April is the kindest month. April gets you out of your head and out working in the garden.

— Marty Rubin

Howdy!

On Tap for Post Status Draft (April 6)

Join us for a Discussion about the Underrepresented in Tech

Coming up on April 6 at 1:00 PM CST, we'll be recording Post Status Draft live with Allie Nimmons and Michelle Frechette as we learn about people who are underrepresented in the technical fields. Join us then to participate in this important discussion.

The Week in WordPress

Post Status Excerpt #4 – Our Job Board, Post Status Gigs, and WordPress Settings

It's your move. What's your strategy?

Cory and Jeff are holding a Business Value Crash Course on Wednesday, April 7 from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM (CST). This intense workshop is designed to help entrepreneurs take their next steps in building a great business. How will you make your next big strategic move?

Kickstart your strategy — and get clarity and confidence with the Business Value Mindset.

We'll work together so you walk away with your first steps toward increasing your company's value. You'll exit this workshop with the direction, numbers, and clarity you need for your next big move.

Reserve Your Spot »

Jetpack is ten years old. 🎂 There's a birthday celebration site you can check out for "an interactive exploration of how Jetpack has helped WordPress sites over the last 10 years."

WordPress Slack was down for a brief period of time on Tuesday morning. Here's the conversation that emerged about this in Post Status Slack, and a Trac ticket opened by Tor-Bjorn Fjellner. 🎫

What happened? Nothing too exciting — not a security event or a malicious act. Josepha Haden Chomphosy explained, "the final step on a profile deletion request went unattended." She also outlined the steps being taken to prevent this from happening again in the future.

I'm actually impressed that Slack uptime for WordPress (and in general) has been as good as it has been over the years. 👍

For International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month, WP Engine hosted an employee-led panel focused on women in technology. You can watch some of the presentations on the company blog.

Search Engine Journal reported on a Facebook for WordPress Plugin vulnerability potentially affecting over half a million sites.

Wordfence has a breakdown of the problems, which they disclosed to Facebook, and how the plugin has been patched. 

⛵ Larry Hudson demonstrates how to build simple static websites with WordPress, WPGraphQL, Eleventy, and Netlify. Mileage will vary depending on the host you use, but it's likely to be very efficient. Larry used AWS Lightsail:

"[I]t only took a few clicks to have a managed WordPress instance running and it only costs US$3.50 per month for a site with low traffic."

🛒 Commerce Journey

• Watch: How to Choose the Best WooCommerce Hosting for Your Store with Kevin Ohashi
• Listen: Paul Maiorana, CEO of WooCommerce, on the unique challenges and advantages of WooCommerce's flexibility and low barriers to entry.
• Read: How to Start an eCommerce Business in 10 Steps

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.

📆 Upcoming Events

• A Business Value Crash Course led by Cory Miller and Jeff Meziere on April 7th will help owners assess the value of their businesses and plan their next move. There's an impressive amount of information covered, along with a Q&A at the end of the workshop. 💥
• WordPress Mega Meetup: On April 15th at 6:30m EST Anne McCarty from Automattic will give an in-depth preview of Full Site Editing and how it can be improved up until its release in WordPress core later this year.
• WordCamp Greece is happening online on April 16th and is free to the public. 🇬🇷
• The Speak Up! Black Speakers in WordPress Workshop from WP Engine is accepting signups. It will kick off on June 5th to support "Black voices in the WordPress community" and elevate "community members to leadership roles." 🧑🏾
• WordCamp Europe 2021 has announced it will take place online from June 7-10. 🏕️

WordPress Jobs: The Post Status Job Board

💼 There are currently 24 Active Job Listings on the Board. We don't 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. »

Codeable wants a part-time, remote Freelance WordPress Developer who builds with heart.

WebDev Studios is looking for a Business Development Associate who is a confident communicator with a passion for business development. This is a full-time, remote role.

Delicious Brains needs a talented Senior WordPress Plugin Developer with lots of experience building WordPress plugins to join the team working on their own sites.

