The WP Minute

Thanks Pressable for supporting the podcast! What hosting should feel like...nothing! https://pressable.com/wpminute It’s the WP Minute! This is Kathy Zant and I’m filling in for Matt. 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 the drill, everything I mention here will be linked up in the newsletter and the blog post. Check out thewpminute.com for the links. News time! If you thought the WordPress acquisition train was safely tucked away at the station, think again, it’s full-steam ahead!  Breaking news announced earlier this morning, AwesomeMotive has acquired one of the — if not the most — highly regarded brands in WordPress: SandHills Development, widely known for Easy Digital Downloads.  Pippin Williamson penned an excellent summary of the events sharing what led him to the decision.  Every business owner knows (or will eventually learn) that there are three possible fates for their business:1. It will one day be passed on to someone else, perhaps through family inheritance2. It will slowly or rapidly decline and at some point be shut down entirely3. It will be sold to a new owner for one reason or another. If you’re a business owner, his post is absolutely worth the time. Liquid Web announces another top-tier brand is being added to their stack, one of the most popular LMS plugins for WordPress: LearnDash.  LearnDash will join the Liquid Web Family under the StellarWP brand, which is the umbrella for our premium WordPress software solutions and includes well-known and respected WordPress leaders such as iThemes, The Events Calendar, GiveWP, Restrict Content Pro, Iconic, and Kadence WP.” You can learn more about how the acquisition went down in our interview with Justin Ferriman and Chris Lema. Highlights include: How long the process tookWhat you should do if you want to get acquiredSpeculation on WooCommerce and the ecommerce space Speaking of WooCommerce, they’ve announced the acquisition of extension maker SomewhereWarm who currently has seven products available in the marketplace.  “This is a huge opportunity for us to help shape the future of WooCommerce, having a clearer view of the path ahead, more resources than ever before, and the support of like-minded people.” DeliciousBrains did a stealth acquisition of the ACF Blocks plugin, picking it up from the folks at Extendify. Extendify acquired EditorsKit earlier this year and the Redux framework last year.  The fantasy league of WordPress We’re thinking about starting a fantasy league of WordPress business & All-Star community members with all of this news! Carole Olinger is now the Social Media Manager at XWPChris Lema changes his title to GM of LearnDashRichard Tabor joins the Extendify teamBrian Gardner is back at WPEngine as Principal Developer AdvocateKathy Zant joins the team at NinjaForms to lead content marketing From the grab bag! Check out the new Tove theme by Anders Noren. You must have Gutenberg installed to activate + for Full Site Editing features. Fabien Kaegy rebuilt his site using a block-based theme, developers pay close attention to this article. We’re excited to be Media Partners for the upcoming WordCamp US kicking off on October 1st! Go grab your FREE virtual tickets today! Vito Peleg and Andrew Palmer announced Bertha.ai, “the fastest way to create content for your WordPress website.” Josepha Haden shares an update to WordPress 5.9 in the latest episode of WP Briefing. That’s it for this week’s weekly dose of WordPress news in less than 5 minutes. Join our private Discord server and be part of the news community. Some folks to thank this week. Bob Dunn, Lisa Sabin-Wilson, and Brad Williams for joining the membership as producers to help contribute to the news. If you want your hand in the weekly news buymeacoffee.com/mattreport. You can buy me a coffee to support the show or join the membership for $79 for the year. I also have an interview with Pippin Williamson who announced this morning that SandHills Development was acquired by Awesome Motive over on the Matt Report. Check that out if you want to hear the conversation with Pippin who ran one of the most respected WordPress businesses in the space for the last decade.

