The WP Minute

Thanks Pressable for supporting the podcast! What hosting should feel like...nothing! https://pressable.com/wpminute State of the Word 2021 just concluded in NYC. Just over 2 hours of updates around the community, the software, and the vision of Matt Mullenweg. This episode is an entire recording of the livestream broadcast over YouTube including audience + listener questions. If you enjoy content like this, please consider giving back to WordPress or donating to this publication. Episode Transcript oh, but really, really, um, welcome to everyone. Thank you all for being here. This is very exciting. Um, I am excited to see all your faces. It's been many years since I've seen some of you, um, in case you have not noticed we are changing our hashtag this year. It is state of the word written out, but remember to do your capitalization for people using reading. Assistive technologies, readers, screen readers. I got it. Uh, there is going to be a Q and a portion after this. It will be here from our live audience, but also some folks at home. Um, uh, he's the at-home portion for us right now. So if you have any questions, get them ready. If you're here, there's a microphone here that you will be able to ask your questions at. Or if you are watching at home, you can head on over to the YouTube embed of this, uh, live stream. And we are monitoring the chat there for questions as well. Um, that is all that I have to say. Um, and I think that's probably all that you want to hear from me anyway. And so tonight giving our annual state of the word where we talk about everything we've done this year and everything we hope to do next year is of course WordPress project. Co-founder Matt Mullenweg. Wow. Wow. We're really here. So, uh, welcome everybody. And I've been told to ask if folks over here can just move up one row. Um, if you don't mind where we're going to try to fill out the front and bed that. This is so exciting and so honestly fulfilling to be together again. Oh yeah. I guess everyone's starting to cascade for those joining us live. We are here in New York city. It is, the sun is setting. We've got a few invited community members from all of the world. Thank you all for coming. We had people joined by plane, train and automobile. How long was the train ride? Two and a half day train ride to get here. So that is definitely the most interesting. I actually am also came a, probably a two and a half day trip, but all the way from Antarctica. So if you notice a little bit of a raccoon tan, that was because I had very strong sunglasses and I guess not strong enough sunblock as that's me have some penguins. And while there I read a lot of books and learned a lot about Antarctica and one that particularly stood out actually a leader who's inspired me for a long time was Ernest Shackleton. And I knew a lot about his endurance journey where ship crashed or got stuck. And then they sent back. Basically they saved every person who was on that journey, but a story I didn't know about him, which I learned about was. Journey's to the south pole. He turned away only 97 miles away from reaching the pole, which is pretty darn close if you've ever tried to get, I think I flew, like if you add it all up, like almost 7,000 miles back. So the turnaround of the last 97 and actually as this was happening, as I was reading about this, I was thinking about the version 5.9 release. So you might know that today was a scheduled or right around today was the scheduled originally scheduled date for the WordPress 5.9 release. And we made a very, very unusual decision for WordPress to delay that release for about a month. So we're going to release it in January, but it felt like we were so close and we decided to turn around. And, but very, I believe it was entirely the right decision as it was for Shackleton. He made it back alive. I think his saying was better to be alive, donkey than a dead lion So we don't want full site editing, which is coming in 5.9 to be a dead lion But it was also I think, a moment for reflection, because of course we talk about and the philosophy part of WordPress, how deadlines are not arbitrary and whatever we were making that decision, which wasn't that long ago, I just delayed the release. I wasn't thinking so much about what's happening right then the kind of month before. But what did we do? 3, 4, 5 months before. So I think it's an excellent time to reflection for reflection. And actually some of this has started on Anne McCarthy's blog. We started talking to her comments section, uh, in public, of course, has everything happens on WordPress about what we can learn from this that we can start putting into effect, not just for the release coming next month, which will be fine, but for the big 6.0, which is coming next year, I've even heard some rumblings that 20, 22 might be a year. We aim for four releases instead of just three, but let's not get too crazy just yet. Where are the beginning of the state of the board? Not the end. Um, uh, we had a very, very exciting 20, 21 and really it was quite fulfilling to be part of it after such. Well, it's still part of a very challenging time in humanity. One of the things I want to highlight first was our eight new core committers, both the core and themes. So let's do a round of applause. for Kelly, David, William, Isabel, Johnny, Jeff JB, and Tanya. I'm so excited, uh, that they now have ability to change the code that runs 43% of the internet. Um, another update is we, we focused a lot this year on wordpress.org. And, uh, one I'd like to highlight to start is around the new sites and this, we do