The future of the WordPress stack

It’s the WP Minute!  This episode is brought to you by FooGallery, check out their latest WooCommerce integration to start selling images right through WooCommerce, head on over to Foo.Gallery for more information! You know the drill, everything I mention here will be linked up in the newsletter and the blog post. Check out thewpminute.com for the links. News It was a blast keeping up with the breaking news last week and things are still shaking.  Alex Denning writes an interesting post about Awesome Motive’s marketing machine powering millions of dollars in revenue. He explores how it all works as separate products in a decentralized network. Go check out his take on Awesome Motive’s value of products under one umbrella. The Matt Report also has a great interview with Syed Balkhi, to recap his point of view on the acquisition of Sandhills development. All the acquisitions… It was announced that WPLandingKit is joining Themeisle. WPLandingKit is a popular plugin that lets you map domain names to individual WordPress pages within your site. Themeisle will look to incorporate this plugin with their Neve and Otter products to provide a solution for managing landing pages for WordPress. Keep your eyes peeled for new offers coming from them. Keanan Koppenhaver announced on Twitter that he acquired @WP_Pusher and @thisisbranch. In his blog, he talks about why this acquisition is so thrilling to him. WP Pusher is solid, supporting a multitude of workflows. It allows one to deploy to every WordPress host in existence.  Keenan states: As a fellow developer, I’m overjoyed at the idea of helping WordPress developers deploy their code more easily, no matter where they’re hosted and without having to resort to ...

Recently on the WPMinute, I was able to have another interview with Eric Karkovack a producer at the WPMinute about his view of the Freelancer in WordPress. Eric has been a freelancer since 1999 and knows how the changes and ups and downs can impact your business. Eric started organically in the WordPress world by coding and writing on his own blog. He had the opportunity to blog for Speckyboy for additional income. This is easy to do if you understand concepts and can contribute through documentation or a tutorial. Blogging allowed Eric to get his opinion out there and connect with people. As a freelancer, you can try this same approach with your area of expertise. There have been many topics recently in the WordPress space. For example, Plugin ownership has impacted freelancers. When the plugin changes ownership how does that impact the freelancer? How will you convert sites and determine how much to spend on maintaining these plugins? The other big area making an impact recently has been WordPress core. The challenge for WordPress freelancers has been the difficulty of navigating and following what is happening in the WordPress space. There is a big barrier with how the freelancer can educate the customer when it can take hours to navigate the updates from WordPress and other channels. When you are impacted as a freelancer in many areas, it helps to write and post about it to keep others informed. Just get out there by practicing writing and posting on social media. This is a great interview with Eric. If you take his advice, you may be able to expand a side project as a freelancer. ...

News I'm sure you've been paying attention to the war. A pro-Russian war plugin appeared in the WordPress plugin repository resulting in a lot of heated conversation on the Internet. It was finally removed by the plugin team in the WordPress repository.  Heather Burns covers a non-US perspective in her article. Weglot, a popular WordPress multilingual plugin, has raised €45M from Partech Partners. Sarah Gooding, over at the WPTavern writes how this is the first time that Weglot has taken outside capital to expand its translation services. The WordPress Performance Team has published a feature proposal that would enable WebP images by default into WordPress 6.0 core. The performance team has published their proposal over on make.wordpress.org. Events WordCamp Asia is tentatively back on the schedule of in-person WordPress events with new dates: February 17-19, 2023 in Bangkok, Thailand. It will begin with a Contributor day, followed by two conference days. From Our Contributors and Producers There is a technical discussion over on WordPress Gutenberg GitHub on the Dynamic replacement of server-provided content in blocks and in HTML attributes. The proposal uses Dynamic tokens which read like Shortcodes 2.0 but with a much better interface. If you need to manage photo/image source attributions and licenses in WordPress go check out the premium version of Image Source Control. This plugin manages and displays image credits which have been an issue for years. If you enjoy founder stories, the article is worth a couple of minutes of your time to read. Jamie Marsland submitted his 100th YouTube video on Gutenberg. If you are in search of a charity form for Gutenberg blocks for your site go check out his video. Do you want ...