This year, VIP is proud to sponsor both the Online News Association’s Women’s Leadership Accelerator and the Poynter Institute’s Leadership Academy for Women. This is our fourth year supporting each program — here’s a little bit about why they’re so important to us.
I write this fresh from wrapping two very full days at Poynter’s spring Leadership Academy for Women in Digital Media. This year, I was struck by how often the attendees used the word “magic” to describe this conference. But then I recalled my first 24 hours at the ONA-Poynter Leadership Academy in 2016. I was completely blown away. In one day, I met more women leaders than I had interacted with my entire career.
Closing the gap
For many years now, VIP has been bringing WordPress to some of the world’s largest publishers. In 2016, we were wrestling with the realization that we rarely interacted with female clients, because digital decision-makers at enterprise organizations tended to be men. We also didn’t have many women on our team and were eager to change that.
At the time, we already had a relationship with the Online News Association, as sponsors of their annual conference. So when the opportunity arose to expand our sponsorship to a women’s leadership program, we were all in.
A different kind of conference
Upon arriving at that first event, I was immediately impressed by the attendees. Twenty-eight women were chosen out of more than 400 applicants. All were up-and-coming female leaders at media companies around the world. Remarkably, the curriculum was completely customized for the group. Coaches closely evaluated attendee applications, teammate feedback, and personality tests to provide 1:1 coaching specific to each individual’s needs. While that was valuable, the most important learnings came from attendees speaking up, being vulnerable, and building on shared experiences.
As a sponsor, I came with a prepared presentation on WordPress, but quickly realized I had to adapt to the room. This was a different kind of conference — one where I was expected to be as open as possible about my challenges and struggles. I threw away my prepared remarks.
Instead, I spoke about becoming a female team lead, and how paralyzing imposter syndrome can be when almost all your clients and teammates are male. I talked about how it takes extra courage to speak up when you’re the only woman in a room full of men — courage I often did not have as a new team lead. I shared that I spent a lot of time trying to be like everyone else. It was a long and frustrating road for me to stop mimicking other people, and start validating the things I was good at.
After that presentation, I made genuine friendships with many of the women in the room.
The spring 2019 Women’s Leadership Academy at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida.
An exponential impact
Since that first sponsorship, women we’ve met at the program have attended our BigWP community events, spoken at our annual VIP Workshop, and become a part of WordCamp for Publishers. Some of them have become trusted friends and advisors for me. Others have become clients.
I’m also proud of the impact the sponsorship has had on our team. As we’ve hired more women, I’ve been able to bring teammates to these events. Over the last two years, Suzi Gaiser, Alexis Kulash, Nabaht Peters, and Rebecca Hum have all attended events and become part of the ONA-Poynter community. I have been grateful to both programs for their interest in soaking up a bit of VIP’s distributed and open culture. In turn, the programs have allowed us to participate in sessions on being a change agent, negotiating as a woman, promoting diversity in leadership, and personal career development.
As I travel home, I’m carrying a little boost of positive energy, reminded that there’s an incredible community of women leaders looking to support each other. At VIP, we’re deeply committed to sustainable journalism, and proud to support the critical work of organizations like ONA and Poynter who help raise new voices to the highest levels of media leadership.
The WordPress team recently celebrated another major milestone with the release of WordPress 5.1, alongside news that the platform now powers a full third of the web. Huzzah! Kauffman Indicators, the Facebook Journalism Project, Rio Negro, MinnPost, and MTN now count themselves among that elite group after enjoying successful launches this month.
Elsewhere, we were lucky to join some amazing conversations about shaping the enterprise WordPress world we want to live in, including more women leaders in digital journalism and the importance of designing for all. Read on for details, as well as the latest updates from across the community.
ONA Women’s Leadership Academy participants and mentors. Photo via ONA.
News and Releases
Updates from around VIP, our clients, and our agency and technical partners.
WordPress released version 5.1. Nicknamed ‘Betty,’ 5.1 introduces new Site Health features and includes performance improvements for the new block editor. Congrats to Automatticians Matt Mullenweg and Gary Pendergast and the 561 contributors (including folks from our partners 10up, Reaktiv Studios, and rtCamp) who made it possible.
It’s official: WordPress now powers 33.3% of the web.
VIP worked with featured partner Alley to help The Kauffman Foundation launch the Kauffman Indicators of Early Stage Entrepreneurship. This new tool offers in-depth reports and interactive data visualizations that present entrepreneurial trends across decades, geographies, and demographic groups.
The Facebook Journalism Project provides products, tools, and training to promote news literacy and help journalists harness the power of Facebook for good.
Argentina’s 115-year-old Rio Negro newspaper is looking mighty fine in its new home.
Longstanding nonprofit news organization MinnPost joined the VIP family.
Congrats to South African mobile phone provider MTN on their new site launch.
10Upturned eight and beta launched WP Acceptance, a team-centric tool for writing reliable, scalable acceptance tests.
Alley shared a reflection on how creating a self-quoting SlackBot shaped their company culture.
Inpsyde released a OneStock for WooCommerce plugin to make it easier to manage product inventory across multiple shops.
rtCamp shared the PHP migration script they used to move 300+ repos, 10000+ issues/PR and 100,000+ comments from GitLab to GitHub. Their team also attended 3 WordCamps in one weekend!
We have had the pleasure of working with News Corp Australia (NCA) since early 2015. Today they host 21 sites with us, including market leaders News.com.au, Foxsports.com.au, and TheAustralian.com.au. For NCA, WordPress represents one important application among others, within a complex and powerful systems architecture that predated their migration. We spoke with Juan Zapata, head of the Site Production Platform team, to learn more about their custom-built Kurator tool, which brings external resources to authors and editors working in WordPress. Read all about it.
Recent Events
Earlier this month, we sponsored and attended ONA’s Women Leadership Accelerator at UCLA. Each year, this event brings 30 women from around the world for a weeklong leadership intensive to advance women in digital journalism. VIP has been a major sponsor of ONA WLA since the beginning and are proud to continue our support. Alternate: This year, our very own Steph Yiu spoke about managing remote teams (recap on her site) and VIP’s work promoting digital journalism.
VIP was also pleased to sponsor February’s Change Forum, where our friends at News UK brought together established media businesses and startups in London to speak candidly about product design and development. Simon Dickson, Alison Blanda, Jason Snow, Ryan Sholin, and Simon Wheatley represented VIP at the event, and Automattic’s design director David Kennedyspoke on reaping the benefits of prioritizing accessibility in design. Get a summary of his talk alongside major highlights in our event recap.
Automattician David Kennedy speaking on designing for diversity. Photo via News UK
Upcoming Events
BigWP meetups focus on the operation, development, and scaling of large, high-traffic WordPress websites. Next up is BigWP Toronto, hosted by our friends at the Canadian Olympic Committee on March 27. These events always fill up fast, so hop to it.
Facebook’s developer conference F8 is slated for April 30-May 1. Billed as, “A conversation about technology and human connection,” this event offers deep dive sessions and product demos across Facebook’s family of apps. You can apply to attend or sign up to stream the keynote.
VIP was proud to sponsor February’s Change Forum, where our friends at News UK brought together established media businesses and startups in London, to speak candidly about product design and development.
Speakers from the BBC, The Times, Netflix, Lego and here at WordPress.com shared lessons learned about audience engagement and growth whilst leading product teams.
The common thread across all the day’s presentations was an acknowledgement that a steady flow of new ideas and perspectives was essential to the continued success of a modern business. Teams at one startup were expected to carry out five experiments every single month.
David Kennedy, design director at Automattic
Data, experience and intuition were all of limited value in predicting which ideas would ultimately move the needle. Several speakers described lengthy or expensive processes which yielded little; whilst tweaks taking only a few hours could have a remarkable impact.
And sometimes, as our colleague David Kennedy explained, ideas expected to deliver one benefit could produce greater gains in another, unexpected way. David’s passion is accessibility in design. He cited the example of NPR, who began posting transcripts of their audio broadcasts to aid accessibility – and saw a significant increase in traffic and user engagement, through the text content’s greater search engine friendliness.
News UK’s Christina Scott chats with Jonas Huckestein of UK bank Monzo
Jonas Huckestein, co-founder of UK banking disruptor Monzo, confessed that the company’s success had been built on trying things, seeing which ones worked, and keeping on doing them. They spent months developing a peer-to-peer payment function, which was a total flop. But a simple ‘golden ticket’ function, to let friends of existing customers jump up the waiting list, drove steady weekly growth for many months.
