“The Hippie times are going to end at some point.”
—Bob Dunn
How has the WordPress community changed since its early days? How does money and market share change it? What lies ahead?
In this episode of Post Status Excerpt, David has an honest and deep dive with Bob Dunn into the “versions” of the WordPress community — something Bob covered in a recent blog post that has gotten some attention recently. They discuss what each “version” was like, how money can make a community act differently, and how people position themselves, for better or worse, in reaction to changes in the community.
Also: David asks Bob if certain changes are unavoidable once a community gets to a certain size and asks what is missing from the WordPress community today that existed in the early days.
LISTEN NOW →
This podcast episode was sponsored by GoDaddy Pro.
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POST STATUS CONTRIBUTORS 📓
Chris Hardie
Friends, Elders, the Matt Factor, and the traits of a resilient community.
We have to talk more about the role of elders in our community. Definitely not elder as in “old entitled men” but elder as in “someone with life experience and wisdom who can be looked to for guidance as the community evolves.” We are old enough as a community to have elders, whether we see them as such or not.
READ MORE ›
Michelle Frechette
It’s assumed that if you are in business, you must have deep pockets.
When I was freelancing, I received an envelope in the mail. In it was a sales sheet requesting that my small business purchase advertising space in a local dance school’s annual recital printed program. I chose not to participate.
READ MORE ›
Write for us! ✍🏼
Have you changed roles, launched a new product, or started a side project? Please share your news with us! And always tell us how we’re doing, anytime. We appreciate your feedback; we read and discuss all of it. 🙏
POST STATUS SLACK 💬
Post Status Slack was busy this week with a discussion surrounding financial support for volunteer contributors in open source — and Automattic's Five For the Future program. A number of Post Status members participated along with Matt Mullenweg in a conversation opened up by Joost de Valk. If you are a Post Status member you can start in the #club channel to catch up on the discussion in context. Here are the highlights:
- Matt Mullenweg has long opposed the idea of an app store for .org, and he maintained that position this week. Matt argued that if everything is an app store, people would "just make more apps instead of collaborating." He noted that non-commercial plugins make up the vast majority of the WordPress plugin directory's listings:
"The top ten plugins, including Yoast and Classic editors, are only about 21% of total active plugins tracked. The long tail of plugin distribution is longer and thicker than most would suspect."
Matt also shared some apparent frustration with certain members of the community taking advantage of WordPress:
"Every day I see web hosts spending millions of dollars a month on advertising and not contributing anything back to WordPress (or even worse thinking they're god's gift to WP because they signed up some customers or ran a conference), and it can be frustrating."
Whatever method might be used to bring in revenue on .org and distribute a cut to contributors, Matt holds the opinion that this isn't as simple as it might seem:
"Donations are incredibly hard to split equitably... even in the super early days of WP I could never think of a fair way to split donations, even among the code contributors, much less those contributing in other less countable but equally crucial ways, like support, translation, testing, documentation."
- Lesley Sim doesn't favor the app store solution but thinks there are ways to reward contributors and create incentives to contribute with badges and other rewards. (See her Twitter thread.) Leslie says she thinks, "at the platform level, it needs to be a blend of financial and reputational incentives."
- Yvette Sonneveld acknowledged discussions like this need to start leading to actionable goals:
"I think this is really a case of what got us here is not likely to sustain us in the future. Our ecosystem feeds millions of people and offered thousands a chance to get to a position they never dared dream of. Just dismissing ideas offered is not getting us any closer to a sustainable solution."
POST STATUS ANALYSIS
Concerns about the lack of support for open source contributors have existed for a long time in and beyond the WordPress community. Several events in the last few months have made this problem a prominent news story and target of government regulatory action. There is no easy solution. The sheer scale (and sadly greed and selfishness by bad and ignorant actors) is unprecedented.
Five For The Future is a worthwhile endeavor to support WordPress, and companies like Yoast and WebDevStudios have been successful in doing this. But WordPress — pressed by increasing demand for high-quality, polished products and functionality — has grown to a point where this may not be enough. I agree with Matt that spreading out donations — real money — would be a challenge and unlikely to be seen as fairly distributed by everyone involved.
The first episode of Post Status Comments took on compensation for plugin developers and the idea of an app store. If you haven’t heard it, I highly suggest you check it out. Cory and I were joined by Joe Casabona and Joost de Valk for this conversation.
This year may see the peak of the conversation about open source sustainability. More of the general public and even the White House now are a part of the conversation. WordPress has the chance to contribute to the solutions that will emerge. This is a chance for the WordPress community to lead.
— David
One of the most interesting and practical things to come to light, thanks to Lesley, is Elinor Ostrom‘s Nobel prize-winning research in economics on the solution to “the tragedy of the commons,” which is often referenced by Matt and lies at the heart of this discussion.
