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.
WordPress In The Long View With James Farmer— Post Status Draft 129
Cory Miller
James Farmer’s WordPress story goes all the way back to his launch of the first hosted WordPress multisite blogging platform — just a few days ahead of WordPress.com. Edublogs currently hosts millions of students’ and educators’ blogs. James talks about successes and failures, his views on Gutenberg, how he stays competitive with Squarespace, and how he thinks the WordPress business community should respond to the loss of active install growth data at WordPress.org.
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.
Agency Owners: Let’s Talk
Cory Miller
WordPress agencies are key players in the WordPress ecosystem. They're working on the frontlines building the Open Web with WordPress for their clients. That's essential to sustained and vibrant growth for everyone with a stake in WordPress and Open Source.I've…
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.
Agency Owners: If You Could Ask Anyone Anything…
Cory Miller
If you could ask anyone anything related to your work as an agency — who would it be OR more importantly what would you want to ask?
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.
Post Status Excerpt (No. 72) — Can We Get to “Yes” on Better UX?
Dan Knauss
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?
The New WooCommerce Agency Partner Program
Dan Knauss
Here's everything you should know about the WooCommerce Agency Partner Program with their program manager, Mary Voelker. Key takeaways: The WooExpert program started in 2015, and participants had to be invited and pay for a membership in it. Agency partners…
Till Krüss on Object Cache Pro, WordPress, Plugins, Testing, and Performance — Post Status Draft 126
Dan Knauss
Till KrĂĽss explains how he found his way into WordPress and a successful business that's solving the hard problems of caching and performance optimization. His work and business model suggest several areas of opportunity for developers and founders working in the WordPress plugin market today.
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.
Going from Agency to Products: The Story of Barn2 — Post Status Draft 125
Dan Knauss
From client services and agency work to a successful product business — Katie Keith tells Cory the Barn2 Plugins story in this episode of Post Status Draft.
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?
