It’s that crazy time of year again where my kids are getting out of school and the week is peppered with half-days. Suffice to say my agenda is a little packed and the ability to gather my thoughts on a trend this week in WordPress is fleeting.
Oh, and WordCamp Europe 2024 is in full-swing. You’re either there, or you have the hashtag muted on X.
So today I’ll return to the list style update of some interesting things I’ve seen come out of the WP Minute LinkSquad Slack channel and from around the web. Cheers to the weekend and an official start of Summer in my household!
DoTheWoo launches 4.0 of the site, now hosted and patterned with WordPress.com. Listen to Bob’s update in his recent episode.
Rich Tabor showed off 720 theme variations for his Assembly theme. It certainly shows the flexibility one could achieve with a new block-based theme, but it raised a lot of concerns on X.
Frank Klein doesn’t believe that users want to empty a box of template parts onto their desk and start building from scratch. He further urges Rich not to assume one way of building a site is what everyone will want.
Eric Karkovack reminded us that WordPress is STILL a professional tool.
As I mentioned in my update last week, I think WordPress is finally moving in the right direction for builders. WordPress is exciting again.
But I also think this is starting another class war inside the community. For a decade+ WordPress was really only for developers. It wasn’t until its second decade where 3rd party tools started to address what builders and professionals wanted. And, only in the last few years that WordPress core slowly started doling out the crumbs to compete against bigger page builder solutions.
Now 4 classes battle it out: developers vs. builders vs. agency/freelancers vs. end users.
Developers constantly pushing the javascript boundaries inside core, builders longing for improved drag and drop experiences, agency types needing more professional workflows & coding standards, while end users just want a darn site to blog or publish pages with.
I’m here for it.
Wrapping stuff up for the week, check out my latest interview with Kim Coleman from Paid Memberships Pro. We talk about raising prices for your WordPress product.
Eric Karkovack warns us that WordPress isn’t immune to clickbait.
If you’re attending WordCamp Europe, go say hi to my day-job team, Gravity Forms! We’re giving away some great stuff on Saturday.
Thanks to our Pillar sponsors Pressable, Bluehost, and Omnisend for supporting The WP Minute for another year!