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Issue #447

“You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”

— Mark Twain

Bluehost

Dear Friends —

It's with great pleasure and gratitude that today I can announce I'm taking the baton from Brian here at Post Status. I'm honored to build on the foundations he laid down and grew at Post Status and in the WordPress community these past eight years.

Brian is not leaving, just changing seats. Please read his announcement about this transition and join us in wishing him the best on his new projects.

David and I talk about the vision we have for the future of Post Status on the podcast, and I hope you will listen and join that conversation with us as we move on together.

You can always reach us my replying to this newsletter, and you can email me directly at cory@poststatus.com

Thank you for being a part of Post Status —

—Cory

A New Era for Post Status

Brian Krogsgard

It is with mixed emotions that I share the news that I am no longer an owner of Post Status. I have officially sold the second half to my partner of the past year and a half, Cory Miller. You have all seen Cory step in and be a major part of this community, and he'll continue to steer the ship as I step aside.

READ MORE ›

Our Future Together at Post Status

Cory and Brian DM

When Brian broached the subject of stepping aside from his ownership in Post Status about a month ago, a couple of thoughts instantly came to mind…

READ MORE ›

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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Very happy to see the release WP-CLI v2.5.0 knowing it was quite the effort. Kudos to the team.

This version includes security patches, PHP 8 support, improved MySQL/MariaDB support, new commands for managing automatic updates and creating MO files, and more. Read the release notes for more.


Matt Chowning opened some issues in the Gutenberg repo to help begin the process of obtaining consent from contributors to relicense their work under the GPLv2 and MPLv2 licenses. Two days later Matt apologized in the wake of contributor reaction to the number of notifications that went out and the publication of committers' email addresses:

"In aiming for transparency and simplicity there were unintended side effects of adding noise into your daily lives with the GitHub notifications. I apologize for this negative impact to you and any other unintended consequences."

Notably, this license change will allow Gutenberg to be used across different services and content management systems. Dual-licensing was first brought up in a Gutenberg discussion on GitHub on July 2, 2020.


WordPress VIP has adopted Multidots' plugin, Multicollab, which provides Google Docs-style editorial comments for WordPress. 📝

Multicollab looks pretty slick — it has the ability to allow inline commenting in posts, to mention team members in comments, and even assign comments to a specific team member. You can check out a live demo too.

Brian spoke with Multidots founder Anil Gupta about Mulitcollab on the Post Status Draft podcast last month. 🎙️


Scott Bolinger asked for picks for favorite WooCommerce themes and shared the top five responses: Astra, GeneratePress, Hello, Kadence, and Storefront.

Patrick Rauland joined in with some recent speed tests he did for Ocean WP, Storefront, Astra, and GeneratePress. 💨


If you use BuddyPress and plan on using Full Site Editing, you should be aware of some issues that have been reported. BuddyPress content is not shown at all on the front end with FSE enabled. (This issue might extend to other plugins too.)

BuddyPress 8.0.0 is nearing its release with a new beta that includes testing with FSE.


Chris Lema compared the leading commercial plugins for customizing the WordPress dashboard without much (or any) coding. If you want to customize the interface for clients or white label it, then this post is worth a look. ⚙️


📆 Upcoming Events


🤝 WordPress Jobs: The Post Status Job Board

💼 There are currently 20 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. »

Help us understand how you're hiring! Take our short, one-question poll. »

Current Listings:

SEE ALL JOBS ›

📺 Post Status Live — Tuesday, May 25 @ 11am CST

Upcoming Webinar: Making Online Summits Work With Nathan Wrigley

Join Cory Miller in a conversation with Nathan Wrigley and Anchen le Roux about effective online event hosting from planning to execution. They're the hosts of The Page Builder Summit 2.0, a free online event about WordPress page builders that took place last week.

JOIN THE WEBINAR ›

🎙️ The Week in WordPress

Post Status Excerpt (No. 11) — A New Era For Post Status

The ExcerptChange and a vision for the future at Post Status

In this episode of Post Status Excerpt, Cory Miller and David Bisset discuss the future of Post Status and Cory's full acquisition of it from its founder, Brian Krogsgard.

Brian launched Post Status eight years ago. Today, Brian shared his announcement publicly, and Cory also outlined his plans for the future of Post Status.

Every week Post Status Excerpt will brief you on important WordPress news — in about 15 minutes or less! Learn what's new in WordPress in a flash ⚡ via iTunes, Google Podcasts, YouTube, Stitcher, Simplecast, or RSS. 🎧

LISTEN NOW ›

WordPress VIP has received a FedRAMP "Authority to Operate" (ATO) approval which paves the way for further work with government entities. 🏛️

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) sponsored WordPress VIP throughout its certification process and also migrated its own legacy infrastructure to WPVIP's platform.


Javier Casares makes the case for why hosting companies should install the PHP-intl extension. Instead of hacks, "we gain the possibility to use a lot of functions that can make our life easier" and "improve the way we develop to improve WordPress."


I'm wondering if Google could be bringing RSS back to popularity with its latest "experiment" in Chrome.


DAVID'S PICKS 📬


Video Picks

📹 Here is my video pick of the week:

  • Matt Medeiros shows how you can create reusable WordPress blocks for podcasters using the GeneratePress plugin, GenerateBlocks.

Podcast Picks

🎙️ Here are my podcast picks:

  • Castos Creators: Matt Medeiros talks with Tim McKenna, the host of the Signal337 (three-thirty-seven) Podcast, about the challenges of a solo podcast and how he adds uniqueness to his show.
  • Women in WP: Lindsay Halsey of Pathfinder SEO shares her insights on SEO and WordPress.

Carefully crafted for you by humans.

The Post Status Team

Copyright © 2021 Post Status, All rights reserved.


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