Another week, another newsletter! I’ve improved my editorial flow quite a bit making it easier to keep this up for you all. I know it was ambitious to do this weekly, but it seems to work so far. I’d appreciate if you’d share this newsletter among your peers and help me grow this newsletter 🙏🏻. Send your friends, your colleagues, your peers to this subscribe page!

WordPress News 🗞

WordPress 5.8 is well underway with the 5.8 Beta 1 being ready for testing. I’m especially excited about the Pattern Library finally being included! What’s your favorite new feature?

• WooCommerce merchants can now list their products across Google. Any WooCommerce store owner now has the ability to easily integrate their product inventory across Google in just a few clicks, and for free. All you need is have you this WooCommerce add-on plugin installed and you’re good to go.
• In my previous newsletter I mentioned ACF being acquired by Delicious Brains, but today I’d like to highlight a super sweet add-on to ACF called ACF Theme Code Pro. Just makes integrating ACF fields into your theme so much easier.
• Another ACF related new item: ACF Extended saw a nice upgrade to their plugin which I’m a big fan of. Maybe you will be too?

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Interesting finds 💡

• The blockchain and its connected crypto coins intrigue me to bits. I’m excited with how that technology stands to solve a lot of problems we see in the world today. One wonderful example is WordProof which allows you to create a timestamp for any type of content you publish on your WordPress (and Drupal now!) site. Another example I saw this week was the ability to use the blockchain for Single Sign-On (SSO). It seems this is accidentally solved by Ethereum. “Sign-In with Ethereum” is, or could be the future of login for every app on the Internet, crypto-related or not. In fact, it’s already the norm for Web3! Check out this Twitter thread for more info.
• Did you know you could apply custom styles to bullet points with CSS?

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What I am reading 📖

I’d like to share an interesting essay I read this week (at least I think we can call this an essay) from my friend Caspar about sustainability. The title, “Sustainability isn’t someone else’s weather” perfectly captures the message and I encourage you to read it because it’s about a lot more than just what you connect to sustainability.

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Bonus 🎁

Not one, but two bonus links for you today!

1. This data about eating behaviour is interesting. It offers a lot of insight into food consumption at the national level. National being United States so that skewed in a particular direction, but interesting information nonetheless!
2. A baby born in 1533 in Dillenburg Castle would become responsible for 90% of color contrast issues on Dutch websites.

That’s it for this week’s ramblings. Thanks for reading!

Best,
Remkus

One last thing…

Share the love: Forward this newsletter to someone who appreciates WordPress news you’re not seeing somewhere else. 🙏🏻

Let’s connect: I’m most active on Twitter and Instagram, but appreciate a connection on LinkedIn as well.

Round two! As I tweeted last week, I am humbled and very happy with the extremely positive feedback I’ve received so far on the first newsletter. That, and seeing more than 30 sign up afterwards 😳😄.

Thank you all for reaching out and subscribing 😊. Let’s dive in this week’s ramblings and see what we’ve got.

WordPress News 🗞

Besides the obvious news of ACF being acquired by Delicious Brains and Iconic by Liquid Web, it’s been a relative quiet week. But, I did find some interesting news for you.

• Back in 2010, a Norwegian and two South Africans came to our second WordCamp Netherlands (for which I was the lead) to talk about WooThemes. Well, Adii specifically was going to do the talking, but Magnus and Mark were happy to join him in Utrecht. What we didn’t know then is that WooThemes would in later years rebrand to WooCommerce and ultimately sell their company to Automattic. With that in mind, it was super fun to hear them reminisce on Bob’s podcast. I highly encourage you to listen to it if listening to podcasts is your sort of thing, ofc.
• Speaking of WooCommerce, here’s an interesting project called WooNext. It’s a React WooCommerce theme, built with Next JS, Webpack, Babel, Node, Express, using GraphQL and Apollo Client. If that’s your sort of thing, go check it out.
• UnderStrap, a popular WordPress theme framework, is acquired by Howard Development and Consulting. They explain why here.
• Ben is running a Twitter poll on whether it’s good, bad, or “depends” that we see so many acquisitions in the WordPress ecosphere. Check it out, there’s some interesting comments to that thread as well.
• WordPress 5.8 will add support for WebP. One more step into a more performant WordPress. Still lots of steps to go 🥲.

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Interesting finds 💡

• CSS allows you to do pretty cool things nowadays, but did you know you can do word morphing now? I came across this super interesting Codepen. Very cool thing to be able to do in CSS!
• Have you ever wanted to know the path a drop of water follows as it hits the continental US before it reaches the ocean? Yeah, me too. This is from where I lived in the US to the Gulf of Mexico. Funny!
• Work with marketing in any way shape or form? Then, oh lawdy, do I have a site full of marketing resources for you!
• I recently came across Auth0 and it’s a pretty nifty tool that works with WordPress as well. Auth0 is an easy to implement, adaptable authentication and authorization platform with loads of cool features attached.

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What I am reading 📖

My reading time is still devoured by one book as reading time was limited in the past week. Still recommend it, though: Outliers – The Story of Success.

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Bonus 🎁

Just have one bonus link for you this time around and that’s Thanks for Subscribing. It’s a curated collection, by my buddy Frank Meeuwsen, of newsletters aimed to make your inbox happy again. Now, who doesn’t want that?! #teaminbox0

That’s it for this week’s ramblings. Thanks for reading!

