Testing

Learning and Pulling Together

Dan Knauss

November 11, 2022

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.

WordPress 6.1.1 • FSE → Site Editor • Twenty Twenty Three

Courtney Robertson

November 10, 2022

Make WordPressPlanet

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. 📅

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 • Raghavendra Satish Peri

Courtney Robertson

November 2, 2022

Make WordPressPlanet

#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. 🇮🇳

The WordPress Enterprise Paradox

Magne Ilsaas

November 2, 2022

BusinessCareers

"WordPress as a platform is putting us on the enterprise path. But what got us here is what makes us irrelevant," says Magne Ilsaas, CEO and Founding Partner of Dekode. Magne wants to start an overdue conversation about three big risks — and opportunities — for WordPress agencies: 1) A lack of spaces for professional conversations and knowledge-sharing, including professional events, meetups, and mastermind groups catering to enterprise WordPress. 2) Successful agencies that use WordPress extensively with little or no community involvement whose work would benefit from enterprise WordPress peer networks. 3) An over-emphasis in WordPress agencies on short-term engineering solutions to the exclusion of long-term business solutions. What's often left out is design, user experience, and most of all the capacity to play a strategic advisory role in partnership with clients.

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.

A Visit from the Good Idea Fairy

Dan Knauss

October 21, 2022

BusinessPlanet

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

Dan Knauss

October 21, 2022

BusinessDesign

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.

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.

Till Krüss on WordPress, Performance, the Plugin Business, and Life

Dan Knauss

October 13, 2022

BusinessHosting

What plugin owner has not felt the pain of an extraordinarily busy support forum? Till is up to (wait for it..) 5-10 minutes a day on support — which he aims to decrease. How? Testing to ensure the highest quality.

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.

Learning and Pulling Together

WordPress 6.1.1 • FSE → Site Editor • Twenty Twenty Three

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 • Raghavendra Satish Peri

The WordPress Enterprise Paradox

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

A Visit from the Good Idea Fairy

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

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

Till Krüss on WordPress, Performance, the Plugin Business, and Life

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

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