Post Status Notes #498

Joost de Valk‘s latest WordPress market share analysis has led to a lot of good questions that are hard to answer without better data and ways to assess it. Are we going up or down? David Bisset offered his take and hosted a community conversation on the State of WordPress Market Share.

Munir Kamal explains how to create a scrollable image gallery block in the editor with an already scaffolded Gutenberg block and some basic React knowledge.

Apple, Google, and Microsoft have taken another step towards a possible passwordless future. This applies to both apps and websites, so I’m looking forward to logging into a WordPress site without entering a password.

Aleksandar Vucenovic announced in Post Status Slack the launch of Pixel Manager for WooCommerce, an extension that tracks store visitors with tracking pixels in the standard way but with “more functional layers that increase measurement accuracy.”

Pixel Manager also finds and automatically fixes or gives you guidance about “problems in your shop setup that might lower or prevent accurate tracking.”

Linux New Media has launched Open Source JobHub, a job site just for open source jobs.

Patchstack has announced the winners of their 2021 WP Bug Hunt, which resulted in “more than 1000 security reports and paid out $17,450 USD as cash” in bounties.

In Post Status Slack, Oliver noted they’ve launched a new Patchstack Alliance site where you can learn about “some new special bounties” and how to get into the hunt yourself! Get in touch with Patchstack to be part of the next WP Bug Hunt challenge.

Congrats to Reakitv, a WordPress VIP Partner, for becoming one of Inc‘s Best Workplaces honorees for 2022.

Neil Thanedar thinks we need a “middle class” for startups — those with $10M to $1B USD in annual revenue.

Eric Karkovack added to the conversation about WordPress theme and plugin license expirations. Eric believes there’s a middle ground between supporting non-paying customers for free and making the user experience worse if a plugin isn’t renewed:

“Software developers should be able to convey the importance of license renewals. But they should also make their intentions crystal clear… Users should know a developer’s policy before they make a purchase.”

Hugh Lashbrooke — who is Head of Community Education at Automattic — shared how he wrote his job description and invented the title for his role. Hugh advises, “If you want to change your career path, figure out what that looks like for you in your context and push for it — advocate for yourself and make it happen.”

Leonardo Losoviz wraps up his investigation of the possible benefits and costs to WordPress if it adopts the Block Protocol. While he feels the attempt at a standard is a “wonderful idea,” Leonardo has come to the conclusion it might not be worth it.

Check out Leonardo’s conversation with David Bisset on Post Status Excerpt to get some background on the Block Protocol along with Leonardo’s first thoughts about it.

If you are looking for a backup plugin, then this recent product comparison from Mike Davey is worth a read.

My preference is for server-side backups, but Mike raises a good point about how we can’t assume any backup is 100% reliable if we haven’t tested them. The bottom line is, the more important the site, the more backup plans you should have in place.

DrupalCon was held in Portland at the end of April. I’ve always enjoyed watching Drupal founder Dries Buytaert‘s “Driesnotes,” which are his keynote speeches at DrupalCons —similar to Matt’s “State of the Word” talks. They’re full of interesting things to learn about this sister CMS project.

The 2022 Driesnote is available on YouTube right now.

Big Drupal news for 2022: Drupal 10 is coming out later this year, and it will require PHP 8.1.

WP Engine continues to expand! They’ve added a new office in Omaha where Flywheel is based. Flywheel moved onto Google Cloud a few years ago around the time Google’s Council Bluffs datacenter came online across the river in Iowa.

Heinrich Hartmann has some excellent suggestions for engineers and really everyone who wants to become a better and more productive writer. Some tips include knowing your audience, making your text skimmable, and leveraging small writing tasks as exercise.

Get David’s picks for the week from WordPress and web tech podcasts and videos.