Matt Mullenweg, Gutenberg Architect, Matías Venture, and Executive Director, Josepha Haden Chomphosy reflect on WordPress in 2023 and aspirations for the coming year.

Congrats to Maxime Beguin on the success of Advanced Themer for Bricks. While it is not necessary to use any addons to make sites with Bricks, Advanced Themer hit a sweet spot in providing new features and tweaks inside the Bricks builder.

The plugin provides features such as the ability to create and manage CSS variables, a class importer, the ability to enable / disable options for clients, as well as shortcuts and additions to the Bricks editor. There are a number of utilities included, such as the ability to enable a light and dark theme for your site, a color palette generator, and the obligatory AI integration.

Advanced Themer launched in April and just reached version 1.1. While a lot of people have been using it on live sites, it is now officially out of beta.

We are used to following the WordPress core team, but don’t hear much about the Polyglots Team. This article provides information about how they are organized and what they do.

What’s next for Beaver Builder? The “Box” Module and Global Styles and Colors. Apparently the Box Module is a new type of flexible container. Not sure how I feel about the new module. Maybe it would have been better to just introduce Flexbox. Global styles and colors have been a long standing request and users will be happy when that is implemented.

Note that this report is based on search volume, which is much different than usage. It says that demand for WordPress is up 11.3%, but for WooCommerce only 1%. It also says that there are a million searches a month for plugins and that expensive and fast hosting remains one of the most valuable parts of the WordPress economy.

For Developers: This is a very cool video by Brian Coord showing how to add custom settings to an already existing block. The example shown walks-through adding some responsive block settings to do different visibility options at different sizes.

Matt Mullenweg launched JetPack AI Assistant on Product Hunt. The feature will be $10 a month subscription.

Breakdance 1.3 was recently released. It includes a number of new features such as easy Isotope filtering for the loop element, WooCommerce conditions, WooCommerce custom product loops, enhancements to the Query Builder, accessibility enhancements and more.

Bricks 1.8 was released yesterday with the anticipated mega menu builder. It is a big release with lots of other small additions and fixes.