VIP News

Updates and features about our platform, services, and partners, as well as stories and events from across the enterprise WordPress community.

August VIP Roundup

August in enterprise WordPress saw the debut of WordCamp for Publishers, updated functionality from Facebook, Getty Images, Chartbeat and Ooyala, […]

New Getty Images Plugin 3.0 with Streamlined Workflow

The new Getty Images plugin v3.0 builds on the previous versions with improved usability and feature enhancements to help you […]

Editorial Dashboards session at WordCamp for Publishers

7 Highlights from the First-Ever WordCamp for Publishers

One of my favorite things about working for the VIP team is the incredible community of clients, agencies, partners, and […]

July VIP Roundup

Highlights from July in enterprise WordPress included our new GitHub Pull Request workflow, Gutenberg version 0.6.0, the upcoming WordCamp for […]

GitHub Code Review Comes to VIP Go

By Scott Evans on July 14, 2017
Posted in News, VIP Hosting

On our containerized managed platform, VIP Go, the platform team has been experimenting with and refining one of the most valuable parts of our service: code review.

Code review does lots of things for our clients. It gives developers confidence that their code will run at scale, that they’re not adding any unanticipated technical debt, and allows us to share skills to develop knowledge and best practices. For leaders and product owners, it makes launches smoother and more predictable, and creates trust and accountability.

When we began working on the VIP Go project a few years ago we felt it was a good opportunity to revisit our development workflows and code review. We had watched developer teams move from SVN to Git and wanted to ensure our tools did the same. We chose GitHub as the place to be as so many open source projects are based there.

One of our goals for this year has been to bring our code review process even closer to the default workflow most teams use. We’d like it to be so seamless that it feels like we’re just another member of the development team. This week we have introduced a new workflow and process for our industry-leading code review with this in mind.

Pull Request Code Review

As of this week, we will now be providing code review using GitHub’s excellent code review tools. Among other things, GitHub provides inline commenting, excellent syntax highlighting and diffing, and allows the VIP team to work with your team in a shared UI.

A pull request against your master branch is all it takes to trigger a code review from one of the VIP team. We will then leave feedback inline against the code itself.

This workflow has a number of benefits:

You control when your code is deployed to production (including reverts)

Once a pull request has been approved by the VIP team you will be able to merge it to your master branch. The merge triggers a code deploy on your site. This allows you to control when code is deployed and you no longer have to schedule deploys with us.

It also simplifies rollbacks/reverts as the Github UI provides a simple one-click method to revert PRs.

Code review takes place inline; no more back and forth in tickets

Our current code review feedback takes place away from the code itself via Zendesk tickets. This abstracts it from its context, which can slow down reviews and the implementation of fixes. On GitHub, conversations happen alongside your code making it easier to address the feedback given. Pushing changes also dismisses inline feedback.

Integration opportunities with automated code feedback and CI systems

In the near future we plan to introduce automated code feedback integrations with Continuous Integration systems like Travis CI, CircleCI, and TeamCity. This will provide near instantaneous feedback on code quality, errors and linting for our code standards.

So far the feedback has been very positive:

“a big thumbs up for the recent change to incorporate the pull request review functionality”
– Weston Ruter, XWP

If you would like to find out more, our documentation on the new GitHub PR Review Workflow describes the workflow in detail and answers many common questions.

Under the hood

The VIP Go operational API searches across all GitHub repositories looking for open pull requests against master branches. These are aggregated into our code review queue. The review queue is what notifies our developers that a review should be started.

The review queue is a React powered front end that interacts with the API. This front end currently supports both this new workflow and our existing workflow which will be deprecated soon.

Here is how a pull request currently looks for our developers:

The pull requests can be filtered to only show those that require attention and we also highlight SLA information along with the latest discussion to take place.

On the GitHub side things are as you would expect them:

What’s next?

