Its the WP Minute! This episode is brought to you by Search WP. Improve WordPress search by visiting SearchWP.com You know the drill, everything I mention here will be linked up in the newsletter and the blog post. Checkout thewpminute.com for the links. Sshh…no major acquisitions this week. WordPress 5.8 is slated for release on July 20. In just over a month, many users will get their first experience of the template-editing mode. This can be exciting for users allowing them to create custom templates without ever leaving the post-editing screen. New powerful blocks like the Theme blocks and Query blocks will be introduced. Beta 3 of 5.8 is available today for testing. If you’re looking for an alternative to Google Maps, Sarah Gooding from WordPress Tavern breaks down some of the recent happenings with the MapLibre Project. Citing she even opened a ticket for Jetpack to consider using it in a future release.  Chris Lema shares his thoughts from the lens of Nexcess/LiquidWeb and other hosting companies on the future success of WordPress. It seems Nexcess might have their own Membership website experience coming for WordPress hosting soon. WPEngine’s Summit 2021 dubbed “The Digital Breakthrough Conference” launches tomorrow June 24th.  From the Grabbag The WPWeekly hit the 50 issue milestone, congrats Davinder. Joe Casabona shows you how to submit to the WordPress Block Pattern Directory without code.WebDevStudios is now a VIP Gold Partner with proven excellence implementing WordPress at scale.Gravity Forms celebrate the Gravity Forms Certified Developer Program (Look for more of this from major plugin vendors in the future).I enjoyed this conversation with WPBuffs founder Joe Howard and Nathan Hirsh on his podcast about starting FreeUp.net a home for hiring WordPress freelancers.  If you’re a creator in the WordPress or web tech space, I talked about how you can get a job leveraging your existing content over on the latest episode of 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 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 this podcast ★

A major update coming to WordPress 5.8. Beta release 2 is available for testing now. This release expands WordPress’ site building capabilities, along with improvements to features users have enjoyed since the launch of the block editor. The release will also include WebP support which 95% of the web browers worldwide use. Check out the WordCamp Europe 2021 Gutenberg demo narrated by Beatriz Fialho. WordPress Taverns’ Sarah Gooding recaps a discussion with Matt Mullenweg and Matias Ventura “The Block Editor Gets Ready to Become a Site Builder” A quote from Matt: For me, 2020 was the year that really felt like people started to see the vision of Gutenberg from four or five years ago, when it was very abstract and they saw it as kind of like the old WYSIWYG editor with some extra lines on it or something,” Mullenweg said. “The first 17 or 18 years of WordPress democratized people putting text into a box. Now we’re democratizing design, allowing people to control the boxes.” This has been another huge project for the WordPress contributors and developers. Josepha Hayden Chomphosy is very transparent on the WP Briefing podcast about how difficult it is to run a large open source project and offers suggestions on how to get a big group of people to come to consensus. Eric Karkovick Editor, Writer & WordPress Expert at Speckyboy covers what WordPress acquisitions says about the future and states that the WordPress ecosystem is maturing and consolidating. “Frankly, it’s becoming a lot harder for solo entrepreneurs or small development shops to manage a popular plugin. Supporting a large userbase while also focusing on the future could become overwhelming.Thus, it’s not surprising to see that some of these products are being sold off to larger firms. We saw something similar happen with internet providers back in the early 2000s. The more mature the market, the harder it became for a small company to carry out its mission. Pretty soon, they were just about all bought up by corporate interests”. Alex Denning along with Iain Poulson tweeted last week that they have created FlipWP and For $300/year the duo will help connect WordPress product companies for sale, with would-be buyers. If all this talk about acquisitions every day has your brain tangled up, Chris Lema posted a straight forward Twitter thread to bring some clarity to this fast-paced space. There are a lot of discussions about companies (and hosts) acquiring folks in the #WordPress space. Now, new marketplaces are getting created to help you sell your company. All of this is great. But not all buyers are the same, and it's not always about the $$$. ★ Support this podcast ★