Ostrom’s research into communities that effectively manage a commons showed that the “tragedy” is actually a “myth” that “blurred the idea of a resource system (the pasture) with resource governance (open access), and at the same time, confused open access (no constraints) with commons (sharing among community members on terms set by the community)” (Scientific American). Viewed correctly, the community attached to a commons is part of the commons and plays a key role in managing it.
— Dan
MAKE ⚙️
Last week, WordPress had updates for four security issues affecting versions between 3.7 and 5.8. If you haven’t yet updated to 5.8, all WordPress versions since 3.7 have also been updated. The security issues included SQL injection vulnerabilities and another vulnerability in some multisite installations.
Tonya Mork shares the remaining known deprecation notices for WordPress 5.9 and PHP 8.1, along with core updates that are related to PHP 8.x.
For every WordPress major release, there is a field guide, and the WordPress 5.9 version was released this past week. Developers should be bookmarking this as it's a post showing not only what to expect but links to all the other relevant core posts about code changes and upcoming features.
Some people have been wondering about the future of the Customizer inside WordPress. Anton Vlasenko shares some insights on how the upcoming WordPress 5.9 Customizer works and how to preview themes. Block themes cannot be previewed because the Site Editor and the Customizer itself will only appear if a non-block theme is activated or a site has a plugin that interacts with the Customizer.
You can also catch a discussion of the Customizer in this recent talk between David Bisset and Anne McCarthy on Post Status Excerpt.
WordPress 5.9 is updating the theme.json version 1 introduced in WordPress 5.8 to version 2. Existing theme.json files will still work and be transformed at runtime to the version 2 format by WordPress.
Alexander Goller notes how WordPress lags behind minimum required PHP versions and offers an explanation:
"Automattic never seemed to have an interest in PHP, the ecosystem or the broader community even though they are the stepping-stone into PHP development for many people."
Although WooCommerce has upped its minimal version to 7.2, Alexander feels it was an overly conservative choice:
"Instead of trying to push the adoption of “modern” PHP, they move to something people are already using. In my opinion, the right move would have been to move to PHP 7.4 now."
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👩💻 Work
Here are two good posts on PHP from Brent Roose. The first explains what you can be excited about in PHP in the year ahead. The second is his take on PHP version stats for January 2022:
“2 out of 3 Composer installs use a PHP version that isn't actively supported anymore."
Brad Jorsch describes six different ways that translation in Jetpack was broken, and how that problem was addressed. If you're interested in translations as a developer, this is something to look into. Brad notes that "overall this was quite a bit of work, but Jetpack’s i18n is now better than ever before."
Tom McFarlin reminds us that although many developers prefer object-oriented programming (OOP) for writing code, it’s not the only way:
"When writing solutions for WordPress, don’t set out to write everything in an object-oriented way. Don’t forget procedural programming in WordPress."
Who is doing great work but hasn't received much notice in the WordPress space? Nominate someone (maybe yourself!) from the Post Status community to be featured in our Member Spotlight. 🔆
Most developers have heard about the recent Log4j debacle by now. Following that debacle, a general discussion emerged about open source and maintaining code for free. Now it appears that at least one developer is sabotaging their own open-source library.
The developer behind popular open-source NPM libraries 'colors' (colors.js on GitHub) and 'faker' (faker.js on GitHub) intentionally introduced mischievous commits impacting thousands of applications.
The reason appears to be "retaliation against mega-corporations and commercial consumers of open-source projects who extensively rely on cost-free and community-powered software but do not, according to the developer, give back to the community."
Jeff Geerling explains the burdens of open source maintainers like himself. He never considers any pull request "simple," but the people making them rudely express this all the time. There's also the matter of money:
"The only way I was finally able to venture out on my own, and devote more time to open source work, was to market things... Even still — with YouTube + book sales + donations — I make half what I made as a full time software developer, especially when I was consulting and charged a substantial hourly rate."
Jeff believes "companies should have open source funds and allocate them to projects and maintainers they depend on."
Daniel Schutzsmith did a comprehensive breakdown of the WordPress .com versus .org onboarding experience in a Twitter thread. Daniel noted in Post Status Slack that he was "VERY surprised to see so many features built into .com." The ability to add (and pay for) plugins has existed on .com for a while — at least on business plans — but you may be surprised at what else has emerged at .com. I wish this was a blog post! 😉
Responding to Daniel's comparison, Matt Mullenweg explained one goal for the new, more polished .com admin interface "was to show .com did a ton better on user tests and then use that to advocate for that design becoming the new wp-admin." However, there is no "data that shows it works any better than wp-admin." Matt added, "We'll probably do some tweaks on both sides to bring learnings from each design. I don't like that .com has a separate design for some of the same screens right now."
Maciek Palmowski at WP Owls passes along a reminder for developers not to forget to test their code. He briefly touches on two ways to test with Husky and Lefthook that allow you to use hooks in Git to improve your testing.
