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Hope all our readers are safe and well, especially those in Los Angeles, where wildfires are currently raging. Our thoughts are with everyone affected, and we urge you to stay cautious and prioritize your safety.
WP Drama still continues, and today, we cover Matt Mullenweg challenging Joost de Valk and Karim Marucchi to fork WordPress, Automattic reducing its WordPress contribution hours, the end of the journey for the WordPress Sustainability Team, and also new projects from the community.
Don’t forget to subscribe and listen to the podcast version of this newsletter, where you can hear more details and discussions about these topics and more.
See you next week!
Team WP-CONTENT.CO
🙌 This weekly newsletter is kindly sponsored by Omnisend, InMotion Hosting and WP Job Openings
🗣️TALK OF THE TOWN
After reducing Automattic’s WordPress Contribution Hours, Matt Mullenweg has now challenged Joost de Valk and Karim Marucchi to fork the WordPress project. He also deactivated the WordPress.org accounts of Joost, Karim, Se Reed, Heather Burns, and Morten Rand-Hendriksen, escalating tensions within the WordPress community.
📰 WORDPRESS & AROUND
All the updates around WordPress and its closely related technologies
In a shocking move, Automattic has slashed its sponsored contributions to the WordPress project from a staggering 3,539 hours per week to a mere 45 hours—bringing its involvement in line with WP Engine and other organizations. This shift means Automatticians who once shaped the very core of WordPress will now redirect their efforts toward profit-driven ventures like WordPress.com, Pressable, WPVIP, Jetpack, and WooCommerce. Juan Hernando announced on Make WordPress Community that the Community Team is unaffected by this move and will continue to support the events.
To this, Joost de Valk tweeted that he is ready to lead WordPress releases which received mixed responses from the community.
- Matt Mullenweg dissolves the Sustainability Team and archives the Slack channel: Matt Mullenweg has decided to dissolve the Sustainability Team and has archived the #sustainability channel on Slack in a surprising turn of events, as it was Matt himself who suggested starting a Sustainability Slack channel at WordCamp Europe 2022. This happened hours after Thijs Buijs announced on the #Sustainability Slack channel that he is stepping down as representative for the WordPress Sustainability Team.
- WordPress 6.8: Release squad, timeline, and focus: WordPress 6.8 is scheduled to be released on April 15, 2025, and will focus on ironing out the existing issues and will focus less on new features. This release will be led by Matt Mullenweg, Jeffrey Paul & Michelle Frechette will oversee the coordination, Joe McGill, Jonathan Desrosiers, George Mamadashvili are the tech leads for this release, whereas Jb Audras is the triage lead. The design lead is Tammie Lister, while the performance and test lead is Felix Arntz and Krupa Nanda respectively.
- Gutenberg 20.0 released: The latest release includes enhancements to the Style Book, a new UI for starter patterns, and many more. This release marks the 200th release of the Gutenberg plugin.
- Proposal: Deputy Team Representatives for the WordPress Training Team: The WordPress Training Team is considering the introduction of Deputy Team Representatives to support the existing Team Reps. The responsibilities will include assisting with the team meeting facilitation, supporting communication between team members and the WordPress community, managing projects and initiatives, stepping in during primary Team Rep absences, and contributing to team decision-making processes. The feedback opportunity is open till the 7th of February.
- Patchstack rejected as WordCamp Europe 2025 sponsor due to lack of ‘significant’ WordPress contributions: Oliver Sild, CEO of Patchstack, shared on X an email he received from WordCamp Central explaining why Patchstack’s application to sponsor WordCamp Europe 2025 was rejected. The email, written by Felipe Santos, detailed a shift in the sponsorship process and Matt Mullenweg termed the email “crappy” and promised to look into it.
- Shutting down WordPress.org’s Matrix Server: The community.wordpress.org Matrix server will be shut down on January 31, 2025.
- What’s new for developers?(January 2025): Justin Tadlock provides a quick overview of the all-new developments and changes that have recently been implemented.
- Core Performance Team Rep nominations for 2025: The Core Performance Team is looking for at least 2 Team Reps and the nominations are open till February 1, 2025. The current team reps are Emily Clarke and Felix Arntz.