The VIP platform team focuses on the advancement of the tools and systems that power WordPress.com VIP. As mentioned above our main focus now is looking at automated feedback and integration with common CI systems. Beyond that we want to keep the dialog open and continue to refine the process. If you’re a current client, we look forward to your feedback as you use these tools. If you’re thinking about working with VIP, we’d love to hear how a process like this would integrate with your workflows and processes. It will be user feedback that helps determine where we head next.

June VIP Roundup

By Dave Coustan on July 5, 2017
Posted in News

We’re back with the past month’s highlights from across the enterprise WordPress ecosystem and the media and marketing landscape.

The sponsor area at WordCamp Europe (photo by tinuzzo)

News and releases
Updates from around VIP, our clients, and our agency and technical partners.

Parse.ly updated their API, enabling new metrics, better searches, and more flexible time ranges. The write-up also includes some short demonstrations of how Slate and The New Yorker take advantage of the API in building useful features.
Playbuzz published an interactive story that serves as a tour of their WordPress.com VIP toolset, version 1.0.3 of their plugin.
Google News completed an extensive redesign of its desktop interface aimed at giving readers more control and access to more diverse perspectives.
Create Alexa Skills through WordPress! The VoiceWP plugin integrates with Amazon Alexa, allowing any site to have its own Alexa skills. Check out the newly launched video Flash Briefing from People on the Echo Show, built by Alley Interactive and powered by VoiceWP.
Inpsyde released Wonolog, a logging library that works with existing php library Monolog.
Dave Ross from 10up shared an exploration of project and task estimation. 10up also updated the Restricted Site Access plugin to optimize it for multisite installations.
Ana Silva from Human Made dug in to recent changes to their hiring process to foster better diversity within the applicant pool and across the company.
Featured partner rtCamp played a big role in the first WordCamp Nagpur, India, including sponsoring and leading a workshop. They’re also sponsoring WordCamp Kanpur.
WordPress 4.8 “Evans” came out June 8th, which includes many small improvements focused on end users and developer-related improvements to existing APIs. It always makes us smile to see familiar names from clients and partner agencies on the credits list, including 11 from rtCamp on this one.
WooCommerce 3.1 is out, which includes a new CSV importer/exporter and a slew of other minor updates.
There are several stories covering the new Gutenberg editor on WP Tavern. Look for more on Gutenberg in the enterprise context shortly from VIP.

Media and Marketing Notes
Research and perspectives on the business of media and the practice of marketing.

“On average, visitors spend 48.2 seconds with pages found through Google search that load with AMP, compared to 35.6 seconds on average with standard mobile pages found through search.”

-Tess Townsend at Recode, on Chartbeat’s latest research on visits to Facebook Instant Articles and Google AMP.

“One of the people familiar with the matter said Facebook is likely to allow users to read 10 articles free before prompting them to subscribe, mirroring the approach of news organizations like the New York Times and the Washington Post.”

-Deepa Seetharaman and Lukas I. Alpert of the Wall Street Journal, on the developing story of Facebook’s emerging news subscription features.

“There are signs that the internet-culture machines are finding ways to make themselves sustainable: YouTube is not shutting down anytime soon, but pre-roll ads weren’t doing the job, and now it has a premium subscription service in order to collect revenue directly from users. The next hubs of internet culture will learn from the mistakes of the past decade, hopefully by doing one of two things: developing a way to collect revenue directly from its audience, like Twitch or Patreon allow now, or by eschewing the notion of a sustainable business at all.”

-Brian Feldman in New York Magazine, on what Tumblr’s financial challenges mean for businesses built on the propagation of web culture.

Featured June Launch: Mother Jones

We’re pleased to welcome 2017 American Society of Magazine Editors’ Magazine of the Year award winner Mother Jones to VIP. Now in its fourth decade, the magazine is a reader-supported nonprofit dedicated to independent and investigative reporting.

Awards and Recognition

Congratulations to Dekode for winning two awards for the campaign they did for Norad, the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation, at this year’s Sabre Awards. The campaign won in the Youth Marketing category as well as the In2Sabre innovation prize, for using gamification to teach youth. The same campaign also won the best website award at the European Excellence Awards in Brussels. (Short case study in English: Daron)

Upcoming Events

The first ever WordCamp for Publishers is happening in Denver on August 17-19. It is a community-organized event bringing together folks who use WordPress to manage publications, big or small. This event will empower participants by coaching them on best practices, and encourage collaboration in building open source tools for publishers.