Best,
Remkus

One last thing…

Share the ❤️: Forward this newsletter to someone who appreciates WordPress news you’re not seeing somewhere else. 🙏🏻

Let’s connect: I’m most active on Twitter and Instagram, but appreciate a connection on LinkedIn as well.

Well, here it is. My first official newsletter. Writing it up presented the question of “FFS, how should I title this?!”, but I ended up going for the name of the newsletter, the week and the year. Ambitious, I know, but that’s how I roll.

Anyway, here we go.

WordPress News 🗞

Seventeen and a half years ago I started using a quirky, super lightweight and new blog CMS. At that time just a couple of months old. Yes, you guessed it, this is a reference to WordPress becoming 18 years old. It’s pretty amazing to see how WordPress has grown, what industry it birthed and the amount of leverage is has garnered with its well of 40% marketshare now.

Is was more than a little sad to see Mike Little, the co-founder of WordPress not being mentioned in the excellent post with the timeline as expressed on Twitter. Frankly, I think it’s a disgrace and I don’t think the edit that has been made since is doing Mike justice as it should. The responses to my tweet are quite worth the read as well, by the way.

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As you may or may not know, every single time your WordPress site produces a 404, the entirety of WordPress needs to load. That’s waisting valuable resources and something you should avoid. However, that’s not always an option or you may need more time to fix those 404s properly. If that’s you, then Brad Parbs has written a wonderful little plugin for you that essentially bypasses WordPress to serve those 404s. Check it out, it’s called Static 404.

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WP Hosting Benchmarks, which is essentially Review Signal rebranded, by Kevin Ohashi published his the result of all his performance test of about 50 WordPress hosting companies. I enjoy these types of independent tests tremendously as in my book, this actually adds value as apposed to these “best hosting for WordPress” listicles that are just there to cash in affiliate commissions. Kevin actually, properly tests hosts and compares apples with apples.

And of course, I also mention this as I’m very happy to see Servebolt’s coming up on top in every single tier. Here’s a short Twitter thread my colleague Thomas did on it. And, if you’re curious on our own analysis of the results, head here to learn more.

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A/B Testing for WordPress, a seriously underrated plugin built by Gaya Kessler has exchanged ownership. It is now in the very capable hands of John James Jacoby. Gaya recently published the news on Twitter. If you’ve never heard about this plugin, it’s an absolute gem for easily adding A/B testing to the Block Editor. Check out the dedicated site explaining what the plugin does.

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Interesting finds 💡

There are two interesting finds I’d like to share with you today.

1. Calendso, an open-source alternative to Calendly. Most calendar booking tools are very limited in terms of control and customizations. And that’s where Calendso comes in. Pretty nifty tool.
2. Chris Wiegman shared an interesting solution to enhance your privacy on the internet. And that’s NextDNS. NextDNS protects you from all kinds of security threats, it blocks ads and all those pesky trackers on websites and in apps and provides a safe and supervised Internet for kids on all devices and on all networks. Parts of it you can solve by starting to use the Brave browser (works just like Chrome, but comes with Privacy out of the box), but NextDNS solves your privacy for your entire network as you can configure your main router with its settings.

What I am reading 📖

My reading time is devoured by one book at the moment (I usually read multiple books at the same time) . Outliers – The Story of Success. Incredibly interesting book that almost certainly is not going in the direction the title suggests. Go check it out.

Bonus 🎁

For my first newsletter I only have two bonus link. And it’s a shameless self promotion as well. Well, sorta.

1. I was on WP Builds‘ This Week in WordPress podcast today and I had a lot of fun doing so. If you’re into podcasts, I highly recommend you check out the podcast in general and the episode I was in in particular.
2. Here’s a bunch of IFs. If you like watching Formula 1. And if you have an AppleTV. And if you’d like to watch Formula 1 on an AppleTV, there’s a solution for that. On Github, of course. Enjoy.

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That’s it for this week. Hope you enjoyed it and do share it with your friends and help them find their way to my newsletter subscribe page.

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Hi there!

Yeah, well, long time no speak from my end 😬 😅. If you’re receiving this email you have at some point in your life subscribed to one of my newsletters. And, let’s get this out of the way right away, you may no longer wish to be so. And that’s okay, so feel free to unsubscribe right away with the unsubscribe link here at the bottom. I won’t be offended ✌🏻.

But before you go, you may want to learn what the plan is for my revived newsletter: Remkus’ Ramblings. Let me explain. The topics that I find interesting are quite diverse and I won’t bore you with every single one of them. But, there are some topics you might find interesting since you’ve signed up to one of my WordPress related attempts to newsletters before.

1. There will be a special section in each newsletters dedicated to what’s happening in the world of WordPress. Particularly things related to web performance and WordPress. Somewhat based on my weekly roundup of news when I worked at Yoast.
   
2. There will also be a section that covers anything interesting I come across. This could be tools, apps, services, the likes. Anything that I believe you should see. This could be about a WordPress plugin or service, but it could also be just some random tool or app I find on the internet. Anything goes, really.
   
3. There will also be a section on the things that have caught my attention. That may be a reference to a book I’m reading, a particular blog post I’ve read that got me thinking, or perhaps just highlighting something I learned about training strongman exercises. I’d like to keep this section quite diverse.
   
4. Lastly, there will always be a bonus section. Can’t not have bonuses, now can we?!

That’s it. That’s the plan.

Hope you’re here to stay, but again, totally fine if you don’t.

Cheers,
Remkus