The WordPress world lost one of its shining stars. I was really shocked to know, Puneet Sahalot lost his life in a car accident on Sunday. His company, Ideabox was behind a lot of amazing WordPress products like PowerPack for Beaver Builder and Elementor.
Just 2 days back, their whole team was excited about the launch new plugin for Oxygen Builder. He was one of the few people I met in real life, a very kind and gentle person gone too soon. Another reminder, life is fragile – live in today!
This week, WIX noise was all over the WordPress community. But there was also music of WordPress goodness like surprise acquisition, faster Astra, celebrity WordPress websites, and a few lifetime deals that actually look good.
WPcomplete helps student track their course progress. It also works with popular membership and course plugin making it all easy for course students.
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What’s Buzzing in WordPress 💖
- Big News… surprising everyone, iThemes has acquired Kadence theme, Kadence blocks, and other plugins. Kadence brand will run independently but these products will also be available to iThemes Agency Bundle members. Also, iThemes will sunset its legacy themes and builder by end of 2022, as Kadence will replace it.
- Speed on Target… Astra theme 3.3 version is out with a focus on performance like reduced HTML & CSS markup, replaced icons with SVG icons, and twice as fast customizer. It also added a new toggle menu button option for desktop view. The next 3.4 and 3.5 version will also heavily focus on performance improvements.
- Interesting Stuff… like exploring popular options for accepting bitcoin payments on your WordPress website. Also, check websites of popular celebrities like Naomi Campbell, Tiger Woods, Usain Bolt, Katy Perry and more powered by WordPress.
Extended Wix WordPress Buzz 🔥
- Wix Talkies… was full-on in the WordPress ecosystem (that was the motive?). So, Wix sent Bose headphones to a few ‘prominent’ WordPress people (like, like, like, like). Besides headphones, the package had a QR code that opened a video ‘trashing’ WordPress. WP Tavern covered this story and do check comments there!
- Wix Put in Place… as expected, this angered a lot of people in the WordPress ecosystem. Matt Mullenweg wrote a strong-worded post with the title, Wix and their dirty tactics to put things in perspective. On the bright side, you can win free headphones from
WIXWordPress through Chris Lema’s free headphones giveaway contest. - Going Away… the cart abandonment solution Jilt is discontinuing support for the EDD plugin (not sure why!). Moving on, Easy Digital Downloads now officially recommend Recapture as EDD’s cart abandonment solution for its users.
- Dev Focus… an example for everyone on how ‘not’ to monetize a free plugin after an acquisition like in the case of ‘one click demo import’ plugin. Also, still in the early days, can serverless hosting for WooCommerce websites tackle the worry of resource spikes?
Quick Bits 👍
- Genesis simple edits & FAQ plugins are closing soon.
- Snippet to turn off reusable blocks in the blocks editor.
- Serverbolt has launched accelerated domains service.
- Hallway Chats podcast is joining HeroPress family.
- WordPress 5.7.1 Release Candidate 1 available for testing.
- WordCamp Europe, call for speakers close Apr 24, 2021.
Baked WordPress Stash on Appsumo 💰
As of now, out of 100+ deals for WordPress products on Appsumo, three baked / established products are getting a lot of attention. MetaBox for custom data handling (ACF alternative), WP Courseware for building courses (though quite recently, this has been in the ecosystem for a long time), WP Compress for automatic image optimization (been there and adding a lot of enhancements). Which is your pick for addition to your WordPress stash?
