The WP Minute

Thanks Pressable for supporting the podcast! What hosting should feel like...nothing! https://pressable.com/wpminute I recently had the opportunity to chat with WP Minute Editor, Eric Karkovack, about some new services we are launching to better help WordPress product owners.Eric has been creating content for WordPress developers and designers for over a decade. But with recent shifts in the publishing landscape, he wanted to find new ways to serve WordPress brands by simplifying their complex products.So Eric has launched WP Product Writeup – a service to create high-quality, easy to understand white label content that gives WordPress products an edge in this competitive market. He can take his extensive WordPress experience and write product explainers, user guides, blog posts, and other materials to amplify a brand.On my side, I’ve realized that focusing on the small market of WordPress news is challenging. We love our sponsors and members, but I need to introduce another way to to help keep this site sustainable. So I’m shifting the WP Minute to offer Launch Services to directly help WordPress business owners get the word out. This includes written content from Eric, videos, sponsorship, and more.So if you need help explaining your product to everyday users in “marketing speak”, reach out to Eric at WP Product Writeup. And if you want to amplify that with a full launch campaign, check out WP Minute’s services. We hope to keep empowering each other in the WordPress community.Key TakeawaysRecent shifts in publishing landscape have impacted writersEric launched WP Product Writeup to create white label content explaining WordPress productsI’ve shifted WP Minute to offer Launch Services to directly help products market themselvesOur deep WordPress experience allows us to simplify complex topicsGoal is to empower the WP community and develop sustainable businesses 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 Hey it’s Matt from the WP Minute. Did you know there’s a professional group of WordPress’ers excited to meet you? If you’re looking for a more casual WP Slack membership to join, chat about the news, and share your own content with our audience —  consider joining the WP Minute membership for $79/year. Get access to our group of merry WordPress bandits and help support our show. Head to thewpminute.com/support to join. ## Your 5 minutes of WordPress this week**RepoGate**Well, I’m glad _that_ (last) week is behind us. Or is it? Seems the most movement we’ve seen publicly from RepoGate is WordPress.com now showing a download and listing link for the “cloned” plugin listing. I’d say that’s a technical win for plugin authors who aren’t so happy WordPress.com is showcasing their code for an upsell to a paid hosting plan. Still no morale win, for the rest of us, however. “The thing that makes me uncomfortable is that my plugin is being used to help sell someone else’s business.” Luke Carbis says on a recent episode of [Crossword](https://crossword.fm/episodes/repository-considerations). Carbis pontificates on having a robots.txt type of solution that allows plugin authors to disallow WordPress.com from listing their plugin.**WonderCart**This week on the WP Minute+, I had a chance to uncover exactly what a product manager does at Bluehost. Jocelyn Hendrickson joined me to share how she helps the e-commerce experience for customers, specifically in the WonderSuite & WonderCart products. Bluehost is a Pillar Sponsor of the WP Minute. We thank them for the generosity, and hope your brand might also become a sponsor too!**Gutenstats**Filed under: “I didn’t know that was a thing!”, is the website gutenstats.blog. The tagline reads, “Gutenberg in Numbers. The Gutenberg block editor for WordPress is used by millions of sites — here’s insight into how.Stats are from WordPress.com and sites running Jetpack. The post statistics only include posts created since late August 2018. The actual number is higher. - 81.7 Milllion active installs- 273.4 million posts written- 233 thousand written yesterday (as of this publication) If you want to see what the most popular blocks are across their tracking, head to gutenstats.blog to find out!## OutroThat’s it for today’s episode. Be sure to listen to our other podcast WP Minute+ you can find it for free, where you get this podcast. Search for WP Minute in your favorite podcast app, and add both because we have some great interviews lined up. Thanks to our Pillar sponsors Pressable.com and Bluehost.com. Thanks to our Foundation+ sponsors thewp.world without these sponsors, support from our paying members, and you the listener — the WP Minute wouldn’t be possible. Get your brand in front of other WordPress professionals, become a Foundation sponsor today for $475 for the year. It’s the best sponsor value in the industry.Head to thewpminute.com/support for more details, that’s thewpminute.com/support 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 