Dan Maby, founder of the Big Orange Heart and a London meetup organizer, recently participated in a Gutenberg Speed Build Challenge. In this post he reflects on the experience and how it changed his view of Gutenberg / WordPress.

Matt has removed Joost and Karim from WordPress org and challenged them to create their own fork.

Automattic is lowering their contributor hours to 45 hours a week, to match those of WPE.

Here is a nice video from Jeffrey Dalrymple. He shows when it comes to user experience, little things can make a big difference. Here he has a suggestion for the Elementor team. I agree with him that we are lucky to have good tools and our tool-set is going to improve even more this year.

Here are some suggestions for WordPress plugin and theme developers following on the WPE / Matt Mullenweg conflict.

Will 2025 be the year of the page builder? Many things happened in 2024 so that now WordPress is poised for lots of changes. Here are my predictions for the new year along with some reasons why. Note, there is a video version linked at the top of the article.

Developer Robert DeVore, who has a number of free plugins in the WordPress plugin directory, has written code to block plugin use on WordPress dot com. He did this to protest Matt Mullenweg’s heavy handed blocking of WP Engine plugins.

A simple and straightforward response to the current situation in the WordPress community.

Joost calls for a change in WordPress leadership and taking back the commons. He is one of the few in the community with the clout to change the current course of the Titanic.