This week Envato published stats on how WordPress product sellers are doing within its economy. Theme authors make up the bulk of WordPress-based earnings on its marketplace and continue to dominate sales. Inspired by his interaction with the WordPress business community at Pressnomics, Ben Chan, director of Growth and Revenue at Envato, penned an insider…
Mika Epstein, who helps oversee the WordPress plugin directory, has published a simple request to stop using copy protection. Epstein explains how copy protection degrades the user experience, makes it difficult to provide tech support, and perhaps most importantly, how they don’t work. She suggests that photographers use a watermark and not put full-size images…
Mario Peshev published a great article that looks at where the WordPress community stands on job titles and skills. Peshev explains why titles are out of control and how they don’t match their expected skill sets. The problem with a number of general titles is that they are overused and it is no longer clear…
WooThemes announced this week that it will be retiring @WooSupport, its Twitter support account, in favor of other support channels. Social media manager Marina Pape reports that support at the company is otherwise healthy. “On the contrary, our support is cooking with Customer Happiness this week averaging 90%, all support teams coming in under 24…
I’ve used WordPress for more than seven years and I can’t think of any features it has that are innovative. I believe part of the reason is that I’ve been stuck in the WordPress bubble for so long, I haven’t been exposed to different ways of doing things. I only know the WordPress way and…
Earlier this month, I described how the features as plugins first model is a mess. Drew Jaynes, who is leading the development cycle for WordPress 4.2, is already making headway into improving the model. Unlike previous release cycles, feature plugins that are likely to be merged into WordPress have been assigned a core mentor at…
This past weekend, 250 professionals gathered in Phoenix, Arizona for Pressnomics, a three-day event focused on entrepreneurship in the WordPress economy. During the last day, attendees had the opportunity to watch Pagely CEO Joshua Strebel interview Matt Mullenweg. Although the session wasn’t recorded, the audience tweeted out the highlights of the interview, and discussion continued…
The founder of WP Site Care, Ryan Sullivan, explains how a negative SEO campaign nearly took his business offline. Sullivan shares details behind the attack, how it affected the bottom line, and says it was someone in the WordPress community who orchestrated the attack. Using some sophisticated techniques we were able to trace back to…
This post was contributed by David Hayes. David loves solving difficult problems at Press Up, publishing new WordPress tutorials at WPShout, and eating cold cereal with milk. The developer tool Composer has been sneaking in around the fringes of the WordPress community. Rarst is a fan. The Roots theme framework folks like it. There’s support…
The CPO and partner of Human Made, Noel Tock, published his WordPress predictions for 2015. His predictions include, custom dashboards, front-end editing, internationalization, and more. This could be the year of admin themes, but I think it largely depends on whether the WP API is merged into core. Tock predicts we’ll see a substantial increase…
WordPress is 11 years old and used on over 20% of the web. Its popularity is made up of many facets including, the community, themes and plugins. In the realm of open source content management systems, nothing comes close to what WordPress has accomplished. Although it’s the market leader, its dominance won’t last forever. Mike…
Mark Gibbs, who writes for NetworkWorld, published an article on how Ghost may one day scare WordPress off as the top publishing platform. Gibbs has some valid complaints with WordPress such as, plugins that don’t integrate with the menu system in a consistent way, incompatible themes, and the post editor. Although Ghost doesn’t have many…
In late September, WordPress.com published the first in a series of short videos that shows how easy it is to publish content from a mobile device. In the 15 second video entitled “Welcome Home,” a user is seen taking photos with an iPhone in various locations. Near the end of the video, the user taps…
During a session at WordCamp Europe, Matt Mullenweg was asked how companies contribute back to WordPress, how they’re doing it, and what companies should do more of. He responded to the question in-depth in a blog post entitled Five for the Future. In the post, he outlines 5% as being a good rule of thumb…
If the WordPress community is your only barometer of knowing how an open source community works together, then you might want to explore outside a bit further to gain a broader outlook on other cultures. Some of the differences are worth examining. A few days ago I noticed an interesting observation regarding the relationship between…