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Hey <<First Name>>—
WordPress agencies are key players in the WordPress ecosystem. They're working on the frontlines building the Open Web with WordPress for their clients. That's essential to sustained and vibrant growth for everyone with a stake in WordPress and Open Source.
I've had some great conversations with our Post Status Agency Owner members in the past few months, and it’s got me and our team thinking about how to better serve and support you.
But I want to do more, so today I posted my calendar link for you in our Agency Owner Slack Channel.
Here’s what I want to ask you and then listen. (One of the best parts of my job!)
- Who you are, what you do best, who do you serve
- Your story of how your WP agency came into being
- What cool projects you are proud of and want to share
- What your goals and dreams are, as well as challenges and obstacles
- Anything else on your mind
If you’re up for a quick call, let's get some time to talk about you and your vital work in WordPress.
– Cory
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BUSINESS
Magne Ilsaas goes back a long way as a WordPress agency founder serving large enterprise clients. He believes the reasons why WordPress has been such a success in that space are now a barrier to its growth. It is not enough to be the pragmatic choice — the “tool that gets the job done, cheaply and effectively.” This leads to short-term, engineering-focused solutions while “other [non-WordPress] agencies are helping clients with strategic decision-making, design and communication, user testing, conversion optimization, and digital marketing.”
Magne wants WordPress agencies to be known for a distinct WordPress culture and mindset:
What if we did business the same way we've built WordPress? What if we leverage our biggest asset, which is not WordPress the tool. It’s WordPress, the community, the culture, the openness, and the inclusiveness. What if we create our own way of integrating our open-source mindset into how we conduct our businesses? MORE →
What does your agency experience tell you? Tell us in Post Status #agency-owners or just reply to this email.
Supporting WordPress Contributors
Some of the best conversations that expert listener Bob Dunn has recorded for Do the Woo are with people the WordPress community is lucky to have. He gets creative, passionate minds together and lets them have the mic. This time it's Alain Schlesser, Carole Olinger, Carl Alexander, and Zach Stepek. An alternative title for this talk could be “Why Can't Contributors Have Nice Things?" (Like a Living Wage) Carl's impactful Twitter thread a few weeks ago inspired this gathering. There's lots more to say about this! READ →
End of the Line for PHP 7.4 in 23 Days
On the themes of maintenance, technical debt, and “pay now, or pay later,” unless it gets changed as WordPress project leadership has requested, PHP 7.4 will no longer be supported with security patches as of November 28. Some hosts are forcing customers to upgrade or leave. Dave Loodts, who has found himself in the forced-to-leave category, started a discussion about it in Post Status Slack. The views offered were broad-ranging, thoughtful, and relevant to the topics mentioned above. Read what Marius Jensen, Jeremy Ward, Chris Reynolds, and others are thinking about it. MORE→
Quick Links
CURATED BY  DAN KNAUSS. Have business news to share? Get in touch.
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TECH
Where The Heck Is That Thingy?!@$
For the second week in a row, Post Status members Roy Sivan and James Tryon have appeared in our roundup, this time for a new plugin in the repo called Missing Menu Items. Sarah Gooding from WP Tavern did a great write-up on why this plugin is sorely needed and how it works. I feel that just by turning it on, it makes things so much more manageable, especially when you work with Reusable Blocks and Block Templates like I have for the past year.
Bon Farewell PHP 7.4
Post Status member Jessica Frick points out that PHP 7.4 is slated to go End-of-Life (EOL) on November 28th of this month. You may have seen a prompt from your host to upgrade to PHP 8.0, and from what I’ve seen that is perfectly fine in most cases. Some managed hosts like Pressable and Pantheon are not forcing sites to upgrade yet, but it’s still probably better to do so (if you can) or start testing now to ensure no hiccups down the road.
I Didn't Know You Could Do That in the Block Editor
Jamie Marsland, best known as Pootlepress, has shared a trick for making overlapping blocks work painlessly in the Block Editor. Almost every site I build these days has some overlapping thing like this, so to be able to do it right in the editor is great! Also, I love his use of “old tech” in the intro of the video to explain.
Cool Tool
Each week we feature one cool tool that can help make your life easier as a WordPress builder.
Swiss Army Knife of Website Tools
Somehow this week I stumbled onto a post over at LayerWP about a giveaway of the Website Toolkit. The name sounds so generic, but as I looked further at what this toolkit does I found myself nodding my head and realizing how much I needed to try it out. This tool crawls your site for broken links or downloads, missing meta descriptions, bad redirects, broken SSL, non-cached content, and more. There’s also quite a list of improvements on the roadmap for the Toolkit that look promising.
CURATED BY  DANIEL SCHUTZSMITH. Have tech news to share? Get in touch.
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POST STATUS SPONSOR
StellarWP provides WordPress solutions for all humankind. We’re a collective of leaders interested in growing WordPress companies. We build great plugins, but we don’t stop there; we continually challenge ourselves to keep innovating and improving.
Reach out to us if you’re interested in learning more →
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COMMUNITY
What is the WordPress community capable of? A lot of good. And a few bad apples.
The Good: This week a team of people from around the world released WordPress 6.1, Misha. The number of people that contributed to this release is HUGE. Folks, WordPress takes more than a village, it takes a small city to keep the momentum moving forward, keep the technology on the cutting edge, and keep the community itself vibrant. There are literally thousands of people who bring positivity to and work hard for the WordPress community. Kudos to each and every one of them!
The Bad Apples: Usually we try to not talk about the negative things. (Well, most of us do, you all know I don’t mind shining a light where it can help, for sure.) And Mika Epstein is no different than most of us. If someone is a personal problem to one of us, it’s usually kept out of the public eye. We soldier on and do our best to ignore minor pests. But sometimes those pests aren’t just pests. Sometimes they are intent on destruction, and will use any means necessary to to attempt to accomplish that.
My hat is off to Mika for being strong through the entirety of what she has endured over years of stalking, attack, malignment, and worse, as part of her commitment to the Plugins Team. No one should ever have to go through what she has. It’s beyond brave of her to share with the community, and I, for one, am grateful that she has.
Member News & Spotlights
Upcoming Events:
CURATED BY  MICHELLE FRECHETTE. Have community news to share? Get in touch.
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▲ MAKE WORDPRESS
This is a new section of the Post Status newsletter highlighting priority topics and issues related to the WordPress project, and its contributors and teams.
WordPress 6.1 “Misha” Dropped Nov. 1
CURATED BY  COURTNEY ROBERTSON. Have Make news to share? Get in touch.
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A big thank you to our Sponsor Partners
Without our Sponsor Partners (and long-time members), Post Status wouldn’t be a feasible business. These great companies have continued to support us and work for you (say thanks when you can):
Pagely — supported us from the beginning
Gravity Forms — supported us from the beginning
GoDaddy Pro — second-year partner
WordPress VIP — first-year partner
A2 Hosting — first-year partner
StellarWP — first-year sponsor
Cloudways — first-year sponsor
Elementor — first-year sponsor
Pressable — first year sponsor
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