New Home and Download Pages for WP.org
WordPress.org is getting new Home and Download pages. The current mockups look very nice! Leave your feedback in the comments.
How to Create a Basic Child Theme for Block Themes
Here’s a nice tutorial at learn.wordpress.org for learning how to get started with child block theme development and a good model for tutorials you can contribute! If you have any questions about being a tutorial presenter please join the #training channel in the Making WordPress Slack group. There are instructions for creating a tutorial in…
Does “Full-Site Editing” Need a New, “User-Friendly” Name?
I’ve been thinking about this question and the others related to it that Josepha Haden Chomphosy posted last week. There’s been a strong comment discussion so far, and I discovered what my view on it is now by noticing what is going on in the grammar of “Editing” versus “Editor.” “Full Site Editing” ends with…
Nulled Themes and Plugins
My first experiences with “nulled” (or back in the day “cracked”) software date back to the golden days of the Atari 8-bit and Commodore Amiga. Blank floppy disks were cheap, and like most kids, I did not have a lot of money or even at times access to legitimate software distributors. Naturally, the way we…
Woo Weekly #400: State of WooCommerce 2022
Congrats to Rodolfo Melogli of Business Bloomer and David Mainayar at PeachPay for reaching issue #400 of WooWeekly back in July. To celebrate this milestone, Rodolfo asked a lot of people (including me) to explain what one thing they’d change in WooCommerce if they could change just one thing. Most of the responses were not…
Transitioning an Agency to Gutenberg
Up this week on WP Tavern‘s Jukebox with Nathan Wrigley, it’s Sean Blakely with the story of the transition to Gutenberg in a large agency, American Eagle. I’ve expected to see stories like this — for years. It seems they’re a little later in coming than anticipated, but it’s a good sign. At the same…
Plugin Checker
On July 5, Felix Arntz proposed creating and adopting a plugin checking tool for the Plugin Review Team similar to the theme checker. The Performance Team would take the lead, but contributors from other teams would be needed as well. Previously, in June, Felix created a proof-of-concept on Github. Looking forward to seeing this in…
Business | Development | Notes
A short history of WordPress APIs — and their future
Here’s an older post about the history of WordPress APIs from Automattic’s mobile apps development team that you may not have seen before. (New to me.) It explains the technical background of the current entanglements of .org, .com, and Jetpack: Why don’t we support a single API in our apps? Wouldn’t that make our lives…
WP Campus 2023
The WPCampus conference won’t happen in 2022. The post-COVID reboot has been delayed until July 12-14, 2023, so save those dates. Until then, keep up with the leadership transition and consider pitching in. WPCampus is a community network and conference for web professionals, educators, and people working with WordPress in higher education. Faculty members, support…
Founders on What They’d Do Over Differently
Eric Karkovack got some nice brief reflections from WordPress product founders/owners Kathy Darling, Cameron Jones, Derek Ashauer, Jack Arturo, Gareth Harris, and Mark Westguard. You may be surprised at what they’d do differently if they were starting out now, knowing what they know today.
Winning the War on WordPress Notification Spam
Nice to see Brian Coords getting involved with the WP Notifications feature plugin project — otherwise known as WP-Notify (Github). He’s calling for testing and feedback on the proof-of-concept at this point. You can click this link and immediately spin up a test environment with the plugin installed at InstaWP — thanks to Ross Wintle…
Faster and Faster
Kevin Ohashi has released another annual report for WordPress (and WooCommerce) Hosting Benchmarks. My takeaways:
Joost’s 7th WordPress Market Share Report
Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast SEO, posted his 7th CMS Market Share Analysis, based on data from W3Techs and BuiltWith. Here are some key points from Joost’s post: WordPress is the #1 CMS with a 43% market share, roughly the same as in December 2021. Shopify currently holds 4.2% market share, which is down…
FSE Themes on the Rise
Hendrik Luehrsen shares stats and notes about 100 FSE themes in the WordPress repo by 53 different contributors. He notes that, excluding the Twenty Twenty-Two theme, “all remaining 99 FSE themes combined have about 30,000 active installs, rising fast!” Hendrik encourages others to: “Build stuff with the FSE themes! Break stuff. Explore limits. Break those!…
WordPress VIP + SalesForce Marketing Cloud
According to Elisa Brown at WordPress VIP, they’ve just announced a partnership and integration with SalesForce Marketing Cloud. It’s the only one of its kind and makes activating your content in WordPress to build email campaigns easier. Yes!
Contributing is Hard — and Easier Than You Think
Brian Coords makes some good points about the difficulty of contributing to WordPress, which is a mark of privilege, as Josepha Haden Chomphosy has noted. Estela Rueda has some wonderful suggestions for how you can contribute to WordPress core teams with just a few hours a week. Her blog post, Is My Contribution to WordPress…
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