[ad_1] WooSesh kicked off this week with a keynote session from WooCommerce CEO Paul Maiorana, who gave an overview of the current state of the ecosystem. More than 3.4 million websites use WooCommerce, according to Builtwith, including 25% of the top million online stores. It is by far the most popular solution among WordPress sites with e-commerce, capturing 93% of the market share. Maiorana covered some industry-wide trends taking shape in 2023. WooCommerce merchants are uncertain about the economy and while some are optimistic, others do not see it improving soon. Although growth has slowed since the pandemic-fueled rapid acceleration towards e-commerce in 2021, Maiorana said revenues are projected to gain steadily through 2025. WooCommerce core is entering a transformative time, as the new admin has been fully merged and Cart and Checkout blocks are now part of core (in beta). The plugin is becoming more block friendly with more than 40 blocks available now. WooCommerce has seen a 319% increase in the usage of block themes and is aiming to have full out-of-the-box compatibility with any block-based theme. The Market for Hosted WooCommerce Products Is Heating Up One of the biggest announcements from the event was that WooCommerce is developing its own hosted, turnkey solution in collaboration with hosting partners. WordPress.com will be the first to pilot the product in February 2023. Maiorana said the goal of the solution is to improve onboarding and retention with the following : WooCommerce pre-installed, activated, and hosted A pre-packaged set of essential plugins Simplified onboarding that works with partners’ systems to improve conversion Competitive monthly price to reduce churn Co-marketing and revenue share with hosts WooCommerce’s hosted solution will be in direct competition with other hosts that have recently launched their own products. In November 2021, GoDaddy acquired Pagely with the intent to deploy a new SaaS WooCommerce product. Pagely was paired with previous 2020 acquisitions of Poynt, a payment processor, and SkyVerge, a popular WooCommerce plugin development company, to create an integrated solution. Last month, GoDaddy launched an open access preview of Managed WooCommerce Stores to US-based customers. GoDaddy’s solution boasts the ability to sync across marketplaces, including Amazon, eBay, Google, Walmart, Etsy, and YouTube, with a single dashboard managing payment processing, marketing, shipping, and inventory. It is integrated with GoDaddy Payments for both online and in-person transactions, which incur a transaction fee of 2.3% + 30¢. The hosted WooCommerce preview plans range from $99.99/month – $249.99/month. At WooSesh today, Beka Rice, Senior Director of Product Management at GoDaddy, gave an overview of multichannel and omnichannel sales for e-commerce merchants during her presentation. Enabling multichannel store management seems to be one of the main selling points of GoDaddy’s offering. Bluehost is another recent contender in the managed WooCommerce hosting space, having launched its product last month. In March, Newfold Digital, Bluehost’s parent company, acquired YITH, a WordPress plugin company with more than 100 WooCommerce extensions. Bluehost’s managed WooCommerce packages include a curated set of YITH plugins to help merchants extend their stores to offer gift cards, bookings and appointments, wishlists, product filtering, and more. Bluehost offers two plans. For the first year, when billed yearly, customers pay $9.95/month for a simple store or $12.95/month for selling across various marketplaces. Customers on the more expensive plan have the option to manage product inventory across Etsy, Amazon and eBay from a consolidated dashboard via Ecomdash. At the budget end of the WooCommerce hosting spectrum, Bluehost’s offering has an emphasis on creating a user-friendly, guided onboarding experience. Bluehost conducted an internal research study last year and found that its small business customers were looking for solutions that would allow them to sell online, but many of them are first-time website creators. The company created this new WooCommerce offering to eliminate the hassle of navigating themes and the many plugins required to launch a store. Bluehost uses YITH’s Wonder theme as the stores starting theme, which we reviewed in August. “Our theme is built for WordPress, utilizes the block structure that modern WordPress websites are beginning to adopt (one of the early block-basedWooCommerce block themes) and also includes three full-page patterns for different homepage layouts and designs,” Newfold Digital SVP of Digital Presence and Commerce Jason Cross said. “This not only provides users with a modern looking store, but also allows them to continue to customize it with ease in the future. YITH Wonder comes with six different style variations that make it easy to customize the accent color combinations and typography for the site.” Bluehost’s offering is aimed at catering to the merchants who will be building the stores themselves. The company has not created its own payments solution but connects to popular payment providers such as PayPal and Stripe and offers cash on delivery and in-store pickup options. WooCommerce is at the start of its journey towards launching a hosted solution but the company also plays a different role in the ecosystem as the maintainer of the core software. In an interview with the Tavern after his keynote, Maiorana said the vast majority (+90%) of ongoing WooCommerce core development is done by the WooCommerce team at