The split from “Matt vs WP Engine” is getting deeper, with ACF being forked as SCF and much more. On the products side, many new things this week: EchoDash, SnippetNest, Agency Toolkit, and AI Services plugin.
✅ The WP Awards 2024. Voting is delayed. This event is sponsored by: GoDaddy, 20i Hosting, Pressable, Crocoblock, WP Division, & Dynamic.ooo.
Meet SureForms – Create beautiful forms with AI, collect data, and integrate with hundreds of apps in minutes. Try the free version today.
Weglot has partnered with WooCommerce to help you seamlessly translate your online store in minutes. Start with a free 10-day trial of Weglot service.
Patchstack offers the fastest WordPress vulnerability mitigation. Protect your sites with automatic virtual patching & 48-hour early warning for new threats.
20i® Next-Gen WordPress Hosting – Blazing-fast cloud platform with free Staging, Cloning, WordPress Manager, CDN & Edge Cache. No plug-ins required!
↑ Community Sponsors supporting this weekly
What’s Buzzing in WordPress 💖
- Activity Dash Platform… Jack Arturo from WPFusion teased the upcoming EchoDash platform for the WordPress community. It enables you to view activity for every tool you use to manage your business like Stripe transactions, WooCommerce abandoned carts, Calendly bookings, and more.
- Snippets Resource… Zack Pyle has launched the Snippet Nest resource website, which features a curated collection of code snippets for ACF, Beaver Builder, Fluent Forms, WP Grid Builder, and general WordPress snippets.
- Disable Specific Block Things… Nick Diego shared code snippets for 15 things you can disable, enable or unregister in the block editor for more custom experience. Like unregister block styles, disable Openverse, set default image size, and disable access to the template editor.
- Agency Toolkit… Matt Schwartz from Inspry has created free Agency Toolkit Plugin that promises to streamline the WordPress experience with debugging and optimization tasks – thereby reducing the need for many other third party plugins.
New Plugins: CSS Avatars, AI Base, Forms, Menus
CSS Made Avatars… Giang Vi has released a handy free Leafio Letter Avatar plugin. It creates user avatars (images) using just the initial letters of the name, rendered entirely through CSS code.
AI Services Plugin… Felix Arntz has released a free open source AI Services plugin to provide base infrastructure for easier implementation of generative AI features in WordPress. Check this post for more details.
Forms in Blocks… JR Tashjian has released the OmniForm plugin, which allows you to create forms within the Block Editor. OmniForm plugin is now available in the WordPress plugins repository.
Classic Menus for Blocks… Craig Gomes shared (Links X) about the release of the free Classic Menus for Block Themes plugin. This plugin restores the legacy menu management system, allowing you to create and manage multiple menus.
Extended WordPress Buzz 🔥
- New Write & Design Modes… Gutenberg 19.4v update has added all new modes for writing and designing in the Block Editor. In the Write mode, all the layout options are hidden from the sidebar, so you can focus on writing. While in the Design mode, all options for colors, sizes, and more appear.
- Finalized WordPress 6.7 Features… Nick Diego published October 2024 summary highlighting features finalized for the WordPress 6.7 release, scheduled for November 12, 2024. Like: Block Bindings API, zoom out mode, new write and design modes, and preview dropdown extensibility.
- People of WordPress… Taco Verdo, a familiar face of Yoast SEO (now under Newfold Digital) is leaving Yoast (Links X). He is joining Emilia Capital from Marieke van de Rakt and Joost de Valk – who are the original Yoast founders, which was sold to Newfold Digital.
- New WP Executive Director… Mary Hubbard has been appointed as the new WordPress .org Executive Director. She will start on October 21, 2024, after resigning as the Head of TikTok Americas, Governance and Experience. She has worked for Automattic before, from 2020 to 2023. Check users’ discussion and Matt’s replies in the Hacker News post.
- New WP Artistic Director… Ian Stewart has been appointed as Artistic Director and product lead at WordPress .com to handle end-to-end customer experience. He has been a part of the WordPress .com team for 14 years.