Valet is looking for a Professional Support Rep — an outstanding communicator who loves working with clients and has a wide range of experience with WordPress. This is a part-time (potentially full-time) and remote role.

Liquid Web is hiring a WordPress React Developer and a WordPress Technician to join The Events Calendar team. These are full-time, remote roles.

iThemes needs a full-time, remote WordPress Developer to collaborate with a cross-functional team to architect and develop durable, extensible, and secure code.

WP Agency is looking for part-time, UK-based, Freelance WordPress Developers to work on ad-hoc projects.

Tyche Softwares is looking for a full-time, remote Senior WooCommerce Developer to build new features, create new integrations, and next-level, performance-optimized, stable plugins. Candidates should be able to work with some overlap in 10AM-5PM GMT +5.30 time.

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

Jeff Starr thinks we need a Favicon standard: "In the beginning, favicons were very simple... but it has gotten very complicated." 🤔

Instead of dozens of lines of code and images, having "a simple yet flexible standard" would allow favicons to be created with a single line code. I'm with Jeff on this, but I'm afraid the ship might have sailed on this issue. But, I would love to be proven wrong.

📱Google's AMP — Accelerate Mobile Pages — has preoccupied web developers and their discussions for years. This controversial technology might be fading away now, ever so slightly.

Search Engine Land noted that AMP won’t be required for articles to show in the Top Stories carousel in search results any longer. After the "Google Page Experience Update" launches in May 2021, that requirement will quietly disappear. As Dwayne Lafleur notes:

"This effectively means that publishers will no longer be forced to use AMP and can instead provide fast, rich experiences on their own domains."

Ethan Marcotte has some concerns:

"Deprioritizing AMP in favor of Core Web Vitals is a very good thing. But it’s worth noting that Google’s taken its proprietary document format, and swapped it out for a proprietary set of performance statistics that has even less external oversight."

Google will continue to support AMP, and if you publish an AMP version of your content, Google Search will still link to that cache-optimized AMP version. 🧐

10up has released a Convert to Blocks plugin to support "safe migrations" to the block editor.👍

How it works:

"The plugin works upon activation, with no configuration needed and does nothing until an editor needs to update or edit an existing piece of content. If a page or post is not already formatted using blocks when the editor is opened [it] automatically maps the content to the relevant blocks that come with WordPress."

Anyone still using the Classic Editor to handle lots of old content will want to consider using this.

Another extremely useful and free plugin from 10up is for publishers like newspapers that use Adobe InDesign. It adds web-to-print workflow capabilities for WordPress and looks quite slick.

The plugin is called Eight Day Week and merits its own dedicated microsite. 🔌

Milica Mihajlija takes on CSS performance and says the most straightforward approach is to keep it small. Compressing files can significantly improve speed, but removing unused code can too. Other methods include using efficient CSS animations and avoiding invisible text during font loading.

"CSS is critical to loading pages and a delightful user experience. While we often might prioritize other assets (such as script or imagery) as more impactful, we shouldn’t forget CSS."

Unsplash has been acquired by Getty Images. 📷

My observations lead me to agree with Carl Hancock in Post Status Slack. Some people in the photography community are unsettled because Unsplash was popular for not being associated with Getty, and others don't like Unsplash giving away photos for free.

I also generally like this take from Mike Demo. In any case, it will be interesting to see how Unsplash moves forward from here.

Featured Partner: Wordfence

Wordfence protects over 4 million WordPress websites with a world-class firewall and malware scanner. It is the most popular security plugin available, protecting WordPress sites from spam, malware, and other threats through the real-time threat defense feed.

Frontity is an established framework that enables you to build a React-based front end for your WordPress site. You may recall we watched their early phase fundraising, their public beta, and we interviewed Reyes Martinez around that time.