have. Some guests audio. We weren't able to get people from around the world all to New York, but we have some audio that working in the redesign of the news page in wordpress.org, the general inspiration was last year's state of the word presentation and overall jazz aesthetics, because the blog doesn't have much imagery. We took some time to explore shapes, typography, layout, and colors, to get a successful result that expresses the playfulness of jazz. I really designed this. Might've been like WordPress 3.0, so it was exciting to start to loop back to some things and wordpress.org. Another thing we were able to launch on wordpress.org was open verse, which I swear we named before Facebook decided to pivot open versus a surgeon openly licensed to search for an image, download and put it on your site, give attribution to the creator and that's it. So open verse is part of we've started to expand how we think about our mission from just being about the code and the tools to allow people to publish to actually what they're publishing. So open verse was originally called creative common search was actually part of the creative commons, nonprofit, but sort of cost and running it's. Um, they decided they were going to shut it down or put it somewhere. And we found a home for it on wordpress.org, which I'm very, very excited about. We have over 600 million creative commons images licensed through it, and we're going to have audio coming up at the end of January. There'll be 2 million audio clips there. And, you know, applying open source to content is a little tricky, but the creative commons of course has a long legacy there, I think 20 years now. And so we're very, very excited to continue carrying that torch forward, to create as much open content on the web as possible. Another thing we got on WordPress dot o...

Thanks Pressable for supporting the podcast! What hosting should feel like...nothing! https://pressable.com/wpminute WP Minute producer Dave Rodenbaugh of Recapture.io discusses what the supply chain issue is with eCommerce and why it is still an issue. The US imports over 41% of its consumer goods from China and these imports come in through two ports - Long Beach, CA or Los Angeles, CA. During COVID people were buying online at a skyrocketing rate and those goods were coming in containers and unloaded. However, there was already a shortage of truck drivers and port workers and with the pandemic this problem has escalated. This means that containers stacked up at the ports and ships waited in the harbor. Today, that record is 96 ships waiting. To address this issue, local laws have been modified to allow containers to be stacked higher, but they are not moving quickly enough. About 80,000 jobs are still open and that’s why items are still not moving. For example, cars and car parts are sitting in containers and can’t get to where they are needed.  According to Bloomberg from December 4th the average waiting time for a ship to be unloaded is 20.8 days! It used to be 6 days - pre pandemic. And the cost of shipping containers has also risen dramatically the past two years as well. The freightos index shows that the current cost is about 14K but the goods that may be on that container are impacting small businesses. So this is the issue in a nutshell. Until we can move that freight completely from all points in the journey, we are going to continue to see small shortages and price increases everywhere. This will probably continue for months. If you have other eCommerce topics you would like Dave to talk about, tweet at the WPMinute and he will put it on the show. Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash Episode transcription It's the WP minute. This episode is brought to you by mind size. If you're looking for monthly WooCommerce report, check out mind size.com. Today's episode is written and produced by Dave Rodenbach producer@thewpminuteownerofrecapture.io. It's his returning episode on the e-commerce minute discussing the. At the supply chain, if you're out there going, man, am I going to get my presence? This holiday season for my kids? They will kind of give us a little insight into that and, and the impact the supply chain has on the e-commerce world. We really hope you enjoy today's episode with Dave. If you do thank him on Twitter. If you want to think the WP minute support the WP minute, by going to buy me a coffee.com/matt report, that's buy me a coffee.com/matt report support WordPress media and independent. Like this. Okay. Let's get into today's episode. Hello again, Dave, Rodenburg here with the e-commerce minute. This episode comes to you right after black Friday, cyber Monday 2021. This week. I want it to talk about an ongoing crisis in e-commerce that you've probably heard a bit about, but you're likely confused as to why it's still a problem. And that would be the supply chain issue. So we've been hearing about supply chain delays since the beginning of the pandemic here in the U S. You probably suffered through some shortages of consumer goods, like toilet paper buying, fresh meat, like chicken or beef. And now you're probably seeing those items on your shores store shelves again, but everyone keeps talking about supplier, June issues, supply chain issues doesn't make sense. Right. So let's unpack that. First of all the United States imports over 41% of its consumer goods from China. There's some smaller amounts that come from Vietnam, India, and Germany. The total is about 56% of, of its total consumer goods come from overseas. That figure has remained fairly consistent for the last four years. According to