So much to learn

In the News The release of WordPress 5.9 is coming this month. There are many performance enhancements that will be part of this release. In addition to editor and front-end performance enhancements, lazy loading images changed, resulting in a 30% faster page load - in some cases. Go over to make.wordpress.org to check out the numbers. Sarah Gooding, over at the WPTavern covers the new API in Gutenberg that will be released with WordPress 5.9. This new API will allow you to lock individual blocks and override template locking which had been the only way to lock blocks. Events As WordPress 5.9 comes out at the end of January, there is a Mega Meetup to provide information that WordPress professionals should know about. You can sign up for the meetup which will be held Thursday, January 20, 2022. Look for some great exploration of Blocks and what to expect around design changes.  WooCommerce Updates Heads up. Starting with version WooCommerce 6.5 (scheduled for release in May) WooCommerce will require PHP 7.2 or newer to work. PHP is rapidly changing and it was determined that PHP 7.2 was the version that still had a significant number of WooCommerce active installs running. If you have an older version of PHP running it will still work, but you will not be able to continue to update this plugin. You also risk the usual performance and security issues by running older versions. From Our Contributors and Producers There are several more 2021 “year in reviews” from the WordPress community.  Brad Touesnard from Delicious Brains shares a nice post about how the company's growth has tripled and how the team is growing.  He also covers the ACF (Advanced Custom Fields) acquisition along with other updates. The article is worth a few minutes of your time to read. WPCloudDeploy shares the blogpost of how they had 10 versions of their product released in one year. They rolled out more than 50 new and improved features last year. This is a pretty impressive post representing a lot of work from that company.  There is also an update from Rich Tabor. He announced that WP Experts has acquired his Login Designer plugin. Did you know that NFT marketplace aggregator Flip, co-founded by UpOnly podcast host Brian Krogsgard (yes the guy from Post Status), has raised $6.5 million in a seed funding round? What is Flip you ask? Flip aggregates NFT marketplaces under one roof on its platform, allowing users to easily navigate through available NFTs to buy.  Ever wonder why competing with Google search is next to impossible? Well, a new search engine needs an index of the web. And many sites don’t welcome any web crawler that isn’t Google or Bing. This article from Fast Company covers the challenges of competing with search that crawls sites with automated software. Brave, which is a privacy-focused web browser, had see