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Image Courtesy of PodsCamp

October 3rd, 2014 will live in the history books as the day when the first conference devoted to Pods took place. Organized by Scott Kingsley Clark, PodsCamp not only focused on the Pods plugin, but it was also the first time the development team was in the same physical location. In the following interview, Clark tells me how he thinks it went and whether it will become an annual event.

Overall, what is your impression for how the first ever PodsCamp went?

It was awesome! It could have only been made better by perhaps more tickets being available for WCDFW which was a barrier for folks coming from out-of-town. When tickets ran out for WCDFW, people couldn’t justify just coming out for PodsCamp, but could justify it if they were able to go to WCDFW that weekend too. Almost all (if not every single one) of our attendees went to WCDFW the next day.

What was accomplished by having the entire Pods development team under the same roof?

This was the first time we were together and it gave us an opportunity to have face to face conversations. We talked about all sorts of things like where we’ve been, where we’re going, and ideas on what we want to improve upon. One killer idea that came out of the weekend was from Joshua Pollock. We’re nailing down the specifics right now and should have an announcement post published as soon as we get things in place.

Do you have any initial feedback concerning the event?

We didn’t make enough from sponsors, Tilt, or ticket sales to cover the cost of the event. Our highest expense was bringing in four people from out-of-town and covering their accommodations. I hope in the future we can secure enough to at least break even.

Is PodsCamp something you’ll try to turn into an annual event?

Yes, we’re going to do this again next year just before WCDFW and will go over new topics now that we have established a baseline. We’re also considering 1-3 smaller meetup-based events near where our team members are located. One of which may be a mini-PodsCamp type of event in Austin, TX. I think that PodsCamp DFW will be our flagship one, which we would bring the whole crew out for, but the smaller ones could be more workshop and less camp.

I just want to again thank everyone who made this possible, especially Chris Lema, Jake Goldman, Tom McFarlin, WPEngine, and SiteGround. I’m so stoked we could pull this off!

Let Us Know if You Attended PodsCamp

If you attended PodsCamp, let us know about your experience in the comments! Slides from each presentation can be found here. Sessions recorded at the event will be added to the Pods Framework YouTube channel.

This story about how a man sabotaged a FAA facility is terrifying and inspiring in how people worked together to overcome it, and also includes this unintentionally funny line, “He had worked at the Chicago Center for eight years, according to an FBI affidavit. The company has fired him.”

Since there is no guest this week, Marcus Couch and I used this opportunity to spend more time than usual with the news. We spend a considerable amount of time discussing WordPress contributions and I provide insight into my distinction between direct and indirect contributions. I share my experience of attending the first WordCamp event for Ann Arbor, MI. Last but not least, we end the show with a shout-out to HostingReviews.io, a resource filled with webhosting reviews from current or past customers without affiliate links.

Stories Discussed:

My Experience at WordCamp Ann Arbor 2014
Contributing Back to WordPress
WebDevStudios Acquires WordPress Support Services Company, Maintainn
5 years into business, Pagely is growing faster than ever

Plugins Picked By Marcus:

Duplicate Title Validation looks for posts and pages with the same name and prevents you from using the same title twice.

Flexible Widget Title enables you to hide widget titles in the frontend of WordPress, while the widget title is still visible in the backend.

WP Double Protection adds the ability to have a second password option. Instead of needing one password to login, you’ll need two.

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By default, if a post or page uses a title that’s already been used, WordPress appends a -2 to the end of the slug to prevent conflicts. Not only do duplicate titles cause conflicts, they’re not good for SEO. Developed by wallfa_hm, the Duplicate Title Validation plugin checks the title and displays a notice if it’s considered a duplicate.

Duplicate Title Detected

I tried to publish a post with a duplicate title but the plugin prevented it from being published and saved it as a draft instead. This is a nice touch and forces the writer to use a unique title.

Duplicate Post Saved as a Draft

It’s not difficult to determine what the plugin is doing but the notices could be improved so they’re easier to understand. If you publish a lot of content, this plugin is an easy way to make sure each post or page has a unique title.

Developed by Hyyan, Flexible Widget Title is a new plugin that enables users to hide widget titles from the frontend of WordPress. When activated, apply brackets to the titles you want to hide. For example, [A Text Widget Title].

Click to view slideshow.

Although the same effect can be accomplished by leaving the title field blank, it makes administering several text widgets in the backend of WordPress more difficult. This plugin allows you to keep the titles in the backend for easier administration but still be able to hide them on the frontend.

I tested the plugin on WordPress 4.0 and didn’t experience any issues.

The Internet’s Most Fascinating Newsletter Writer, Dave Pell. Still one of my favorite reads, though I don’t look at it every day because it’d make me lazy about blogging and you all would get tired of seeing “Hat tip: Dave Pell” on every post.

Introducing The Players’ Tribune, a new media platform that will present the unfiltered voices of professional athletes, bringing fans closer to the games they love than ever before. Founded by Derek Jeter, The Players’ Tribune aims to provide unique insight into the daily sports conversation and to publish first-person stories directly from athletes. From video to podcasts to player polls and written pieces, The Tribune will strive to be “The Voice of the Game.”

The Players’ Tribune, powered by WordPress. Here’s Jeter’s intro. Hat tip: John Gruber.

Our goal is to create a sustainable membership with a large enough base that it will fund reporting and writing at rates that are competitive with the best print magazines in the world.

You might not have heard of a Longreads Membership yet — you join for a monthly fee and 100% of that goes to independent publishers and writers. We’re announcing an update to the program to match every dollar in, so it doubles your contribution. I just joined Longreads at $10/mo, about what I pay for Netflix, and I can’t wait to see what comes out from the editorial team next.

Pagely is celebrating their fifth year of business right now. They have just launched their newly designed website (note to early readers: it’s in process of launching at this moment, so some links may not work until later today) to reflect some of the ways they’ve changed over the years. They are also growing, rapidly.

The new website is a complete rebrand. They’ve tweaked their logo many times over the years, but they’ve completely changed it now. It’s much more modern and can be used in a variety of ways.

The new website is flat, geometric, modern, and as sassy as ever (like with their Investors page they are quite proud of). In all, the redesign attempts to showcase happy customers and what makes them different.

They are introducing brand ambassadors — a kind of super testimonial — that includes names you’ll surely recognize from the WordPress community.

Additionally, they are giving other managed hosts a bit of a sting with what they call #turnthepage, a dedicated page to highlight that they don’t charge for pageviews, something that most managed WordPress hosting companies do.

Pagely has implemented the new branding and design elements across most of their platform, including their Support sub-site.

In addition to branding and a web redesign, Pagely is attempting to showcase that they were first to market with managed WordPress hosting, but also that they are best in class. The strategy — and particularly their recent all-in move to being an AWS-based service — appear to be working.

Record growth

I discussed the Pagely redesign and their recent growth with Joshua Strebel, Pagely co-founder and CEO. He told me that they’ve seen an enormous amount of growth this year.

Revenue is up 28% in the last month alone and between 40-45% quarter over quarter. This means that Pagely is on pace to more than double in size between this summer and next.

To some this may seem a surprise, but it’s part of some slow and steady investments Pagely has made in recent years.

They certainly did not scale at the pace of other players in the market — most notably WP Engine. They also (as noted above with the Investors page) have bootstrapped their company from the beginning.

Noone knows exactly how big Pagely is today, and that’s part of what you get with their owners. Though I’m told they are “more than 10 people but fewer than 50.”

The Strebel’s (on the left of the picture above) own the company — only sharing equity with some key employees — and they are proud of their independence.

It’s nearly impossible to be a Pagely customer without feeling the presence of Josh and Sally Strebel’s own personalities. And while Josh is an opinionated figure in the WordPress community, Pagely customers seem quite happy with that.

Managed host customer satisfaction

Steven Gliebe started a new project recently called HostingReviews.io, a website that attempts to collect non-biased reviews from social media about various hosting solutions. Pagely has a 94% happiness rating according to HostingReviews.io — matched only by Flywheel’s 95% rating.

I like Steven’s project because he is not using affiliates at all with this project, an aspect that spoils most hosting review websites. Here’s a breakdown of some others:

 

Changes in managed WordPress hosting markets

It’s been an interesting time to analyze the managed WordPress hosting market. For one, the term “managed WordPress hosting” is here to stay. Nearly every large player — including the likes of GoDaddy, Bluehost, Dreamhost, and more — offer a managed WordPress hosting product.

The differences between these large company products and the original smaller players — players like Pagely, WP Engine, Pressable, and later entrants like Flywheel, Siteground, and Pantheon — are beyond the name of the product. You really have to dig into each service and business model to get a full grasp of how they are unique.

And this is really hard.

For one, you can find positive and negative things about every host in the world. But also, these companies are often targeting different audiences. For instance, GoDaddy and the other large hosts pretty clearly want the smaller website audience, but to upsell them with a more WordPress-specific package. And that’s fine; they can offer some great functionality for that.

But Pagely, Pantheon, and some others are going after bigger fish; and they are marketing themselves appropriately.

