Cool tools and tech talk for designers, developers, and engineers working with WordPress.
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
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.
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. 🦇
Move Over CSS, Here’s JSON • A New Generator Goes Turbo • The Hidden World of Javascript in WordPress • Cool Tool: URL Params
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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