together with Ubuntu. Intel dominated the chip space forever. Still does, technically, but AMD and Apple are going after their lunch including the paper bag it’s packed in. Sprinkle in the open source coding languages, tooling, and protocols over the last 30 years and everyone shouts open operability — until they get control — and then it’s “our way is better than your way, see ya later.” Why I want WordPress to win Probably for all of the reasons you do too. I love the software, it affords me a career, a specific lifestyle, and it puts food on the table. I think WordPress is the best piece of software around to help drive a technical workforce. First, because of its flexibility. Second, because it’s open source. But not open source like Swift — which is locked into Apple. WordPress can run and do a lot more than other “closed” open source projects. The open source software could be powerful for local community programs that train, spread awareness, and deploy solutions around WordPress which leave real impacts on society. An approachable solution to publish and consume local government topics which are crucial to a town’s population. Non-profit and news that sorely need a low-cost solution to democratize publishing. Understanding how programming, the internet, and technology works for a young (or old!) demographic. I want WordPress to win because of that, not because it makes a prettier website than Wix. The desire for open source should not be the desire for control If you love open source, you have to love the fact that you’re not in control. It’s going to be dealing with the ups and downs, letting humans settle the issues at hand. You hate a feature? Too bad, wait for someone to change it. Your favorite part of code just got shipped? Now stand and defend its existence in each future version. Not in control? Fork it. Me? No. You? Doubt it. But GoDaddy could. It wouldn’t be easy. None of this is easy. Who said it would be? Open source is giving up direct control, knowing that you have to deal with the wait: volunteering, funding, resources, project direction, etc. It means dealing with the flaws of humans or herding cats, as some call it. Otherwise you put someone in control, let them decide all the things, and you get something that isn’t open source. It’s called Apple, where they build a great commercial product but only release a sliver of it through open source. It’s the brittle timeline of WordPress we’re living in now. On one hand, we need a leader like Matt, on the other he’s a benevolent dictator that doesn’t want to leave. On one hand, he needs the community to rally around the cause, volunteer at all the things, and generally drive innovation for good. On the other hand, he can walk into any board room with his 43% of the pie, and raise enough money to do it all himself — WordCamps and all. But he’d still have his kryptonite: Time. In defense of Matt Mullenweg I don’t envy his position, plus I think he does way too much. .org release lead, CEO of Automattic and the dozen+ products it has, Tumblr guy, investor, I think philanthropist, and then he has to live a life. My gut tells me that none of this is moving fast enough for him. WordPress competing with other platforms, WooCommerce being more real, and exercising this desire to weave open source (through WordPress) into the fabric of web technologies. And that last part, is what got us into this recent mess. I’m not going to link up his tweets or screenshot them, you can check out this article by MasterWP if you want to see an archive of his “WP Deplorables” moment. The straw that broke? Was a tweet in reference to Newspack.pub and Matt’s urge to defend the importance of open source + WordPress in journalism. Specifically for local journalism. Which as I stated above, I’m 100% in favor of. The cost of running a media business is already high enough, we don’t need fees and software to be the blocker to publishing stories that impact a society. And it was in this moment replying to a GoDaddy employee that Matt summoned his Will Smith impersonation and slapped an entire group of humans for no reason at all. Well, there is a reason, and one I’ll talk about in a moment, but it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair to GoDaddy, it wasn’t fair to their employees that do give back, and it wasn’t fair to us as a community to see our leader break like that. I mean, I Am Legend was one of my favorite movies. What if GoDaddy had their way with WordPress They’d have no choice but to give back to to the project 100x what they do now. There are a lot of great people building things for WordPress at GoDaddy these days. Even if you include my fanny-pack wearing ex-boss that lets more bad tweets fly than good. They’re employing a lot of people that help usher WordPress along. In fact, when it comes to supporting the community, GoDaddy is great. They reach out to me and my content creating colleagues to see if there are ways to support