Customers loved it when Netflix began sending out brand-new movies on the day of the DVD’s release; but it only reduced customer churn by a tiny amount, so they canned the initiative.
Conversely, when faced with the dilemma of whether to notify customers about the imminent expiry of their initial free trial, Netflix decided to do the ‘right thing’, and send out reminders. It naturally reduced conversion rates, costing the company tens of millions in revenue; but they decided it was good for the brand… and easy to reverse.
Gibson Biddle, former VP of Product at Netflix
How to decide if an innovation was successful? It depended on what you had hoped to achieve, the data you considered, and who was making the decision. Your CFO might take one view; your community of users, or readers, or consumers might take another. It’s for the culture of the company to decide whose view matters most.
With VIP’s roots deep in the WordPress open source community, these conclusions rang true to our own experience. We believe that the freedoms to innovate on top of WordPress, to share your ideas and efforts with the world, and to choose from many solutions already in circulation, are key factors in the continuing growth of WordPress.
After a brief stint away for the holidays, 2019 is off with a bang (or, a shake, for the VIP Business Development team attending a meetup in Mexico City last week). The first 1/12th of the year has seen several exciting launches, including GitHub, Prensa Libre, and Crowley. Our client USA Today came back with its Ad Meter rankings of the most popular ad at the Superb Owl, but our favorite might be this shoutout to the free press from the Washington Post.
Take a look ahead at this month’s updates from across enterprise WordPress, including a spotlight straight from VIP’s own newsroom, and the running list of events we’ve got our eyes on this spring.
The VIP Launch Squad met in Boulder, Colorado last week. Photo not actual size. (Photo credit @kgagne)
News and Releases
Updates from around VIP, our clients, and our agency and technical partners.
GitHub has a new home on VIPGo, with a .blog TLD. Check out github.blog or their 2019 policy predictions for a look around the new digs.
Prensa Libre is one of the biggest newspapers in Guatemala and one of the highest-trafficked websites in Central America. We partnered with Alley to migrate them over to WordPress and the VIP Go platform. New capabilities include a refreshed landing page module system, and the option to export wire stories straight to print.
Congrats to Crowley on their long-haul launch of a new site on VIP, and many thanks to the small army of collaborators from across several teams who made this one possible.
Alley published a robust 2018 year in review, highlighting their work with news organizations, museums, nonprofits, and more.
Hello Design worked with MDC to build the Coral One robot, which Business Insider called the best robot at CES2019.
Clutch named Human Made both a “Top 1000 Global” B2B company and “Top WordPress Development Company.”
Reaktiv Studios launched Tala on VIP Go as a multilingual site.
Rtcamp is heading to WordCamp Bangkok, where CEO Rahul Bansal will speak on the art of pricing. Read how choosing ‘focus’ as a guiding theme for 2018 impacted their year.
Setka’s CEO Katya Bazilevskaya was quoted in the Native Advertising Institute’s 2019 predictions e-book (gated download).
Platform Notes
We’re building a testing panel to give us feedback as we develop our client-facing tools. If you’re interested in helping us, please drop us a note via support.
VIP CLI has been updated to 1.3.0. You’ll notice a few updates: we now preview the date and time of the backup used for sync, show the mapped domain when listing apps, and better messaging around environments–as well as some minor bugfixes and general bolt tightening. Please update your local install with npm install -g @automattic/vip
We’re upgrading our VIP Go Hosting to PHP 7.3, to take advantage of the performance benefits, stability, and security advantages there. Non-production environments were updated on Monday 4 February, and production sites are planned to be upgraded on Monday 25 February (Lobby post)
VIP is deeply committed to the sustainability of news organizations, large and small, around the world. We’re excited to share we’ve doubled down on that commitment by investing in the News Project. According to founder Merrill Brown, the News Project’s goal is to “stabilize existing news sites and encourage new startups by simplifying publishing and the path to sustainability.” Take a product tour to learn more about their tools, or sign up for their newsletter to stay up to date.
Upcoming Events
Tickets are on sale for WordCamp London, April 5-7. This event joins a slate of WordCamps going down all across the globe this spring, including Jakarta and Pune on February 16, Helsinki March 7-8, and Miami March 15-17.
‘Intelligent Connectivity’ is the focus of #MWC19, coming to Barcelona February 25-28. Attendees can explore 8 themes, including Immersive Content and Digital Trust.
This year’s (free) AMP Conference will be in Tokyo April 17-18. Already an AMP expert? Act fast: the call for speakers is open through February 14.
Libby Barker, a Senior Project Manager, and K. Adam White, a Senior Developer, both from Human Made, spoke about their approach to working with clients on Gutenberg projects, even before its recent official launch in WordPress 5.0. This talk was delivered on November 13 at BigWP NYC, a gathering of developers and product people who work on WordPress applications at scale.
Instead of reinventing the wheel, Human Made started with the blocks already available in Gutenberg, and customized from there. Rather than spending time and effort building blocks from scratch, they were able to give clients more control of design elements and a better editing experience.
Any Gutenberg block might turn out to be reusable on another page, or in another layout. In one example they shared, the Human Made team found that an element built for a site’s homepage could double as a recirculation module at the bottom of single posts or pages, too.
Watch the talk:
BigWP is our enterprise WordPress meetup series, that brings together developers, business leads, and product people who work with high-scale WordPress applications every day. To be the first to find out about the next enterprise WordPress event in New York, join the meetup group. You’ll find groups for other cities there as well.
How the Setka Editor team built AMP compatibility into their custom post design tool
At our latest enterprise WordPress meetup in New York on November 13, Katya Bazilevskaya, Cofounder and CEO at Setka, talked about building the Setka Editor to be Gutenberg-ready and AMP-ready. The Setka Editor is a powerful tool for building beautiful longform stories out of building blocks, all optimized for mobile with full Google AMP integration.
The Setka team transformed WordPress galleries, javascript libraries, and even animations into AMP-ready HTML elements, speeding up mobile load times and giving users a lightning-fast experience.
Modern CSS approaches available in AMP help cut down on time to First Meaningful Paint, and Setka users are seeing the difference.
Watch Katya’s talk:
BigWP is our enterprise WordPress meetup series, that brings together developers, business leads, and product people who work with high-scale WordPress applications every day. To be the first to find out about the next enterprise WordPress event in New York, join the meetup group. You’ll find groups for other cities there as well.
At WordPress.com VIP, we’ve worked closely with journalists since the very beginning of our service. From our earliest clients, news organizations were an integral part of WordPress’s growth from an open-source blogging platform to a technology that now powers more than 32% of all sites on the web.
Since that time, VIP has grown into an enterprise publishing platform that now boasts a customer list including some of the biggest news organizations in the world — CBS, Time.com, and News Corp., to name a few — to global brands like Microsoft, Airbnb, Capgemini, and Capital One.
But in this difficult business climate for news organizations, we want to double down on our commitment to journalism and a free (and sustainable) press. Today VIP is announcing that it has made a significant investment in The News Project, a new WordPress-based platform founded by Merrill Brown, the veteran digital news executive who helped launch MSNBC.com.
In addition to VIP’s financial investment, The News Project will be powered by VIP’s platform, with a goal of serving medium-sized digital news organizations around the world. You can read more about TNP’s vision here.
Along with VIP’s existing platform for large publishers and brands, Automattic’s funding of the new Newspack initiative with Google and other partners (announced yesterday), our own in-house media properties Longreads and The Atavist (bringing the best narrative storytelling to WordPress), and even the individual work of reporters like 12-year-old Hilde Lysiak, we are deeply committed to the sustainability of news organizations, large and small, around the world.
We’re thrilled to work with Merrill and his team on this shared vision. For more information, go to thenewsproject.net.
How The New York Post uses WordPress to manage push notifications for a busy newsroom
Remy Stern, Chief Digital Officer at the New York Post, our hosts at BigWP NYC on November 13, led off the presentations with an explanation on how they use WordPress.com VIP to send thousands and thousands of push notifications, email alerts, and to control their breaking news alerts on the web, too.
Why use WordPress to manage notifications? It’s the central tool for workflow in their newsroom, and reduces the risk of errors by keeping things in one familiar system with a consistent user experience. As a bonus, that helps things move quickly.
“Speed really matters when you’re sending out breaking news push notifications.”
Maropost, Urban Airship, and even Apple News are all in the notifications mix for the New York Post, all managed from inside their WordPress admin.
Watch Remy’s talk in full:
BigWP is our enterprise WordPress meetup series, that brings together developers, business leads, and product people who work with high-scale WordPress applications every day. To be the first to find out about the next enterprise WordPress event in New York, join the meetup group. You’ll find groups for other cities there as well.