- Block Plugin Rebranding… The Plus Blocks for Gutenberg plugin from the team at POSIMYTH Innovations has rebranded to Nexter Blocks and is joining other products – Nexter Theme and Nexter Extension.
- WP Anniversary Milestones… Jeff Starr is celebrating 10 years at Plugin Planet and is giving away three lifetime Pro licenses in a giveaway contest. FluentCRM is celebrating 4th birthday with tremendous growth and reaching over 50,000+ active installs.
- WP Milestones… Adam Preiser shared (Links X) that SureCart has crossed Easy Digital Downloads to become the number two Ecommerce Plugin for WordPress. Katie Keith shared (Links X) about the Barn2 Youtube channel clocking over two million lifetime views.
Buzz: WPGraphQL, SlimSEO, MaxiBlocks Go, Query Loop
WPGraphQL now Community Plugin… Jason Bahl has left WP Engine, joined Automattic, and will continue to work on WPGraphQL plugin. This will become a canonical community plugin on WordPress .org with more access to resources and possibility of merging into core in the future.
Slim SEO… the 4.0v has introduced dynamic variables feature to configure meta tags in meta title and meta description. For example, for ‘Events’ post type you can output date next to post title text in the meta title field.
New MaxiBlocks Go Theme… now available for free, MaxiBlocks Go theme is live in the themes directory. This theme comes with block patterns, full-page templates, global style cards, and customisable SVG icons.
Advanced Query Loop… Ryan Welcher has updated 3.2.0v the free Advanced Query Loop plugin with the ability to exclude posts by category and new the option to disable pagination.
Quick Bits 👍
- New Consultant Template using Greenshift & Fluent Booking.
- Core: WordPress 6.7 Beta 2 is now available for your testing.
- Insightful: Private Equity and the Soul of WordPress, by Eric.
- The Spectra builder has joined (Links X) 1 Million active club.
- The Stories of WordPress: HeroPress is celebrating 10 years!
Forking ACF to SCF, & more complex now!
Matt Mullenweg published a post titled Forking is Beautiful explaining how WordPress started as a fork. The community members are welcome to fork WordPress and mentioned the FreeWP project from Vinny Green as a fork – which is actually a news media outlet (in the making). And then came the news of ACF being forked as SCF.
ACF, Advanced Custom Fields, plugin (owned by WP Engine) has been forked (changed) to new name SCF, Secure Custom Fields. Matt Mullenweg posted about this, “This is a rare and unusual situation brought on by WP Engine’s legal attacks, we do not anticipate this happening for other plugins.”
The ACF team posted (Links X), “We have been made aware that the Advanced Custom Fields plugin on the WordPress directory has been taken over by WordPress dot org”. Iain Poulson from the ACF team shared more information, “We were saddened and appalled by Matt Mullenweg’s actions this morning appropriating the Advanced Custom Fields plugin…”.
Matt vs WP Engine: More Coverage
The login page at WordPress .org website got a new checkbox saying, “I am not affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise”.
Jack Arturo from WPFusion has filed a cease and desist (Links X) letter against Automattic and WordPress .com for unauthorized use of the WPFusion trademark on the WPFusion page at WordPress .com website.
The latest interview of Matt Mullenweg on WP Engine issue, with Auren Hoffman from World of DaaS, “There is a business called WP Engine, which many people, including my own mother, thought was WordPress Engine or officially associated with WordPress. They’ve been able to build their business to be this large on that confusion”.
Omnisend is an easy, simple to use email marketing, email newsletter, SMS marketing & automation plugin for WordPress websites.
Platform InMotion with high performance servers for serious WordPress websites, comes with hassle free deployment tools and expert support.
mySites .guru is the Ultimate Toolkit for managing multiple WordPress sites with the award winning Site Audit, Backup, Update, Secure, Monitor, & Alerting features.
Kinsta managed WordPress hosting with unparalleled speed, leveraging Google Cloud and the latest C3D servers, it ensures lightning-fast performance.
↑ Community Sponsors supporting this weekly
