Another win for the fediverse. Plugin developer Matthias Pfefferle (who is joining WordPress with the acquisition):

When Matt announced that Tumblr wants to implement ActivityPub on Twitter, I asked why not WordPress, so I came in contact with Automattic and they offered me the opportunity to work full time on the plugin and other Open Web projects.

The plugin lets people follow your WordPress site on ActivityPub-supporting social networks. Today it has over 2k active installs, but what would that number look like if this plugin came bundled with new installs/upgrades?

There’s very little downside for WordPress site owners to one-click install that sucker…

No, not running the rendered assets of a WordPress install in the browser. That wouldn’t be noteworthy. This is running the entire WordPress kit and caboodle inside your browser, thanks to WebAssembly.

Try it for yourself right here. Feel free to play with it: log in with admin / admin, add a comment, etc.

Leonardo Losoviz is pretty excited that Matt Mullenweg expressed interest in having WordPress’s editor comply with the Block Protocol:

My excitement comes from what happened with GraphQL, where the release of servers, clients, and tools adhering to a common specification has produced a rich ecosystem; and from my own development of a plugin that could support new features through the protocol.

Don’t fret if you’re new to this “Block Protocol” concept, like myself: Leonardo starts off this (long) article with a nice explainer before he gets into the potential outcomes of WordPress’s involvement.

Austin Gil:

For building applications, I like to use a “modern” tech stack (Vue.js, Express.js, Node, PostgreSQL). Sexy, new technology is fun to work with and makes me feel smart. However, I see a lot of folks in the dev community speak poorly about WordPress, and I just don’t get it.

He goes on to explain why he continues to use WordPress, things he doesn’t love about it, and provides a few tips for using WordPress effectively.

helps you to quickly provision WordPress with SQLite and serve the site using PHP’s builtin webserver. No external WebServer like Apache or Nginx and Database Server like MySQL or MariaDB is required. WPSQLite can give you a completely portable installation of WordPress which you can install even in your pendrive and run on *nix based operating systems, or even on Windows.

This looks like a great option for getting a WP dev environment bootstrapped without much hassle. I didn’t even know you could run WordPress on SQLite…

From the Gatsby blog on their choice to use headless WordPress for their blog:

The Gatsby blog has content from 133 authors. We’ve published articles from our community, technology partners, and staff members. WordPress enables us to have unlimited users (without paying a subscription per seat). WordPress also comes with powerful role-based permissions and has free plugins from services like Auth0 to unlock flexible security and authentication options. Those features made WordPress a perfect fit for our particular use case.

If you missed this exchange between WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg and Netlify CEO Matt Biilmann at the recent Jamstack Conf, read this to get the tldr. Here’s a section of the conversation to focus on…

Public debate kicked off at the end of August, with Mullenweg telling reporter Richard MacManus: “Jamstack is a regression for the vast majority of the people adopting it…”

“I don’t think the era of WordPress is over,” Mullenweg added. “I think we’re going to reach over 50 per cent market share in the next few years.”

This is not so much to do with architecture, but rather because users love software-as-a-service, whereas Jamstack is about custom development. There is not yet a Jamstack equivalent to the likes of Shopify, Squarespace or Wix, all mentioned as growing businesses.

WordPress and Jamstack are not completely in opposition. “I still think WordPress can play a really important role in the future ecosystem,” said Biilmann. The pattern he said he sees is WordPress used as a headless service, with developers “completely being in control of the front end layer.”

WordPress is MASSIVE — so why would a site using WordPress consider moving to JAMstack? This technical case study from Sarah Drasner covers how Smashing Magazine manages their content and what an actual WordPress migration looks like (using Smashing Magazine).

In this two-part article series, we’ll cover what an actual WordPress migration looks like, using a case study of the very site you’re reading from right now.

We’ll talk through the gains and losses, the things we wish we knew earlier, and what we were surprised by. And then we’ll follow it up with a technical demonstration of one possible migration path, not off WordPress completely, but how you can serve decoupled WordPress so that you can have the best of both worlds: a JAMstack implementation of WordPress that gives you all the power of their dashboard and functionality, with better performance and security.

Easily interact with the WordPress API from your front-end, whether it’s React-based or not. Built with axios.

Daniel Bachhuber joined Nadia and Mikeal to discuss his work on wp-cli, the economics, origins, staying productive as a maintainer, fund raising, and the state of wp-cli today.

Matt Mullenweg:

On Saturday I delivered the State of the Word presentation alongside Mel, Weston, and Matías. There’s always a post-event buzz but I definitely noticed a change in tenor of people’s thoughts on Gutenberg after the presentation and demo.

We still need to line up that Gutenberg show…