Peek behind the scenes with the WordPress team at News Corp Australia
We have had the pleasure of working with News Corp Australia (NCA) since early 2015. Today they host 21 sites with us, including market leaders News.com.au, Foxsports.com.au, and TheAustralian.com.au.
For NCA, WordPress represents one important application among others, within a complex and powerful systems architecture that predated their migration. They run their own massive content database and API (CAPI) and also use Méthode for print publishing. The smart ways they have integrated their existing components into WordPress as they migrated their flagship publications to it are a testament to their development vision and execution. They also point to one of WordPress’ great strengths. Its flexibility allows enterprise organizations with existing infrastructure to adapt and evolve with WordPress over time, rather than requiring a complete systems overhaul and mass migration all at once.
The SPP team at News Corp Australia
Kurator Lite is one of those powerful custom-built tools that NCA uses to bring external resources to authors and editors working in WordPress. After catching a glimpse of Kurator Lite in action, I chatted with Juan Zapata, head of the WordPress group, the Site Production Platform (SPP) team at News Corp Australia, to hear more about its history, how it works, and what’s in the pipeline for the SPP team.
You shared a really cool video that shows how an author or editor in WordPress at News Corp Australia can use Kurator Lite to work with all these different assets and content from all over the company. It looks like a really impressive piece of workflow. Tell me about its history.
Juan Zapata: Before we moved on to WordPress VIP we had two different platforms running. One was called FatWire, which was Oracle-based, for print and digital. The other one is Méthode, for print editions of newspapers. There was a disconnect between digital and print in which a user had to create the categories in both systems to be able to have them running correctly. This gap drove the company to create something to bridge the two.
That’s where the need for Kurator came about, a tool that manages whole sections of content in both. It’s a tool to help editorial tell the story a bit more easily and share it within these 2 worlds. After Kurator the team built Kurator Lite, which is that small panel you see in the video. That allows you to see the sections or the categories that you can assign to multiple stories. Then they embedded that thing into FatWire. And the same functionality was embedded into Méthode.
What year was that?
I started at News Corp Australia in 2015, and I think that project started in 2013.
How many publications and asset sources does Kurator search?
Kurator is basically an interface on our database, which is called CAPI, for Content API. At this stage, it has six million stories, last time I heard, like a month ago. The stories are syndicated across multiple sites, so it is basically a massive search on our database.
Really massive. So there was Kurator and you had versions of it implemented in these two CMS systems, FatWire and Méthode. Tell me about the WordPress implementation.
We decided, ‘okay, editors already know how to use this tool. Editors already are familiar with these interfaces. Let’s also embed it into WordPress, where they are managing digital publications.’ That’s the video that you saw in which you can basically find stories, search by section, drag and drop those assets from an external database, which is not within WordPress. Then WordPress will grab them and import them to be displayed and curated.
How recently was that embed for WordPress made available? When did the team finish that?
That needed to be done ASAP as we implemented WordPress…It went live at the end of 2015, so it had to be ready by that time because they need to be able to manage stories or curate stories within WordPress. They need to be able to search the stories that are not in WordPress to be able to import them and organize them and display that within the WordPress template. That had to go straight out.
The News Corp Australia Content API has over 6 million stories
How does it work? Can you walk me through some of the ways that an editor or an author would use it as they’re creating a story?
We tried to keep it as simple as possible. There are two ways of interacting with this thing. One of them is to rank or put collections into WordPress. Within WordPress, we created a custom post type that is a collection of items, of stories, of promos or whatever you want in there. It’s a collection of posts, basically.
You can go and open an interface for Kurator in your right panel. Then you search for whatever story you want. You drag it and drop it. You drop it into your container of the collection in that case. Then you can rank your collection in any place or your story in any part of the collection. It can be in the first location of that collection.
Then that collection is rendered in the website, for example, in the front page. It will be like the main stories in there. They can drop main stories in there directly, so they manage that concept of collections in there for that one. One way of doing it is through ranking stories into collections. You can open your Kurator panel, drag and drop, and pull your story directly in there.
The other way authors use Kurator Lite is, when you’re creating a story, basically you have your WordPress story in there. You create your title, your body. Within News Corp, we have the concept of containers. Container One is…if I translate that into WordPress, that will be your thumbnail image or your picture image. When you open the article page at the top you’ll see your featured image.
We have extended that functionality a little bit. What you can drop in there is multiple images and even videos. To keep it simple you just open your Kurator window on the right side, and then search for the image and then drop it into Container One. We have also extended this capability to the body of the article using this as oEmbeds elements.
Finally, we have something that is called Container Two right at the bottom, which is a container for related articles, things that you may be interested in that are related to these articles that you’re creating. The same functionality works there. You drag and drop and put it into that container. We tried to keep it as easy as possible as it helps to manually curate content.
The drag and drop looks really nice in the video. How does that work?
It took us a while to develop because the Kurator panel is an iframe. What we have to do is behind the scenes when you click on a drag event, it extends or puts a div that extends across the whole visible area of your editor. When you drag out of your iframe (visually as you are still within it), it starts sending post messages to that parent window, telling it, “Look, I’m in this position of that massive element.” Then it will be able to identify what to highlight behind the scenes.
Because there was no easy way of offering drag and dropping functionality between two iframes, we came with this approach. It’s all done through post messages going back and forth. Once you drop it, it sends another post message saying, “I drop it in this location.” Then we’ll add it and trigger the whole thing that is happening there.
It’s not the best implementation today because nowadays there are various different tools available that we can implement it with. There is now a way that we have figured out of integrating directly into WordPress, instead of using an iframe, but we tried to keep it as close as possible as it was implemented in the previous system because it was a known interaction and a business requirement. We knew what we were going to do in there at the time, basically, instead of going and trying different stuff with WordPress. But now we know a way of integrating more directly with WordPress, which will come later on.
What else does the full Kurator application do? What features are you most proud of?
Kurator does section management. If we translate that into WordPress terms, that will be category management. You can create categories in there. It does very good as it displays syndication rules in a very natural way. Kurator does not syndicate per se, but it has the rules of syndication. You can create a section within Kurator, and that section will say, “Okay, when somebody selects this specific section, I have to put it in this website in this category, in this other website in this category, in this website in this category.” It will tell CAPI, “You have to publish this information into all these sites.”
That’s one of the fantastic features that Kurator has in there, section management and syndication management.
The other one, of course, is Kurator Lite, which is for searching assets. That’s the part that’s integrated into WordPress.
The other one is legal kill. The whole concept of legally killing an asset is to remove it from any website as soon as possible for legal reasons. You say, “I want to legal kill this item,” but the problem is that the asset has been syndicated to multiple sites. You cannot say, “Yeah, it’s deleted from all the sites,” until you get confirmation from all the sites. To accomplish this Kurator verifies all the sites that it has been syndicated to and starts pulling information from there to see if everything was successful depending on the information that it has. It stays there until it finishes. If there is an error, it will notify people about it. It’s a very robust platform built in Node.js with AngularJS. It’s very interesting. It’s completely separate to WordPress, completely separate to CAPI. It’s its own beast.
How much of a team supports Kurator?
It’s three people. It’s a very small team. It was built long ago, and the core of it hasn’t needed to be touched since then. They built it as a plugin system – one plugin is search. Another plugin is the legal kill functionality. Another plugin is the section management piece. That core thing, they haven’t touched it since they built it. That’s how well they built it. It was a very good engineering task that they did in there for that one. Yeah. At this stage, it’s three people maintaining it.
Tell me about the SPP team, what does your team do and how do you work?
Within the company, we are the core team that powers WordPress and the teams that all the other product teams developed. We are responsible for ingesting content from our content API, CAPI into WordPress, getting that synced correctly in WordPress, Developing and maintaining our own editor and supporting theme developers with extra plugins within other functions of the team.
We are 4 WordPress PHP developers, 2 testers, and 1 automation tester, who is also a developer.
We actually have 52 different plugins that allow us to do a lot of stuff in our system within WordPress. To name some we have CAPI sync which controls the translation and ingestion of content to WordPress, Authoring which allows editors to create content within WordPress with all the different containers and integrations, Kurator integration, CHP integration which is our archive of images not hosted within WordPress, Legal Kill, Draft Post, Expire Post, Site Migration, I can go on…The list is massive.
What’s coming up on the SPP roadmap?
One big one is, we removed the previous liveblogging functionality that we were using, which was with a third party. We are bringing it into WordPress using VIP’s Liveblog plugin. We have been rolling that out this last month. Now we’re rolling out AMP support for live blogging which I’m really keen and looking forward to getting it out. Also, we are working on migrating to VIP Go to which our plugins need a bit of massaging but nothing that worries me.
