Brian Krogsgard, Author at Post Status • Page 175 of 201

There are no small changes

“Scope grows in minutes, not months. Look after the minutes, and the months take … Read more

The truth about building commercial WordPress plugins

It’s not easy to make good, sustainable income selling commercial WordPress plugins. Tom McFarlin … Read more

The Styles plugin integrates a ton of customizer options into the default themes

I ran across the Styles plugin today, thanks to a tweet from Brady Vercher. I was intrigued because Brady said, “I really think this plugin could be the standard for easily customizing themes.” That’s quite a statement. But after installing Styles and playing with it a little bit, I can definitely see it being a great plugin for site owners who aren’t comfortable customizing CSS in WordPress themes.

Styles is a free plugin on WordPress.org that has extension plugins for each theme that it integrates with. Currently, you can get the extensions for each of the default themes, Twenty Ten through Twenty Thirteen, for free. The plugin homepage has a cart icon and a “free” banner on each of these themes, hinting rather obviously that their intention is to offer paid extensions for customizing other popular themes.

Here’s a video overview of Styles:

Page.ly acquired BlogDroid

Page.ly, the oldest managed WordPress hosting provider, has acquired BlogDroid. BlogDroid is a newer player in … Read more

Designing in the browser

Designing in the browser has been talked about by many industry leading designers. Here … Read more

WordPress 3.5.2 released (maintenance and security release)

WordPress 3.5.2 has just been released. As this is a maintenance and security release, … Read more

Week in WordPress podcast: How much is WordPress worth?

I was just on the Week in WordPress podcast with Jeff Chandler, of WP … Read more

How to build websites your customers will love

I’ve really been enjoying Help Scout’s blog the past few months. In a recent … Read more

Lessons for plugin developers from Joost de Valk

Joost de Valk published to his blog this morning about a mistake he made … Read more

WYSIJA is a surprisingly delightful WordPress newsletter plugin

WYSIJA. A play on WYSIWYG, WYSIJA stands for “What You Send Is Just Awesome.” Yeah, it’s tough to remember. But once you check it out, this plugin is hard to forget.

The team of seven people behind WYSIJA is from all over the world; and their plugin has steadily grown over the last year to be a dominant force in the WordPress newsletter space. This free plugin has almost half a million downloads in just over a year, and it has a staggering percentage of 5 star ratings on the WordPress repository.

I first discovered WYSIJA around August of 2012, because I had a client that was looking for a WordPress interface to create their newsletters. This is a common reason for people who try it out. I was really surprised just how easy of an experience they made creating newsletters with their drag and drop interface, especially because my only comparison was Mailchimp, who take their newsletter creation experience very seriously and have a huge team working on the design and form factors.

Similar to Mailchimp, you can send up to 2,000 newsletters per month with WYSIJA for free. For those that are pessimistic of WordPress’ ability to send mail (a worthy concern for many hosts), you can sync delivery with a Gmail Account or over SMTP. There are a ton of other features that integrate nicely with WordPress as well, such as auto-sending newsletters with new posts, batch delivery, CSV exports, email notifications to admins, and integrated signup options for various parts of your website.

A call to change WordPress widgets

Jesse Friedman has written up how he thinks that WordPress widgets and widget areas … Read more

Team of 10 set roadmap for the future of WordPress documentation

A team of 10 WordPress folks just spent three days at the Open Help Conference and Sprints in Cincinnati in order to analyze a variety of issues with current WordPress documentation practices, and to create a roadmap moving forward.

The team was led by Siobhan McKeown, and a total of 10 people attended the conference. WooThemes, Automattic, and 10up each contributed time and money for some of their team members to take part in the conference. All attendees were:

Siobhan McKeown
Kim Parsell
Hanni Ross
Ryan Markell
Jerry Bates
Drew Jaynes
Eric Amundson
Michael Kraft
Maria Scarpello
Ryan Ray

When I asked her how she felt everything went, Siobhan had this to say:

It’s been great to see the docs team grow and develop over the past year, and I was really excited to get so many people together in one place. We were able to talk about the issues around documentation and try to get to grips with how we can make our docs better for both users and developers. We want to provide the resources for developers to easily extend WordPress with a better reference and better learning materials, and we all agree that the user experience around documentation should be as seamless as it is for WordPress itself – over the coming two years we plan to make that happen.

WordPress theme for presentation slides

Otto Wood has created an initial version of a WordPress theme intended for use … Read more

What’s your WordPress job title?

Job titles can be confusing. If you’ve ever tried to hire a WordPress consultant … Read more

Tweeple plugin offers tweet feeds compatible to Twitter V1.1 API

If you’re like most of the internet, you probably didn’t update your Twitter feeds … Read more

How much are the big WordPress companies making?

It’s a question many of us have pondered. Just how much money do these “big” WordPress product companies make? WooThemes, Copyblogger (makers of StudioPress), Gravity Forms, WP Engine, Sucuri, and many more companies are clearly making significant revenues compared to one and two person businesses. But it’s rare you hear a business say specifically just how much revenue they have.

The best I’ve heard up to now is that the largest of the visible WordPress companies are making “multiple millions” of dollars per year. Well, that could be $2 million or $200 million. My personal guess was that the top theme shops are making around $10 million per year. But that was an educated guess, based on various reports of active subscriber counts, hiring rates, etc. Also, the number of people that work somewhere hardly correlates to revenue, though it’s at least a sign of investment. As for hosting companies, I really have no clue.

Brian Clark, the founder of Copyblogger Media, has helped clarify this question for at least one of the most visible WordPress based companies out there. In what amounts to a big chest puffing exercise, for lack of a better term, Brian Clark revealed in the comments section of a Fast Company article that Copyblogger Media is a $7 million per year company.