Going after WordPress.com VIP

WordPress.com VIP is the king of the big-WordPress mountain. They have the promise of infinite scale and excellent reliability. It’s Automattic’s own product and an excellent business model for them.

They are able to charge big companies big dollars (relative to other WordPress hosting, not compared to some enterprise software these companies are used to) to get the assurance that their website is hosted safely and reliably.

WordPress.com serves billions of pageviews every month. It’s simply a massive platform and a comfortable place for companies to take their WordPress hosting needs.

Pagely wants to be an alternative to WordPress.com VIP. They see themselves as a viable and attractive alternative. For one, they’ll tell you that you can run anything on Pagely; whereas WordPress VIP has a restricted ecosystem that involves approved-only plugins and stringent code reviews for any custom code, that often requires one of their VIP service partners to perform the work.

VIP is a great service. However it is no longer the only service capable of serving clients at scale. We are winning more of those high-caliber clients that need the extra flexibility our stack offers.

– Joshua Strebel, Pagely CEO

Pagely and others seeking the high end market are still relatively early on in their efforts; WordPress.com VIP is a behemoth in that market.

A changing tide

I’ve noticed — and I’m sure some of you have too — a change in tide of WordPress managed hosting. This year has no doubt been a very tough one for some managed hosts.

It’s been painful to see customers that were once happy with their service — to the point of being huge brand ambassadors themselves — to quietly leaving and moving on to something else, now with warranted skepticism.

Personally, I try to stay pretty host-agnostic. It is a very difficult market to say anything about, due to its incredibly competitive nature. However, I think it’s obvious that Pagely — accompanied by the likes of SiteGround and Pantheon — is on the rise while some of the other early entrants to WordPress managed hosting are struggling to consistently deliver on their promises.

However, with new-found popularity and fast growth, Pagely too can be susceptible to some of the same growing pains of their competition. But they say they’re ready for it.

They’ve invested heavily in AWS and put all their technology chips in Amazon’s basket. And they assure me that they have been hiring some of the best support techs and engineers in the business. Additionally, they tell me that because they aren’t investing a ton of money into marketing, their customer influx is more natural and less likely to strain more linear growth levels.

Time will tell if Pagely is ready to scale with players that have more money and resources than they do, but they’re definitely excited about the recent growth, the new brand and website, their brand ambassadors, and the challenges ahead.

After a busy weekend of WordPress conferences, among those that took place is the first ever WordCamp Ann Arbor. Situated on the University of Michigan campus at the Michigan League, nearly 150 people from all walks of life gathered to learn about WordPress.

Beginner’s Guide to WordCamps

I started the day with a session by Marc Benzakein entitled “How to Rock a WordCamp Even if You’re a Total n00b.” When Benzakein asked how many in the room were attending their first WordCamp, the majority raised their hands. After attending more than a dozen WordCamps, Benzakein offers advice to first-time attendees and explains how to get the most out of the event.

Click to view slideshow.

 

I’d like to see more WordCamps incorporate the same or a similar session at the beginning of the event, especially if it’s the first one for the area. It breaks the ice and gives attendees a realistic expectation of what a WordCamp is all about. Those who attended the presentation had the opportunity to meet Benzakein’s son, Eli.

His son contributed to the conversation and helped break the ice with his humorous questions and commentary. He contributed so much that if he registers an account on WordPress.org, I’d like to see the speakers badge added to his profile. If you’d like more information on how to survive your first WordCamp, Carrie Dils has an excellent survival guide available.

 Child Themes and Theme Frameworks

Next up, I sat in on Phil Hoyt’s presentation on using Frameworks and Child Themes. He described the benefits of what a theme framework offers and the proper way of editing themes via child themes. His theme framework is called Generic and is available for free on the WordPress Theme Directory.

Learning about Child Themes and Theme Frameworks

Be The Peacock

My favorite session of the day was “Be the Peacock: Creating and Loving Your Online Brand” by Rebecca Gill. The idea behind her presentation is that a peacock has beautiful, vibrant colors, and is not afraid to strut them. Likewise, individuals need to stand out and make themselves and their brand distinguishable. In the presentation, she tells the story of how she was once a shy individual, afraid to strut her colors and diagnosed with Imposter Syndrome. After receiving a pep talk from Chris Lema, she embraced her inner peacock.

Be The Peacock Not The Peahen

 

Wise Words From a Mentor

When Ross Johnson put the wheels in motion to organize WordCamp Ann Arbor, he didn’t have a reference level of interest. Although the Ann Arbor area has a monthly meetup group with 40-50 rotating attendees, he didn’t know if people would feel compelled to travel from Detroit. Because of the uncertainty, attendance for the event was capped at 150 tickets. “We ended up selling out early and having nearly seventy people on the waiting list. We of course had made all of our accommodations based on 150 people,” Johnson told the Tavern.

John Hawkins who organized WordCamp Las Vegas 2013 and is putting together the event for 2014 mentored Johnson along with a few other first-time organizers. Hawkins suggested to Johnson that he should release more tickets and that 10-15% of people wouldn’t show up. “As predicted, a large group of people didn’t show up and we were able to accommodate everyone without issue.”

Finding a Venue

Finding a venue can be one of the more challenging aspects of organizing a WordCamp. Most speakers appreciate being able to walk to the venue from their hotel room. After ruling out corporate venues due to cost, Johnson was left to choose between donated office space, public space, or the University of Michigan.

Lyndsay Johnson who studied at the University recommended that he try contacting the Michigan League event services department. “After touring the facilities we knew it was the spot we wanted to try. It was central to downtown and had an incredible classic vibe to it which brought an interesting contrast for a tech event.” Another benefit to using the League is the on site catering as well as a strong technology team to help keep technical hiccups to a minimum.

Lessons Learned From a First Timer

Johnson recommends that organizers start early. While WordCamp Ann Arbor took place on October 14th, he sent out the first email related to the event in early February. “On paper it doesn’t look like there is that match to do, but it’s more than it seems.” Second and third time organizers have the luxury of building off of previous experience. That’s a luxury first timers don’t have. “When starting from scratch you have to design a new website, new badges, new logo, etc.”

One of the most important aspects of managing a large event such as a WordCamp is the team surrounding you. “Get a group of organizers that you can really trust and don’t be afraid to delegate to them.” In addition to Johnson, the organizing team includes: Justin Ferriman, Kloe Ferriman, Rebecca Gill, Lyndsay Johnson, Kyle Maurer, and Declan O’Neill. Despite having help, Johnson feels as though he took on too much work and will do a better job next year of asking for help.

Will There be a WordCamp Ann Arbor 2015?

Johnson tells me that they’ll likely have a second WordCamp in Ann Arbor next year and planning will begin sometime in February or earlier.

Can’t Wait For Round Two

For a first time event, WordCamp Ann Arbor didn’t experience many hiccups. The WiFi speeds at the League were fantastic with a consistent 20Mb up and down throughout the day. Attendees had to fend for themselves at lunch, but the setup offered an opportunity to exercise with a short walk to main street. Downtown Ann Arbor is filled with great places to eat but many of the locations are small, not being able to handle 10 or more people per table.

With only 150 attendees, the atmosphere was relaxed and there was ample opportunity to meet each other. Attending WordCamp Ann Arbor reaffirms my feeling of enjoying smaller WordCamps versus those with 300 or more attendees. Last but not least, the University of Michigan is a beautiful campus, especially this time of year. If you live in or around the Ann Arbor area, keep tabs on the WordCamp Central schedule and consider attending WordCamp in 2015.

Click to view slideshow.

On Friday, October 10, 2014, from 1-5PM I will be presenting a WordPress and Blogging Workshop in Forest Grove, Oregon, at the Forest Grove Senior and Community Center as a fundraiser for the center and part of the Writers in the Grove group. The price for this 4 hour event is $30 ($5 discount with […]

WordPress development agency, WebDevStudios, has acquired Maintainn for an undisclosed amount. According to the announcement, the acquisition enables WebDevStudios to provide better maintenance and support to clients. Founded in 2012 by Shayne Sanderson, Maintainn provides maintenance services including 24/7 security monitoring, daily off-site backups, weekly updates to WordPress core, themes and plugins, a dedicated WordPress support desk and custom development.

Sanderson, once an employee for WebDevStudios as a Technical Project Manager, left the company in late 2013 to work on Maintainn full-time. What started as an individual endeavor, turned into a five person company.

The Retainer Arm of WebDevStudios

On paper, the acquisition makes sense. WebDevStudios is able to focus on attracting new clients knowing they have a foundation in place to offer support and maintenance packages to new and existing clients. Maintainn is essentially the retainer arm of WebDevStudios. Retainers are defined as, “a fee paid in advance to someone, especially an attorney, in order to secure or keep their services when required.” When applying the definition to development agencies, it’s not hard to see why most have a retainer program in place.

Brian Krogsgard, who works for WordPress design and development company Range, explains why retainers can be an important part of an agency’s business model.

