Show Script
This is Malcolm Peralty here from PressTitan and this is The WP Minute, Episode 151

The most important news this week is the release of WordPress 5.1 nicknamed “Betty”. It comes with performance improvements and fixes to the block-based editor and adds the start of the new site health features. This release has much more polish than the 5.0 release and is, in my mind, ready for production use, so for those of you holding onto the 4.9 branch of WordPress, you should be safe to update at this point, but please test on a staging environment and have good backups before you do.

Over on WPEka, they take a look at WP Fluent Form, a plugin that tries to mimic Gravity Forms or Ninja Forms in terms of both features and pricing. I don’t know that it has enough to separate it from the pack of freemium or premium plugins in that niche, so much so that the writer of the article accidentally mentioned Gravity Forms as a title to the Add-ons section of the post. I have been and will always be a Gravity Forms fan, though I do think they need to work on form style and a form library of sample forms.

Have you ever wondered where you can find all of the add-ons for Gravity Forms? Check out this post on the GravityView blog that covers much of the Gravity Forms Universe such as GravityPerks, JetSloth and others. It always amazes me how many other companies are thriving by creating premium add-ons to a premium plugin for a free piece of software.

On the Elegant Themes blog, they have a post regarding sending email newsletters from your WordPress website. I often tell people to use MailChimp or similar services for better delivery rates, and this article goes on to explain some other reasons why you might want to use a third-party service. They could have done this as a general article with no WordPress connection, so I have to give them points for tying it in so nicely.

ClassicPress 1.0.0 RC 1 is out. It looks like the fork of WordPress is still humming along as it gets close to releasing its first version. ClassicPress 1.0 was created in part because of the move towards Gutenberg and the block-based editor system but has extended beyond that in hopes of creating a fast, secure, modern publishing system with WordPress as the seed so it can take advantage of the huge community of developers and designers familiar with the software. If you are looking for a WordPress alternative, I’d recommend checking out ClassicPress.

Do you want a cute way of knowing when something on your WordPress site needs updating? Check out the Wapuu Dashboard Pet plugin highlighted on WPTavern. It shows a little Wapuu creature in different states depending on what’s going on with your WordPress install. From happy to sad to sick to dead. Is this the start of making your WordPress required maintenance into a gamified Tamagochi experience?

That’s it for today’s WP Minute, thank you all for watching.

Sources:
WordPress 5.1
WordPress Fluent Form
Gravity Forms Universe
Email Newsletters from Your WordPress Website
ClassicPress 1.0.0 RC 1
Wapuu Dashboard Pet

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