Presenting rtCamp, our first partner agency in the Indian market

We’re excited to unveil India’s rtCamp Solutions as the newest members of the WordPress.com VIP Featured Partner Program, and our first partners based in Asia.

Unlike many such schemes in the IT industry, our Featured Partner Program is kept deliberately small, and highly selective. Its members are the dozen agencies worldwide whom we can confidently recommend to the largest and highest-profile online publishers, for the most ambitious WordPress projects.

To become a partner, an agency must demonstrate creative and technical excellence on VIP-level engagements. We also expect them to share the user-centric, community-minded values which have made WordPress itself so successful.

Founded in 2009, in the Indian city of Pune (150km inland from Mumbai), rtCamp – rt, standing for ’round table’ – is precisely the kind of team we want to endorse, and present as a role model for their local WordPress community.

Their technical credentials are strong; but it’s their record of community engagement which is particularly remarkable, with members of their staff being named among the contributors to every release of WordPress in the past three years.

The Indian tech sector is booming, and growing in self-confidence, no longer satisfied just to pick up outsourced work from Europe and North America. Interest in WordPress is surging, with a growing number of the country’s leading websites choosing WordPress as their CMS, and a flourishing ecosystem of consultancies claiming WordPress expertise.

It’s high time VIP nominated an agency in the Indian market whom we believe to be capable of delivering those nationally significant projects, and doing so in the right way.

rtCamp have shown themselves to be up to the task; and ready to play a leadership role as the Indian WordPress ecosystem moves to the next level. We’re proud to call them partners, and we look forward to helping them deliver websites which show India’s 1.3 billion people what WordPress is capable of.

The VIP team will be happy to advise on the contribution rtCamp, or any of our Partners can make to your next WordPress project.

Building the Apple News WordPress Plugin

At a BigWP meetup at the New York Post, Bradford Campeau-Laurion from Alley Interactive talked about building the Apple News WordPress plugin for the New York Post.

You can view his slides here.

See the presentations from previous Big Media & Enterprise WordPress Meetups. For Big Media & Enterprise WordPress Meetup groups in other cities, see the full list on VIP Events and join your local group.

Want more information about WordPress services for media or enterprise sites? Get in touch.

Building alpha.phila.gov in the open with WordPress

At a Hacks/Hackers + BigWP meetup at the Comcast Center, Karissa Demi from the City of Philadelphia talks about building alpha.phila.gov on WordPress.

View her slides here.

See the presentations from previous Big Media & Enterprise WordPress Meetups. For Big Media & Enterprise WordPress Meetup groups in other cities, see the full list on VIP Events and join your local group.

Want more information about WordPress services for media or enterprise sites? Get in touch.

Contributor Relationship Management: CRM in WP

At a BigWP meetup at the New York Post, Roger Theriault, Sagar Sood, Steve McNally from Hearst presented on creating a contributor network in WordPress.

You can view their slides here.

See the presentations from previous Big Media & Enterprise WordPress Meetups. For Big Media & Enterprise WordPress Meetup groups in other cities, see the full list on VIP Events and join your local group.

Want more information about WordPress services for media or enterprise sites? Get in touch.

2016 VIP Workshop – Session Update

We are closing in on the registration for this year’s VIP Workshop. Have you registered yet? If not, please find our helpful button below…

Register now

 

If you’re new to the VIP Workshop, our team hosts the premier event focused on the needs of enterprise WordPress users. We provide content for both engineers as well as business and product leads with the goal of providing the most well-rounded, relevant program possible.

For the Developer track…

  • a double-session covering WP-API, including using it on WordPress.com;
  • a content syndication roundtable that will feature clients’ and partners’ perspectives;
  • a review of automated testing strategies tailored to working with our platform;
  • a session dedicated to managing large networks of sites and the challenges that this presents; and
  • a review of some of the significant outages we’ve dealt with, the lessons learned, and how these can be prevented.

For the Business track…

  • Exponential Results with Small Teams – Time is our most precious resource. We should constantly spend resources to recapture it so we can put it back to work elsewhere.
  • The Product Game – Teamwork, decision-making, and change management.
  • Making the Most of Your Data – Using anonymous user data to keep people on your site today and in the future.
  • The Convergence of Content, Design, and Technology – The evolution from a channel-based approach to one that aligns and connects multiple capabilities to achieve its core objectives and enable innovation.
  • Net Neutrality – A leading voice on this subject will take us through some history as well as a look ahead.
  • Emerging Market Internet – Emerging market internet is the last blue ocean of users, but how do you optimize for their slow speeds and small screens?