Jetpack gave us all a boost by pushing out a forced update patching a vulnerability in the Carousel feature. Tony Perez illustrated his point of view on how forced updates, in the hands of bad actors, could be a risk for the software. Brandon Kraft, part of the Jetpack team, tweeted that the forced update was justified by the meta/security team since 18% of Jetpack sites were affected. We weren't part of the discussion. Provided details and got the response, but I wouldn't expect a security convo to be public. But, yes. Single feature impacted. A few things need to be all true for it to matter on a site, which looked like qualified about 18% of sites IIRC.— A Guy Called Kraft ❤️‍ ★ Support this podcast ★

Today is an interview with Brad Touesnard, founder of Delicious Brains, talking about his recent acquisition of Advanced Custom Fields. A series of questions I’ve provided him, where he’s recorded answers to via audio. I hope you enjoy today’s episode and learn more about one of WordPress’ most historic acquisitions. Check the transcript at the bottom of the post and please share this episode out on your social media channels! Transcription [00:00:01] It’s the WP minute. This episode is brought to you by easy support videos, support your WordPress users by placing videos right in the WordPress admin. Get it@easysupportvideos.com.[00:00:12]Today is an interview with Brad two Nard, founder of Delicious Brains, and talking about his recent acquisition of advanced custom fields, a series of questions he’s recorded answers to via audio. Let’s dive right in.[00:00:24]Can you give us a sense of how you vetted a product company like ACF? What was attractive besides the obvious..[00:00:29] Revenue, especially recurring revenue, definitely looked at that right away. I looked at the customer base and what their expectations were.[00:00:40]there is obviously more to it with due diligence, . In terms of verifying all those numbers and making sure everything was accurate , and legit, but the accountants and lawyers handled most of that anyway and just provided reports.[00:00:57]ACF’s pretty simple company Elliott set up a really kind of simple thing for 10 years by himself. There weren’t a lot of moving parts , to really vet , in this deal, in terms of what was attractive, obviously…[00:01:10]ACF isa great product that has a passionate and large community of users and customers. The thing that particularly appealed to me is that the customers are the same as our customers.[00:01:24]I think the thing that was the most attractive, it was like, this is a way for us to really kind of step into more mainstream WordPress world, I think. And that seems to be, I’m definitely feeling that over the last few days as the, after the announcement , was made, the, it was really, it’s almost overwhelming how much noise has been kicked up on Twitter especially around lifetime licenses.[00:01:53]How do you weigh this decision amongst the existing product lineup at Delicious Brains?[00:01:58] I’m confident that we can hire folks and handle ACF and scale up what we’ve been doing all these years with our existing products. And, we’ve added, within the last few years we’ve doubled our products.[00:02:11]this is just an extension of where we’ve been already going. It makes complete sense. It’s kind of a supercharging, right? If we were adding two new products over the next, three years, that’s a lot different than adding, a massive product, overnight. it is a big jolt to the business.[00:02:30]Can you hint at the size of the deal?[00:02:32] Nope. Moving on[00:02:34]Will pricing and existing licenses be honored for customers.[00:02:38] Yes. We made that very clear in the announcement posts that we won’t be changing pricing anytime soon.[00:02:46] And if we do in the future existing customers, won’t be impacted.[00:02:50]Then of course we made the mistake of totally not mentioning lifetime licenses and totally missing that and that was a mistake. I wrote a tweet thread yesterday, everyone seems happy with what we’ve decided to do with lifetime licenses.[00:03:07]Is this Delicious Brains way of investing in Gutenberg and a potential theme product in the future.[00:03:12] Definitely not a theme product. That’s not really been something on my mind. I’m not going to write off any ideas, but yeah, it’s just not something we’ve really considered at this point.