Thanks Pressable for supporting the podcast! What hosting should feel like...nothing! https://pressable.com/wpminute Liquid Web is acquiring again, this time in the popular WordPress LMS plugin space. Justin Ferriman, Founder of LearnDash, penned the acquisition statement on the company blog. I invited him on to share what the process looked like from an owner’s perspective and how it impacts his day-to-day responsibilities. https://twitter.com/chrislema/status/1440154950227546124?s=20 Chris Lema also makes a shift through this acquisition, becoming the General Manager of Learn Dash under the Liquid Web umbrella. He’ll share what that role means to the product, along with some outlook on how Liquid Web approaches platform solutions. We’ll spend some time talking about e-commerce and WooCommerce opportunities for the WordPress industry.   matt  |  Issue #  |  Tuesday, 21 Sep 2021  |  Reading time:  2 mins  | Read online Listen to the episode Join the The WP Minute membership + Discord server! Support our work at https://thewpminute.com/supportGet the newsletter at https://thewpminute.com/subscribe ★ Support this podcast ★

Thanks Pressable for supporting the podcast! What hosting should feel like...nothing! https://pressable.com/wpminute It’s the WP Minute! This is Michelle Frechette and I’m filling in for Matt. 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 the drill, everything I mention here will be linked up in the newsletter and the blog post. Check out thewpminute.com for the links. It was a busy week for News  Sarah Gooding at the WPTavern covers the push toward Full-Site Editing and the announcement of a new Default Theme for WordPress 5.9. This is the last scheduled release for 2021. WordPress 5.9 is starting to take shape as Josepha Haden Chomphosy published a planning roundup at the end of last week with a tentative schedule and scope. Head over to the get involved page on WordPress.org to see the schedule and participate in this important release. Jetpack has acquired Social Image Generator, a WordPress plugin founded by Daniel Post. The Social Image Generator automatically creates social image shares for your content, saving hours of tedious work. It creates images for all major social networks including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, VK, WhatsApp, iMessage, and Reddit. Simply share your content as you normally would, and the images will automatically appear. Daniel will be joining Jetpack to continue the work on the Social Image Generator and integrating it with Jetpack’s social media features. If you are interested in influencing the future of the product, you can schedule time with Jetpack research for a chat. Alex Denning shared a tweet about his interesting post on the getelipsis blog and what the future of WordPress searches will look like after COVID-19. The headline takeaways from the research showed average monthly searches in Jan-Jul 2021 compared with the averages for 2020 to be: Overall WordPress searches are down by -6.4%WooCommerce searches are down by -8.8%Theme searches are down by -16.7% To see this fascinating research, jump over to the blog post to cover the nuances around WordPress searches. Luis Herranz tweeted that it has been a couple of weeks since the official announcement of Frontity and Automattic. If you would like to see his perspective and excitement about this move check out his blog post. Keeping up with Ful-site Editing (FSE) If you’re a curious mind wanting to keep up with how full site editing is evolving, Mattias Ventura proposes a look to global styles in the user interface with what we might expect in future WordPress versions.  Elements like how global typography, colors, and layout spacing options are all shown in the Github issue tracker. From the Grabbag Intuit announced that they will buy email marketing company Mailchimp for $12 billion in cash and stock. That’s billion with a B. Matt covers this with Leslie Simm in a separate podcast on The WP Minute. How do we deal with all the changes in WordPress as an entrepreneur? Cory Miller and David Bisset have a great discussion on the PostStatus podcast about resilience working in this environment. It is important to have a team of support around you so you do not feel like you are working in a vacuum. Speaking about PostStatus, I have a recent post on Diversity vs. Inclusion: Why Tokenization is Harmful. This will be a series to follow to see how you can become better at inclusion. In addition to the work I do at GiveWP, I’ve recently joined Post Status as a contributing writer and podcaster. My areas within the organization will cover job seeking and hiring within the Get Hired podcast and blog, as well as inclusion and representing underrepresented populations within technology. Be sure to visit PostStatus.com for more, and underrepresentedintech.com for the unrepresented in tech issues as well. 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 I’ve invited Lesley Sim, co-founder of Newsletter Glue (hey! they power this newsletter!) to share her opinion on the recent Mailchimp acquisition by Inuit for $12 Billion dollars. Mailchimp is almost as synonymous with WordPress as Yoast is, so I’m sure many of you have some mixed feelings about this. I was delighted to hear her opinions on the software, community feedback, and what comes next for a product like NG which integrates so closely with large platforms like Mailchimp. Click the podcast player to hear the episode and don’t forget to share this with others! Mailchimp alternatives mentioned (but also, don’t drop Mailchimp): MailerLiteCampaign MonitorSendinblueSendyMailcoButtondownEmailOctypusflodeskKlaviyo Transcript [00:00:00] Matt: It’s the WP minute today’s special episode is brought to you by easy support videos, support your WordPress users, right inside your WordPress admin. Using embeddable videos to show them what to do. Check out easy support videos.com today’s special episode. Is hosted by Leslie SIM. One of the co-founders of newsletter glue, a fantastic email newsletter plugin that integrates with WordPress. It delivers this.