For Black Friday, Yoast released an update that placed an animated banner on the dashboards of all WordPress admin pages where it was installed. This resulted in some negative feedback and discussions about ad policies from plugin companies. Yoast was updated a short time later with the banner removed, and CEO Marieke van de Rakt issued an apology on Twitter.
Several consequences of this event have been positive:
- There was a pull request on the WordPress.org Plugin Directory Guidelines Github repo, which was closed two days later after some significant discussion.
- The WP Notify project (which will be meeting again in January) got some attention.
- Timothy Jensen released a plugin that “organizes admin notices for a cleaner administrative experience.”
It’s not related to the dashboard ad fiasco, but Yoast released a well-made and (I think) entertaining video ad.