At the time of this publication, thirty-thousand plus eyeballs have landed on John Blackbourn’s tweet that has sparked an event that goes well-beyond #WPDrama this week.It seems WordPress.com has publicly replicated the .org plugin pages. My peers at WP Tavern and The Repository have covered the many aspects of this debacle. I’m out of energy this week for anything more in-depth, so I’ll leave you with these two things:Listen to my latest interview with Jon Clark of StellarWP. We’re chatting about marketing automation, YouTube creation, and video games!The following text is are my thoughts on leadership and future of WordPress…There are many leaders in the WordPress space, doing great work, and that work quickly gets washed away through a storm of scathing outrage. When Josepha asked the community in her WCUS 2023 talk, “Why is it important that we are thriving?” The answer was, “because WordPress can change a life.”Words can also change a person’s life.Simple words like developer meeting can make a WordPress power user feel like whatever’s going on at that table, isn’t for them. WordPress entrepreneur can cast a vibe of WordPress but with Shark Tank, and who wants that? Words that attack or summarize a persons worth through petty insults, that can change a life, immeasurably.For WordPress to thrive people must want to contribute. Contribute to code, to design, to meetings, and above all else, to the conversations about our beloved software. It’s not about your code, your profits, your 5%, or your lowercase P — it’s that you recognize how open source WordPress empowers us.It empowers us to do everything I just said — code, profit, 5% — and through this, it creates opportunity.Opportunity for you, and the people that you impact, through your work, with WordPress. This has a ripple effect. The more people that discover opportunity through WordPress, the wider that ripple spreads to the next person, and to the next person.Though there’s an odd juxtaposition this week:A 100-year plan announced at WordPress.com to ensure your life’s work is preserved for a generation to come. But, will WordPress last 100 years like this?To ask for a hand in helping WordPress thrive across members of our online and offline community in favor of spreading the larger mission: Democratize Publishing. But is that really the mission we’re all on?You have to want this for yourself and for WordPress.I’ve been a critic of WordPress for a while. Not to be confused with being outright critical of WordPress. My angle has always been perched at the view of, what I call, the blue-collar digital worker.When a leader de-value’s someone’s position in a community, they aren’t knocking down one person, but an entire group of people, that feel like their worth is being ripped from them. “If that person isn’t good enough, how am I?” They might ask.When a leader mocks the accomplishments of one person, there’s another person standing right behind them trying to find footing to reach that very same height of success. “Why should I continue if this isn’t good enough?” They might ask.This is not thriving, this is soul crushing. Leadership loses the very thing they need in order for WordPress to thrive: Trust.Trust that people want to wake up and go do WordPress. Whatever doing WordPress means to them.Trust that we’re all on the same shared mission of The Four Freedoms and to Democratize Publishing.Losing trust means you lose belief from the people on the mission with you. Sure, people will continue to write Iines of code for WordPress, because they need to survive. WordPress isn’t going to get replaced anytime soon, and most humans aren’t going to walk away from it as a means to their survival.But they will fall out of love for it, what it meant, and what it could be. There’s no parade for leaders at the of this mission. We arrive home, shut the door, and put our laptops away.How was your day with WordPress?Two people started WordPress. Thousands of people have contributed lines of code to WordPress. Tens of thousands (possibly hundreds of thousands!) have spread the good word of WordPress — faults and all.WordPress is amazing because it can change a life. I believe it. I am it. You are it.But after this week, I can’t help but ask: Will WordPress thrive, or simply survive the next 100 years? Support our work at https://thewpminute.com/supportGet the newsletter at https://thewpminute.com/subscribe ★ Support this podcast ★

Matt Mullenweg and Josepha Haden Chomphosy discuss WordPress 6.4, the Twenty Twenty Four theme, collaboration within WordPress, a coalition of LMS plugin providers, and how to keep WordPress thriving. A diverse range of topics is covered, from the future of WordPress to the impact on freelancer/agency-client relationships.

Equalize Digital partnered with NASA for automated accessibility testing in WordPress. The WP Community Collective launched their inaugural fellowship program. WordPress plugin BackWPup acquired by group.one.

