Automattic Snaps Up Scroll Kit to Add to the WordPress.com Product Team

Scroll Kit founders Cody Brown and Kate Ray announced today that they are joining the product team at WordPress.com. Automattic, having recently acquired Longreads and Cloudup, adds Scroll Kit to its collection, ostensibly in order to subsume its better features into WordPress.com.

Unlike Cloudup and Longreads, which have continued on with business as usual after acquisition, Scroll Kit will be shutting down its editor in three months as part of the deal. Users of the app are encouraged to export their scrolls in case a more native solution is available further down the road.

Scroll Kit allowed users to create beautiful web pages without writing a line of code. Its powerful visual content editor was actually used to recreate the New York Time’s interactive Snowfall experiment in an hour, a project which NYT says took hundreds of hours of hand-coding. Although its makers cannot yet comment on their super secret future plans, one cannot help but wonder if this radically simplified visual editor may soon make its way into WordPress.com.

Scroll Kit already has a WordPress plugin listed among WordPress.com VIP’s list of layout and organization plugins. This tool offered Scroll Kit users the ability to connect directly to self-hosted WordPress sites and create customized templates as well as change images, fonts, backgrounds, and add special effects. “We’ll take what we learned building Scroll Kit and apply it to a product that’s always been tightly integrated with ours,” Scroll Kit creators said, as they bid their current users goodbye.

Will WordPress.com incorporate Scroll Kit’s editor into the theme editing experience for its customers? If so, it will be interesting to see if some of those features trickle down to the open source WordPress project. With the instant popularity of front-end visual editors like VelocityPage for self-hosted sites, a simplified theme editing experience is bound to resonate with WordPress.com’s user base. Scroll Kit’s makers said that their objective was “to create a process for making the web that was more like drawing on a piece of paper.” If they can bring that experience to WordPress.com, then Automattic has just bought itself a magic wand.