Helen Hou-Sandi reads your WordPress news!

It’s the WP Minute! I’m Helen Hou-Sandi, filling in for Matt. This episode is brought to you by FooGallery, check out their latest WooCommerce integration to start selling images right through WooCommerce, head on over to Foo.Gallery for more information! You know what it is, everything I mention here will be linked up in the newsletter and the blog post. Check out thewpminute.com for the links. Let’s get into the News Video Press announced that they have a new refreshed player that offers creators an intuitive design that puts their content in the spotlight. Video Press is fully integrated into WordPress so neither you nor your audience need to be redirected to external apps.  You may already be familiar with VideoPress which is included in the Premium, Business, and eCommerce plans on WordPress.com and powers WordPress.tv. If you are a self-hosted site, you can get VideoPress through Jetpack, now available as a standalone product. The brand new default theme Twenty Twenty-Two is targeted to be released with WordPress 5.9 in December. This flexible default theme for WordPress takes advantage of the Full Site Editing and Global styles features, which we have seen recently. Kjell Reigstad, the lead designer covers the customizations nicely over on make WordPress.org where they are looking for community involvement. Head over to get involved and weigh in on the future of default themes.  Joost de Valk tweeted this week that he is excited about the news of a proposal also over on make WordPress.org from Ari Stathopoulos proposing the creation of a team focused on the performance and speed of WordPress. It seems that in comparison to some other platforms, WordPress is falling behind. A team will bring more organization and visibility to this effort. Check out the proposal and get involved if this is your area of expertise. Davinder Singh Kainth over at the WPWeekly is running the WP Awards 2021 event. You can vote for your favorite WordPress Plugins, Themes, Tools, and Services at the WP Awards 2021 event. Nominations are open now. Voting begins November 1st with results in December. Be sure to send over your nominations or become a sponsor. WPMainline wrote an interesting piece about being honest with users and hidden fees. The article covers a tweet from Mark Zahra mentioning that he had been contacted by someone in the WordPress community who was working on a post that would list some of the best plugins to use. What set this email exchange apart from others is that the author told him that in order to be included in the post, he would need to pay a fee. Yes, pay-to-play. Jeff’s article is a good review about transparency when money is being exchanged. This is a good reminder when working in the WordPress community. How about WooCommerce? WooCommerce continues to be one of the world’s most popular e-commerce solutions, processing billions of dollars in transactions. However, integrating and managing in-person sales with a WooCommerce online store hasn’t always been seamless and can be time-consuming and difficult for website developers and business owners alike.  Back in Se