Week in review: Beta 1, WooThemes is seeing double, and much more

Welcome to the third “Week in Review” on Post Status, where I hope to offer up some of the things you may have missed in the last week or so. It’s been a busy week, and there’s a lot to share, so let’s do it.

WordPress 4.0 beta 1 is out

Beta 1 of WordPress 4.0 is out. This means that the feature list is frozen, and testing is underway. If you haven’t tested WordPress 4.0, now is a great time to be involved.

WordPress 4.0 is going to be an excellent release. There are a number of nice new features slated, including language selection upon install (a huge feature), an improved customizer experience, new media views, a new plugins experience in the admin, and an awesome scroll effect in the editor that makes writing so much better.

I just have to tease the scrolling:

Thanks to Konstantin Kovshenin for the video.

You can check out more about Beta 1 on the WordPress release post, and do give it a spin with your themes and plugins to help test for bugs.

WooThemes has doubled revenues in the last year

WooThemes celebrated their sixth birthday last week. But I think they buried the lede in the post. Included in the celebratory post was the note that they’ve gone from 30 to 40 employees, doubled their revenues, and tripled their profit rates in the last year.

That’s some serious growth, and I’m sure mostly on the back of WooCommerce. As readers know (I love linking this post), WooCommerce is now over 80% of their revenue, and probably more now.

Bye bye, bacon

Sadly, WP Bacon is done for. The podcast was a fun one, and the blog was pretty good too, but Rob and Ozzy are moving on. The domain got hammered a while back, and the effort to recover the site’s value just wasn’t worth the effort, so the Bacon is gone.

No fear though, the folks behind it aren’t going anywhere. You can follow Rob and Ozzy on Twitter to catch them in their new antics.

The history of WordPress, abridged edition

Kinsta is a WordPress hosting company, and they spent some serious time putting together a pretty in-depth post about the history of WordPress.

This is a good read, but it’s honestly (even with a post this size) really hard to capture the complete scope of WordPress and its history. There’s a good book on the way that will really tell the story, but for now, Kinsta’s post is quite the achievement, and you should definitely check it out.

iThemes Sync has an app for that

As Chris Lema highlights with a video review, iThemes has released an iOS app for their Sync website management service.

Sync is looking really great, and might be worth checking out if you’re looking for new options in this changing space.

The building blocks of responsive web design

The Theme Foundry (a Post Status sponsor, for what it’s worth) did a nice write-up on the building blocks of responsive design.

I especially liked this post because Drew focused on some things we forget some times, like scaling calls to action, line height, and font weights. There are also other good resources linked within.

Design (more than just pixels) for your audience

I read a lot of stuff that’s not strictly WordPress related. On Medium, Quartz strategist Mia Mabanta gives an in-depth look at how the financial news website got excellent conversion numbers getting executive-level folks to fill out a survey.

The degree of strategic thinking and testing goes to show how well something can do if we put some real effort into it. This is a great case study that any consultant or product maker could learn from.

Another good read that’s not strictly WordPress is Brad Miller’s post on the connection between customer service and user experience design.

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That’s it for the last week. Of course, these are all posts other folks have created. We also had a great week here at Post Status, including some guest posts from Brady Vercher and Jason Resnick I hope you’ll check out.

The days ahead are also shaping up nicely for Post Status. I hope you are all refreshed and ready as I am for a new week.