Automattic. “One important difference is that we are really focused on the WooCommerce ecosystem – including the thousands of web hosts that help support and drive WordPress and Woo adoption across the globe – as our most important ‘customer,’” he said. “And what we’re hearing from these customers is that it is challenging to compete with the simplicity offered by proprietary, turnkey e-commerce solutions. At the same time, many web hosts don’t have the capabilities to address things like onboarding, conversion, and retention holistically – they need our help to compete and win.” Many of the major hosting companies that serve WordPress customers, like WP Engine, GoDaddy, and Bluehost have already developed their own hosted WooCommerce solutions, although there are many smaller companies that do not offer curated plugins, themes, and friendly onboarding that may be more open to partnering with the makers of WooCommerce. “We’re also working with
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#46 – Nick Diego on Why You Should Be Excited About the Possibilities of WordPress Blocks – WP Tavern
[ad_1] [00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley. Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the themes, and in this case, why you should be excited about WordPress blocks. If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or go to WPTavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players. If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea featured on the show. You can do that by heading over to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox, and use the contact form there. So on the podcast today, we have Nick Diego. Nick is a Developer Advocate at WP Engine. He can be found, creating educational content, building plugins and themes, and contributing to WordPress core. He’s on the podcast today to talk about his passion and optimism for the future of WordPress using blocks. At the recent WordCamp US, Nick gave a presentation entitled, ‘Let’s build a custom block in 15 minutes’. It was his attempt at showing a group of WordPress enthusiasts that the barrier to creating blocks is slowly being eroded, due to the creation of new tools. These tools are creating opportunities for people who might otherwise have stayed away from block development. It’s becoming easier to create the blocks as the tools take away much of the technical burden of getting you up and running without advanced knowledge of JavaScript and React. Coupled with core components, native blocks supports, and a bit of guidance, Nick thinks that every WordPress developer can add custom blocks to their repertoire. It’s clear that Nick is all in on blocks. And during the podcast, he makes the case for why you should be too. They offer so many opportunities for what can be displayed on a page, and their capabilities are only getting better. We talk about how WordPress core blocks are trying to support developers by adding components and blocks supports so you don’t have to repeat the development work already done by others. You can build on top of previous work and thereby save yourself valuable time. It’s a fascinating chat, especially for those who are, as yet, undecided about whether they want to embrace WordPress blocks. Typically when we record the podcast, there’s not a lot of background noise, but that’s not always the case. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be bringing you recordings from a recent trip to WordCamp US 2022, and you might notice that the recordings have a little echo or other strange audio artifacts. Whilst the podcasts are more than listenable, I hope that you understand that the vagaries of the real world were at play. If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all the links in the show notes by heading over to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast. Where you’ll find all of the other episodes as well. And so without further delay, I bring you Nick Diego. I am joined on the podcast by Nick Diego. How you doing, Nick? [00:04:03] Nick Deigo: I’m doing great. [00:04:03] Nathan Wrigley: Would you just introduce yourself? Give us a little bit of your background, who you work for. How come you’re at WordCamp US. [00:04:08] Nick Deigo: I’m a developer advocate at WP Engine. I also do a lot of contributing both on the WordPress core team and also on the training team for WordPress. [00:04:16] Nathan Wrigley: He’s doing a talk, presentation. What’s it all about Nick? [00:04:19] Nick Deigo: It’s all about trying to get people excited about building their own custom blocks, and I attempted to build a custom block completely in fifteen minutes. [00:04:27] Nathan Wrigley: Did you achieve it? [00:04:29] Nick Deigo: Just barely. I got the zero minute sign as I was just finishing the presentation, so I just got under the wire. [00:04:35] Nathan Wrigley: I guess the principle therefore, is that if you can do something in 15 minutes, I mean, let’s be honest, you’re pretty well versed, probably had a few runs through of that. But the bit that you are trying to educate people in, is that it’s easier now than it ever has been. So there’s no excuse to not explore. Is that basically it? [00:04:50] Nick Deigo: Yeah, and I think building blocks has been a bit scary. I know it was scary for myself. I didn’t come from a JavaScript background, mainly PHP. And so I wanted to show people that there’s so many more tools nowadays that it’s not as scary to get started, and if I can do it in 15 minutes, and I came from a non-technical background. You can do it