Tech Roundup for the Week of August 22
DigitalOcean’s acquisition of Cloudways • Stop saying “Gutenberg!” • Build Mode Live with Brian Gardner and Sam Munoz • One week left to submit a style variation for TT3 • Cool Tool of the Week: Munir Kamal’s Editor Plus
Estimated reading time: 60 minutes
WordPress Development Around the Web
A glimpse of what’s going on in the world of development and design in the WordPress space.
Huge news in the hosting space! DigitalOcean is set to acquire Cloudways for $350 million (USD). From a development perspective I hope this enables Cloudways to innovate even more in the coming years, but it does immediately pose the question: will DigitalOcean keep their competitors’ hosting services available on Cloudways. All signs point to the same business-as-usual, but only time will truly tell. Regardless, big congrats to Post Status members over there, Robert Jacobi and Zach Stepek.
Fränk Klein over at WordPress agency Human Made is asking us to stop saying ‘Gutenberg’. This makes sense. We need to have a consistent vocabulary on how we talk about these things to each other and to stakeholders so we all understand what we’re discussing. I’ve gotten into the habit of saying “the Block Editor” when talking about the new interface for page building in core, but I never thought that we could also break down explaining the various parts to full site editing as well. Human Made does a good job of clarifying all of this, and it might even be a great addition to the WordPress documentation to have all these defined right up front somewhere.
Speaking of hosting companies, Post Status members Sam Munoz and Brian Gardner from WPEngine have started a regular Zoom meeting called Build Mode Live to help anyone with their questions and struggles around full site editing, the block editor, WordPress, and how it all impacts business owners. They’re bringing a design, development, builder, and business owner perspective to an area where we haven’t seen much open discussion. You can sign up to participate right now!
On the Make WordPress Design blog Channing Ritter, Design Director at Automattic, shared a reminder that there is one week left to submit a variation to be included in the new Twenty Twenty Three theme (TT3). There’s a Figma file attached to Channing’s kickoff post you can use for the variations. This builds on the tools I shared last week that reinforce the importance of a build flow from Figma to WordPress. All of it is very encouraging! It’s great to see this process improving.
Cool Tool
Each week we’ll feature one cool tool that can help make your life easier as a WordPress builder.
Editor Plus
Have you been struggling with the lack of features in the block editor that you’ve grown accustomed to having in a page builder? That is where Editor Plus comes in! It helps you set background, margin, padding, icons, tabs, accordions, ratings, and even animation. I like most that these settings also stay in place even when you switch themes, keeping it from locking you into a specific theme forever. The plugin is led by serial developer Munir Kamal, who also runs Editors Kit and Gutenberg Hub. A bonus for users of this plugin is that there are also a ton of great video tutorials on how to extend Editor Plus to do almost anything.