Will Morris has a good overview of Frontity's current iteration and how WordPress developers might want to use it. He explains how to create a new Frontity project, connect it to WordPress, and publish it. Will also gets into Frontity theme customization. 🎨

Brian Jackson reviews Ulysses, a writing app that recently added features for writing and editing content in WordPress. Brian compares Ulysses with Bear, another popular app. He also explains how to export your documents from Ulysses and publish them to WordPress.

iA Writer is another well-established and popular writing app that has a minimalistic, ADHD-friendly interface and WordPress inegration. On-page word count and analytic features in iA Writer were crafted to keep your focus on the specific text you are writing or editing, down to the level of single sentences. 📝

Custom Post Type UI v1.9.0 from WebDevStudios officially supports showing Custom Post Types and Taxonomies in WPGraphQL.

The WordPress Foundation offers five tips for organizing a successful online do_action charity hackathon. ✔️

Leonardo Losoviz explains how you might be able to host all your PHP packages together in a "monorepo."

"The monorepo allows us to version-control all our packages together, so that creating a new branch and submitting a pull request will be done in a single place, including the code for all packages that may be affected by it."

Bernhard Kau explains some effective and straightforward ways to repair a corrupted WordPress database. 🗄️

This WP-Admin reference by Bracketspace is a good place to quickly reference elements from wp-admin. Developers might find this useful for their plugins. 🔌

Michelle Frechette over at Big Orange Heart shares a daily wellness checklist for being happy, healthy, and productive: "Consider yourself your biggest asset... so taking care of you needs to be a top priority." 🧡

Squarespace, which has over 1,200 employees, recently raised $300 million at a $10 billion valuation. While the market share of WordPress is many times larger, commercial closed-source platforms are gaining investment and a little bit of growth.

Sara Soueidan shows that horizontal rules in HTML don't have to be boring. In this post, Sara shows how she created some interesting visuals and how her horizontal rules can be improved "so that they adapt to various contexts while remaining semantic and accessible." 👍

The official PHP Git server was attacked this past week. The attack is still under investigation, but actions were quickly taken to protect it, and there is no active security risk.

Wordfence explains what WordPress users need to know about the attack.

To learn more, you can read Enrico Zimuel's explanation on LinkedIn. Github will now be the main repository for the PHP source code, as reported by Enrico and Ax Sharma for Bleeping Computer.

Here's an insane story of how bad UI on Substack and 1Password cost Timmy O'Mahony $2,023. 🤯

Nikita Prokopov says "Font size is useless" and needs to be fixed. If you're a front-end developer or a font geek, read this.

Also mentioned in Nikita's blog post is an article from Vincent De Oliveira explaining exactly how fonts and the CSS line-height algorithm work.

Fontshare is a free font service with professional-grade fonts that are 100% free for personal and commercial use. 🆓

YouTube is experimenting with hidden dislike counts on videos. 📺

Kevin Ohashi at Review Signal has branched out from his annual benchmarks for general web hosts and WordPress hosts with a new set of tests for WooCommerce hosting. He talked about his research methods and the current state of web hosting with Brian Krogsgard for Commerce Journey.

DAVID'S PICKS 📬

Video Picks

📹 Here is my video pick of the week:

• Gift Egwuenu has a great video if you are interested in what the Frontend Developer's learning roadmap looks like for 2021.

Podcast Picks

🎙️ Here are a few podcasts worth listening to:

• WP Tavern Jukebox: Nice to see the WP Tavern return to the WordPress podcast community, with Josepha Haden Chomphosy interviewed by Nathan Wrigley. In this episode, I learned that Josepha was introduced to WordPress by her mother.
• The Kitchen Sink: Adam Silver talks with Amber Hinds about accessibility.
• WP Briefing: In a recent episode Matías Ventura joins Josepha Haden Chomphosy to talk about full site editing.
• ShopTalk: Many topics get covered in this show, but start listening at 15:40 to hear Dave Rupert and Chris Coyier talk about headless WordPress and the block editor.
• Women in WP: Check out this interview with Torre Capistran. Torre leads a WordPress agency that specializes in creating websites with the Divi Theme for enterprise clients.