Retainers can be an excellent business tool for financing growth and forming long-term client relationships. Retainers offer consistent, reliable income that makes financing new hires less scary. They also allow the firm to really get to know the client and their needs over time, versus being limited to a single project scope. An existing retainer also puts the firm in great position to get lump sum projects from the client when those opportunities come up.

Not only do clients receive maintenance and support for WordPress, they also have access to a great team of developers. This gives WebDevStudios a competitive edge against companies such as WP Site Care, WP Curve, and WP Maintainer that mostly focus mostly on maintenance and support.

MattReport Interview With Both Parties

I encourage you to read this interview published on MattReport.com containing insight from both parties involved in the deal. Communication and keeping financial books in order are just two pieces of advice given within the interview. It also shines a light on the future of Maintainn and what its role will be within the company.

What are your thoughts on the acquisition and will we see other WordPress maintenance companies acquired in the near future? If so, use the comments and give us your best guess.

Sarah Gooding of the WordPress inside baseball blog WP Tavern has an interview with me she titled Matt Mullenweg on Ensuring the Future of WordPress.

I’m going to take a leaf out of Chris Lema’s book right now to answer whether WordPress should be used for eCommerce: It depends.

There are camps of thought that think WordPress isn’t right for eCommerce, and there are people that think it’s the only way to go. Having worked with and used several different eCommerce platforms (both hosted and self-hosted), I’ve definitely developed the mindset that there are use cases for each. WordPress can be the right choice in a lot of circumstances, but not all.

Hosted vs. self-hosted

If you’re not sure about the major differences between hosted vs self hosted platforms, I recommend reading Patrick Rauland’s overview of the major differences. WordPress eCommerce usually falls under self-hosted eCommerce (I don’t count WordPress.com since it uses external eCommerce solutions). Forbes also recently wrote about this, though I don’t necessarily agree with their conclusions.

The typical viewpoint is that WordPress plugins like WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads are great for small stores or people that just want to quickly and easily sell a few items, while hosted platforms like Shopify and Bigcommerce are for “serious” stores.

This viewpoint is actually pretty backwards, not to mention the fact that the number of items is a poor way of determining which platform you should use.

Give each its due

Is WordPress the best platform on which to build apps? I don’t always think so, but it could be. Is it always a good choice for eCommerce? Nope. However, it’s the right one for lots of stores, and it’s the wrong one for lots of stores.

There are a few major strengths and weaknesses of both WordPress and hosted solutions. I’ve worked most with WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, and Shopify, but have tried lots of other eCommerce solutions for comparison. Some of the knocks against WordPress aren’t valid, but we should note that some are.

WordPress eCommerce weaknesses

Everyone loves to talk about how easy certain WordPress plugins are to use. When you compare WordPress plugins to something like Shopify, this just isn’t true. They may be easy to use for people that are familiar with WordPress, but not for the average user who wants to start selling online with no experience.

WordPress requires a domain name purchase, hosting setup, installation, plugin installation and setup, theme installation and setup, blah blah blah, you get the drift. With hosted solutions, you don’t worry about this (though solutions like Evermore — which was covered by Post Status when it launched — make this interesting). You pay your monthly bill, and you’re handed a store website – you just pick the name and get rolling. You can start adding products right away, and then you might get into changing your theme or other setup.

Some of the site tweaks or setup with hosted solutions aren’t easy, but the learning curve for a solution like Shopify is far gentler than the learning curve for something like WooCommerce.

There are also WP Cron issues for some sites, as it’s not a perfect system for scheduling actions, like recurring payments. It can work pretty well, but other platforms can make this far easier to implement and more reliable than Cron.

WordPress store owners are also responsible for their own hosting, software updates, and security. For many site owners, these are huge responsibilities. Hosted solutions roll all of this into their package so that users don’t have to know how their website is powered. They just have to use it.

Both WordPress and hosted solutions will scale, but there are considerations with WordPress that users need to be aware of. Database issues (like backups or memory with massive amounts of customers and orders) should be addressed, hosting has to be optimized, and plugins need to scale with the site. With a hosted solution, none of this is your problem as a user.

WordPress eCommerce strengths

Bearing these weaknesses in mind, it’s a bit crazy to me that WordPress is sometimes referred to as the “easy solution” or the right tool for “small stores”. It’s not. In many cases, it’s like bringing a tank to the eCommerce playground.

So what does WordPress do well?

First, WordPress offers the most all-in-one website solution available. WordPress can offer the eCommerce aspects of the website, in addition to its many other CMS features. The ability to create a single, seamless CMS experience for a multi-purpose website makes it quite compelling and more budget-friendly than more “eCommerce first” platforms.

Second, it’s optimized for SEO. Your content is crucial here, and WordPress is built for content. More importantly, if you’ve tried to blog on another platform, you know how painful it can be (don’t start with me Squarespace fans, that thing is difficult to use). WordPress doesn’t encourage you to avoid blogging to avoid headache: it’s built for complete websites, and is not simply focused on eCommerce.

WordPress also contains functionality that you can’t always get with different platforms. There’s a massive selection of plugins, themes, and all sorts of solutions for WordPress that are readily available. Since it’s open source, it’s far easier to find ways to customize it when compared to closed platforms like Bigcommerce.

Speaking of customizations, your ability to customize WordPress or plugins is far easier than with hosted solutions. There’s lots of functionality that can be achieved with WordPress that’s not even possible in hosted solutions. For example, developers have no control over the Shopify checkout process, but this can be entirely customized with WordPress.

You can also usually find a plugin that will provide a “starting point” for a customization project. Even if you find a Shopify or Bigcommerce app that gets close to what you need, but not quite, you’ll need to create a completely custom solution anyway – there’s no “extending” there.

Along with customization is the control over your environment. You can spin up your eCommerce site on something like Digital Ocean, and you’ve got control over the entire site, from server to theme.

Product type

The biggest difference for me between hosted solutions and self-hosted actually isn’t usability or scalability – it’s product type. Can almost every eCommerce platform sell tee shirts? Yes. Even EDD can do that, and it’s made for digital products.

However, selling complex products becomes infinitely more difficult on hosted platforms, as you’re restricted to what the API offers for product changes, which isn’t always a lot. For example, if you’ve ever tried to add pricing changes for customization options in Shopify, you know that it literally takes some wizardry, black magic, and possibly bubble gum used as tape to do so.

WordPress plugins make this far easier, because the entire platform is open, not just an API. Most eCommerce plugins have more than enough actions or filters to change products, product pages, checkout forms, or any other part of your site.

Recap

Hosted eCommerce solutions are typically easy to use, and can provide some customization options via apps or other add-on services. However, it’s like renting a house versus owning. With a rented house, you can’t go knocking down walls or completely remodeling – you’ve got to work inside of a framework you’re given. This is exactly how a hosted solution works.

The benefit to this is that you absolve yourself of a lot of responsibility and worry. The entire experience is managed and supported, and is typically very easy to work with.

However, WordPress eCommerce is like buying the house. You can do whatever you want – add-on, rebuild sections of the house, change layouts around, add tunnels to other houses, you name it. However, when the water heater blows up, it’s your responsibility.

WordPress also affords the opportunity to sell complex products, such as measurement based products like corks by the pound, that simply can’t be sold on other platforms. The same ability to customize WordPress so thoroughly lets you customize the eCommerce plugin you’re using.

You gain the flexibility that comes with the platform, as well as the benefits like tons of plugins, themes, a great content structure, and a consistently maintained and updated core solution. However, the Frankenstein site that you build is your baby, and yours alone – you need to host it, maintain it, and care for it.

WordPress lets you create advanced functionality via plugins and customizations, but isn’t right for users looking for an easy, basic shop setup. If you want a move-in ready house or a beautiful rental, you should look at hosted solutions. If you’re willing to make your dream house from great bones and foundation, or you need to sell fairly complex products, then WordPress might be it for you. It’s not the “easy” solution, but it can be a great one.

The ever-creative Childish Gambino has released a new mixtape STN MTN (track by track) which is part of a longer EP Kauai that was just released on iTunes. Donald is a friend and an artist whose work fluently spans much more than music. And I’m not just saying that because, as Techcrunch noted, he shouts out to Krutal and I at the end of Go DJ.

I think that most of the people involved in creating software for the web have completely forgotten what it’s like to navigate these waters, and that “our setup is so simple!” statements are in general full of crap. Over the next few days, I am going to try to set up up a website on a domain I own using only the documentation and support available to the average person (who doesn’t have access to lead developers and heads of support teams). Is this decision predicated by the fact that none of those people were around when I tried pinging them today at 6am? Well, yes, yes it is. But given the frustration level I have encountered in the first 2 hours alone, I am glad they’re not around right now. I’ve been setting up websites since 1999, and I think we are making the process harder, not easier.

Get ready for some painful descriptions of just how janky all our product flows and documentation are. I know I’m wincing.

I’m thinking this will wind up being the equivalent of a play in 3 acts, but I could be wrong — it depends on how complicated things get.

