Carefully selected and weekly curated news from the WordPress ecosystem — and beyond. Keep up with WP, WooCommerce, web tech, and business topics that matter to you. We also gather new podcast episodes and videos that are worth your time, other than our own. For a quick, weekly digest of what’s happening in the WordPress core teams head over to This Week in WordPress.org.
#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. 🇮🇳
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.
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. 🦇
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here’s a glimpse of what’s going on in the world of design and development in the WordPress space this past week. As I look around the Post Status Slack and the chatter on Twitter, this week has been filled with conversations emphasizing the struggle of running a business as a solo devpreneur.
Help test WordPess 6.1 Beta 3! 🧪 Check out the latest features that are coming in the 6.1 release. 📦 Follow updates about bringing back the Active Install Growth chart. 📈
