“Sports, Politics and Technology. All the same game.”
— George Shirk
Howdy!
Being at R3 again this week — in person — with some amazing entrepreneurs was delightful. I also had a great time hanging with Matt Mullenweg in San Francisco earlier this week too! It’d been a few years since we got lunch in Houston, and it was overdue.
I came with questions: How can we grow WordPress and its economy together? What can we do for WordPress itself?
Because of this newsletter and Post Status's origins as a WordPress curated news blog, a lot of people think of us primarily as a news source. Sometimes we break some news, like the Pagely acquisition. More often we are digesting it and asking what matters most to our members and the people we want to become Post Status members: the business owners and professionals making their living in the WordPress ecosystem and those just starting out.
Most of all, we want to guide, connect, and elevate our members as they grow. And we want to make sure we share, nurture, and replenish the common resource we have in the Open Web.
What do we mean by "The Open Web?" Read our manifesto about it, our vision for navigating the risks and opportunities ahead, together, in the WordPress economy.
Tell us what you think; we're glad to have you with us.
— Cory Miller
🌅 Early Access Opportunity! Post Status Business Membership has just launched, and we’ve got additional bonuses and perks coming up — exclusive to you for signing up early.
Accessibility, Creatibility, and Connectibility — these are the three things that define the Open Web in its ideal state. It can be accessed by everyone, anyone can freely create on it, and the communities that form there can sustain themselves and grow.
WordPress is critical to the Open Web as an indicator of its health, an ecosystem for business growth, and a path for people to contribute to the health, growth, and future of the Open Web.
We want to guide, connect, and elevate our members — WordPress businesses and professionals — as they grow. And we want to make sure we share, nurture, and replenish the common resource we have in the Open Web.
Post Status is proud to present a live gathering after the State of the Word. Join us in Twitter Spaces with guests TBD on December 14 @ 12PM EST. We'll be discussing questions like:
What was most significant about this year's State of the Word?
What should WordPress professionals be focused on and thinking about?
What does the future holds in 2022 for the WordPress project, community, and ecosystem?
Save the date! 📅 More details to follow.
Thanks to WP Lookoutfor sponsoring this morning's Twitter Spaces conversation for Post Status Comments about the WordPress news space!
WP Lookout is the plugin and theme update intelligence tool for WordPress professionals. Get timely information on new WordPress plugin and theme versions, security updates, author changes, mentions in the news and more. Set customizable notifications by email, Slack, webhook and RSS.
"I expect the hallway track to be pretty busy during this event." —Nathan Ingram
In this episode of Post Status Excerpt, David talks with special guests Nathan Ingram and Ryan Marks about WordCamp Birmingham 2022 — one of the first in-person WordCamps after almost two years of no live events anywhere in the world. With 200+ people expected to attend, Nathan and Ryan talk about the safeguards that will be in place, how they are managing expectations, how their sponsorships are being handled, the role of hybrid events, and how WordCamp Birmingham's reboot is being received in the WordPress community.
Tonya Morkannounced on November 17th that a new date will be set for the WordPress 5.9 Beta 1 release, Yesterday Robert Andersonconfirmed a proposed date of November 30. Tonya noted more time is needed to deal with a potentially blocking issue in the core editor along with some other items:
"These items could affect the 5.9 Release Candidate (RC) and, likely, the final release. So it is better to allow time to focus on them at this stage."
This schedule would see a release of WordPress 5.9 in late January.
Modern Tribe has a statement posted on its website. It is literally titled with one word: "Statement." The statement says they have been acquired by LiquidWeb, but Modern Tribe "will continue to operate as an independent agency with its existing leadership."
Most people in the WordPress space weren't too surprised but this acquisition because LiquidWeb already acquired Modern Tribe's flagship product, The Events Calendar, at the beginning of this year.
The sale did reignite an ongoing conversation in Post Status Slack: is the amount and frequency of acquisitions healthy for the WordPress ecosystem today and in the future?
Reid Peifer from Modern Tribe shared his feelings in the Post Status conversation:
"I think the macro and the micro view is pretty appropriate for us as a community. The macro lens — we’re seeing a lot of consolidation and movement. Skepticism of corporate motivations is healthy and keeping a critical eye on what’s surrounding you is just part of being a good community member and a good business person.
