This is an interesting transparency type of report detailing Katie Keith’s experience being a sponsor of WordCamp Europe. She is the co-founder of Barn2 Plugins.

In this in-depth expert-level tutorial Stephanie Eckles provides an overview of modern CSS features and considerations for their use. In the tutorial she shows how the new features of CSS might be used to create a modern brand theme.

Google is getting out of the domain name business and will transfer approximately 10 million domains to Squarespace for management. This is a big boon for Squarespace.

Just as Matt gives a keynote at WordCamp US, so too Drupal founder Dries Buytaert presented the State of the Drupal Project at DrupalCon North America 2023. Drupal was focusing on the importance of innovation and had a contest where project proposals were shared and voted. One of the top projects involves working on Gutenberg for Drupal. In a surprise move, Matt Mullenweg donated funds and personal to help.

We had a long wait for the big Bricks 1.8 release, but now 1.8.1 has come rather quickly. It includes the auto-regeneration of CSS files after updates, Bricks integration with WP-CLI, a new Breadcrumbs element, and for developers, documentation and an example for adding your own dynamic data tags.

Joost de Valk looks at how the top 10 CMS options are doing. He found that WordPress is at 43.2% market share, which is .2% more than 11 months ago. There are some comments about how the others are doing also.

Calvin Akn, a security researcher, published an article looking at WordPress malware scanners. The summary of the article is that malware scanning can be helpful for detecting common malware, but more sophisticated attacks can bypass it and give you a false sense of security. Therefore, you should not rely totally on malware scanning but should have good measures in place for prevention. There are some interesting and clever step by step illustrations of the concepts described in the article.

The research in the article was done in conjunction with GridPane and Thomas J. Raef. Patchstack verified the proof of concepts discussed, as noted in the article.

Version 16.0 of Gutenberg, plugin version, was released with the ability to manage pages in the Site Editor, the new command center with an open API, and other enhancements. This version of Gutenberg will be included in the upcoming 6.3 release of WordPress.

Brian Gardner recently held a webinar where he showed how to fork the Frost theme to make your own block theme. He now has created a new base theme called Powder, which seems to be a fork of Frost. He intends people to use it as a basis for their own themes. While Powder is free, Brian created a theme called Powder Social which is a premium theme available for $125 lifetime purchase.