jungle scout. So 40% of all those imported goods pass through one of two ports in the United States, either the port of Los Angeles or the port of long beach, for those that know their California geography, that basically means the greater Metro area of Los Angeles is responsible for 40% of all consumer goods coming to the United States. That's huge. Now let's spice that up a bit during COVID. Consumer online spending increased dramatically. So those goods started. Over in containers. Once they arrive, the workers would unload the containers and then move them to trucks or railroad cars for further distribution in the United States. But before the pandemic even started, there was already a truck driver and warehouse workers shortage to the tune of about 61,500 jobs, which under the pandemic skyrocket at another 33% higher to 80,000 jobs. And no. Fill them. So without these essential workers to move freight, the containers just stacked up at the ports. And eventually the ports build up causing the ships with new containers, to idle in the Harbor, waiting to be unloaded, which then created a line of ships all the way out into the Pacific ocean at its high point of over 96, unloaded ships that. The number today. So recently the local laws in California, specifically in long beach, long beach and Los Angeles were changed to help get some of the ships to unload by stacking containers higher than was previously allowed by. But there's still a bottleneck of moving that freight from port to its final destination. Those 80,000 jobs are still open right now. And that's why we're seeing some items on shelves remain unstopped or very low stock. And you see emails from stores to say shop early. So we still have stock during the holiday. That's also why things like cars have increased in price, both new and used ships that are required in every vehicle. Now are simply sitting at sea and can't get to their final destination parts to prepare cars are sitting in containers at port and can't get to the garages that need them. My own repair garage told me a story about holding one of their cars for five months because they couldn't source a part to repair. Anywhere in the United States at any price, they were willing to pay anything. Still couldn't do it. That story is unfortunately a very common. According to Bloomberg from December 4th, the average waiting time for a ship to be unloaded has reached an all-time high of 20.8 days almost 21 days. The average for most of the summer before September was about six. Days. So it's more than tripled. And the cost of shipping containers themselves has risen dramatically over the last two years, pre pandemic the cost of a shipping container hovered somewhere between one thousand five hundred and two thousand five hundred a container at peak. This summer containers from China to the west coast, ran over 20 found. Dollar's a container currently we've dropped to a much lower point of about 14,000 9, 34 as of December 3rd on the FBX, which is the Freightos Baltic index that talks about the current prices of shipping containers. But for a container that likely has between 30 and $40,000 worth of goods on average, that is a terrible cost increase for most small businesses. So that's the supply chain issue in a nutshell, until we can move that freight completely from all points in the journey, we're going to continue to see small shortages of things everywhere and price increases for almost everything. And it's going to keep going on for months to come and for. I hope that was helpful for you this week. If you have other e-c...

Thanks Pressable for supporting the podcast! What hosting should feel like...nothing! https://pressable.com/wpminute After appearing on the Post Status State of WordPress News roundtable, I felt like I had a bit more to say about my experience with WordPress news. WordPress news isn't a heavily trafficked topic on the web. How does a publisher build more than just a side gig from putting out WordPress news? How do we define WordPress news? I asked Kim Coleman, co-founder of Paid Memberships Pro, to see if she had any questions around the topic and if she had any interest in recording a podcast episode about it. Thankfully she was willing to chat and share her questions and her opinions on how we do WordPress news. If you enjoy today's episode, please say thanks to Kim on Twitter or consider becoming a supporting Producer here at The WP Minute! Episode Transcript [00:00:00] Matt: It's the WP minute, a special WP minute because I am joined by a special coat. Co-host the title of this episode is called challenges of a WordPress news business. I have my great friend here, the lovely Kim Coleman, Kim, welcome to the program. [00:00:18] Kim: Hi, thanks for having me, Matt. I'll. I want to add who I am before we get too deep, because Everybody knows you. [00:00:25] Nobody knows me, maybe. Well I've been working in WordPress as the line goes from the WordPress rep since I used to rock the Kubrick theme. So I'm a really OJI community member. I spend a lot of time doing site development and moved into products. [00:00:39] And now most notably a WordPress membership plugin paid memberships pro. [00:00:45] Matt: I want to talk about how you and I ended up in this moment of time first. I did. Post status state of the WordPress news. I think they called it and it was a great Twitter space. I'm not a fan of Twitter spaces. Dave, if you're listening, I'm an old school podcast. I like things to be recorded. [00:01:02] I like to sit in our little recording room that we're in now and I don't have to use my phone. So I wanted to, once