Stormy days for WordPress

The community movement

– 159 employees left Automattic: Matt asked Automattic employees to leave the company if they do not resonate with the CEO's decisions and vision with an Alignment offer, 159 people took the offer and resigned (8.4% of the company).

– Big changes ahead: former Executive Director of the WordPress project, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, is among the 159 people that left Automattic last week, here's her goodbye post, many other key roles left the company.

– WP Engine lawsuit against Automattic: Automattic responded to WP Engine complaint. In case you've missed the whole story there's a good recap on The Verge journal and another good one on CNBC.

– The first WordPress Online Hackathon: AnyoneCanWP participation topics have been disclosed, submissions will start on October 11, participation is free and there are many great prizes to win (3k $ is the first prize!).

– Plugins review waitlist has reached 0, congratulations to the team!

WordPress 6.7 – What to expect

The biggest changes coming to WordPress 6.7:

• Improved Data Views for navigating templates and pages in the Site Editor.
• A new Zoomed out view to easily add new patterns to a page or a template.
• The new Twenty Twenty-Five theme that promise to be highly flexible and with a wide range of pre-designed patterns.
• Block Binding: there will be a basic UI that allows you to connect attributes with custom fields to their binding sources, directly in the block editor.
• Fluid typography will be now available in the style settings of the site editor.

WP Minute has a good short video about these highlights.

An we can expect many other improvements in different WordPress areas.

The scheduled release date for WordPress 6.7 is November 12 and now is the perfect time to test the beta version. You can do it directly via this WordPress playground link.

Quick info 👍

• WordPress Playground now allows you to launch and manage multiple playground instances directly into your browser.
• The WordPress sustainability team published their meeting recap (September 27), interesting project to add a sustainability plugin in core WordPress following the Green Web Foundation guidelines.
• WordPress State of the Word is going to take place in Tokyo December 16, 300 tickets are available to attend the event in person, the live streaming will be on the WordPress YouTube channel.
• WordPress Core Days will take place in Rome November 8-9, tickets are still available. A great event that will gather beginner and expert core contributors from all over the world.

I've tested 5 Gutenberg Blocks plugins

These are in my opinion the most interesting blocks plugins at the moment.

• Stackable
• Spectra
• GreenShiftWP
• GutenKit
• Nectarblocks

They have a good user base, they are feature rich and they all have a very active development team working behind the scenes.

In the video I'm showing the process to create a simple hero section with each one of these plugins to compare them from a UI / UX and first approach perspective.

ACF, plugin check, Sure family plugins, Woo

– Update your ACF free: if you are an ACF free user and you want to continue receiving automatic updates, you will need to update the plugin manually using the latest version provided by ACF team, since ACF (part of the WP Engine family) has been blocked to provide updates through WordPress.org servers.

– All about checking: if you are a WordPress plugin developer and want to submit your plugin to the wordpress.org repository check the Plugin check, to discover if your plugin meets all the requirements in order to be approved.

– A promising contact form plugin: Ferdy made a cool video showing how to create contact forms for free using AI with the new SureForms plugin. A pro version is expected to be released soon.

– Automation: in case you've missed the news SureTriggers now lets you develop your App integration on their platform.

– WooCommerce 9.4 release is postponed from October 21 to November 12, it will add to core the WooCommerce Brands functionality.

Are you Classic or FSE?

Classic themes

– Blocksy 2.0.70 adds a new Waitlist feature for WooCommerce where users can subscribe to products that are out of stock to be notified when they're back in store. Available only in Blocksy PRO Business and Agency plans.

FSE themes

– Ollie v 1.2 is has been released October 5, new home page pattern designs are now available and few other improvements.

– Neve FSE from Themeisle has crossed 9k active installations, Neve is a free full site editing theme with lot of style variations and predesigned patterns.

Builder movement

– Bricks 1.11 beta is now available for testing, a lot of improvements and new features packed into this version.

– Kadence advanced Header/Navigation blocks have been released on October 3. You can use these powerful Kadence blocks to create menus directly in the block editor, and they are compatible with both classic and FSE themes.

– ACSS 3.0.16 has a new handy feature to indicate external links on your website.

– Etch: if you're curious about the next “big thing” in WordPress then subscribe to the waitlist for the first alpha. Etch founder, Kevin Geary, expects it to be ready for production in 1 year.

My favorite WordPress hostings

The hosting I've used and I promote as an affiliate, if you are choosing a new host for your next project, please consider supporting WP Roads by clicking on my links.

• Hostinger: best value for money, high quality services, easy to use interface, good support team. WPROADS coupon gives an extra discount.
• SiteGround: high quality service, great support.
• Kinsta: the best cloud hosting for big projects that requires maximum speed, worldwide CDN, high level security.

Jamie Marsland speaker at Kadence Amplify Event

The new Head of WordPress YouTube will speak at the annual Kadence Amplify event, October 25. You can register for free to his talk “How I grew My YouTube Channel to 100,000 Subscribers” and you can expect also some insights on what is coming to wordpress.org YouTube channel.