“A man on a thousand mile walk has to forget his goal and say to himself every morning, 'Today I'm going to cover twenty-five miles and then rest up and sleep.’”

— Leo Tolstoy

Howdy!

Post Status Excerpt (No. 1) – WordPress 5.7 & PluginRank

Get the latest WordPress news with Cory and David as they kick off the show.

This week's topics: WordPress 5.7, the visual editor, and PluginRank.com. 🔌

Every week Post Status Excerpt will cover important WordPress news relevant to the Post Status community — in about 15 minutes or less! Learn what's new in WordPress in a flash.⚡

WordPress 5.7 was released on schedule on Tuesday with 66+ enhancements and 126+ bug fixes.

This release was made with the work of more than 481 volunteers. Of these, 129 are first-time contributors to WordPress core. 🙌

The 5.7 release was named "Esperanza" after Esperanza Spalding, "a modern musical prodigy" who I'm overjoyed to add to my playlist. 🎶

If you haven't read the 5.7 field guide, now's a good time. If you are a developer, be sure to check out the upcoming plans for full site editing and Gutenberg.

Francesca Marano interviewed two Yoast employees who were deeply involved with this release: Tim Hengeveld served as the Design focus lead and Sergey Biryukov as the Core tech lead. 🙏

WordPress publishes nearly 80 packages to npm now. Greg Ziółkowski explains the latest changes to the process: when trunk is closed or in feature-freeze, you can use package distribution tags to get the future development version of a package you need. 📦

Example:

npm install @wordpress/components@next

Read Greg's post at Make WordPress Core for more details about the overall strategy for how WordPress uses npm and to share your feedback.

Bob Dunn, based on survey results and feedback from his outstanding podcast guests, tells us how 2020 played out for WooCommerce businesses.

Some businesses did better than others, and some store owners saw trends like "people requesting free or discounted rates due to being hit hard by the pandemic." At least one started their business because of the pandemic.

It's good to see that, by far, most survey respondents did as well or better than previous years, with the largest group reporting, "I was lucky, it was amazing." And, for the most part, few or no major changes needed to be made to their business operations.

Bob also has an updated guide for WooCommerce extension developers that is worth checking out as well. 👍

Steve Burge and his team have taken ownership of the Simple Tags plugin.

It has been renamed to TaxoPress and has a new website. The plugin has been in existence for over a decade and has over 80,000 users. 🔌

Ashley Rich over at SpinupWP breaks down all you need to know about caching and WordPress including the different caching layers and common pitfalls. 🕳️

🛒 Commerce Journey

Upcoming Webinar with Becky McCray: How Small Town Retailers Can Use the Best Tricks of Major Stores to Win in eCommerce. Learn about the special strengths small businesses can leverage to compete in the global economy. Win big with small retail in eCommerce. 🏘️

Be sure to Join our Facebook group and subscribe to our newsletter for our latest content and a weekly roundup of the best eCommerce reading being published today.

WordPress Jobs: The Post Status Job Board

💼 There are currently 18 Active Job Listings on the Board. We don't always have space for them all here, so be sure to check online too.

☀️ 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. »

WPRiders needs a WordPress Solutions Architect to research and propose WordPress based architectures and engage with new clients for new projects.

Maintainn, the maintenance and support division of WebDevStudios, is looking for a Support Engineer who has at least two years of WordPress maintenance, backend development, and customer service experience.

ThemeIsle

eSkyCity wants a part-time, remote WordPress Developer to join their Professional Services team.

Frontity needs a Content Marketer for a full-time, remote role to help increase brand awareness and impact.

Awesome Motive is hiring a Senior WordPress Technical Support Specialist to supervise a small group of support team members. They are also looking for a Senior WordPress Developer. These  are both full-time, remote roles.

Universal Yums is looking for a full-time, remote but US-based, business-minded WooCommerce Developer.

CauseLabs wants a US-based, remote Senior Web Engineer to join their engineering team.

GLIDE is looking for a Senior Developer and team lead who loves WordPress. This is a full-time, remote role.

Cozmoslabs is searching for a Content Marketing Manager to lead content strategy and accelerate growth. This is a full-time, fully remote role.

