Keeping Higher Education Website Managers’ Dream Alive While Sunsetting Edupack
Blake Bertuccelli
Every University IT department dreams of a self-service system in which they do not have to deal with outside vendors.
Evolving Edupack: A One-Size Fits All Plugin Leads to an Accessibility Platform and Enhanced Agency Services
Blake Bertuccelli
I now believe that a one size fits all website publishing product is not possible. Each university has its own set of requirements. The requirements vary from the placement of buttons to the type of accessibility a university mandates. In the end, universities shouldn’t sacrifice individual requirements for ease of use.
Learning and Pulling Together
Dan Knauss
This week was all about revisiting and continuing conversations that have special value and maybe for that reason tend to continue on with a life of their own. Tom Willmot dropped a fine Twitter thread about the challenge all enterprise WordPress agencies face. This came in response to Magne Ilsas' featured post here last week, The WordPress Enterprise Paradox. In a similar theme of industry peer cooperation, Eric Karkovack asks if WordPress product owners and developers can see a common interest in "voluntary standards." Could this clean up the plugin market? James Farmer thinks the WordPress business community can do more for itself too — by sharing data. In Post Status Slack we're learning the tricks and trials of ranking in the WordPress.org plugin repository. How about plugin telemetry? Learn from the voices of experience.
Who’s Going to Pay for All This?
Dan Knauss
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.
The WordPress Enterprise Paradox
Magne Ilsaas
"WordPress as a platform is putting us on the enterprise path. But what got us here is what makes us irrelevant," says Magne Ilsaas, CEO and Founding Partner of Dekode. Magne wants to start an overdue conversation about three big risks — and opportunities — for WordPress agencies: 1) A lack of spaces for professional conversations and knowledge-sharing, including professional events, meetups, and mastermind groups catering to enterprise WordPress. 2) Successful agencies that use WordPress extensively with little or no community involvement whose work would benefit from enterprise WordPress peer networks. 3) An over-emphasis in WordPress agencies on short-term engineering solutions to the exclusion of long-term business solutions. What's often left out is design, user experience, and most of all the capacity to play a strategic advisory role in partnership with clients.
Moving and Not Moving With the Crowd
Dan Knauss
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.
A Visit from the Good Idea Fairy
Dan Knauss
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
Dan Knauss
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.
Connect freemium plugins to premium extension sales?
Dan Knauss
Justin Labadie's wishlist for the WordPress.org plugin repo:
1) Ensure all search results are relevant.
2) Standardize a Premium product upsell interface.
3) Make it possible to show other products by the same author.
1) Ensure all search results are relevant.
2) Standardize a Premium product upsell interface.
3) Make it possible to show other products by the same author.
Five takes on helpful plugin stats and insights
Dan Knauss
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!
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!
How to sell plugins, themes, and services on WordPress.com
Dan Knauss
Read the FAQ.Fill out this form.Agree to the WordPress.com Marketplace Vendor Agreement.If needed, integrate with the WordPress.com Store Licensing API.
Does WordPress.org Data Belong to the WordPress Community? Should It?
Dan Knauss
Today WP Watercooler sought Solutions to the Active Growth Problem. In a pointed but respectful conversation moderated but Sé Reed, the Watercooler crew got one new detail from Otto about the decision to remove the active install charts: it was…
Over, Under, Around, and Through
Dan Knauss
This week Alex Denning (Ellipsis) draws on Iain Poulson's historical, high-level plugin data at WP Trends to offer some thoughtful, somewhat contrary, but practical and grounded perspectives on the value of Active Install Data. At the WP Watercooler and elsewhere, a realization seems to be setting in that the data is not open source and not the property of the WordPress community. Like last week's episode of Post Status Draft with Katie Keith of Barn2 Plugins, Till KrĂĽss (Object Cache Pro, Relay) offers a lot of lessons this week about less travelled paths to success in the plugin business even as a very small company or company of one. Performance, testing, and support are key, interrelated parts of Till's success and probably the most important ones to borrow in your own life and work if they resonate.
Why the WordPress.org growth charts might not matter
Dan Knauss
In 2019-20, only four plugins entered the space and broke into the upper tiers. These were Site Kit for Google, Facebook for WooCommerce, Creative Mail for WordPress and WooCommerce, and Google Ads and Marketing by Kliken. Has the WordPress.org repository become a closed shop, a tapped-out ecosystem where the winners have taken all? Here are some suggestions about how to break in or changes that could be proposed to open and diversify the repository. Until that happens, do growth charts matter?
Till KrĂĽss on WordPress, Performance, the Plugin Business, and Life
Dan Knauss
What plugin owner has not felt the pain of an extraordinarily busy support forum? Till is up to (wait for it..) 5-10 minutes a day on support — which he aims to decrease. How? Testing to ensure the highest quality.
Trust Issues
Dan Knauss
Cory Miller asks, "What can we do to better support our plugin developers and product owners?" Katie Keith offers some clues with the story of her WordPress/WooCommerce agency and product shop, Barn2 Plugins. Dan Knauss and Nyasha Green talk about microaggressions, the Active Install Growth Data story, and US federal legislation aimed at Open Source Security. In an increasingly "demon-haunted world," how can we know who is doing what with the hardware and software tools we use? Ben Gabler, CEO and Founder of Rocket.net, is in our Member Spotlight.