I was done with that conversation, which again was a fabulous conversation six or seven of us from around the WordPress news space, fantastic conversation. But I felt like I really only scratched the surface on what it's like to, I don't know. [00:01:20] I hate to say run a WordPress news business, but that's the phrase that comes into my head. And Kim, I know that well I've known you for years, right? Ever since I was running my studio, you running your studio, we go way back. But I saw you chatting up others in the WordPress new space on Twitter with some great points, some strong opinion. [00:01:38] I was like, Kim's the perfect person to sit down with to talk about this stuff. And that's how we've ended up in this room today. Is that a fair state? [00:01:45] Kim: Totally fair. Yes. I struggle with opinionated verse. Not because my product does work with a lot of other plugins out there and businesses. So, who you are as an individual and who you are as your business face are an interesting part of these conversations, but yeah, I'll, I'll do my best juggling. [00:02:03] Matt: Kim burying the lead right out of the gate. We're going to talk, we're going to talk about that stuff. So it's Kim I don't wanna say interviewing me, but we, we chatted on some points that we thought were really important to share about news in the WordPress space. And there's so many of us are blogging about WordPress. [00:02:20] We have our opinions, we want to share it. And then there's like a small percentage of us that say, okay, I'm going to do this for a living. Like I'm gonna write about WordPress, whether it's tutorials, development, tutorials, training stuff, or, inside WordPress news. And I know there's a few of you out there especially in the discord server that. [00:02:38] Yeah, that's what you do for a living. You create content around WordPress whether it's eat, soft content, like the tutorial or more of the hard hitting stuff, like the news, you want to figure out how to do it. I've got some opinions to share. And I think Kim has a couple of questions for me [00:02:53] Kim: I want this to be your build in public moment where we talk about Matt report media and what you're doing with the news. And like we said, the title of the show, what are the challenges that we're facing as a community? And what are those things? So I think that's a good kickoff is let's establish, why is it important? [00:03:09] Why is news important in WordPress? We're a multi-billion dollar industry made up of many big and fewer and fewer huge and then thousands of tiny, tiny companies. So why is news important to you? [00:03:23] Matt: I'll give you my, why it's important to me from, from the heart first is because look, it is a, it's a big space. And one of the very first things that I saw coming into the WordPress space was, looking at some colleagues that were, that they were getting the connections, they were getting the projects, they were, selling the plug-ins and the themes. [00:03:47] And I'm talking 50. Plus years ago. And I was just curious, like how, how does this all work? Like as a newcomer into the space, as big as WordPress is today, there's new new people coming in right now, like 70 is installing WordPress probably for the first time, literally, right when we're saying this and they might be thinking, I want to start an agency, I want to do this thing. [00:04:07] Or I just want to know what's happening here. And it was very important for me to be able to quickly learn that and just get a feel for, for the land. And on the surface. That's why it's important for your average WordPress user. Who do I turn to? Where do I go in this WordPress space for the business owner? [00:04:26] Yeah. You want to have somebody who's out there covering, well, this year, specifically acquisitions investments, who's doing what? With products and services you want to have that sort of pulse on, on the. To really know, where your business and what your opportunity is in the, in the marketplace, whatever a CNBC approach of, analyzing the market, but for WordPress and that's something that's interesting, to me, as, as somebody who's in the business side of it. And then I think there's a third leg of, just accountability and transparency. [00:04:59] It, it is a multi-billion dollar industry largely covered on the, under the umbrella of automatic and Matt Mullenweg. And there needs to be just a a critical eye on how things roll out because in an open source community, we're all giving up our time and investing in WordPress. And that's an awesome thing. [00:05:26] Open source is, and WordPress is, it's an awesome thing, but to have folks like Sarah Good. Who really dives deep into some of these stories and analysis to, to, to illustrate the picture to us, to let us decide on whatever heavy topics it might be in the community and the contributor space again, automatic or GoDaddy, like having that critical eye on the space, I think is important. [00:05:52] As narrow as this space really is it drives business for a lot of us, and I, I think that news or content around it is, is important. And that's what it means to me. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that or. [00:06:06] Kim: yeah, I think when I reflected on this question, I thought about my customers and I thought about. They're very little involvement in the WordPress community, which we call it the WordPress community. It's the faces you see, on Twitter, maybe in other communities you're in you see them in the hallway track, you see them in in-person or virtual meetups related to WordPress. [00:06:27] I call those people, t...

