WP Weekly 131 - Steam - Website Animator, Better Woo Gallery, Automated Newsletters

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WP Weekly 131 / Steam

With the month of January almost over, things are picking up steam in terms of launches and new features. A lot of updates to various page builder plugins, a tool for website animations, making Woo product gallery better, and Thrive Themes has a new owner.

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What’s Buzzing in WordPress 💖

WP Niche Projects… WPTurbo has updated the online child theme generator tool for generating a child theme by specifying the site URL, theme folder, and other parameters. While Ranuka Herath has launched the MoonWP project which attempts to organize and rank WordPress resources like themes, and plugins through user votes.
Got Noticed…. add scroll and time-based animation effects to your WordPress website with the new animator plugin from CSS Hero through point-and-click actions. Also, tame the image gallery on WooCommerce product pages with the new WooThumbs v5 release promising a modern look and more conversions.
Product Updates… FluentCRM 2.7 update has added the latest post block option and recurring campaign feature for automated email newsletter functionality. Also, SEOPress has introduced the OpenAI integration to automatically generate meta titles and descriptions for your posts and pages.

Extended WordPress Buzz 🔥

Page Builder Updates… Elementor has made the roadmap public to keep users in the loop (video here), with regard to upcoming features like mega menu and loop builder. While Builderius major upgrade version 0.9.9.5, with the new hook templates feature that allows building full websites or extending existing themes and plugins. Also, the Oxygen Builder 4.4 update has introduced a new standalone stylesheet editor for Oxygen stylesheets.
Business of WP… the ‘Awesome Motive’ team is on a roll in 2023 with regard to acquisitions. They have now acquired Thrive Themes which feature a lot of tools like Thrive Architect, Thrive Theme Builder, Thrive Leads, and more. Also, Lesley Sim is shaking up things for the Newsletter Glue plugin with a more refined focus on newsrooms and media companies with the updated pricing.
WP Community… WordPress admin needs a makeover, this has been on my wishlist for a while now. Joost de Valk explained it effectively, “WordPress needs a design system, and it needs it fast”. Also, how does the WordPress community deals with LGBTQ matters, check this podcast episode featuring Mike Demo, Tracy Apps, and David Wolfpaw.
Dev Focus… the WordPress performance team has released SQLite Database Integration as a standalone plugin to allow testing with the ultimate goal of integrating this in the WordPress core. Also, a proposal from the WordPress community team for adopting GitHub for better collaboration.

Quick Bits 👍

Demo new job board template created with Elementor & JetPlugins.
Wordfence 2022 State of WordPress Security Report (See PDF link).
YoastCon 2023 schedule is now available for talks and workshops.
View Source is a new podcast by Aurooba Ahmed and Brian Coords.

WordPress Origin… 20 years ago!

Mike Little shared, “20 years ago today, I commented on Matt’s blog & kicked off the project that became WordPress. Now WordPress powers over 43% of most popular domains. It is made by a worldwide community of thousands of contributors & millions of users. Wow!”

We all are thankful to Mike and Matt for the awesome WordPress and the even more awesome community around it.

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