When the WordPress community is really at its best, it’s balancing that macro view with the micro. In all of these changes are individuals with their own needs, wants, and aspirations. I love when we collectively can apply a critical eye to big broad strokes, but retain the respect and enthusiasm for everyone as individuals.
Whether or not I just contributed to the stagnation of the broader WordPress ecosystem — it’s on me to prove otherwise. I’m actually pretty excited about that."
POST STATUS ANALYSIS
As a WordCamp organizer, I can't help but wonder how many sponsors will be available at tables during in-person WordPress events in the years ahead. Corporate sponsors offer the most support to WordCamps after the WordPress Foundation. Acquisitions and mergers mean fewer deep pockets from corporate sponsors.
We still need to wait and see how this acquisition plays out. I don't think "harmful" is the right term to use to describe the drive to consolidate that has been so strong this year. The space is definitely changing and growing. When change is happening, opportunities open up.
Matt Mullenweg will provide a retrospective of 2021 and cover trends and topics that range from "WordPress 5.9 and Openverse to Web3 and non-fungible tokens (NFTs)."
There will be a Question & Answer session. You can either send your question ahead of time to ask-matt@wordcamp.org, or ask during the event in the livestream chat on YouTube.
After the event, David Bisset will be hosting another talk for Post Status Comments in Twitter Spaces with guests (TBD) to discuss their reactions to the State of the Word. Join us! Get in touch (just reply to this email) if you'd like to be a guest speaker; we would like to have a diverse panel.
When it comes to theme.json, Ellen Bauer believes it's very important for theme developers to take a close look at new developments now and participate as much as possible in theme.json's evolution. Ellen gets into the file structure and lists some helpful resources for further reading.
Recently there was a vulnerability discovered in the Starter Templates plugin, which is installed on over 1 million WordPress websites. If you have this plugin installed, make sure you are updated to at least version 2.7.1. It was released on October 7, 2021.
Here's an integration that makes sense: Paid Memberships Prointegrates directly with Castos Private Podcasting. Now, on a membership site, "you could create a private podcast of bonus episodes for all customers with a certain membership level."
What happens when member subscriptions expire or members leave? "Paid Memberships Pro sends that information to Castos, and your Private Subscribers are removed from your private podcast."
Simple Feature Requests is a good plugin to try if you need to collect and manage user feedback using your existing WordPress website. The latest release adds bug fixes, updates, multiple boards per site, and the ability to organize requests by the board they're on.
Bob Dunn shares his perspective on the WordPress community and the reasons why people leave it. Exits, he points out, have always been happening: "The problem is that things change, or don’t change, and they get frustrated or downright angry... The smart ones know when to leave. Give up that piece of WordPress and move on."
POST STATUS ANALYSIS
I agree with Bob that no community is perfect, and from my experience organizing and maintaining a community with meetups and WordCamp Miami, I have learned that community can also mean different things to different people. For some, it is a very emotional connection, and for others, it is not. Some of the best things I’ve seen happen to people have only occurred when they joined other communities or explored new frontiers. Others find satisfaction by staying put.
Manage your clients, websites, and tasks from a single dashboard with GoDaddy Pro. Perform security scans, backups, and remote updates to many sites on any host. Check up on site performance, monitor uptime and analytics, and then send reports to your clients. GoDaddy Pro is free — and designed to make your life better.
There are some interesting methods used in the newly release Kadence Conversions 1.0 for using the block editor to build popups, slide-ins, and ad banners. Site owners get a nice range of controls, including the ability to target specific visitor types, devices, or limit the conversion items to specific pages.
Hauwa Abashiya, hailing from the UK and Nigeria, writes this week's HeroPress essay under the title "Finding My Global Family." Hauwa found the WordPress community a diverse and inclusive place:
"I get to talk to people from all walks of life, support and help build a community that cares for each other. I get to make an impact for good. If we don’t look out for each other, who will?"
Whether you are an individual or a company, your participation in Five for the Future is needed and will be warmly welcomed.
What does it look like in practice to contribute to Five for the Future? Your opportunities as a contributor can be as vast as the WordPress project itself. Whether sponsoring events to subtitling videos on WordPress.tv, there are many ways to get involved.
