Rage against the plugin machine

Josh Pollock, a co-founder of Caldera forms, shared how he was able to have a career in development because of WordPress. He writes about all the extra work needed to build a plugin now and how that is impacting the learning curve in WordPress. Josh is working on a new product called Plugin Machine. He has always been interested in helping developers and this looks like an exciting opportunity for new developers coming into the WordPress space. Go check out what is planned for Plugin Machine and sign up for early access. Sarah Gooding at the WP Tavern shared the latest on the antitrust lawsuit against Google. The Lawsuit claimed AMP was created for the purpose of pushing publishers away from “header bidding.”  The full text of the newly unredacted complaint, which was unsealed by a federal judge last week, references research from internal Google documents. It states that internal Google communications identified header bidding as an “existential threat.”  We will keep an eye on Sarah’s reporting as this concern should continue to be a priority for the WordPress Community. Jetpack is finally formalizing its approach to agency licensing with a new portal launched this week. The program is aimed at streamlining product setup and account billing records for agencies and professionals who use Jetpack on client projects. Sarah was very busy writing about this as well this week. Birgit Pauli-Haack shared this blog post from lead architect of the Gutenberg project  Matías Ventura, reviewing theme.json and what’s on the horizon for it. Theme.json allows themes to control various aspects of the block editor, from presets to settings to the appearance of blocks, and was introduced in WordPress 5.8. Matias covers the cool things that can be done with it already and what will be unlocked in the future. As we have been reporting, WordPress 5.9 is full steam ahead towards the December 14, 2021 release date. The make.wordpress.org website is still showing the raised hand emoji where contributors and volunteers are needed. Also over on make.wordpress.org there is a redesign of the Gutenberg page. You can review the proposed updates and if you want to get involved, volunteers are welcome. Search Engine Journal reported that WordPress took a bit of a beating by sharing the