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A Visit from the Good Idea Fairy

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Dan 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?
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Latest articles

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

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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.

Over, Under, Around, and Through

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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.

WordPress with an IDE in it

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Brian Krogsgard

Have you used the beta version of WordPress 4.9? I have. One of the new things is the file editor, which has been pretty fully overhauled. It has a lot of improvements. If we are to have a file editor…

The Creative Commons license is now compatible with the GPL

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Brian Krogsgard

The Creative Commons license and the GPL have not always played too nicely together, as much to do with semantics as anything else. Now they do, but there are some things to consider, if you are trying to bundle a…

Use Vagrant. No, use Docker. No,…

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Brian Krogsgard

Use Vagrant. No, use Docker. No, Docker requires Vagrant for most people. No, Otto is the new Vagrant that uses Vagrant and does what Docker does but is less complicated. Sounds complicated. Call me when you get it figured out.

Updates to the theme review and directory debate

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Brian 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…

Free WordPress themes and the elephant in the room

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Brian 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.…

Should we ditch the WordPress file editor?

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Brian Krogsgard

Ryan Sullivan makes a pretty compelling argument to ditch the file editors built into the WordPress admin. Anyone that's been working with WordPress for a while has either heard horror stories or has some of their own, of either being…

How to take advantage of WordPress 3.7’s language packs

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Brian 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…

Understand WordPress internationalization and translation

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Brian 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…
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