Thanks Pressable for supporting the podcast! What hosting should feel like...nothing! https://pressable.com/wpminute Was Gravatar hacked or not? It depends on what you have read or what your definition of “hacked” is I suppose. The password breach monitoring service HaveIBeenPwned alerted users to a large-scale data leak by Gravatar, an add-on service for user profiles owned by Automattic. In October 2020, a security researcher published a technique for scraping large volumes of data from Gravatar, the service for providing “globally unique avatars," HaveIBeenPwned warned. This technique allowed the details of just under 114 million users to get into hackers' hands. Sarah Gooding over at WPTavern wrote that Automattic said they were not hacked. The Gravatar service gives you control over what you want to share online through their API.  So this information can be made public and somebody can scrape that data and use it nefariously.  Jeff Chandler pointed out that this has been an issue since 2009 and shared the information from developer.it. Security researchers and privacy advocates have warned about privacy attacks on Gravatar for years. Gravatar did not send out notices about the breach and left it to the user to accept the risk or use something other than Gravatar. WordPress updates There is a new directory for FSE block themes. Over on make.WordPress.org during the run-up to the release of 5.9 developers should note that the directory names for templates and template parts are being changed.  With the release of 5.9 these will instead be: templates parts It's pretty straightforward. Events Ellen Bauer will be sharing a twitter space with Justin Mahinyala discussing #Freelance opportunities for developers, designers, writers, and marketers in the #WordPress ecosystem. They will share advice and tips on how to get started. DM any questions you want them to talk about. 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 inaugural Member Sunday Spotlight is here and we’re honored to highlight Daniel Schutzsmith. A thrice WordCamp organizer, now carving out a niche for WordPress livestreams with his latest project, WP Livestreams. With a passion for livestreams throughout the pandemic, Daniel stumbled into a real need for livestream creators and viewers. With so much great WordPress content being streamed, he hopes to make his website the go-to destination for the community to find new content across YouTube, Twitch, Twitter spaces and whatever technologies come next. Quite a natural direction for someone who thought he’d hang his hat on radio broadcast before getting into programming. It was a real treat to listen to this interview lead by former WP Minute Managing Editor, Paul Lacey. Don’t forget to say hi to Daniel in the WP Minute Discord server or on Twitter. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please share it on social media. Consider becoming a WP Minute member too! Join our annual membership including access to the Discord server, getting Producer rights to this very news channel and take part in the the #linksquad. We’re nearly 50 strong, so why not join us? Grab your membership at buymeacoffee.com/mattreport 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  This episode is brought to you by Mindsize. If you’re looking for monthly WooCommerce support, look no further than Mindsize.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 There was a lot of excitement this week around LTDs (LifeTime Licensing Deals). There were several posted reactions to the email sent from Delicious Brains, the new owners of Advanced Custom Fields. The email was not well-received (to say the least) by some users that have had Lifetime Licensing because it was asking for a part-time donation for the product. Twitter exploded with reactions and many in the WordPress community responded as well. We covered this on the WPMinute and Sarah Gooding also wrote about both perspectives — positive and negative —  in her article over on the WPTavern.  The bottom line is that the lifetime licenses are tough, and very few still remain in the WordPress space. ACF (read: Brad) will continue to honor the pricing for legacy customers. With the recent delay of WordPress 5.9 the team is looking for testers for Beta 1. Angela Jin posted the link for the helpful testing guide. Feel free to participate and let them know how you “broke” it. Testing is very important for a successful release.  