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.
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.
WordPress 6.1.1 • FSE → Site Editor • Twenty Twenty Three
Courtney Robertson
Get a look at the latest default theme, Twenty Twenty-Three! 🎨 Full Site Editing has a new name: "Site Editor." 📝 And WordPress 6.1.1 will be released on November 15. 📅
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.
InstaWP: A Conversation and Tour with Founder Vikas Singhal — Post Status Draft 128
Dan Knauss
InstaWP is about a year old now — let's take a tour of it and catch up with Vikas Singhal to see how he hopes it will evolve. Currently, it's a testing, demonstration, training, and marketing tool for WordPress product owners and agencies. Next, Vikas aims for InstaWP to support a marketplace for developers and agencies launching WordPress sites. Finally, he envisions it becoming a platform of platforms — WordPress-as-a-Service for people building their own WPaaS
WordPress 6.1 • Raghavendra Satish Peri
Courtney Robertson
#WordPress 6.1 was released on November 1. ✨ Check out all the updated and revised support articles. 📖 Learn about #accessibility and contributor Raghavendra Satish Peri from the WordPress India community. 🇮🇳
WordPress 6.1 RC5 • WP-CLI 2.7.1 • Help Test Plugin Dependencies Feature Plugin
Courtney Robertson
WordPress 6.1 rolls out on November 1. Help test 6.1 Release Candidate 3 — and the Rollback feature plugin. Be sure to look over the 6.1 DevNotes, Field Guides, and Team Updates.
To Heck with Black Friday, I’m Raising My Prices! — Post Status Draft 127
Dan Knauss
This week in Post Status Slack, Lesley Sim, the founder of Newsletter Glue, dropped this announcement: "While everybody is offering discounts for Black Friday, we’re planning to significantly raise prices. We’ll be narrowing our target audience and focusing mainly on medium-large publishers and online businesses; working with them more closely and providing a high level of customization and support." What motivated Lesley's decision? Where does she expect it to take her company? How can plugin owners find enterprise agency partners? Listen to this episode of Post Status Draft and find out.
Post Status Excerpt (No. 71) — Building, Supporting, and Selling a Winning Product — With or Without WordPress.org
Dan Knauss
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.
Best Practices and Tools from rtCamp
Dan Knauss
I've been collecting rtCamp news for a while — they have a great monthly newsletter — and here are some of the highlights worth sharing broadly.
WordPress 6.1 RC2 • 6.1 Sneak Peek with Nick Diego • WP-CLI 2.7.1 • Help Test Plugin Dependencies Feature Plugin
Courtney Robertson
Get a sneak peek at WordPress 6.1 with Nick Diego. Help test 6.1 Release Candidate 2 — and the Plugin Dependencies feature plugin. Be sure to browse the 6.1 DevNotes, Field Guides, and Team Updates. WP-CLI 2.7.1 is available now.
Over, Under, Around, and Through
Dan Knauss
This week Alex Denning (Ellipsis) draws on Iain Poulson's historical, high-level plugin data at WP Trends to offer some thoughtful, somewhat contrary, but practical and grounded perspectives on the value of Active Install Data. At the WP Watercooler and elsewhere, a realization seems to be setting in that the data is not open source and not the property of the WordPress community. Like last week's episode of Post Status Draft with Katie Keith of Barn2 Plugins, Till KrĂĽss (Object Cache Pro, Relay) offers a lot of lessons this week about less travelled paths to success in the plugin business even as a very small company or company of one. Performance, testing, and support are key, interrelated parts of Till's success and probably the most important ones to borrow in your own life and work if they resonate.
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?
WordPress 6.1 RC1 • DevNotes • Field Guides • New LearnWP Course
Courtney Robertson
WordPress 6.1 RC 1 has shipped with a release date of November 1. It's time to start testing! Check out the Developer Notes, Field Guide, and related team updates.
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.
Diversifying Revenue, the 50% Coding / 50% Marketing Lifecycle, Active Install Clawback, and Turbo Admin
Daniel Schutzsmith
Here’s a glimpse of what’s going on in the world of design and development in the WordPress space this past week. As I look around the Post Status Slack and the chatter on Twitter, this week has been filled with conversations emphasizing the struggle of running a business as a solo devpreneur.