too. [00:05:09] Nathan Wrigley: When blocks came around, Gutenberg was launched the first time, how did we build blocks and how has that changed? What things have come over the horizon since then to make it easier? [00:05:19] Nick Deigo: You wandered in the wilderness and looked for some documentation that maybe didn’t exist, and maybe looked at some core blocks and you kind of tried to figure it out. But today you can scaffold an entire block with one line of code in your terminal and voila, you have a block. [00:05:34] Nathan Wrigley: Is that because it’s become easier to do, or is that just that there’s more documentation? Are there actual tools? Are there pieces of software that you can download and use and things to make it more straightforward? [00:05:46] Nick Deigo: I find building with JavaScript is just inherently more challenging than PHP, but we have tools today written by contributors to WordPress that allow you to take all the hard bits and it takes care
Continue readingWordPress 6.1 RC 1 Released, Ready for Testing and Translation – WP Tavern
[ad_1] We are less than three weeks out from WordPress 6.1’s official release on November 1, 2022. RC 1 was released this week, marking the hard string freeze, which means 6.1 is ready to be translated. The features landing in this release are heavy on block and site editor improvements that will bring users a greater level of design control. Many of these features have been tested in the Gutenberg plugin but will need further testing now that they are in core, including the expanded template experience, better placeholders for blocks, new modal interfaces and preferences improvements, and updated menu management. WordPress 6.1 includes 11 releases of the Gutenberg plugin (13.1 – 14.1). If you are monitoring WordPress’ core development blog, you may have seen the deluge of dev notes coming in ahead of 6.1. A few of the highlights include the following: The WordPress 6.1 Field Guide has also been published. This guide includes all the technical details of the changes coming in the release, as well as the full collection of dev notes. There are a good number of updates that fall outside of the editor with ticket references in the Field Guide, including error logging and hooks added to wp-cron.php, database updates, addition of required attribute for required inputs on multisite site registration, updates to external libraries, REST API improvements, and many more miscellaneous core updates. Plugin and theme developers are encouraged to test their extensions against RC1 and update the “Tested up to” version in the readme file. WordPress testers who are not comfortable filing a Trac ticket for bugs should report them to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. [ad_2] Source link
Continue readingShortcodes Ultimate Plugin Patches CSRF Vulnerability in Version 5.12.1 – WP Tavern
[ad_1] The Shortcodes Ultimate plugin, used on more than 700,000 WordPress sites for creating things like tabs, buttons, and accordions, has patched a vulnerability in version 5.12.1. The plugin’s changelog simply says, “This update fixes a security vulnerability in the shortcode generator. To the author’s credit, the changelog clearly denotes it as a security update, although it doesn’t offer specific details. The vulnerability was reported by researcher Dave Jong at Patchstack and is logged at the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) as a Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerability leading to plugin preset settings change. It was patched two weeks ago and the NVD published the advisory this week. At this time, the vulnerability is not known to have been exploited, but users are advised to update to the latest version. Based on WordPress.org stats, 46% of the plugin’s user base is running on versions older than 5.12.x. The Shortcodes Ultimate plugin author has since released version 5.12.2, which fixes an issue with the Shortcode Generator Presets that was introduced in the previous update. [ad_2] Source link
Continue readingGutenberg 14.3 Improves Image Drag and Drop – WP Tavern
[ad_1] Gutenberg 14.3 was released this week with drag-and-drop improvements for both the block editor and the site editor. Automattic-sponsored contributor Aaron Robertshaw published a video, illustrating how the block editor now supports dropping an image onto an empty paragraph block to replace it with a new Image block. The site editor has also added drag-and-drop capabilities for blocks and patterns in the new zoomed-out view, which was added in Gutenberg version 14.1. It zooms out to focus on building and composing patterns, allowing users to move sections around without affecting the inner blocks. It can be enabled under “Experiments.” In 14.3, users can drag blocks and patterns right onto the canvas with an overhead view that makes it easy to place in between existing blocks. video source: Gutenberg PR #44402 This version also introduces new support for alt + arrow keyboard combinations for navigating blocks. Robertshaw explained how they work: For example, if your cursor is towards the end of a long paragraph, you can quickly press alt + up arrow to move to the beginning of that paragraph. If you are already at the beginning of a text block, you’ll move to the start of the previous paragraph. Similarly, alt + down arrow will move you to the end of a block of text. The Styles typography controls have been updated to include the Tools Panels that users have available in the Block Settings interface. This makes the experience more consistent and expands the capabilities to allow for resetting the values. This release includes dozens of fixes and improvements to design tools, components, the Block API, and more. Check out the changelog in the announcement post for the full list of updates. Gutenberg 14.3 will not be included in the upcoming WordPress 6.1 release but will be rolled into core the next time around. If you want these features now, you can install the Gutenberg plugin. [ad_2] Source link
