Let’s get insightful in understanding the importance and power of Elementor in the WordPress ecosystem. Also, digging into the upcoming trends in the WordPress world in 2022 and tools stack used by a bunch of WordPress power users. Plus, all the facts and insights from the State of Word.
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What’s Buzzing in WordPress 💖
- Big & Bigger… Is Elementor the secret behind WordPress’ growth in the recent few years? Joost de Valk did a little digging to discover the importance of Elementor in the WordPress ecosystem. Justin Ferriman also highlighted the fact, Elementor’s position in the marketplace is approaching Shopify levels. And in case you did not notice, Elementor now offers Elementor Pro plugin with hosting included at $89 USD yearly pricing.
- Got Noticed… Elementor is going strong but what if you want to switch from Elementor to Gutenberg? Andrew Palmer is brewing a one click solution at Gutenberg AI for Elementor to Gutenberg conversion. Also, promising a light weight eCommerce option, North Commerce is now in the early beta along with a lifetime deal.
- Product Updates… Visual Composer 41.0 now comes with full layout builder support, meaning you can define everything within the builder like fonts, styles, and layouts. Generate Blocks is getting more power as their other ‘WP Show Posts’ plugin functionality of post query will be merged within Generate Blocks plugin, and the WP Show Posts plugin will be retired moving forward.
Extended WordPress Buzz 🔥
- WP Ecosystem… Jamie Marsland did a special video inviting a few popular faces in the WordPress ecosystem sharing tools that form their WordPress stack, an interesting watch for sure! Also, check out 22 WordPress trends and predictions for 2022, how many of them seems like a green signal for you?
- State of the Word… 2021 was full of WordPress goodness. Check the full video of the keynote which was watched online and attended by an in-person audience as Matt said, ” we had people join by plane, train, and automobile”. Courtney Robertson over at GoDaddy did an exhaustive recap of this event highlighting Gutenberg’s progress, WordPress growth, and the future.
- Winners and Winners… if you are an email subscriber, then you already know the results of ‘The WP Awards 2021’. Top 5 winners by vote count were: The Admin Bar (WordPress Community), ACF Pro (Dynamic Data Plugin), Elementor (Page Builder), Yoast SEO (SEO Plugin), and Wordfence (Security Plugin). Check full results here to see the top 3 winners in each category.
Quick Bits 👍
- Join Daniel’s new WordPress Community over at Twitter.
- Making sense of new thing called Web3 and WordPress!
- Creative Commons search engine rebranded to Openverse.
- WordPress 5.9 beta 3 is now available for your testing.
The WP Awards 2021: A Few Observations!
A few older plugins are still going strong with constant updates and improvements like Gravity Forms, ACF Pro, and Yoast SEO winning in their respective category. Gutenberg surprised a lot of people with its 2nd position and Elementor was expected to top (why not!). The hosting category had a lot of nominations and votes were split wide among them, with Cloudways at the top.
Also, the WordPress Blogs category had the expected winner WPBeginner but the second spot to Chris Lema was a surprise for some (not for me though, as I follow that blog regularly). Finally, thank you to everyone who voted and shared about The WP Awards 2021. Also, a big thanks to the following sponsors. The WP Weekly is taking a holiday break, see you next year – Happy Holidays!
