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WordPress In The Long View With James Farmer— Post Status Draft 129

Cory Miller

November 11, 2022

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.

Design and Development News for the Week of November 7

Jonathan Bossenger

November 11, 2022

DevelopmentPlanet

A new way to keep up with that fast-moving project we all rely on, PHP. • Making wordpress/wordpress-develop usable in GitHub Codespaces. • Help count WordPress contributors and sponsors • Directory Serve is our cool tool of the week — a way to serve files to and from your phone.

Learning and Pulling Together

Dan Knauss

November 11, 2022

BusinessPlanet

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.

Design and Development News for the Week of October 31

Daniel Schutzsmith

November 4, 2022

DesignDevelopment

Missing Menu Items • Farewell PHP 7.4 • I Didn’t Know You Could Do That in the Block Editor • Why is Your Computer Cosplaying as a PDP-11? • Effective Writing for Devs • The State of CSS • The Swiss Army Knife of Website Tools: Website Toolkit

Who’s Going to Pay for All This?

Dan Knauss

November 4, 2022

BusinessPlanet

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

November 3, 2022

DraftPlanet

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 RC5 • WP-CLI 2.7.1 • Help Test Plugin Dependencies Feature Plugin

Courtney Robertson

October 28, 2022

DesignHosting

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.

Post Status Excerpt (No. 72) — Can We Get to “Yes” on Better UX?

Dan Knauss

October 27, 2022

PlanetPost Status Podcasts

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?

WordPress 6.1 RC2 • 6.1 Sneak Peek with Nick Diego • WP-CLI 2.7.1 • Help Test Plugin Dependencies Feature Plugin

Courtney Robertson

October 20, 2022

DesignHosting

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.

Five takes on helpful plugin stats and insights

Dan Knauss

October 20, 2022

BusinessFeatures

Good ideas for the future of data disclosed to plugin authors using the wordpress.org repository:

1) Identify surges of unhappy users reacting to a bad release — and the opposite, happier outcome.

2) Use pageview analytics to estimate total potential user interest and conversion rates.

3) Assess a plugin's performance with the .org search algorithm, the quality of releases, and plugin incompatibility as well as PHP compatibility issues.

4) Collect significant user behavior data anonymously without phoning home.

5) Just reveal all the raw data with privacy options for individual authors — no interpretive analysis on wordpress.org.

BONUS: Let's take this discussion somewhere else!

Over, Under, Around, and Through

Dan Knauss

October 14, 2022

BusinessPlanet

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.

Till Krüss on Object Cache Pro, WordPress, Plugins, Testing, and Performance — Post Status Draft 126

Dan Knauss

October 14, 2022

DraftPlanet

Till Krüss 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.

WordPress 6.1 RC1 • DevNotes • Field Guides • New LearnWP Course

Courtney Robertson

October 12, 2022

DesignHosting

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.

Active Install Data Story Update: Not a breach but abuse of an endpoint

Dan Knauss

October 8, 2022

NotesSecurity

John James Jacoby has been the main source of (unofficial) information about the removal of active install statistical tracking for plugins in the WordPress.org repository. On Friday, he provided more technical details on the WPwatercooler podcast.

WordPress 6.1 Beta 3 • Active Install Growth Chart

Courtney Robertson

October 6, 2022

DesignHosting

Help test WordPess 6.1 Beta 3! 🧪 Check out the latest features that are coming in the 6.1 release. 📦 Follow updates about bringing back the Active Install Growth chart. 📈

Going from Agency to Products: The Story of Barn2 — Post Status Draft 125

Dan Knauss

October 4, 2022

DraftPlanet

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.

WordPress In The Long View With James Farmer— Post Status Draft 129

Design and Development News for the Week of November 7

Learning and Pulling Together

Design and Development News for the Week of October 31

Who’s Going to Pay for All This?

InstaWP: A Conversation and Tour with Founder Vikas Singhal — Post Status Draft 128

WordPress 6.1 RC5 • WP-CLI 2.7.1 • Help Test Plugin Dependencies Feature Plugin

Post Status Excerpt (No. 72) — Can We Get to “Yes” on Better UX?

WordPress 6.1 RC2 • 6.1 Sneak Peek with Nick Diego • WP-CLI 2.7.1 • Help Test Plugin Dependencies Feature Plugin

Five takes on helpful plugin stats and insights

Over, Under, Around, and Through

Till Krüss on Object Cache Pro, WordPress, Plugins, Testing, and Performance — Post Status Draft 126

WordPress 6.1 RC1 • DevNotes • Field Guides • New LearnWP Course

Active Install Data Story Update: Not a breach but abuse of an endpoint

WordPress 6.1 Beta 3 • Active Install Growth Chart

Going from Agency to Products: The Story of Barn2 — Post Status Draft 125

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