springtime
This month’s newsletter includes details for our upcoming meet-up (next week!), conferences to check out, a brilliant free book, a new explainer from David, web news and some thoughts and links about the recent WordPress drama.
Time for the next meet-up ツ
Next wednesday evening, we’ll resume our monthly meet-ups ツ The idea is to keep the first wednesday of the month as our date, skipping January, but back in February through till May/June. Details will always be included in this newsletter ツ
Next week, Wednesday, after 6pm, we will again be meeting in The Lost Hour – now our new hang-out. This little video, taken by Antony in April 2022, shows us there (view in browser).
As I mentioned before, we found it to be a friendly and affordable place. It is located between the Cutty Sark and Greenwich DLR stations, literally a 2-3 minute walk from either station.
I do hope to see many of you there ;)
conferences
The next London Web Standards is coming up ツ
*20 November 2024 @ 18:00 GMT – 20:00 GMT
@ Greenwich University 10 Stockwell Street, Greenwich, SE10 9BD*
November brings the next installment of this lovely event – and if you feel so inclined, Dave Letorey, one of the organisers, would be happy if you fancy giving a talk, even a short lightening talk ツ Let him know if you do ~ or let me know and I can introduct you ツ
The event is again at Greenwich uni – check out the details and get your ticket (it’s free ツ).
WordPress Accessibility Day 2024
This event happened earlier this month and was amazing. The videos will soon be available to watch ~ definitely worth it ツ
> WP Accessibility Day is a 24-hour event with presenters from around the world. There will be a single track of about 24-27 presentations. Attendees can register for free and watch live streams of talks. After the event, recordings will be available on the WP Accessibility Day YouTube channel with corrected captions and on this website with captions and full transcripts.
Brighton: FFConf 2024
> A full day of eight carefully curated sessions for an audience that cares about the future of the web, and who want their ideas challenged.
Check out 2024.ffconf.org for details.
This is curated by the wonderful Remy Sharp and his lovely wife Julie and anyone who ever attended will tell you that this is one of the most friendly, fun and inspiring conferences around. If you are still a student, there are cheap tickets available just for you ツ
Nikki attended last year and wrote a blog post about the talks of the day and her experience, check it out: A student goes to #FFCONF
Flexible Typesetting, Tim Brown
This is a lovely treat: another brilliant A Book Apart book is now free for everyone ~ and how lovely is this: Tim gave me permission to embed it in my handbook in the chapter on typography as well ツ It’s an excellent read and you should go ahead and just dive in ツ
> Flexible Typesetting is now yours, for free
And Tim created a beautiful site to go with it too: Flexible Typesetting
All about the CSS font-family property
As you might know, David has a still fairly new website for his excellent explainers ~ explainers.dev. If you’ve not had a look yet, I’d highly recommend you do ツ
The latest is an article all about the CSS font-family property – well worth a read ツ
Web news
Web Foundation is shutting its virtual doors
Tim Berners-Lee recently announced on Mastodon the end of the Web Foundation which was started in 2009.
Social Web Foundation
The launch of this initiative has seen mixed reactions across the web and the fediverse. Some are hopeful that something like this can have a positive impact. Others are more cynical due to the players involved. It is worth having a read and keeping an eye on how this will evolve ツ
> Social networks have transformed the way we communicate, bringing new opportunities and new problems. Now they’re evolving once more – into open and decentralized spaces that no one organization controls.
>
> The Social Web Foundation works to grow this new ecosystem in an open, healthy, and sustainable way-working with technologists and the public to build a new global town square that works for everyone.
WordPress news
Last month saw some drama in the world of WordPress: Matt announced that WPEngine, a company offering hosting, maintenance and plugins, has been banned from wordpress.org. A few weeks later, the popular plugin ACF has also been affected – with wordpress.org forking it to take ownership themselves. Many different reactions followed, of course – and it is worth knowing about this if you are, or are considering, using the plugin for any of your sites.
First up, do have a read of the blog post from Matt explaining these decisions:
* WP Engine is not WordPress
* Secure Custom Fields
While many people feel this is a really bad move from the side of WP/Matt – I am reluctant to form an opinion as I don’t know the ins and outs well enough to understand the full story here. I am just relieved to know that not everyone abandoned ship: I stayed, Jeffrey Zeldman.
There are too many articles around to quote here, and I can’t quite get over my personal feeling that people reacting strongly against this due to the fact that money is involved as part of the discussion. To me, there are still very few system around that stayed as true to their original mission to be for people as WP. While I don’t agree with many of the recent moves by wordpress.com (I teach it, so I currently do struggle to see how lots of the latest changes are good…) ~ I still think that WP is quite unique and overall created for the greater good.
This article is a good summary of the conflicting thoughts many are now having as a response: Is Matt Mullenweg defending WordPress or sabotaging it?
Practically speaking:
If your site is using the free version of ACF – you can now get it from their main website. Check the footer for the link to download. Bear in mind that if you are using it and update via the admin interface, you will be using Secure Custom Fields instead. This means you will get all the functions available on the free version of ACF, updates will be handled as always, via the wordpress.org website.
(At the time of writing, the plugin itself will still show the ACF branding but all up-sell options are now removed)
If you are using the Pro version, you can still update via downloading the files from the main ACF site too – and nothing will break. If you paid for the update to PRO, it is likely that you are using some of the more advanced features, and so you can keep updating and your setups will keep working.
Regardless of all this, let’s hope that WordPress will do the right thing and look after the users of the free version of this plugin going forward.
As always, contributions most welcome ツ
That’s it ~ if you have anything to share, or any ideas or suggestions of what I could include in the next newsletter, please let me know!
Hope to see you next week?!!! ツ
All the best, Prisca
PS: the delay in sending this newsletter today is due to a hiccup on ButtonDown which disabled my account temporarily. The usual schedule of wednesday will resume next time ツ