[00:00:27] Email that goes out for the WP minute today’s episode. She breaks down her take on the MailChimp acquisition.[00:00:34] I invited Leslie to share her opinion on the acquisition since she works so closely. Well, not only with MailChimp, but with email, with newsletters, with customers. Leveraging these platforms. Okay. Let’s dive into Leslie’s episode about the MailChimp acquisition for nearly half the total value of the world’s banana industry.[00:00:59] Lesley: I’m super happy for the team. I believe they’ve worked on MailChimp for over 20 years and that’s a long, long, long time to be working on anything. And if they want to move on, then that’s great. It’s a very large amount of money, so I’m glad that they were able to have such a great name.[00:01:19] Not all companies, are able to have amazing exits, not all companies want to exit. But I can see, or I can imagine if, the founding team gets tired of stuff like their options are we sell the company or we transition out and hire a CEO CEO to work on top.[00:01:39] For, we know we, they considered that and chose to exit and, they could liquidate some of their ownership and that’s great.[00:01:46] Sometimes, with acquisitions of this size there it’s, it can be kind of polarizing. So I saw a tweet this morning from Ruben Gomez and yeah. Funny, I’ve seen completely opposite takes on MailChimp acquisition plus bootstrapping.[00:02:03] The first being this proofs, bootstrapping is dead good riddance. And the second, this proofs bootstrapping works for building very big companies. So I’m on team. This proofs boot shopping works for very big companies. Yeah, they were bootstrapped. They got a gigantic exit. So that’s great.[00:02:23] The other kind of polarizing take that I saw online for this was the founders got all the money because the employees didn’t have equity because this was a privately held company that the employees kind of, didn’t get a big win as well.[00:02:37] And I kind of have some opinions on this. It said in the press release that I think the, the employees got like a 300 million RSU restricted stock options[00:02:47] so it’s not like the, the employees came away with nothing, but also having said that, if you’re joining Coca-Cola or. Pepsi or PNG, you don’t join with the intention of getting equity from the company. I feel like that’s kind of a quirk of the tech startup wall and it’s not really something to be expected.[00:03:10] Also let’s not forget the reason why a lot of these startups give equity in the first place. The reason being. At the beginning, this, these companies can’t afford to pay their employees a four week. And so the supplement, a smaller wage with stock options on the promise slash bet that the company grows big.[00:03:33] So, so people forget that as well. They forget that so many of these startup, no matter what they promise, they end up going bust and, It’s where it doesn’t matter, like, that you had all those stock options, like you’re now out of a job. Right. And you stock means nothing.[00:03:49] So I feel like some of that conversation is kind of that conversation and that unpleasantness is, kind of misplaced.[00:03:57] Matt: Does the MailChimp acquisition. Have any effect on newsletter glue[00:04:02] Lesley: MailChimp has some of the best public APS on the market and excellent, excellent documentation as well. I don’t think that it will get worse even if they don’t maintain it properly or whatever. It’s still, already industry-leading. And I mentioned the EPA is because that’s how we knew that the glue connects MailChimp to WordPress. No impact on us there.[00:04:25] Matt: I’ve seen this reoccurring trend throughout the years of evaluating and using software where a great piece of software serves a very strong utility in the early days. And everyone loves it. Because it’s doing exactly what they need. And as that company grows. The software starts to scale into something of a larger platform. MailChimp is a perfect example of this. It used to send just newsletters and then it became an automation tool, an e-commerce tool.[00:04:56] A landing page tool, and so many other things, probably under the hood. Do you have any words of wisdom for scaling a piece of software? For those of us who are out there? Uh building our own software tools[00:05:08] Lesley: I don’t have any legitimate words of wisdom seeing as how I’ve never scaled any software from utility to a larger platform plea newsletter guru is still very much in the utility space.[00:05:21] I do kind of see why software or why a company would do this.[00:05:26] At some point you kind of, reach a market situation. Most people know about you. You’ve mostly put insight your possible users in a market have already used you. And there’s only so much more growth. You can act out.[00:05:39] A specific feature. And so people start moving breadth ways rather than depth. So rather than building like deeper and deeper for a customer set, they start moving breadth ways to get new customers. And I guess like the ultimate breadth plea is to become a platform. MailChimp was trying to move into e-commerce for, I think the past two or three years, they moved into landing pages as well. And a lot of that didn’t really get much traction maybe because of their name, they have mail baked into their name. And so, it’s hard to become a e-commerce landing page builder if your name is mill Chimp....