That’s great. What kinds of use cases around News Corp is live blogging used for mostly? Is it sports? Is it entertainment?
Almost everything. Sports is the main one that you will see in there, but they have rolling stories around every morning that says, “Things that you need to know today.” Think of it like a live coverage story. They’re just churning stories in there into the Liveblog, and that appears in your homepage saying, “Things that you need to know today. This happened, or this happened yesterday.” They change that every 10 minutes, every 15 minutes. It’s like a live blogging functionality, but they use it in that part of the site. That’s used every day.
Political applications as well, they use it. Catastrophic events, like fires. Anything that needs a live blog, but basically the two main ones are sports, and then daily things that are happening in the city.
To learn more about our work with News Corp Australia, check out this case study.
At the risk of early December overshadowing an exciting November, we have to lead off with the biggest headline from the WordPress community in years. Just last week we all celebrated the completion of months of design, development, and refinement: the release of WordPress 5.0 featuring the new block editor! And add to that the release of AMP for WordPress version 1.0, as well as an open source theme based on Big Bite’s new platform for Amnesty International, all in just the past several days. There was a whole lot of November before that, including a BigWP event in New York and launches for Indian Express, Thrive Global, Boston Herald, National University, and SheKnows. Read on and we’ll bring you up to speed with notes from across the enterprise WordPress community.
Matt Mullenweg discussed the release and next phases of WordPress 5.0 in his annual State of the Word address at WordCamp US. (Photo by Val Vesa.)
WordPress 5.0 Arrives
The future of WordPress is here! Congratulations to the core team and all of the colleagues, partners, and community members who made the WordPress 5.0 release a reality. VIP clients, check the Lobby for all the details on deployment at VIP and next steps.
Project lead Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word (full video) at WordCamp US outlined the next phases of the Gutenberg project, including customization outside the post/page, collaborative editing, workflows, and multilingual innovations.
Jeffrey Paul, core contributor and team lead at XWP, composed this WordPress 5.0 Field Guide to help you navigate the ins and outs of the new release.
First annual Automattic Design Award winners were announced at WordCamp US last week (photo by finalist Ahmad Awais).
News and Releases
Nashville welcomed WordCamp US, the largest WordCamp in North America, last week. Check out WCUS on Twitter for conference photos, session takeaways, and lively post-event chatter.
Also at WordCamp US, Automattic announced the winners for the first-ever Automattic Design Award! See the full list on the award website.
BigWP NYC brought our friends at the New York Post, Setka, 10up, and Human Made together along with a packed house. Topics included integrating plugins with AMP, decoupled WordPress architecture for the enterprise, and more. Stay tuned for videos from the talks, coming soon.
When PMC acquired Rolling Stone, they turned to XWP and VIP to bring the beloved brand’s digital experience up to date. The Make WordPress Marketing team just published XWP’s case study documenting the collaboration.
Congrats to the AMP project on the release of version 1.0 of the official AMP Plugin for WordPress.
rtCamp worked with the Indian Express team to revamp their flagship website on VIP. Their Gutenberg Fields Middleware plugin, which makes it easier to create custom Gutenberg blocks, is now compatible with WordPress 5.0. And more than a dozen rtCampers attended WordCamp Ahmedabad as proud sponsors and volunteers.
K. Adam shared some techniquesHuman Made are using to bring familiar React-ecosystem developer conveniences to their Gutenberg work.
10up teamed up with StoryCorps for a poignant Google Doodle tribute honoring Veteran’s Day in the US.
Big Bite took their latest work building a new block editor-ready platform for Amnesty International one step further. Their new open source theme makes some of those tools available for any organization to use.
Rasmus Lerdorf, inventor of PHP, turned 50 on November 22.
Platform Notes
As mentioned above, WordPress 5.0 has been released! VIP clients, you will experience no immediate change to your publishing experience. Check out the Lobby for notes on next steps and working with the Gutenberg plugin as the project moves on to next phases.
Domains have come to the VIP Dashboard. Currently a simple list of domains mapped to your environment, VIP has big plans for its future functionality.
VIP CLI was updated to 1.2.1:
We now display a preview for vip sync which details the backup date/time being synced and the search/replace to be performed.
We now display the primary domain, instead of the *.go-vip.co domain in and vip app list.
The Query Monitor update from 3.0 to 3.1.1 includes lots of changes such as a logger, accessibility fixes, and bug fixes. This release also introduces a Dark Mode.
Dekode, based in Oslo, Norway, is the leading enterprise WordPress agency in the Nordics. They blend design, development, and strategy work to build cost-effective, self-sustaining solutions for enterprise clients like Tidal, Facebook, and the Norwegian government. Read more about what they’re building in our latest partner profile.
Upcoming Events
The Inland Press Association’s Mega Conference is slated for February 25-27 in Las Vegas. Topics span digital subscriptions, newsroom transformation, advertising sales, audience monetization and more.
MWC Barcelona (formerly Mobile World Congress) is the largest mobile event in the world, bringing together the latest innovations and leading-edge technology from more than 2,400 leading companies. It’s happening February 25 – 28, and it’s not too late to grab a pass!
Speaker applications are open until January 7 for the first-ever WordCamp Nordic coming to Helsinki March 7-9.
Fancy a warmer clime? Join IRE and NICAR in Newport Beach, CA on March 7-9 for their annual conference devoted to data journalism.
Last week saw the release of WordPress 5.0, the project’s first major update in a little over a year. It’s most notable for the addition of the new Gutenberg editor component, which introduces blocks as the new mental model for WordPress content management.
In his 2018 State Of The Word speech, project lead Matt Mullenweg told attendees at WordCamp US that the pace of change would remain high. Gutenberg, he explained, was only the start of a process to address some fundamental problems in the software’s overall user experience.
Here’s our selection of key highlights for VIP clients and the enterprise WordPress community.
WordPress is all-in on blocks
Blocks have been designed to be predictable and tactile. They can cope with the full range of functionality expected of any WordPress site: they can be simple, like a text block, or as rich as an entire e-commerce interface.
They reflect the reality of HTML structure, making it (finally!) possible to meet user expectations on things like copy-and-paste from applications like word processors. But as developers we’re able to simplify their presentation, make their function readily apparent to users, and make them reusable across the interface.
Already we’ve seen an explosion of creativity within the community. Creators of well-established plugins have made early efforts to adapt their interfaces to exploit the potential of blocks: Matt specifically highlighted the popular Yoast SEO and AMP plugins, which provide feedback on a block-by-block basis. And new plugins are being created, bringing structured content into the editor area without the clumsy use of shortcodes.
We’re also seeing the growth of libraries, toolkits and tutorials, making it easier than ever for developers to surface complex functionality or embed external services within the authoring experience. It won’t take long for users to expect to find a block for every purpose.
Blocks will break out of the text box
Matt confirmed that the next challenge for Gutenberg is to take the same block concept beyond post content. He showed examples of how blocks might replace what we currently know as ‘widgets’ and ‘menus’. Configuration would take place within the WordPress admin area, in the Customizer – or perhaps even inline, on the front end.
Development of phase two will take place, as before, in plugin form – giving developers plenty of visibility into the process, and plenty of time for experimentation and testing.
Key enterprise functionality ahead
Matt also shared his thinking for the third and fourth phases of the Gutenberg initiative, both with particular appeal to large scale professional content publishers.
Phase three is set to focus on collaboration and workflows. It is likely to include content locking based on blocks, rather than pages as now. This will be especially valuable to newsrooms working on breaking stories: we know many of our clients already have elaborate workarounds to allow journalists to work on different parts of the same article simultaneously.
Matt admitted: “One of the reasons that copy-and-paste from Google Docs to Gutenberg is so good, is that when I’m writing a post that I’m going to collaborate on, Google Docs is better for that. But if we can integrate these workflows directly into WordPress, we can integrate them with user systems, we can integrate them with revisions, and we can allow them to be fully extensible in a way that a SaaS service will never, ever be.”
Phase four will finally bring an official way for WordPress to support multilingual publishing. Numerous proven approaches already exist, of course. But the lack of a canonical solution within WordPress core is often cited as a weakness, and existing solutions often cannot guarantee to be compatible with other plugins and services.
Both these phases, proposed for 2020 and beyond, are likely to have implications for existing solutions, including plugins created and recommended by VIP. We’re excited to contribute our experience in these areas to the core initiatives, and encourage all of our clients to get involved as well. Feedback and participation from VIP clients provided the core team with critical insights during phase one, and those insights become even more pertinent as the team takes on the next areas of focus.
