I’m not a WordPress core contributor. I don’t write the code, and I don’t make it a priority in my life to be contributing to the Marketting, Accessibility, WP-CLI, Support, Themes, or any other of the volunteer teams that keep WordPress a healthy ecosystem. And I don’t know enough of the people who do that work to claim to have my finger on the pulse of what’s going on for them.

One of the most pleasant surprises of our time at WordCamp US 2018 was that we got to meet Dan Maby. Dan is the founder of WP&UP, a registered charity that exists to support and promote mental health in the WordPress community

WordPress.com expands its news offering, with funding from Google.

On his personal blog, Studio Press lead developer Nathan Rice makes an interesting point about the block-derived performance issues that may come from having lots of Gutenberg blocks and lots of CSS rules to style them in WordPress after 5.0. I don’t know how serious the performance degradation will be over time — I don’t know if anyone does. But I do know that it’s worth some consideration that as you load more styles it does indeed impact the waterfall of the site, as Nathan highlights.

I’m cheered and hopeful that Mr. Krogsgard is correct and Post Status will soon return to form. (It kind of limped out of 2017 and into 2018, but Brian recently emailed members about his new dedication.) This interview with Matt makes me think it may well. An independent journalist who has smart opinions and pushes (at least) a little on someone as influential as Matt is A Good Thing™️.

WordPress 5.0 is releasing tomorrow. December 6, 2018. Yay!?

Over at WPTavern, Sarah wrote up an important issue as Gutenberg speeds toward delivery. (For those who haven’t followed, sometime about a month ago, it was announced that WordPress 5.0–the Gutenberg includer–would try to launch before American Thanksgiving, on November 19.)

I’ve always had pretty mixed feelings about the Advanced Custom Fields plugin. I still do.

Great reporting and case studies from the Tavern.

The three of us (Alex, David, and Fred) had the pleasure of being on last week’s WP Tavern podcast. We discussed what we’ve learned about teaching and learning WordPress development, and why we believe the WPShout Pro Community solves learning challenges that nothing else quite addresses.