This week: Frontity, theme.json, online store pricing, WP Translation Day, and much more.
Guest Editor
Joost de Valk is the founder and chief product officer of Yoast.
His day to day consists of running the product side of Yoast and coming up with new features for users.
He’s also responsible for Yoast’s WordPress core team and supporting Yoast’s CEO Marieke, being both her colleague and her husband. You can find Joost on Twitter or read his blogs on Yoast.com and Joost.blog.
WordPress acquisitions: who’s next?
With our own acquisition only barely finished, I think about acquisitions in the WordPress ecosystem a lot. If you look at PostStatus’ acquisition tracker, you’ll see that a lot of WordPress businesses have been acquired over the last year. Many companies in the ecosystem are buying, which is clear from posts like the one by Chris Lema on valuations we’ve linked below.
When many companies are buying, others are clearly also selling. For some businesses, a relatively fast exit is all their founders wanted. For others, like us, an exit is something you’ve been thinking about for a while and is in many ways the end of a long road and potentially the start of a new journey.
Not everyone starts their business wanting to be an entrepreneur. I know for me I was mostly thinking about being a solopreneur when I started, and only later on did the entrepreneurial spirit in me get awakened. It’s clear that we’re not done yet, and I’m now on the other side of the table, evaluating businesses in the space.
What I am hoping is that, as the ecosystem matures, something Speckyboy covered in an article in June that I’m highlighting again, we aim to keep it diverse. In companies of all different sizes, all contributing to make WordPress a great ecosystem to work in. The biggest question that comes to mind though is: who’s next?
Frontity has just become a part of Automattic. Though not surprising (the latter has already invested a million euros in it), it still is worrisome that the framework developers are to focus on Gutenberg instead of the further development of Frontity.
Chris Lema has published a great tool to assist you with pricing WooCommerce-based stores. It should also help customers see the ballpark figure they should expect.
Rich Tabor has put out an excellent series of articles on color, font, and spacing standardization in theme.json.
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.
Carolina Nymark’s tutorial explains how to configure typography options in theme.json.
Birgit Pauli-Haack has just started at Automattic as a developer advocate. It should come as no surprise considering how much work she devotes to the Gutenberg Times website.
After ten years at Automattic, Andrea Middleton decided to take a position at Reddit.
Andrea was a vital person to our community – she was the one who launched WordCamp, but she also worked on many other projects related to the entire community.
Post Status has launched a new podcast titled Get Hired. In the first episode, Cory Miller spoke to Courtney Robertson about getting a job in the WordPress world.
Maksym Denysenko has contributed another article on acceptance tests.
This year, WordPress Translation Day lasts for a whole month. Expect numerous events that will allow you to learn how to translate WordPress.
Marcus Kazmierczak explains the benefits of theme.json not only in themes created for Full Site Editing.
Riad Benguella presented proof of concept for dynamic block building based on one json file. Intriguing.
Chris Wiegman has gathered add-ons for Visual Studio Code that will help in working with WordPress.
iThemes has collected a lot of interesting facts about WordPress. For example, 1074 WordCamps have already taken place worldwide.
Buddy, Kinsta, and Osom Studio organized a webinar on excellent WordPress flow. On the website, they published the recording with answers to all the questions asked.
As Bootstrap is now ten years old, Eric Karkovack depicts its influence on how we create websites.
Jeff Matson from Pagely describes Mercury – their new tool to make our sites run faster.
Upcoming Events:
On September 9, Nate Finch will host the An Ideal WordPress Development and Deployment Workflow webinar.
WPMRR Virtual Summit, a conference devoted to earning through WordPress, is scheduled to take place on September 21-23.
GitKon will take place on September 22-23. Conference organized by GitKraken.
After a short break, WordCamp US returns in its online version on October 1.