The WP Minute

Support our work at https://thewpminute.com/supportGet the newsletter at https://thewpminute.com/subscribeOur 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 this podcast ★

Support our work at https://thewpminute.com/supportGet the newsletter at https://thewpminute.com/subscribe 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 this podcast ★

Support our work at https://thewpminute.com/supportGet the newsletter at https://thewpminute.com/subscribeIt 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 l...

Support our work at https://thewpminute.com/supportGet the newsletter at https://thewpminute.com/subscribeGobble 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 this podcast ★

Support our work at https://thewpminute.com/supportGet the newsletter at https://thewpminute.com/subscribe 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"/>

Support our work at https://thewpminute.com/supportGet the newsletter at https://thewpminute.com/subscribe 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

Support our work at https://thewpminute.com/supportGet the newsletter at https://thewpminute.com/subscribe   Paul Lacey  |  Friday, 12 Nov 2021  |  Reading time:  34 mins  | Read online Listen to the episode This is content was sponsored by Connekt. They create handcrafted digital products, like WordPress plugins and themes. This was part of the WP Minute content bounty program where today’s author earned $200 to write and record this post. Thanks to Connekt for helping us create content like this. Today’s episode is bittersweet. It’s one man’s take on how Gutenberg has impacted the WordPress community deeply — down to the core. How the weight of control shifting in our space has shuttered him. The constant tug-of-war feeling that splits our community. And with all that, making this his final act for WordPress…for now. This man is former WP Minute Managing Editor, Paul Lacey. I’ve known Paul for a while, he’s a great person and genuinely cares about the people around him. He and I both hoped that the WP Minute project was different enough to re-energize his love for the space, but it only masked it temporarily. Ironically, it was through today’s essay/podcast, that reassured that stepping away from WordPress is the best thing for him. I wish him all the best, and I hope you do too. By the way, the content bounty program that Connekt supported, Paul wants me to donate the $200 to Big Orange Heart. Enjoy today’s episode, with Paul. Change In the 2015 State of the Word, Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic gave the community a homework assignment – “Learn Javascript, deeply”, “because it’s what’s going to allow WordPress to thrive for the next 13 years”. It was a clear signal that something was coming, something new, and something big.  And that something, was change.  Change in industry can be a great thing, in fact with change more often than not comes great opportunities for those willing and eager to embrace.  But then there are others that don’t really have a great deal of control over their place within the system, they are forced to adapt and accept.  For those people, change can be bad.  Fishing Reels, 50 Pence Wedding Rings & The Printing Press Growing up in a working class family in the 80s, we weren’t poor, but money was tight, and work was always hard.  My Dad was a toolmaker in a precision engineering factory.  He and hundreds of his workmates worked long and hard hours – paid by the hour.  But something kept them together, with a sense of place – the community.  The individuals within the company’s community formed groups – fishing clubs, chess clubs, table tennis and football (soccer) tournaments, reading clubs, dance nights, live music, street parties for the whole families of the workers – all run by volunteers, and self funded by the community itself.   My Dad specifically was involved in the fishing clubs and competitions, he used his skills to make fishing spools and reels which he would sell to his friends at cost.  He even made his own wedding ring out of a melted down Fifty pence coin with the likeness of Her Majesty The Queen’s distorted image wrapped around his finger on the inside. Industrial progress, growth and maturity ultimately led to change.  The company was bought out by an American investor and was broken up. New teams from the States were brought in to modernise and capture new business opportunities.   The precision engineering part of the company was closed to be replaced by a printing press business.  After over 20 years, my Dad lost his job, as did all of his friends. The community broke up, fractured, people lost touch.  You can replace the jobs, but you can’t replace the community, once it’s gone, it’s gone.   This sense of community is something I’ve had within me for my whole life too.  I’ve always sought out a tribe of like minded people. I was always playing bands in local music scenes, and traveling the UK skateboarding – meeting new people and gaining new insights and experiences.   Photo by shawn henry on Unsplash Matt’s Memorial Around the time I finished University I broke my ankle. Slowly, I hobbled away from Skateboarding. But the feel of that community is always with me.  When one of my best friends from those days, Matt, died a few years ago I attended his funeral and over a hundred old friends from the Skateboarding communit...

