Kjell Reigstad / make.wordpress.org
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Kjell Reigstad released a first peak into the new default theme Twenty Twenty-Two this week. Kjell is the lead on design and Jeff Ong is leading development. The site was built with Full Site Editing in mind.
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POST STATUS ANALYSIS
This theme is slated to be released with WordPress 5.9. That seemingly timeline is in doubt by some, but overall the theme might be one of the most attractive (in terms of function and design) default themes I’ve seen in a few years, and I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet.
Paul Maiorana / woocommerce.com
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Happy 10th anniversary to WooCommerce, which launched its first version on September 27, 2011. 🎂
WooCommerce CEO Paul Maiorana shared some highlights from WooCommerce history: 16 months after launch, the plugin had 500,000 downloads. 137 days after that, the total was 1 million. By year 5 it was acquired by Automattic. Today WooCommerce has reached 150 million+ downloads, has more than 730 official extensions and themes, 300+ team members, and it’s been translated for 66 different locales.
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POST STATUS ANALYSIS
Happy 10th anniversary to WooCommerce, which launched its first version on September 27, 2011. 🎂
WooCommerce CEO Paul Maiorana shared some highlights from WooCommerce history: 16 months after launch, the plugin had 500,000 downloads. 137 days after that, the total was 1 million. By year 5 it was acquired by Automattic. Today WooCommerce has reached 150 million+ downloads, has more than 730 official extensions and themes, 300+ team members, and it’s been translated for 66 different locales.
WooCommerce was not started from scratch — it was a fork of Jigoshop. I was about to write up a post going down memory lane, but Sarah Gooding saved me some time there — although maybe next time WordPress’s anniversary is celebrated, perhaps b2 should be mentioned in the title too. Some called the Jigoshop fork an ugly one, while others noticed it was controversial only briefly. A few thought it was even humorous.
In the end, this does prove, just like WordPress itself, that forks of GPL codebases can be successful.
— David
Brian Contreras / Los Angeles Times
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In the Los Angeles Times, Brian Contreras writes about the rise of captions in videos because so many people are watching them in silent mode.
According to Dan Greenberg, president of the ad exchange Sharethrough, company data shows that 75% of people overall, and 86% of millennials, keep their phones muted throughout the day.
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POST STATUS ANALYSIS
This is good news for people whose hearing is impaired, but sadly I don’t think accessibility for that particular segment of the population was the driving factor here. All in all, a net win though, and it shows how short attention spans are now for even video.
— David
David Bisset / Post Status Contributor
— Why are so many acquisitions happening in the WordPress space? Why now? What's the motivation to sell? How does it affect WordPress?
David Bisset / Post Status Contributor
— Some highlights and an overview of WCUS 2021 from David Bisset. Catch up on anything you missed and learn how you can get more involved in WordPress.
Felix Arntz / make.wordpress.org
— The performance impact of using jQuery in WordPress themes
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Justin Ferriman / justinferriman.com
— After a Twitter Spaces conversation hosted by Post Status, Justin Ferriman was inspired to write a post that when into a bit more detail about his decision to sell LearnDash. (We hope to have a summary of it in a few days.)
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Ashley Rich / spinupwp.com
— Caching plugins perform poorly in Nginx so Ashley Rich identifies the best ones how and explains how you can “turbocharge” them for Nginx over on the Delicious Brains blog. Ashley’s picks are WP Rocket, WP Super Cache, and W3 Total Cache.
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Post Status Slack / poststatus.slack.com
— I’m pointing to a good discussion in Post Status Slack this week about the issue brought up by Pippin Williamson in his interview with Cory Miller: are the different WordPress experiences across different managed hosts a threat to WordPress — the project, platform, and community?
If you’re a Post Status member, you should join our Slack and check this out — and say hello! 👋
—David
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Konstantin Kovshenin / wpowls.co
— Konstantin Kovshenin has a walkthrough showing you how to deploy WordPress to DigitalOcean with Sail CLI, a free and open source, command line tool that Konstantin is building. He is also looking for feedback or suggestions that will make Sail more useful for developers. It’s on my “check out” list.
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Cal Evans / www.gun.io
— Cal Evans shares his feelings about the importance of writing in your career as a software developer, how to improve your writing, and why writing will level up your career. What he means by “writing” goes beyond documentation to creative and intellectual growth:
“When you write a lot, you understand that a lot of it is crap, but you’ve got to get that crap out of your head to make room for the good stuff.”
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Shawn Wang / www.swyx.io
— Shawn Wang offers some good thoughts about where the development industry is going.
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Juliette Reinders Folmer / make.wordpress.org
— Juliette Reinders Folmer notes upcoming changes to the WordPress Core PHP test suite — which uses the industry standard PHPUnit tool to run the PHP unit tests. Juliette explains why these changes were needed. The proposed solution means the test suite would “run on all PHPUnit versions between PHPUnit 5.7.21 up to the latest release… which allows for running the test suite against all supported PHP versions using the most appropriate PHPUnit version for that PHP version.” 🧪
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Mary Job / wpafrica.org
— Congrats to Mary Job and the WordPress community in Africa for launching wpafrica.org — a focal point for business owners, developers, designers, bloggers, startups, marketers, and publishers on the continent. The site also adds that “we see a WordCamp Africa in our near future, perhaps in 3- 5 years.” We would love to see that happen. 🌍
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Konstantin Kovshenin / konstantin.blog
— Konstantin Kovshenin explains why wp_mail is “not broken” but why it might not be working for some people, and why hosts sometimes spend energy directing customs to install an SMTP plugin for their mail woes. It’s a technical post so you’ll learn a thing or two about SMTP and MTAs. 📭
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