Thanks Pressable for supporting the podcast! What hosting should feel like...nothing! https://pressable.com/wpminute It’s the WP Minute! This is Carrie Dils and I’m filling in for Matt, who’s tweeting about podcasting. 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 the drill, everything I mention here will be linked up in the newsletter and the blog post. Check out thewpminute.com for the links. Let’s get to the News Stay tuned for the direction of block development in the next few months. Justin Tadlock over on the WPTavern wrote about whether block development is merely a templating system with no build process. Since there still is a big concern around the direction of block development, he went ahead and reviewed where the React-based WordPress block editor (sometimes referred to as Gutenberg) had been hitting speed bumps for WordPress developers who have been more PHP Centric. Helen Hou-Sandi also published on her blog how she spent the last 8 months telling anybody she talked to about custom WordPress block development. They were way less scary and much easier than she thought they were going to be for somebody with minimal React experience. She said that a big game-changer for adoption and shifting thinking would be to find a way to unify templating between the front-end and the editor, essentially swapping the places where you output content with the corresponding editor component.  My personal opinion: “That sounds amazing”! Helen says: “these are experiments and there will likely be many failed paths”, and that the focus remains on the problem to be solved during the research and experimentation phase, not on the implementation details. If you want the scoop on React and the possible direction of block development make sure you check out her post and follow updates on Twitter. For you plugin developers seeing plugin changes on WordPress.org: Mika Epstein reported on WordPress.org that inaccurate stats were adjusted for 100 plugins recently because of a stats gathering change. This means those plugins had their active install stats seemingly adjusted downward. She wants you to understand this was painful for a number of developers and they held off on announcing this as they were still doing a bit of triage and making sure it was blocked. Sorry about that confusion and it is corrected now. Let’s Talk about WooCommerce If you follow Bob Dunn for WooCommerce news, he announced that his Twitter handle changed for all things Woo. Jump over to @DotheWoo for updates and news. Moving on to the Grabbag If you are a runner, walker, or crawler this one is for you. WordPress has a virtual 5k scheduled for October 1 through October 30. This race is virtual and “virtually” anyone can participate in the race with the possibility of completing the 5k race. You can track your route on your favorite app or record the 5k off the grid. And you can register for the WordPress 5k or just donate if you cannot participate. We are looking forward to seeing your progress and success. Just tag #wwwp5k. And…Congrats go out to Jonathan Wold for joining Cory Miller over at Post Status. Keep your eyes peeled for good things coming from them. 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 at thewpminute.com. 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 In the News  You’re in luck for 2021 if you are dragging your feet using Gutenberg and the block editor. The Classic Editor Plugin was published in 2018 to help with the transition to the block editor with support through the end of 2021.  Now the Classic Editor plugin will be supported through the end of 2022.  It may be a good time to re-think your transition plans on your websites. Frontity has been acquired by Automattic. Even though Frontity is a React framework, it doesn’t mean that they are going to push React to the WordPress frontend.   Matt Mullenweg wrote in his recent blog post that there’s still a lot that: We can learn from decoupled systems and we can incorporate those learnings into WordPress itself as we emphasize performance, flexibility, and ease of development.I look forward to Frontity joining WordPress and channeling their efforts into the WordPress APIs, documentation, and Gutenberg’s full-site editing tools.” Sarah Gooding over on WPTavern updated the community about the progress on the block-based Navigation editor screen.  