A JSON Schema for theme.json and one for block.json are now available to help with building block-based themes. The schema can be used by code editors to provide things like tooltips, autocomplete, and validation while editing theme.json or block.json. The WP Live Streams Directory pick of the week “Building Modern WordPress Plugins With Plugin Machine (Part 2)*” presented by Josh Pollock, formerly of WPCaldera, on December 7th at 11pm UTC / 6pm EST / 3pm PST. In Part 1 of his talk, Josh laid the foundation of the mess that modern tooling has become for plugin development. In Part 2, Josh will show us a demo of Plugin Machine, a new app he’s building that helps developers create plugins and add features to them easily. You can catch this by registering for the Pittsburgh WordPress Developers and Designers meetup. Other News From Our Contributors Shopify Engineering announced that they had their biggest Black Friday Cyber Monday ever in 2021. They were proud of the uptime and traffic across the infrastructure along with their partner Google Cloud. Liam Dempsey shared this post by Andy Stitt thanking WordPress for helping him find Digital Accessibility. This is a great article of how WordPress helped Andy advance and allow him to concentrate on accessibility now.   Giving Tuesday And now, I’d like to introduce you to Mary Job, who’s leading the Uwani Hub building project. If you feel compelled to support their efforts, consider clicking on the link to donate. Quote/Transcript for show notes: Thank you Matt for the opportunity to speak briefly about the Uwani Hub Building Project on the WP Minute Podcast. I started this building project this year so that we would have a better chance of achieving our vision 2030 WordPress goals, we currently have 9 workstations in our current space, we need at least 30 of those which is what the building allows us the opportunity to have. We are giving ourselves a 10 year, now 9-year timeframe because we do not want to stretch our volunteers too thin, and because this is not just about numbers, but making an actual impact on each individual we teach WordPress program. As you may well have heard in the News, my country Nigeria is lacking in lots of basic infrastructures, we can’t boast of consistent electricity, by choosing to do WordPress in our community, we are looking at impacting our participants not only with a tool useful for their personal empowerment but also one they could export career-wise without necessarily leaving our country shores. For us at the hub, those 5000 people would not just be a number, but people with faces we are going to build the WordPress community with, together. WordPress is central to this cause because it is one tool that I have come to know so well enough to teach to others, and more importantly because the future of WordPress lies in the hands of the coming generation (our current & future teenagers). If we can make them see what we all see when asked “Why WordPress?”, then we would be leaving a mark, not just today, but also tomorrow. Folks can go to support us at Uwani.org or on our Open Collective page, we sincerely hope our programs get well underway from the year 2022 if we can finish the building before the end of January 2022. Continuing our Giving Tuesday coverage with a note from Dan Maby on his success with his campaign yesterday at the Big Orange Heart. Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:  Birget Pauli-HaackDaniel SchutzsmithLiam DempseyNigel Bahadur Thanks to the new Contributing Members that joined this week:  Mary JobEllen BauerSam MunozHauwa Abashiya  Thanks to supporting members Joe Casabona who bought me 3 coffees saying “Thanks for everything you do in the WordPress space!” Speaking of coffee, you can buy Me a coffee to support the show or join as a member for $79 for the year to get access to the private Discord server. Become part of our merry band of WordPress newsies and get involved in the weekly WordPress news like everyone I mentioned above. That’s it for today’s episode, if you enjoyed please share it on your social media, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser. Don’t forget to share share share this episode with others and jump on the mailing list Support our work at https://thewpminute.com/supportGet the newsletter at https://thewpminute.com/subscribe

