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This week in WordPress
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The countdown is on to WordPress 6.0 next week
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For some analysis, the WooCommerce Roundtable Dives Into WordPress 6.0 on the Do the Woo podcast, featuring WooCommerce Partner Marketer Ronald Gijsel, OSTraining CEO Robbie Adair, Cloudways Director of WordPress Robert Jacobi, and XWP Senior Product Designer Tammie Lister.
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If you haven't yet checked out what WordPress 6.0 looks like, PootlePress owner Jamie Marsland shares short demos of the most important features for site builders in his video WordPress 6: The Most Exciting Update Ever?
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Also, "Can you believe core contributors have already started bug scrubs for 6.1? I guess you can never start too soon," says Birgit Pauli-Haack in the Gutenberg Times Weekend Edition 215.
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Meanwhile, "What's trending among the #FSE themes in the theme directory?" tweets Carolina Nymark, a Yoast-sponsored core contributor, who shares some of the trends she's seeing with full-site editing themes in the WordPress repository. Her thread covers data like common color slugs, version of theme.json used, font-size slugs, and even common blocks styled in theme.json.
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Does WordPress market share matter?
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Bisset and Post Status Editor Dan Knauss followed up the podcast with a tidy summary of the market share debate: Does Market Share Matter?
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"WordPress is and will continue to be the dominant CMS on the web. Even if market share is shrinking, there isn't going to be a single player CMS that will usurp WordPress. (WooCommerce is a different story)," tweets Christina Warren, Sr Dev Advocate at GitHub, who adds, "For better or worse, WordPress is the Windows of CMSs."
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Edupack CEO Blake Bertuccelli, tweets, "WordPress' shrinking market share is our chance to streamline internet resources and promote #opensource with MEGA-NETWORKS."
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WP Mainline's Jeff Chandler tweets, "WordPress marketshare drops a bit, mass hysteria ensues. I'm on the scene and all of the anti Gutenberg people are pointing at WordPress folks and chanting "see, I told you so". Meanwhile, We all know WordPress ain't getting to 50% without Jetpack." He links to Sarah Gooding's 2015 article How Important is Jetpack on WordPress' Road to 50% Market Share? at WPTavern.
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Meanwhile, "I start doing something not WordPress for my day job in late January, market share starts declining in February. Coincidence? 🤔" tweets WordPress OG lead developer Helen Hou-SandÃ, who's now the Senior Software Engineering Manager for GitHub's Special Projects team.
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Business Spotlight: LearnDash
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LearnDash is taking cutting-edge e-learning methodology and infusing it into WordPress. We're trusted to power the learning programs for major universities, small to mid-size companies, startups, entrepreneurs, and bloggers worldwide.
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Is WordCamp US sponsorship too expensive?
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After WordCamp US put a call out for sponsors last week, GiveWP founder Devin Walker questioned the high cost, tweeting, "‘This year's event will bring together 650 members of the WordPress community.' Fewer attendees, more expensive sponsors. Would you spend $30-60k to sponsor and only reach 650 people in person?"
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WordCamp US organizer Cate deRosia tweets, "For WCUS, I know the smaller attendance was factored into sponsor prices. There are too many different factors to compare WCUS to WCEU."
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"Hell no. 😂 just show up in your team swag and shake hands. Sponsoring WCs had negative ROI," tweets LearnDash founder Justin Ferriman, to which Walker replies, "There's ROI at WCs if done right I believe. Measuring it is another thing entirely. For this camp though I'm not so sure. The actual number of people you're targeting is actually less than 650 seeing as a good hundred or so of those folks would be sponsors anyways."
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WordCamp US organizer Kathy Drewien tries to explain, tweeting, "#WCATL and #WCMIA both have significantly lower venue costs than #WCUS 2022 for a similar number of participants. We, the [WordCamp US] organizer team, believe the quality of attendee/sponsor interaction will be greater this year."
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But ultimately…. "I don't know the answer to the question, but I'm enamored by that bald guy in the featured image. They attract good lookin' folks to that event," tweets Ben Meredith, Director of Customer Service & Support at LiquidWeb.
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Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship to be awarded this year
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After a two-year hiatus due to Covid-19 and the ban on major WordCamps, the WordPress Foundation's Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship returns in 2022.
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The scholarship honors the late Kim Parsell, a much-loved contributor to the WordPress Docs Team who was affectionally known in the community as #wpmom.
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The scholarship is awarded to someone who identifies as a woman, is a WordPress contributor, has never attended WordCamp US before, and needs financial help to attend.
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Since the scholarship wasn't awarded in 2020 and 2021, there will be three scholarships awarded this year for 2022, 2021, and 2020. Applications close on June 26, 2022.
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#WPCommunityFeels: Alice Orrù
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This week, what's inspiring Alice Orrù, a multilingual content writer and translator with a penchant for accessibility, software localization, and WordPress. Alice created Ojalá, the first newsletter in Italian about inclusive and accessible communication.
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A podcast worth listening to: Short Cuts by Josie Long. I started listening to this podcast during the first lockdown of 2020. It’s based on short sound documentaries, stories of people from everywhere, and the sounds of the environment surrounding the people being interviewed have a prominent place. It feels like you're there with them. Maybe that's what made me fall in love with this podcast: it allowed me to travel and listen to people as if we were having coffee together at a time when it was impossible to do so.
