Dan Knauss

Who’s Going to Pay for All This?

person putting coin in a piggy bank

Magne Ilsaas wants WordPress to be more than the pragmatic choice for enterprise clients. He wants WordPress agencies to be known for a distinct WordPress culture and mindset. Alain Schlesser, Carole Olinger, Carl Alexander, and Zach Stepek have a frank talk with Bob Dunn about the costs of not supporting WordPress contributors. Post Status members including Dave Loodts, Marius Jensen, Jeremy Ward, and Chris Reynolds discuss the looming PHP 7.4 EOL. Plus Jb Audras‘ breakdown of contributions to the WordPress 6.1 release. For your weekend reading, some news and insights from business, workplace, webtech, and govtech writers beyond the WordPress bubble.

InstaWP: A Conversation and Tour with Founder Vikas Singhal — Post Status Draft 128

InstaWP is about a year old now — let’s take a tour of it and catch up with Vikas Singhal to see how he hopes it will evolve. Currently, it’s a testing, demonstration, training, and marketing tool for WordPress product owners and agencies. Next, Vikas aims for InstaWP to support a marketplace for developers and agencies launching WordPress sites. Finally, he envisions it becoming a platform of platforms — WordPress-as-a-Service for people building their own WPaaS

Moving and Not Moving With the Crowd

people walking on gray concrete pavement

This week’s WordPress business highlights for Post Status: Lesley Sim is pivoting Newsletter Glue to an upmarket clientele. A discussion starter about WordPress UX. Do we need a curated plugin ecosystem, more open standards, and easy access to current expert consensus points in key knowledge areas? Time to bail out of Twitter? PayPal? Katie Keith tells her HeroPress story.

To Heck with Black Friday, I’m Raising My Prices! — Post Status Draft 127

This week in Post Status Slack, Lesley Sim, the founder of Newsletter Glue, dropped this announcement: “While everybody is offering discounts for Black Friday, we’re planning to significantly raise prices. We’ll be narrowing our target audience and focusing mainly on medium-large publishers and online businesses; working with them more closely and providing a high level of customization and support.” What motivated Lesley’s decision? Where does she expect it to take her company? How can plugin owners find enterprise agency partners? Listen to this episode of Post Status Draft and find out.

Post Status Excerpt (No. 72) — Can We Get to “Yes” on Better UX?

Post Status Excerpt (No. 72) — Can We Get to "Yes" on Better UX?

This week in an article shared in Post Status Slack, Eric Karkovack suggested some ways to improve the WordPress user experience, especially for DIY users setting up a website for the first time. Some of the things Eric wants to see happen, like a standard interface for plugins and a curated view of the plugin ecosystem, are also commonly expressed by designers, developers, and people in other roles at WordPress agencies serving enterprise clients. Can we get everyone to “yes” on a better UX?

A Visit from the Good Idea Fairy

person holding light bulb with string lights inside

Building, Supporting, and Selling a Winning Product — With or Without WordPress.org • Are Active Install Counts Relevant to Your Business’s Success? (Even if they are accurate? And they haven’t been.) • Let’s Fix What’s Broken (The Plugin Repo) Not What Isn’t (The Freemium Model) • Follow Leaders, Adopt Standards • Tools and expertise from rtCamp • Some great and “doable” ideas for the future of plugin business metrics on the .org repo. Could some of them help put an end to intrusive and manipulative dark patterns in the WordPress Admin dashboard and notifications?

Post Status Excerpt (No. 71) — Building, Supporting, and Selling a Winning Product — With or Without WordPress.org

This week I sat down again with Eric Karkovack to talk about the WordPress stories and topics that are on the top of our minds. Independently, we made nearly the same selections. There’s a single throughline in this episode — what works, what doesn’t, and what will take WordPress businesses forward in the product, agency, and hosting spaces.

Five takes on helpful plugin stats and insights

blue skies

Good ideas for the future of data disclosed to plugin authors using the wordpress.org repository:

1) Identify surges of unhappy users reacting to a bad release — and the opposite, happier outcome.

2) Use pageview analytics to estimate total potential user interest and conversion rates.

3) Assess a plugin’s performance with the .org search algorithm, the quality of releases, and plugin incompatibility as well as PHP compatibility issues.

4) Collect significant user behavior data anonymously without phoning home.

5) Just reveal all the raw data with privacy options for individual authors — no interpretive analysis on wordpress.org.

BONUS: Let’s take this discussion somewhere else!

A2 Hosting
Omnisend
WordPress.com