us. You might even hear a sponsorship spot from GoDaddy on a future podcast episode. Jetpack recently passed at a sponsorship opportunity with me. I never heard from anyone at WordPress.com, you never see a WordPress ad anywhere. Either because they don’t need it, or they don’t realize they need it. This is where Matt will start to lose ground. Connecting with the community. But let’s cut straight the chase: While GoDaddy spends on marketing and showing up at WordCamps, it’s not like they directly employ 40 people to commit to WordPress core. I’m not as smart as Mullenweg, but GoDaddy’s current market cap is just north of $11 Billion dollars. Back of the napkin math tells me that half a million a bucks a year to ensure the open source software which nets you a few billion a year, is not a hard pill to swallow. This seeming lack of dedication to re-invest back into the open source project by a company with a fiduciary responsibility to get shareholders paid, would send any Fresh Prince into a tailspin. And it’s not just GoDaddy, it’s every company. It’s Matt’s Five for the Future. Just imagine if GoDaddy called Mullenweg’s bluff and threw a million dollars of salary to WordPress core every year. If Matt really wanted to be in control, as we all like to pontificate, what would Automattic do? Call it? Raise it? Fold? Along with not being as smart as Matt I’m not an Anthropologist either, but imagine the dynamics of a jousting match like Automattic and GoDaddy investing resources into WordPress core? Maybe in that timeline you’d love Full Site Editing? Maybe I wouldn’t want to rip my face off trying to set up a new menu item. And as these two titans clash to click the commit button, other organizations from around the globe start to weigh in too. I mean, we don’t want Automattic and GoDaddy to be the ONLY ones controlling this software that we love…do we? Imagine what good would come of these giants touting a tagline of “$1million dollars invested every year into writing code fo...

We have switched over to Slack from Discord. News There has been a lot of feedback for full site editing in the latest release of WordPress. The team over on make.wordpress.org is looking for people to sign up for usability testing by June 24th. This outreach program is going to try something new and pair up members of the program with community designers. Once paired, they will then find time between June 20th and July 1st to record a 15-minute call on Zoom going through one of two tasks: Creating & applying a new header, and using and customizing patterns. WordPress.org is now strongly recommending that theme authors switch to local hosted webfonts. Sarah Gooding writes over on WPTavern that a recent German court case fined a website using Google-hosted webfonts. In order to comply with GDPR - Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation - WordPress themes should switch to locally hosted webfonts. Are you still recovering from WCEU? There are two reviews from media supporters that you may want to check out. Bob Dunn and Matt Medeiros recorded their experiences. And there are nearly 3000 event photos. If you would like to see those you can view the photo album from WCEU on Flickr. Andrew Palmer reviews his WCEU experience right here on the WP Minute. Nathan Wrigley interviews Matt Mullenweg on the Jukebox podcast hosted at the WPTavern. Mullenweg shares his reflections on WordPress and the changes to come in the future. WooCommerce: WooCommerce 6.6 was released and you can find the complete changelog over on the WooCommerce site for the recent changes. From Our Contributors and Producers Eric Karkovack writes about the CMS landscape (including WordPress) on the latest at the WP Minute. Eric makes a good argument about why a freelancer would not choose WordPress for building a website. What’s with the WordPress vibe? Changes and Acquisitions seem to be published weekly now. Acquisitions in #WordPress have created some concern among smaller businesses and entrepreneurs as we compete with bigger companies with much larger budgets. Mark Zahra has a little survey on Twitter asking if you had to double down on one area in the next 6 months with the goal of generating growth, what would it be? There were several layoffs reported lately from Elementor and Envato. James Giroux tweeted about the status of @envato and @elemntor announcing significant redundancies in the last week. You can help those affected by: 1. Celebrating wins publicly and calling out individuals by name 2. Adding to their LinkedIn profiles 3. Introducing them to your network Next Up: Simplified Business Minute by Sam Muñoz The Case for Not Automating Client Interactions New Members We would like to welcome Mark Westguard to the WP Minute community and thank Sarah Gooding and Carrie Dils for buying a digital coffee to the WP Minute. Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:  Eric KarkovackRaquel Landefeld ★ Support this podcast ★