Post Status Notes #499

With WordCamp US being held in-person (September 9-11), that also means the WordPress Foundation’s Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship has returned! This scholarship provides financial assistance — including travel costs — so the recipient can attend the conference. It’s good to see three scholarships will be awarded this time, thanks to COVID-19 taking out in-person events for us in 2020 and 2021.

Brian Coords says WordPress “needs to start thinking like a platform again.” While I don’t agree that Full Site Editing feels like or is the next “Google Plus or Apple’s Ping,” I do believe it could distract from user experience elsewhere and other things that need attention. (My take: Google abandoned Plus without putting much effort into it, and Apple is just bad at social full stop.) [DB]

I talked about what WordPress needs in a recent Post Status Comments episode on the prospects of declining market share with Joost de Valk, Alex Denning, and Jessica Frick. [DB]

Leo Gopal from Cape Town, South Africa writes about depression and mental illness, and how the WordPress community has rallied around him.

Here’s a new plugin from Xaver Birsak that hosts the Google Fonts you use on your own server.

If you’re a Gravity Forms user and have ever needed charts and graphs, then GravityView‘s new plugin might be of interest.

The WP Accessibility Day website is live! The date for this event is November 2-3, 2022.

Carolina Nymark took to Twitter for an insightful investigation and survey about the Full Site Editing themes already in the .org theme directory. She shares stats like the number of core blocks styled in theme.json and common color slugs.

Here’s a good two part series (part one and part two) from Hidde de Vries on common accessibility issues that you can address and fix on your site today.

Ross Wintle has combined a searchable command palette with “fancy browser APIs” to enable voice-controlled WordPress. Fun experiment!

If you are new to WooCommerce and looking into performance enhancements, this post from Ibad Rehman might be a good place to start.

Bernhard Kau has released a WordPress plugin for MailChimp users. “If you are using MailChimp and want to show a nice archive on your page, you can now add it with a block.”

The WordPress Performance Team has published the 1.1.0 release of the Performance Lab plugin. It includes an enhancement that “replaces the featured image with a WebP version when available.”

A nice take here from Ollie Williams on color fonts. Modern web typography, fonts, and CSS have come very far in a relatively short period of time.

While Jason Coleman‘s “The WordPress Way” post is a few weeks old, if you haven’t read it, you should. Jason explains the core values of his team at Paid Memberships Pro, which includes the idea that the GPL license will result in “the best code.”

Jason explains what this means in specific terms in a time of debate and discussion about what should happen to WordPress software when a paid support license expires. For Jason, the WordPress way “means our code will continue to work as expected if your paid license expires.”

While I think there are slightly different takes on what is best for customers and that experiments in the WordPress ecosystem should be encouraged, I also would like to see more people follow in Jason’s footsteps and publish their core values.

WooCommerce has opened up a call for testing regarding the move to custom tables. It’s the first milestone for a large effort but the goal of the call “is to test the migration process across various hosts and server combinations.”

Courtney Robertson shows you how to lock blocks in WordPress, a new feature coming in 6.0. Good for when a client takes over writing and revising content and hits a button accidentally.

Here’s a free and open source tool that converts tweets into static HTML — perfect for testimonials.

GOV.UK dropped their jQuery dependency from their front end, with some impressive numbers in the performance results. Great takeaway: “Don’t shortchange your users if the web platform can easily do the job a framework can.”

Héctor Prieto shares the WordPress 6.0 release process (starting next week), including the timeline and how you can help.

Tom McFarlin thinks there is more to WordPress than FSE and Headless. He feels “we’re spending a lot of time talking about the same things in WordPress as of late.”

I can understand where Tom is coming from — there are lots of technologies beyond React we can use. Getting off the beaten path is a good way for developers to get new ideas, have fun, and prevent nimble competitors from dominating certain niches.

Jonathan Bossenger explains why it’s important to think about indexes for custom database tables — and when not to use them. He shows how you can diagnose and add indexes, offering valuable tips. One example: “When you are filtering or joining data based on specific fields, adding indexes to those fields is a crucial step in ensuring your queries are optimized.”

Sari Azout says it’s no longer enough to organize the world’s information — it’s more important to organize the world’s trustworthy information with “boutique search engines that index, curate, and organize things in new ways.” This article rings true to me, as I find some Google searches less effective than they have been in the past.