Enterprise takeaways in brief
The next phases of the Gutenberg project will continue to take place in plugin form. This will allow enterprise teams to test and adopt new functionality gradually as it comes out, and evaluate it in the context of existing workflows and customizations.
Phase two will focus on admin elements outside of pages and posts, further simplifying and streamlining the experience for users.
Phase three will focus on collaboration and workflows, which will be particularly useful for busy newsrooms as well as brand and product teams.
The fourth phase will take on multilingual publishing, bringing a canonical solution into core.
There are lots of ways for you to participate in the project! Whether directly through the many points of entry outlined on Make.WordPress.org, by sharing a private demonstration and feedback session with us at your offices, or simply by testing and working with the new features as they are developed, you can play a critical role in the project’s success.
Photos courtesy of: Brian Peat, Jen Hooks, Val Vesa. Thank you!
This series profiles each of our featured partner agencies.
Dekode is a digital agency based in Norway focused exclusively on WordPress platforms for the enterprise segment. Dekode strongly believes the best digital solutions are crafted when the disciplines of design, development, and strategy work in cross-functional teams. They have been a WordPress.com VIP Featured Partner since 2015.
Dekode team in their Oslo office
What’s your agency’s origin story?
Magne Ilsaas founded Dekode in 2009, bringing a background in design and establishing a strong tech and creative team from the start.In the Nordics, WordPress historically has not been known as a big media CMS like in other parts of the world. As big believers in the platform, Dekode set out to grow and evolve its reputation in the region.
Since its founding, Dekode’s focus has been to demonstrate the value and foundation of WordPress for Enterprise, B2B, B2C, and marketing sites in their local market.
Pick three words that describe your agency culture.
Pragmatic, compassionate, honest.
Consultant Christian Buksti and Dekode’s CEO Magne Ilsaas
Tell us about a client project you are especially proud of.
We’ll mention two:
Design and code frameworks: The Norwegian Government Security and Service Organization is responsible for digital services for the governmental secretaries and the Prime Minister’s office, as well as a number of other public institutions such as the Supreme Court and the Parliament. DSS operates 50+ web pages on WordPress. These require thorough quality control and continuous development of functionality.
Dekode is the trusted advisor for these projects. As a reflection of our commitment to delivering cost-effective, self-sustaining solutions for our clients, we’ve built a design framework rather than a one-off platform for NGSSO. With this flexible theme, NGSSO can create new websites themselves. Currently, they have 60+ websites without the help of Dekode and at no additional cost.
Community for Down Syndrome: Today, most conversations about Down syndrome amongst parents happen on social media and especially on Facebook. These shared experiences and discussions are often vital to the lives of children with Down syndrome, but as soon as they are published they fall down the drain of the Facebook feed. This knowledge does not have an expiry date, but in a year or five years, there is no possible way to retrieve it. We wanted to do something about it.
We recently launched our new community platform oppsiden.no (The Upside). It’s a social knowledge sharing community for Down Syndrome. This was a Dekode-initiated project and the culmination of months of collaboration with the Norwegian Network for Down Syndrome. We are extremely proud Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg came to our office and officially launched the platform.
Norwegian Prime Minster Erna Solberg at Dekode’s office celebrating the launch of oppsiden.no
What are you most excited about in the WordPress community right now?
We are currently excited about the launch of the Gutenberg editor. From our experience thus far, when it comes to custom blocks, it has been really promising. We’ve been big fans of using Advanced Custom Fields for tailoring modular websites for a long time now. Gutenberg will make this a native experience to WordPress, and the experience for editors will be a really big and important upgrade. Gutenberg has the potential to be a fantastically open-ended system – themes, plugins, and possibilities on steroids. We’re looking forward to developing sites and platforms that harness that open-endedness to deliver the kinds of focused and dialed-in editorial experiences enterprise use cases tend to require.
What’s your favorite conference or event of the year, and why?
This year, one of the best “conferences” Magne attended was a boat of startups, founders, and investors who all disconnected from their busy online lives. What amazed him on this trip was the willingness to share knowledge on how to run and scale your business in a sustainable way. This is something we at Dekode want more than anything else for the WordPress ecosystem: to share and collaborate on our businesses the same way we do with code.
As 2018 comes to an end our immediate goals are transitioning our design and code framework to Gutenberg. We’re also excited to launch our new community/ intranet platform and continuously position WordPress as a proper enterprise alternative.
Thank you, Dekode!
More on Dekode:
Petter Walbø Johnsgård of the Dekode team
Agency focus and specialties:
WordPress platforms, for clients with long term recurring digital needs
Design and code systems that enable brands with multiple sites to reuse components and scale their digital ecosystem in a sustainable way
Enterprise intranets on WordPress
Operationalizing their client’s business strategy while challenging stagnant thinking
Currently working with:
The Norwegian National Library
Facebook
Tidal
The Norwegian Government
Norwegian Society for Sea Rescue
The Church City Mission
Norwegian Helsinki Committee
Agency highlights:
Largest WordPress specialist agency in the Nordics
Recently launched an Enterprise intranet product on WordPress
Creating a design and code system for the Norwegian government enabling them to launch websites themselves
Global Diamond Sabre Award winning campaign for NORAD, a learning solution for youth about foreign aid
With the projected release date for WordPress 5.0 fast approaching on November 27, there’s lots of October news around the Gutenberg project and the new editor it’s bringing to 5.0. Read on for updates from WordPress core, releases from Kaiser Family Foundation and The New York Post, Intercom, and XWP for the AMP Project. Don’t miss the call for entries for the brand new Automattic Design Award.
The latest updates about WordPress 5.0 and the new editor.
5.0 is coming! The updated WordPress Core timeline calls for WordPress 5.0 release on November 27, with release candidate 1 coming on November 12. VIP clients, keep an eye on the Lobby for updates as we draw closer.
As of this post, WordPress 5.0 beta 3 is the latest release, which came out on November 5. WordPress 5.0 beta 1 came out on October 24th. Naturally at this stage beta releases include Gutenberg as the default editor, the Twenty Nineteen theme, and all previous default themes updated to include block editor styles.
The Core team has announced that the Classic Editor Plugin will be supported until at least December 31, 2021. You’ll find lots of additional detail at that link as well.
We recommend all projects using the Gutenberg plugin today to upgrade to at least version 4.1 to assure a smooth transition. Gutenberg 4.2 is now available for testing. The updated formatting API makes it easier to extend Rich Text options throughout the editor. Developers can now add their own block categories and assign icons for better visual cues.
VIP’s Shannon Smith talking React at WordCamp Vancouver.
News and Releases
Updates from around VIP, our clients, and our agency and technical partners.
Our own Shannon Smith presented at WordCamp Vancouver, demonstrating how theme and plugin developers can use React to make the most of the new Gutenberg editor experience.
The Institute for Nonprofit News launched the INN Index, a comprehensive study of nonprofit news outlets. One key finding? Over half of INN’s newsrooms have 3 or more revenue streams.
Hear Joel Davies’ talk from BigWP London on how The Sun optimized their World Cup coverage this summer to draw 23 million unique visitors a day during the tournament.
10up helped Intercomtransition from ‘blog’ to ‘publication.’ They also spoke at React.js in Capetown and sponsored WordCamp Islamabad.
Alley created a sleek interactive map for Kaiser Family Foundation and launched a new Style section for the New York Post’s Page Six.
Dekodelaunched Oppsiden.no, a social knowledge sharing platform for the Down Syndrome community. Launch party special guests included Norway’s Prime Minister, Erna Solberg.
Human Made helped Greenpeace reinvigorate their global web presence, realigning with open technology and principles along the way. They also updated and re-released the extensively researched whitepaper, “Headless WordPress: The Future CMS.”
A team of 6 rtCampers attended the AMP Roadshow Mumbai 2018where Pradeep Sonawane delivered a talk about “WordPress with AMP.” Up next? Nirmal Desai will attend WordCamp Kochi and share his experience working with Enterprise publishers.
Platform Updates
Our first VIP Dashboard feature has soft-launched (shhhhh): visit the dashboard to see all your apps, then click through to an individual app to sync from production to your non-production environments. Sharp-eyed observers will see we’ve added a “Support” button down on the left; give it a try and tell us how it’s going.