Support our work at https://thewpminute.com/supportGet the newsletter at https://thewpminute.com/subscribeIt’s the WPMinute! I am Liam Dempsey with the following news and updates. This episode is brought to you by Easy Support Videos. Support your WordPress users by embedding videos and screencasts right inside the WordPress admin. Learn more at EasySupportVideos.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 Jetpack is acquiring WPScan. WPScan is being used across the WordPress ecosystem to identify vulnerabilities in WordPress core, themes, and plugins. Besides creating an outstanding security offering, Jetpack’s goal for this acquisition is to make malware data and APIs more open source. As part of the acquisition, two of the WPScan founders, Ryan Dewhurst and Erwan Le Rousseau, will be joining Automattic to continue their work improving security for the WordPress ecosystem. WPScan will continue to operate independently in the near term and may be integrated into Jetpack Scan in the future. There has been a lot of news around core updates on make.wordpress.org. There is a core editor improvement with a new view that lets folks have a space to focus specifically on editing a single template part (like the header or footer). You will be able to access this mode in a few ways once Gutenberg 11.9 is released. If all goes well, then in WordPress 5.9. Around the FSE program (Full Site Editing that is) the team went into round three of questioning that was gathered through the FSE outreach program. There were many questions around themes, the customizer and fonts. Keep your eyes open for a round four. Paul Lacey recently spoke with Vikas Singhal of Express Tech & InstaWP on the WPMinute about his company’s upcoming FSE (Full Site Editing) Theme Launch.  It was interesting to see a practical implementation of FSE design. The theme is called Guten and launches in December. You can check this out on the WPMinute to get a review of the FSE Theme implementation and design. Spencer Forman also at the WPMinute spends time talking about how many more theme years are we going to see? Are we ready for a default theme that flexes Gutenberg’s block-based approach over a designed theme like Twenty Twenty? Go listen to Spencer’s take on the release of styled themes with major WordPress releases. Justin Tadlock, at the WPTavern, wrote a great blog post on the third-party plugin WooCommerce and asked the question Where are the Block Themes for WooCommerce? WooCommerce is a third-party plugin and is unrelated to the core WordPress and Gutenberg projects. But as we know, WooCommerce is owned by Automattic. So, one can assume that there is some crossover among developers. For a deeper look at what is ahead, read Peek into the WooCommerce Blocks Roadmap, which is developer-specific. You may come to the realization that the size and scope of WooCommerce Block integration is not simple and far off for FSE. SEO Google has announced that it’s renaming Google My Business to Google Business Profile. Google has explained that the existing Google My Business web experience will eventually transition to primarily supporting large multi-location businesses. Local SEO experts have been quick to react to the update. If SEO is included in your WordPress space go check out the changes that are coming. In other SEO news….RankMath, with over a million installs annonces Content AI to take the hassle out of writing. That is a great idea for many who are writing that specific content for organic SEO. RankMath will hold your hand while you write content to see if it is worthy of Search Engine Rankings. Events Wordfest Live is back in March 2022. The deadline for the call for speaker submissions is December 6, 2021, at midnight UTC. The organizers will start to notify speakers from December 16, 2021, onward. Wordfest is seeking proposals on a wide variety of topics. Go check out the details on their site if you are interested. WooCommerce BobWP announced his first Do the Woo partnership with PostStatus. Bob has been friends with Cory Miller for a long time and it made sense at this time to partner with somebody he mentions a lot in the WordPress space on his podcasts. Congratulations Bob and Cory! From Our Contributors and Producers We have been reporting for weeks how different it is for developers and writers coming into the WordPress space with the changes to core and the addition of Gutenberg. Tom McFarlin shares his perspective about both on his blog. Tom is an experienced WordPress developer and you may have followed his writing over the years. He writes that although WordPress is a different set of technologies now, it’s not very different for somebody getting started in programming in any discipline. Developers need to learn different technologies and make them work. He shares several points in his post and it is definitely worth it to take the time to read. Speaking of WordPress development, Aaron Jorbin shared his development toolchain while he was building the Post Format Block. Aaron covers three tools (wp-scripts being his favorite) in his post that can improve the quality of your code and allow you to focus on things that matter instead of the repeatable tasks that happen in the world of development. Over on the WPTavern, Nathan Wrigley interviewed Tara King. Tara has recently started working for Automattic in a developer relations role. Tara will lead a newly formed team who will get out and try to understand the pain points that people are having with the new Block Editor and Full Site Editing. She is encouraging developers toward a Gutenberg future and wants to hear from you. The WebDevStudios team was over on PostStatus discussing the Legend of the H...

Support our work at https://thewpminute.com/supportGet the newsletter at https://thewpminute.com/subscribeToday’s episode is a special report by WP Minute correspondent, Spencer Forman. How many more theme years are we going to see? The Twenty Nineteen, Twenty Twenty, Twenty Twenty One and so on — seem like a strange naming convention bordering a simple novelty tradition. With Gutenberg squarely aimed to take on page builders, especially with Full Site Editing right around the corner, we’d be mindful to note that plugins like Elementor ship with only one theme — every year. Are we ready for a default theme that simple flexes Gutenberg’s block-based approach over an opinionated design? Spencer has a few words to share with you about that today. If you enjoy today’s episode, please share it with others. Join our mailing list to never miss an episode and consider becoming a member to support free WordPress media like this. 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 this podcast ★

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