Continue readingA Free Business Block Theme for WordPress – WP Tavern
[ad_1] WPZOOM is coming in strong with its first block theme approved for the WordPress Themes Directory. UniBlock is a beautifully designed theme that is well-suited for businesses and freelancers. The company plans to adopt the concept of full-site editing in other WPZOOM themes as well, following the release of UniBlock. UniBlock’s default look is sporting a darker color palette in the navigation and above the fold, with a lighter background for the rest of the website. The video on the sample homepage uses the free WPZOOM Video Popup Block plugin, which supports Vimeo and YouTube. It’s a simple, lightweight block that allows users to customize the play button and play icon. After activating the theme, clicking on ‘Customize’ will prompt the user to install the video plugin. It can also be converted to a Custom HTML block or removed entirely at the user’s discretion. UniBlock’s 19 custom block patterns include everything one might expect from a business theme but, most impressively, it ships with five full-page patterns: Front Page About Services Blog Contact Alternatively, users can assign the page template in the post settings to get the same effect. These full-page patterns are convenient for speedy page building. They make it possible to get a basic business website up in a matter of minutes. Here’s an example of the Services full-page pattern that will instantly embed when selected. Users can delete any sections they don’t need, add more blocks and patterns, and quickly fill in all their own information. Separately there are patterns for a footer with text, links, multiple arrangements of featured boxes with text and button, multiple designs for call-to-action sections, pricing tables, team members with social icons, testimonials, header cover, sidebar, 404 page, and more. Users can delve even further into customizing the templates with the site editor, as UniBlock is packaged with nearly two dozen templates and template parts. Here they can also edit the menu and adjust global styles. WPZOOM is developing a Pro version of the theme to release in a few weeks with support for importing the whole demo, multiple color schemes, multiple demos, premium block patterns, and additional header and footer layouts. Check out the demo on the WPZOOM website to see the theme in action. WPZOOM has also written documentation for UniBlock, which covers general topics like how to use block patterns, how to set up the front and blog pages, and how to create a menu in the site editor. Since the company’s most popular themes are what would be considered classic themes, UniBlock is new territory for most of their customers. It is so far the only block theme among WPZOOM’s collection of 31 themes. Block theme adoption is slowly making its way across WordPress’ major theme shops and the official directory is now hosting 160 themes tagged for full-site editing. As more longtime theme companies make their block theme debuts and develop a base for future themes, WordPress users may start to see a rapid acceleration of the number and variety of block themes available. UniBlock is so far one of the few block themes in the directory with a singular focus on business websites. It is available to download for free from WordPress.org or via the admin themes panel. [ad_2] Source link
Continue readingPlugin Dependencies Feature Plugin Now Ready for Testing – WP Tavern
[ad_1] For more than a decade, WordPress developers have been discussing how core can support plugins that require one or more other plugins in order to work. Having a standardized way of managing plugin dependencies would be a useful and time-saving feature for developers, who currently have to roll their own solutions for this. “The situation there is a lot like the relationship between parent and child themes,” project lead Andy Fragen said in February when introducing the idea for the feature plugin. “Without their relationships to the bigger plugin, those dependent plugins can do very little. Every plugin developer is on their own to code a solution to resolve the issue. The single most common example is WooCommerce, which is a dependency for hundreds, if not thousands, of WooCommerce add-on plugins.” After nine months of discussion and development, the Plugin Dependencies feature plugin is now ready for testing. It allows plugin authors to specify any WordPress.org-hosted plugin(s) that are required for their plugins to function. A plugin that has dependencies can be identified by adding a “Requires Plugins” header to the docblock of the main plugin file. Plugin authors can specify as many dependencies as necessary in a comma-separated list of plugin slugs. How does it work? Site owners will get an admin notice if there are dependencies they need to install. The plugin card will be updated to display the Requires and Required by information on the Plugins screen. Fragen outlined how the community can test the new core support for handling plugin dependencies. You do not have to be a developer to participate in testing this new feature. It involves installing