Setting

A quiet home in the Pacific Northwest featuring cable internet with advertised speeds of 25Mbps down/10Mbps up. A comfortable bed with pillows propped against the headboard, against which our main character lounges at the opening of Act I, equipped with a MacBook Air circa 2010, an iPhone 5s, and a debit card.

Cast of Characters

Jen Mylo: An average web user trying to set up a site for the first time.

GoDaddy: The registrar holding the domain [Ed. Note: Legacy registrar; I'll switch it to namecheap at some point before it's time to renew].

Dreamhost: A web hosting company that Jen Mylo has loved forever and that employs one of her favorite people as their resident WP expert. They were hosting non-profits for free before it was cool.

WordPress: An open source content management system you can use to run a website. Claims a famous 5-minute install, “well-known for its ease of installation.” Rumor has it this web app is made by a bunch of weirdos.

BuddyPress: An open source WordPress plugin that creates a social network on your site. Also made by weirdos.

Rivermark Community Credit Union: A community credit union in Portland, OR that likes to do everything online; where Jen Mylo keeps some of her money.

Stay tuned for Act I!

This catchy song has been making the rounds with my friends, see if you can listen and not move just a little bit:

You might have noticed there have been more posts around here lately. Actually until yesterday (Oct 3) there was an unbroken string of at least one post a day since August 25th, 40 posts in total. It started with a tweet from Colin Devroe:

I challenge @mds @yarcom @kyleruane @garyvee @stewart @TechonomicMan @geoffd @clarko @photomatt to personal blogging every weekday for 30dys

— Colin Devroe (@cdevroe) August 27, 2014

Until now I forgot it was only weekdays, so I was doing weekends as well. Friends know I like doing personal experiments just to question assumptions or ingrained behavior, other examples this I’ve tried this year are giving up drinking for a month, going without a smartphone for 40 days, and more recently training for a half marathon with my friend Rene. I thought blogging every day would be a burden, but it actually became a great source of joy. It was more a shift in mindset than anything — every day I read things I think are interesting, share links with friends, have thoughts that are 80% of a blog post, and write a ton privately, it was just a matter of catching those moments and turning them into something that was shared with the world.

The tools besides WordPress that I found super-helpful in this were Simplenote, which was great for capturing thoughts and drafts when I was on the go, and I’ve been using the Editorial Calendar plugin to help me schedule drafts and keep an eye on my progress. The Editorial Calendar plugin is useful but I don’t love it — I wish the calendar view moved week by week rather than replacing the whole table, that it was responsive or worked on mobile, and that it would take over your publish button so you could define a desired posting cadence (in my case every 24 hours) and it would put a finished post in the next free slot, or let you bump something to the front of the queue and push all the other posts back a day. There were a few missteps along the way with timezones but overall I’m happy with how the experiment turned out.

So what broke the streak? It was actually one of the other experiments: running. I’ve never considered myself a runner, and never really done it in my life, but a few months ago I started trying it and have been training up for a half marathon on November 16. (It’s also a great opportunity to take photos.) Yesterday morning I woke up early around 5 AM and as the sun started to come up, and the weather was so nice after I rounded the Bay Bridge (planned turnaround point) kept going to Crissy Field where I saw the Golden Gate from afar and thought it would be fun to cross it. After crossing I was starving by and figured 3 more miles would be a half marathon and also put me in Sausalito. The last mile or two was really tough, definitely beyond what I was ready for and I walked a lot, but I was very proud of the result, finishing in around 2 hours 45 minutes. But I hadn’t planned to stay out that long, and the rest of my day was full of meetings. I had moved my scheduled post for the day out so I could talk about the new Childish Gambino mixtape (post coming tomorrow) but the rest of the day was so busy and I got exhausted so early I totally forgot to post.

So achieved one life goal while breaking the streak on another, which is not ideal, but today is another day and I want to see if I can break the 39 day streak next. Everything happens one day at a time.

Photo by Vladimir Kaladan Petkov

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 to avoid the tragedy of the commons. The post ignited a healthy discussion throughout the WordPress community.

While his post is more about WordPress organizations, companies, and agencies and how they can grow their part of the pie and WordPress as a whole, I’m going to focus on individual contributions.

What is a WordPress Contribution?

photo credit: Chrstopher – cc

The definition of what classifies as a contribution to WordPress is subjective. In the broadest sense of the term, I define contribution as anything that furthers the WordPress project. I seperate contributions to WordPress into two groups, direct and indirect. Direct contributions are those that deal with the core of WordPress such as patches, leading a release, and commits. These have a direct impact on WordPress and the millions of people who use it.

Indirect contributions are those that further the project without using code. Examples include meetups, WordCamps, and tech support. These are what I think make up the vast majority of contributions to WordPress.

Contributing to WordPress Without Realizing it

As I thought about the 5% goal and whether or not I meet the criteria, I had an epiphany. Thousands of people likely contribute to WordPress everyday without realizing it.

• A friend emails you and needs WordPress support. You help fix their problem.
• Someone needs a particular plugin to fulfill a need and you offer a suggestion that works.
• You’re at a local meetup and help someone figure out how to use a particular feature in WordPress.

All of the examples above are indirect ways of contributing to WordPress but are things millions of people do everyday. In these moments, users are helping each other while in the background, they’re contributing to WordPress. This is important because it means a lot of individuals are probably closer to the 5% goal than they might realize.

The Impact of Contributions

One of the first comments to Mullenweg’s article is a question asked by bftrick, “I like the idea of having a full-time employee that works on WordPress core but I think I’d rather have everyone on board and contributing 5% of their time. What do you think about that?” Mullenweg’s response is as follows:

Any percent that people can pitch in is fantastic! Some tasks divide into smaller pieces better than others, I’m sure over time you’ll find the balance that maximizes your impact. That actually brings up a good point, it’s good to look at what impact you’re having — I’ve seen companies dedicate a person full-time that hasn’t really had a big impact, and people working just a few hours a week that have had a big one. Look at the outcomes and results of what you contribute objectively, and if it’s not working try something different.

I find it fascinating that some companies devoting time and effort to work on WordPress can end up having little impact. Mullenweg’s comment is a good reminder to look at the impact your contributions are having.

The Value of Contributions

After years of being involved in the community, it’s my understanding that every contribution counts no matter how small it is. In December of 2013, I explained with the help of a few mentors, how I contributed to the core of WordPress for the first time. I corrected a typo inside the default theme. I’d almost classify this as an indirect contribution but since it deals with the core of WordPress, I consider it a direct contribution. Due to the typo I fixed, my name was added to the credits page of WordPress 3.8.

There are hundreds of ways for people to contribute to WordPress but few that receive public acknowledgement. This is one of the reasons why badges have been added to WordPress.org user profiles.

If you’ve organized or have spoken at a WordCamp, which I classify as an indirect contribution, you’ll be publicly acknowledged with a badge.

On the surface, all contributions to WordPress no matter how small appear to be valued equally. However, WordPress is code that is written and maintained by humans. If direct contributions from volunteers decline to nothing, all of the indirect contributions become a moot point. While I think writing about WordPress is definitely a worthy contribution to the project, the reality is, code is what gets the job done.

Contributing Back to WordPress Just Makes Sense

While Automattic makes a significant contribution to the WordPress project, I’d hate to see it become the only large contributor. Development of WordPress 4.1 is being lead by John Blackbourn, who is employed by the agency, Code For The People. It’s the second release in a row to be lead by an individual not employed by Audrey Capital or Automattic. This is a welcome trend and something I’d like to see continue into the future.

For companies, agencies, and anyone else who rely on WordPress to put food on the table, contributing back to the project seems like common sense. WordPress is 11 years old but if those with a vested interest don’t contribute back at least 5% as suggested by Mullenweg, there’s a chance we might not be able to celebrate WordPress’ 21st birthday.

Related Material

• Post Status – Contribution Culture
• Ben Metcalf – The feasibility and governance concerns behind 5% contribution to WordPress Core
• Tony Perez – The Vision of Five and What it Means.
• Dries Buytaert – Scaling Open Source Communities
• Chris Lema – There Are Many Ways to Contribute to WordPress

Building an audience and growing traffic on your blog is an evergreen topic at WordCamps everywhere. Here are some recent videos from WordCamp Capetown and WordCamp Calgary on how you can raise the profile of your blog with the power of content!

How to build an audience in 743 difficult steps

Rian van der Merwe shares why it is better to stay away from the easy ways and choose the difficult ways instead, and how a struggling blog with an insignificant number of readers can become not only a source of great joy and expression, but also a source of non-insignificant income.

View on WordPress.tv

Finding Your Voice – Learnings From 6 years of Failure

In this talk, Ernest Barbaric discusses how 6 years of failure, and trying thousands of tips, tricks and best practices helped him to build an audience and a blog presence and how finally the right words came out through the keyboard, they connected with the right people, traffic quadrupled almost instantly, Publications came knocking and business started coming in from across the globe.

View on WordPress.tv

This weekend is a busy time for WordPress conferences. One event to keep an eye on is WordCamp Tampa. They have been selected as one of the first to participate in a live stream pilot program using new equipment purchased by the WordPress Foundation.

