Time to update, WordPress 6.1.1 is out! GitHub has made Codespaces available for 60 hours/month, and WordPress is exploring Core contribution integrations with wordpress/wordpress-develop. It’s team rep nomination time too.

The journey to GiveWP 3.0 is well underway — an open, iterative development process that fully embraces WordPress’s Gutenberg block editor. Give cofounder Matt Cromwell and development director Jason Adams share what they’ve learned so far.

Every University IT department dreams of a self-service system in which they do not have to deal with outside vendors.

I now believe that a one size fits all website publishing product is not possible. Each university has its own set of requirements. The requirements vary from the placement of buttons to the type of accessibility a university mandates. In the end, universities shouldn’t sacrifice individual requirements for ease of use.

Who’s doing the four-day work week in WordPress? • What good sources for professional development have you found? • Getting your implementation intentions right.

Never waste a good crisis.

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.)

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.

Post Status Member Spotlight: Parvez Akther – founder of ThriveDesk and WordCamp enthusiast.

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.

Meet Dominyka Mikšėnaitė, community manager at Hostinger. Le3arn about Hostinger & how Post Status helps her meet people in WordPress.

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.

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. 📅

WordPress agencies are key players in the WordPress ecosystem. They’re working on the frontlines building the Open Web with WordPress for their clients. That’s essential to sustained and vibrant growth for everyone with a stake in WordPress and Open Source. I’ve had some great conversations with our Post Status Agency Owner members in the past few…

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.

Igor Ligay is the founder of Stylemix. He’s looking for interesting connections, opportunities, and partners to grow business together.

Missing Menu Items • Farewell PHP 7.4 • I Didn’t Know You Could Do That in the Block Editor • Why is Your Computer Cosplaying as a PDP-11? • Effective Writing for Devs • The State of CSS • The Swiss Army Knife of Website Tools: Website Toolkit

In the spotlight: XWP is a team of web experts genuinely invested in making the web – and web experience – a better place.

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 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 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. 🇮🇳

“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.

What does a sustainable WordPress community mean? What does it do? Tell us!

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?

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 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.

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.

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.

It’s our Halloween roundup of ghoul tools, but we’re not going to show you anything scarier than David Bisset‘s dev dad joke tweets. Just Blocks Made of Humans, a totally non-scary image creation AI — as long as you do not install the Performance Loab plugin. Also in our cauldron: hairy, scary Block Styles and the classic so-lean-it’s-skeletal ingredient, Balsamiq. 🦇

This week in an article shared in Post Status Slack, Eric Karkovack suggested some ways to improve the WordPress user experience, especially for DIY users setting up a website for the first time. Some of the things Eric wants to see happen, like a standard interface for plugins and a curated view of the plugin ecosystem, are also commonly expressed by designers, developers, and people in other roles at WordPress agencies serving enterprise clients. Can we get everyone to “yes” on a better UX?

Next in our Member Spotlight is Nev Harris. Nev shows agency owners where the profit is hiding in their business.

Three quick things I want you to know about: Post Status, like WordPress, is a global community. And we’re making progress toward serving our entire community step by step. On Fridays now, you can join our European Member Huddle hosted by members Jason Rouet and Evangelia Pappa.  If you have Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals, share those…

Big steps for accessibility at WordCamps. Miriam Schwab is in our Member Spotlight! Some upcoming events. Don’t miss being listed in our BF/CM deals!

Move Over CSS, Here’s JSON • A New Generator Goes Turbo • The Hidden World of Javascript in WordPress • Cool Tool: URL Params

Building, Supporting, and Selling a Winning Product — With or Without WordPress.org • Are Active Install Counts Relevant to Your Business’s Success? (Even if they are accurate? And they haven’t been.) • Let’s Fix What’s Broken (The Plugin Repo) Not What Isn’t (The Freemium Model) • Follow Leaders, Adopt Standards • Tools and expertise from rtCamp • Some great and “doable” ideas for the future of plugin business metrics on the .org repo. Could some of them help put an end to intrusive and manipulative dark patterns in the WordPress Admin dashboard and notifications?

This week I sat down again with Eric Karkovack to talk about the WordPress stories and topics that are on the top of our minds. Independently, we made nearly the same selections. There’s a single throughline in this episode — what works, what doesn’t, and what will take WordPress businesses forward in the product, agency, and hosting spaces.

Justin Labadie’s wishlist for the WordPress.org plugin repo:

1) Ensure all search results are relevant.
2) Standardize a Premium product upsell interface.
3) Make it possible to show other products by the same author.

I’ve been collecting rtCamp news for a while — they have a great monthly newsletter — and here are some of the highlights worth sharing broadly.

Pretty snazzy new looks coming the the WordPress documentation site! You can help the Docs Team: Come to the first ever Documentation team Contributor Day on October 25th.

