Flywheel Acquires WordPress Local Development Tool Pressmatic

Flywheel has acquired Pressmatic, a local WordPress development application for OS X. The application was created by Clay Griffiths, who will be joining Flywheel to support the product as part of the acquisition.

Pressmatic launched in July 2016 with a $129 price tag but Flywheel is opening it up for free for all users. The company is rebranding the product as “Local by Flywheel” and plans to create a Windows application, add off-site backups for local sites, and sell premium support.

“From the start, the application encompassed so many of Flywheel’s core values: speed, simplicity, and allowing designers and developers the freedom to do what they love,” Flywheel CEO and co-founder Dusty Davidson said. “It’s a perfect fit.”

Griffiths told the Tavern that he is excited for the opportunities that Flywheel can provide for Local going forward. “I originally built Pressmatic because I saw the gap that existed for a truly great local WordPress development experience, and now with the resources and team at Flywheel we’re set to really build something great,” Griffiths said. “I certainly could have continued to go at it alone, but after meeting the team it became clear that the right answer was to partner up and really go big.”

Griffiths Plans to Continue Headway Themes Support and Development in his Spare Time

The acquisition comes just months after Griffiths, who is also the co-founder of Headway Themes, was embroiled in the controversy surrounding the company’s lack of communication and decline in support. Many potential customers were turned off to Pressmatic as the result of Griffith’s lack of support for Headway Themes’ customers and its mistreatment of employees. They company publicly confirmed its financial troubles and apologized to customers after a former employee went public about not having been paid and customers not receiving support.

When asked how the Pressmattic acquisition affects Headway Themes customers, Griffiths confirmed that he will continue to be involved with support and development of Headway.

“This acquisition and employment will provide myself and my family much more stability than we’ve had in a long time, and will allow me to better focus on Headway in my spare time,” Griffiths said. “This includes rolling out the upcoming 4.1 release, and working hard to make sure the support and other outstanding issues are resolved for all our customers.”

Pressmatic is used by hundreds of WordPress developers and is Flywheel’s first acquisition. The application was built on top of Electron, an app framework that enables developers to build cross-platform desktop apps with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. It allows users to run apache or nginx, switch between PHP versions for any site, create multisite installations (including subdomain setups), and create remote tunnels to share local development. Mac users can download the new Local by Flywheel application at local.getflywheel.com.