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A concept worth understanding: There is no inclusion without accessibility. These days the term inclusive is all over the place, and everything claims to be inclusive: from language to marketing campaigns, from movies to events to architecture... But too often we forget that what is not accessible to all people, including those with a disability, cannot be called inclusive.
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A Twitter account worth following: Alexa Heinrich (@HashtagHeyAlexa) is a social media strategist and speaker specializing in accessibility. I really like what she does and how she says it. Plus she is really generous in her sharing of free resources for anyone who wants to learn how to use social media in a more accessible way.
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An article worth reading: The Pudding's articles would all be worth reading, actually, because they are wonderful and enhanced with incredible data viz! This piece in particular explains very effectively how newspapers offer an often distorted representation of women: When Women Make Headlines.
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A habit worth forming: Reading is my best habit, so I’d say: read something new every day, whether it's a few pages of a novel, an essay, a graphic novel, or an in-depth article from a newspaper you appreciate!
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Contributing to WordPress Accessibility
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All this month, we've been talking about accessibility on the web. From accessible content to SEO and social media, this all-too-important topic doesn't get nearly the attention it deserves. With our final meetup of May, we thought we'd bring in some real experts—experts that rely on your accessibility efforts to navigate the web and use the products you create!
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In this session about contributing to WordPress accessibility, team reps for the WordPress Accessibility Team, Alex Stine and Joe A. Simpson Jr., join us to discuss the benefits of contributing to the WordPress project and ways that you can get involved. Even if you don't write code or have the time to devote to ongoing accessibility work, you can help out by testing new iterations of WordPress—a win-win for the project and for your clients!
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RSVP to learn more about the WordPress Accessibility Team and testing future release of WordPress!
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This free virtual event is presented by GoDaddy Pro and will take place on Wednesday, May 25, 2022.
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In other WordPress news...
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- Should Automattic purchase, or at least become a primary funder of, Mozilla? "Would happily do it," was WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg's reply when asked by Michael Beckwith, Products/Support Engineer at WebDevStudios, this week.
- The WordPress Briefing's latest episode features Joe Devon, a co-founder of Global Accessibility Awareness Day, to chat about open source and accessibility. Devon discusses the importance of usability and empathy as they relate to making materials accessible for all.
- WordPress Accessibility Day, a separate occasion with similar goals, has been announced for November 2-3. Join for a free, 24-hour virtual conference focused on building accessible websites in WordPress.
- As Eric Karkovack puts it, creating a professional-grade WordPress site often relies on fitting themes, plugins, and custom code together. The WP Minute writer's latest opinion piece points out that this creates a number of "licensing woes" for freelancers, who have to pass on licensing information (and fees) to clients once the project is over.
- Earlier this year, WooCommerce announced its plan to produce an MVP of custom order tables by Q3. Now it's calling for developers, agencies, and hosting companies to test migration to its first implementation of customer order tables.
- WordPress started as a way to make blogs, which means newcomers to WordPress sometimes have a hard time using it to create fleshed-out websites. Destiny Kanno, co-organizer of BlackPress, is hosting a virtual meetup on May 26 that will help participants gain the confidence and tools they need to make a website, not a blog.
- Last month the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team disclosed a set of vulnerabilities in the Jupiter and JupiterX Premium themes (as well as the required JupiterX Core companion plugin) that allowed any user to become an administrator. The developers quickly addressed the issue, and Wordfence is now recommending users update to the latest patched version to remove the vulnerabilities.
- In other security news, Wordfence is also tracking a large-scale attack against a Remote Code Execution vulnerability in Tatsu Builder. At least a quarter of remaining installations are still vulnerable—if you have the free or premium version of Tatsu Builder, update today!
- Convesio is expanding into Europe with Convesio.nl, a Dutch version of the site. The content of the website has been fine-tuned to the specific needs of companies in the Netherlands.
- The Welch News single-handedly keeps journalism alive in its tiny West Virginia county—and it uses WordPress to do it. Tyler Channell, creator of the PaywallProject, helped The Welch News take its content virtual with a shiny new WordPress site, which you can now read about at WPTavern.
- Patterns, or collections of blocks that can be saved and reused, can be tricky to work with. Ana Segota (a self-taught WordPress designer) and Kelly Choyce-Dwan (who helped Automattic build the Pattern Directory and Creator) joined WPTavern's Jukebox podcast to discuss using the Creator and submitting your own patterns to share with others.
- WordPress NYC is hosting a series of meetups on modern, privacy-respecting analytics and how to leverage first-party data. Here are the dates and how to sign up!
- Marc Benzakein, operations manager of ServerPress, joined WPwatercooler to discuss sunsetting WPSiteSync. Listen to last week's episode to learn what went into their tough decision-making process.
- Podcaster, co-founder, and community engagement professional Michelle Frechette has organized a lot of events in her lifetime. In a new Post Status blog post, Michelle offers some key tips on how to be a good event organizer… or speaker, or attendee.
- Sucuri is investigating a massive adware campaign that redirects site visitors to third-party web addresses. You can read about the investigation (and take steps to mitigate vulnerabilities on your own site) in Sucuri's latest blog post.
- Is WordPress hurtling toward a closed-source future? In a new opinion piece, MasterWP's Spencer Forman points out key differences in the WordPress community's sense of wonder between now and 16 years ago.
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