Monthly Roundup – January 2021

Hello!

Grab a mug of coffee, bowl of cereal, or fully loaded breakfast plate and join us on a virtual breakfast tour around the world as we break our fasts.

Oh, you’d like to be featured on such lists? Then come aboard and join us!

Insights

Whitehouse.gov chose WordPress once again. High-profile government websites across the world have been using open source CMSs for a long time, including Whitehouse.gov which used Drupal from 2009 up until 2017 when it switched to WordPress. Hats off to Wide Eye Creative, 10up and Andrew Nacin for rebuilding the site in 6 weeks!

W3Techs’ Web Technologies of the Year survey data for 2020 is here. It is interesting to see Shopify surpass Google, Endurance, GoDaddy, and other major players as the Hosting Provider of the Year, but not totally surprising. WordPress is the top CMS for the 11th time in a row, now powering 39.9% of the top 10M websites. WooCommerce makes for a significant part of this number, as 18.9% of all WordPress websites use WooCommerce.

News from Around the Web

Shutterstock joined WordPress VIP as a Featured Technology Partner. Shutterstock is the leading editorial media provider to enterprise publishers and corporations across the globe.

Facebook is prioritizing original reporting. News articles with exclusive and original content will receive more distribution in the News Feed. Since News Feed ranking involves several different factors, Facebook anticipates “most news publishers won’t see significant changes to their distribution.”

Gutenberg 9.7 and 9.8 were released, and the highlight is the ability to drag-and-drop entire block patterns onto the editor canvas. This is excellent progress as we steadily move towards eventual Full Site Editing. To know more about where we are with FSE, check out this post on WordPress.org. An MVP of FSE is expected to be part of the Gutenberg plugin around April 2021. Here are the changelogs for 9.7 and 9.8.

WordPress.com launched a one-page theme called Blank Canvas. This is a good representative case of what’s to come and puts into perspective the potential of Full Site Editing to make a lot of things faster, easier and more efficient for content editors and managers.

WordPress.org started a new podcast called WP Briefing. Each episode will talk about a little something from the larger WordPress philosophy, a highlight from the community, and list out a few upcoming important things. “Bite-sized insights into how it all works.” Check out the first episode here.

Kinsta launched DevKinsta, a local WordPress development tool. It works on Docker virtualization compared to Local by Flywheel which runs natively. Read more here.

Water Cooler

Popular on our #watercooler Slack channel.

• Cloudflare Waiting Room
• Is Apple silicon ready for developers?
• 2020.stateofjs.com – Survey data about the latest trends in JavaScript, presented in graphical visual treats

Events

WordCamp India Workshops concluded last week and were an absolute blast! Kudos to rtCampers Prasad, Sayed, Imran and Muhammad for their valuable sessions and involvement in making this event a success.

Contributor Days will take place this weekend (Feb. 6 and 7), followed by Speaker Sessions the next week (Feb. 13 and 14). Grab your free tickets here.

That is all for January, see you next month!

Links: Breakfast with rtCampers