[00:03:24]Investing in Gutenberg, that’s a bit of a different question.[00:03:27]I can see that. ACF blocks is a huge part of ACF and I think it’s a huge part , of the WordPress block editor space.[00:03:36]I love what Elliot has done there, he’s built a bridge really between, the kind of old school, WordPress developers, the PHP and jQuery, and those developers and, the react folks. It’s very challenging to level up on react.[00:03:53]We’ve been doing it ourselves and it’s, very tough. I very much sympathize with folks who are struggling to kind of make that leap from, J query to react. That’s a huge leap. Anyhow, I think I think there’s lots more opportunity there to help folks extend the block editor, make custom blocks using ACF. So we’ll definitely, we’re definitely pumped to work on that project, but also I don’t think Gutenberg is necessarily the best tool for every job inside of WordPress either.[00:04:26]there’s lots of cases where you might want to basically create a database of something. A database of books, a database of staff people or whatever it is. And Gutenberg’s UI is for building websites, but building pages, it’s not, , it’s a layout engine, it’s not designed for entering data.[00:04:46] So I think that’s also where ACF has shined, right? it’s been a wonderful UI for for entering information. And I think that’s where ACF can continue , to shine inside of WordPress.[00:04:59]What immediate challenges does a product like this present to delicious.[00:05:03] The biggest one , is hiring. We’ve been hiring like crazy this year. I think in the last 12 months we’ve doubled the size of the team. We’ve really ramped it up in the last three or four months though, because we knew this was coming.[00:05:18]The good news is we’re pretty much staffed up. we’ve hired pretty much all the developers we need , for ACF at this point. We’re in really good shape.[00:05:29]One challenge that we’re facing is scaling management leadership around our products and adding ACF to the mix here it’s going to put a strain on that some more. So I’m looking at that, adding more leadership management resources to the team, considering even having someone like a COO role.[00:05:52]Someone working with me to scale a company essentially.[00:05:56]Last question to wrap up. What are you most excited about with acf now joining your suite of Delicious Brains products?[00:06:04] Bringing our strengths our user experience and UI strength to ACF and improving that UI, making things, just all that much better. Making the developer experience better. Even improving, the backend code. Elliot , would be the first to admit that there’s areas of the code that are old and dusty that could use some attention.[00:06:28] I’m really excited to ship that stuff to the community. It’s going to be so exciting to push out our first release or our first few releases and see how people react , to the work we’ve been doing.[00:06:43]Thanks for taking the time to do the interview. Brad, if you’ve not seen Delicious Brains before check out Delicious Brains.com and all of the amazing tools they have there. And of course, if you’ve never, ever heard of ACF before, check out advanced custom fields.com, don’t forget to subscribe to the WP minute@thewpminute.com and share, share. Share this episode on social media. Cause we’d love more listeners around here leave us a review on apple podchaser.com. okay that’s the wp min...

In a surprise tweet overnight (at least here in the US timezone), somewhere in Australia Elliot Condon announced the acquisition of his iconic WordPress plugin, Advanced Custom Fields by the Delicious Brains software company.  WordPress News: ⁦@dliciousbrains⁩ acquires ⁦@wp_acf⁩ | 10 Years of ACF – A truly wonderful time https://t.co/ytgpkcQ0l8— The WP Minute (@TheWPMinute) June 2, 2021 Delicious Brains of course famous for WP DB Migrate Pro and DIY WordPress hosting, SpinupWP. I have reached out to both Brad Touesnard, founder of DB and Elliot for comment, I hope to have those replies back to publish a blog post soon.  Rob Howard, CEO of Howard Development & Consulting announced the acquisition of the Understrap theme framework, ironically in a Medium post. Reportedly a $50,000 investment.  It’s the first time I’ve heard of Understrap:  “The UnderStrap package allows you to quickly and easily build search engine optimized websites with WordPress.” “I anticipate one of our first steps will be the addition of a Bootstrap 5 version (which has already been started as an offshoot project), since that’s been one of the most important roadmap items for a while now.” Not to be outdone on acquisitions, Chris Lema tweets that LiquidWeb has acquired Iconic, makers of a suite of WooCommerce plugins.  