OMG 6.0 already?!

News Matt Mullenweg recently announced that he would be personally running Tumblr for a while. Tumblr lost their CEO and Matt is making this his top priority within Automattic for the immediate future. Keep an eye open for improvements in the community. Are you or your clients using Wordpress.com? Wordpress.com is now making it possible to purchase certain plugins directly on the plugin page.  The plugins that are available right now are for WooCommerce subscribers with a Business or eCommerce plan. Keep an eye out for more paid plugins appearing in 2022. Josepha Haden Chomphosy on make.wordpress.org shared the potential release timing for 2022 of WordPress. This release looks like this right now: 6.0 – Late May 6.1 – Mid October If you have project management skills or can lend a hand on these next major releases, contact the release team. The Preliminary Roadmap for Gutenberg 6.0 has also been published by Matias Ventura on make.wordpress.org.  There are four phases outlining the long-term roadmap. Events The schedule of WordCamps is published over on WordCamp central. Many are in the early stages of planning and don't have a date yet. WordCamp US has been scheduled September 9-11, 2022 in San Diego, CA. From Our Contributors and Producers To celebrate Black History Month Underrepresented in Tech will tweet about a black tech innovator/inventor every day in February. Google is burying FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) in its sea of abandoned experiments. Sarah Gooding over at the WPTavern writes that Google’s FLoC ran in limited markets and received overwhelmingly negative feedback from the tech industry that left Google with an uphill battle to get enough buy-in to proceed. So now Google is proposing topics. Stay tuned for the feedback on this new proposal. Squarespace rolled out an expansion of their Member Areas program. This allows publishers to earn money selling instructional and other kinds of content online through private members-only sections of their Squarespace website. Would you like to see block standardization across the web? Joel Spolsky has an interesting blog post asking what if blocks were interchangeable and reusable across the web? He suggests a non-proprietary, block protocol that will be open and free. His article is an interesting one to read. The WPMinute Contributor spotlight is on Aurooba Ahmed this week. She has created a new plugin called the superlist block for WordPress. This is Aurooba’s first publicly released plugin on WordPress.org. The plugin lets you add other blocks within the list items essentially making it supercharged. Listen to Joe Casabona’s Creator Toolkit on Creator Clock Minute Transcript: Hey everybody, Joe Casabona here a