WordPress has a number of great free plugins in the plugin directory. For the past few years at this time I’ve taken a few minutes to write a review on the plugin page to express my thanks for the plugins I use and rely on. This year I gave a review for Independent Analytics, which I’ve used on a couple of sites.

If you have a few minutes, I’m sure the plugin authors would appreciate a review.

This is a full walk-through tutorial on creating custom blocks using Blockstudio.

On X Matt Mullenweg suggests that non-Gutenberg based site builders will have more user churn and have to raise prices more often. I’m guessing Matt was referring to Elementor’s recent price change in the tweet.

True or false — Gutenberg based site builders will have greater user retention?

This article talks about the new direction for WooCommerce, emphasizing WooExpress as a competitor to Shopify.

This is interesting for front-end developers – the article is about creating web components with vanilla HTML, JS, and CSS. Hat tip to Vitalii Kiiko in the Builderius Facebook group.

A bit of a toot of their own horn, but one has the feeling that the WordPress leadership doesn’t give much credence to the “extender” community. This post from HumanMade outlines some of the ways agencies help the WordPress project.

WordPress com vs org got a write up in Smashing Magazine. I don’t know about changing the name, but better “co-branding” that clarifies the differences between the platform and the CMS could help.

This WPTavern article has more information about the journey of Mike McAlister in his efforts to get the Ollie theme accepted into the theme directory. It is interesting that Matt Mullenweg and Josepha Haden Chomphosy urged accepting it as an experiment, but I guess that is not going to happen.

Tom McFarlin reflects on his journey learning tech and sharing not only how to do something, but also how to problem solve, think about tech, and get to know others online.