Ok, this one is one of the ones I've been waiting for. I'm so thrilled to welcome @iconicwp to the @liquidweb / @stellarwp family.https://t.co/04Lmjw9oe8— Chris Lema (@chrislema) June 2, 2021 “With Liquid Web backing us up, we’ll have more fuel to add to our fire. Our existing team is sticking around and so is our customer-focused ethos. “ WordPress turned 18 this week.But like any other rebelling teenager coming of age, not without its difficulties. When announced the illustrated timeline omitted Mike Little from the lineage of events, but was corrected by Josepha a short time after blowing out the candles.  Get to the blocka! Gutenberg 10.7 updates are out. This release introduces the first iteration of responsive menus in the Navigation block. Anne McCarthy published a call to test Full Site Editing by way of challenging you to build a portfolio page.  I think this is a great opportunity for non-developers to partake in the development of WordPress with a low barrier to entry. I enjoy the work Anne is doing in this space.  Speaking of full site editing, WPMarmite produced a report on data found surveying 127 WordPress theme shops and their adoption of Gutenberg + FSE.  57% of theme shops feature their Gutenberg compatibility.Only 17% of theme shops offer custom Gutenberg blocks.3% of theme shops provide block patterns.17% of theme shops write about Gutenberg (posts about WordPress 5.0 release excluded).65% of theme shops updated or released a theme in the last 3 months. Automattic launches a block based parent theme. Could this be an indication of a future base theme for WordPress proper moving forward, or just a developer tool for Automatticians. Read Justin Tadlock’s post on the WordPress Tavern. Product announcements Formidable Forms looks to shift focus to WordPress users needing a “custom application development” experience with their forms plugin. Former StudioPress founder Brian Gardner has launched Frost.Friend of the show Joe Casabona has refreshed the Podcast Liftoff website. Food for thought Jonathan Wold, Community lead for WooCommerce at Auotmattic, expresses a potential need for an independent “app store” for WordPress. I assume thoughts do not reflect his employer on this one. ★ Support this podcast ★

Post Status founder Brian Krogsgard has sold the remaining half of his ownership of the WordPress media brand to his partner, Cory Miller. Kicking off his his farewell post, A New Era for Post Status, Brian states: “It has been an extreme privilege to create and run this community — and see it blossom into a wonderful entity with its own identity. In the last few years, I’ve worked to bring more voices and more talent into the fold, and I’m confident that I leave Post Status in very able hands.” I had a chance to Interview Cory Miller about the transition, and here’s what he had to say. (Hit play on the podcast, reader!) You can gain more insight from Cory’s announcement on the website and his Draft podcast episode. The Blocksy Theme, was covered on the Tavern recently highlighting all of their investments into the theme + Gutenberg. It’s better for all of WordPress when we see a privately owned theme company growing these days. Stackable Gutenberg page builder founder Benjamin Intal was interviewed on the WP Jukebox podcast delivering his outlook on the now competitive Gutenberg block landscape as compared to his start back in 2018. Note the use of the phrase, “Gutenberg page builder” a noteworthy and intentional title in his pitch about the company. Affiliate Royale has re-branded to EasyAffiliate. You can see the whole new brand and website at EasyAffiliate.com. It’s a CaseProof owned company which includes PrettyLink and MemberPress, both of which owner Blair Williams entered into the Awesome Motive accelerator WP Beginner Growth Accelerator program, a Syed Balkhi owned initiative. Oldies but goodies The Query Block received some enhancements back in the Gutenberg 10.6 update. Pay close attention to the Query Block. I think it’s important to how users experience pulling content out of WordPress and displaying it on the front-end and will be crucial in the full-site editing experience. How do you feel about presenting your vaccination status at the next WordCamp? A proposal including comments from around the community was posted back on May 12th. I interviewed Brian Casel founder of ZipMessage over on The Matt Report podcast. 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 ★ Support this podcast ★

