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Use Your Words. The Inclusive Way.
Michelle Frechette
Michelle set out to learn more about the new Yoast Inclusive Language feature. TL;DR, it's amazing and you should implement it!
Latest articles
Big Growth Isn’t for Everyone
Tom Lach
Back in 2019, my agency was a team of 10 people, and we were entering a space where we could easily start working with big enterprises. Our idea of the future was to scale up and grow. Of course it was.
The Future of GiveWP and the Block Editor
Dan Knauss
The journey to GiveWP 3.0 is well underway — an open, iterative development process that fully embraces WordPress's Gutenberg block editor. Give cofounder Matt Cromwell and development director Jason Adams share what they've learned so far.
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.
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.
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!
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?
Open Source Communities: You May Not Be Interested in CISA, But CISA is Very Interested in You
Dan Knauss
United States national security interests are poised to become more invested in and engaged with open source projects classified as public infrastructure. From Log4j to the Securing Open Source Software Act, how did it all come together in 2022, and what may lie ahead?
Active Install Charts Removed from Plugin Repo
Dan Knauss
In reaction to as-yet-unpublicized details about the abuse of active install data in the WordPress.org plugin repository, the charts displaying that data have been removed from plugin pages in a move expected to be temporary. Important (and some familiar) questions are emerging as this story unfolds: how to balance the values of openness, security, and privacy as well as cooperation and competition at WordPress.org — still the central hub for WordPress plugin businesses.
What is WP Cloud?
Dan Knauss
WP Cloud is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) built on the hosting infrastructure that’s behind WP.com, Pressable, and WordPress VIP with GridPane soon to follow. Agencies that want to white label their client hosting are ideal customers for WP Cloud via GridPane.
Atarim and Rocket.net Partnership
Dan Knauss
Vito Peleg, Atarim's cofounder and CEO, explains how he "cracked" the partnership problem to find alignment with other companies that can help them all accelerate their growth. Vito explains what Atarim's latest partnership with Rocket.net brings to both companies and their customers — and he anticipates more deals like this in the year ahead.
WooCommerce vs. Shopify: Why Do We Make It So Hard?
Dan Knauss
How to make a user experience that doesn't suck has always remained a kind of trade secret among those who make it their trade. That's understandable, but it's Drupal behavior in a WordPress world.
Salary Transparency: Why Not?
Piccia Neri
On the Post Status job board, like many others, most of the WordPress employers who use it don’t include salary ranges on their job listings. Should they? Piccia Neri asked them all why they do or don't practice salary transparency. She also put the question to agencies, freelancers, the WordPress community, developers, and designers on Twitter. Find out what Piccia learned and why she thinks salary transparency should be a universal practice where it hasn't yet become a legal obligation.
One-on-One: Better Professional Development Conversations
James Giroux
If we take a step back as people leaders, we know that feedback is an incredibly powerful tool in helping our teams get better. Yet, one of the challenges many people leaders face is not knowing what to give their direct reports feedback on.
WCUS 2022
Michelle Frechette
WCUS is just around the corner. Michelle Frechette presents some tips to make the most of your attendance, including networking and masks!