Depending on the outcome of the experiment at this and other events, live streaming may become a regular feature of future WordCamps. Here’s a recap of the events taking place this weekend and how you can enjoy some of them from the comfort of your home.

PodsCamp

The First Ever Podscamp

PodCamp is being held in Dallas, TX on October 3rd, 2014, a day before WordCamp DFW (Dallas/Fort Worth) with a ticket price of $50. Each ticket grants you access to the event, BBQ for lunch, and direct access to the developers of Pods Framework. This will be the first time every member of the Pods development team will be in the same physical location. There are 12 tickets remaining.

PrestigeConf

Prestige is a new conference taking place on October 3rd-5th, 2014 in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota and is being organized by Josh Broton and Kiko Doran. Unlike WordCamps, Prestige only has one track and is devoted to the business of WordPress. There are 17 tickets remaining for October 4th. However, there are 32 tickets remaining at $49 each to view a live stream of the event. Prestige also has a WP Armchair site to monitor the hashtag assigned to the event.

WordCamp DFW (Dallas/Fort Worth)

For the first time since 2009, there is a WordCamp being held in the Dallas/Forth Worth area. WordCamp Dallas is a two-day event beginning on October 4th. The first day will have sessions covering various aspects of WordPress while Sunday, October 5th is contributor day. Tickets are sold out but you can keep tabs on the event via http://wcdfw.wparmchair.com/.

WordCamp Ann Arbor

WordCamp Ann Arbor is a one day event in downtown Ann Arbor, Michigan near the University of Michigan. For just $12, attendees will have an entire day of sessions to choose from to learn WordPress. It’s the first event of its kind in for Ann Arbor and tickets are sold out. I’ll be at this event so if you see me, stop and say hi.

WordCamp Tampa

WordCamp Tampa, Florida, is a two-day event beginning on October 4th. Tickets are sold out but you can watch the event from home if you purchase a live stream ticket. There are 954 tickets remaining at a cost of $5 each. WordCamp Tampa is part of a pilot program to experiment with new equipment purchased by the WordPress Foundation to generate a high quality live stream. Depending on the results of the experiment at this and other events, live streaming may become a common feature at future WordCamps. Alternatively, you can follow along via http://wctpa.wparmchair.com/.

In this episode of WordPress Weekly, Marcus Couch and I travel to Singapore to interview Lester “GaMerZ” Chan. Chan has 23 different plugins in the plugin directory, amassing an incredible total download count of 12,241,325! This accounts for approximately 1.6% of all plugin downloads from the directory.

Chan explains how he handles support for 23 different plugins and offers suggestions to improve WordPress.org to make providing support easier. One of his suggestions is to give plugin authors the ability to close threads in their plugin’s support forums. Chan describes what the WordPress scene is like in Singapore and informs us that there a shortage of WordPress developers. Last but not least, he explains his role as “Tech Guy” for the Tech In Asia website which is powered by WordPress.

Stories Discussed:

Reader Poll: What Are Your Favorite Features In WordPress 4.0?
Meet John Blackbourn, WordPress 4.1 Release Lead
Ben Gillbanks Announces The End of TimThumb
GoDaddy and Media Temple Engage in Strategic Partnership With WP101

Plugins Picked By Marcus:

Gravity Forms Personality Quiz Add-On lets you create simple, un-scored personality quizzes (think Buzzfeed-style quizzes). While there is an official quiz add-on for Gravity Forms, it is focused on graded quizzes like those you might take in school. This add-on lets you easily create quizzes that return a result rather than a grade, like “How Texan are you?” or “What Disney character would you be?”

TTT Crop This is an easy and fast way to crop any uploaded image into WordPress. No more complicated graphical editors, photos of people without heads, or products with a wrong view. Select the thumbnail, edit the crop area, and save a new thumbnail image.

WP Family Tree is a graphically formatted family tree generator for WordPress. Family members are registered as custom post types through which you can manage things such as name, birthday, the person’s picture, occupation, etc. You can also establish relationship associations, such as who a person’s mother and father are or their spousal relationship.

WPWeekly Meta:

Next Episode: Wednesday, October 8th 9:30 P.M. Eastern

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Listen To Episode #164:

Photo by Vladimir Kaladan Petkov

Matt Mullenweg made waves this past weekend during his Q&A session at WordCamp Europe when he strongly advocated the importance of companies contributing back to WordPress. He offered a rule of thumb for companies that benefit from the software and want to invest in the future of WordPress:

I think a good rule of thumb that will scale with the community as it continues to grow is that organizations that want to grow the WordPress pie (and not just their piece of it) should dedicate 5% of their people to working on something to do with core — be it development, documentation, security, support forums, theme reviews, training, testing, translation or whatever it might be that helps move WordPress mission forward.

He cites the tragedy of the commons as an example fate that he hopes WordPress can avoid.

The 5% statement was instantly controversial, sparking a number of heated discussions on blogs, news sites, and Twitter. Some took exception to the wording of his suggestion, as the use of “should” implies a moral obligation, complicated further by the fact that the statement originates from a person in a position of power, who many perceive as the person most likely to benefit from increased contributions.

Granted, Mullenweg is at the helm of what is undeniably the most successful WordPress-based company in operation. Automattic is one of many companies that are entirely reliant on this software for their continued existence. Though all may not benefit equally from contribution, it does not negate the fact that the WordPress project is 100% dependent on contribution and would not exist without it. If we want to see it grow, there must be continued contribution, and in the end it doesn’t matter if that motivation is practical or ideological.

Open source businesses are free to act on Mullenweg’s suggestion of 5% contribution or to throw it out entirely. The issue cuts close to home. It’s a personal question of philosophy as much as it is a business consideration.

For Mullenweg, the suggestion of a 5% contribution originates out of a desire to ensure the future of WordPress. The project started out much like your average garage band. Mullenweg wanted a place to blog and post photos, so with the help of a handful of contributors, WordPress was born. Since the very early days, he has been unwavering when it comes to protecting user freedoms with the GPL and established the project’s mission to democratize publishing through open source software.

Before you decide to contribute, it’s a good idea to consider the future of WordPress. Where does Matt see the project going? Do you want to be a part of taking it there? I had the opportunity to speak with him at WordCamp Europe to press further into his vision of WordPress for the next decade.

Mobile

You’ve probably heard it before: mobile is a big part of the future of WordPress. Mullenweg emphasizes this in nearly every recent interview I’ve read and Automattic is aggressively hiring mobile developers. For many internet users, their mobile device is the only way they access the web. This is particularly true for users in countries like China and India. If WordPress is to gain penetration in these geographical regions, it must provide a solid mobile experience.

This puts the WordPress mobile apps in a singular place of influence, which results in a bit of controversy at the moment. Currently, the apps are packed full of WordPress.com features that provide functionality beyond the core publishing experience. Many self-hosted WordPress users find the Reader in particular to be irrelevant.

Mullenweg explained Automattic’s approach to the mobile apps:

The goal with the mobile apps is first and foremost to get as many mobile app users as possible, because I think that ensures WordPress development for years to come. They are open source projects and people can contribute code to make them do a lot of different things. The team is focused on developing the things that will be most compelling to people on the mobile side. That’s notifications, stats, and the reader.

Since the apps are open source, developers can fork them and remove unwanted features if they want to. However, this seems a bit counterintuitive for self-hosted WordPress users who don’t use WordPress.com features. The recent video ad produced by Automattic does not put the spotlight on the Reader but rather features the mobile apps in use for publishing media. Won’t people be using the publishing features more often than the Reader? Mullenweg doesn’t think so.

By definition, people read more than they write. You read far more than you write. The average blogger doesn’t post every day. They read blogs every day. In fact, they read WordPress blogs every day, over a billion per month. By connecting more of those to the active users with this thing we call WordPress, I think it opens the door for more publishing in the future, which is really exciting.

The apps are technically open source. If there’s a strong contingency of developers who don’t agree with the preeminence of WordPress.com’s Reader in the app, they can work to change that through contribution. The reality is that mobile developers are few and far between. At the moment, Automattic drives nearly 100% of the contribution on the apps and its agenda is unrivaled. These apps wouldn’t exist without the company’s contributions.

I asked Mullenweg if other contributing commercial entities are free to push their own features through the official mobile apps. “Yeah they could,” he said, but followed it up with more insight on what he believes to be Automattic’s role in the mobile apps:

I think that in many ways, Automattic is a shepherd. When you type in WordPress into a search engine, we’re the thing that pops up first. We’re the gateway drug, the thing that brings in the billions of people who don’t use WordPress yet. That’s our responsibility.

He believes that, as more users easily gain access through WordPress.com, it will mean a greater number of those who transition to self-hosted sites, as people graduate from the service. “We’ll even help them move on,” he said. Obviously, you cannot simply download PHP files to your phone and get started.

“We want you to be able to start a blog and engage with the world of blogging 100% from the mobile device,” he said. “That requires WordPress.com and Jetpack features. Will it forever? Maybe not, but, as an idealist in a practical world, while that is not what I’d choose as a perfect solution – I’d love for you to be able to run WordPress on your phone and the world could access it, but that’s not reality today.”

