SaaS

Tom Willmot on the Challenges and Opportunities Facing Enterprise WordPress — Post Status Draft 130

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Dan Knauss
Sparked by Magne Ilsaas's ideas in The WordPress Enterprise Paradox, Tom started a Twitter thread and hosted a live discussion with Magne and others at enterprise WordPress agencies this week. Their main concern is the challenges that arise from not having a well-defined brand and market that allows "WordPress for the Enterprise" to stand out — without being ties to a particular WordPress company or host. After getting an outline of the problem as it stands today, I asked Tom what might help differentiate "Enterprise WordPress" as a collective or entire ecosystem of agencies operating within it. Can open-source values of sharing and cooperation shape a unique global identity for enterprise WordPress agencies? Is it time for an inter-agency association or "guild" to take on these challenges?

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

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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.

Learning and Pulling Together

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Dan Knauss
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.

Who’s Going to Pay for All This?

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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

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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

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

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Dan Knauss
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?

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.

SaaS, Plugin, or Both?

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Dan Knauss
The perennial question — to SaaS or not to SaaS? Both? WordPress-centric product and marketing, or not so much? Danielle Di-Tommaso and Josh Barling from Acsell join Vito Peleg from Atarim to talk about their experiences in these scenarios with…

Pentesting as Contributing

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Dan Knauss
Robert Rowley at Patchstack explains what I believe is the first-ever reported vulnerability in Gutenberg (the plugin, not in WordPress core) to make the National Vulnerability Database. Robert has opened an issue for discussion in the Gutenberg GitHub repo that…
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