We are incredibly excited for what we know will be the best VIP Workshop yet. If you haven’t registered yet, do it now before it’s too late!

Register now

 

New: WordPress Plugin for Facebook Instant Articles

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Facebook has announced that its Instant Articles program will be open to publishers “of any size, anywhere in the world” starting on April 12, 2016. And with the free plugin we’re unveiling today, you’ll be able to prepare your self-hosted or VIP WordPress for the demands of this new channel.

Install it now from GitHub (it’s also coming soon to the WordPress plugin directory).

Instant Articles, now available to people using Facebook for iPhone and Android, load articles in Facebook’s News Feed up to ten times faster than standard web articles, and are optimized for the mobile reading experience.

The native format includes a built-in set of interactive tools like auto-play video and tap-to-zoom image galleries, bringing stories to life on mobile devices. Early analysis suggests that people engage more deeply with the immersive experience and share Instant Articles with their friends more often than standard web articles.

We’ve been working with Facebook, and VIP Featured Partner agency Dekode, on a plugin which takes care of the basics. Activate it, and you’ll have a compliant feed of Posts, wrapping your core content in the markup Facebook requires.

How it works

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Facebook has a review process where they verify that all Instant Articles generated from your website are properly formatted and adhere to their community standards and content policies before you’ll be able to start pushing content to the platform. (You can get more information in our Instant Articles FAQ.) Instant Articles generally should contain all the content a person would see in the web version of an article, so if you have extended the standard WordPress Post template in any way, it’s likely that you’ll need to extend the plugin’s default output too.

If you find any problems in our plugin, please send your feedback as an Issue on GitHub. And if you write a compatibility layer for another popular plugin, we’d encourage you to share it with the WordPress community via a Pull Request.

The Instant Articles program is one of several current initiatives that aim to bring improved speed and performance to the experience of reading news on your mobile device. We are thrilled to be working with Facebook on making it easier than ever for WordPress publishers to reach and engage their audiences in new ways.

Learn more at Facebook.

Announcing the 2016 VIP Workshop

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May 9-12, 2016 @ The Carneros Inn

We are excited to announce the next installment of the WordPress.com VIP Workshop! As the leading provider of enterprise WordPress solutions, WordPress.com VIP provides the premier event focused on the needs of enterprise WordPress users. In our 5th year of the VIP Workshop we’re adding sessions for product owners in addition to our developer sessions. Also new to this year – a Best of WordPress.com VIP showcase where we recognize the best of your work over the past year (stay tuned for when we open the request for entries).

Register now

 

The VIP Workshop provides a unique opportunity to learn from the WordPress.com VIP team in person, as well as exchange ideas and experiences with other WordPress.com VIP clients and partners through networking lunches and dinners, in-depth curriculum and exercises, and focused, collaborative conversations.

A quick peek at the itinerary – details & agenda will be continually updated on the WordPress.com VIP Workshop page.

  • Monday, May 9th — Arrival Day. Check-in, special guest keynote and welcome dinner.
  • Tuesday, May 10th — In depth business and engineering sessions.
  • Wednesday, May 11th — In-depth product sessions and hands-on development workshops. We’ll wrap the day up with the Best of WordPress.com VIP showcase!
  • Thursday, May 12th — Departure Day.

Space is limited for this event, so register now and take advantage of early bird pricing! Early bird pricing is $3,500 each until March 15. After which, the full participant price will raise to $4,000.

Images by CM Howard from the 2015 Automattic WordPress developer summit at the Carneros Inn in Napa, CA

Images by CM Howard from the 2015 Automattic WordPress developer summit at the Carneros Inn in Napa, CA

Toronto BigWP and Developer Training Coming Soon!

The WordPress.com VIP team will be hosting both a BigWP event and a training course in the Toronto area this month, and we would love to see you there!

BigWP is a meetup event crafted specifically for professionals deploying, managing, or working with WordPress installations in enterprise environments. If you work with a large, high-traffic WordPress installation, you’ll find short and informative talks from other people who are doing innovative things with the same.

Our Developer Fundamentals II training course is designed to assist WordPress developers with learning best practices in code security and performance to help safeguard critical, high-scale WordPress environments, but you’ll learn things that apply to WordPress installations of all shapes and sizes.

