Matt and WP Engine saga continues, and various members of the WordPress community express their views and possible solutions. Also in this issue: Four new plugin launches and new features introduced in plugins like: FluentBoards, ClickWhale, WP Rocket, and WPForms.
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What’s Buzzing in WordPress 💖
- Plugin Price Hike Works… around three months back, WP Fusion raised prices by 20% on annual plans. Jack Arturo shared insights on how this price hike worked with increasing average order value from new customers and maintaining the same conversion rate.
- Top Plugins Table… Pascal Birchler has updated (Links X) the Periodic Table of WordPress Plugins. Changes for LiteSpeed Cache crossing 6+ million installs, Image Optimizer by Elemntor with 700k+ installs, and Hostinger Tools clocking over 2+ million installs.
- Loaded Gutenberg Update… Gutenberg 19.3v has a lot of things to look forward like the zoom out mode, swap the position of the publish buttons, use of custom block names in inspector controls, automatic phone number linking, and allow dropping of multiple images to the image block.
- PNG to AVIF, WebP… the Modern Image Formats plugin from the WordPress Performance Team, the 2.2.0v update has added support for converting uploaded PNG files to AVIF or WebP formats.
New Plugins: Mailer, Social, SMTP, & Invoicing
New Site Mailer Plugin… the team at Elementor has launched an independent solution for sending transactional emails. Site Mailer Plugin promises high email deliverability, and there is no need to connect or configure any third-party transactional email services.
New Social Plugin… team at Bit Apps is launching Bit Social Lifetime early bird offer from $99 on October 01, 2024. It promises to make scheduling and sharing your WordPress site content across multiple social platforms easy.
New (Rebranded) Solid Mail… the team at SolidWP has rebranded the WP SMTP plugin with over 80,000+ installs as a new Solid Mail Plugin for transactional mail integration with various third-party email services.
Invoicing Solution… Ghazi Pradana Putra, over at WPSora, has introduced Invoize pro plugin, which promises to be a powerful and feature-rich invoicing plugin for WordPress users. There is a free offer for 50 users during the early access period.
Extended WordPress Buzz 🔥
- Connecting Hosting Folks… Anne shared the proposal to create a private Slack channel performance-hosting where members from hosting companies and the performance team can have direct communication and feedback for performance issues.
- Create Gutenberg Block… Atta shared his workflow for creating a Gutenberg block, which is used as a base for creating more complex blocks, providing an easy reference and a quick starting point.
- Core Contribution Workflow… Felix Arntz published about the workflow for managing the git and SVN checkouts and committing to the WordPress Core.
- WordPress Third Parties… check all new WP Third Parties, a collection of classes and utilities that can be used to efficiently load third-party libraries into your WordPress application.
- WP Anniversary Milestone… NSquared is celebrating 10 years in the WordPress space, from launching Draw Attention in 2014 to building Simply Schedule Appointments in 2017, and now introducing AAArdvark and BlinkMetrics.
- WP Milestones… Shahjahan Jewel shared (Links X) about the journey of Fluent Forms to the 500,000+ installs milestone that started in 2018 and is still going strong. Sybre Waaijer shared (Link X) about The SEO Framework plugin clocking over 200,000+ active installs!
New In: FluentBoards, ClickWhale, WPRocket, WPForms
Fluent Boards… 1.30v has added one of the most voted roadmap requests, the Recurring Tasks Feature, that allows you to repeat tasks at a specified interval of day, week, month, or year.
ClickWhale… 2.2v has added a new Forms Block that allows you to display a form on a bio link page with the form created through a popular form plugin like Contact Form 7, Fluent Forms, Ninja Forms, and WP Forms.
WP Rocket… 3.17v has introduced Automatic Lazy Rendering feature that analyzes the page structure and detects elements where lazy rendering can be applied to faster page loading.
WPForms… adding more AI power to form building process, WPForms has added an AI Choices feature, allowing you to generate choices for a question automatically by describing the context of the question.
Quick Bits 👍
- Finally, for Divi users, Divi 5 Alpha is now available for download.
- Tutor LMS has reintroduced Lifetime Plans starting from $499.
- Novashare 1.5.4v added a share and follow button for Bluesky.
- Pressable starting plan now priced at $25 per month for 1 site.
- Core: WordPress 6.7 Beta 1 is scheduled for October 1, 2024.
- WP Trademark Policy updated, compare changes, via Matt Pritchett.
- Which companies contribute the most? WP 6.6 statistic breakdown.
WP Engine banned from WordPress Org & then!
Matt Mullenweg shared about the decision to ban WP Engine from WordPress org access. “What I will tell you is that, pending their legal claims and litigation against WordPress org, WP Engine no longer has free access to WordPress org’s resources.”
However, after two days – this ban was temporarily suspended until October 01, 2024. “We have lifted the blocks of their servers from accessing ours, until October 1, UTC 00:00. Hopefully this helps them spin up their mirrors of all of WordPress org’s resources that they were using for free while not paying, and making legal threats against us.”
Diverse Coverage from Community Members – Part 1
Mike McAlister published We are WordPress, “Sure, it may not always be the shiniest or the coolest platform of the day. And we have plenty of work to do to improve leadership, transparency, and diversity of thought.”
Brian Coords emphasized misconceptions about Matt, “The wider ecosystem provides a ton of visible value but Matt has been putting an insane amount of resources into keeping the lights on and the engine running.”
Eric Mann’s drama from sidelines, “It’s painful to watch, but will hopefully answer a lot of questions about the health of this particular part of the open source.”
Joost de Valk’s on transparency, “discuss how to better highlight companies that are contributing and how to encourage others to do so.”
Syed Balkhi’s Contributing to WordPress, “I believe that symbiotic mutualistic contributions are crucial for a healthy ecosystem because…”.
Michele Butcher-Jones’s War in WordPress, “No matter what, we have hit a time where WordPress should be more than just one person”.
Diverse Coverage from Community Members – Part 2
David McCan’s fault lines exposed, “he needs to establish clear rules for fair use for resources like access to the update servers”.
Justin Ferriman’s Matt vs WP Engine, “I think he has a higher expectation of them than the average WordPress user.”
Lawrence Ladomery’s on WordPress Marketing, “Make WordPress Marketing needs some fresh ideas, including a new mission”.
Robert DeVore’s WTF is WordPress?, “I agree with Matt on predatory practices of big money in order to further their bottom lines”.
Ryan McCue’s WP Engine Must Win, “WP Engine must win this legal battle for the continued health and vibrancy of the WordPress project”.
Anil Gupta’s taking stand for WordPress, “I’m reflecting: Is my agency, Multidots, doing enough to support and nourish the WordPress ecosystem?”.
Continued with… Video & Podcast Appearances
Matt Mullenweg joined The WP Minute live show for a few minutes, answering quick questions from the panel. He also appeared in Theo Browne’s studio for a video chat about the current saga and on the ThePrimeTime video channel discussing this situation.
Matt and many WordPress community members discussed it in a community audio call over Twitter X platform hosted by Tia Wood. Also, Andrew Palmer joined Rob Cairns in a discussion around Matt Mullenweg’s keynote and more.
All this is exhausting for everyone, including Matt (Links X), “I feel legally bullied and hurt. I feel sad for what WP Engine is doing to the WordPress and WooCommerce communities. I feel tired.”
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