Steve Burge

Welcome, Spellbook! Spellbook is our new platform plugin that brings all Gravity Wiz product suites, updates, and plugin discovery together into one magical grimoire.

Yes, another great example too 👏 gravitywiz.com/welcome-spel...

Introducing Foundation: A unified settings, licensing, and support framework for GravityKit products We are excited to announce the release of Foundation, a major upgrade to the GravityKit toolbox of plugins 🚀 Foundation is the name for our new licensing,

A lot of this is inspired by @zack.katz.me and his team at Gravity Kit. We've shamelessly borrowed ideas from their Foundation tool: www.gravitykit.com/foundation/

This is a plugin called "PublishPress Hub" and will be on the WordPress repo.

You won't have to use it, but it'll be available as a tool for our power users.

For example, you'll have one place to easily export all the settings from all your PublishPress plugins.

Are you a WP dev with lots of plugins?

We're about to launch something new that may interest you.

We've 10 different plugins with more to come. It's a pain for users (and us) to have 10 areas for license keys, import/export, debugging tools etc

The solution: one dashboard.

In addition to this month's main Metaslider release, we're also working on a Pro version of the MetaSlider Lightbox plugin. Here's a list of the first features:
- Zoom into each image
- Rotate the images
- Fullscreen mode
- URLs for each image
- Social sharing

Yes, I was definitely worried they would proceed with plans to drop the BC plugin.

This is the right call.

I think we would just have added much of the BC code to our own extensions, if the decision went the other way.

I don't post much about Joomla these days, but we still run Joomlashack with +2000 customers.

Some good news: the Joomla team have decided to keep including a backwards compatibility plugin in Joomla 6, due in October.

This means a lot of older extensions will still work 👏

MetaSlider Lightbox – Image Lightbox, Gallery Lightbox, Video Lightbox, WordPress Lightbox Lightbox plugin for WordPress. Build your image lightbox, video lightbox, YouTube lightbox, slideshow lightbox, YouTube lightbox.

Download the plugin here: wordpress.org/plugins/ml-s...

Huge plugin update 🥰 MetaSlider Lightbox 2.0 is live.

You can use lightboxes for your MetaSlider slideshows, plus images, videos and much more.

Jen Kramer - Educator, Author, Teaching the world to tell their own stories online

Check out Jen's work at jenkramer.org

Watch the PublishPress Podcast episode with Jen: youtu.be/SOGXl40IMkE

Companies don't want to hire junior developers who use AI.

@jenkramer.org has taught web design for years.

She says junior developers need to learn fundamentals. Companies don't want to hire people who can use AI. They want to people who can understand and solve their problems.

What even is the TikTok algorithm? 🤣

We've started putting some clips from the PublishPress Podcast on TikTok and the results are always zero or several hundred views. No in-between.

Leaky Paywall - WordPress Paywall Platform for Publishers Leaky Paywall for WordPress helps news and magazine publishers build email lists, grow subscription revenues, and create new content products.

Check out Pete's work at leakypaywall.com.

Catch the whole PublishPress Podcast episode with Pete here:
youtube.com/shorts/byy6L...

@peterericson.bsky.social works closely with niche magazines. They can be in an excellent position to move their business online. They have passionate, highly-engaged audiences. Fly-fishing, drumming, track-and-field ... these are examples of big opportunities.

Yes, and the writer makes a good point that this isn't infrastructure spending that will last. This will mostly be obsolete in a few quick years.

WebDevStudios WordPress design and development agency. We create quality-driven digital experiences for startups to enterprise projects. Your success is our mission.

Check out Brad's work at webdevstudios.com

Watch the whole PublishPress Podcast episode with Brad: www.youtube.com/watch?v=omJV...

@bradw.illiams.com from WebDevStudios was involved in a ground-breaking project, moving Microsoft's blog networks from closed-source code to WordPress.

He landed that project by getting out and participating in the WordPress community ...

Honey, AI Capex is Eating the Economy AI capex is so big that it's affecting economic statistics, boosting the economy, and beginning to approach the railroad boom

Here's the link to the original post. The author says AI is basically the keeping the US economy out of recession paulkedrosky.com/honey-ai-cap...

This is a little nuts. A couple of years ago, investment in AI was 0.1% of US GDP and this year it's going to be 2%. The country hasn't seen anything like this since the railway boom of the 1880s.

This is interesting, and surprising to me:

AI is coming to the WordPress core and it's explicitly planned to be part of Gutenberg Phase 3 (admin design, real-time collaboration etc).
make.wordpress.org/ai/2025/07/1...

YouTube video by PublishPress Why the Most Successful Media Companies Use WordPress, With Ben May

Check out Ben's work at thecode.co

Watch the whole interview with Ben: www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWkV...

Ben May and his team at The Code Company have built some of the biggest multi-lingual sites on WordPress.

He believes that even having some simple multi-lingual features in the core would help WordPress agencies win more projects.

Coming this week: a big update to the MetaSlider Lightbox plugin.

Previously it was just a connector. Now, it's a standalone plugin.

You can add lightboxes to all your slideshows, plus core images, and galleries.

It's built with the awesome lightGallery library.

Oh wow. The beta of jQuery 4 has just been hanging out there for a year now

WordPress support that feels like family. Your website should empower you to build a better life, and we’re here to help make it happen!

Check out Andrew's work at www.nerdpress.net.

Watch the whole PublishPress podcast episode with Andrew at www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z47U...

Andrew from @nerdpress.net works with food bloggers and they're on the frontlines of dealing with AI competitors.

Andrew believes some AI is fine in your writing workflow. The key is knowing where to draw the line:

We're just over half-way through 2025. How is WordPress business for you?

From talking to my friends in Slack groups, the main answer seems be "erratic". Monthly growth YoY is see-sawing between +40% and negative numbers.

The overall mood seems to be optimistic but nervous.

Oops, sorry. Typing too fast.

Thanks Michael. That's useful to hear. This came from a client and the idea was new to us and we're exploring it. The client got the idea from the Drupal community: drupal.org/project/deco...

PublishPress Checklists: Pre-Publishing Approval Checklist – Validate Post Requirements Define checklist tasks to complete before publishing posts. Make sure your content meets your requirements.

This is a potential feature for the PublishPress Checklists plugin: wordpress.org/plugins/publ...