BigWP

BigWP is a networking and education event focused on supporting developers, product managers, and editorial teams who run large, high-traffic WordPress sites. We’ll have a handful of short (5-10 minutes) flash talks on the following topics:

  • Google’s AMP on WordPress
  • Scaling WordPress for High-Traffic Sites
  • Developing Gamification for WordPress
  • Powering a TV Channel with WordPress

When: Tuesday, March 15th at 7 p.m.
Where: Shaw Media, 121 Bloor St. East
Event and speaker information is here.

Training: Developer Fundamentals II

WordPress Fundamentals II is a day-long, intensive course meant to improve WordPress developers’ understanding of advanced concepts. The workshop focuses on code security and performance, and will be taught by Stéphane Boisvert and Mo Jangda.

We recommend the training session for all developers working with enterprise-level WordPress deployments as the concepts discussed will apply universally.

When: Tuesday, March 15th at 9 a.m.
Where: The Foundery, 376 Bathurst St.
Cost: $950 CAD per attendee
For more details or to purchase a ticket, please visit the Eventbrite page. The class is limited to 20 participants – please sign up ASAP!

If you have any questions about either event, please get in touch!

The Dream Internship: Work at Automattic (Summer 2016)

EDIT: Last day for applications is Friday February 26th at midnight Pacific time. If you’ve been thinking about it send your application in now!

Our company Automattic — which runs WordPress.com, Akismet, VaultPress, and many other services — is hiring interns, specifically to work with us on the WordPress.com VIP team.

WordPress.com VIP provides hosting and support for high-profile, high-traffic WordPress sites, including Time.com, FiveThirtyEight.com, qz.com, search.fb.com, MicrosoftStudios.com, NYPost.com, and more.

We are looking for two engineering interns to join us for the summer, to work on development for the WordPress.com VIP platform. This paid internship runs 12 weeks, and we are flexible on the specific dates.

Where will you be working you may ask? Anywhere! We are a distributed company and are happy if you work from wherever you are — as long as you have a good internet connection.

What will I work on?
We have two different internship roles available.
The performance-related internship will focus on auditing client code for performance improvements, creating a plugin that would help bring performance improvements to the broader WordPress community, and related tasks.
The security-related internship will focus on auditing client code for security improvements, working with clients to make related code changes, surfacing stastics about the types of attacks blocked on VIP, and related tasks.
In both cases the work and your contributions will be tailored to where your own interests lie.

Interested? Complete your application by filling in the form below. In the space provided, introduce yourself and why you’d like to be an intern with our team. Be clear about what you’ve done and what you’re interested in working on. Feel free to use as much space as you need in the form and be sure to give us more information by including links to your online profiles as appropriate.

We’re serious about increasing diversity in the tech industry. We encourage applications from women, people of color, people with disabilities, members of the LGBTQ community, and other communities traditionally underrepresented in this field.

If your application sounds interesting, we’ll schedule an interview (usually written / text chat, since we communicate a lot via text) as a next step. Good luck and thanks for your interest!

Applications are closed. Thank you for your interest!

Josh Betz is a former VIP intern who now works as a code wrangler at Automattic. During his internship he worked on a VIP user management plugin and helped build a new WordPress.com product. 

A warm welcome to Norwegian WordPress experts Dekode

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Norway’s Dekode are the newest members of the WordPress.com VIP Featured Partner Program, bringing a dash of Nordic cool to our list of the planet’s leading WordPress development agencies.

Based in Oslo, Magne and his growing team are building not only an excellent reputation for themselves, but for WordPress as a platform for publishing and ecommerce. The Scandinavian CMS market has historically been dominated by one proprietary platform; but Dekode are working to establish WordPress as a credible alternative, even for complex enterprise usage.

They represent WordPress at Oslo’s Webdagene (‘Web Days’), one of the region’s leading conferences for the web industry; and they help organise Oslo’s WordPress meetups, including its very highly regarded WordCamp. (If you’d like to discover if that reputation is justified, the next one is in just a few weeks.)

More than most, Dekode’s focus is on combining creativity and technology. There’s no doubting their developers’ credentials; but what really shines through their project portfolio is the sophistication of their visual and UI work.

Dekode are consistently producing beautiful, modern, innovative websites. They aren’t afraid to take on challenging work, such as reinventing local community journalism, pushing WordPress forward as they do so. And they are doing it all in the right way, recognising the need for solutions to be sustainable in the long term.

So we’re excited to bring Dekode to the attention of a wider audience. They have concentrated on the Norwegian market thus far, but we’re in no doubt, they are ready to do great things on a European level.

If you’d like to find out more about Dekode, or any of our Featured Partners, please don’t hesitate to contact us.