Cloudways is bringing back its free Prepathon online event next week, from September 30 to October 2, just in time for the busiest shopping season of the year. Over three days, speakers and panelists will dig into how ecommerce is changing, and how businesses can keep pace as younger generations rewrite the rules of shopping. According to Danish […]
Fueled Layoffs Spark Tension After Former Employee Pre-Empts Announcement
Fueled has confirmed layoffs this week, cutting 4–5% of its workforce. But the news reached the WordPress community sooner than the agency planned, after a former employee decided to go public. On Monday, former staffer Sam Sidler, who worked in account and strategy roles until his own layoff in 2024, published a blog post pre-empting Fueled’s announcement. Sidler […]
Nick Hamze’s ‘Cool Kids’ Post Kicks Off Fresh Debate on WordPress’s Image Problem
After calling for “more weirdness” in WordPress theme design earlier this year, Nick Hamze has again struck a nerve, this time with a post unpacking WordPress’s image problem and why it has “lost the cool kids.” His critique, Why WordPress Lost the Cool Kids (And How to Win Them Back), published on Monday, has drawn strong agreement from […]
New FAIR 1.0 Release Brings Decentralized Package Management to WordPress
FAIR has reached its first major milestone with the release of version 1.0 this week, bringing together all the moving parts of its decentralized package manager into a working system for the first time. In its announcement, the FAIR team said the release enabled WordPress site admins to find, trust, and install packages from independent sources or from […]
From RV Life to CEO: Jon Penland’s Unlikely Road to Leading Kinsta
Back in 2011, Jon Penland was selling centrifugal pumping units into the water and wastewater markets — a job as glamorous as it sounds. He was good at it, but nine hours a day in a gray cubicle left him restless. “There has to be a different way to live,” he told his wife one afternoon while driving […]
GoDaddy’s AI-Powered Airo Site Designer Creates WordPress Sites in Minutes
Heads up: This is sponsored content, created and paid for by one of our sponsors. Their support helps keep The Repository going. All sponsors follow our Advertising Policy. Starting a business is one thing, but getting a website live? No big deal if you work with WordPress every day. But if you’re, say, a hairdresser, it can feel […]
Woo & Klaviyo Report Reveals Shift Toward Intentional Shopping, Shares Tips for Merchants
Shoppers in 2025 aren’t impulse buyers — they’re cautious, they do their research, and they’re harder to win over. That’s the message from Commerce Insights: Cracking the Code on the Modern Consumer, a new report from Woo and Klaviyo that doubles as a guide to help agencies and freelancers optimize their WooCommerce sites. The survey of more than […]
WordPress Project Launches New Experimental Core Program Team
The WordPress project is trying something new: a Core Program Team. Announcing the experiment this week, Executive Director Mary Hubbard said the team’s goals were to strengthen coordination between core sub-teams, improve efficiency, and make contribution easier. Its focus will be documenting practices, surfacing roadmaps, and supporting new teams with clear processes. Source
Enqueue Reveals Speaker Line-Up With Focus on AI, Performance, and the Future of WordPress
Enqueue, a new one-day event for engineers working with WordPress at scale, has unveiled what co-organizer Ben May is calling “the best lineup of any WordPress event this year.” The program, coming to Sydney on November 28, featuring local and international speakers, with talks spanning technical deep dives, case studies, and forward-looking sessions on AI and modern workflows… […]
Enterprise WordPress Survey Closing Soon as Scale Consortium Calls for Final Responses
The State of Enterprise WordPress Survey is closing soon, and the Scale Consortium is making a last call for big brands, universities, and publishers running WordPress at scale to have their say before the deadline. Now in its third year, the survey has become the closest thing the enterprise side of the ecosystem has to an annual health […]


