The Sky is Falling! Nope, Just a Little Blue Bird
Michelle Frechette
Tell me where you will be building your next following if it’s not on Twitter. DM me on Slack (or Twitter while it’s still standing.)
WordPress In The Long View With James Farmer— Post Status Draft 129
Cory Miller
James Farmer’s WordPress story goes all the way back to his launch of the first hosted WordPress multisite blogging platform — just a few days ahead of WordPress.com. Edublogs currently hosts millions of students’ and educators’ blogs. James talks about successes and failures, his views on Gutenberg, how he stays competitive with Squarespace, and how he thinks the WordPress business community should respond to the loss of active install growth data at WordPress.org.
Design and Development News for the Week of November 7
Jonathan Bossenger
A new way to keep up with that fast-moving project we all rely on, PHP. • Making
wordpress/wordpress-develop usable in GitHub Codespaces. • Help count WordPress contributors and sponsors • Directory Serve is our cool tool of the week — a way to serve files to and from your phone.
Learning and Pulling Together
Dan Knauss
This week was all about revisiting and continuing conversations that have special value and maybe for that reason tend to continue on with a life of their own. Tom Willmot dropped a fine Twitter thread about the challenge all enterprise WordPress agencies face. This came in response to Magne Ilsas' featured post here last week, The WordPress Enterprise Paradox. In a similar theme of industry peer cooperation, Eric Karkovack asks if WordPress product owners and developers can see a common interest in "voluntary standards." Could this clean up the plugin market? James Farmer thinks the WordPress business community can do more for itself too — by sharing data. In Post Status Slack we're learning the tricks and trials of ranking in the WordPress.org plugin repository. How about plugin telemetry? Learn from the voices of experience.
WordPress 6.1.1 • FSE → Site Editor • Twenty Twenty Three
Courtney Robertson
Get a look at the latest default theme, Twenty Twenty-Three! 🎨 Full Site Editing has a new name: "Site Editor." 📝 And WordPress 6.1.1 will be released on November 15. 📅
What is the WordPress community capable of? A lot of good. And a few bad apples.
Michelle Frechette
WordPress 6.1 is here, and it's awesome! It takes more than a village — really a small city — to keep us moving forward. Thank a contributor — there are thousands of them. • Thanks especially to Mika Epstein! It’s beyond brave of Mika to share what she has gone through for the Plugins Team and the whole community. No one should ever have to go through what she has. You should know her story if you don't.
Who’s Going to Pay for All This?
Dan Knauss
Magne Ilsaas wants WordPress to be more than the pragmatic choice for enterprise clients. He wants WordPress agencies to be known for a distinct WordPress culture and mindset. Alain Schlesser, Carole Olinger, Carl Alexander, and Zach Stepek have a frank talk with Bob Dunn about the costs of not supporting WordPress contributors. Post Status members including Dave Loodts, Marius Jensen, Jeremy Ward, and Chris Reynolds discuss the looming PHP 7.4 EOL. Plus Jb Audras' breakdown of contributions to the WordPress 6.1 release. For your weekend reading, some news and insights from business, workplace, webtech, and govtech writers beyond the WordPress bubble.
InstaWP: A Conversation and Tour with Founder Vikas Singhal — Post Status Draft 128
Dan Knauss
InstaWP is about a year old now — let's take a tour of it and catch up with Vikas Singhal to see how he hopes it will evolve. Currently, it's a testing, demonstration, training, and marketing tool for WordPress product owners and agencies. Next, Vikas aims for InstaWP to support a marketplace for developers and agencies launching WordPress sites. Finally, he envisions it becoming a platform of platforms — WordPress-as-a-Service for people building their own WPaaS
WordPress 6.1 • Raghavendra Satish Peri
Courtney Robertson
#WordPress 6.1 was released on November 1. ✨ Check out all the updated and revised support articles. 📖 Learn about #accessibility and contributor Raghavendra Satish Peri from the WordPress India community. 🇮🇳
The WordPress Enterprise Paradox
Magne Ilsaas
"WordPress as a platform is putting us on the enterprise path. But what got us here is what makes us irrelevant," says Magne Ilsaas, CEO and Founding Partner of Dekode. Magne wants to start an overdue conversation about three big risks — and opportunities — for WordPress agencies: 1) A lack of spaces for professional conversations and knowledge-sharing, including professional events, meetups, and mastermind groups catering to enterprise WordPress. 2) Successful agencies that use WordPress extensively with little or no community involvement whose work would benefit from enterprise WordPress peer networks. 3) An over-emphasis in WordPress agencies on short-term engineering solutions to the exclusion of long-term business solutions. What's often left out is design, user experience, and most of all the capacity to play a strategic advisory role in partnership with clients.
Make WordPress Sustainable
Dan Knauss
What does a sustainable WordPress community mean? What does it do? Tell us!
Agency Owners: If You Could Ask Anyone Anything…
Cory Miller
If you could ask anyone anything related to your work as an agency — who would it be OR more importantly what would you want to ask?
Moving and Not Moving With the Crowd
Dan Knauss
This week's WordPress business highlights for Post Status: Lesley Sim is pivoting Newsletter Glue to an upmarket clientele. A discussion starter about WordPress UX. Do we need a curated plugin ecosystem, more open standards, and easy access to current expert consensus points in key knowledge areas? Time to bail out of Twitter? PayPal? Katie Keith tells her HeroPress story.
WordPress 6.1 RC5 • WP-CLI 2.7.1 • Help Test Plugin Dependencies Feature Plugin
Courtney Robertson
WordPress 6.1 rolls out on November 1. Help test 6.1 Release Candidate 3 — and the Rollback feature plugin. Be sure to look over the 6.1 DevNotes, Field Guides, and Team Updates.
To Heck with Black Friday, I’m Raising My Prices! — Post Status Draft 127
Dan Knauss
This week in Post Status Slack, Lesley Sim, the founder of Newsletter Glue, dropped this announcement: "While everybody is offering discounts for Black Friday, we’re planning to significantly raise prices. We’ll be narrowing our target audience and focusing mainly on medium-large publishers and online businesses; working with them more closely and providing a high level of customization and support." What motivated Lesley's decision? Where does she expect it to take her company? How can plugin owners find enterprise agency partners? Listen to this episode of Post Status Draft and find out.
What AI and Automation Are — and Aren’t — Good For
Michelle Frechette
Thoughts on how AI and automation can be enabling to individuals and help us all be part of our communities where human-to-human interaction is the best and most vital part. • We love our community on Twitter, but maybe that's not where our community will be in the future. • Nev Harris is in our Member Spotlight. • Our Black Friday deals are live — and you can still add yours. WordPress Accessibility Day, WordFest, and WP Wealthbuilder Summit are coming right up, and so are WordCamps! We'd love to see you at one of our EU/US weekly Huddles.