The best way to decide how to contribute is to review the nearly 20 different teams that make up Make WordPress. Within each team, skim the top welcome boxes, review meeting times, and read a few recent posts to see what the team has been working on. Then, consider your skills and availability. Many teams have a few low-lift ways to contribute occasionally for just a few hours, while others need more regular help.
"You can change the URLs and alter the post content, but the GUID should almost always be left alone. If you absolutely must change your GUIDs, we recommend using a plugin instead of trying to alter them manually."
Ben Gillbankshas shared his work on ElementalCSS, which he calls a "classy utility library for building websites quickly." It's effectively a CSS library of simple collections of CSS styles that can get you up and running fast if you need a website to look good right away. Ben says he "wanted to make a CSS library like Tailwind that was more opinionated and, frankly, a lot smaller."
Joe Hoyle has published an experimental library to render custom Gutenberg blocks built in React on the server. In an attempt "to contribute to the ever-growing field of Gutenberg developer experience," Joe has written a blog post about this project. It's not yet "production-ready," but it looks very interesting and worth a look.
Shira Ovide, Latrice Royale, and other guests did a virtual talk for a New York Times live event and experimented with how we can engage in productive dialogue online.
POST STATUS ANALYSIS
This recording is worthwhile viewing if you have anything to do with community building and management.
My key takeaways: Be intentional about the type of community you want to have. How do you want it to look and feel? Have clear, specific rules.
Model the rules/community expectations.
Make sure there is moderation present. Make sure it’s timely and consistent.
Have a plan for posts held for review: make sure there are multiple eyes on them.
Have a plan for suspending and removing posts and users.
Communicate the reasons for the suspensions/removals, who the decision came from, and why it was made.
Have moderators who understand how people try to get around the moderators and rules. Be ready for that.
Who are your moderators? Should they be a part of or separate from your platform? Should they be compensated, and if so who should be compensating them and how?
Be intentional with your vetting process. Who are you letting in, do they know the expectations, and do they share the values of the community?
— Kayla Demopoulos
Cate DeRosia announced "the creative team at Big Orange Heart [has a] new coloring book: Color My Heart Orange!"
Meg Millercompiled a list of fifteen "common" design trends for review based on their accessibility and whether they should be encouraged.
Meg focuses on trends that revolve around color and typeface aesthetic, organizing content on a page, graphics and visuals, and audio experiences. Among her reminders:
"Users come to websites from all walks of life and from an infinite variety of situations and that needs to be remembered and considered."
"...what if you took the low-risk items and offered them as an opportunity for someone else to learn. Over time they’ll develop competencies that they wouldn’t have without the opportunity."
Pantheon is doing a month-long "Annual Gift of Open Source" event that aims to encourage code- and non-code-contributions to open source projects. For each contribution to the Drupal or WordPress projects, Pantheon will donate $20 to the Drupal Association or the WordPress Foundation — up to a maximum of $5,000 for each organization.
In non-WordPress-related news, it's good to hear that "click to subscribe, call to cancel” (a tactic more than a few American news organizations use) might be coming to end since the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has stated this dark pattern is illegal.
WP Career Summit — the first of its kind – will be held online April 8, 2022. While still in the early stages of planning, we can promise it will be an amazing event! 📆
WordCamp São Paulo 2021 🇧🇷: O WordCamp São Paulo completa 10 anos no dia 27 de novembro. Online e grátis! 🇧🇷 WordCamp São Paulo turns 10 on the 27th of November, 2021 when it takes place again as an online event.
WordCamp Taiwan 🇹🇼: WordCamp Taiwan will take place online this year from December 11-12, 2021 and welcomes all WordPress lovers. 🇹🇼 2021年12月11日到12日，台灣即將迎來一場全新的里程碑 WordCamp，一場更新、更好、更多花火的的國際級綜合研討會. The Call for Speakers is still open.
WP Y'All, It's WordCamp Birmingham on February 4-5, 2022. You can find more information and sign up here. Here's the Call for Sponsors and the Call for Speakers. The speaker call deadline is November 30.
Big Orange Heart and the WordFest Live volunteers will kick off another global tour of the WordPress community on March 4, 2022. You can register now! Check out the Call for Speakers and the Call for Sponsors. Sponsorships and donations will help provide resources to aid the mental health and well-being of remote workers worldwide. All proceeds go to the Big Orange Heart charity! Everyone organizing this event is a volunteer. 🧡
