1 — It’s that time of year …. and I’m guessing you’re in the midst of team party stuff today and imagining all your goofy antics, fun games and banter. I hope you and your team have a blast.
If you have cool things you’re doing, share it in the #club today or tweet at me or @post_status!
2 — Just got back from NYC a couple days ago as I got to attend the 2021 State of the Word given by Matt Mullenweg. (Thanks Matt, Angela Jinn and team for hosting us and an incredible event! And it was so good to see, hug and hang with roughly 20 Post Status members too.)
3 — I hope you’ve seen all the things our team is iterating on for you at Post Status this year. I’m so energized about our community and team. I keep saying, “Everything I want to do — I can do at Post Status.” (By the way, we have our first full-time team member, Talisha Lewallen, who started this month as our Director of Operations!)
I’m hosting our year-end Post Status Member Huddle next week. After some team intros, we’re going to give you some time and space to Look Back (2021) and Look Forward (2022).
Then we’re going to share our plans for you for 2022. Our theme is going to be Give, Grow, Together.
Oh and we're likely giving out some fun things for you too.
Post Status Members: You're invited to our end-of-year member huddle! 🥳 Celebrate 2021 as we plan ahead for an amazing new year. Come and go between 11 AM-1PM CST December 22. RSVP today »
Courtney Robertson has a great recap with photos from this year's SOTW event. It includes a handy table of contents keyed to timestamps (thanks to Marcus Burnette 🎩) so you can pick out what Matt said about mergers and acquisitions, market share, etc.
Michelle Frechette caught Matt after the event for a brief chat about some of those topics, and David Bissethosted a discussion right after SOTW with Bet Hannon, Eric Karkovack, Maciek Palmowski, and Rae Morey sharing their reactions. Others joined in, including Jeff Chandler, Ryan Marks, Hazel Quimpo, Scott Kingsley Clark, Jason Taylor, and Amber Hinds.
Do you want your WordPress site to load faster? In this webinar, we’ll learn how to think about front-end performance, as well as the tools and tactics to improve your visitor’s experiences. Our guests Mike Crantea and Sabrina Zeidan are engineers at XWP who specialize in WordPress and web performance. They will share how they've learned to think about front-end performance. They'll also talk about tools for monitoring and tactics for building — and maintaining — a highly performant WordPress site.
“You shouldn't be the one to always take, you want to be the one to always give.” —Mary Job
In this episode of Post Status Excerpt, David chats with special guest Mary Job. Mary is a remote, “nomad” worker in Africa who travels from city to city. She is an engineer with Paid Memberships Pro but also spends a large amount of time growing and stimulating the African WordPress community. Mary helped start WP Africa, a site devoted to the community of WordPress users on the continent. She talks about challenges they face, compares the WordPress presence with Google's in Africa, and she looks forward to the day when there can be a WordCamp Africa.
You need durable Managed WordPress Hosting for all your mission-critical sites. Pagely offers managed DevOps and a flexible stack with the same enterprise-level support to all its customers. Peace of mind starts with Pagely. Try it today!
WordPress 5.9 Beta 3is out and available for testing. Since Beta 2, 14 bugs have been fixed. The current target for the final release is still January 25, 2022. 📅
Is Elementor WordPress's "secret" growth filter? Joost de Valkponders that question. According to his analysis of the latest numbers from w3techs:
"Elementor is taking a bigger and bigger part of the WordPress pie... in a few recent months, WordPress without Elementor has actually shrunken."
POST STATUS ANALYSIS
This is an astonishing number of new WordPress being built with Elementor. If Elementor didn’t exist, it’s possible this growth would have happened anyway, but here we are.
Joost expands a bit beyond this post in Post Status Slack where he rejects the idea of Elementor ever getting big enough to fork WordPress and become completely independent:
“If Elementor at some point decides “hey we can fork WordPress,” we’ll see. If they don’t, we’ll never know. But I do think that the correlation here is strong enough to warrant more thinking from everyone in the ecosystem.”
I don’t see a fork happening, but I am definitely keeping my eyes on the Elementor numbers along with WordPress’s marketshare. 🍴
— David
This blew my mind with nostalgia: Riad Benguellashared a video demo showing Kubrick as a block theme. The repo is on Github for anyone who wants to check it out, but Riad says it's not done yet.
"So when it comes down to the root of the problem, perhaps it isn’t CSS itself but our unwillingness to examine our sexist ideas of what is worthy in web development."
Also related and worth a read is Heydon Pickering's post along the same lines. Both posts made me pause and think about front-end development in a different light.
Corey Maasshas written a tutorial on how to add a "support" or Help Scout-style contact widget to your WordPress site using some free plugins and Beaver Builder.