Thanks Pressable for supporting the podcast! What hosting should feel like...nothing! https://pressable.com/wpminute It seems a year can’t go by without the pesky lifetime WordPress license topic popping up to spice up the holiday conversation. A struggle dating back 7 years ago to the month when Jeff Chandler covered, now defunct, Sidekick.pro where then owner Ben Fox shared his pricing experiments. When Brad Touesnard purchased Advanced Custom Fields back in June, he was swiftly reminded how hard lifetime license pricing really is. I mean, he did his due diligence, he knew what he was getting into. But the lifetime license woes lingered well before the new owners arrived. Elliot Condon wrestled with it, “get it all for one price forever” that is, until he finally revised pricing for 2020 to build the business a better runway. Lifetime license holders will get **all** ACF Pro software updates forever. They won’t be required to pay for version 6.0 or any other major or minor releases in the future. They signed up for updates for life, so we’ll continue to deliver on that promise forever. 8/10— Brad Touesnard (@bradt) June 3, 2021 On Delicious Brains acquiring Advanced Custom Fields Amidst a fumbled start, Brad, did bless all lifetime license holders with access — forever. It’s on Twitter, so it’s permanent in my book. This isn’t the first pricing rodeo for Brad and company. When asked about lessons learned with pricing in a 2018 interview with Joe Howard on the WPMRR podcast, Brad had this to say: “I think the biggest thing that people don’t do is experiment with their pricing.When I launched Migrate DB Pro, I think the developer license was, $99 per year.In December of that year, I doubled the pricing. Which would have been totally uncontroversial, except that I changed all the prices for the existing customers as well. I didn’t grandfather it.And there was definitely quite a bit of blowback. I’d regret doing it because I feel like at that point, it wouldn’t have hurt us to like grandfather those people in but I don’t believe really in grandfathering people in forever.That’s the same aversion I have to like unlimited things and “lifetime this and that.”Brad Touesnard Pricing is challenging, no doubt, and lot has already been said about lifetime licenses. Should you offer them as a product owner? Clearly the data (and the community) is pointing to a firm “no” at this point. Should the customer expect that a lifetime license actually means a lifetime of free…everything? Read Chris Lema’s take, On Lifetime Licenses. WordPress, the only billion dollar software industry that has us begging for money Paul Charlton of WPTuts posted a reaction video to a recent e-mail sent from Delicious Brains, the new owners of Advanced Custom Fields. In the video, Paul shares his frustration with the ask of lifetime license holders to “pitch in” to keep the development of the popular plugin alive. Paul was one of the first in line to question what would happen to lifetime license holders when Delicious Brains acquired ACF back in June. From the current events: Agency Principal, Alex J Vasquez doesn’t seem to have an issue with the ask, stating “ Could this have been said differently? Sure, a better crafted msg would go a long way but I have zero issues with the ask.” Could this have been said differently? Sure, a better crafted msg would go a long way but I have zero issues with the ask.— Vah–skezz (@alexjvasquez) November 27, 2021 Where for folks like Charlton, it “sticks in his throat” that customers are almost feeling guilted into supporting the product. Charlton has no problem if users want to support their favorite software, but is not entirely thrilled when a brand requests it. When the dust settles After reaching out to Paul for a post-publishing lay of the land, he responded: “My biggest takeaway is the complete silence from them to be honest. They’ve been tagged in many replies and spin off comments and nothing at all has come back from them.As for learning anything new, it’s pretty much radio silence across the board. Just speculation and frustration from most commenters.” UPDATE: An updated quote from Paul after the recent ACF tweet It’s good to hear Delicious Brains are going to honour the LTD, but maybe it would be a good idea to run future emails through a competent PR company first to avoid confusion. The ACF Twitter account tweeted: “Lifetime license customers: We are still firmly committed to honoring lifetime licenses and all future emails. We will reaffirm this commitment. So there is no confusion. Signed, Brad Touesnard.” When I asked Brad for a comment, that was the tweet he shared and pointed to his previous thread, posted back in June. Some of our WP Minute Producers have expressed their thoughts in our Discord server: “Well, Brad is in a tough spot here—there are a ton of these “lifetime deals” with ACF that he inherited and their something of a liability from a business perspective.”Dave Rodenbaugh “Brad should save himself a lot of LTD headache in the long term and just stop supporting the...

