WP Review

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Talk to any business owner worth their salt and they’ll likely tell you that you need to pick a niche. This can be a niche in a product, like ConvertKit. It could be a niche in a market, like serving single parents who work from home. But lately I’ve been wondering if a niche near and dear to my heart is a actually a good one, and that’s WordPress.

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They say no good deed goes unpunished. Recently in the WordPress space, perhaps even the wider open source space, there’s been a lot of discussion about that. Is contributing to WordPress worth it? In December Matt Mullenweg asked us to give Five for the Future. He talked about the Tragedy of the Commons. But who is really contributing to open source? And how do we make sure people who do contribute don’t feel like their good deed results in punishment?

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Last week I asked you how you will use WordPress in 2022…as in, how will WordPress serve you? This week I want to talk about what you can do to grow your WordPress business. If you’ve read the title of this episode, you already know what I’m going to say: don’t target WordPress people…or put differently, don’t target people just like you.

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As we reflect on 2021 and prepare for 2022, I want to pose a question to you: What will you use WordPress for in 2022? The mission of this show in 2022 is helping small business owners in the WordPress space grow beyond the WordPress space.  And as much as we should serve our WordPress community, WordPress needs to serve us. So I’m posing the question again: what will you use WordPress for in 2022? Plus, my picks of the year.

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Delicious Brains caused quite an incident when they asked their lifetime subscriptions to consider switching to annual to continue supporting development. Then a certain YouTuber found this to be so offensive that he had to fuel the fire…a missed opportunity in helping WordPress users see what good value to dollar ratios look like. Well, I’m not going to miss that opportunity.

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What’s up with all of the acquisitions? What are we even doing in the WordPress community? How much of a say do we really have on the open source project? These are big questions, but as my friend William of Occam said, “”entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.” Or as it’s often (but maybe incorrectly?) paraphrased, “The simplest solution is often the best solution.” 

But whether or not that’s actually the principle behind Occam’s Razor, it’s still a good one. And that helps us answer the above questions, on this week’s WP Review.

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Get all of the show notes at https://wp-review.castos.com/028

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There’s been a lot of news around Gutenberg and the block editor as we barrel towards the November 9th feature freeze. Plus, are we getting the whole story of why the block editor exists and what it’s supposed to do? 

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Last week’s Facebook outage brought an onslaught of platitudes from people talking about how terrible Facebook is, and how you should own your own platform. But even as a developer myself, my thoughts are a little different.

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It’s been 10 years since WooCommerce was forked from JigoShop and turned into the giant of the ecommerce space that is it today. And while it was maybe a little cutthroat, the problem doesn’t necessary lie with the fork. It lies with the way you position your product, and your business. Plus, thoughts on all the aquisitions from last week!