So why doesn’t Automattic simply rename the apps to reflect the fact that the it heavily features WordPress.com? “We could rename it to WordPress.com App, but then there would be no WordPress app.” Automattic only has 15 mobile engineers at present and there aren’t many on the outside lining up to contribute to the open source apps. For Mullenweg, the ease of starting a free blog via the app is something that will help to ensure the future of WordPress:

It’s difficult to build an open source thing on a closed source platform. I see it as a gateway drug and it gives people more options down the road. If we don’t do anything on mobile, five years from now, when everyone is only using mobile devices, they will all have Squarespace’s or Weebly’s. WordPress is still around but it just doesn’t matter. This allows us to matter five years from now.

Mullenweg sees the apps as an easy onramp to the WordPress software in general, but recognizes that the method isn’t the most ideal situation for everyone. “The direction we’re moving is to make them more modular, so people can fork the apps more easily in the future,” he said. “If you talk to anyone on the mobile team, you will find a passion for open source.” This means that there’s the potential for the focus of the app’s development to change in the future.

Internationalization and Global Adoption

Croatian, Serbian and Slovenian WP communities with @photomatt @nacin at #WCEU – photo credit: Konstantin Tatar

WordCamp Europe is unique in that it brings together many WordPress users whose primary language is not English. Mullenweg could not hide his excitement about the recent and upcoming changes related to internationalization. “If WordPress is representative of the world, then English should be a minority of the interactions, contributions and even plugins,” he said, and remarked further on how we’re still in the old mindset of taking English plugins and themes and then translating them into another language.

Personally, I am far and away most excited about the internationalization improvements, because the fact that WordPress has that many users at all in these other languages where there’s not very much documentation, no plugins, very few themes, it’s kind of amazing. Basically we have lots of usage in other countries but it’s primarily built by English-speaking people. So when that starts to change to where you can, for example, login to your dashboard in Spanish, installation, plugins and themes in Spanish, I think it could substantially change WordPress’ adoption rate.

He believes that internationalization improvements will be key to improving WordPress’ global adoption and may perhaps be more of an influential factor than the software’s incremental improvement on features:

Honestly, incremental features in WordPress probably aren’t going to change its adoption rate (the number of people starting a WP blog every day). At this point, that’s primarily driven by our reputation and existing users. What will substantively change that is if WordPress opens up to vastly more audiences than it was before, be that platforms, languages, or cost. At the moment WordPress.com is free but it’s not fully available to all languages.

WordPress already receives many contributions from contributors who do not speak English as their first language. Mullenweg believes it may be quite a ways down the road from now before WordPress core development requires translators to effectively incorporate contributions from what may someday be a larger contingency of non-English speaking lead developers.

“Maybe there’s a full-time translator working with Nacin,” he commented, imagining how internationalization could change the project in the future. With WordPress fully opened up to more languages, the software has the potential to improve at an exponentially faster rate than it does now. It’s an exciting prospect to consider.

The Value of Experimentation

In his quest to ensure the future of WordPress, Mullenweg often looks outside of the project for inspiration. He’s devoted a team at Automattic to experimenting with non-WordPress technologies. This was the team that created the Selfies app, released earlier this year.

The app wasn’t built on WordPress and didn’t appear to be as polished as other Automattic products. I asked Mullenweg why they chose to release the app in its unpolished state. He highlighted the importance of experimentation:

One thing that’s difficult in a company, as it grows, is to not just work on the thing that’s most successful. WordPress, WordPress.com, Jetpack, these are ridiculously successful by any measure. It would be very easy for all 272 people at Automattic to only work on that. One of the things we did this year is create a team that is almost like our version of Google X, except we’re not going to space. As a smaller company our ambitions are a little more modest, but we do want that sense of experimentation, and that it’s ok to release something that’s not 100% polished.

This further clarifies the release of the Selfies app, which the team presented as an accident wherein the planned Gravatar App morphed into Selfies. “There’s no one working on a Gravatar app right now,” Mullenweg said, confirming that the idea was considered and then scrapped. What they learned in the process was more valuable than delivering on the original idea.

Usage is oxygen for ideas, right? The things that we know and learn by releasing stuff, we never could have learned otherwise, so look for more of that. That team has lots of things planned – their charter is specifically not to do things that integrate with WordPress. I’d love for it to be a much larger team, actually.

This spirit of experimentation is what sets Automattic apart from many other companies that simply focus on their successful products. Perhaps it will someday translate into technology that can work alongside WordPress, especially when the software adopts more modern APIs.

The Mission

In recent press, Automattic has received considerable attention due to the fact that the company doesn’t work from one centralized office. The idea is brand new to those who have only experienced more traditional workplaces. I asked Mullenweg what he believes is truly unique about his company. He cited a few things, such as the hiring process, the reliability of WordPress.com’s technical architecture, the dedication to experimentation. But in the end, for him, everything loops back around to the mission of democratizing publishing.

I don’t think there’s anything that doesn’t exist in any other company. Obviously we’re really deeply involved with WordPress. So is 10up and many other WP consultancies. We do a ton of open source but so does Canonical, Acquia, Redhat, and everyone else. I think it’s just the combination of all of these things, the truly distributed nature, and the mission, which isn’t just about bottom lines. It has an altruistic aspect as well.

Mullenweg’s Five for the Future post compelling open source companies to strive to contribute 5% back to the core software is a hotly debated topic in the WordPress ecosystem right now. Those who do not share the same practical convictions or altruistic ideals feel that the idea comes with an implication of people “working for free.” The folks at Automattic are hoping to lead the way in proving that commercial success can go hand-in-hand with an altruistic mission. For Mullenweg, it’s part of a larger vision and an unwavering commitment to ensure the future of WordPress for all.

Derek Low on What It’s like to Fly the $23,000 Singapore Airlines Suites Class [link removed, see end]. I’ve been on the Emirates First Class A380 with the shower before, but this looks like an entirely other level. I also must confess I think Emirates has rather gaudy design. The best I’ve seen design-wise is actually from Swiss Air, as you’d expect. Update: Apparently the original link borrowed pretty heavily from another blogger, so here are links to the original author’s posts: one, two, three.

T’was an exciting month around Akismet headquarters. We caught over 300 million spam messages in just one day for the first time, on September 26. And if that wasn’t enough, we saw over 300 million comments in one day again on September 30.

But wait, there’s more… we also broke our daily record a total of 4 times this month. Our last daily record was 269 million spam messages on August 21, here’s what happened since then:

• We broke the daily record on September 4th with 280 million spam comments
• And then again on September 7th with 284 million spam messages
• And then again on September 26th with the groundbreaking 312 million comments
• And finally, just yesterday – on September 30 -we broke our record again with 366 million spam comments

Phew. What a ride. :mrgreen:

There were two other times in Akismet history when we broke the daily record this many times in one month. In November 2011 we broke the daily record 8 times (!) and in December 2012, we broke it 6 times. Though, the numbers were much easier to beat then – 90 to 100 million daily spam comments in November 2011, and 177 to 196 million in December 2012.

Here are the daily numbers for September, with the previous record marked for comparison:

You may have also seen a rise in your own spam comments this month. If you’re noticing a larger number of comments than usual being missed by Akismet, please do get in touch through our contact form so we can help out. Let us know what your API key is, and on what website you’re seeing the increase, and we’ll be happy to take a look.

Our slowest day this month was September 14, with a mere 218 million spam comments going through. Compared with September of last year, the number of spam comments going through Akismet increased by 112%, and it increased from last month by 10%. This month, we missed about 1 in every 4,574 spams.

As usual, real comments make up only a small portion of the total comments we see coming through – at 4% this month.

This post is part of a monthly series summarizing some stats and figures from the Akismet universe. Feel free to browse all of the posts in the series.

The contributor day following WordCamp Europe was a tremendous success, bringing approximately 180 people to the SiteGround offices in Sofia. A healthy mixture of veteran contributors were in attendance, as well as many folks who were brand new to contributing.

At the beginning of the day, contributors split off into smaller groups to focus on translations, core, documentation, theme review, support, GlotPress, and Rosetta. When Theme Review Team member Tammie Lister put out a call for theme reviewers, hands shot up all over the room. Automattic donates Lister’s time two or three days per week specifically for helping with WordPress.org theme review.

After the event, she reported that 27 new people were added to the WordPress Theme Review Team. They started by introducing themselves and discussing why one might want to get involved. Those who had some experience shared their individual processes. After this, they dove straight into reviewing and each person was given a theme.

“The current idea is that during the month of October we will be focusing on how we do contribution days now, so we’re having experiments and thinking about ways to improve that,” Lister said. During the last weekly meeting, the Theme Review Team identified the pain points in adding reviewers and brainstormed ideas for onboarding new reviewers during contributor days. This includes the possibility of creating a doing_it_wrong() theme, as a project at WordCamp San Francisco, that can be used for education and testing. Lister said they will be playing with a few ideas at upcoming contribution days in San Francisco and Toronto.

