Wordpress | Post Status Draft Podcast

Cory Miller is joined by North UX founder, Krissie VandeNoord to discuss her journey of agency ownership. Their work contributes to the businesses they serve, winning big and experiencing new levels of growth from the unique solutions they bring. From hearing about her background as a natural problem solver to her experiences engaging client needs with creative solutions, you will be inspired to break through limitations into the land of possibility.Top Takeaways:Building for Nuance: North UX likes to hone in on what makes a business really unique and find solutions to highlight those things so they are experienced as an asset instead of a detractor.Problem Solving Spiral: Poking around, asking questions, and figuring out ways to develop solutions spiraled Krissie from seeing and experiencing challenges to being a solution-building developer. Navigating and figuring things out is the work it takes to give you the experience to increase your confidence threshold. This can act as a springboard to making great c

In this episode, Jess Frick, Pressable’s Director of Operations, discusses what differentiates the hosting performance and support Pressable offers WordPress users. They are a “small but mighty” hosting provider from the Automattic family powered by the agility to continuously evolve to better serve customers with diverse needs. Her enthusiasm, generosity, and honesty inspire us to use the power of WordPress for good. As a WordPress lover, Jess shares her thoughts on the benefits of being people-powered.Top Takeaways:Differentiated by Support: When facing an issue with your site, Pressable understands you don’t have time to wait for answers or be redirected to articles and links that don’t deliver real time solutions. Pressable support is led by a team of WordPress experts with a proven record of responding in less than 3 minutes and solving issues in under 10 minutes on average.Technical, User-Friendly Interface: Pressable’s single dashboard offers simple site management with a clear view of site performance

Robert Jacobi shares his work as the Director of WordPress at Cloudways, or to put it simply-strategy, partnerships, and product marketing. After working for years as an agency owner, Robert joined the WordPress community. His experience enables him to foster the relationship between business and open-source projects and vice-versa. Robert shares how the products and services offered by Cloudways enable businesses of all sizes to accomplish their vision of “moving dreams forward”.Top Takeaways:Cloudways Offers One-Click Easy: Staging in one click. Migration in one click. Scalability without the complexity.Open-Source Ecosystems Thrive: Communities are driving satisfaction. There are so many opportunities to take in feedback and make improvements. They are driving new niches for flexibility, freedom, and scalability.Find the Right Fit: Are you getting the value of what you are paying for? Are you getting less than you need? Are you taking advantage of all of the functionality you are paying for? Little things

In this episode of Post Status Draft, Cory is joined by D'nelle Dowis, CEO of Berry Interesting Productions. She and her husband have worked in WordPress for over a decade and run a small, consultative agency. D'nelle shares truly helpful insights about centering relationships in work and life. From being invested in clients for the long haul to being intentionally curious about knowing others and how they spend their days, D'nelle invites us to let connection be the fuel that informs and inspires who we are and how we work.Top Takeaways:Build Long-Term Client Relationships: Building long-term relationships enables you to advise clients from a big-picture perspective, as opposed to just building technical solutions.Support is Serious Business: Doing what we do best should give our client's peace of mind that their sites will perform as needed when needed.Look Beyond a Client's Ask to Unseen Opportunities: As clearly reflected in D'nelle's experience share about her yoga studio client, leaning into hard season

Tom Willmot has been a WordPress pioneer and leader in the agency space since co-founding Human Made in 2010. Just in the past year, Human Made has more than doubled its size with a team of 100. Tom is also CEO and co-founder of Altis DXP, Human Made's enterprise WordPress digital experience platform. I caught up with Tom this week to find out what he's thinking about the challenges and opportunities of the enterprise market for WordPress agencies today.Sparked by Magne Ilsaas's ideas in The WordPress Enterprise Paradox, Tom started a Twitter thread and hosted a live discussion this week about the challenges of not having a well-defined brand and market for enterprise WordPress. In the minds of clients beyond the WordPress and open-source community not to mention unhelpful tech industry analysts, "WordPress" is something you can buy, and it's often confused with any number of related brands: Automattic, WordPress VIP, and managed WordPress hosts that support enterprise clients.After getting an outline of the

In this episode of Post Status Draft, Cory is joined by James Farmer, CEO of Incsub, WPMU DEV, CampusPress, and Edublogs. James’ WordPress story goes all the way back to his launch of the first hosted WordPress multisite blogging platform — just a few days ahead of WordPress.com. Edublogs currently hosts millions of students’ and educators’ blogs. James talks about successes and failures, his views on Gutenberg, and how he stays competitive with Squarespace. Cory brings up the WordPress.org active install data question and gets James’ take on how he’d like to see it re-emerge with greater value for plugin businesses.