An amazing group of speakers was announced in June. They work with journalists and publications on all aspects of digital publishing. They’ll lead discussions and workshops on a variety of topics, including WordPress publishing workflows, distribution methods, content syndication and tooling, censorship, modular layout design, open-source in newsrooms, and site architecture.

Organizers from the VIP team, its partner agencies, and VIP clients have worked together to plan this one of a kind event. Tickets are still available, but they’re going fast.

Send us your news, events, awards, and other info for the next issue. And sign up below to receive these roundups via email:

Custom Tools for the Largest UK Newspaper: The Sun and Human Made

By Dave Coustan on June 26, 2017
Posted in NewsTagged bigwp, Customizer, Human Made, Site Management, The Sun

Powerful and intuitive, the WordPress editorial and content management interface is also extremely flexible. It has been customized to match varied and sophisticated workflows for enterprise media and marketing teams all over the world.

Last month at the Big WP Meetup in London, John Blackbourn (@johnbillion) of VIP agency partner Human Made presented highlights of a major customization project for The Sun and its sister publications, The Irish Sun and The Scottish Sun. The Sun is the largest newspaper in the UK by circulation, and second-largest by online audience. The customization work was just one piece of a larger replatforming initiative that moved The Sun to WordPress.com VIP from a print-based CMS. This was a massive undertaking, and involved moving 10 years worth of content — 400,000 articles a terabyte of images.

John’s talk focused on the interface Human Made built to match the editorial workflow of the three publications.

Requirements and Discovery

Highlights from the Sun’s editorial requirements included:

Editors need to quickly and frequently alter the content and the layout of the home page, which can change as often as every ten minutes
Complete, visually accurate previews of changes before they go live
Scale to handle and manipulate hundreds of articles on the same page
Smart and efficient data storage methods

To gain more context and uncover useful details about each of these requirements and how the editors really work, Human Made ran a workshop with The Sun’s editorial team.

They found that editors very frequently move a story around on the home page based on importance, and not in only one direction. Depending on how a particular story develops, it can take any number of routes through the slots on the page. And story order can change up to every few minutes.

Also, originally editors thought they wanted open and free-form editing capability, to have a fully open palette with which to work. Through exploration they found that there are really a limited number of patterns that they use frequently. They may be updated every once in a while, but for the most part they work from a number of pre-set formats. A detail or shade of clarity on a requirement like this has a huge impact on how an agency like Human Made conceives of the solution, and what they prioritize.

Watch Blackbourn describe highlights from the workshop below:

The result of the project was a completely overhauled layout customizer (using WordPress’ extensible Customizer) and page/section management tool – all set up to work within the WordPress admin interface without requiring any side trips or extra clicks. It’s a tool The Sun’s editors live in every day, all day.

The ingenuity of the entire interface is impressive to see in action, but three particular areas of note from the talk:

The Cascade

To tackle the ability to move stories around the page throughout the day, Human Made developed something they call The Cascade. This allows editors to stick an article to their cursor and swap it with an existing article on the fly, so that they don’t need to go through an extra step of adding or removing to adapt the story order. This tool efficiently controls articles throughout the entire, scrolling home page layout.

Layout Chooser

Editors add new sections by choosing from a couple dozen pre-set layouts, which cover all of the styles they more commonly use. Picking one adds a blank section into which they can then quickly drop articles, then easily style and publish the new layout. This all unfolds in the WordPress editorial interface, without requiring them to go to a separate screen or tool.

Precise Preview Rendering

In order to achieve the preview goal, any time an editor makes a change, WordPress fires off an AJAX request to the back end and pulls in the actual template code the site will use to render the finished page. This assures that editors see an accurate preview, and that there are no discrepancies between what shows up during section management and what the user sees when the visit the page. This also makes maintenance seamless, because when a template changes, that inherently and automatically changes the preview code.