The screen got a status check last week as part of a Hallway Hangout meeting. Once the Navigation screen is available by default in the Gutenberg plugin, the team working on the feature will be able to gather more feedback. Matias Ventura provides a quick overview of the main areas and features currently underway for 5.9 in Gutenberg. Some are in more advanced stages than others, but together they paint a picture of what this will look like. Some News Around Security  On August 13, 2021, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team responsibly disclosed two vulnerabilities in Nested Pages, a WordPress plugin installed on over 80,000 sites that provides drag and drop functionality to manage your page structure and post ordering. If you have any friends or colleagues using this plugin, please share this announcement with them and encourage them to update to version 3.1.16 (or newer) of Nested Pages as soon as possible. On August 3, 2021, the same team initiated the disclosure process for two vulnerabilities discovered in the Gutenberg Template Library & Redux Framework plugin, which is installed on over 1 million WordPress sites. One vulnerability allowed users with lower permissions, such as contributors, to install and activate arbitrary plugins and delete any post or page via the REST API. A second vulnerability allowed unauthenticated attackers to access potentially sensitive information about a site’s configuration. Please go ahead and update that as soon as possible. WooCommerce news They are planning to raise the minimum WordPress and PHP requirements needed to use the Action Scheduler plugin. This change will impact any plugin or theme that includes the Action Scheduler as one of their bundled vendor libraries. It also impacts any sites where Action Scheduler is installed as a standalone plugin. In these cases, before updating Action Scheduler to 3.3.0 or higher, it is important to perform some basic safety checks. From the Grabbag People are moving and grooving in and about the WordPress Space. Congrats to Birgit Pauli-Haack who has run the Gutenberg Times and Changelog Podcast. She has started as a developer advocate over @Automattic. So many of us are familiar with Andrea Middleton’s work and know her personally from WordCamps. Andrea made the announcement on Twitter and her blog that she is moving to Reddit after contributing to WordPress for nearly ten years. 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 In the News  WordPress.org was in the news again. This time there was a lot of confusion about WordPress rejecting plugin submissions with the WP prefix. They said this was to address potential trademark abuse. As you can imagine, this sparked some interesting debate (read: controversy) on Twitter and Slack channels. This information ended up being misinterpreted as WPSteward reported, but it generated responses across the entire Community in record time. People legitimately freaked out because of how the information from WordPress.org has been handled in the past. We all have kind of felt this. There has been a track record for this type of communication and folks generally feel as though they are not being heard.  Sarah Gooding over at WPTavern and Jeff Chandler over at WPMainline went into further detail about how this was “making mountains over molehills”. Go check their articles out for different perspectives on this news flash. This is also time for a joke. Like what happens when two train conductors walk into bar…ok. Gutenberg keeps chugging right along with the roadmap to WordPress 5.9 and Gutenberg 11.3. Birgit Pauli-Haack and Grzegorz Ziolkowski discuss the preliminary roadmap on the 50th episode of the Gutenberg Times Changelog podcast. Congratulations on number 50! As more and more of us are being asked to pay attention to the changes in the Block Editor in Gutenberg, go check out what Iian Poulson writes. He sees the negative talk turning into more optimism. There is a great long post for developers over at Delicious Brains to review.  Getting back to business Immerseus founder Jack Kitterhing tweeted that Immerseus had been acquired in full. His eight-month-old company generated $100k in sales from apparently a single Facebook group marketing channel…and he has a day job…and like 5 other products. I think I should have him on the Matt Report to give us the map to this gold mine… Events WordPress meets education at WPCampus online September 21 and 22nd. Although the conference is advertised for Web Accessibility, go and check out the schedule. There are many panel discussions and general lectures that can help you in your agency. The second annual WPMRR (WP Monthy Recurring Revenue) Virtual Summit will run online-only this year from September 21 – 23. Joe Howard is hosting the event alongside guest host Brian Richards, the organizer behind WordSesh and WooSesh. Justin Tadlock covers all the details over on WPTavern. From the Grabbag Are you seeing yourself leaning towards unhealthy habits in 2021?  David Bisset and Cory Miller talk about developer overload on the latest podcast of Post Status. With so much to learn today, it’s not just WordPress but the entire internet leading to so much information to process.  