The WP Minute

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 ★

Thanks Pressable for supporting the podcast! What hosting should feel like...nothing! https://pressable.com/wpminute Now that WordPress 5.8 is here, what’s next?  Many people have been using WordPress 5.8 since the release last week. Joe Casabona does a great review on his YouTube channel which covers improvements in the block editor, embedded pdfs and table improvements.  Justin Tadlock over at WPTavern does a rundown of plugins that test the theory that many features of WordPress 5.8 can be disabled until you are ready to address them yourself. And the fun won’t stop…Hector Prieto tells us What’s next in Gutenberg stating: Full Site Editing is the lighthouse goal for Phase 2 of Gutenberg. As such, it’s good to remember it is a collection of projects that allow site editing with blocks, bringing powerful capabilities for a smooth editing experience. Don’t get left behind (and don’t complain) about the features being shipped when you can see a lot of the conceptual work being done around Full Site Editing on make.wordpress.org.  Patterns all around me WordPress.org/patterns might be the most exciting “release” around WP 5.8 for me, anyway. A browsable collection of block patterns that you can literally copy/paste into your WordPress page is really exciting.  I’m looking forward to seeing what others contribute to the directory when it’s available. WordPress on the rise…but not plugins?  David Bisset, Post Status chief curating officer, alerted us to a recent decline in active plugins through the year 2021. In contrast to the growth of WordPress, David reached out to others in the community to help draw a pattern:  There’s no reason to panic but plugin authors and business owners should be aware of the trend and keep an eye on it. I think the sudden dip is what caught my (and others) eye. While noteworthy, the ecosystem could be “adjusting” as other industries are going through similar trends. Pull up the post on Post Status for more visuals, including riveting graphs.  A win for accessibility + WordPress Also over at WPTavern, Sarah Gooding covers the recent decision for Colorado to become the First State to Require State and Local Government Websites to Meet Accessibility Standards.  Colorado has more than 4,268 active local governments using WordPress and those responsible for local sites will need to begin the process of creating a plan to ensure they are accessible before July 1, 2024. The WordPress.org Themes Team announced an open discussion and a date for a Zoom meeting with theme authors. This meeting is scheduled July 28th at 2:00 p.m. The team is proposing a new set of guidelines that reduces and simplifies what is currently in place. The BuddyPress team released their block widgets 9.0. The new BP Widget Blocks are Legacy Widgets, rebuilt as BP Blocks. You can also access them in the Block Editor for use in your posts or pages. Events WordCamp US 2021 will be a one-day event scheduled for October 1st with networking opportunities, speaker sessions, workshops, and more. This was proposed after COVID cases are on the uptick again in the US. From the Grabbag Rich Tabor has made a new block plugin for adding markdown comments that only display while editing a post with Gutenberg. If you decide to test it, just remember the block only renders within the editor. For developers reading this, that means there’s no save function. Gravity Forms adds a new reCAPTCHA Add-On with their newest launch. They are providing Support for Google reCAPTCHA. With the new Add-On, all Gravity Forms customers can now integrate Google reCAPTCHA v3 in any or all of their forms. 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  A lot of WordPress News this Week After months of talking about the release of WordPress 5.8, it has finally arrived. Matt Mullenweg announced that “Tatum”, our latest and greatest release now available for download or update is in your dashboard. This release is named in honor of Art Tatum, the legendary Jazz pianist.  But if you need a thorough review, I recommend you head over to Kinsta’s blog where Carlo Daniele had time to write an amazing summary that covers all the new features of WordPress 5.8. His full-featured post includes a table of contents along with the videos discussing what has been worked on and added in the latest few months. It is a great source for all of the new things in WordPress 5.8. Speaking of great sources… Birgit Pauli-Haack covers more WordPress Themes for Full-Site Editing along with their Resources in the latest post on Gutenberg Times. Birgit says:  “Just remember that themes may be wonky at times until developers have had time to make updates.” Bob over at Do-the-Woo covers the latest WooCommerce updates. These updates cover the Action Scheduler 3.2.0 and 3.2.1. The AS library from 3.1.6 to 3.2.1 has been updated in this latest release. Sounds fascinating. This release comes with several fixes and an additional database index to speed up performance for sites with heavy traffic. We all love that. Lastly, Sarah over at WPTavern reports that Tiny, the makers of TinyMCE, have acquired Setka, a content design and editing platform, for an undisclosed amount of money. TinyMCE is used by millions of WordPress users, most visibly in the Classic Editor plugin as well as the Advanced Editor Tools plugin, previously known as TinyMCE Advanced.  