In Case You Missed It – Issue 17

photo credit: Night Moves – (license)

There’s a lot of great WordPress content published in the community but not all of it is featured on the Tavern. This post is an assortment of items related to WordPress that caught my eye but didn’t make it into a full post.

Interviewed for WordPress.tv

A few weeks ago, Marcus Couch and I were interviewed by John Parkinson. Parkinson is a volunteer moderator and performs community outreach for WordPress.tv. In the interview, we discuss the benefits of WordPress.tv, the WordPress community, WordCamps, and more. I encourage you to check out his other community interviews as well.

WooCommerce and WordPress Used to Sell Stress Cubes

CNBC has an interesting story that features a 24-year-old who made $345K in two months selling Stress Cubes, a knock-off of the Fidget Cube. The Fidget Cube raised nearly 6.5M dollars in crowdfunding money.

The Fidget Cube experienced significant delays in shipping due to manufacturing issues. The 24-year-old contacted suppliers in China, purchased 1,000 plastic cubes, created a similar product, and shipped it to market before the Fidget Cube had a chance to reach backers. He used WordPress and WooCommerce to sell Stress Cubes grossing him nearly $350K in two months.

Why WordPress in Education

Jared Bennett explains how the Hamilton Wentworth District School Board uses WordPress. “We run over 100 individual school websites on a WordPress Multisite Network, and back in May of 2011, we launched the HWDSB Commons: a second Multisite Network which now hosts over 8,000 blogs for over 30,000 users,” Bennett said.

Bennett shares links to plugins the team created to solve specific issues such as comment moderation in BuddyPress and blocking specific modules in Jetpack. Since WordPress is free as in beer, it allows his school board to spend public money in a more responsible way.

“In the WordPress ecosystem we operate in, I pay for functionality to be developed, and I share it openly on platforms like the WordPress plugin repository, or on sites like Github,” Bennett said.

“The money you would have spent to enable the previously developed functionality, you can now spend on something else, something that I might benefit from. Think about how much more responsible this model is, particularly when we are talking about spending public money.

“We are all contributing; and the community benefits from those contributions; and our money — and the functionality of our platforms — improves exponentially faster than if we were all spending our money paying the private company over and over for code that has already been paid for by previous customers.”

To learn more about WordPress in education, listen to episode 261 of WordPress Weekly where we interview Cameron Barrett, founder of SchoolPresser, LLC. Barrett explains how he negotiated and helped migrate Newark New Jersey’s public school system from a proprietary CMS to WordPress.

WP101 Plugin Now Has WooCommerce and Jetpack Videos

The WP101 plugin has added Jetpack and WooCommerce training videos. This is in addition to the Yoast SEO and WordPress training videos.

Huge update for our WP101 Plugin! It now includes WooCommerce and Jetpack videos. That’s 90 videos for your clients! https://t.co/6jtzj1JgkC pic.twitter.com/CByYvd61Xi

— WordPress 101 (@WP101) February 8, 2017

Adding Meta Fields to a Widget Sidebar Section

Example for how to add meta fields/controls to a widget sidebar section in the customizer: https://t.co/aMadLioQn6 #javascript #WordPress

— Weston Ruter (@westonruter@mastodon.social) (@westonruter) February 9, 2017

WP Sessions Developer Survey

WP Sessions is conducting a developer survey to find out about the tools developers use. Results will be anonymized and shared in aggregate in a few weeks.

Widget Logic Has a New Maintainer

Widget Logic, a popular plugin actively installed on more than 300K sites, has a new maintainer named WPChef. The plugin was created nine years ago by Alanft. Prior to WPChef gaining commit access, the last time Widget Logic was updated was two years ago.

After gaining access, WPChef released Widget Logic 5.7.0. This version fixed a PHP 7 compatibility issue, a conflict with WPML, added a new default load logic point, and a Ukrainian translation. In addition to bug fixes, a global admin notice to install Limit Login Attempts Reloaded was also added. Limit Login Attempts Reloaded is a separate plugin owned and maintained by WPChef.

Limit Login Attempts Reloaded Admin Notice

The wording of the notice and appearing globally caused some users to be concerned or upset. Some users responded to the update by writing 1-star reviews. After a user described the notice as sounding like fake news, WPChef changed it.

From SupportPress to Help Scout!

The WordPress.org community team is moving away from SupportPress to Help Scout. The move opens up a number of possibilities as Help Scout offers a lot of features that are non-existent in SupportPress.

Moving from SupportPress to Help Scout

Plush Wapuu!

In what is a traditional part of this series, I end each issue by featuring a Wapuu design. For those who don’t know, Wapuu is the unofficial mascot of the WordPress project.

#Wapuu army is taking over #WordCamp US #wcus #wcus2016 pic.twitter.com/Giyt3KFsnF

— Musannif (@mzahir) December 3, 2016

This plush Wapuu which was given away at WordCamp US 2016 as part of the event’s swag was a huge hit with attendees and their children. I have one myself and the quality is superb.

That’s it for issue seventeen. If you recently discovered a cool resource or post related to WordPress, please share it with us in the comments.