Developer Olga Gleckler was recently featured in the People of WordPress segment on WordPress.org. It's a good piece of writing and worth a read:

“I traveled through a very uneven path, with a lot of obstacles and noise, but for me, it’s like a kaleidoscope where a little turn presents a new picture, a new “ah-ha” moment, new excitement after seemingly pointless efforts.”

Alex Denning took a deep dive into the advertising campaigns of some WordPress businesses, inspired in part by recent events involving Elementor and Bluehost.

Alex looks at the different ads WordPress businesses are running and considers why they might be taking these approaches, with some input from the business owners.

Alex recommends re-targeting ads because the:

"give you the opportunity (once you’ve collected the appropriate consent) to show display ads [,...] reminding the visitor about your product and giving them the chance to come back."

While ads aren't the only marketing channel at your disposal, they are a "reasonable marketing channel to consider if you’re doing $10k+/month, or if you have a big pile of other people’s money to spend. Re-targeting ads are the possible exception." 🎯

It's up for debate right now how much demand there will be for headless WordPress. Jason Bahl identifies a key barrier:

While much of WordPress was built with decoupling in mind, the WP REST API and Gutenberg were not.

As a result, decoupled application developers interacting with WordPress are limited in what they can achieve.

Jason also offers three possible ways forward and explains how WPGraphQL can help. 👨‍💻

WPCampus is asking for feedback to make decisions about future events. They're aiming to hold their annual conference a month or two later in the year than they usually have, in August or September. 👩‍🎓

Scott Bolinger explains how he made a plugin (available to the public) that saves checkout form values in WooCommerce. 🛒

Kealan Parr relates what "every developer" must know about encoding and Unicode. This is a good overview of why we need encoding, what problems it solves, and what happens when it goes wrong. 🤯

I enjoyed reading these tips from The Leaf Node on how to craft effective landing pages along with some common mistakes to avoid. 🍂

Matt Mullenweg went on WPCoffeeTalk with Michelle Frechette. They covered a lot of topics, but here's a thought that stuck with me. ☕

🌦️ Speaking about the international response to COVID-19 and vaccine development, Matt said:

"It really makes me a little more optimistic about climate change or other ... existential issues we're facing that are going to require us to all work together.... If we take a proprietary approach it's not going to work we need to open source a little bit and get everyone working on the same things."

Featured Partner: GoDaddy Pro

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.

Some high-profile acquisitions to happen recently, first in the hosting space: InMotion Hosting announced its acquisition of RamNode.com, a provider of "affordable and high-performance" unmanaged VPS Hosting." Mike Demo comments on the deal: "InMotion now has an EU data center with an extensive OpenStack offering to give site owners more flexibility."

In the cryptocurrency and commerce space, PayPal has bought Curv, a company that specializes in security infrastructure for digital assets. 🔒

MemberPress reports their customers have passed the $1 billion (USD) mark in sales using their plugin. Launched in 2013, MemberPress is projecting $600 million in combined earnings for its users this year.

Beyond membership subscriptions, MemberPress has Learning Management System (LMS) features and is being heavily used for digital courseware. 👍

I ran across squoosh.app this week, a tool that compresses and compares images with different codecs in your browser.

DAVID'S PICKS 📬

Video Picks

📹 Here is my video pick of the week:

• All videos from WP Engine DE{Code} 2021 are now available and include keynotes from Jason Cohen, Marieke van de Rakt, and Mike Little. There are some good talks in the niche tracks as well. 👍

Podcast Picks

🎙️ Here are a few podcasts I've appreciated lately:

• Gutenberg Changelog: Birgit Pauli-Haack and Mark Uraine discuss Gutenberg 10.1, the dev notes for WordPress 5.7, Full-Site Editing, and testing tools between releases. 🛠️
• By Design: David and Mary Sherwin explain how the product brief can be a tool for alignment and consensus about what you’re going to build. 🏗️
• Michelle Frechette talks tea, mugs, the national treasures of Japanese ceramic art, early WordPress history, and more with Matt Mullenweg on WPCoffeeTalk. 🍵