A group of people got in charge of the team, who to put it politely, shouldn’t have even been on the team. These were people that were unable to deal with being wrong and unable to understand that they didn’t know everything. They then blocked anyone else from even applying to join the team and refused outside help to address the problems they were creating.

While the problems with the team were very evident, there hasn’t been someone with oversight of the team that others could go to get the problems with the team addressed. So the problems were allowed to continue for years, until, for unclear reasons, the head of the team left. The lack of oversight unfortunately doesn’t look to have changed.

Making the situation worse, those people seem to be protected in the WordPress community, so there was largely silence about the problems. The WP Tavern, for example, has covered the new team multiple times, but ignored the team for years before that despite the ongoing problems being brought to their attention. The same is true for other outlets that cover WordPress. Those trying to civilly raise the issues were criticized for doing that. Bringing up the problems behind the scenes with the companies sponsoring the problematic team members was also ignored. The team members also have controlled the WordPress support forum and shut down attempts to discuss the problems there as well.

Hopefully, things are moving in the right direction now with the new team members, but so far, things are still not in great shape. Earlier this week, we found that a plugin with a publicly known vulnerability likely to be exploited is still available in the plugin directory, despite the company run by the head of WordPress having publicly claimed nearly a month before that the vulnerability existed. If the new team is actually interested in getting things right, working with us and others who have tried to help the team in the past would be an easy way to make things better.

It addresses many of the issues raised on this article.

I think that as long as you keep Genesis updated so that it continues to work with new versions of WP, that is all that is needed. I don’t think anyone is looking for new features.

As long as the Gen middleware and the Studio Press themes can use the block editor I don’t see any major reason why you need to run to FSE… I tried FSE with the current WP 2020x themes and didn’t like it… and to be honest did not see a use-case for it in our shop.

I’m not sure WPE understands what a ‘good thing’ they have with Genesis and SP. If your company decides to EOL Genesis, there is a huge part of your customer-base that are going to run to another platform… (my people like Astra) and WPE will not be the first place they (we) look to for goods and services in the WP space.

I know that I were running WPE (and I’ve run companies much larger than WPE) I’d be working my tail off to develop Genesis and keep it current as possible so as not to lose such a large (and happy) customer base.

Without Gen. and SP all you are is a hosting company… a very good for sure, but there is nothing that really distinguishes you from the many, many other really good hosting companies.

I don’t know what kind of business-savvy WPE has, but I would hope there is someone on board with an MBA or the equivalent experience who understand a simple fact that applies to all businesses: It is far, far, far easier to keep an old customer than to get a new one.

Genesis can be a ‘golden goose’ for you… and you need it because you don’t have any other ‘geese’ on your farm.

Without Genesis, you are have to compete with many, many other ‘upscale’ hosting companies… and there is not much room for dynamic growth in that market, from what I can see… and I’ve been the software arena since I wrote my fist line of IBM ALC code in 1973 for H. Ross Perot’s EDS company (which puts me at an age close to dead!)

Anyway, thanks for contributing here.

I’d also like to understand & learn from what created this situation:

• What went wrong?
• How was it allowed to get so bad?
• Why did it go on for so long?

I think it’s important to learn from past mistakes.

I’m Lisa Canini (lisacee). I’m a newer addition to the world of WordPress. I’ve been working in WordPress since 2020. I love React and great UI.

I usually follow news about WordPress developments through local WordPress FB groups and local web hosting forums.

I am also a regular visitor to WPTavern and happy with the creation of this forum.

In my free time I write down my thoughts at https://diakhir.blog

Thank You

Create a short code with that in it, call it [copy-year] add it to the block/classic editor/builder. It should say year started too so 2000-2023 or your saying it’s been copyrighted this year. Easiest fix is not to include the year.

I believe AI will play a tremendous role in making copywriting more accessible to small-medium businesses. I have been able to build new products in a few months – it would have taken me years with ChatGPT.

It has its place in WordPress and we have to embrace it, or lose to competitor businesses.

But it is unclear how much new feature innovation we should do for Genesis at this time. We are keeping our eyes, ears and minds open though. If you have ideas or would like to talk more in depth, feel free to reach out to us at WP Engine.

I have been into WordPress ever since WordPress was born. I write about WordPress every week at https://thewpweekly.com and dig into cool plugins at https://pluginsly.com

…among many other web things!

I am from Kenya, and I run a blog about Divi and WordPress called https://divibanks.com

I recently launched a WordPress newsletter – oh, and it’s not the ordinary type of newsletters you are used to. Weekly, share stories, opinions, and news that matter to the WP professionals. You can check it out at https://wpcorner.co

I am so glad to have found out about this forum. Let’s connect via X at https://www.twitter.com/abonyo_pl

There are some good BB Press plugins that can do that out of the box (Ajax Search and GD Power Search come to mind).

There probably was already a block to do that somewhere, but I also wanted to use this as an opportunity to develop a custom block from scratch. I ended up creating a simple block plugin that does just that: it inserts the current year.

I’m a firm believer in modularity when we’re talking about blocks. There are lots of block libraries out there, but the problem with this approach is that if you need just one function, you end up including a lot of unused code in your WordPress instance.

You can find the block plugin here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/dynamic-year-block/

This will probably be integrated into the WordPress core sometime in the future, but for now, it’s a refreshingly simple way to solve this issue. Not to mention that it opened up a whole new horizon for me in relation to block development. Enjoy.

I’m the Head of Web for a small agency in Birmingham (UK) called PLOTT.

Home

I’ve been building websites for years, but only 5 years commercially. I use WordPress as my daily driver. I’m currently working on a bespoke events system with WooCommerce for a Law association.

Right now, I’m all about pushing the boundaries of website design in this new block editor era. The moment I tinkered with the first Gutenberg plugin version, I knew that design would be at the forefront of this new phase of WordPress.

I’m currently working on creating flexible solutions that empower users to experiment more with their site’s design. My journey starts with crafting neat template kits and themes over at https://epico.studio.

Let’s connect!

I am also using Genesis Framework for my blog (https://wpcanban.com) and developing a child theme called Paradise (https://wpcanban.com/mua-paradise-child-theme). It would be a big loss if the Genesis Framework was forgotten.

Thanks for the kind words!