WordPress News

Five years of Yoast

Brian Krogsgard

May 22, 2015

Joost de Valk sent a newsletter this morning noting that Yoast has been in business for five years. It's hard to believe just five years ago he had a job working for someone else. Now they are a team of…

Entrepreneurial gaps and value pricing

Brian Krogsgard

May 22, 2015

A post has been making the rounds, by Ellen Chisa, on the things taught at Harvard Business School that were particularly helpful. Ellen highlights a lot of things, but two stood out to me. 1) The entrepreneurial gap We also…

Transparency in WordPress businesses

Brian Krogsgard

May 21, 2015

Business

I love seeing companies open up and share their business details. Income and transparency reports have become more and more popular. Alex Turnbull, of Groove, notes why transparency alone should not be just about the numbers: Why is transparency effective? Because…

Struggles developing a commercial WordPress plugin

Brian Krogsgard

May 21, 2015

From Iain on the Delicious Brains blog: Building software to sell is a tricky business. It isn’t always as simple as writing code and getting people to buy it. WordPress commercial plugins come with their own set of considerations, issues…

Critical rendering path and front end performance notes

Brian Krogsgard

May 21, 2015

There is no fold, unless you're talking about the critical rendering path, of course. For a primer on critical rendering paths, Patrick Sexton has a good introduction: Let's look at the path that this page takes before it gets displayed....…

A couple more notes on the WooThemes acquisition

Brian Krogsgard

May 20, 2015

Business

Thank you to all members for your patience on the newsletter, as I spent a great deal of time on the WooThemes acquisition post. I have a couple of thoughts I thought I'd leave specifically for you. New space in…

An Automattic affiliate program?

Brian Krogsgard

May 20, 2015

In the comments of Matt Mullenweg's announcement for the WooThemes acquisition, someone asked if he could bring back WooThemes' affiliate program. I was pretty surprised by his answer: I think it didn’t work for them well the last time around,…

The growing pains of company blogging

Brian Krogsgard

May 20, 2015

Gregory Ciotti has some really good advice for getting through the growing pains on your company blog over on Help Scout. Blogging for a corporate entity is damn hard. Most organizations have a hard time with it, if they even try.…

Customizing WordPress media players

Brian Krogsgard

May 20, 2015

Brady Vercher has a really helpful post describing in detail how to customize WordPress' media players. Working with MediaElement.js can be a bit of a challenge, but his guide shows you how to add classes to be able to set…

New committers for WordPress 4.3

Brian Krogsgard

May 20, 2015

With the WordPress 4.3 release cycle, three new people are getting guest commit access, two are continuing their guest commit access from 4.2, and three have been announced to have permanent commit access. New guest committers for WordPress 4.3: Ella…

Automattic has acquired WooThemes, makers of WooCommerce

Brian Krogsgard

May 20, 2015

BusinessHosting

Matt Mullenweg announced today that Automattic has acquired WooThemes, whose flagship product is the popular eCommerce plugin, WooCommerce. All 55 team members at WooThemes will join Automattic, swelling ranks at Automattic by around 18%.

WordPress essentials, free for the next month from Lynda

Brian Krogsgard

May 18, 2015

Lynda's WordPress Essentials course has been viewed 100,000 times. They are making it free for the next month "to celebrate." It's a good opportunity to send a solid course to your friends that have been wanting to learn the basics…

The slowness of the WordPress admin is a liability

Brian Krogsgard

May 18, 2015

The WordPress admin is not fast. In fact, due to a variety of reasons, it can become quite slow even for relatively normal sites. And even a brand new install doesn't have completely "snappy" page loads on the admin. Put it…

An argument to change WordPress plugin distribution

Brian Krogsgard

May 14, 2015

Josh Pollock has a lot of thoughts on WordPress plugin distribution on WordPress.org. WordPress.org probably shouldn’t become an eCommerce platform and I don’t think it’s the right place to be upselling plugins and themes. It could, however, better facilitate paid…

Evolution of the WordPress codebase

Brian Krogsgard

May 14, 2015

Jordi Cabot has some pretty fun charts to look at on the evolution of the WordPress codebase. Included are charts for days between versions, most active contributors, percentage of the codebase by filetype, the most changed files, and more. For example:…

Live sandboxes versus admin screenshots

Brian Krogsgard

May 14, 2015

Leland Fiegel posed the question on WP Chat, "why don't we seem to see more live sandbox sites set up?" I know I heard from someone that A/B tests didn't show higher sales from using a sandbox/demo plugin. Personally, I'm…