- WooCommerce 9.5.2: Dot release: This release improves the coupon logic in checkout and changes to the Customers API endpoint.
- Feedback request: Adding order fulfillments to WooCommerce: The WooCommerce team is planning to introduce order fulfillments into the core and wants the community feedback to make sure it is implemented correctly.
- Critical vulnerability patched in GiveWP plugin: An unauthenticated PHP Object Injection vulnerability was recently patched. Users are to update to the latest version immediately.
- Google Search Console adds hourly data export to 24-hour view: Google Search Console adds hourly export to 24-hour view, offering faster, actionable performance insights with reduced data delays.
- Google criticizes Bing for mimicking Google’s homepage: Microsoft faces backlash after Bing mimics Google’s interface, sparking criticism from Google Chrome’s security chief.
💵 INVESTMENTS, ACQUISITIONS & PARTNERSHIPS
- Kestrel acquires 99w: David Allsop, the founder of 99w, is joining Kestrel along with his suite of plugins.
- WP Coupons has been acquired: Brian Jackson confirmed this development via X but has not revealed the new owner. He has however announced that the new owner is an active member in WordPress and blogging space.
👥 COMMUNITY NEWS
Updates and News from the WordPress Community
Themeisle does a recap of what happened in the world of WordPress throughout 2024.
- Mary Baum will take on the project WordPress Developer blog: Birgit Pauli-Haack made the announcement on #core-dev-blog Slack channel about Mary Baum leading the WordPress Developer blog project.
- WordPress as a git repo: Adam Zieliński explains how he has turned WordPress into a markdown editor, a git client, and a git server.
- Rodolfo Melogli expresses concern about the current direction and decisions being made within the WordPress project: In a tweet addressed to Matt Mullenweg, he addresses its high time to shift focus towards clarity, collaboration, and transparency. To this Matt replied, “The lawsuits will go years and could potentially bankrupt me or force the closure of WordPress.org. It also takes a huge amount of time — there is no “lawyers work on that.”
- Sé Reed on why the WordPress community does not want a fork: In this X thread, Sé Reed explains why the community does not wish to a fork by diving into the journey of the WordPress project from the start.
- The WordPress Android app is a failure: Amber Hinds discusses her experiences and frustrations with the WordPress Android app, including known bugs that have existed since 2018, making it impossible to publish an accessible, properly coded post via the app. Matt replied to her post on X,” Curious if you tried the @Jetpack app and if the same issues would have happened…..Part of your problem is stringing together a bunch of plugins that don’t integrate with each other.”
- Known gaps to fill after changes to my WordPress Contribution hours: Anne McCarthy talks about how her contribution hours to the WordPress project have gone down to zero as a result of Automattic reducing its contribution hours. She is documenting the tasks and responsibilities before going on a sabbatical so others can take over during her absence.
- Gutenberg Times turned 7: Birgit Pauli-Haack started curating Gutenberg updates right after WordCamp Europe in June 2017. She registered the domain Gutenbergtimes.com and started the newsletter on January 14, 2018. Bob Dunn aka BobWP started the DoTheWoo network around the same time, and they are planning a joined anniversary podcast episode to chat about their journey in the WordPress community.
- A new poll started by Simon Harper regarding contributions to the WordPress project: The poll seeks to find whether the recent WordPress drama has influenced you or your team to reduce contributions to the WordPress project.
- A new filter created by Vinny McKee to search by page ID: The snippet allows users to search by page ID to further refine search results.
- Mastodon to be owned by a non-profit organization: The ownership of Mastodon will soon be transferred to a non-profit organization and this move will ensure that Mastodon will not be owned or controlled by a single individual.
- New milestone reached for WP Umbrella: WP Umbrella now has over 40k active installations.
🚀 NEW PROJECTS
- All new CyberAlerts: Ryan Dewhurst, the founder of WPScan has announced the launch of CyberAlerts, aimed at providing real-time vulnerability and threat intelligence, helping organizations stay ahead of emerging cyber threats.
- Disembark tool from Austin Ginder: Austin Ginder has created Disembark, a new tool to easily generate a WordPress backup.
- All new Edge Images plugin: Jono Alderson has released his first WordPress plugin, Edge Images, which automatically uses your edge transformation service (e.g., Cloudflare, Accelerated Domains, Imgix, etc.) to apply performance optimizations to <img> markup.
