Post Status has been a haven for kindness and generosity, but it’s thanks to our members, readers, listeners, colleagues, and friends that the work we do together and the fun we have is good, meaningful, and regenerative for our community. On that note, this is my last post in my role as editor at Post Status…
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
It’s not meteoric growth by any means, but it’s good to see over 127 block themes listed in the WordPress.org theme directory. Highlighting block themes in the navigation was a good idea and an odd one to oppose, but I guess change is always hard. Even the most popular themes and builders like GeneratePress are…
Dan and Eric discuss their top picks for WordPress news stories of the week and the topic of professionalism. What is it — what does it mean for us in the WordPress community, and how does it relate to a healthy open source project and business ecosystem?
I’m looking forward to lots of good things coming in the future on the new WordPress core Performance Team blog, and I’m glad SVG and WebP are finally going to be usable in WordPress by default. (This is already the case in some hosting environments.) But the forced on-by-default generation of WebP images when you…
Up this week on WP Tavern‘s Jukebox with Nathan Wrigley, it’s Sean Blakely with the story of the transition to Gutenberg in a large agency, American Eagle. I’ve expected to see stories like this — for years. It seems they’re a little later in coming than anticipated, but it’s a good sign. At the same…
Eric Karkovack got some nice brief reflections from WordPress product founders/owners Kathy Darling, Cameron Jones, Derek Ashauer, Jack Arturo, Gareth Harris, and Mark Westguard. You may be surprised at what they’d do differently if they were starting out now, knowing what they know today.
Hendrik Luehrsen shares stats and notes about 100 FSE themes in the WordPress repo by 53 different contributors. He notes that, excluding the Twenty Twenty-Two theme, “all remaining 99 FSE themes combined have about 30,000 active installs, rising fast!” Hendrik encourages others to: “Build stuff with the FSE themes! Break stuff. Explore limits. Break those!…
It’s still far from simple to do well — let alone do better — what was first possible in the Web 1.0 era, even before WordPress was born. Thoughts on “WordPress Lite” and “Create Once, Publish Everywhere.”
What if there was a “lite” version of WordPress that was still WordPress — still customizable under the hood but tuned up for a great user experience for particular use cases? For example — could a lite version be used to allow an admin to literally build an online store in minutes from a mobile device? How about just a note taking app with cool open web features? What if, what if, what if…!!!
In an alternate universe two WordPress “products” exist: the WordPress we know today plus a slimmed-down or highly streamlined “lite” version. We gather a panel of WordPress professionals to ask “what if” and “what could be done” and “would it be practical?”
Is there a win-win solution for plugin owners fighting churn and their professional WordPress customers, like agencies and freelancers?
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