WP User Avatar, a plugin that was acquired by Collins Agbongama with over 400k active installs, took a hard pivot in it’s latest 3.0 version. The WordPress tavern reports what the plugin looked and functioned like, before becoming ProfilePress, it’s new name. Lots of end users share their opinions in the comments of the Tavern, and as you can imagine, they aren’t too happy. I reached out to Collins to learn more about him, his company, why the change to ProfilePress, and what he plans to do next. Read the interview to find out the back story. Release the themes! WP Engine’s head of Marketing for StudioPress, Chris Garret, shares the upcoming changes to WordPress once beloved framework for new developers. Most notably: ProPlus customers will get access to Genesis Blocks Pro and Genesis Custom Blocks ProGenesis Framework and the Sample Theme will be available for free.StudioPress-made themes will no longer be sold individually Hosts go round’n’round More from WP Engine includes their latest investment in hosting large-scale WooCommerce sites offering, which looks more like window dressing than a more unique & robust solution from the likes of LiquidWeb. Speaking of LiquidWeb, they launched a completely new plugin brand and portal to wrangle all these darn acquisitions lately! Check out StellarWP for more information. Let’s get to the core When WordPress 5.8 is released in July of this year, Internet Explorer 11 will no longer be supported. Shaun Andrews shares some of the ongoing work of what what the Patterns Directory is starting to look like in the second iteration. If you’re interested, you won’t want to miss the screenshots shared on the post. From the grab bag “If we are only able to focus on high quality work for 4 hours, yet we work for 8 or more, what do we spend the other 4+ hours doing? “ Matt Mullenweg wishes Squarespace good luck in their S-1 direct listing announcement in a post summarizing his admiration of CEO Anthony Casalena and the product. Squarespace will trade under ticker SQSPPippin Williamson of Sandhills development plans to experiment with 4-day work weeks starting this Summer. Citing: “If we are only able to focus on high quality work for 4 hours, yet we work for 8 or more, what do we spend the other 4+ hours doing? “I interviewed Kristen Youngs co-founder of coachingnocodeapps.com 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! ★ Support this podcast ★

Liquid Web continues to expand it’s nexus of acquisitions with it’s latest grab of GiveWP. From GiveWP’s own blog post: The future of GiveWP remains a top priority.Every team member is critical to our success.Leadership of the team and product are staying the same. You can check out our own interview with the GiveWP’s leadership team, Devin Walker and Matt Cromwell at thewpminute.com and friend of the show Joe Casabona featured a chat on the How I Built it podcast. Can’t get enough audio/video? How about over 2+ hours on the future of WordPress?! The WP Cafe podcast sat down with Josepha Haden Chomphosy & Matt Mullenweg to highlight the project’s future as of May 10th 2021. As you’d imagine most things point to Gutenberg, Full-site editing, but one particular discussion I thought was interesting was the term Universal Themes. Give this show a listen to learn more about that or attention a scheduled Universal Themes Hallway hangout on Friday May 14th at 14UTC WP Builds hosted a discussion as part of their Page Builder Summit event with 3 employees from Automattic titled “Preparing for the future of WordPress” This time a much more technical and tactical illustration of the project. Tune in to listen to Marjorie Asturias Director of Growth R&D, Anne McCarthy Developer Relations Wrangler, and Donna Cavalier a Technical Content Writer. With the future comes the…past? Tonya Mork and Andrew Ozz collaborated on a plugin that halts the block-based widget functionality for those of us needing to opt-out of that potentially critical component of a WordPress site. The plugin notes that support will carry through 2022. WordPress Tavern reports that Jetpack has made more features available without connecting to WordPress.com. But not to be outdone by it’s own updates, learn why the .com connection is important over at Jetpack.com. It also serves as a great resource for the features you can use without the connection. From the grab bag! Freemius has taken their massive library of WordPress business content and compressed it all into a nice cheat sheet for you.And I launched version 2.0 of my plugin, Easy Support Videos, make supporting WordPress clients fun using video inside the WordPress admin. ★ Support this podcast ★