A Room Full of Themers

The best part of getting a record number of new reviewers together was packing a room full of themers who were all buzzing about the craft of WordPress theming. “What was really exciting about today is that it wasn’t just developers,” Lister said. “We had some people who didn’t know much HTML, some who were newer to theming, and some who were doing it the right way.”

The key thing for new reviewers is to take your time, Lister said. “I think the thing is that you just have to take it slowly when you start theme reviewing. You go through the process and you get faster.”

New reviewer Andrew Liyanage decided to jump in and join the Theme Review Team in order to sharpen his professional skills. “I wanted to get into theme design. I thought before designing a theme, I could get into review in order to get to know what the do’s and the don’ts are,” he said. “I’m already reviewing a theme right now, and it’s going better than I thought it would.”

Lister plans to match each new reviewer with someone from the new mentoring program, established last month. Although most of the communication happens on trac, there are more people than ever to help out with the process.

“A lot of it is trac focused, because it has to be, but we now have mentors, more admins, and trusted reviewers. So there’s a lot more people but there’s a lot more people looking after those people,” Lister said.

With a record number of new theme reviewers added in one day, the team now has 27 more people who are familiar with the guidelines. This is bound to make a significant dent in the queue and lighten the load for the rest of the team.

This post spends a lot of time analyzing and referencing two other blog posts. Excuse me for that, but also be sure to read both, as they are relevant for this post and also interesting in their own right.

Matt Mullenweg wrote a blog post called Five for the Future yesterday that advocates his belief that WordPress-centric companies should aim to utilize 5% of their company resources toward contributing back to the project.

He noted in the post that Automattic isn’t quite to this point, but that they are working on it, and describes why he believes it’s important. He closes with this:

It’s a big commitment, but I can’t think of a better long-term investment in the health of WordPress overall. I think it will look incredibly modest in hindsight. This ratio is probably the bare minimum for a sustainable ecosystem, avoiding the tragedy of the commons. I think the 5% rule is one that all open source projects and companies should follow, at least if they want to be vibrant a decade from now.

This was followed up by one of the co-founders of one of the very hosting companies Matt partially referenced in his post — WP Engine’s Ben Metcalfe — who responded with a blog post of his own: WordPress: What exactly do they get for their 5%?

I think I was immediately thrown off by Ben’s post title, but so many times throughout reading it I was shocked at how he made assumptions of Matt’s intentions or missed what I would call “the point”.

5% is not a decree

Obviously, Matt is not speaking from the mountaintop with a proclamation of law. This is his recommendation — one that he believes will reward the firms that strive for it.

I believe that the community has already shown us that those that invest into WordPress are rewarded from it. We improve our understanding of a foundational software of our careers, improve our skills, are more marketable, more attractive to employers, and create natural opportunities for developing industry relationships.

How should 5% of “people” be defined? I’m pretty sure Matt would agree that 5% of people or 5% of revenue toward people doesn’t really matter to him; yet Ben makes a continuous sticking point about the cost of — and need for — engineers.

Additionally, while Matt utilizes full-time employees, the same (or better) effect could be had with shared time from more employees.

I’m not big into absolutes, so it’s important to remember that while I’m advocating that Matt’s recommendation of 5% time, I think it’s simply a good recommendation. This is a free economy and companies can do what they want. But I think in the current and long term, contribution will be key to greater corporate success for those that choose to do so.

What does 5% cost, and who does it require?

While Matt was careful to include numerous non-engineering roles companies could help with, ultimately what drives the open source project is source code contribution by software engineers. …

A reasonable engineer in the US costs $100k/y, and if you factor in benefits (tax funded health-care, anyone?) and overheads you could easily be looking at $130k or more per person, per year. …

A 200+ person web hosting company would need to hire 10 engineers to meet a 5% goal, requiring a budget of anything between $1MM-1.3MM+ per year. Those engineers probably need a manager – to mentor them, provide career development etc. Those 11 people also put pressure on human resources, finance, legal, facilities etc – probably equating to another person again. Now we’re talking probably more like $1.25-$1.5m annually.

First, I believe Ben has spent too much time in the world’s largest cities if he believes engineers cost $100,000 per year on average. In my experience (yes, I interview people myself), that’s not the case, and based on my decent view of the ecosystem it’s not an appropriate going rate — especially if the offer on the table is a particularly desirable position.

More importantly, the project needs far more non-technical contributors. Ben’s assertion that “ultimately” software engineers drive the project is not true. Users drive the project. A technically savvy user-minded contributor can be a beacon of light to a group of software developers. And given the user-facing nature of WordPress itself, non-engineer contributors could drastically improve the less code-sexy parts of the WordPress ecosystem: project management, docs, training, testing, support, translation, etc.

Additional to “core” contributions, WordCamps, plugins, themes, communities, and many other venues are outstanding places where contributors — yes, they’re still contributors! — can impact the overall project.

Finally, as I noted above, I think companies could quite effectively contribute parts of employees’ time versus dedicated 100% time, which would also prevent the need to have dedicated managers for open source contributors.

Foundational software to your business

Ben spends a chunk of time saying that big companies like GoDaddy get a “get out of jail free card” and that obviously Matt wouldn’t expect they dedicate 5% of their thousands of employees.

GoDaddy definitely benefits from WordPress and they also contribute to it; and no, they don’t contribute 5% I’m sure. But WordPress is not foundational to GoDaddy’s business. They have a dedicated sub-product for it, and they also have many contributors to it.

WP Engine, and many others (including mine), are almost completely or completely reliant on WordPress as a platform. WordPress and its underlying technologies are foundational to our careers and businesses.

It is simply a different story to compare a company that would continue on pretty much fine without WordPress and one that would have to seriously reconsider their entire business model.

For example, let’s compare the scenario to a publisher. Re/code is built on WordPress. They have a staff of 20+. Do they completely rely on WordPress for their website? Yes. For their business model? No. In their scenario, it makes sense for them — and could benefit them pretty directly — to allocate some time of some employees to WordPress, but if WordPress disappears they can and will migrate to a different platform.

Contributing to the full stack

It was questioned to me on Twitter, after my initial reaction to Ben’s post, whether I contribute 5% of my time to open source projects like PHP, MySQL, and other tools that WordPress relies on.

This is a good question and point, but it does not cause me to stumble in my opinions. I believe open source contributions in general benefit the entire software stack.

In my scenario, I can be more impactful on the WordPress project than others. But I believe contributions can take many shapes, in both directions.

Some folks, like Daniel Bachhuber, greatly contribute to the project as a whole by supporting upstream projects like WP CLI.

Automattic is a fantastic example of a company that has both upstream and downstream contributions. They are active contributors to, employers of contributors or founders, or monetary sponsors to a huge number of downstream projects: WordPress, PHP, Nginx, jQuery, Elastic Search, Node, Socket.io, and probably a bunch I can’t think of or don’t know about. Additionally, they are a driving force behind dozens of upstream, open source themes and plugins.

Edit: Matt says in a Tweet where Andrey Savchenko asked for clarification about PHP contributions that Automattic doesn’t actively contribute to PHP. Though I think I define contribution a bit more loosely than Matt does.

Whether a company is contributing to their foundational piece of software, a downstream or upstream application, or on an adjacent aspect that leads to the betterment of the platform that is foundational to their business objectives, then I believe it will in turn be beneficial to their bottom line.

Contribution as culture

Contribution should not be considered an isolated cost, but an enabling investment.

If I run a business that relies on a foundational piece of software like WordPress, then it benefits me greatly for my employees — no matter what role they play within the company — to be intimately familiar with that software.

In my last job, I was tasked with guiding a transition of my company from developing mostly on a proprietary CMS to WordPress. I consistently preached the importance for everyone in the company to understand some fundamentals of WordPress itself. During my time there and since I’ve moved on, I’ve seen other members of that company learn the software, get involved in our local community, and even contribute back to WordPress itself; and both they and the company are better off for it.

Whether an employee is in sales, customer service, design, development, management, or wherever else — every employee knowing your product is important. I firmly believe this. I would want anyone in an organization I’m part of to be able to discuss our product in detail and with confidence to anyone.

When your company relies on a foundational piece of software — such as those we’re discussing in this post — that’s in effect part of your product. We are building products and services around and for WordPress. How important should it be that our company’s employees understand it?

And how can they understand it better? By contributing of course!

Have a new support rep? Show them the WordPress.org forums to get their feet wet. New designer or front-end developer? Have them sit in on default theme conversations or read through the Make UI blog. New sales person? Get them involved at your local meetup and WordCamp. This list can go on.

Avenues for contribution are an incredible gateway for learning WordPress. Blogging about WordPress (another avenue of contribution) has greatly enabled me to be better at my job, and therefore made me significantly more valuable to the companies I’ve worked with.

Five for now

Matt called his post Five for the Future, and talked specifically about how a 5% investment by a company will ensure a greater future for WordPress and therefore said company. I disagree.