The Random Show with Brad and Matt was back last week with great information on NFTs and Podcast streaming satoshis. If you want to find out how to make money with Crypto and NFTs jump over and listen to one of the best episodes. Longtime WordPress product maker Brian Gardner raised eyebrows recently with his newest venture, Frost. He’s now made it publicly available for purchase. Find the pricing page over at FrostWP.com. 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 In the News  Everyone in the WordPress world is talking about the acquisition of Yoast to NewFold Digital. Yoast SEO, the well-known plugin for WordPress with over 12 million active installs, is the flagship product of Yoast.  I interviewed Joost de Valk on the WPMinute. The most important takeaway was that despite all of the speculation, the feedback has been mostly positive. Like many other WordPress concerned citizens, Jeff Chandler shares his initial thoughts on the acquisition on his podcast over at WP Mainline. As with all acquisitions, people are afraid that stuff will change for the worst — especially in ads or upsells. At this time, the Yoast product will not be adjusting free or premium features or adding in any other pesky upsell ads. Also keeping up with the news, Matt Mullenweg discusses the funding rounds from Automattic since last February. Automattic closed a primary funding round of $288M, bringing in some new partners including BlackRock, Wellington, Schonefeld, and Alta Park. Matt covered the buyback of $250M shares that were primarily targeted at current and former employees. Matt’s article also discusses the hiring challenge that Automattic has right now. Welcome to the club. There are lots of jobs available over at Automattic. Go check them out if you’re interested. Riad Benguella writes a new blog post about the difficult task of monitoring performance with Gutenberg and looks at the cost of several WordPress plugins – particularly loading time with blocks. Since the performance is measured with blocks by extendibility, the repository for blocks has been growing like crazy. This can often make your typical WordPress site have over 12 (or more) plugins installed. These plugins can impact performance and Riad does a great job of testing plugins with Gutenberg and reporting his findings. View the results along with the methods over on his blog. The average load times of the most popular are…well I can’t show you the graph in audio…but you have to take a look. The three top offenders are Yoast, Jetpack, and WooCommerce. Events WordCamp US will be back online October 1st. There is a call for Sponsors along with Speakers and talk ideas. Since there aren’t enough female-identified speakers in India this time, GreenGeeks is teaming up with the lead of the Diverse Speaker Training group in WordPress #wpdiversity, Jill Binder, to develop trainers who can teach others how to run the workshops at their local WordPress meetups all over India. This is happening September, 24 & 25. From the Grabbag Don’t get nervous about all the WordPress changes. Many entrepreneurs are feeling a little squeezed in the plugin space but no need to worry just yet. Go listen to the latest podcast on the Matt Report with Nathalie Lussier, founder of AccessAlly a LMS plugin for WordPress shows how you can stand apart and still grow your business by knowing your perfect customers and maturing your product. Joe Casabona is at it again this week over on YouTube.  He covers a little-known feature in Gutenberg called the “Move To” menu item for blocks. He shows you how it works and when the best time to use it in this short tutorial. 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 at thewpminute.com. 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 In the News  Titan, a professional e-mail service, raised $30 million from Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com. This investment deal takes the company’s valuation to $300m. Titan will use the funds, the single largest investment made by Automattic, to expand its range of products, the professional email platform said on Wednesday. It did not disclose any details on the new products. Here’s a clip from CNBC-TV18 featuring the CEO of Titan. Professional #email platform @TitanEmail raises $30 M from Automattic, the parent company of @wordpress.com, and is valued at $300 MN@MugdhaCNBCTV18 finds out from serial entrepreneur @bhavintu on how he plans to take on #Google & #Microsoft in this space pic.twitter.com/C0EZAIJTgL— CNBC-TV18 (@CNBCTV18News) August 5, 2021 All of this leads to the question… How do the new products get integrated into the Automattic ecosystem?  