Submit your best work in site, solution, and style categories for the brand new Automattic Design Award, recognizing the very best in Gutenberg-ready, accessibility-enabled projects from 2018. A truly amazing panel of judges includes Khoi Vinh from Adobe, Kat Holmes from Google, and Jeffrey Zeldman from A List Apart. Representatives of the VIP family include Sarah James of 10up, Ant Miller of Human Made, Rahul Bansal from rtCamp, Joshua Wold of XWP, and Simon Dickson representing VIP.
The next BigWP Meetup takes place November 13 at the New York Post headquarters featuring enterprise WordPress talks from speakers at the New York Post and VIP partners Setka, Human Made, and 10up. Tickets are now all gone, but we’ll have coverage on the blog. Join the meetup group to be the first to hear about the next event.
WordCamp US is coming right up, Dec. 7-9 in Nashville. Organizers recently released the full speaker schedule. You might notice several familiar faces from Automattic, 10up, Human Made, XWP, Yoast, and many more. See the full speakers list here and grab your ticket while you still can.
Have you gotten your ticket for WordCamp Europe? It goes down June 20-22 in Berlin. While it may seem like a long time from now, tickets always sell out, so grab yours fast.
Two years on from joining the VIP program, The Sun’s WordPress-powered website has grown steadily to become the UK’s biggest digital commercial news website, with over 30 million unique users each month – that’s fast approaching half the UK’s total population.
Sport, and specifically soccer, has always been a key part of The Sun’s offering; and with England headed to the summer’s World Cup in Russia, the newsroom were keen to make the most of the opportunity.
In a characteristically cheeky talk at our recent London BigWP event, The Sun’s head of newsroom systems, Joel Davies described how they were able to create a new destination section, with the ambition to cement The Sun’s brand as the ‘home of the football fan’.
The new section, built and launched in three months, incorporated a new mobile-first design, reflecting the fact that 90% of traffic was mobile, with full-screen teasers, interactive on-page components, plus new commercial slots and navigation.
Joel explained some of the design elements and special content features the team developed, making full use of the flexibility offered by the WordPress platform. They used the Shortcake plugin, a precursor to the new Gutenberg editor’s block concept, to construct complex page layouts, rendered on the front end by React components.
They produced just under 100 articles per day during the tournament, and almost 1,000 videos, viewed a total of 11.5 million times. The World Cup section alone drew 23 million unique visitors over the course of the competition, with a return rate of 45%. (Sadly, the England team returned empty handed.)
Automattic is putting together our first ever Design Awards, and we want you to be a part of it.
Earlier this year, in his talk at WordCamp Europe, John Maeda announced plans for an Automattic Design Award, to highlight and encourage examples of great design work in the WordPress ecosystem.
With WordCamp US fast approaching, we are now inviting entries at automatticdesignaward.blog. Submissions need to be in by November 16, with the announcement of the winners on December 3.
There will be nine awards in total, with three trophies presented in each of three categories – Best Site, Best Solution and Best Style.
We aren’t just looking for your prettiest pieces of work. At WordCamp Europe, John talked about the need for ‘deep design’ – rather than just sprayed-on design, added as an afterthought. Too often we focus simply on shipping; and whilst that may have been acceptable in the past, today’s users know they can and should expect more.
So we’re looking for work which demonstrates thorough processes of discovery, consideration, delivery, and listening to users’ responses.
There are two core eligibility requirements. Submissions must be ready for the arrival of Gutenberg, the new WordPress editor; and they must demonstrate accessibility as a ‘need to have’, not just a ‘nice to have’.
At VIP we’re fortunate to work with some of the most ambitious design and development teams in the WordPress space. We see many examples of smart, sophisticated design in the projects we support; and we’ll be encouraging our clients to put themselves forward. But we’re particularly excited to see what’s happening elsewhere in the ecosystem, especially behind the scenes.
Full details of the awards, the assessment criteria, the judging panel and the beautiful trophies can be found at automatticdesignaward.blog.
The idea of multilingual web publishing sounds straightforward enough. A publisher operating in multiple countries, or in a country where multiple languages are spoken, needs the ability to manage content – as well as site features like navigation – in multiple languages.
But having worked on many such projects in my career, I can assure you that multilingual publishing means different things in different situations. Is content always created in one particular language, then translated into the others? Or can content originate in any of the operational languages? Is every piece of content translated? If so, when, and by whom? If not, what do you do when a piece of content isn’t available in the language being viewed?
WordPress has been fully translated into dozens of languages, from Afrikaans and Albanian to Vietnamese and Welsh; but it doesn’t have a built-in solution for multilingual operation. While that might initially seem like a negative, it means there is scope for a number of different approaches, reflecting the different scenarios and workflows associated with multilingual publishing.
At last month’s Big WP event in London, Giuseppe Mazzapica from VIP agency partner Inpsyde reviewed the approaches taken by some of the best known WordPress plugins, noting their respective strengths and weaknesses.
Inpsyde are, of course, the agency behind Multilingual Press, the multilingual plugin we use most often at VIP. Its approach, based on the multi-site mode built into WordPress, stays closest to ‘normal’ WordPress operation. This means other functions, including third-party plugins, are much more likely to work without workarounds.
But the VIP platform also supports other solutions, which may be a better fit for certain clients, their requirements, and their workflows. Our engineers are always happy to talk through the workflow needs of any given project, and help our clients make the right choice.
The WordPress core development team has just announced a draft schedule for the next WordPress release, which will include the long-awaited new editing component, Gutenberg. But for many leading WordPress agencies, Gutenberg has been a fact of life for several months already.
One such agency is VIP partner Big Bite, whose technical director Jason Agnew described the experience of implementing Gutenberg on a number of enterprise-level projects at September’s BigWP gathering in London, hosted by our friends at News UK.
Big Bite have recently been working with a major global bank, to produce an internal news app for consumption primarily via iOS and Android smartphone apps, but managed in WordPress using Gutenberg blocks. And as profiled here previously, they delivered a block-based solution for Amnesty International to build and manage pages in visual form.
Jason describes how Big Bite nominated one team member to become their in-house expert, giving him the time he needed to build his own knowledge, which he could then spread across the company.
Developing with Gutenberg can feel a lot slower, Jason says: ‘you can’t really build the site until you have all the blocks.’ His rule of thumb is that it takes a week to build a block: but if a client is in it for the long run, ‘it’s definitely worth the investment now.’
Discussing Gutenberg with clients has been really easy: some even described the authoring experience as ‘fun’, which is rare indeed in the world of content management systems! Project owners expressed concern at using beta or newly-merged functionality; but Jason has explained that it’s worth a little bit of risk now, in order to save a lot of upgrade costs in the future. ‘Most people can relate to that,’ he says.
VIP has been helping clients and developers prepare for the arrival of Gutenberg. We have a test environment showcasing the Gutenberg experience: just go to testgutenberg.com and start clicking around, no login required. We also have a series of free how-to videos for developers; and a free plugin allowing site owners to manage the rollout of Gutenberg functionality across their site at their own pace.
Welcome to the September roundup! Even though this is October material, we’d be remiss not to start off with the big news coming out of the Gutenberg project this week, Matt Mullenweg’s Plan for 5.0 update and Gary Pendergast’s follow-up Proposed Scope and Schedule. We’ll keep you updated as 5.0 plans continue to come together.
Meanwhile, there’s lots to catch up on from September. The Online News Association’s annual event is always a highlight of the year and ONA 2018 in Austin was no exception. We came back energized and excited about all of the work going on across the digital journalism community. And thank you to Human Made and News UK for co-hosting our latest BigWP London, with great talks which will be available on YouTube shortly.
Read on for news and updates from across enterprise WordPress, including a new section called, “What We Read,” a carousel of articles (and podcasts) that inspired, informed, and influenced us this month.
Gutenberg News and Notes
The latest tools, demos, and updates around the block-based editor coming to WordPress 5.0.
As mentioned above, plans for the WordPress 5.0 release are starting to take shape. Matt Mullenweg posted a plan and Automattician and core contributor Gary Pendergast gave further details in this proposed scope and schedule, identifying November 19 as the target release date.
Earlier in September, Gutenberg version 3.9 shipped with a host of UX improvements within the editor, in addition to the ability to create reusable templates and import/export reusable blocks.
Updates from around VIP, our clients, and our agency and technical partners.
VIP teamed up with Human Made to host Big WP London, featuring talks from 10up, Big Bite, Inpsyde, and News UK. Video from the talks coming soon!
Alley helped the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation answer the question, “Does where you live affect how long you live?” by building a life expectancy estimator using data from 73,000 U.S. Census tracts. They also redesigned the Online News Association’s VIP-hosted resource portal just in time for #ONA18.
10up CEO John Eckman shared slides from his talk at WordCamp NYC on rethinking his approach to GDPR and privacy.
