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The BIG news this week is that Pagely joined GoDaddy. Pagely, a large managed WordPress host owned by the Strebels, joined with GoDaddy to help grow and cover a larger segment of the market. Josh Strebel writes that his successful company always took the uncompromising position that employees and customers come first. This acquisition will allow GoDaddy to become more like Pagely. The annual Pressnomics conference will continue as well…but may look a little different moving forward.

Congratulations Josh, Sally, team and GoDaddy!

Liquid Web has acquired Modern Tribe to complement its family of WordPress businesses. Modern Tribe will operate as an independent group and act as an innovation team serving the Liquid Web Family of Brands. The Events Calendar, also a Modern Tribe product, was acquired by Liquid Web in 2020. Both teams are excited to be under the same roof again, this time as standalone teams, but coworkers again. 

Over on make.wordpress.org, there was an announcement of the core committers for 2021. Two major releases have been released and a final one is underway. There were several new people added who are actively reviewing and merging contributions. They have helped the project move forward with great speed. A big thanks goes out to all the committers this year.

Pagebuilder and other Block Builder News

Elementor launched a new big production campaign highlighting “web creators”. This looks to be a commercial on par with Webflow or Squarespace. Is this their first step towards autonomy from

Kadence Conversions 1.0, announced the release of a robust plugin to give site builders a no-code interface to create lightweight and performant popups, modals, slide-ins, and banners. Kadence Conversions is the only no-code option that leverages the native WordPress block editor in order to create attention-grabbing appeals and offers that convert. 

Events

The State of the Word was announced for this year. It will be live streamed December 14th beginning at 10:00 a.m. EST.  Since 2020, the state of the Word has been online and will be live streamed this year from New York City. Join Matt as he provides a retrospective of 2021, discusses the latest trends he’s seeing, celebrates the community’s amazing wins, and explores the future. You can expect to hear about a range of topics, from WordPress 5.9 and Openverse to Web3 and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

Also, you can participate in the annual WordPress survey. The 2021 WordPress survey helps those who build WordPress understand more about how the software is used, and by whom. This survey helps leaders in the WordPress open source project learn more about contributors’ experiences. Jump over to make.wordpress.org to get your  experience counted. 

WooCommerce Engineering Highlight

Would you like to know how WooCommerce Blocks render interactive blocks in the frontend? As Gutenberg is starting to experiment with rendering interactive blocks on the front end (ex: using React) they have shown how this is currently being done. This documented approach is not the only way of doing it, and it will probably evolve once APIs with the same purpose are added upstream to Gutenberg. However, it’s a system that proved to be solid and is giving good results in real life stores.

From Our Contributors and Producers

Jason Bahl was recently discussing Gutenberg on the Decode podcast over on WPEngine. Jason shares the challenges of the Gutenberg block editor in the WordPress Headless environment. Check out this discussion for the current challenges and progress of Gutenberg blocks.

Birget Pauli-Haack shared an article explaining Theme.json for WordPress Block Themes. If you have been dragging your feet on understanding how themes will be built for WordPress, this article is worth the time reading to understand the structure of the three main parts of the theme.json file.

Jason Coleman shared his 2020 Transparency report in his recent Business Update over on his site. This report took a while to publish, but he launched his own membership frontend login and profile pages for Paid Memberships Pro. People had often asked for or just expected this out of a membership plugin. Now this is available instead of the WordPress plugin that he recommended in the past. It’s an interesting read, especially learning how a plugin company survived through COVID.

and I will quote this line:

At year end our revenue was up 50% from $800k in 2019 to $1.2m in 2020.

There were a lot of people starting membership sites through COVID.

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

  • Birget Pauli-Haack
  • Daniel Schutzsmith
  • Kathy Zant
  • Davinder Singh Kainth
  • Matt Medeiros

New Members:
We would like to welcome our new members this week Adam Warner and Dave Rodenbaugh. We are looking forward to their participation in the weekly news!

You can buy Me a coffee to support the show or join as a member for $79 for the year to get access to the private Discord server.

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