On the latest WP Minute, we delve into the release of WordPress 6.4 RC 2, potential implications for the WordPress professional community, and a spotlight on the upcoming Twenty Twenty-Four theme. Is it set to revolutionize the market?  The episode also touches upon the challenges in the WordPress arena – from declining sponsorship dollars for media to the broader perception of WordPress among end users. Moreover, the episode delves into the nuances of the WordPress market and the potential...

WordPress 6.4 is coming packed full of 100+ performance updates, along with some minor iterative changes to the overall UI. In a recent YouTube video, I took a look at RC1 available now to demo. Now’s your chance to dive in ahead of time and see what changes are coming, for either you or your clients. The biggest impact will be the new Twenty Twenty Four theme, which I’ve also previewed on the channel, but sans the Google Font management feature we were all looking forward to. Fret not, if...

WordPress.org briefly introduced 1-click plugin previews this week. If you found yourself looking at the plugin page on the world’s largest directory this week you could enter the official WordPress playground to explore what the plugin had to offer. The first problem? Well, it didn’t work. This sent authors scrambling to understand why their plugins weren’t working or more generally making the case for why this lead to a worse experience overall for the end user. The root of the issue,...

The dust is settling on the Ollie theme’s onboarding experience, which was set to be included in the theme’s core functionality when author, Mike McCalister, submitted it to the theme repo. The onboarding experience bucked the trend of traditional themes and included additional functionality like an onboarding wizard, building pages with the click of a button, and embedding helpful content. You can see a walkthrough of it in my video on YouTube. This was viewed as innovative and something...

I recently had the opportunity to chat with WP Minute Editor, Eric Karkovack, about some new services we are launching to better help WordPress product owners. Eric has been creating content for WordPress developers and designers for over a decade. But with recent shifts in the publishing landscape, he wanted to find new ways to serve WordPress brands by simplifying their complex products. So Eric has launched WP Product Writeup – a service to create high-quality, easy to understand white...

Hey it’s Matt from the WP Minute.  Did you know there’s a professional group of WordPress’ers excited to meet you? If you’re looking for a more casual WP Slack membership to join, chat about the news, and share your own content with our audience —  consider joining the WP Minute membership for $79/year.  Get access to our group of merry WordPress bandits and help support our show. Head to thewpminute.com/support to join.  ## Your 5 minutes of WordPress this week **RepoGate** Well, I’m glad...

At the time of this publication, thirty-thousand plus eyeballs have landed on John Blackbourn’s tweet that has sparked an event that goes well-beyond #WPDrama this week. It seems WordPress.com has publicly replicated the .org plugin pages. My peers at WP Tavern and The Repository have covered the many aspects of this debacle. I’m out of energy this week for anything more in-depth, so I’ll leave you with these two things: Listen to my latest interview with Jon Clark of StellarWP. We’re...

If you missed out on WordCamp US 2023, today’s episode will share some of the highlights from the talks of Matt Mullenweg and Josepha Haden Chomphosy. I urge you to watch the entirety of their presentations, but to also tweet at us to share your thoughts on the future of WordPress. Clips include Mullenweg’s outlook to WordPress 6.4 and Twenty Twenty Four theme. What does WordPress and Collaboration look like? WordPress will look different soon A collab of LMS plugin providers takes...

There’s a solid batch of headlines this week that I think you’ll find interesting before you head out to WordCamp US next week. Speaking of, if you’re headed to WordCamp next week, be sure to say hi! I’d love to hear more about your experiences with the WP Minute and any feedback you might have. The entire WP Minute squad will be there like Me, Eric, and Raquel. Equalize Digital is blasting off into outer space — literally! NASA selected Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker for automated...

We have a packed episode today chock full of WordPress news goodness, including some audio clips from Courtney Robertson, Jeff Chandler, and Rich Tabor sharing what they love about WordPress 6.3.  First up, Aurooba Ahmed shared her new project wphelpers.dev which gives you a snazzy UI for all core WordPress blocks and their functionality.  You can expand each block and peel back the JS-y goodness that each block is powered by. Direct link right to the GitHub repo, and more developer features....

In this episode of the WP Minute podcast, host Matt discusses various WordPress news and topics. He starts by highlighting a WordPress.com initiative to encourage people to transfer their domain registration from Google Domains to WordPress.com. Matt also talks about a joint effort by open source projects, including WordPress, to raise concerns about the proposed Cyber Resilience Act in the European Union. He mentions an article about the new WordPress editor, Gutenberg, and concludes by...

If you're sick and tired of the WordPress dashboard, maybe you want to give Eric's post, The WordPress Dashboard Needs Some Love, a read. Also in today's episode, I'm reminding you about our other podcast feed The WP MInute+, a free podcast that covers the long form WordPress discussions like my old podcast, The Matt Report. The conversation I just published featuring CliftonWP highlights a lot of what a modern day WordPress entrepreneur is thinking in this fast paced iteration of our...

