WP 6.1 Feature Freeze 1 Week to Go! 

WordPress Beta 1 and a Feature Freeze is coming on September 20. Here's what we know so far:

• 🚶🏻‍♂️ WordPress 6.1: Product Walk-Through Recap
• 🔌 Matt: Core needs to be more editorial
• 📸 Matt: WebP NO GO for Core for 6.1
• 📚 Survey: How did you learn WordPress?

Salary Transparency: Why Not?

1. Be transparent about pay ranges.
   Make them wide if you have to. The right candidate will be honest about where they should sit on that range
2. Reward skills, talent, and experience regardless of location.
   A prosperous workforce is a happy one, and your company will benefit from it.
3. Never ever ask people to name their price!
   It’s your responsibility to define the role and give it a value.

Vito is a a tireless, tenacious but gracious entrepreneur driven by a great vision for making collaboration with your agency's clients easier. I'm thrilled to see WordPress founders lead this investment. We need even more people investing in founders like Vito. —CM

There's a great discussion about Adobe's acquisition of Figma in our #club channel.

Also in #club, Carl Hancock and Travis Lopes dropped some great insights and spurred some sharing about PayPal usage/revenue. What we've learned:

• Travis: "Our payment gateway mix across all transactions is around 65/35 in favor of Stripe [over PayPal], if not a bit higher." (After a year with both options offered to customers.)
• Carl: "Historically I've heard others say around 30% for PayPal vs. Credit Card break down. We are around 20%. This year it's trending under that. PayPal has been trending downward every year in terms of payment method used."
• Travis: "Interestingly, almost all of our PayPal transactions come from non-English speaking countries."

Quick Links

• Here's a recent article from the MIT Tech Review that asks, Why can’t tech fix its gender problem? Why not indeed. Why not the WordPress community? Read More→
• @Stratacomm live tweeting the sessions at WordCamp US noted the "Biggest applause line of @camikaos DEIB talk" was “In order to have equity, we have to have salary transparency.” David Bisset captured the moment with a GIF. Read More→
• "Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things." Did Peter Drucker actually say that? Almost! But we sure do. Read More→

CURATED BY DAN KNAUSS. Have business news to share? Get in touch.

Adobe in Talks To Acquire Figma

In a move that literally no one saw coming and that many designers will groan about, Adobe is in talks to acquire Figma while still letting the company run autonomously. Figma CEO Dylan Field wrote an informative tweet thread providing insight into the deal and how the companies will move forward together. The irony is not lost that Figma was created out of frustration with big box design companies moving too slowly with innovative tools. So now it appears a big box company will buy the rebels.
 

Who Put Block-Based Template Parts in my Classic Theme?

At the WP Tavern, Sarah Gooding breaks down the importance of having classic theme authors try out block-based template parts “without breaking their whole site design.” This is pretty exciting to be getting this functionality for Classic themes. It will open the door for old custom themes to modernize a little bit and have the best of both worlds. Some people aren’t as ecstatic and have good reasons to be cautious. Like with all things, change is hard, but it is constant.

Hosting Companies Embrace WooCommerce

Some may see them as existential threats, but several hosting companies announced their own WooCommerce solutions in the past week, notably to gain buzz around WordCamp US. Pagely / GoDaddy started off with the first announcement last week, debuting Managed WooCommerce Stores. Followed by Bluehost unveiling an easier interface to launch a WooCommerce store. And rounding out this list, although perhaps with an asterisk, WPEngine “re-announced” their WooCommerce offering and debuted a new addition to it called LiveCart. We’ll be watching to see how these solutions compare and if they can be long-term investments for these companies.

Hunting For The Perfect Local Dev Environment, So He Rolled His Own

We’ve all been there. You set up your local dev environment and everything goes well until you get a few use cases where it cannot do what you need, or it has little quirks that annoy you, or it just feels slow and stale. So Chris Wiegman set out to make one he would enjoy. For those that don’t know, Chris actually joined WPEngine a few years ago to help build a local dev tool, but long story short, he has moved on to other things in the company. So having him come out with a local dev environment isn’t terribly offbeat. For those of us who loved the high days of Vagrant then you’ll most likely enjoy the setup that he has put together. Check it out on Github and please do provide feedback as this is a work in progress.

Cool Tool

Each week we’ll feature one cool tool that can help make your life easier as a WordPress builder.

WebPageTest

Are you always going to GTMetrix or Google Page Speed Insights to test your web pages? There is a better way. WebPageTest provides one place to test Core Web Vitals, Lighthouse, or even compare the differences between two pages. WebPageTest feels a bit more maintained with current testing standards than GTMetrix, and it provides better explanations of the errors that come up than Google’s testing solutions.

Quick Links

• Steve Burge noted the appearance of a free AI image generating plugin, Block Diffusion by Kevin Batdorf. Check It→
• Post Status answers a #WordPress question: "As a Senior Developer with little WordPress experience, how can I best showcase my WordPress skills to clients?" Add Your Answer→
• Brian Henry noticed new activity on 10up's WP_Mock github.com/10up/wp_mock→

Pressable

Founded in 2010, Pressable is a world-class managed WordPress hosting provider built on the same data network as WordPress.com and WordPress VIP. With industry-leading performance, 24/7 expert support, a 100% uptime guarantee, and seamless integrations with WooCommerce and Jetpack, Pressable provides the tools you need to manage your WordPress websites and grow your business all in one place.

The Path to better Professional Development Conversations

• Create space in your one-on-one framework for professional development conversations. It takes discipline to avoid the tactical but the outcome is better.
• Decide early on what the core competencies are for a junior, mid and senior level of the role you want to hire or have in your team.
• Develop an evaluation matrix or 9-grid that you can share with your fellow managers to help you assess individuals and make promotion decisions.

Quick Links

• Drake Baer at Business Insider writes about the wrong kind of professionalism that's all too common. He says it's "a bias-making machine that needs to end." Read→
• Dan Knauss and Eric Karkovack discuss professionalism. What is it? How does professionalism relate to a healthy open source project and business ecosystem? Listen→
• Cory Miller and Michelle Frechette talk about their WCUS takeaways. Listen→

CURATED BY CORY MILLER. Have career news to share? Get in touch.

5 Days Without a Shower

You might be wondering how I ended up that way. It’s a tale of disability and inaccessibility. 

To be fair, I had a wonderful time at WCUS 2022. People were amazing. My Post Status team was awesome. My StellarWP team was awesome. Seeing people I hadn’t seen in years, and meeting new folks was amazing. It was ALL SO GOOD!

But … I got stuck in the lobby bathroom. And I couldn’t access my hotel room shower. And most doors were next to impossible to get through without human assistance. (Including my hotel room door.)

The accessibility at WCUS was disappointing at best, and tear-inducing at its lowest point. Read →
 

Quick links

• Dan Knauss blogs about Asking for the ADA Suite. Read→
• Post Status Note Creativity and Chronic Pain highlights “a frank conversation about illness and pain” from AIGA Eye on Design by Madeleine Morley. Madeleine talks with SICK magazine editor Olivia Spring about SICK’s rejection of productivity as a virtue. Pause and rest when you need to — and make that possible for your employees or team. Read→
• Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at WordCamps: We can do it! Read→

CURATED BY MICHELLE FRECHETTE. Have community news to share? Get in touch.

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