Contributing now will benefit the company and its employees right now. And while both Matt and Ben focused on individuals within the company being targeted contributors, I think it’s much more beneficial to have a much larger percentage of a company contributing a portion of their time (even if small). I’d rather see 2 of 200 employees be full time contributors and then have 80 10% contributors than have 10 full time contributors.

I think we’ve seen many, many examples of contributors (people and companies) reaping tangible and intangible benefits from when they contribute — whether that contribution is to the codebase or the community. Contributors in this ecosystem come out on top.

Contributions are not an isolated cost or burden. Nor should their effects be limited to good faith investments to the sustainability of the ecosystem.

Contributions benefit the bottom line, and they benefit the bottom line right now.

Stream 2.0 is a significant update that changes the stand alone plugin into a service. But not everyone is happy with the change. Those who use Stream in enterprise environments have voiced disappointment regarding the latest update. The following is feedback from a user on the Advanced WordPress Facebook group. “Heads up if you use Stream. The 2.0 upgrade now stores everything in the cloud instead of the local database and requires a WordPress.com account to use it. It’s a great plugin but this new functionality is not optional and I can no longer use it with our enterprise data.”

I reached out to Stream project lead, Frankie Jarrett, and asked why the team decided to rely on third-party services. I also inquired whether users have any options to house data on their own servers or connect it to a service of their choosing. Jarrett gives insight into the future of Stream as a Service and let’s us know if they are working on a version that is compatible with enterprise environments.

Interview With Frankie Jarrett

photo credit: Claire L. Evans – cc

Jeff – Why the decision to use an external service by default to offload Stream activity data?

Over the past 10 months we’ve learned a lot about logging events, specifically logging actions taken inside the WordPress Admin. As time went on, some of the biggest concerns we had revolved around the topics of performance and security. It became clear to us that Stream needed to be more than just a plugin to advance into a solid solution, it needed to be a service that was self-contained and lived alongside WordPress instead of trying to force it to work inside the WordPress architecture and never truly being scalable or secure.

MySQL is nice solution for storing content with simple querying, this is how WordPress uses it, but MySQL is actually bad for storing logs, especially if you want to retain them for a long time and/or run complex queries on them while also expecting those queries to be fast. Not to mention, you don’t want the performance of your website’s content to be affected at all. Since the primary purpose of the MySQL database is to store and serve up content to your website visitors, it was our view that should never be hindered by event logging.

Now that Stream is a service, we can use brand new technologies like Elasticsearch, that are better suited for (and even designed for) querying huge numbers of logs. The result is a more powerful querying performance, the possibility for users to do even more complex queries in the future (for their Reports), and have no worries about keeping logs for a very, very long time. The things we are now doing in Stream 2.0, and plan to do in the future, require the power of Elasticsearch and don’t translate into MySQL storage solutions.

In regards to security, websites and databases get hacked all the time. Unfortunately that’s just the way it is. Since all of Stream’s records had previously lived inside the website, it too was as vulnerable as the website itself. This means that any hacker that gained access could mess up a site and then cover up their tracks by simply deleting the Stream log data. This was a bad thing and meant those logs weren’t really a true security audit trail at all. Now that Stream is a service, those logs are untouchable by an intruder. Once an action is performed, it’s forever in the event history, so the site owner knows without a doubt what things have happened on their site and can go through an undo the damage.

Jeff – Why the connection between Stream and WordPress.com ID logins?

photo credit: Manchester-Monkey – cc

This was an easy decision for us, actually. Over the past few years there have been several WordPress companies that have had their sites hacked and user passwords have been compromised as a result. It’s a sad and unfortunate thing that can be avoided by simply not storing them. Our solution for this was to use SSO (Single sign on) powered by WordPress.com.

This means Stream doesn’t have to store any login details for any customer and customers don’t have to sign up for yet another account somewhere. Furthermore, WP.com SSO supports two-factor authentication. This is a huge win for folks who are really concerned about the security of their logins, and we wanted Stream to have this capability.

The reason why we chose WP.com SSO was because of its status and reach in the WordPress community. Stream is a WordPress product and service, so it only makes sense to reach as many WordPress users as possible. When you think about all the people who use Jetpack, Gravatar, Akismet, VaultPress and Polldaddy – that’s a lot of people. Maybe not everyone, but again, we wanted to make a decisive decision not to store user login credentials at all, and that could mean some people might not be able to use it, but it’s for the good of all our users. WordPress.com SSO was also very easy to implement on our WordPress-powered site compared with the Facebook, Twitter or Google SSO alternatives.

Jeff – Is the connection between Stream and WordPress.com similar to Jetpack in that some things won’t work without the connection?

The only time Stream needs to talk to WordPress.com is during sign up, for login credentials. Stream doesn’t ping back to your website like Jetpack does. This means your site doesn’t have to be publicly accessible for Stream to work and can be run on a local/development environment without any problems or extra steps needed.

Jeff – Overall, what are the future plans for Stream now that it’s morphed into a service?

photo credit: wwarby – cc

Now that we have some scalability, performance and security milestones behind us, we are very much looking forward to making Stream even better in the coming months and years. You might have already noticed, but Stream 2.0 featured built-in integration with eight popular WordPress plugins. We intend to continue making Stream compatible out-of-the-box with tracking things that many other popular plugins do.

Another thing we plan to do is open up a REST API for people to be able to access their data and do anything they want with it. This is a very exciting prospect. Finally, we are working on ways to have a complete “mash-up” of all of your Stream data in one place. This is based on a lot of feedback we’ve been getting from folks who run not just multi-site, but multiple single-site installs for their clients and want to see everything that’s happening in one place. We think that will be another huge benefit to people and something that is only possible because Stream is now a service.

Jeff – One of the complaints I’ve seen is that Stream’s reliance on third-party services makes it incompatible with enterprise environments. What is the team doing to address this issue?

The new Stream relies on the power of Elasticsearch for performance and complex queries, but we are exploring ways for the Stream service stack to be run on-premise for Enterprise organizations who have strict internal policies that would require that. We don’t have have an ETA on when this type of solution will be ready, but we are actively pursuing it.

Stream 2.0 is available for download and includes a plethora of enhancements. This version features a rewrite from the ground up with a focus on scalability, security, and activity. As part of the rewrite, Stream activity data is stored in the cloud using Amazon Web Services with Elasticsearch. This is the same type of setup Jetpack uses to power its Related Posts module.

Request For a WordPress.com ID

The data is stored over an SSL connection making it hard to tap into your activity stream. The Stream team explains the plugin as being the black box of a WordPress site that even the NSA can’t penetrate. As part of the security enhancements, Stream uses your WordPress.com ID to authorize your account.

After connecting my WordPress.com ID to Stream, it loaded a Plans and Pricing page in place of the backend instead of just connecting my account. This is unexpected behavior and a disappointing user experience. I ended up having to load the WordPress backend in a new browser tab.

I ran into a loop where each time I logged into the backend of WordPress, I’d see the Connect to Stream notification. Each time I clicked the button, it would load the Plans and Pricing page. As it turns out, the reason for the endless loop is because I didn’t have a subscription registered with the Stream website. Once I completed the process of registering for a free account, the WordPress backend loaded the Stream records screen.

Successful Connection To Stream

I recommend text be added to the top of the Plans and Pricing page. The text should explain that in order to complete the connection to Stream, a subscription plan needs to be selected. It’s not obvious and gave me the impression the plugin is broken.

Support For SMS Notifications Thanks to an Outside Source

One of the neat features in 2.0 is the ability to set up SMS notifications. For instance, every time a theme, plugin, or WordPress is updated, you can configure Stream to send you a text message.

Configuring SMS Notifications In Stream

SMS notifications ended up in 2.0 thanks to the contributing efforts of Jeff Matson. Matson is the author of the WP SMS Notifications plugin we highlighted on the Tavern back in July. Matson explains why he decided to contribute to the Stream project, “When I created WP SMS Notifications, the biggest comment I received was that I should work with Stream to add my functionality to their plugin. The team behind Stream agreed and I was given access to their Github account. Now, I can proudly say that my code is behind one of the greatest activity tracking plugins out there.” However, the only way to take advantage of SMS notifications is to use the Pro account which is available for $2 per month.

Older Version of Stream Will Remain Available For Download

Stream has undergone major changes and is now a service versus a stand alone plugin. For those who don’t want to update to the new version, the Stream Team is leaving the previous version online via Github. Versions 1.4.9 and below won’t receive any more updates outside of patching major bugs or security vulnerabilities.

Overall, a Solid Update

Stream 2.0 is a solid update. The latest edition supports activity tracking for eight of the most popular WordPress plugins out-of-the box including: Advanced Custom Fields, bbPress, BuddyPress, Easy Digital Downloads, Gravity Forms, Jetpack, WooCommerce and WordPress SEO by Yoast. SMS notification is a great enhancement and I think it’s respectable of the team to keep 1.4.9 available for those that don’t like the new direction Stream is heading in.

Are you satisfied with the latest update to Stream? Does using WordPress.com and Amazon Web Services turn you off from using it?