There are a lot of exciting features coming to WordPress 6.3 which will set the tone for the next few years of our favorite CMS. We’ll explore the upcoming state of this new release and provide some thoughts on which demographic of WordPress user it’s shaping to serve. As always, please share this on social and be sure to join the newsletter. The Not-So-Nice Side of the WordPress Community The WordPress community, like any other, has its share of negative behaviors and incidents. While the...

Matt explores some of the more challenging aspects of the WordPress project, in today's episode. With so many parts of the project being planned or already underway, the challenge to keep up with the software's evolution might become rather difficult. Pointing to a WordCamp talk from Courtney Robertson "We are they" Matt provides a bit of a public service announcement to dealing with the upcoming changes. Read this week's news updates on the website. ★ Support this podcast ★

In this WP Minute podcast episode, Matt discusses changes in WordPress. He focuses on a feature called the Command Palette. This used to be known as the Wayfinder. Matt talks about how this is similar to things you can find in Apple's Spotlight and Descript Notion. He also looks at the competition between WordPress and new platforms like Wix and Squarespace. Then, Matt talks about what it's like to run a WordPress news site. He shares his experience trying to work with WordCamp, but getting...

Apple Journals & Day One | Matt Mullenweg Important Takeaways: Apple announced its own Journal app at WWDC, which competes with Automattic’s product, Day One. Day One has a few advantages over Apple’s Journal app. One of them is the upcoming feature of Shared Journals, which allows fully end-to-end encrypted shared private journals with friends and family. Another advantage of Day One is its cross-platform availability. Unlike Apple’s Journal app, which is limited to Apple devices, Day...

We’re slapping the beta label on it! For the summer, we’re experimenting with a new format to the podcast and the newsletter. In the past, I’ve talked about the cost of curating and commenting on the weekly cycle of WordPress news. The cost is starting to catch up, sponsors want more, and the audience is falling out of interest. We’re experimenting with delivering your the links our team and members have curated throughout the week, with a podcast episode from contributing members. This...

We have to start this week’s news with coverage of WordPress’ 20th birthday. Our beloved CMS officially reached the milestone on Saturday, May 27. Dozens of celebratory events were held around the world. You can even sign an online birthday card as part of the #WP20 From Blogs to Blocks campaign. Meanwhile, there is some special content worth checking out. First, WordPress co-founders Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little joined Drupal founder Dries Buytaert for a conversation on open source, AI,...

The hot topic this week was diversity. More specifically, how it relates to the upcoming WordCamp Europe speaker lineup. After the event announced its fifth round of speakers, StellarWP’s Michelle Frechette took to Twitter with the following observation: “So far only 25% of the speakers announced for #WCEU are women (by name/photo), and only three appear to be non-white. Hoping to see some more inclusion in the next few rounds of announcements.” What followed were some heated comments -...

Results from the WordPress 2022 Annual Survey have been released. WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy notes that this was a slimmed down version of the survey. It featured 29 questions - as opposed to nearly 100 in past editions. This led to a 26% increase in completion rate. However, there was also a 56% decrease in overall submissions. Among the highlights of this year’s results: 53% of respondents say they’ve used the Block Editor. Meanwhile, the Classic Editor saw a 25%...

On May 27, 2023, WordPress will celebrate its 20th birthday. It’s hard to fathom that the software has been around for so long. Yet some of us may struggle to remember what the web was like without it. Just think of the designers, developers, and users that have come along during these past two decades. A whole generation has had easy access to content management and nearly-endless customization. Lucky them! As a more experienced (ahem, old) freelancer, I can recall the challenge of building...

It looks like the days of automatically sharing WordPress.com content to Twitter are over. Automattic announced that customers will no longer be able to auto-publish to Twitter via the Jetpack Social plugin. You may recall that WordPress.com’s access to the Twitter API was suddenly suspended in April. While it eventually came back online, changes to Twitter’s policies have made the continued use too expensive. Automattic says that Twitter’s price increase is “prohibitive for us to absorb...

Managed WooCommerce hosting is a growing segment within the WordPress ecosystem. And it has a new entrant: WooCommerce. The Automattic-owned eCommerce provider recently launched WooExpress. The service is hosted by WordPress.com. It aims to be a one-stop shop for building and maintaining an online store. Packages start at $40 per month with discounts for paying annually. A selection of pre-installed extensions and themes are included. Sarah Gooding of WP Tavern reports that WooExpress’...

It’s the WP Minute!   Support independent WordPress news like this, join the Slack membership, or purchase a classified listing in the weekly newsletter at thewpminute.com/support    And now a word from our sponsor.   You know how it goes, everything I mention here will be linked up in the newsletter and the blog post. Check out thewpminute.com for the links. Most Impactful The uncertainty surrounding social media providers like Twitter has sparked interest in alternatives. Mastodon and other...

Do you remember what made WordPress 5.6 so historic? It was the first version of the software produced by an all-woman and non-binary release squad. And it looks like history is about to repeat itself. WordPress 6.3 is scheduled to be released in July and will once again feature an all-women and non-binary squad. Project Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy made the announcement and shared an outline for those interested in contributing. The momentum for this reprisal can be traced back...