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You know how it goes, everything I mention here will be linked up in the newsletter and the blog post. Check out thewpminute.com for the links.



In the News



There was a lot of excitement this week around LTDs (LifeTime Licensing Deals). There were several posted reactions to the email sent from Delicious Brains, the new owners of Advanced Custom Fields. The email was not well-received (to say the least) by some users that have had Lifetime Licensing because it was asking for a part-time donation for the product. Twitter exploded with reactions and many in the WordPress community responded as well.



We covered this on the WPMinute and Sarah Gooding also wrote about both perspectives — positive and negative —  in her article over on the WPTavern. 



The bottom line is that the lifetime licenses are tough, and very few still remain in the WordPress space. ACF (read: Brad) will continue to honor the pricing for legacy customers.



With the recent delay of WordPress 5.9 the team is looking for testers for Beta 1. Angela Jin posted the link for the helpful testing guide. Feel free to participate and let them know how you “broke” it. Testing is very important for a successful release. 



A JSON Schema for theme.json and one for block.json are now available to help with building block-based themes. The schema can be used by code editors to provide things like tooltips, autocomplete, and validation while editing theme.json or block.json.



The WP Live Streams Directory pick of the week



“Building Modern WordPress Plugins With Plugin Machine (Part 2)*” presented by Josh Pollock, formerly of WPCaldera, on December 7th at 11pm UTC / 6pm EST / 3pm PST. In Part 1 of his talk, Josh laid the foundation of the mess that modern tooling has become for plugin development.



In Part 2, Josh will show us a demo of Plugin Machine, a new app he’s building that helps developers create plugins and add features to them easily. You can catch this by registering for the Pittsburgh WordPress Developers and Designers meetup.



Other News From Our Contributors



Shopify Engineering announced that they had their biggest Black Friday Cyber Monday ever in 2021. They were proud of the uptime and traffic across the infrastructure along with their partner Google Cloud.



Liam Dempsey shared this post by Andy Stitt thanking WordPress for helping him find Digital Accessibility. This is a great article of how WordPress helped Andy advance and allow him to concentrate on accessibility now.  



Giving Tuesday



And now, I’d like to introduce you to Mary Job, who’s leading the