Money is important, even in the WordPress ecosystem. Many folks expressed ‘their’ stand on WordPress.com announcement of offering custom websites starting from $4999. Reality check, there are cheap hosting solutions offering website builders to premium managed hosting offering tons of features – still, agencies and freelancers flourish. Let’s continue…
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Money + WordPress + Community 💖
- Starting at $4,900… WordPress DOT com is now offering custom website service. This has resulted in a few ripples in the WordPress ecosystem as seen in the comments section of WP Tavern’s post.
- More Reactions… Matt Medeiros made a passionate video, which received ‘point-wise’ reply from the official Matt (Mullenweg). Robert Jacobi summarized more ‘views’ on this heated topic. While Chris Lema emphasized ‘competition is good’, Joe Casabona explained Automattic isn’t really competing with you or me.
- Interesting… sourcewpDOTcom website has been sold by Dhiraj Das to Hubspot for over $100K, which had a good amount of list posts content bringing Google love. However, from the user perspective, such content has issues as highlighted by Ben at Layer WP.
Extended WordPress Buzz 🔥
- In the News… the popular Events Calendar plugin has been acquired by Liquid Web. Recently, they also acquired membership plugin Restrict Content Pro under iThemes brand, building a solid portfolio of plugins for agency owners. The team from All in One SEO plugin apologized for enabling auto-updates without notifying users, and the reaction was expected.
- Blocks Life… the first Gutenberg update of 2021 focus on drag & drop of block patterns from inserter to editor, upcoming UI changes for reusable blocks. Also, learning to overcome challenges when switching from page builder to the Gutenberg Blocks world.
- Let’s Learn… check this guide to understand seven important files in the WordPress theme hierarchy. Lesley Sim wrote a detailed guide for setting up a paid email newsletter on the WordPress platform (so, why Substack!).
Quick Bits 👍
- WP Scheduled Posts plugin rebranded as SchedulePress.
- Gravity Forms next beta 3 is here for massive 2.5 release.
- Rank Math added instant indexing API feature for Bing.
- Updated WP HighlightJS for 1 click code copy button.
- WP Rocket soon getting new brand identity & website.
- Kinsta teased upcoming dev tool for WordPress users.
- The full schedule of WordFest 2021: 48 sessions, 24 hours.
WordPress Be Like in next 10 years 💨
The future of WordPress is always an interesting topic to ponder over. The team at XWP summarized as: WordPress will continue to grow (with the goal of 51% share), it will become more accessible (thankfully), blocks are the future (for sure), and community will continue to grow (more connections).
