“Teamwork begins by building trust. And the only way to do that is to overcome our need for invulnerability.”
— Patrick Lencioni
Howdy!
Have you ever been part of a peer-mentoring group for entrepreneurs? I’ve benefited so much from small groups of like-minded business owners meeting on a regular, consistent basis with “Vegas Rules” — anything you share stays there. I’m eager to get a leadership group like this started — want to join it? Give me a shout in Slack, on Twitter, or email me.
We also have an opportunity for a new Post Status sponsor who’s willing to cover costs for our Slack account. We’ve been on the free version all these years, which leaves us without a permanent archive and some other useful features. If your company might be interested in sponsoring Post Status Slack, let’s talk.
🤯 Can you beat "developer overload" with organization? David thinks good habits can help, and Cory suggests going for a hike as a useful analogy.
In this episode, David and Cory have a conversation about another way to prevent Developer Overload: organization. Cory shares how he benefited from a mentor, while David feels that documentation, commenting code, and following some best practices can help reduce anxiety overall — if you can convince yourself to adopt new habits. This show is worth a listen just for Cory's “going on a hike” metaphor.
Also covered in this episode: Cory encourages David to take the Kolbe A Index test.
Every week Post Status Excerpt will brief you on important WordPress news — in about 15 minutes or less! Learn what's new in WordPress in a flash. ⚡
🗓️ Reserve your spot today for this August 31 event now!
Nellie Akalp will be joining Cory Miller for three upcoming episodes of Post Status Live. She will be discussing business expansion to another state (August 31), trademarks and DBAs (September 28), and legal compliance issues for digital nomads (October 26). Business owners and freelancers will benefit from these live presentations and discussions where audience participation is encouraged.
Post Status Live webinars are hosted by Post Status Publisher and CEO, Cory Miller. They feature special guests and subjects relevant to WordPress professionals. Audience participation is welcome! Let’s learn together.
An official announcement confirms that official support for the Classic Block Editor — originally scheduled for the end of 2021 — has been extended another year:
“After discussing this with Matt, it’s clear that continuing to support the plugin through 2022 is the right call for the project as well as the community.”
It’s possible this decision will be re-evaluated in the future and support might be extended beyond 2022 as some people have speculated, but I don’t believe that is necessarily the case. Active install growth for the Classic Editor plugin has been in decline for a while, but the millions of sites currently using it make extending support the right call now.
Ending support for the Classic Editor too soon would encourage individuals and companies to create their own supported versions. 🍴
Advanced Custom Fields' 5.10 release is its first “big” release since Delicious Brainsacquired it back in early June. New features include support for the WordPress Blocks API v2, a new full height setting for blocks, opacity support for the color picker field, and more. 🎨
Iain Poulson's release announcement introduces the new people who will be working on the free and “pro” versions of ACF: Matt Shaw (previously lead developer on the WP Migrate DB Pro team) and Liam Gladdy who came on board after the acquisition.
Matias Ventura explains what he thinks are the more substantial and interesting thingstheme.json starts to unlock for WordPress: compatibility, performance, accessibility, and portability. 🔭
My favorite:
“There’s also the possibility to use certain definitions to customize aspects of the look and feel of wp-admin based on the current site design.”
Iain Poulson bravely took on the effort of writing the “ultimate overview” of the block editor for developers in 2021. Iain doesn’t make any assumptions about his readers’ existing knowledge of Gutenberg, so this is a good resource for onboarding coders who haven’t dipped their toes into the pool yet.
Iain gets into the pros and cons of the editor and shares some block editor tips and tricks.
In the “multi-monorepo” model you have at least two monorepos:
“one public and one private, with the private monorepo embedding the public one as a Git submodule, allowing it to access its files. The public monorepo can be considered the upstream, and the private monorepo the downstream.”
What you choose should be based on your needs. For example, “the native WordPress search… is an acceptable solution in many cases.” But not in others.
On the other hand, Paulina says “Jetpack Instant Search does a great job on CSS-Tricks and, as we’ve just seen, can work with headless WordPress as well.”
“The hardest part of acceptance testing is [setting up] their environment, but you only need to do it once. Tests look really, super simple, and you can teach your QA engineers to write them.”
No matter what you’re working on with your WordPress website, Sandhills Development has a tool that can help you. Sell digital products with Easy Digital Downloads. Use AffiliateWP as your affiliate marketing solution. Sugar Calendar is event management made easy. And WP Simple Pay is a lightweight Stripe payments plugin. Craft superior experiences with the ingenuity of Sandhills’ plugins.
