ManageWP has been teasing ManageWP.org for what must be a few months by now. I received an email invite yesterday to see what the wait was all about. Based on the teasers, the new service seemed to be some sort of aggregated WordPress news source, and that appears to be accurate.
I played with it for about half an hour, and my main takeaway was that it felt like a Digg style resource geared around WordPress. The user experience is pretty good and the web technology appears quite advanced. Interestingly, the app isn’t built on WordPress; or at least the display portion of the site isn’t WordPress. It appears they’ve invested a significant amount of energy, and potentially money, into the project.
In it’s Digg-like manner, the site requests users to submit links, which get delivered to a “latest” feed. Then, based on popularity, articles are featured. Logged in users can upvote items. When submitting an article, users are asked to provide a title and description, with an option to include an image.
Honestly, the site functionality is very familiar to my original ideas for what Post Status would be. However, I iterated toward a more traditional blog with links that are more editor-curated and less user-filtered. I think ManageWP could succeed with the user-filtering method as long as the audience is large enough to actually vote on items with enough relevance to know what to feature. It’ll also require that submission levels are high enough to justify variations between “latest” posts and “top stories”.
The “member” section also has a gamification aspect to it. Users receive rankings based on their number of submissions, the comments on their submissions, and the upvotes on their submissions.
I’m not sure when exactly ManageWP.org will launch in full to the public. At this time, you get directed to the landing page still unless you have the link from their early-access email.