Watch Blackbourn demonstrate each of these features:

These new tools and platform free up The Sun’s editorial teams to focus on what’s most important, what’s most popular, and what has suddenly moved from a small blip to a massive unfolding scoop.

To be notified of the next BigWP event in London, join the Meetup group. There are also enterprise events throughout the year in various other big cities.

We’ll always have Paris: thoughts from WordCamp Europe 2017

By Simon Dickson on June 23, 2017
Posted in News

Simon Dickson and Matt Mullenweg on stage at WordCamp Europe

WordCamp Europe has become an annual highlight for anyone working with WordPress on this (or that) side of the Atlantic, and it was great to see so many familiar faces gathering in Paris last week for the 2017 event, from Europe and beyond.

The event is now in its fifth year, with each a little more polished and professional than the last; and Paris was no exception, drawing a crowd of almost 2,000 people from 82 countries, with another thousand following the live video streams.

The speakers programme featured some of the most prominent names in the WordPress space, including lead developers Andrew Nacin, Mark Jaquith and John Blackbourn; Automattic’s global head of computational design and inclusion, John Maeda; plus of course, the now-traditional Q&A session with WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO, Matt Mullenweg.

Whoever is operating the camera for @johnmaeda talk at @WCEurope needs a medal. #WCEU pic.twitter.com/koEGIMqSOM

— David Bisset (@dimensionmedia) June 16, 2017

It was great to see a number of faces from the VIP partner ecosystem on stage, too. 10up’s Adam Silverstein led a workshop at a busy Contributor Day. rtCamp CEO Rahul Bansal gave a flash talk on bringing new people into the WordPress community through translation sprints. Human Made’s Petya Raykovska, Jenny Wong and Rian Rietveld gave rousing talks, with Ant Miller bringing his customary energy to the job of MC’ing one of the Tracks. (Or so I’m told: I was MC’ing in the other room at the time.)

A particular highlight was the beautiful and spacious sponsor area, between the registration desks and the main conference hall. Speaking as something of a WordCamp veteran, it felt like the first time I’ve ever seen sponsors receiving the prominence their support deserves – and without detracting from the community feel of the event, too.

The VIP team has always considered the broader ecosystem to be an integral part of our value proposition. When we represent WordPress at enterprise level, our message is all the more compelling when potential clients can see a diverse marketplace of products and service providers. Looking around the sponsor area, few could doubt that WordPress now demonstrates the kind of maturity and sustainability that corporations expect to see when selecting a strategic platform.

A recurring theme throughout the event was Gutenberg, the new block-based text editor component, whose first beta release Matt Mullenweg announced during his Q&A. Although still some way from being production-ready, it’s clear there is a lot of excitement about its potential to take WordPress content creation to the next level, far beyond the current capability of other enterprise CMS solutions. The VIP team will be working with clients and partners over the coming months, to help them make the most of its new possibilities.

The organisers have wasted no time in cutting up the videos for viewing on demand. All the talks, plus a few behind-the-scenes extras are already available at WordPress.tv; many are also available on YouTube. You’ll need to supply your own café and croissants.

But really, there’s no substitute for being there. If you use WordPress for work or for pleasure, and perhaps even both simultaneously, large-scale events like WordCamp Europe or its transatlantic cousin WordCamp US provide an amazing opportunity to meet people and hear stories from far and wide. Your next opportunity will be Nashville in December; or next year’s European event, in the Serbian capital Belgrade. See you there?

Photos courtesy of Val Vesa (@adspedia), published on Flickr under GPL

May VIP Roundup

By Dave Coustan on June 2, 2017
Posted in Monthly Roundup, News

With May drawing to a close, we’re several weeks out from seeing many of you at VIP Workshop, and WordCamp Europe is just days away. See below for the past month’s highlights from across the enterprise WordPress ecosystem and the media and marketing landscape.

We’ve added a signup form below the post to get these updates via email, and please send feedback and notes for next month any time.

