WP Weekly 163 – Which WP

Which WordPress (.org or .com) should have what content, features, and focus considering the community aspect of the .org setup? This conflict has raised head again in a big way! Also featured in this issue: are updates from RankMath, Pods, MemberPress, GravityKit, WooCommerce, and more.

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What’s Buzzing in WordPress 💖

  • New Releases… RankMath SEO has launched the AI for WordPress service that works within the WordPress dashboard to generate SEO optimized content with the power of 40+ templates and tools. Also, MainWP has released a new Fathom Extension allowing you to view all websites Fathom analytics data within the MainWP dashboard.
  • Integration & Partnership… MemberPress plugin has added Stripe Tax integration, enabling the automatic calculation of taxes for every sale on your website. Also, GravityKit and Gravity PDF now have a strategic partnership – thereby, GravityKit is now offering PDF for GravityView as an individual product that allows users to view, download, or share single entry PDFs.
  • Got Noticed… the team at B2 has released a WordPress plugin for integrating with their B2 analytics service that measures what percentage of websites have ad blockers. Also, Pods 3.0v has released a Conditional Logic for Fields feature, allowing you to show or hide a field based on the value of another field.

Extended WordPress Buzz 🔥

  1. Dev Focus… Michelle Schulp Hunt and Matthias Hunt VSCode have created the VSCode Syntax Highlighter for intelligent FSE or Gutenberg Block Markup. Also, Matt Wiebe shared about the new ActivityPub plugin update that allows your WordPress blog to be followed in the fediverse, and receive replies back as comments.
  2. WP Perspectives… Rahul Bansal from rtCamp shared about being successful, “accountant may consider us a failure from a numerical perspective, but I will still consider it a success”. Also, Eric Karkovack exploring on how we can fix the WordPress word scramble and finalize the terminology that everyone can understand.
  3. WP Awarded… the Openverse project by WordPress for an open-source library of photos and audio has been awarded the 2023 Open Education Award for Excellence in the Open Infrastructure category. Also, Zao, WPSpins, FirstTracks Marketing, Bright Vessel, and Kelp are the winners of The WooExpert Awards, Americas, 2023.
  4. WP Milestones… Anne McCarthy is celebrating 9 years at Automattic and wrote about this journey from “trying to get a job in San Francisco to be with a person I loved and have some sense of stability financially”. Also, Thomas Griffin shared about OptinMonster’s 10 year journey and how it did not happen – almost!
  5. WP Plugin Milestones… the NotificationX plugin from the WPDeveloper team is celebrating its 5th birthday and now has over 30,000+ users worldwide. Also, the TablePress plugin has crossed another milestone of 12 million downloads; amazing!
  6. WordCamps Action… after the gap of three years, WordCamp Mumbai 2023 is happening this year on October 28, 2023. The first batch of tickets for WordCamp Asia 2024 were sold out quickly this week – I got my ticket, did you? You can wait for the next batch of tickets or purchase the Micro-Sponsor ticket. Also, the call for sponsors is now open for WordCamp Nepal 2024.

Quick Bits 👍

Which WordPress (.org or .com), and why?

John Blackbourn posted this tweet asking, “why has WordPress .com has replicated the entire WordPress .org directory on its .com domain”. Also, the .com version has the ‘free with business plan’ button instead of ‘free download’ button. Matt Mullenweg, Automattic CEO, contended this observation by saying, “this gives plugin authors greater distribution”.

This whole thing has snowballed into a really big, busy, and messy thing – read here for more aspects of this issue at the WP Tavern by Sarah Gooding (also check comments on that post).


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Upcoming Events 💬

September 27, 2023: WordPress Accessibility Day 2023, Livestreaming Free.
September 28, 2023: WordPress Web Agency AI Summit 2023, by Crocoblock.
September 28, 2023: Best Practices for Email Marketing, BlueHost online event.

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