Thanks Pressable for supporting the podcast! What hosting should feel like...nothing! https://pressable.com/wpminute We have a packed episode today chock full of WordPress news goodness, including some audio clips from Courtney Robertson, Jeff Chandler, and Rich Tabor sharing what they love about WordPress 6.3. First up, Aurooba Ahmed shared her new project wphelpers.dev which gives you a snazzy UI for all core WordPress blocks and their functionality. You can expand each block and peel back the JS-y goodness that each block is powered by. Direct link right to the GitHub repo, and more developer features. If you’re coding blocks or beginning to learn WordPress development, you’ll want to bookmark this site. Post Status announced their upcoming WP Career summit.Join us for the WP Career Summit If you’re looking for a career in WordPress, want to host a talk, or find out how to reach potential employers you won’t want to miss everything happening on October 20, 2023 when the summit kicks off. The WP Tavern covered a recent story pertaining to the massive backlog of plugins to be reviewed at WordPress.org. The list includes over 900 plugins awaiting approval. Sarah Gooding cites “The volunteer team responsible for reviewing plugins has undergone significant restructuring after the departure of long-time contributor Mika Epstein”WordPress 6.3 is here! Pressable and GoDaddy have you covered with a top-to-bottom look at all of the great new features. Stick around to the end of the episode to hear more from our special guests about their WordPress 6.3 goodness.Anne McCarthy posted an overview on how to produce WordPress demo videos for official WordPress release announcements. I applaud the team for opening up this marketing effort to the greater community. The article is ripe with guidance on what to consider before creating a video tutorial, and how the overhead of creating an asset like this might need to be dispersed throughout many contributing members. I do have a hot take here: As a content creator, make your own video tutorials and post them on your own YouTube channel, blog, or social media platform before committing to something like this. While this might be the only way someone like me could ever get credit for contributing to WordPress, but I’d prefer not to have such a rigid approach to how I show off WordPress — warts and all. Before we wrap up, I want you to check out the latest content from WP Minute’s editor, Eric Karkovack. This week he wrote a great piece exploring what it would take for other CMS’s to catch up to WordPress dominance. I’m still amazed that the closest CMS to WordPress is Shopify. WordPress is roughly 10x that of the e-commerce platform.  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 this episode of the WP Minute podcast, host Matt discusses various WordPress news and topics.He starts by highlighting a WordPress.com initiative to encourage people to transfer their domain registration from Google Domains to WordPress.com. Matt also talks about a joint effort by open source projects, including WordPress, to raise concerns about the proposed Cyber Resilience Act in the European Union.He mentions an article about the new WordPress editor, Gutenberg, and concludes by remembering and honoring two individuals who made significant contributions to the WordPress community. Matt encourages listeners to subscribe to the podcast and mentions available sponsorships.WordPress.com offers to pay domain transfer fees for the first millionWordPress.com is offering to cover the transfer fee for the first million domains that move from Google to WordPress.com. This also extends the domain registration for an additional year.WordPress.com commits to matching or even lowering the renewal price that users were paying with Google Domains. This applies to over 400 top-level domains (TLDs) they offer. They also promise to keep domain prices low, only raising them if their wholesale costs increase.WordPress.com has been a domain name provider for over a decade and is committed to the open and inclusive web. They aim to support users’ ability to truly own their content and identity on the web. Users don’t need a site or hosting plan to manage their domains with WordPress.com.LinkWordPress, Drupal, Typo3, and Joomla join forcesOpen Source Matters, Inc. (Joomla), Typo3, WordPress, and the Drupal Association have issued a joint letter to the legislators of the European Union raising concerns about the proposed Cyber Resilience Act. This is a significant move as these four organizations collectively serve over 50% of the European websites.The organizations argue that the proposed regulation could undermine effective software practices due to its ban on “unfinished software”. They also express concern that the expansive definition of “commercial activity” could deter the contributions of many developers to open source software.The groups see this as an opportunity to explain the unique role that Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) plays in the software that underpins much of the web and to develop a model for how regulation should be applied to it. They also aim to educate legislators and policy-makers about the shared values that open source communities have with the European Union.LinkThis project is moving hella fastThe author expresses their love for Gutenberg, the block editor for WordPress, but also highlights its rapid pace of development. They note that this speed can sometimes leave developers behind, especially due to the shift from PHP to JavaScript (JS).The author discusses the challenges of debugging Gutenberg, particularly when encountering errors. They note that unlike PHP, where errors are logged in a file, JS errors are logged in the browser console. This shift in error handling can be confusing for developers used to PHP.The author criticizes the lack of proper documentation for Gutenberg, particularly when it comes to resolving specific errors. They argue