Thanks Pressable for supporting the podcast! What hosting should feel like...nothing! https://pressable.com/wpminute Gobble gobble! WordPress 5.9 will not be released until the beginning of 2022. There were some major blockers identified with the Beta Release and the team thought it best to delay the release instead of pushing through the holidays. Beta 1 was originally scheduled to release last week. Now the overall schedule will be updated to reflect the new date, January 25, 2022 (edit: We said 22nd in the podcast, but have revised it here.) This will give contributors more time to collaborate further on the release. There is a new video posted on Facebook that covers responsive editing and customization for 5.9. Check this out to see all the new features that are coming.  Justin Sainton shared how he got the new brand for pagely.com launched with full site editing in WordPress. This article shares how the project was started in January of 2021 but was quickly finished in 8 weeks for the merger and acquisition with GoDaddy. Justin covers some of the pain points of Full Site Editing in Gutenberg that you should be aware of in case you decide to follow this accelerated timeline yourself. Events As I mentioned last week the State of the Word will be live-streamed from New York City. That means that you can join the fun either online or in person, on December 14, 2021, between 5 and 7 pm EST! You can join with your local Meetup for a watch party and now you can participate in person in New York City by filling out the registration by Sunday, November 28, but be aware that not all requests will receive a seat due to the venue capacity – set at 50.  Sabrina Zierden shared the first plans for the largest venue for WordCamp Europe 2022. To work on the plans, they have reopened the Call for Organizers again. It looks very exciting to have live conferences scheduled in 2022. That video looks pretty amazing as an in-person venue. Security We should maybe be getting used to seeing Security breaches happen but when it does, it is still so disturbing. This time in a disclosure to the Securities and Exchange Commission, GoDaddy revealed that they had been hacked. This was not the first time the company was compromised. GoDaddy stated that it has discovered that an “unauthorized third party” had accessed a managed WordPress hosting environment. Up to 1.2 million users were compromised. According to this document, GoDaddy believes that the first breach occurred around September 6, 2021, and investigations are currently underway. Go change all your WordPress passwords if you have accounts with GoDaddy. From Our Contributors and Producers Block Building Do you want to create your own custom block? The Wicked Block Builder is in the WordPress plugin directory. There’s no setup required and you can build blocks in as little as a few minutes. The block builder is still in beta so please make sure you have a backup in place before you give this plugin a try. The Automattic Theme team has been working on a plugin to help you create a Blockbased child theme. You can use the existing tools to make changes to a Blockbase theme, and then export a bundle of templates and theme.json as a new child theme. Once the theme has been created then unzipped to your WordPress site, you can modify it further. It is a cool tool to go check out. In the continued discussion around custom blocks, Matt Watson wrote a nice in-depth article about creating Gutenberg blocks over on the WPOwls. The challenge was to build a typical “Owl-Link” Gutenberg “Block” using JavaScript and React style syntax. Matt does a great job of reviewing how to build and apply a block pattern in Gutenberg. If you are not interested in learning blocks at all, you can check out Webflow’s approach to creating Websites with no code. BobWP shared that this will be year 11 for him in the WordPress space. His post reflects on people leaving WordPress recently and how the community has been important to him over the years. The PHP foundation has been created as an open collective to help maintain the knowledge that has been developed over its 26-year history. The language has been actively developed by a huge number of people and in order to have this stick around for another evolution, the foundation has been established.  Many companies have joined forces to keep PHP alive, including Automattic. Mind and Body Minute As we are all busy around the holidays while trying not to eat all the pies so…enjoy the clip submitted by Michelle Schulp! It is a great reminder to take care of yourself, set realistic wellness goals, and approach the season with mindfulness. Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:  Birget Pauli-HaackDave RodenbaughDaniel SchutzsmithBob DunnJeff ChandlerVinny McKeeMaciek Palmowski  New Members:We would like to welcome Vinny from Wicked Plugins and Patrick Garman from Mindsize. They were quick to contribute this week in the news, and we appreciate it! That’s it for today’s episode, if you enjoyed please share it on your social media, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser. Don’t forget to share share share this episode with others and jump on the mailing list 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 WP Minute WooCommerce merchants estimated to process more than $840 Million dollars over BFCM deals Play Episode Pause Episode Mute/Unmute Episode Rewind 10 Seconds 1x Fast Forward 30 seconds 00:00 / 00:07:27 Subscribe Share RSS Feed Share Link Embed ' class="input-embed input-embed-5398"/>

Thanks Pressable for supporting the podcast! What hosting should feel like...nothing! https://pressable.com/wpminute  The WP Minute PageDaddy Play Episode Pause Episode Mute/Unmute Episode Rewind 10 Seconds 1x Fast Forward 30 seconds 00:00 / 00:06:51 Subscribe Share RSS Feed Share Link Embed ' class="input-embed input-embed-5386"/> Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 00:06:51 | Recorded on November 17, 2021 The BIG news this week is that Pagely joined GoDaddy. Pagely, a large managed WordPress host owned by the Strebels, joined with GoDaddy to help grow and cover a larger segment of the market. Josh Strebel writes that his successful company always took the uncompromising position that employees and customers come first. This acquisition will allow GoDaddy to become more like Pagely. The annual Pressnomics conference will continue as well…but may look a little different moving forward. Congratulations Josh, Sally, team and GoDaddy! Liquid Web has acquired Modern Trib...