About a year ago, Vikas Singhal launched InstaWP, a serverless platform for spinning up WordPress sites instantly for demos and sandboxes, development and testing, or training and education. Along with WordPress, any combination of plugins and themes can be included. There’s GitHub integration, and InstaWP has the ability to push sites to a large number of hosts or pull them to a local development environment. (InstaWP generates Blueprints — .zip packages for WP Engine’s Local app.)InstaWP is being embraced by WordPress product developers and agencies. It has significant product testing and marketing applications since customers can spin up any number of demo sites based on a custom template, and this activity is logged. Vikas has picked up seed funding from Automattic and looks forward to announcing many new partnerships with WordPress businesses that have found InstaWP and valuable and complementary tool.Vikas sees InstaWP’s future as a marketplace for agencies, developers, and freelancers. Because of its p

Transcript ↓This week in Post Status Slack, Lesley Sim, the founder of Newsletter Glue, dropped this announcement:"While everybody is offering discounts for Black Friday, we’re planning to significantly raise prices. We’ll be narrowing our target audience and focusing mainly on medium-large publishers and online businesses; working with them more closely and providing a high level of customization and support."What motivated Lesley's decision? Where does she expect it to take her company?For some background, listen to my recent conversation with Till Krüss, whose business model for Object Cache Pro and conversations following from it were part of Lesley's thinking about her own product.In this conversation with Lesley, we talk about:Pay attention to the shape of your market and your pricing.Lesley SimLesley's experience with Black Friday sales tactics."Lifetime" memberships and licenses.Where Newsletter Glue started and how its pricing model has changed.Why freemium didn't work for Newsletter Glue.Lesley's ex

Can We Get to “Yes” on Better UX?What does WordPress need to do to appeal more to do-it-yourself website builders and creators who are trying to take a business, hobby, or side project online? This week in an article he shared in Post Status Slack, Eric Karkovack suggested some ways to improve the WordPress user experience, especially for DIY users setting up a website for the first time.We also have lists of plugins we disrecommend — to the point that it's a dealbreaker if a client insists on using them. And of course, these lists change a lot over time. We all know these things — but it's a kind of “open secret” within professional WordPress circles. That's understandable! Comparison is the thief of joy — and possibly revenue.Some of the things Eric wants to see happen, like a standard interface for plugins and a curated view of the plugin ecosystem, are similar to views commonly expressed by designers, developers, and people in other professional roles at WordPress agencies serving enterprise clients. And

This week I sat down again with Eric Karkovack to talk about the three top WordPress stories on the top of our minds. Independently, we made nearly the same selections! It seems the temporary loss of active install stats at WP.org has created an opportunity to rethink long-held assumptions and find new ways forward. Our news picks are all related to this in one way or another. So there's a single throughline in this episode — what works, what doesn't, and what will take WordPress businesses forward in the product, agency, and hosting spaces.Are Active Install Counts Irrelevant to Your Plugin Business's Success? (Even if they were accurate?)There are always going to be developers who push the envelope when it comes to littering the dashboard and just making it a difficult user experience. Maybe data is part of the way we solve that.Eric KarkovacFirst up is Alex Denning's article at Ellipsis, "WordPress.org is ineffective for plugin distribution in 2022." Alex argues the likely temporary loss of Active Install

Back in August, I had a long conversation with Till Krüss (edited down to

Trust can be betrayed in so many ways or failed even with the best of intentions.Dan KnaussIn this episode of Post Status Excerpt, Dan and Ny take on three issues in the WordPress community that can threaten or impair trust while also revealing how foundational trust is, especially in open source.First, they talk about Ny's article at MasterWP, "Enough with this woke stuff: and other racist speech you can unlearn," which explains microaggressions and received a significant number of macroaggressions in reply — but also far more positive support from the community.Next, "How do we rebuild trust when it's harmed?" is a question that leads into the biggest WordPress story of the week — Matt Mullenweg's apparent decision to shut down access to active install data at the WordPress.org plugin repo due to an unspecified security breach and/or privacy concern. The way communication has happened — or hasn't happened — about this decision is clearly damaging trust in the WordPress community, particularly among business

Katie and Andy Keith started out as a WordPress agency almost a decade ago and then tried to break into WordPress products, first with themes and then plugins. Challenges arose with reliable project management on the agency side while they tried to establish a foothold in the WordPress plugin market. The WooCommerce Extensions Store is where their business took off. With niche extensions that had no competition, they ranked very quickly.

