Building new Themes without built-in audience is tough, reveals study. Managed WordPress and Hosted WordPress trademarks acquired. Also in this issue, brand new WordPress Plugins: Smart Creator Press and WP Consent.
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What’s Buzzing in WordPress 💖
- Hostinger Horizons… going beyond just hosting, the team at Hostinger has launched a new AI-powered product called Hostinger Horizons. It promises to turn your idea into a web app by chatting with the AI. Then test, interact, and go live with your app.
- ClassifAI… Darin Kotter shared (Links X) about the latest release of ClassifAI, the AI toolkit for WordPress, by 10up. It now includes support for Ollama AI provider, allowing you to run various AI features in WordPress, 100% local and offline, with full control over your data.
- ZipWP Custom Domains… no more random URLs for websites on ZipWP, with a new custom domains feature for blank websites, you can have a specified custom domain. This feature will soon include AI generated websites also.
New WP Plugins: SCP, Consent, Woo Cart, & Gravity
Smart Creator Press… a brand new all-in-one membership, courses, and funnels plugin. Smart Creator Press (SCP) promises to make building an online business easy for digital creators, coaches, and entrepreneurs using WordPress.
WP Consent… Syed Balkhi and team have launched the all new WP Consent plugin for cookie consent management. It allows you to create cookie banners without coding with geolocation and many other features.
Advanced Woo Cart Icon… James Koussertari over at StriveWP has released Advanced Woo Cart Icon block for full control on cart icon on your WooCommerce store. It includes 5 inner blocks for cart icon, label, total, weight & count.
Gravity Dynamic Lookup… the team at GravityKit has released a free addon Gravity Forms Dynamic Lookup for Gravity Form users. It enables you to dynamically populate field choices with Gravity Forms entry data or WordPress users.
Integrations: Breakdance, SlimSEO, AnalyticsWP
Breakdance + AnalyticsWP… 2.3.1v has added built-in integration for AnalyticsWP in Breakdance builder, which includes an AnalyticsWP Event element that supports two different event triggers that add additional information to a user’s journey.
Slim SEO… 4.4.0v update has added integration with the Breakdance builder which enables the Slim SEO plugin to parse content from Breakdance for generating meta description.
Extended WordPress Buzz 🔥
- Faster WordPress… Felix Arntz shared how Speculative Loading feature in WordPress 6.8 can lead to near-instant page load times by loading URLs before the user navigates to them. This feature uses Speculation Rules API which ascertain which kinds of URLs to prefetch or prerender, and how early such speculative loading should occur.
- SEO & Events Calendar… the team at The Events Calendar plugin has implemented SEO improvements, suggested by Joost de Valk. Like 404 header for month, day, and week views when there are no events, no-index in the calendar’s month and week views.
- Gutenberg Update… 20.3v added option to ignore sticky posts in query loop and the social icons block now comes with the option to add a Discord icon.
- Acquisitions Train… Rogier Lankhorst shared (LinkedIn) about the acquisition of privacy friendly analytics plugin, Burst Statistics, by the team at UpdraftPlus. Last year, Rogier also sold Complianz and Really Simple SSL.
- WP Milestones.. in a very short time, SureForms plugin has rocketed to 100K users, with 50k to 100k users added in just 34 days. Also, in just 3 months of time, the Fluent Community plugin is now powering (Links X) over 3000+ community websites.
Updates: Elementor Addon, Woo Bookings, Novashare
Charts Widget for Elementor… PowerPack Addons for Elementor has introduced Advanced Charts Widget for Elementor users. It allows you to display seven chart types like: Line, Bar (Vertical & Horizontal), Radar, Doughnut, Pie, Polar Area, and Bubble Charts.
Booking & Appointment plugin… 7.3.0v has added a filter to modify the resource field within the Search Product Availability widget, allowing it to function as a search field instead of a dropdown.
Novashare… 1.5.9v added new location follow button ideal for Google/Apple maps and location pages. It has also added support for image pin buttons to appear on images inside Bricks editor content.
Quick Bits 👍
- Core: WordPress 6.8 Beta 1 now available – help test WP 6.8v.
- Automattic Special Projects website for inspiration and plugins.
- Matt on real cost of security for WordPress websites & options.
- Let’s Learn
- How to customize WordPress embeds to match with your theme.
- Plugin Dev: Improve custom WordPress Plugins with Plugin Check.
- CSS: First look of functions in CSS (YouTube) by Dmitry Mayorov.
- Career Moves
- Yashwardhan joined GoDaddy as Associate Marketing Manager.
- Robert DeVore joined Fueled + 10up as a Senior Web Engineer.
Stats & Analysis: State of WordPress Themes!
Dumitru Brinzan analyzed data from over 1,700 themes released on WordPress org throughout 2024, which are active on 481,560+ websites in total. Only 6 themes surpass 10,000 active installations and 8 themes exceed 5,000 active installations.
Concluded, “… reality is that most new themes struggle to attract enough users to move beyond the lower tiers. This isn’t surprising, but it’s still discouraging for new developers hoping to make a meaningful impact without a built-in audience”.
Lawrence Ladomery looked at two years’ worth of Make WordPress Themes Trac data, and found – 70% of Themes published are Classic Themes but FSE Themes are growing. Looking at the “wordpress theme” keyword, demand has dropped dramatically over the last 10 years, but the keyword search volume is still pretty high: 67K in the US and 422K globally.
Trademarks: Managed WordPress & Hosted WordPress
Rae Morey has reported that The WordPress Foundation has secured trademark registrations for “Managed WordPress” and “Hosted WordPress” in the United Kingdom (February 7, 2025) and Australia (February 20, 2025 – here and here).
Also, in various other countries / jurisdictions like the United States, European Union, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand – the trademark application is under processing.
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