Advanced Editor Tools adds a “Classic Paragraph” block to the block editor that gives access to the TinyMCE editor with configurable rows and buttons. It provides a stepping stone for those who are not quite ready to switch to the block editor. Events This is the week folks. Wordfest Live starts on July 23, 2021. It’s the 24-hour festival of WordPress. From the Grabbag Changes are being made to meetup.com, the platform where local WordPress events are based. WPCalendar.io will no longer receive any more updates. If you think we can’t keep up with Acquisitions, join the club. Quite literally, Cory Miller over at Post Status has an Acquisition Tracker and it shows you when a WordPress business was sold and who bought it. Over on the Matt Report, my latest interview is with Dave Rodenbaugh. He shares he was never even working on a part-time basis with his business Recapture.io. In fact, the way he put it, he was only devoting 10% of his energy into the business while being contracted at a corporate gig he recently had the chance to exit from. Go check out the latest episode. 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 Automattic purchases Pocket Casts, a popular podcast app that was facing an uncertain future. A quote from the creators of the app: “As part of Automattic, Pocket Casts will continue to provide you with the features needed to enjoy your favorite podcasts (or find something new). We will explore building deep integrations with WordPress.com and Pocket Casts, making it easier to distribute and listen to podcasts” Recent installs of WooCommerce were hit with a vulnerability which has since been patched. If you haven’t updated your WooCommerce site, please check that as soon as possible. A quote from the WooCommerce blog: Our investigation into this vulnerability and whether data has been compromised is ongoing. We will be sharing more information with site owners on how to investigate this security vulnerability on their site, which we will publish on our blog when it is ready. Pantheon host, known for WordPress hosting and Drupal hosting has raised 100 Million in a Series E round We were planning to raise in a year or two years down the road. But we have a lot of conviction in where this industry is going and our customers’ needs are pretty apparent, so we used this as an opportunity to accelerate our operational plans for the company.” — Zack Rosen, Pantheon CEO, tells TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/13/webops-platform-pantheon-raises-100m-from-softbank-vision-fund/ From the grab bag I found EduPack to be an interesting “Jetpack-like” plugin for higher ed A walk around the search block by Javier Arce depicts how he approaches the design of the Gutenberg search block WordFest Live starts next week, July 22-23 What is headless and why does everyone seem to want it? Hosted by Miriam Schwab of Strattic and team Yoast Over on the Matt Report I interviewed Dave Rodenbaugh of recapture.io on how he took that business from part time to full time 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 Great News for the Castos Team in private podcasting Castos, a leader in podcast hosting and analytics, has successfully closed an investment round of $756,000. With investments by Automattic, Yoast SEO, along with individual investors, Castos will use this additional capital to fuel its advance into the Private Podcasting market. A quote from Craig Hewlett:  “On both the individual and corporate investor side I think the investors see the vision that we have for what the Private Podcasting market can mean for Castos and want to help us achieve that potential,” Hewitt said. Big huge large news: I sold @SearchWP! Lots to say but the words can't fit in a tweeter https://t.co/OdfYlZDYXG— Jon Christopher (@jchristopher) July 7, 2021 SearchWP finds a new homeJonathan Christopher tweeted that his product SearchWP has been acquired by Awesome Motive. A quote from Syed Balkhi in the announcement post:  “As he wanted to pursue the next chapter of his life, we started discussing the future of the SearchWP plugin. Given our experience running a suite of popular WordPress plugins, SearchWP was a perfect fit for our family of products.” He goes on to state:“A WordPress search plugin that a