This week: new service on wordpress.com, the ethics of GPL license, the popularity of WordPress among B2B websites & much more…
Guest editor
Contributing to open source software to improve your personal and professional skills.
My life changed radically since I started contributing to WordPress in 2015. I learned new skills, increased my knowledge, I met new people and improved the quality of my life significantly. Working with people from across the globe is eye-opening: you get to see different point of views and even if you stay in a bubble, the one created by the project you have decided to contribute to, it will still be bigger, more diverse and interesting than the one you might have created in your place of residence, with only the people that are physically around you.
Here are some inspiring links which I hope will get you excited and motivated to contribute to open source in 2021. They are all videos of talks given at WordCamps, something I miss terribly in this new COVID world.
Helen Hou-Sandì, one of the lead developers on the WordPress.org project, gave this talk at WordCamp US in 2019. Open Source, Open Process, Open Web: it’s a good starting point to learn not only about WordPress but about open source in general. I refer to it often, especially when I ask myself if a specific feature or project I am working on is useful for the majority of the users.
Gábor Hojtsy is the Drupal Initiative Coordinator and at WordCamp Europe 2016 gave a great talk that touched on two topics very dear to me: processes in OSS and multilingual. It is always interesting to hear about other projects and how they manage big features. I have bookmarked it years ago and I hope it will come in handy when it will be WordPress.org time to include multilingual support – phase 4 of Gutenberg in the roadmap.
Can you make money with open source? You sure can! The open source freedoms state it quite clearly, you’ll hear it in Helen’s talk. Marieke van de Rakt and Joost de Valk, respectively CEO and CPO of Yoast, aka my bosses, gave a great talk at WordCamp US 2018 which addressed the business side of open source.
And finally, let’s say you want to take it a step further and become a maintainer of an open source project. Daniel Bachhuber gave some solid advice in his talk at WordCamp Europe 2016.
A new service – website creating – appeared on wordpress.com. A minimum price of $4900 has been set. The community is divided, with some even feeling threatened. From my Polish perspective – I’m glad. I’ll consider this price as the minimum.
Your site. Built by us. Built for you.Joe Casabona also touched upon this topic. He claims authors shouldn’t fear Automattic’s service.
The customers often need specialized services, and the market is big enough to accommodate one new company.
Ben from LayerWP decided to check how much truth there is to entries such as ‘10 plugins to vote’. Unfortunately, he found them to be rarely updated & serving only to earn money from affiliation.
LearnDash is taking cutting-edge e-learning methodology and infusing it into WordPress. Trusted to power the learning programs for major universities, small to mid-size companies, startups, entrepreneurs, and bloggers worldwide.
Here’s an engaging article on the ethics of the GPL license. It’s a reliable license that spurs sharing. On the other hand, it also allows copying and modifying code.
In a stimulating interview Ryan Dewhurst, the author of WPScan, offers a few useful bits of advice, e.g., how to best secure WordPress.
His opinion on WP security, in general, is noteworthy too. He believes the progress in this area is enormous, which grants a brighter outlook for the future.
All in One SEO plugin’s authors forced an automatic update in WP against user’s settings.
They have already fixed it, but I don’t know what they were thinking when they forced the update.
Gutenberg grants new business opportunities to people and enterprises to gain market share – some interesting musings.
Here’s a fantastic tutorial for those still unaccustomed to Gutenberg. It includes many tricks for facilitating writing.
Eric Karkovack reports problems we encounter when switching from a page builder to Gutenberg.
Matt Mullenweg is interviewed on issues concerning WordPress, Automattic, and company management style.
Kinsta released next in a series of articles showing how to use their performance monitoring device in practice.
Liquid Web acquired Events Calendar. So far, there have been no changes for the users. It’s worth mentioning, though, that last year they secured Restrict Content Pro.
Delicious Brains spent their 2020 on developing plugins & services (no surprise here), celebrating progress (no wonder, they offer great things), but also on problems with recruiting. Pandemics made remote work a standard.
Backlinko created a B2B website report, which shows that over 60% of them are WP-based.
WordFest Live 2021
There is also a full list of speakers for WordFest Live 2021 starting January 22nd!
If to don’t want to miss this great event register today.