If you haven’t checked out the VIP Dashboard for our VIP Go platform, take a look and open a ticket to let us know what you think. (Watch for the first major feature, which will be data sync, arriving over the next few weeks.)
Liveblog v1.9 introduced support for the AMP project, alongside the popular AMP for WordPress plugin. v1.9 also includes enhanced performance for high-traffic liveblogs and support for cross-domain updates (Lobby post).
Spotlight: Amnesty International
Take a video tour of the custom Gutenberg blocks powering Amnesty International’s new platform, built by Big Bite for the new WordPress editor. Their team is also working on one of the largest Gutenberg-built applications to date, with a global financial organization.
VIP take: “Still exchanging Microsoft Word documents with contributors to make edits? Apparently, some publications are still redlining their way to a final draft, while others have made the shift to Google Docs. If you’re happy with the collaborative editing features in Google Docs, try out this add-on to send your drafts straight to your WordPress site.” — @ryansholin
VIP was thrilled to be a part of ONA again in 2018, which went down in Austin, TX from September 13-15.
To kick things off, we and our partners at Alley co-hosted a pre-conference meal where we broke bread with clients and friends. At the conference itself, VIP’s very own Steph Yiu, Ryan Sholin, and Shannon Smith teamed up to present “The Future of Content Creation in WordPress” which gave an inside look at the intersection of publishing, WordPress, and Gutenberg. Ryan also joined a panel on “Remixing Content: Refining Your Workflow to Make Your Work Flow,” sharing tips to make workflows meet your newsroom’s distribution needs without bloating them.
Overall, the VIP team was inspired to see how journalists and newsrooms are using WordPress to create new frontiers in digital publishing. To learn more, visit the VIP-hosted journalists.org.
Upcoming Events
WAN-IFRA is hosting the Digital Content Expo (DCX) and World Publishing Expo parallel to each other from October 9-11 in Berlin. While the World Expo focuses on print strategies, DCX examines digital trends for content production, distribution, management, and monetization.
WordCamp US is coming to Nashville again on December 7-9. Organizers just announced the fifth round of speakers. November 1 is the deadline to get a printed badge (and share your preferred shirt size).
NICAR is slated for March 7-10 in Newport Beach, California. Sign up for the NICAR mailing list to stay up to date with conference announcements.
The first batches of tickets have dropped for WordCamp Europe! It goes down June 20-22, also in Berlin. While may seem like a long time from now, tickets always sell out, so grab yours fast.
See how Big Bite’s custom blocks streamline publishing for Amnesty International.
Update: Big Bite and Amnesty have rolled many of the features you’ll see below into Benenson, a new open source theme any organization can use.
The most exciting thing around the WordPress community right now is the new editor experience. The Gutenberg project has transformed what it’s like to create content and manage pages and sections. It has also offered a new approach to matching a team’s existing workflow, and allowing editorial teams to work in the context of what the site and pages actually look like. And it has made a flexible, granular reusability of individual elements across projects and even across the community much more directly available.
Agency partner Big Bite has built an entirely new site platform for Nobel Peace Prize Winner Amnesty International, with the new WordPress editor as its foundation, via the Gutenberg plugin. They focused on developing custom blocks and a core theme that serve as the heart of Amnesty’s digital efforts moving forward. More than a new site, this is a framework for applying consistent brand identity, design, and user experience standards to many new sites and for allowing creators to spin up new, powerful sites quickly and with ease. And as a part of Big Bite’s and Amnesty’s shared commitment to give back to the community, large parts of the project will be released as open source components for anyone to use.
In the short video above, you’ll see a quick overview of what it’s like to build new sites quickly and publish and manage content in Amnesty’s new platform launching in September.
August kicked off with the second annual WordCamp for Publishers in Chicago, IL, where presentations and discussions centered on how publishers can protect and nurture the open web and all of its core values.
Meanwhile, as awareness efforts kicked up a notch, the new WordPress editor Gutenberg plugin surpassed 100,000 active installs within a week (and is now past 300,000). It’s now a central component of many new enterprise site projects slated for Q4 launch.
A fitting signoff as WordCamp for Publishers 2018 drew to a close with a day at the ballpark
Gutenberg News and Notes
The latest tools, demos, and updates around the block-based editor coming to WordPress 5.0.
After several releases in August bringing issue fixes and user experience enhancements including the new “Spotlight Mode” and Unified Toolbar design, the Gutenberg plugin is now at version 3.7.
Currently at 300,000+ active installs, the plugin crossed the 100,000+ threshold just a week after the “Try Gutenberg” prompt appeared in the WordPress dashboard.
Automattician and core contributor Gary Pendergast offered big picture thoughts on the long range vision and benefits of the Gutenberg project.
News and Releases
Updates from around VIP, our clients, and our agency and technical partners.
Catch up with notes and highlights from the second annual WordCamp for Publishers with co-organizer and Automattician Alexis Kulash’s comprehensive recap.
Get to know new VIP technical partner Setka and their print design-inspired, Gutenberg ready, content creation tools.
The Brightcove Video Connect plugin version 1.5 is now available, bringing multiple enhancements and bug fixes.
Matthew Ingram at Columbia Journalism Reviewinterviewed VIP client Civil‘s founder Matthew Iles ahead of the CVL token sale coming up on September 18th.
Congratulations to the 10up team for the successful launch of nobelprize.org. Learn more about their origins and work in VIP’s latest partner profile. And check out the public release of Distributor, which uses the REST API to make it easy to reuse content across sites.
Austin Smith, CEO of Alley, authored an extended report and recommendations around the future of local news for Lenfest, also excerpted in a piece for Nieman Lab.
Reaktiv Studios wrote an ode to Bootstrap, their favorite CSS.
Congratulations to rtCamp for their contributions to WP-CLI v2!
We’ve soft launched a VIP Dashboard for our VIP Go platform at https://dashboard.wpvip.com/. Please open a ticket to let us know what you think. We’re planning the first major feature, which will be data sync.
This month we profiled VIP agency partner 10up, whose work includes enterprise WordPress tools including Distributor and Ads.txt Manager. They have also contributed greatly to efforts around the new WordPress editor. 10up comprises more than 150 full-time staff members globally, and works with a wide array of clients including Facebook, Microsoft, Google, the State of California, ESPN, and AARP. Read the full profile to find out about 10up’s agency history, vision for the future, and why they chose the three words “Dedicated,” “Creative,” and “Welcoming” to describe their culture.
Media and Marketing Notes
Research and perspectives on the business of media and the practice of marketing.
“Unless we build in natural alternatives to ad revenue models we can’t be an honest authentic media brand.”
Frederik Anderson in Digiday explains Vice’s strategy to grow its revenue streams through ‘offline activations’ like music festivals and food courts.
“Even as they draw from journalism standards and training, podcasters seem to embrace the idea that their tone, style and motivations go beyond traditional techniques, defining their craft in non-journalistic terms such as intimacy and connection.”
Janet Saidi of the LA Times on how podcasts are changing journalism.
“The best parts of Chicagoist, the ones that Chance would be wise to preserve, were its broad editorial freedom and its focus on niche neighborhood stories that might escape the attention of larger outlets.”
Kim Bellware speculates on the implications of Chance the Rapper’s purchase of local news site Chicagoist.
Upcoming Events
#ONA18, the Online News Association‘s annual conference is just a few days away! Sept. 13-15 in Austin, Texas. Find us at the Midway when you get there. VIP is proud to support ONA as both a sponsor and the platform for ONA’s sites. You’ll find us in several spots on the schedule, including Steph Yiu’s Table Talk and a session with New York Times’ senior editor Hamilton Boardman called, “OMGWTFBBQ: Breaking News Without Breaking Your Site.”
The latest BigWP London is also just around the corner, September 13th at News UK headquarters in London at 6:30 pm. The four flashtalks are as follows: WordPress Multisite for large and high traffic multilingual websites by Giuseppe Mazzapica of Inpsyde; Rebuilding NobelPrize.org by Gabe Karp of 10up; How we won the World Cup by Joel Davis, News UK; and Using Gutenberg in production, by Jason Agnew, Big Bite. Space is limited and signups will close 24 hours before the event.
Look out, too, for a surprising amount of WordPress-related content at Drupal Europe! Automattic will again be sponsoring the event’s Open Web Lounge, to promote sharing and networking between open source projects, communities and influencers; and there are several familiar names from the WordPress world on the session program.
We’re excited to announce our newest technical partner, Setka! Setka creates tools that make it easy for content creators to produce beautiful, customizable, multimedia content pages that work across platforms.
