KrautPress Musings

For some time now, I’ve been thinking about how to scale KrautPress up a little. Back in 2016, I started this wonky German WordPress magazine called KrautPress. Over the years, it saw many contributors come and go. Some wrote just a post or two; others were true powerhouses, churning out high-quality content left and right. I truly appreciated everyone contributing.

Continue reading “KrautPress Musings”

A breath of fresh air for the German WooCommerce community

It’s time for new impulses in the German WooCommerce community. After more than two years of pandemic and many standstills, we want to start a new Meetup. Since I started the first German-speaking WooCommerce Meetup in Frankfurt in 2016, the world has changed, and so has WooCommerce.

WooCommerce has grown tremendously as a tool for the independent sale of goods and services, has secured considerable market share, and has accumulated a veritable ecosystem of extensions.
So the number of users, developers, and agencies making a living with Woo is growing steadily, yet many areas still lack exchange among these groups. In the larger WordPress community, local meetups are an essential link between different groups. Around WooCommerce, however, Germany’s Meetup culture has not been able to gain a foothold.

Continue reading “A breath of fresh air for the German WooCommerce community”

Less crappy Twitter embeds please!

WordPress has allowed embedding third-party content in posts and on pages for ages. In the classic editor, it was possible to simply paste a link to a popular external service like Twitter, Soundcloud, YouTube, etc. Using a clever format called oEmbed, WordPress could retrieve the linked content from the respective platforms and embed it in its content. Today there are separate blocks for the individual providers in the block editor, but nothing has changed in the basic principle of this mechanism.

The whole thing is perfect for integrating videos, putting tweets in a larger context, or presenting your music. But as is often the case, there’s a downside to it. The negative side effects of embedded content are manifold.

Continue reading “Less crappy Twitter embeds please!”

Focus on accessibility

For the start of the new decade I have a new small project to announce. If you read my German WordPress newsletter WP Letter regularly, you might have noticed that I am always including articles about accessibility.

That’s no coincidence, as I am particularly interested in the accessibility of the web in general and of WordPress in particular.

Catching Attention

But because accessibility is still far too often ignored or at best poorly treated even in 2020, I would now like to proclaim the topic month of accessibility in January.

Continue reading “Focus on accessibility”