If [an employer] can't afford not to operate without suspicion and distrust, what does that tell you?Dan KnaussDan and Ny talk about their WordCamp US experiences both good and bad. Their conversation focuses on accessibility and disability. Ny had an experience with Uber at WCUS that made her agree with Dan's preference for traditional and preferably unionized taxi companies or public transit. They both reflect on the accessibility challenges and failures Michelle Frechette shared in Five Days Without a Shower before turning to an important article by Piccia Neri that was published at Post Status this week.Piccia's article considers the value of salary transparency in hiring and job listings after asking WordPress employers why they don't advertise a salary range in listings. Ny is optimistic pay transparency will soon be the norm in US law. Dan is optimistic the WordPress community can make the changes it needs out of empathy and regard for others plus the motivation to build a high-quality, professional wo

There's always new people coming in, being embraced and accepted, [and being] shown the wayCory MillerIn this episode, Cory and Michelle talk about their takeaways from WordCamp US. The Post Status Huddle ahead of the conference was a great experience for them and many Post Status members. Michelle explains her experience with some accessibility challenges. Cory stresses the need for empathy and awareness about these issues. What everyone agrees on: we love getting together as a community! WordPress is an industry, and it is people. The people come first. Cory also talks about his and Post Status' interest in serving its agency-based and European members.

"So it's hard for people in the community to kind of branch out and communicate online. So imagine how hard it is for people who are new" —Nyasha GreenDan and Ny are looking forward to attending WordCamp US this week, which is a first for them both. In a slightly more casual conversation touching their usual topics — the business of WordPress, careers, and community — they share the things they're looking forward to seeing and doing at WCUS and in San Diego.Some of the WCUS sessions they're interested in have to do with WordPress security and bug bounty programs, cross-cultural communication, WordPress and performance, and getting young people into WordPress. Other tech and open source conferences also come up, as Ny is planning to attend All Things Open 2022 in Raleigh, North Carolina.Finally, Ny and Dan discover they both have non-tech backgrounds and started reading J.R.R. Tolkien at an early age. Ny talks about learning several languages and reading The Hobbit in Latin.

"We're not afraid to let our human side show." —Eric KarkovackIn this episode of Post Status Draft, Eric Karkovack joins Dan Knauss to discuss their top picks for important topics and news stories in WordPress this week. Then they take up the topic of "professionalism." What is it — what does it mean for us in the WordPress community, and how does it relate to a healthy open source project and business ecosystem?Eric's Top News Picks:WP-Optimize "Cheating" Scandal (WP Tavern)WebP in WordPress 6.1 On Hold/Being ReconsideredWordPress.com Now Offering $499 WebsitesDan's Top News Picks:Unethical "GPL clubs" and "piracy" — and what we can do about it. (An emerging discussion in Post Status Slack and on Twitter.)Gravity acquires Gravity — Gravity Forms acquires Gravity Flow and Gravity Experts, product/service businesses in the Gravity Forms ecosystem owned by Steven Henty, Director of Product Development for Rocketgenius – the creators of Gravity Forms.Our spotlight on Jonathan Bossenger — and what he says (and pe

And I would say you're contributing by learning. Like if you're, if you're learning in community, that's a step- Dan Knauss How do we give back? We all want a community of creativity, cooperation, and contribution — how do we get there?In this episode Dan and Ny talk about WordPress and giving back. Giving, making, creating... Looking at the search results for "Make WordPress" and "the firehose" of Make WordPress Slack where the #docs channel was having their weekly meeting, Dan and Ny look at the wide range of options there are for new contributors.,Mentoring and organizing Meetups is a topic that comes up again. That's where Ny feels she has been given the most and most enjoys giving back. However, there are barriers to getting people engaged with the WordPress project — and to work for free.Dan asks what needs to be done to reach younger people. Ny talks about the barriers from a BIPOC perspective, where sensitivity to history and personal stories matters. Dan relates that to an inner city gardening projec

What's it like to enter this WordPress community media space, especially as the editor of a publication with many voices, personalities, and perspectives?My friend and dialogue partner, Nyasha Green, is six months into her role as Editorial Director at MasterWP, so today we're talking about what that's been like for Ny, what she's learned, and how we look at the WordPress media space we both work in.Unsurprisingly we talk about conflict, communication, personality, and the importance of in-person events. That brings up WCUS — a first for both of us — where we'll meet each other and a lot of people we've only known remotely. It also sounds like I might get roped into a karaoke duet. (Not if I can help it!)

People don't realize how long ago "long ago" wasn't. We're not talking about two, three, four hundred years ago. My family always stressed working somewhere your employer respects you, because it wasn't that long ago they didn't have a choice.Nyasha GreenWe're rebooting Post Status Excerpt as a weekly chat between Nyasha Green and Dan Knauss (and guests—please join us!) about a few of the active topics and discussions in the WordPress community that we feel are most important. Big thanks to David Bisset in his former role as host and curator here, and also to our intern and post-production engineer, Olivia Bisset.This week we're talking about pay transparency. Ny relates some personal experiences where an employer did not disclose pay or how employees were selected for raises. This leads us into a discussion of pay transparency in the hiring process — how it matters to everyone but especially job seekers who are black, indigenous, and other people of color. (Ny has written about this before, and Piccia Neri h