A Visit from the Good Idea Fairy
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A Visit from the Good Idea Fairy

ByDan Knauss

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?

Post Status Excerpt (No. 71) — Building, Supporting, and Selling a Winning Product — With or Without WordPress.org
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Post Status Excerpt (No. 71) — Building, Supporting, and Selling a Winning Product — With or Without WordPress.org

ByDan 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.

Does WordPress.org Data Belong to the WordPress Community? Should It?
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Does WordPress.org Data Belong to the WordPress Community? Should It?

ByDan Knauss

Today WP Watercooler sought Solutions to the Active Growth Problem. In a pointed but respectful conversation moderated but Sé Reed, the Watercooler crew got one new detail from Otto about the decision to remove the active install charts: it was made months ago. How should the data collected by WordPress.org be understood, as a basis…

Over, Under, Around, and Through
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Over, Under, Around, and Through

ByDan 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 Krüss (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.

Updates to the theme review and directory debate

ByBrian Krogsgard

Matt Mullenweg dropped in on the conversation surrounding the theme review debate last night, and dropped hammer. To try and summarize, he basically opened the door for all sorts of potential changes for both the theme review process and the WordPress.org theme directory / website. Some of the specifics, slightly adjusted for clarity and grammar:…

Free WordPress themes and the elephant in the room

ByBrian Krogsgard

There has been a big kerfuffle the last few days in the community of theme authors and theme reviewers on WordPress.org. The theme review team discovered that some themes are skirting (knowingly or not knowingly) some old-standing rules around content creation. What? It’s a long-standing rule that free WordPress.org themes should not create content (custom post…

It’s time to ditch download counts on WordPress.org and get real stats

ByBrian Krogsgard

I’m grumpy today. Clickbait journalism annoys me, and WordPress security related clickbait journalism especially annoys me. Ars Technica, PC World, ZD Net, and TripWire are just a few sites that reported over a million WordPress sites were susceptible to being hacked after a vulnerability was discovered by Sucuri. Except, you know, that it’s not true. The…

How to take advantage of WordPress 3.7’s language packs

ByBrian Krogsgard

In order to take advantage of the WordPress 3.7 “language packs” functionality, Otto Wood lays out some ground rules that plugin and theme authors should be following. This is an excellent resource. If Otto’s post looks like a foreign language to you (oh, the puns) then check out my guide to understanding internationalization and translation…

Understand WordPress internationalization and translation
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Understand WordPress internationalization and translation

ByBrian Krogsgard

Internationalization (i18n) and translation is one of those fuzzy gray areas for many of us in the WordPress community, especially amongst Americans. We’re simply not very accustomed to a multilingual society, therefore we sometimes erroneously don’t think about internationalization of our code and translating our projects to other languages. But WordPress is 20% of all the web,…

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