test plugin files and confirming admin notices appear and disappear at the right times. Testers who are comfortable editing plugin files can try adding dependencies, adding a dependency for non-WordPress.org plugins, and other more advanced tests. Version control is not part of this project, so developers will not be able to specify a minimum required version, for example. “Version control is out of scope for the feature as described in the original Make post referenced above,” Fragen said in response to a question on the feature plugin. “As the majority of the dependencies come from the dot org repository, the most current versions will be installed. “Specifically, WordPress should automatically prompt the user to update to the current version and may use auto-updates as well.” Testing will be open until December 1, 2022. Anyone who wants to be part of moving this long-awaited feature towards a possible inclusion in core can report issues to the WP Plugin Dependencies plugin’s repository. [ad_2] Source link
Continue readingJetpack Social Plugin Adds Paid Plan, Free Users Now Limited to 30 Shares per Month – WP Tavern
[ad_1] Jetpack has announced changes to its Jetpack Social plugin that may impact publishers who frequently share across social media networks. Previously, users could share an unlimited number of posts automatically via their connected social media accounts. Jetpack is shuffling its monetization strategy for this extension and has capped social sharing at 30 shares per month for the free tier. A new paid plan offers 1,000 shares and re-shares per month, starting at $1/month for the first month and is $10/month thereafter. As a concession, Jetpack is rolling the social previews and re-sharing into the free plan. With Jetpack Social, if a post is automatically shared to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, that counts as three shares. It’s easy to see how quickly these shares can rack up to where even a casual blogger might require a paid plan. Publishers that are used to being able to automatically share all their posts for free should be aware this change that limits them to to 30 shares per month. I would not be surprised to see some users switch to another social sharing plugin, as many others offer far more social networks and don’t limit the number of times users can share. Instead they opt to restrict re-sharing, scheduling, or the ability to connect multiple accounts per social network. Jetpack Social has a new team behind it focused on making the product better. In 2021, Automattic acquired the Social Image Generator plugin with plans to integrate it into Jetpack’s social media tools. This may make the product more compelling, since it currently doesn’t stand up well to the myriad of free sharing plugins out there. Jetpack only supports four social networks, but the team is working on expanding the plugin’s capabilities. The plugin’s development team also accepts feature suggestions on its GitHub repository. Version 1.4.0 of the Jetpack Social plugin moved the share limits code to the Publicize package and added a meter to show users how many shares they have remaining. Users on the free plan should notice these changes in their dashboards. [ad_2] Source link
Continue reading10up Publishes Gutenberg Best Practices Website – WP Tavern
[ad_1] 10up has published a Gutenberg Best Practices website as a public resource with tutorials, documentation, and example code. Maintaining current documentation has not been a strong point of the official Gutenberg project as the pace of the project makes it difficult for contributors and extenders to keep up. “Gutenberg introduced an entirely new editorial paradigm for content creation and page building within WordPress,” 10up Associate Director of Editorial Engineering Fabian Kaegy said. “Because the block editor is still fairly new, it is advancing quickly and changes are introduced regularly; as such, learning opportunities are scarce and we have felt an absence of best practice documentation that meets 10up standards for craftsmanship.” 10up’s Gutenberg Best Practices were written to supplement WordPress’ core documentation with what Kaegy said is a “more client-services-centric approach tailored to engineering enterprise-level editorial experiences.” For developers who are brand new to working with the block editor, the Reference section has a wealth of information about the anatomy of a block, the fundamentals of block theming with theme.json, block extensions, block variations, and more, with supporting videos and gifs. The documentation also gives a little more context for practical usage. For example, the section about Block Transforms includes information about when and how to define block transforms. The Training section of 10up’s Gutenberg Best Practices contains a mini crash course on the file structure of a block and all of its components, and how to build a custom block using the 10up Starter Block. This is especially helpful for developers looking for some extra guidance developing their first blocks. The Guides section contains more advanced topics like extending core blocks and including frontend JS with a block. The documentation is available on GitHub for anyone to contribute edits. The site also links to a discussion board on GitHub where developers are welcome to join discussions and workshop the best practices in collaboration with 10up employees. 10up has published the Gutenberg Best Practices website with a beta designation and intends to update and expand it as WordPress evolves. [ad_2] Source link