Get a sneak peek at WordPress 6.1 with Nick Diego. Help test 6.1 Release Candidate 2 — and the Plugin Dependencies feature plugin. Be sure to browse the 6.1 DevNotes, Field Guides, and Team Updates. WP-CLI 2.7.1 is available now.

Good ideas for the future of data disclosed to plugin authors using the wordpress.org repository:

1) Identify surges of unhappy users reacting to a bad release — and the opposite, happier outcome.

2) Use pageview analytics to estimate total potential user interest and conversion rates.

3) Assess a plugin’s performance with the .org search algorithm, the quality of releases, and plugin incompatibility as well as PHP compatibility issues.

4) Collect significant user behavior data anonymously without phoning home.

5) Just reveal all the raw data with privacy options for individual authors — no interpretive analysis on wordpress.org.

BONUS: Let’s take this discussion somewhere else!

Miriam Schwab is the co-Founder and Head of Strattic, an end-to-end static hosting and publishing platform for WordPress websites.

Today WP Watercooler sought Solutions to the Active Growth Problem. In a pointed but respectful conversation moderated but Sé Reed, the Watercooler crew got one new detail from Otto about the decision to remove the active install charts: it was made months ago. How should the data collected by WordPress.org be understood, as a basis…

This week Alex Denning (Ellipsis) draws on Iain Poulson‘s historical, high-level plugin data at WP Trends to offer some thoughtful, somewhat contrary, but practical and grounded perspectives on the value of Active Install Data. At the WP Watercooler and elsewhere, a realization seems to be setting in that the data is not open source and not the property of the WordPress community. Like last week’s episode of Post Status Draft with Katie Keith of Barn2 Plugins, Till Krüss (Object Cache Pro, Relay) offers a lot of lessons this week about less travelled paths to success in the plugin business even as a very small company or company of one. Performance, testing, and support are key, interrelated parts of Till’s success and probably the most important ones to borrow in your own life and work if they resonate.

Here’s a glimpse of what’s going on in the world of design and development in the WordPress space this past week: A delicious developer’s advanced guide to WP-Config, the WordPress 6.1 Field Guide, and Twenty Twenty-Three looks amazing! Brian Gardner released a new FSE theme, Powder. Cool Tool of the Week: Lorem Picsum by David Marby and Nijiko Yonskai.

In 2019-20, only four plugins entered the space and broke into the upper tiers. These were Site Kit for Google, Facebook for WooCommerce, Creative Mail for WordPress and WooCommerce, and Google Ads and Marketing by Kliken. Has the WordPress.org repository become a closed shop, a tapped-out ecosystem where the winners have taken all? Here are some suggestions about how to break in or changes that could be proposed to open and diversify the repository. Until that happens, do growth charts matter?

What are the best things the WordPress community can do to better support plugin developers and founders? Recent discussions around the Active Install data being removed from WordPress.org forces us to respond to this question if we believe a healthy third-party plugin market is essential to WordPress, as I do.

Till Krüss explains how he found his way into WordPress and a successful business that’s solving the hard problems of caching and performance optimization. His work and business model suggest several areas of opportunity for developers and founders working in the WordPress plugin market today.

What plugin owner has not felt the pain of an extraordinarily busy support forum? Till is up to (wait for it..) 5-10 minutes a day on support — which he aims to decrease. How? Testing to ensure the highest quality.

WordPress 6.1 RC 1 has shipped with a release date of November 1. It’s time to start testing! Check out the Developer Notes, Field Guide, and related team updates.

John James Jacoby has been the main source of (unofficial) information about the removal of active install statistical tracking for plugins in the WordPress.org repository. On Friday, he provided more technical details on the WPwatercooler podcast.

Decision-by-committee is difficult enough, and decision-by-community is called an election. Surely there must be a way that we can gather information, keep the community informed, and move forward in a mutually-beneficial way.

Cory Miller asks, “What can we do to better support our plugin developers and product owners?” Katie Keith offers some clues with the story of her WordPress/WooCommerce agency and product shop, Barn2 Plugins. Dan Knauss and Nyasha Green talk about microaggressions, the Active Install Growth Data story, and US federal legislation aimed at Open Source Security. In an increasingly “demon-haunted world,” how can we know who is doing what with the hardware and software tools we use? Ben Gabler, CEO and Founder of Rocket.net, is in our Member Spotlight.

In this episode of Post Status Excerpt, Dan and Ny take on three issues in the WordPress community that can threaten or impair trust while also revealing how foundational trust and healthy communication are: 1) racism and microaggressions, 2) the sudden removal and uncertain fate of the active install growth chart in the WordPress.org plugin repository, and 3) open source and security. Briefly discussed: emerging US federal policy that aims to secure open-source software. Zero-trust architecture might work well for networked machines, but human relationships and communities need trust.