Justin Tadlock, from WPTavern, reviewed a new theme by Automattic called Quadrat, a Block-Based Podcasting WordPress Theme. In addition to the great color scheme and headers, Quadrat includes nine custom patterns. The focus for most of the patterns are on podcasting, but some are general-purpose enough for other use cases, such as “Media and text with button”. Justin felt that the development team missed a prime opportunity with its podcast-related patterns. Instead of integrating with a podcasting solution, this theme uses simple, static blocks from core WordPress. With Automattic’s recent fundraising with Castos, it would have made sense to integrate this theme with the podcasting company’s plugin, Seriously Simple Podcasting (SSP). Ahem…I work for Castos. Many others are seeing the changes in the developer community Chris Weigman, a well-known developer in the WordPress community started a lively discussion on Twitter about how the WordPress ecosystem is not as welcoming as it used to be. The barrier to entry, which was once so low, seems to be evaporating. The simplicity of WordPress is gone. Since Gutenberg has been the direction, WordPress is almost unrecognizable from what it used to be. The ability to extend WordPress is limited without the knowledge and experience. This means that projects that could once easily be imagined and built by a small group of people are now funded by big corporations that have money to do the development.  New developers in WordPress will have rewarding careers working for hosts and other larger, more established companies in the space.  The thing to keep an eye on in the next few years is to see how new careers will not be built on developing plugins and themes. Smaller contributors will be able to create courses and share their skills in the WordPress community by writing and speaking at events. Bob Dunn from Do The Woo believes that there will not be much development with new plugins and themes, but you will still be able to easily build sites with WordPress. He covers additional conversations and perspectives on his blog post. From the Grabbag Congrats to Milana Cap for receiving funding from Yoast Diversity Fund for leading WordPress 5.8 Docs. Travis Lopes just made the leap from full-time at Rocket Genius — the makers of Gravity Forms — to run his software business, forgravity.com.  Check out my interview with Travis on the Matt Report. 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 Joe Casabona is filling in for Matt this week, who’s on assignment.  In the News  Jeff Chandler has opened up subscriptions to WP Mainline. Subscribing to this site will eventually get you the most recent content about WordPress. At the moment you will provide financial support to Jeff as he publishes and produces audio content in the WordPress ecosystem. Mode Effect, LLC, a full-service e-commerce consulting, development and management agency recently acquired Amplify Plugins, a WooCommerce and WordPress plugin development company to expand its plugin solutions to existing and prospective customers. Termly, the GDPR Cookie Consent Banner is one of the easiest, most effective, and popular cookie consent plugins available for WordPress with over 200,000+ downloads. Just remember after upgrading, you will need to sign up for a Termly account from within the plugin, or on the site app.termly.io, then enable the consent banner again. Sara Gooding reports over on WPTavern that PublishPress, makers of the PublishPress and PublishPress Blocks plugins, have adopted the Organize Series plugin from Darren Ethier. Organize Series is a 15-year-old plugin for organizing and displaying posts in a series, useful for novel writers, educators, magazine sites, and anyone breaking their longer content up into a series. From the Grabbag The first release candidate is now available for WooCommerce 5.6. WooCommerce is on track for the planned release for August 17th. Bob in his weekly Do The Woo podcast covers the highlights. Travis Smith on the StudioPress blog writes about how you can quite simply pre-populate a “post” (regardless of post type) with the classic editor. So you don’t need to add the Classic editor plugin any longer. The latest Beaver Builder newsletter has a great WordPress checklist to use for your agency. If you’re a web designer, you’re probably skilled at the launching phase. However, it’s still important to make sure you’re covering all of your bases. To help you do that, you can use this website launch checklist. If you are interested in linking a section of a page in WordPress, David Hayes from WPShout has created a quick guide on how to link page content and then how to add that link to a WordPress Navigation Menu. The quick guide shows you how to link users to a specific heading within an article. And finally, after a couple of months of hard work, I’m happy to announce my new “Master Full Site Editing” course. It covers all of the new features of the block editor, and what you can do with Full Site Editing. You can get it now at 50% off by going to masterfse.com. Get it today and get free, lifetime updates. If you want to learn more about me, you can head over to casabona.org.  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 ★