Continue reading#47 – Adam Silverstein on the State of Images in WordPress – WP Tavern
[ad_1] [00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley. Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, the state of images in WordPress. If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to WPTavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players. If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea featured on the show. Head over to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox and use the contact form there. So on the podcast today, we have Adam Silverstein. Adam is a WordPress core comitter, where he works to fix bugs and improve modern web capabilities. As a developer relations engineer in the content ecosystem team at Google, he works to invigorate the open web by empowering and educating developers. At the recent WordCamp US he gave a presentation entitled images on the web, past, present and future. In it, he outlined his thoughts on where the web is going in terms of support for different image formats. Alongside text images are the bedrock of webpages. We browse the internet and expect pages to have images of all forms. Photos, illustrations, charts and images to convey additional meaning to the text. But how do the images actually get on the page? WordPress makes handling images pretty easy, and Adam explains what happens when you upload an image to the media library and then display it on a page or post in a browser. We discussed the fact that different image sizes are created automatically by WordPress, which can be used in a variety of contexts across your website. You’ve likely heard of many of them. But perhaps you have not thought about which image format belongs where. As with code, the technology behind images does not stand still. New image formats are being created all the time, and are being supported at differing rates by the major browser vendors. In the past, we typically used JPEG. GIF or PNG files to display images on our websites, but there’s good reason to think about adopting other defaults in the near future. We discussed some of these new formats, such as WebP, AVIF and JPEG XL, and find out how they are speeding up website loading times because of their smaller file sizes. We also get into how you can optimize your images and how plugins and SaaS solutions can reduce the size of your files before or after you upload them to your WordPress install. Adam has some good advice about a topic which is becoming increasingly important, page load time. And if you’ve never given the serious thought, this is a great podcast episode for you. Typically when we record the podcast, there’s not a lot of background noise. But that’s not always the case. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be bringing you recordings from a recent trip to WordCamp US 2022, and you might notice that the recordings have a little echo or other strange audio artifacts. Whilst the podcasts are more than listenable, I hope that you understand that the vagaries of the real world were at play. If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all the links in the show notes by heading over to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast. Where you’ll find all of the other episodes as well. And so without further delay, I bring you Adam Silverstein. I am joined on the podcast today by Adam Silverstein. Did I get that right? [00:04:38] Adam Silverstein: You did. That’s the way I like to pronounce it. [00:04:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Perfect. Adam is here because he did a presentation at Word Camp US this year. What was the presentation about Adam? [00:04:46] Adam Silverstein: It was images on the web, past, present, and future. So kind of like a history of images and also what’s coming in the future for modern image formats. [00:04:54] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. We’ll delve into that in a moment, but before we do, would you just give us the two minute potted history of Adam. How it is that you’ve come to speak at a WordCamp. [00:05:02] Adam Silverstein: Sure. Yeah. I mean, I used to build sites in, uh, Dreamweaver. Then I discovered WordPress as a way to let my clients be able to edit their content. Then one day I decided I should contribute back to WordPress. I became super involved in Core and help rewrite revisions for 3.6. Eventually, I became a core comitter. And, worked at agency, 10up, for quite a while, and then eventually wound up on the CMS team at Google. Working on the web platform, trying to make the web platform better. And I still work on WordPress quite a bit in that role. [00:05:30] Nathan Wrigley: Google seemed to be doing a lot more with WordPress. [00:05:33] Adam Silverstein: Absolutely. Since about 2017 when they started showing up at every WordCamp. And also they have that first party plugin Site Kit, which is their own plugin that’s very well supported that connects your WordPress site to Google Services. [00:05:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, we spoke to Felix a few episodes ago. So, if you’re into Site Kit and things like that, you can search for the Felix Arntz episode. But we’re here to talk about images today. And I’m going to lead off with something which is going to make me sound incredibly ignorant, and apologize for that. And that is simply this. When I visit a webpage or I’m building a website, images basically just magically appear. They’re on my computer. I see that there’s an image, there’s a file
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