WordPress 6.0
WordPress 6.0 “Arturo” was released on schedule (May 24th) with many new features and enhancements related to full site editing.
Gutenberg 13.3 was released yesterday.
Check out Anne McCarthy‘s post on the latest core editor improvements to container blocks and block locking. Anne shows off some new features to explore with rows, stacks, and groups.
Anne also has a recap (video and written highlights) of yesterday's hallway hangout on Full Site Editing topics.
Jean-Baptiste Audras offers some interesting stats for the 6.0 release as he's done with six previous releases — 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, 5.6, 5.7, not 5.8, and 5.9) so we can see compare them. Some highlights:
519 people (~25% were first-time contributors) from at least 53 countries and 134 identified companies contributed.
The United States leads in contributions followed by Russia, thanks to Sergey, who had the highest number of individual contributions to 6.0. Then comes Jean-Baptiste himself in France and George Mamadashvili in Georgia.
Automattic (with its 70 contributors) had the most contributions, followed by Yoast, Whodunit (France), and GoDaddy.
It's interesting to see how national populations, the number of their contributors, and their total contributions are independent variables that can vary widely. Automattic‘s Jorge Filipe Costa from Portugal is in the top 20 by contributions, and Portugal ranks high despite having only three contributors in all.
Some standout individuals, like Sergey, George, Jean-Baptiste, and Jorge do an enormous amount for the project, and there are quite a few of them! It is ultimately a community effort.
WordPress is 19!
Nyasha Green interviewed Olivia Bisset about her work on wp19.day. Olivia is also an intern here at Post Status. (An enthusiastic WordPresser, coder, WordCamp speaker and volunteer, Olivia is slightly younger than WordPress itself.)
Newly posted to WP19.day: brief video greetings from Matt Mullenweg, Lindsey and Cory Miller, Syed Balkhi, Vito Peleg, much of the team at Yoast, and many others.
WordCamp Updates
Hari Shanker R passed along the news that regional WordCamps will not need to go through a proposal process anymore — they can directly apply to organize a camp for their region using the WordCamp application form. From now on, “WordCamp Central will evaluate the health of local communities when assessing a regional WordCamp application.”
Bob Dunn has some nice, bite-sized tips on building WordPress sites from some of the speakers at the upcoming WordCamp Europe 2022.
Giving Back and Looking Forward
Thomas Fanchin at Weglot has a great post about his company enthusiastically embracing Five for the Future and becoming a WordPress Global Sponsor. He notes how much there is to look forward to in events, worldwide, in 2022.
Weglot has been sponsoring Juan Hernando, a WCEU organizer (among other things) and now Pedro Mendonça on the core Polyglot team.
What Should Count for Five for the Future?
Josepha Haden Chomphosy has taken a stab at defining activities that can be considered contributions to Five For the Future, and she is looking for feedback.
Josepha says valid 5ftF contributions should clearly benefit the WordPress project and not an individual person or company. Contributions related to creating or supporting (third-party) WordPress themes, plugins, or blocks “are critical to extending the reach and utility of the WordPress project,” but they are also in a “grey area.” Generally they shouldn't be associated with the Five For the Future mission or count toward corporate commitments to the program.
In the comments, Adam Warner asked if completely free code like Contact Form 7 might be worth counting, and Brian Gardner asked about contributions to the Pattern Directory with Courtney Robertson chiming in about CC0 images contributed to Openverse.
Managed WordPress.com Hosting Starter Plan
WordPress.com has launched a new plan called “WordPress Starter“ for $5/month. It seems to be a the “in-between” option some were looking for earlier when the “Pro” level was first announced. The “Starter” level includes custom domains, additional storage, simple payment processing, and Google Analytics to the free option.
Notably, WordPress.com is increasingly being marketed as a web host for “managed WordPress hosting,” and it can claim to be the fastest on the planet.
WordPress and Sustainability
Joost De Valk explains how optimizing search engine crawling can help save energy — and therefore the environment. Remember that search engines will crawl almost any URL they can find in your page source.
Tom Greenwood shares some tips on reducing waste in web design. Even if you just stop autoplaying videos, that's a start.
Over at the Matt Report, Hanna Smith asks, “Can WordPress save the planet?”
It's good to see these economic and ecological concerns emerging more in the WordPress space. If you'd like to take a hard look at the situation, try starting with the Stockholm Resilience Centre‘s Planetary Boundaries Framework (CC BY 4.0).
One of Bill Gates‘ favorite authors, Vaclav Smil, is also worth a weekend deep dive. Smil is a Czech-Canadian scientist and policy analyst on the Faculty of Environment at the University of Manitoba. His new book, How The World Really Works, was summarized nicely in the latest issue of Sentiers by Patrick Tanguay.
Opportunities for Lean WordPress and WooCommerce Solutions?
Rob Howard asks what growth opportunities WooCommerce might see ahead as Shopify suffers a post-pandemic decline in its stock price and market share. Shopify will likely stabilize as pressure from Wix, Squarespace, and WooCommerce increases. Some would say — unfavorably — this is an “Apple-like” tactic. But Rob's right — there's an opportunity here for WordPress and Woo:
“Let Shopify, Squarespace and Wix duke it out for the low-end market, and do everything you can to help WooCommerce corner the market for higher-end, highly custom e-commerce solutions.”
There's also a good opportunity for a “build a store on a mobile device quickly” experience now.
Check out the new Fruits platform — it seems to do just that.
What if something similar existed based on a trimmed-down WordPress install? Want a full store with custom features? Click a button, and it becomes the full WordPress + Woo experience ready for customization.
Christina Warren and Dan Knauss have similar thoughts about a Substack or Ghost-like distribution of WordPress.
