🎅Have Yourself a Merry Little DEVmas🎄

By Editorial staff

December 24, 2024

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Read to the end to see the only thing we have to say about pineapple on pizza…

In today’s edition:

Congrats to the first ever winner of the Kim Parsell Memorial WordCamp Europe Scholarship – Lena Stergatou!
What’s 122 feet tall and has skis for eyelashes and spruce trees for arms?
WP Gives a Hand celebrates five years of well, giving a hand. 🙌

Hot Off The Presses: All the Jingle Bell That’s Fit to Rock

Sleigh Whaaat?!

2024 is almost over already? Damn, my clumsy little fingers just got used to typing it. You’re telling me I have to start typing 2025 soon? Ugghhhh…

Anyway, we won’t take up too much of your time because you’ve got important stuff to do, like playing Xbox with your cousins, destroying your elderly parents at Scrabble, fumbling with the assembly instructions for that new scooter and fighting the post-Turkey sleepies. 🦃😴

But Christmas has us feeling all Santa-mental… so here’s a little song for you:

✨ Have Yourself a Merry Little DEVmas ✨

Have yourself a merry little DEVmas
May your plugins load right
From now on, all errors will be out of sight

Have yourself a merry little DEVmas
We’ll keep sending memes
And an update on the newest WordPress themes

Here we are as in olden days
Posting stupid puns galore
While faithful readers who are dear to us
Comment on our blogs once more

Through the years we all will work together
If the sites allow
Maybe we will change the world with code, somehow
So have yourself a merry little DEVmas now! 💗

It’s Giving… Uh… Giving.

Feeling like you want to be more generous this holiday season? Even if you haven’t been spooked by three guilt-tripping ghosts, you might be thinking about how you can give back. We certainly are, especially after hearing that WP Gives a Hand is celebrating it’s fifth birthday! 🎂🥳

The charitable initiative unites businesses to donate a portion of their revenue to support various non-profit organizations. Over the past five years, 29 companies have collectively raised more than $52,000 for 19 different charities. Nice one!

The 2024 campaign is still in swing, with participating companies donating a percentage of their sales until December 29th. Some of the charities supported include SOS Children’s Villages Latvia, World Bicycle Relief, Italian animal shelter ENPA Mira, One Tree Planted and UNICEF.

Lena Stergatou Wins WordCamp Europe’s First Kim Parsell Scholarship

The first ever WordCamp Europe Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship has been awarded, and the recipient is Greek WordPress developer Lena (Eleni) Stergatou.

Previously exclusive to WordCamp US, this scholarship now includes WordCamp Asia and Europe, recognizing contributors from around the world who embody Kim Parsell’s spirit of community and advocacy for women in tech.

Lovingly referred to as #wpmom, Kim contributed countless hours of volunteer time to the WordPress project and her commitment lives on in the people she inspired.

Inaugural winner Lena describes herself as a “Code Wrangler” and “Happiness Engineer” and has expertise in multisite setups, Greek translations and plugin development. She holds a Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Democritus University of Thrace, and currently develops web services for the Greek educational community at the Computer Technology Institute (CTI Diophantus).

Lena says, “I love to debug, fix broken things, extend functionalities and share them with others.”

The scholarship will cover Lena’s travel to the host city of Basel, Switzerland, hotel accommodation for the event duration and a WordCamp ticket for the June 2025 event.

Lena, you’re a legend and we’re very happy for you! Have fun in Switzerland! 🙌

Go Away, I’m Working On My Novel!

So, if this winter is when you plan to finally hunker down and finish that book you’ve been planning to write, we’ve got good news for you.

You can now use the WordPress Block Editor to write your book – then export it as an EPUB file that can be read on any e-book app like Kindle or Apple Books.

It’ll treat each heading as a chapter, so you can easily navigate the content from within the e-book reader. You can even add a cover with a custom image.

Writing a book on WordPress ain’t a new thing. In fact, we wrote a tutorial on how to organize an online book using WordPress waaaaaay back in 2012.

(2012?! In internet years, that blog post is approximately the same age this very bitchy cuneiform tablet.)

But before now, it wasn’t as easy to do this and you’d have needed to use one of the many third party services out there to turn your blog posts into a book. As developer Ella writes in the blog post linked above, this is definitely a full circle moment for Gutenberg!

A Few Fun & Festive Facts

Apparently when Robert May wrote the story of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer in 1939, he almost named him Rollo, Romeo or Reginald. Imagine Santa saying, “Hey Reggie! Bring that glowing nose over here for a sec, will ya?” (Source)
In order to deliver gifts to all the children in the world, Santa would have to fly at a speed of 4,705,882km/h. Yeeeesh. (Source)
Online shopping on mobile made up 51% of holiday purchases last year. (Source)
According to Gen Z, Brussel sprouts are like, totally lit, fam. (Or at least they were in 2023.) They became a TikTok trending veggie and supermarkets in the UK reported a 150% boom in sales last year. (Source)
You’ll get a frosty reception if you ever visit Bethel, Maine… it’s where the world’s largest snowperson was built. At 122 feet tall, she was only a few feet shorter than the Statue of Liberty, her eyelashes were made from skis and her buttons made from truck tires. (Source)

A Stocking Stuffed With Blogs & Resources

All you want for Christmas is the “good, old Twitter?” Eric Karkovack from the WPMinute hopes Bluesky will be a fresh new start.

OpenVerse, the platform that’s like Santa’s workshop for openly-licensed creative media, now has a Dark Mode toggle that makes browsing very easy on the eyes.

If you could ask Santa for any feature, enhancement or bug fix on Gutenberg/WordPress, what would it be? Riad Benguella asked the question, Martin Dubovic recapped the responses.

And since we can’t send you actual candy for your stocking, how about some eye candy? These creative website layouts shared by Jamie Marsland should do the trick.

Doing some last minute decorating? Here’s a site that calculates the amount of baubles you’ll need based on the height and width of your tree.

And if you’re all about those twinkly light vibes, this site will help you find the best decorated homes and official displays in your area.