Sean McCabe joins Post Status Publisher Cory Miller for a deep dive into the Daily Content Machine.
In this webinar, Post Status CEO Cory Miller interviewed Sean McCabe about his business, Daily Content Machine.
Daily Content Machine is a service that takes one video from you every week and turns it into professionally edited, titled, and captioned video clips. From a single source, Daily Content Machine customers get five clips for each day of the week for their YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts.
Post Status Live webinars are hosted by Post Status Publisher and CEO, Cory Miller. They feature special guests and subjects relevant to WordPress professionals. Audience participation is welcome! Let’s learn together.
Jason Cohen, founder and CTO of WP Engine, participated in an AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) on Reddit this week. 🐻 He shared that WP Engine is the 7th-largest public website host in the world — and the largest that focuses on WordPress — with 170,000 customers and 1,100 employees.
On creating a true purpose for your company: Jason warns against ideas like “helping people create a legacy” that are too distant to really mean anything. Instead, embrace the true and inspiring ways you help “people [fulfill] their entrepreneurial dreams — [gain] control of their life, [lift] themselves above the situation they’re currently in to change their lives and feed their families with their passion.”
On why he went with WordPress hosting 11 years ago: “Definitely not luck to pick this area — I did 50 customer interviews before determining this was a good idea.”
On the most difficult aspects of WordPress: “One two-edged sword is that you can extend everything with plugins… the flip side of that is, with say 30 plugins and some custom stuff, that’s a lot to manage. Upgrades, something breaking, something incompatible… This isn’t unique to WordPress of course, it’s a natural factor of extensible software.”
There are plenty of other good thoughts about business in the interview. Jason is one of those people you could spend hours with in a WordCamp hallway and learn a ton.
To calculate what a business is worth, Chris Lemalooks at four things: strategic value, asset value, revenue value, and people value.
You can focus on revenue or people, but in the end “there’s not one perfect way to determine a business’s value” and no two businesses are the same.
Businesses also go through different stages, Chris notes:
“Triple-digit growth is easier on a company doing $100,000 [in revenue] as compared to one doing $10,000,000. What that means is that your valuation may differ because of the stage of growth your business is in.”
“Having a pool of talented developer resources available will only strengthen your technology team and really set up your projects for success.”
Other reasons include maintaining relationships and learning from each other. 🤝
Alex Blackie has written a good “Email Authenticity 101” guide to DKIM, DMARC, and SPF — the basic knowledge you need to keep emails sent from or on behalf of your domain out of spam folders and less vulnerable to spoofing. ✉️
🔒 Wordfence has been reporting on several plugin vulnerabilities you might want to check up on:
☀️ Employers: Get your job opening in front of many of the best and brightest members of the WordPress community. List your job opening with Post Status today. (Get a 20% discount as a Post Status Club Member!) »
The Global Women in Tech Festival: Taking place from September 24-25, FemTechConf is a female-founded tech conference uniting women and allies to empower women in the tech community. There will be three full tracks of fast-paced tech talks catering to all experience levels. Check out the speakers and register now!
WP Campus 2021: Tune into this free event for WordPress in higher education from September 21-22. The schedule and presenters have been posted and you may register now.
The 2021 WPMRR Virtual Summit:An online conference (September 21-23) that's 100% focused on helping you make monthly recurring revenue work for your WordPress business. Hosted by Joe Howard and Brian Richards. Register here.
Video Picks
📺 Here is my video pick this week:
Building a Beautiful Map Block Pattern in WordPress:Joe Casabona demonstrates how to build a beautiful block pattern for Google Maps in the WordPress block editor.
Podcast Picks
🎙️ Here are my podcast picks:
Doo the Woo: This is Mendel Kurland and Zach Stepek's first show together, and their guest is Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Josepha explains how her musical background translated to being the executive director of WordPress. She also relates how her team members "deal with, think about, and navigate conflict" and what role diversity has in the WordPress project.
Underrepresented in Tech:Michelle Frechette talks with Allie Dye of WP Valet about accessible workplaces. What does this mean in a world that is inaccessible to many people who have invisible illnesses and disabilities?
In The Loop: This is a good discussion about using WordPress in an agency setting, including common challenges, favorite projects, and career advice.
WP Briefing: An entertaining behind-the-scenes look at WP Briefing bloopers. 😆
syntax.fm:Scott Tolinski and Wes Bos have advice for new developers: learn to read error messages and get comfortable with the command line.
