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This week in WordPress
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WordPress passes 40%
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"The only thing that grows faster than #Bitcoin is the % of @WordPress websites on the Internet 💚" tweets WordPress retainers agency DevriX. WebDevStudios CEO Brad Williams adds, "WordPress growth in 2020 is INSANE! +4.3% market share in a year and 40% market share overall! 💪🏼💪🏼💪🏼 …but yeah, it's only good for blogs 🤪 KIDDING!!!"
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Meanwhile, Morten Rand-Hendriksen, a senior staff author at lynda.com at LinkedIn, warns, "As #WordPress reaches 40% market share of websites running a CMS, the web faces the risk of monopolization and monoculture. For the open source CMS landscape to thrive, we need healthy competition. Overspecialize, and you breed in weakness."
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We'll give the last word to web consultant Groei Genoten: "Looks like W3Techs can use a new fresh responsive #WordPress website too 😉"
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On Twitter, Ellipsis Marketing founder Alex Denning says, "Tough spot for Elementor: previously the max order value for their plugin customers was $199, and they realise they're providing significantly more value for some customers and need to get this higher. Higher prices make sense and will probably work out, but tough short term."
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"Elementor announced a new pricing structure this week and the internet overreactions are borderline hilarious," tweets Augie De Blieck Jr, creator and writer of PipelineComics.com. 'Capitalism is broken,' claims one pundit, because Elementor is now charging the breathless amount of $1 per site for the power users. Those greedy bastards…."
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Automattic acquires Parse.ly
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In this week's acquisition news, WordPress VIP Buying Content Analytics Firm Parse.ly. That's Allison Prang's headline at The Wall Street Journal. It is parent company Automattic's first large enterprise software acquisition. The deal will give WordPress VIP's enterprise customers access to Parse.ly's insights to measure and in turn improve their content.
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On his blog, Matt shares a comment Parse.ly co-founder Andrew Montalenti posted back in 2012 about distributed companies. This week, Andrew tweets, "It's a big day at @parsely. But an even bigger day for the open web. We're joining @WordPressVIP & @Automattic to bring content analytics to every company. A shared fully distributed team culture. A shared focus on innovation. This is gonna be fun. 🚀""
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Also, "@WordPressVIP is acquiring content analytics company @parsely, changing its name to WordParseVIPly*," tweets Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab, adding, "*second part not technically true."
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Matt Medeiros vs Matt Mullenweg
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After Matt Medeiros took aim at Matt Mullenweg in January over WordPress.com's custom website service in his YouTube video #ispellitwordpressnow, the pair chatted it out this week. During their hour-long discussion, Matt Mullenweg defended Automattic's decision to make $4,900 websites, saying "Automattic entering a place generally grows the market." He cites WordPress VIP as an example where its presence has "been a big contributor" to the growth and scale of enterprise businesses like 10up.
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The pair also cover "blue collar digital workers" — aka implementors or website builders — who Matt Medeiros believes control the undercurrent of WordPress' adoption but "don't seem to be very valuable in this community." Matt Mullenweg says implementors aren't prominent in core discussions and he feels a personal responsibility to represent them, adding "Gutenberg itself was largely in response to what I was hearing from" freelance web developers and agencies.
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The WordPress Core Team has released version 9.9 of Gutenberg. It's the 99th release of the plugin and will be the latest version bundled into WordPress 5.7. Automattic JavaScript engineer and core contributor Robert Anderson says the team has been hard at work implementing Full Site Editing (FSE), Global Styles, the Navigation block, and the Widgets screen, along with plenty of bug fixes and enhancements.
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In other WordPress news...
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- WordPress 5.7 Beta 2 is now available for testing. The final release of WordPress 5.7 is expected to ship on March 9, just four weeks away.
- Is it realistic to release full-site editing within the next five months? "In my view, no," says Human Made Principal Engineer Fränk Klein, who also runs WP Development Courses. He sets out his arguments in Should Full-Site Editing be in WordPress 5.8?
- More 2020 reviews: MailPoet co-founder Kim Gjerstad shares what happened during a big year for the email plugin, including joining WooCommerce. Ryan McCue, Director of Product at Human Made, shares how Altis turned one year old during a big year for the nascent enterprise platform.
- The gatsby-source-wordpress plugin, Gatsby Cloud's official WordPress integration, has been marked stable as of v4 and released to the public. As Sarah Gooding explains at WPTavern, the plugin sources data from WordPress for headless setups that use Gatsby on the frontend. It's a rewrite of Gatsby's previous source plugin and works in combination with the WPGatsby plugin to integrate content preview and incremental builds from Gatsby Cloud.
- Newspack, a Google News and WordPress.com initiative, has published a showcase of 60 news sites running on the platform. Sarah Gooding reports WordPress.com announced its plans to build the Newspack CMS two years ago and successfully signed on more than 50 sites in its first year. The cloud-based platform is open source and highly customized to generate revenue for small to medium-sized publications.
- Sarah Gooding also reports that WP Engine is deepening its investment in headless WordPress with the creation of a new team dedicated to furthering the technology that developers rely on when opting for this architecture. The hosting company has hired WPGraphQL creator and maintainer Jason Bahl as part of this team and will be investing in more engineers and other roles to support decoupled setups.
- WP Feedback has rebranded as Atarim after transitioning from a standalone plugin to a cloud-based SaaS (software as a service) platform, reports Justin Tadlock. After launching WP Feedback 18 months ago, founder Vito Peleg says the evolution has been in response to user needs and feedback.
- GoDaddy Pro has launched the Hub, a dashboard that brings together all of its products, pro-specific tools, and solutions, writes Justin Tadlock. The platform is aimed at web developers and designers, providing a central location to manage client work.
- Wordfence is urging users of the NextGen Gallery plugin to update to the latest version after discovering two Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerabilities. The popular image gallery plugin is installed on more than 800,000 websites. Ram Gall, a threat analyst at the security company, acknowledged the plugin's publisher, Imagely, for its fast and professional response when made aware of the security flaws.
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