This update from Anne McCarthy about the block editor raised my interest:
"...work is underway to suggest block patterns based on the block one is working with.... in the long run it will be easier to create content and get inspired without leaving the editor. "
There is a video on the post along with an early PR to check out. ✨
Eric Karkovack shows how you can conditionally control block visibility in the WordPress Gutenberg Editor with the Block Visibility plugin. 👻
WordPress 5.8 will allow developers to set their plugin hostname — this allows third-party plugins to avoid accidentally being overwritten with an update of a plugin of a similar name from the WordPress.org Plugin Directory. 🔌
Carolina Nymark has published her full site editing (FSE) theme, Armando, in the WordPress theme directory.
Armando is designed for blogs or sports teams. It includes multiple block styles and block patterns, including site headers, site footers and page layouts.
I'm sure this is just the start of a big crop of FSE themes coming soon. 👍
Two Sides to Every Profile
This week the WP User Avatar plugin (with an install base of around 400k) rebranded itself as ProfilePress, and while it remained free, it was transformed in a big update from a simple "does one job" plugin to a much larger set of features. It's now a user registration, profile, and membership management plugin that offers a paid upgrade to the pro version.
As you can imagine, many users were not happy about this move. As frequently happens when users are frustrated, many downrated the ProfilePress plugin on the WordPress.org repo. I give credit to Dan Maby whose tweet first got me monitoring the situation. Other developers and companies also jumped in quickly to provide alternatives to people already using WP User Avatar.
It's easy to make a judgement at this point, but I did read Matt Medeiros' interview with Collins Agbonghama, the founder of ProfilePress, about the changes and his thoughts about the community's reaction. You can draw your own conclusions, but this stuck with me:
Maintaining free plugins is evidently unpaid labour but surprisingly, very demanding. You get droves of users demanding help...And as soon as you offer say a paid version to help offset the cost of development and maintenance of the free version, you get criticized.
Free plugins can be a labor of love or a thankless job. Sometimes both.
Could this transition have been handled differently? Probably. Perhaps it's up to the WordPress community to educate developers better in this regard. This isn't the first time something like this has happened. It won't be the last. While we hear a lot about big acquisitions, even small companies and single developers are getting more aggressive in monetizing, acquiring, and/or changing free plugins — always a difficult needle to thread. 🧵
In case there was any doubt, WordPress 5.8 will no longer support Internet Explorer 11. Unsurprisingly, the block editor will be the part of WordPress that's most heavily impacted by this change.
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