If you're a Gravity Forms customer, you might appreciate this preview of the upcoming 2.8 release with new features for your workflow inbox such as live data refresh and notifications about new tasks while you’re using other applications.
Related: The new Gravity Forms Google Analytics Add-On is in beta and available for testing.
Jack Arturo talks about webhooks and improving webhook performance in WP Fusion. He also notes this change in the product:
"WP Fusion now ships with an api.php file inside the plugin folder. You can POST your webhooks directly to this file, and it will validate them and save them directly to the database, bypassing the normal WordPress load process."
🛒 The Woo Snippet
WooCommerce Blocks, Admin, and Action Scheduler updates were included in the latest release of WooCommerce 6.1. Preceding that release, WooCommerce Blocks 6.7.1 brought a patch release and a bug fix. On the Gutenberg side of things, Jamie Marsland from PootlePress shared an encouraging sneak peek of his WooCommerce BuilderBlocks which bring Gutenberg Full Site Editing to Woo product pages.
Lastly, what is someone thinking when they release a plugin in a saturated market? Mark Westguard not only brought no-code to his form plugin but expanded it to bring customizations to WooCommerce. Crazy! You can hear his story here at Do_the Woo.
— Bob
Special Offer for Post Status Members: If you'd like to become a Woo Builder Friend and join the Do_the Woo community, you can get $50 off if you're a Post Status Member.
Tuesday, May 24 @ 9am – 4pm EST
This event will be like a conference, but all presentations are a series of 15 Tweets issued one per minute with the conference hashtag in a scheduled time slot. You can add images, GIFs, videos, and links to your tweets to add more depth. People viewing a presentation can interact with the presenters, creating question and answer threads. All presentations will become permanently available Twitter Moments as long as the presenter wishes to maintain them.
RSVP Today »
GROW 🌱
If you use Google Analytics and have anybody from the EU visiting your website, then this decision reached by Austria’s data protection watchdog might have some big impacts. Google Analytics was found to breach GDPR, and therefore it is illegal in EU member countries.
In Post Status Slack, Aurooba Ahmed notes that she switched some clients "who have a strong European presence to Fathom Analytics for this very reason." Pat Ramsey acknowledged looking into Matomo and Plausible for the same reasons.
We'll see how this ruling affects US-based websites and how (or if) Google can respond effectively.
Rafa Poveda shared on The Other WP newsletter what lessons were learned running one of the first in-person WordCamps after (and I would say "still during") the pandemic. As the lead organizer of WordCamp Sevilla 2021, Rafa shares his concerns and how the camp focused on people rather than the number of talks presented.
Lau B. Jensen, CEO of Zimtik, shares some lessons learned about pricing his invoicing SaaS for freelancers, including some faulty assumptions about Zimtik's customers work:
"Once your business is up and running, we wanted a natural ramp that would distinguish those who work internationally with many clients and those who are local. For a few reasons, this was a mistake."
Brad Touesnard reflects on the past year for Delicious Brains which saw a major acquisition in Advanced Custom Fields, and big changes to their team, products, and projects:
"We experienced healthy growth again this year with total revenue up 13% over last year. This is a drop from last year’s growth rate, but I’m still very happy with it."
About ACF in particular:
"The difference between a one-time sale and recurring revenue is on display here. The situation is looking much healthier in 2021, with revenue up 47% over 2020."
Human Made has a travel handbook for their employees that others have borrowed from for their own policies. The Human Made version was recently updated for COVID.
Due to rising COVID cases in the area, WordCamp Birmingham 2022 has been postponed with possible new dates in April or May:
"The WordPress community is bigger than any single WordCamp. We cannot in good conscience continue forward with our event, given the current risk, since this decision could negatively impact other in-person WordCamps currently in the planning stages."
As someone who has been around the web since the early days, I appreciated this tweet from Matt Mullenweg. Matt says many people think Web 2.0 was defined by social media platforms like Facebook when in fact "platforms like WordPress, Odeo, Six Apart [Movable Type and Typepad], Flickr, Technorati, and del.icio.us had open data and interoperated."
There are some interesting comments from that thread and others who are retweeting it.
—David
Looking for icons? iconoir.com is a large open-source library with 1000+ SVG Icons, designed on a 24x24 pixels grid. React and React Native libraries are also available.
One of the reports not related to WordPress that we still enjoy is the Top Emoji Trends annual report. For 2021, the top Ten on Twitter were: 😭 😂 🥺 🤣 ❤️ ✨ 🙏 😍 🥰 😊. Top new emoji: ❤️🔥 Heart on Fire. In addition, 21% of all tweets now contain at least one emoji. Emoji trends are fun to read, but they also show changes in how people communicate, at least on Twitter.
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Video Picks
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Podcast Picks
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