Iain, Jason, and Mark (Big Bite Creative) and Anthony (Trew Knowledge) on wheels at VIP Workshop

News and releases
Updates from around VIP, our clients, and our agency and technical partners.

The WordPress.com for Google Docs Add-on has had a few updates since its launch in March, including support for categories and tags, and post types. If your team uses Google Docs as part of your editorial workflow, this Chrome extension could save some time. (changelog)
Emily Schechter, Product Manager for Chrome Security at Google, gave a talk about the importance of HTTPS at Google I/O, featuring the story of our own extensive rollout.
WordPress.com VIP is now Privacy Shield certified under the EU-US and Swiss-US Privacy Shield Frameworks.
Human Made shared their company handbook with the world and also released Cavalcade, a “a horizontally-scalable WordPress jobs processing solution.”
Inpsyde published a detailed and visually rich look at their company retreat.
Alley Interactive updated the Publish to Apple News plugin to version 1.2.7, with minor bug fixes.
Recent reader-facing feature updates to VIP clients FiveThirtyEight and The Undefeated include allowing visitors to embed the site’s podcasts via iframe code snippet, and implementation of the Apple metatags for smart podcast promotion.
Technology partner Parse.ly analyzed more than 10 million articles published last year to find out which platforms drove site traffic, broken down by topics.
WordPress 4.7.5 security and maintenance release and Jetpack 4.9 launched. The latter included new widgets and bug fixes.
WordPress 4.8 is expected around June 8-9. VIP customers, check the VIP Lobby for more info related to the release.
A hackathon for small businesses in Detroit staffed by volunteer WordPress developers turned in to WordPress.com’s first ever TV ads.

Media and Marketing Notes
Research and perspectives on the business of media and the practice of marketing.

“Mobile Ad-Blocking Skyrockets: In developing markets where data costs can be high, users are increasingly blocking ads whenever they can. Nearly 400 million people around the world block mobile ads.”

-TechCrunch coverage of Mary Meeker’s annual Internet Trends presentation. (slides, video via Recode)

“Google Attribution works by integrating with AdWords, Google Analytics and DoubleClick Search to bring together ad data from across Google to give a more complete view of performance. It is based on tech Google acquired when it bought attribution company Adometry three years ago. The machine learning works by determining how much credit to assign each step in the consumer journey – whether a first search or a final click before purchase. It analyses each account’s unique conversion patterns to compare the paths of those who convert with those that don’t, meaning personalised results.”

-Sarah Visard covers the May 23 launch of Google Attribution and related tools at Marketing Week.

“Now, when you click on a Trending topic, you’ll see a carousel with stories from other publications about a given topic that you can swipe through. By making it easier to see what other news outlets are saying about each topic, we hope that people will feel more informed about the news in their region.”

-Ali Amahdi and John Angelo at Facebook, on their redesigned Trending results page, which aims to distribute attention on timely topics to a broader set of publishers and views.

“Our interviews with more than 70 social media managers and strategists for the Tow Center for Digital Journalism’s “The Platform Press: How Silicon Valley Reengineered Journalism” found that expensive news distribution strategies aren’t yet yielding enough consistent revenue for publishers to justify the costs or to know whether their strategies are working.”

-Nushin Rashidian at CJR, on the challenges of publishers caught in the crossfire between social media platforms, and the complexity of trying to optimize assets like video to multiple competing specifications.

Featured May Launch: Spotify Jobs

We’re proud to highlight Spotifyjobs.com which launched on VIP in early May. The site integrates several API’s and features vibrant, emotive moving image backgrounds that use focus pulls as a design element.

Awards and Recognition

Congratulations to Big Bite Creative for winning a European Digital Media Award for Best Lifestyle, Sports, and Entertainment app, for their React native/WordPress powered football news app 11versus11.

