Dog days of WordPress summer

Gutenberg News

Last week there was a bunch of new stuff with Gutenberg 13.8.0. Birgit Pauli-Haack discusses all the new features with Grzegorz Ziolkowski over on the changelog podcast. You can hear about Fluid Typography, updates to Block APIs, and WordPress 6.1 Planning.

The Gutenberg Editor is testing On Tumblr and Day One Web Apps. Sarah Gooding over at WPTavern writes about the details of using the betas on Tumblr and Day One. Check that out.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce 6.8 has been released. Smart Shipping for new sites has been added to this release. You can see all of the recent updates by checking out the WooCommerce site.

Events

WordCamp Asia sold out of tickets on their first batch of standard and micro sponsor tickets in just 1 day. The second batch of tickets will be available soon.

From Our Contributors and Producers

The Free Rider topic around WordPress got a lot of discussion going in the WP Minute Slack channel. Joe Casabona published a podcast episode on why free riders are necessary and really not a problem that needs to be solved. If you really want to democratize publishing, then you can’t expect everyone to contribute. You have to accept and welcome the free riders. Eventually, they may want to contribute and be part of the open source community. Joe was also interviewed by Brian Coords over on MasterWP.

WordCamp US is right around the corner. If you are an introvert that will be attending, you may want to listen to the Matt Report podcast with Ken Elliott. Ken is a self-described “networking introvert” that built a WordPress agency with his co-founder and he will be emceeing WordCamp US next month. WordCamp US is sold out but you will be able to live stream for free.

The first beta release of Advanced Custom Fields PRO 6.0. is now available. It has improved performance for Repeater fields with large datasets, and a new generation of ACF Blocks with block JSON support. Go check that out if you are interested.

Marie Comet shared on Twitter a little experiment of bulk converting Classic WordPress posts to Gutenberg posts. You can check out this tool for converting classic posts to blocks and provide feedback.

Wordfence has looked at the threats to Ukrainian websites since the invasion of Russia. This cyber-war has been going on since mid-March and this blog post shows the statistics for the threats.

For WordPress developers that have been using Desktop Server for many years, it was sad to see ServerPress is closing. If you are a Premium Subscriber, you will have support until your subscription is up. Check out the just-released interview with Marc Benzakein reviewing that 12 years in business and the 10 years he was a partner.

GoDaddy Inc. reported their financial results for the second quarter ending June 30, 2022. Revenue was up 11%, and they announced an additional $250M share repurchase plan. GoDaddy’s CEO, Aman Bhutani said:

We continue to execute well against our strategic priorities, including building a one-stop shop for connected commerce, ubiquitous presence and digital identity, wrapped in our world-class customer service.

Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:

• Joe Casabona
• Eric Karkovack
• Raquel Landefeld
• Birgit Pauli Haack
• Cameron Jones
• Daniel Schutzsmith