I think it’s a good practice for us WordPress Pros to at least keep an eye on what’s going on the world of websites outside of our chosen CMS. A quick and effective way to learn about other ways people learn WordPress is this little article from Steve Benjamins at SiteBuilderReport.

Here we are sharing news of a podcast so new that you probably can’t even easily subscribe to in your podcast player. (Or at least I failed. Because they’re still mid-podcast-directory approval, it seems.) But I just listened to the first episode and I think it’s definitely worth keeping in on your radar.

If you saw my post from last week looking at full-site editing you might wonder what it’s like. And if you’re lazy/busy like me, you probably haven’t yet made a point of giving it a run-through on your own. So I really appreciated that WPShout friend Eric Karkovack took the time to install and write up the experience of fooling around with the Q theme.

You may have seen the headlines about how WordPress.com is coming for all the freelancers. For those that didn’t see it, WordPress.com (owned by a company called Automattic) recently announced that its “premium website building service”  is now officially accepting customer applications for “websites starting at $4,900 USD.”

This article from Justin Tadlock over at WP Tavern caught my attention over holiday break. While Justin’s been talking about full-site editing themes for a while, Armando was the first of these “future of WordPress themes” that I took a look at.

Without knowing this news, MailPoet came up organically last night in a discussion we were having at the Fort Collins WordPress Meetup. Someone was looking to send an email newsletter from WordPress, and MailPoet was the option a few of us had heard of for that. (No one had used it.)

Always a worthy read, the Field Guide for the next version WordPress—5.6—is here. The new theme, application passwords being integrated, and a load of incremental updates are the highlight features for me. Sure to be a solid release, but if you’ve got an older site you’re not paying attention to, the jQuery update remains a source of possible fear.

I have to admit that one of the places I feel I most conspicuously show my age is how little interest I have these days for the latest of web-dev hype. I would consider the “JAMstack” hype train one of those things. I’m vaguely aware of it, I know that a lot of people I respect as “cutting edge developers” are super into it. But I just don’t really care. (And only part of that is because it is 2020 😝)

I admit I haven’t been following the concept and execution of Gutenberg Block Patterns very closely. Primarily this is because visual design has never been with a strong suit for me, nor (consequently) something I spent much time on. It is precisely for this reason that I’m so grateful for Birgit Pauli-Haack’s “WordPress Block Patterns Resource List.”

I’ve somewhat intentionally given this little story about a new WordPress 5.5 feature a silly title. But as this story from Sarah Gooding over at the Tavern illustrates, people are already putting the new WordPress wp_get_environment_type() function to good use. And this story was doubly-interesting to me because I for one had no earthly idea that this new function existed. 😳