beginner, non-techy, small business owner can easily set up in less than 10 minutes to grow their business. I sat down with the team, and we have a crystal-clear 12 month plan. A lot of exciting things are coming your way in the coming months.” Also check out the interview with Jonathan Christopher in this article: Finding an awesome home for SearchWP Full Site Editing Testing Call #8 Compared to previous calls for testing for the FSE (Full SIte Editing) Outreach program, this round is intentionally targeting a more developer-centric audience compared to site builders or end users. in order to bring high impact feedback for theme.json, a new tool for extenders. You can read more about what to expect with upcoming efforts on make.WordPress.org site. Events WordFest live is coming up July 23rd. You can go and check out the speaker sessions that you do not want to miss! Grabbag Many of you are familiar with Troy Dean. Well, he was not a part of an acquisition but a name change and rebranding..  Troy Dean states: “The WP Elevation name was changed to Agency Mavericks to embrace the essence of the community and brand apart — our maverick spirit.” To honor Ujwal Thapa The WordPress Biratnagar Facebook group announced last week that a WordCamp scholarship in honor of Ujwal Thapa, who passed away from COVID 19 complications.  The WordPress Biratnagar community decided on this scholarship to honor his memory. And finally…face to face WordCamps in 2021? The WordPress community team is removing the barrier to organizing in-person meetup events for fully-vaccinated people. This is great news and we are very lucky to be able to move forward with scheduled events. Over on the Matt Report I interviewed Jason Coleman of Paid Memberships Pro on his journey to 100,000 active installs.  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 Gutenberg, WordPress 3.8 Release, WooCommerce & Jetpack WordPress 5.8 is still marching along with modifications for release in July. Eighteen bugs and fixes were applied from Release 3 concentrating on polishing existing default themes, fixing bugs in the new block Widget screen, and squashing Editor bugs collected during beta. WPTavern posted a review of the Gutenberg 10 updates in the plugin. The Query and Query Loop blocks were renamed, hopefully clearing up all the confusion for end users. The Query Loop block has been renamed to Post Template to better represent its purpose within Query, whereas the Query block label now refers to it as Query Loop. I enjoyed Justin Tadlock’s take on WordPress theme lock-in, in the block-era. “I do not necessarily see this as a Bad Thing. We have always had these little silos in the WordPress ecosystem, and they have mostly worked out.” WooCommerce News. The first release candidate is now available for WooCommerce 5. The planned release date is July 13. Jetpack launched a new mobile app. Automattic has launched a new mobile app for Jetpack, available on iOS and Android. The app features an array of Jetpack-specific features, including: Backups and restoresSecurity scanningActivity monitoringSite statsAnd more Security in the news  Ithemes Security Pro 7 was released with significant improvements and a redesigned interface. Tony Perez writes on NOC about how we communicate #wordpress and #security. People focus on all the tools and configurations, and not enough on the actions they’re trying to prevent. He covers his approach in this article about WordPress in the Enterprise. According to ehackingnews.com Over 800 million WordPress-linked records are leaked in this misconfigured cloud database associated with DreamHost, a popular WordPress hosting platform. A fix was made “within hours” of the discovery. Grabbag  Ninja Forms celebrates 10 years! Congratulations to James Laws and Kevin Stover. https://twitter.com/jameslaws/status/1409589138257371141?s=21WPEngine is now offering  Local 6.0 Pro free for everyone. As of June 29, 2021, everyone has access to Local Pro tools and features for free. This is another great tool for developing locally.Alex Standiford at WP Dev Academy released his new course that teaches how to build modern, scale-able WordPress plugins quickly. If you’re a developer looking to up your WordPress game, this course is for you. Just how competitive is the membership plugin space? Learn how Paid Memberships Pro has grown over the last 8 years in my interview with Jason Coleman 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 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 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 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 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 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 our work at https://thewpminute.com/supportGet the newsletter at https://thewpminute.com/subscribe ★ Support this podcast ★