Rodolfo Melogli shows how a WooCommerce developer might be able to "get" the shipping zones and rates, noting that "it’s likely that you will need to loop through them when you need to display shipping rates somewhere, or for other custom functionalities."
Front-end developers should add this post from Andy Bell on fluid type scales to their reading list. I agree withChris Coyier this has the potential to be a trend starting next year. It's amazing how far CSS has come and continues to go.
Pagely provides durable Managed WordPress Hosting for all your mission-critical sites. Managed DevOps and a flexible stack come with the same enterprise-level support to all customers. Peace of mind starts with Pagely. Try it today!
Once in a while, we get "WordPress Questions" submitted to Post Status. They can range from first-time site builder questions to highly technical, advanced developer questions. So now, when we get a good question that's not too easy, we'll share it in Post Status Slack's #learntogether channel and consider writing a post with answers contributed by the Post Status community. We may even follow up later to see how our advice actually played out, in a Post Status version of "Stump the Chumps."
Anyone can play! If you don’t mind being featured here as an expert/chump, please take a shot at answering or improving (in the comments) our latest question from a WordPresser out there in the wild. Or, you can submit your own stumpers. Educational (and entertaining) answers are preferred.
Thanks to Tiffany Bridge, product manager at Nexcess/Liquid Web, and Mark Root-Wiley of MRW Web Design for the answers they contributed to our latest WordPress question:
"How can I display an annual cycle of daily posts individually in a widget or block — and a full calendar view?"
If you are looking for typography resources, I was reminded recently to keep Google's own font.google.com resource handy even if you don't use Google Fonts. There are resources there for choosing font types, and several sections could form a solid foundation for experienced designers who want to deepen their knowledge.
The recent discovery of a serious vulnerability in Log4j2 has sparked big discussions in developer communities — focused mainly fact that this is an open-source codebase maintained by just a few volunteers with minimal corporate sponsorships, despite the software's importance to many large companies.
This isn't the first time a vulnerability or bus effect has startled the open source community, and many people are claiming Log4j2 is a sign of a deep and persistent problem: the role of the Open Source maintainer has failed to mature from a hobby into a proper profession.
That's the position held by Filippo Valsorda, a developer at Google:
"Most maintainers fall in one of two categories: volunteers or big company employees. Sometimes both. Neither model is healthy."
"GitHub stars famously cannot be used to pay rent... If you use software made by others in their spare time and find it useful, pay them. This should not be a controversial opinion. This should not be a new thing."
Steve Ruiz, who claims he gets $2,000 a month from GitHub sponsors, has similar thoughts. He shares the options the community has, from raising funds from users to sponsorships, or being acquired by a friendly company.
Instead "we should always build accessible sites, no matter how many people with disabilities use them." Building sites (or anything) with accessibility and inclusion in mind tends to make products that are better for everyone.
If you design and often find yourself reaching for an automatic palette generator, this post from George Francis will show you how to use only a text editor and a web browser to generate color palettes. Recommended for those with a "good grasp of HTML, CSS (knowledge of HSL and RGB colors will be helpful), and JavaScript." 🎨
After Matt Mullenweg gave his annual State of the Word talk, Joe Casabona expressed a somewhat contrary view that the way to learn WordPress is not by contributing:
"We first must use our time and creative energies to get ourselves (or our company) into a financially stable state where we actually have the time and resources to give back. Then, and only then, should we contribute. Not a moment sooner."
POST STATUS ANALYSIS
In the context of young people just starting out, I tend to disagree, and we had a civil discussion on Twitter about this. I do think different viewpoints like Joe’s are worth sharing. Joe’s “help yourself before helping others” is an excellent analogy and valid point.
That point could be applied to the WordPress community as a whole as well. If the WordPress community doesn’t make itself more open, transparent, and welcoming to those already in the community — how can it expect to help potential long-time contributors come into the community from outside?
—David
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! 📆
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. 🙏
WPMainline: Jeff and Malcolmdiscuss the theme.json generator by David Gwyer, CMS market share, and public Gravatar data.
How I Built It: Joe Casabona and Nathan Wrigleydiscuss if and how speakers should be paid for virtual events.
The WP Minute: The WP Minute has an audio version and transcript of the State of the Word live broadcast — including the question and answer session.
Indie Hackers: Listen to Matt Wensing talk about his journey with his company Summit and staying afloat for years without any revenue.
The Matt Report: Jordan Galshares his challenges building on a platform like Shopify and his latest play in decentralized (and headless) ecommerce.
Voices of the ElePHPant: Cal Evans and Khayrattee Wasseemtalk withSara Golemon, Joe Watkins, and Sebastian Bergmann about the newly formed PHP Foundation.
The World Wide Web has changed us. Nearly two-thirds of the world is now “online” and we have more opportunities than ever to access, create, and connect. The Web didn’t happen by accident, though, and its future isn’t to be taken for granted.