- Upcoming EventKoi plugin: Lesley Sim, co-founder of Newsletter Glue has previewed their upcoming plugin called EventKoi, a WP events plugin.
- New theme from Elementor: The Hello Biz theme is crafted specifically for business websites and includes some premium widgets.
- Robert DeVore is reviving the Stealth Login Page plugin: He has announced a reimagined version of the Stealth Login Page plugin originally created by Jesse Petersen who passed away in 2017. This plugin protects your WordPress® site by locking down access to the wp-admin and wp-login.php pages unless a secret auth_key parameter is passed. He has also launched the Block AI Crawlers plugin that allows users to block known AI crawlers from accessing your website and AffiliLink, a WordPress® plugin designed to streamline your affiliate marketing efforts.
- Aleksandr Samokhin’s WordPress block development course: The WordPress block development course is now available.
- Introducing PootleWriter: Jamie Marsland has introduced PootleWriter, a new friction free writer app for WordPress.
🔖 INTERESTING READS & PODCASTS
More posts and podcasts from the WordPress Community you don’t want to miss
- WordCamp Asia 2025 with Meher Bala and Dan Tabifranca: In this episode, host Devin converses with Mehr Bala and Dan Tabifranca about the upcoming WordCamp Asia 2025. They have a conversation around the responsibilities of WordCamp leads, and what attendees can expect in Manila, including exciting program tracks, keynote speakers, and unique cultural experiences. From Doo the Woo.
- In conversation with Andrew Palmer: Bud Kraus is joined by Andrew Palmer, who shares details about his complex personal life and entrepreneurial journey. From, Seriously Bud?
- An open letter to WordPress theme designers: Brian Gardner talks about the color contrast issue which is a major accessibility issue and how developers can solve the problem.
- Is LLM-generated code good for open source?: Brian Coords makes it clear that there is nothing wrong with using AI-generated code but at the same time reminds us that the true value of open source lies in shared contributions, collaboration, and community-driven growth rather than just the code output itself.
- 14 Popular sites built with WordPress: Brainstorm Force explores the 14 famous websites that all run on WordPress.
🛠 GUIDE ZONE – HOWTO’S and MORE
Handpicked fresh guides from WordPress circle
- Create a landing page: From WordPress.tv
- How to enable and use the WordPress debug log: From Melapress
- How your plugin can customize the WordPress Command Palette: From Kinsta
- SQL Query optimization for faster WordPress sites: From Delicious Brains
📆 SAVE THE DATES
Do not miss a WordPress event ever again
- WordCamp Asia on February 20-22, 2025: Tickets are out now.
- PressConf 2025 on April 23-26: A conference for WordPress Professionals and the tickets are now available.
- WordCamp Europe on 5-7 June 2025: WordCamp Europe 2025 is looking for speakers and sponsors
🎁 WORDPRESS DEALS OF THE WEEK
Again, these are the best deals of the week, handpicked by yours!
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- 4 Months free offer on hosting plans of WP Engine (Coupon Code- FREEDOMTOCREATE)
- 10% off on monthly & annual plans at SureTriggers (Coupon Code- WPCONTENT10)
- 15% off yearly plans at Videvo (Coupon Code – WPV15)
MORE DEALS
- 50% off for the first 6 months on all monthly standard plans at Kinsta
- 50% off 3 months on Liquid Web’s Bare Metal server hosting
- 40% off for Constellation plugin
This weekly newsletter is kindly sponsored by awesome WordPress Companies 🦸♂️🙌
Last but not least, updates from WP-CONTENT.CO 👇
After reducing Automattic’s WordPress Contribution Hours, Matt Mullenweg has now challenged Joost de Valk and Karim Marucchi to…
In a shocking move, Automattic has slashed its sponsored contributions to the WordPress project from a staggering 3,539…
Matt Mullenweg has decided to dissolve the Sustainability Team and has archived the #sustainability channel on Slack in…
Managing one or multiple WordPress websites, whether by yourself or with a team, will involve numerous tasks with…
Team WP-CONTENT.CO
This weekly newsletter is kindly sponsored by Omnisend, InMotion Hosting and WP Job Openings
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