Joost de Valk has announced he’s acquired WPForce.com from Jonathan Dingman for an undisclosed amount. WPForce was created in 2011 as an outlet for Jonathan to share opinions and news with the WordPress community. Along with the acquisition, Joost shared details of the process he had to go through to transfer the site into his possession.
This Isn’t The First Acquisition For Yoast
This is the second WordPress community asset I’ve seen acquired by Joost De Valk. The first was WP-Community.org, the previous home of The WordPress Community podcast in 2009. At the time, Joost was producing a podcast called PressThis with co-host Frederick Townes, author of the W3 Total Cache plugin. The two podcasts were merged but soon after, the podcast went silent.
The Future Of WPForce
Yoast states they will be toying with the old content of WPForce and the established business directory on the site. He hints that we’ll soon find out what their plans are. In a follow-up comment, Yoast mentions the site will be a great testbed for upcoming themes they are developing.
Are there more WordPress site acquisitions in the future? In a comment published on the acquisition, Yoast said “We’d be interested in buying just about any good WordPress site or product that fits into what we do“.
When I approached Joost about the idea of acquiring WP Force, Joost was very receptive and moved very quickly on the idea. After having run WP Force for a number of years, it’s exciting for me to see that the site is now in even more capable hands than my own. I couldn’t be happier with how things turned out.