I had the chance to sit down with Devon Walker and Matt Cromwell of GiveWP to talk about their sale to Liquid Web. GiveWP has been the dominant WordPress donation plugin over the last few years. This move makes sense for Liquid Web as they continue to round out a complete managed WordPress solution for their customers. Liquid Web acquisitions have been on a steady increase lately, with their most recent large acquisition of the Events Calendar plugin. I hope you enjoy today’s episode with Devon and Matt. Transcript Liquidweb acquires GiveWP [00:00:00] Matt Medeiros: [00:00:00] We were just chatting before we hit record. Devon, you were mentioning that things were getting wrapped up started to get almost wrapped up last week. [00:00:06] I’m sure this has been a process. When did this start? What does the timeline look like for some kind of acquisition this size?  [00:00:15]Devin Walker: [00:00:15] We’ve known Chris Lema for a while now. I’ve known him probably 10 years almost.  Around November of last year, I received an email from him that said, Hey, would you be interested in talking about how potentially we could work together, more liquid web? And what does this look like? And throughout the rest of 2020, we kind of went back and forth , “Hey, what does this look like?” [00:00:36] What it, what does it potentially mean for you? What does it mean for us? And then come the new year we landed on. Okay. Potential acquisition could be in the cards. And then a lot more negotiation around that into the LOI phase. And eventually we settled on something that made sense for the both of us  our company and liquid web, but our entire team. [00:00:59] And [00:01:00] then once we went through that, we got into more of the due diligence process, which was a very interesting and. A good learning process for everybody involved and then eventually closed on April 30th of last month.  [00:01:12]Matt Medeiros: [00:01:12] Same brand new parent company, more resources to the customers. [00:01:17] As people listen to this today, not much is going to change. Matt, Devin turns to you and says, “Hey, we’re thinking about getting acquired by liquid web from a CEO’s perspective, where do you start going to dot the I’s cross? [00:01:27] The T’s? What was that whole process like as somebody who kind of sees every oversees, everything?” [00:01:32]Matt Cromwell: [00:01:32] Don’t mess with my tools. I got stuff going here. The biggest thing Devin and I always have been on the lookout for is more resources. The ability to, to inject more energy into the stuff that we’re doing. [00:01:43]One of the most important resources we have all the time as our team. So that was definitely my very first thing is do they want the whole team? And the immediate question answer to that was, yeah. They understand. And they see that the team makes the product.  [00:01:57]Most folks, I think listening here know what it’s [00:02:00] like to, to run their companies on their own and bootstrapping all their resources as best as they can. And it, stretches everybody thin, but we’re always trying to look for the best way to support our people. [00:02:11] And I do feel like this is a win-win across the board for all of our team members. [00:02:16] Matt Medeiros: [00:02:16] Devin when you first start to have these conversations with Chris and you say, Hey, it’s great to add more resources, but man, this is my baby. I mean, you and I, you were a guest co-host of the Matt Report for a little while years ago, when you started giving WP, we’ve obviously met up at word camps and certain sort of senior journey highlighted your journey. [00:02:35]How do you start putting up the mental guardrails to say. Okay. This is, this is for the greater good of everyone. [00:02:41] I’m sort of giving this up. This, this passion, this dream, how do you do that?  [00:02:47] Devin Walker: [00:02:47] Yeah. Well, one, one major thing was they want the leadership to come along with the product. And so. Matt and myself, Matt C CommonWell here, and me are not going anywhere. We are still fully in charge [00:03:00] of the destiny of our product, and of course we’ll have lots of good advice and good, good mentoring that now we don’t have to pay for  [00:03:08] Matt Medeiros: [00:03:08] using Chris’s clarity line. [00:03:10] Devin Walker: [00:03:10] That was, that was painful to pay that bill every month. But no, we, we Yeah, you’re right. Like my ownership and mats ownership. We, we no longer have that any more, but we have great incentives in place to meet certain goals that they’ve set and we’ve sat and and a lot more resources to do that. [00:03:28] So, while w it was sad to see kind of my ownership go away in the product. It was, at least gratifying to know. We’re we still have. The ability to pull the levers that we’ve always  [00:03:39] Matt Cromwell: [00:03:39] had. Yeah. It’s a really good question though, because I feel like folks who build things that grow and scale and get larger. [00:03:50] At some point you do start to recognize that this actually is. Larger than me. And one thing that, I already mentioned, one thing we’re super proud of is our [00:04:00] team. We start to recognize that our team really is the people that have built this over time. And, and no product that has this much success is, is, is just on the back of one person anymore. [00:04:11] So, But the ability to just say, okay, I’ll just do this different with our business. We don’t have that ability anymore, but give in itself really gets to continue and and go strong and probably stronger than we could have done it on her own. So, yeah.  [00:04:26]Matt Medeiros: [00:04:26] We’ve the three of us have chatted personally about the business and some of the clients you’ve had, I won’t say the names here, but I’m sure they’re on your website and you can feel free to say some of your notable clients, active WP, but you have some. [00:04:37] Really notable clients, some really big brands use your product and something like this, like you said, this is, this is bigger than us. There’s no longer can we just play with some of these not plays, not also, not a great word to use, but we can’t just focus on, on, maybe even doing things the WordPress way anymore. [00:04:55] Maybe we have to broaden our horizons, open up the different technologies and in [00:05:00] a place like liquid web is going to have. Some real broad reaching technologies. Cause they don’t just do WordPress. They do all kinds of things. So, yeah. You start to really sit back and look at this and say, yeah, if we’re going to turn this into a air quo...

We have a quick run down this week…let’s Do the Woo! (Hi, Bob) WooCommerce has invested in one-click checkout platform, PeachPay. According to PeachPay’s PR post: Cart abandonment is a significant problem for eCommerce businesses – in 2021, the global average rate has risen from previous years to 78.65%. PeachPay aims to significantly reduce this by providing shoppers with a frictionless, one-click checkout experience. Robert Jacobi covered the investment: So if we do a little math, the investment for PeachPay is no more than $450,000 (assuming that the 30% filled of $1.5 million includes the recent investment). View his link in the show notes to read through his interview with David Mainayar, co-founder and Chief Growth Officer of PeachPay. Other Woo news: Automattic purchased woo.com for an undisclosed sum of money. Yoast has re-shaped their Diversity Fund project in the wake of COVID and the challenges of travel, stating: We want to keep our Diversity fund alive and we want to keep helping people in the WordPress community. That’s why our Diversity fund will now be used to sponsor people that work on a project that benefits WordPress. This can range from teaching a group of people anywhere in the world how to use WordPress to writing patches for Core. Speaking of travel, Will We See In-Person WordCamps in 2021? An Open Discussion on a Path Forward, asks Justin Tadlock of the WordPress Tavern. One commenter states: I don’t see why this is so complicated. If large, indoor gatherings are legal in the host country, then WordCamps should go ahead with no extra restrictions beyond those prescribed by the local law. People can then decide to attend or not. Matt Mullenweg replies: “This is a good way to approach it.” FluentCRM wins Torque Mag’s Plugin Madness 2021 — congrats FluentCRM, but I still can’t wrap my head around putting my CRM into my CMS… I stumbled across WPStackable which is setting its sights on launching a new v3 for Gutenberg soon. Which looks like a competent suite of Gutenberg blocks. Finally, WordFest Live call for speakers is now open, The festival of WordPress kicks off July 21, 2021. This week on the Matt Report, I ran a “play it forward” episode highlighting 3 other podcasts in our space, WP Coffee Talk, Women WordPress, and Hallway Chats. 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! ★ Support this podcast ★