Steve Burge
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steveburge.com
Steve Burge
@steveburge.com
850 followers 360 following 590 posts
Part of a team building WordPress publishing plugins with over 1 million users: PublishPress, Metaslider, TaxoPress, and Logtivity.
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Evan Prodromou is often called the "Father of the Fediverse". He's spent years building open platforms.

Why does he enjoy working on open platforms? Because he loves seeing what creative people can do when they're not locked into siloed, limited platforms.
Good on @nerdpress.net for this move.

They support a ton of creators who produce great work. And it is work that could be incredibly valuable for AI tools.

But to get that value, the publishers need to get leverage, and this is the best bet right now:
www.nerdpress.net/blocking-ai-...
Blocking AI Bots with Cloudflare Enterprise
Because creators should be compensated fairly for their work.
www.nerdpress.net
We had Rodolfi Melogi on the PublishPress podcast today, talking about his Checkout Summit event in Palermo in April.

Wish him luck: the call for speakers and sponsors ends this week🤞

Check out the conference details at checkoutsummit.com
Checkout Summit – The Global Conference for WooCommerce Experts
Hang Out with the WooCommerce Movers We’ve built WooCommerce plugins, optimized themes, complex flows, and entire businesses on WooCommerce — but we’ve rarely h
checkoutsummit.com
It's that time of the year in the WordPress world.

The Halloween spam is out-and-about in your WordPress dashboard 🎃☠️🤦‍♀️
Evan Prodromou is often called "The father of the Fediverse". It's amazing how much overlap there is between the aims of WordPress and Fediverse. These two communities should work together more!

WordPress people should be using the Fediverse more, and Evan explains why:
There's a surprising number of niche WordPress events at the moment
- PressConf in Arizona
- LoopConf in London
- Enqueue in Sydney
- SomeConf in Minnesotta
- Checkout Summit in Palermo
I feel like I'm probably missing some more?
PressConf 2025 was a big success. @raquelkarina.bsky.social has ideas for what could come next ...

Tickets are already available for PressConf 2026 ✅.

But what about Europe? Asia? Expanding beyond WordPress? 🤔
We welcomed @raquelkarina.bsky.social on the PublishPress podcast and she explained how the finances work for an event like Press Conf. Where does the revenue come from? What are the costs? And where to plants fit into all of this? 🪴😲
👍 Strongly agree.

These AI moves are giving me added enthusiasm for the work we're all doing in open source.
We were lucky to have @raquelkarina.bsky.social on the PublishPress podcast, telling the PressConf story.

PressConf is the best WordPress business conference but the talks are never recorded. Raquel explains why 👇
I'm noodling with this idea: a much better version of the Reusable Blocks screen.

Reusable Blocks could be such a 💯🚀 feature in WordPress, but they're hidden right now (they're not even normally called Reusable Blocks)
He says they are still planning to add real-time collaboration to the WordPress core. And then we got sizable update on the project's progress 👏 So if you're interested in real-time collab, check out this (very technical) update on the progress: github.com/WordPress/gu...
Sync Engine and Real-Time Collaboration · Issue #52593 · WordPress/gutenberg
This is the overview issue for the collaborative editing project as defined on this post. The goals are multiple here: Allow multiple users connected to the same WP-Admin to collaborate together on...
github.com
So here's an update on real-time collaboration in WordPress.

I posted yesterday about the new plugin and technical approach coming from a team at WordPress VIP.

Jacob Smith from VIP posted a very helpful reply to my post on Linkedin.
Sync Engine and Real-Time Collaboration · Issue #52593 · WordPress/gutenberg
This is the overview issue for the collaborative editing project as defined on this post. The goals are multiple here: Allow multiple users connected to the same WP-Admin to collaborate together on...
github.com
TLDR: I think this means that real-time collab will be available as a plugin for advanced users, but will not make the WordPress core.

Honestly, I think that's 100% fine. Not everyone needs real-time collab and it's an enormous technical challenge to add it to WordPress core.
Using WebSockets is a significant technology change from previous attempts at this. Most low-end hosting companies don't support WebSockets.

Here's some background from when I started writing about real-time collab in WordPress back in 2019: publishpress.com/blog/google-...
The plugin is here: github.com/Automattic/v...

Here's what you'll need to use it:
- A separate WebSocket server
- A custom version of the Gutenberg plugin
- At least PHP 8.2
We quietly saw some big news about the future of WordPress and Gutenberg.

I've seen several mentions in the last few days about the new real-time collaboration plugin from WordPress VIP.

It's a substantial and important change to the previous plans ⬇️
Fresh from a very successful WordCamp Canada this weekend 🇨🇦, we've a new podcast episode featuring @raquelkarina.bsky.social telling the PressConf story, and talking about how to hold events that people love:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cO9...
The PressConf Story: How Raquel Manriquez Launched the Best WordPress Business Conference
YouTube video by PublishPress
www.youtube.com