Upcoming Events: WordCamp Europe

The big event in June – in fact, the biggest event in WordPress history is this year’s WordCamp Europe, with well over 2,000 people expected in Paris. The event opens with Contributor Day on Thursday June 15 where VIP’s Tom Nowell will be helping first-timers take their first steps in core contribution. Then on Friday and Saturday it’s the usual packed schedule of talks and demos, with VIP’s Simon Dickson returning to the stage as an MC. Look out for VIP wranglers Andrea, David (A), Scott, Shannon and Stefan among the army of volunteers.

Speakers at the event will include Rian Rietveld, John Blackbourn, Jenny Wong and Petya Raykovska from Human Made; Adam Silverstein from 10up; and Rahul Bansal from rtCamp. Matt Mullenweg will do his now traditional Q&A on the Saturday afternoon, in the company of Om Malik. And watch out for Automattic’s John Maeda, a big hit at our Napa workshop last month, on why design is often an afterthought – and why designers are to blame.

If you can’t join us in Paris, watch for announcement about the conference livestream in the coming few days; or catch up afterwards at WordPress.tv.

Other Events

Technology partner Skyword is hosting brand storytelling conference Forward 2017, June 15, in Boston.
Getty Images will be hosting the panel discussion Seeing is Believing: The Power of Re-picturing Stereotypes at this year’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity on June 22 at 4pm.
Speaker submissions are now wrapped up for the first WordCamp for Publishers, which will be August 17-19 in Denver.
The WordCamp US call for speakers will be open until June 23 at 11:59 EST. The event itself will take place December 1-3 in Nashville, TN.

Send us your news, events, awards, and other info for the next issue. And sign up below to receive these roundups via email:

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Challenging times for online journalists: thoughts from ONA Dublin 2017

By Simon Dickson on June 1, 2017
Posted in Community, Events & Training

A few of us from the WordPress.com VIP team were delighted to join journalists, producers and developers from Europe and elsewhere for the Online News Association’s conference in Dublin, Ireland in mid-May. VIP is a long-time sponsor of ONA’s events: this was their third outside North America, but the first to venture away from London.

Dublin’s regenerated Docklands area has attracted countless global businesses in recent years, including many from the tech world. Google were our hosts for the drinks reception on the evening before. Facebook’s international headquarters, just a few minutes walk away, was the venue for the main event.

Mark Little: photo by Leopold Stuebner, used with permission #

The highlight of the day was closing keynote speaker Mark Little, known to many in the audience as a TV journalist and presenter on Irish state broadcaster RTÉ. He left to found social media news agency Storyful, bought by News Corp in 2013; then took charge of media partnerships at Twitter. Few could be better placed to describe the quandary in which journalism, particularly digital journalism, now finds itself.

Social networks had not set out to become the most powerful news distribution platforms of all time, he contended; it was an unintended consequence. Authoritative news content is ‘flowing through a pipe that is ranked and priced on the basis of emotion.’ With revenue dependent on competing for attention, and generating an emotional response, Mark suggested ‘you could not design a better model to erode trust in news and information than the one we sit in right now.’

His remedy lay in a move towards subscription-based funding, perhaps via bundled models as Netflix does for movies, or Spotify for music; and deeper and more direct engagement with consumers. Restore that trust, he proposed, and there was a bright future for journalism as a public utility, telling readers not just what they wanted to hear, but what they needed to hear.

A theme running through many of the day’s sessions was the uneasy power relationship between publishers and platforms, including our hosts for the day. As a man with a foot in both camps, Mark said it was time for platform companies to recognise and address those unintended consequences of their growth, ‘not through marketing, but through changes to the product’.

But there was no shortage of optimism in evidence, with sessions touching on artificial intelligence, clever use of smartphone notifications, and immersive storytelling techniques. Many of these can be watched on demand via the ONA website.

Online journalism may be going through turbulent times, but sometimes, that’s when the most exciting ideas emerge.

We’re already looking forward to ONA’s main annual event, taking place in Washington DC in early October. VIP will once again be a sponsor, with our Recharge Lounge providing an opportunity to power up your portable devices, whilst talking to us about the VIP service or WordPress more generally. Tickets are available at a reduced rate until June 29.