A week ago, I was contacted by a WordPress user who asked an interesting question, Is it ethical for a company to use its own staff to bump plugin ratings on wp.org? At first, I didn’t give much thought to the question until I investigated the links they provided me. I researched the plugins they…
*Updated August 5th* WooThemes has published a follow up post that explains in more detail the reasoning behind the first post. It also contains apologies and although we could argue on whether their choice to customers should have been to opt-in or opt-out, the choice is there for customers regardless, which didn’t exist before. Lots…
You have to give Daniel a lot of credit. He recently published his personal quest to conquer non-mortgage debt by selling his plugins. The debt amounted to $67,000 and he was able to pay it off in just 8 months. He is now creating an emergency fund equal to six months of income. But how…
Coen Jacobs developer for WooThemes has used his personal site to vent about commercial themes bundling commercial plugins. There were at least two themes hosted on the ThemeForest marketplace that were bundling commercial WooThemes plugins along with a copy of GravityForms. Those themes have been temporarily hidden from view by ThemeForest until they comply with…
Chris Lema has started an engaging conversation around the topic of plugin authors not charging enough for their plugins. The main take away I have from his article is that plugin authors are under charging for the value that their plugins provide. But after reading the comments, I think most people are of the opinion…
The folks behind Pressnomics have announced the dates for this years conference. It will be held on October 17th-19th. For those that don’t know, Pressnomics is a conference centered around the services and products that have created a successful and diverse economy around WordPress. Tickets go on sale June 19th at 10am PST and will…
Over on the Automattic Theme team blog, Michelle Langston has published a great primer on distributing themes whether they be free or commercially based. Besides the tips offered for distribution, the tutorial also covers a number of things all theme authors should consider doing before releasing there theme into the wild such as making sure…
In what I believe is the first of it’s kind, PressNomics aims to bring together the various commercial entities that are successfully making a living around WordPress. The conference is being held in Chandler, Arizona which by the way, is a great name for a city between November 8th and 10th, 2012. There is room…
Congratulations goes out to Luke McDonald as one of the themes produced by Press75.com has been selected to be part of the WordPress.com commercial theme store. The theme is priced at $50.00 and is called Debut. It’s mobile ready right out of the box along with having post format support. Speaking of post formats, Debut…
In-depth article by Siobahn McKeown that breaks down how commercial plugin developers are monetizing their efforts through the WordPress.org plugin respository. The article covers the guidelines that plugin authors should follow, examples of successful plugins as well as plugins that didn’t meet the guidelines, and various ideas plugin authors can try. One of the things…
One of my favorite WordPress plugins of all time WP Ajax Edit Comments, will soon be free again for all to use. According to a recent email sent out by iThemes, as of January 1st, 2012 they will no longer be supporting Ajax Edit Comments as a premium plugin. Instead, the full version will be…
In a recent discussion amongst those on the WordPress Documentation mailing list, Scribu brought up the question on whether or not links to commercial solutions were allowed within the Codex. Lorelle VanFossen summed things up pretty nicely in the following quote: A fantastic article that helps spell out the details of the Codex article on…
The WP 101 Tutorial Plugin is a combined effort by Shawn Hesketh and Mark Jaquith. The premise of the plugin is simple, to showcase video tutorials of WordPress from within the back-end of WordPress. After using the plugin and watching a few videos, I think it delivers on all levels. From what I could tell,…
In a interesting business move by WooThemes, the commercial theme company has announced that they will be re-focusing their efforts to be a WordPress centric theme company, again. Another example as to how time flies, it wasn’t too long ago when WooThemes began releasing themes for Expression Engine, Tumblr, Drupal, Joomla, and Magento. This was…
I’m not sure if you noticed as much as I have but there seems to be a commercial theme sorter popping up on every corner. At least, that’s the impression I get as I’ve routinely been receiving emails lately from people letting me know about the launch of their theme sorter. The newest one to…