that the current documentation is inadequate and that developers often have to search through GitHub issues to find solutions to their problems. They believe this is one of the reasons why some developers have negative feelings towards Gutenberg.LinkRemember those that have passedWordPress dedicates this page to the memory of those we’ve lost. They’ve shaped our project and enriched our community. As we remember their passion and commitment to WordPress and open source software, we celebrate their spirit.Forever in our hearts, their legacy endures through every line of code and every user they’ve impacted.LinkFrom the grab bag!Here are some other interesting links from the week.https://www.underrepresentedintech.com/webinars/sponsor/https://wptavern.com/classicpress-community-considers-re-forking-woocommerce-for-classic-commerce-v2https://jonathanbossenger.com/2023/07/28/the-state-of-wordpress-developer-tools-survey-results/https://us.wordcamp.org/2023/schedule/ 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 If you're sick and tired of the WordPress dashboard, maybe you want to give Eric's post, The WordPress Dashboard Needs Some Love, a read. Also in today's episode, I'm reminding you about our other podcast feed The WP MInute+, a free podcast that covers the long form WordPress discussions like my old podcast, The Matt Report. The conversation I just published featuring CliftonWP highlights a lot of what a modern day WordPress entrepreneur is thinking in this fast paced iteration of our favorite CMS. Be sure to add us to your podcast app! Search for "The WP Minute" and you'll see both podcasts available to follow. 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 There are a lot of exciting features coming to WordPress 6.3 which will set the tone for the next few years of our favorite CMS.We’ll explore the upcoming state of this new release and provide some thoughts on which demographic of WordPress user it’s shaping to serve. As always, please share this on social and be sure to join the newsletter.The Not-So-Nice Side of the WordPress CommunityThe WordPress community, like any other, has its share of negative behaviors and incidents. While the majority of the community is supportive and positive, there are instances of abuse and misconduct that can’t be ignored.Several recent incidents highlight the issue: Mika Epstein, a member of the WordPress Plugin Review team, faced abusive behavior from plugin developers; Raiber Cristian, a WordPress developer, decided to stop offering free support on WordPress.org due to abusive behavior; and WordCamp Dhaka was cancelled due to concerns about corporate influence and favoritism.The author suggests that the community needs to police itself, support each other, and stay informed about abusers. They also suggest that more concrete rules could be part of the solution, but acknowledge the challenges in enforcing them and the potential for unfairness.Read the original articleAccessibility expert Adrian Roselli sued for wanting accessibility to be accessibleAdrian Roselli, a well-known accessibility expert, is being sued by AccessiBe, a company that provides automated accessibility solutions. The lawsuit is in response to Roselli’s criticism of AccessiBe’s product.Roselli’s main argument is that automated tools like AccessiBe’s cannot fully ensure a website’s accessibility and may give a false sense of compliance, potentially leading to legal issues for the website owners.The lawsuit has sparked a backlash from the web accessibility community, with many viewing it as an attempt to silence valid criticism and discussion about the effectiveness of automated accessibility tools.Read the original articleVox media drops its own CMSIt stopped licensing Chorus to external publishers last year, per Adweek, but continued to use it to power its own network of over a dozen digital media sites.The company still owns other tech products, including Concert, its advertising platform, and Coral, the commenting platform it acquired in 2019. But moving forward, monetizing its own audience engagement will become a bigger focus.Vox Media will move its own websites off of Chorus and into WordPress VIP, the enterprise arm of the 20-year-old CMS company.Read the original articleUse ChatGPT to Generate Group Conversation Topics for Your Online CommunityThe article discusses how AI, specifically OpenAI’s ChatGPT, can be used to generate conversation topics for various online communities, including those focused on Brie cheese lovers, video game wiki writers, backyard gardeners, and digital nomad business owners.The author emphasizes the importance of a well-crafted prompt in generating relevant and engaging conversation topics. Being clear and specific in communicating what you want from the AI greatly improves the chances of getting a useful response.The article also promotes Paid Memberships Pro, a WordPress plugin for building and managing online communities. The plugin allows users to sell free and paid subscriptions to their community and offers a variety of add-ons and integrations designed for community websites.Read the original articleLinks from the grab bagJeff Matson has officially joined Pressable’s marketing teamSyed Bahlki defends WordPress with a $1M wagerWPCoffeeTalk: Going deeper with Bluehost new WondersuiteWatch the 6.3 product demo 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 Matt explores some of the more challenging aspects of the WordPress project, in today's episode. With so many parts of the project being planned or already underway, the challenge to keep up with the software's evolution might become rather difficult. Pointing to a WordCamp talk from Courtney Robertson "We are they" Matt provides a bit of a public service announcement to dealing with the upcoming changes. Read this week's news updates on the website. Support our work at https://thewpminute.com/supportGet the newsletter at https://thewpminute.com/subscribe ★ Support this podcast ★