Part of what makes the Setka Editor special is it brings the elements we love about print design into the interactive environment of the screens we use today. It puts power directly in the hands of editors and designers to create stunning content with beautiful features—without much extra effort (and without always having to rely on developers). They can change page layouts, add interactive and multimedia elements, and make other design decisions based on what will serve their content best. The user-friendly WYSIWYG interface combined with customizable layout and style templates give the people producing content creative freedom while making sure they stay on-brand with design.
While the user experience is a breeze, the Setka Editor is working hard behind the scenes. It’s already compatible with the new Gutenberg editor, and will stay on track as WordPress moves to version 5.0. It pairs with the AMP for WordPress plugin to generate eye-catching Accelerated Mobile Pages. It generates the mobile version of your article pages automatically. The HTML is stored in the database, so your content design stays the same even if you uninstall the plugin, and pages can be exported in any necessary formats. The plugin seamlessly integrates into both editorial processes and scaling technical infrastructures to keep everything moving efficiently.
“We’re so proud to be a WordPress.com VIP Partner, since VIP and the WordPress community value design as much as we do. We can’t wait to keep adding more features to help you easily produce amazing content,” said Katya Bazilevskaya, co-founder and CEO of Setka, who spoke on visual storytelling at this year’s VIP Workshop in Napa.
If you’d like to know more about how Setka can improve your daily workflow, drop us a note.
The second annual WordCamp for Publishers went down last week in Chicago with the theme “Taking Back The Open Web.” This theme was sparked from questions explored in a 2016 post by Drupal founder Dries Buytaert:
Do we want the experiences of the next billion web users to be defined by open values of transparency and choice, or by the siloed and opaque convenience of the walled-garden giants dominating today?
As conference organizers, we challenged speakers to touch on whether an open web ever truly existed, what state it’s in now, the consequences of a closed web, and how publishers can protect and encourage an open web.
Overall, we saw common themes emerge around empowering publishers to innovate and evolve. There was a shared belief that ethical journalism depends on an open web, with inclusivity as a fundamental building block to creating responsibly for the future.
Each of these topics has raised significant discussion in the WordPress community, and we envisioned #WCPub as a platform to discuss the state of the publishing industry and future of WordPress in the open web together, with folks from all different backgrounds in the industry. Thankfully, our speakers and attendees were more than up to the task!
Those who weren’t able to attend in person could live stream the entire event.
Where Code Meets Community
John Eckman, CEO of 10up, was particularly drawn to the challenge of the event’s theme as it related to identity, inclusivity, and imagined communities. John explored the philosophical roots of the open source movement and how those ideas influenced modern-day open source ethics, software freedom, and netizen empowerment.
“Accessibility should be a pervasive feature and not shoved in. We have allowed ourselves to walk away from it. Inclusivity should be a core principle.” @jeckman#wcpub
Austin Smith, CEO and co-founder of Alley, presented his research on the narrow path for local news. He argued in order to protect hyperlocal journalism, we’ll need to convince more readers to pay for the content they consume. We’ll also need to empower local publishers to innovate formats, ownership, and distribution.
Tyson Bird, projects designer at GateHouse Media, and David Parsons, senior software engineer at USA Today, spoke about their use of WordPress at scale to enable publishers to manage large media networks with a variety of markets and staff.
An Emphasis on Engagement
Caroline Porter, consultant for the Shorenstein Center on Media, Harry Backlund, co-founder and director of operations at City Bureau, and Sarah Schmalbach, resident at the Lenfest Institute, discussed the ethical collection of user data, experimenting with innovation around reader engagement, and two-way audience communication in a panel session moderated by Sherry Salko, director of the Amplify News Project.
Eric Ulken, a consultant, and Nick Johnson, founder of Pigeon Paywall, shared differing viewpoints on monetization strategies that ultimately focused on catering to users and their needs.
Key challenge of modern journalism: “There aren’t enough good ways for online readers to compensate publications in ways proportionate to the value they receive.” –@eulken on paywalls #wcpub
There was a lot of excitement around Gutenberg, and Chris Van Patten, founder of Tomodomo, open sourced his team’s documentation project on best design practices using Gutenberg live during his presentation.
Chris wasn’t the only presenter to live open source a project during a talk. Russell Heimlich, lead developer at Spirited Media, open sourced his team’s image CDN project to much applause.
The Trust Project also announced their Trust Indicators plugin during the event.
Sina Bahram, president of Prime Access Consulting, and Pattie Reaves, senior user experience developer at Alley, discussed the importance of developing with accessibility in mind.
Two lightning talks also addressed site accessibility concerns: one focusing on the particular needs of those with dyslexia, and another which offered a solution to accessibility through integration with Alexa.
Jim Birch, senior Drupal engineer at Kanopi Studios, walked us through the value of correctly implementing metadata for content and showed off the tools for doing so.
Shayda Torabi, director of marketing at WebDevStudios, and Jodie Riccelli, director of client strategy at WebDevStudios, demoed a number of workflows with streamlined editorial experiences all contained entirely within WordPress.
Brands big and small are using WordPress. But when we look at the editing workflow, we're all piecing together stacks of frankentools before content gets into WordPress. Premise: Can we centralize everything in WordPress instead? #wcpub
Keanan Koppenhaver, CTO at Alpha Particle, showcased a few modern use cases of the REST API, from the Techcrunch redesign, a mobile news simulator, Amazon Echo integration, virtual reality, and more.
AMPlifying Performance
Barb Palser, global product partnerships at Google, argued we should look at site performance as a product, with a focus on quantifying the opportunity to increase user engagement.
Leo Postovoit and Ryan Kienstra of XWPwent a step further and demonstrated how to improve performance “up to 85%” simply by integrating AMP.
On the flip side, Brian Boyer, VP of product and people at Spirited Media, delivered a passionate talk explaining his team’s decision to leave the AMP platform to focus on engaging readers in a different manner.
The always-quotable @brianboyer on user experience: "We want people to love us, and nobody's going to love us when we're punching them in the face." #wcpub
Attendees voted on Unconference session proposals to explore hyperspecific themes. The winning topics (“Gutenberg Therapy Session,” “Direct Revenue Discussion,” and “The Future of WordCamp for Publishers”) served as an opportunity for many to share their concerns about specific industry trends.
Workshops dealt with a variety of topics important to the community:
Joshua Wold, design strategist at XWP, dove into creative thinking through development problems by sketching.
Ernie Hsiung, CTO at WhereBy.Us, fostered a discussion about communication across stakeholder groups.
We held a series of lightning talks that ranged widely in topic: from determining whether WordPress was a product or community, to implementing transparency standards for news; from solving content reuse and syndication woes to finding smarter and more efficient ways to create responsive HTML emails and manage media at scale, and even a case study of the need to combine mobile and AMP themes.
A Look to the Future
Then — all too soon — it was over!
We wrapped up the event with a shout-out from NiemanLab naming us WordPress’s publishing summit and a trip to the ballfield to see the White Sox take on the Indians.
Many thanks to all the speakers, sponsors, organizers and volunteers who made this fantastic week possible. Hope to see everyone at next year’s WordCamp for Publishers!
10up is a digital agency focused on delivering finely crafted websites, apps, and tools that advance business objectives. They have been a WordPress.com VIP Featured Partner since 2013. Founded in California with a fully distributed team, 10up’s Webby-winning and Emmy-nominated work includes projects with household names like Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and The New York Times.
The 10up team at this year’s company-wide summit
What’s your agency’s origin story?
10up was founded by Jake Goldman in 2011. Jake helped his prior company abandon proprietary CMS software starting around 2008, giving him a front-row seat to WordPress’s rapid iteration from a basic blogging platform to a compelling content management system, and the delight that it created for its customers. Jake was eager to master WordPress: he built plugins that became popular, contributed to WordPress itself, and traveled around the country to participate in WordCamps.
With training in business, information systems, and software development, and an eye for beautiful craftsmanship, Jake saw an opportunity to start an agency that could position itself as a leading provider of integration and delivery of WordPress. The rise of “distributed” remote-work companies, the remote nature of WordPress core itself, and the rising international WordPress community suggested it was also time for a 100% distributed agency.
Jake set up shop in his small home office and got to work bootstrapping 10up. From its earliest days, 10up focused on superior engineering quality and elegant editorial/administrative user experiences Leveraging a strong network of connections, Jake quickly welcomed exciting clients like 9to5mac, Trulia, and TechCrunch.
With the help of the earliest additions to his team, many of whom still remain at 10up and some of whom have gone onto to impressive roles elsewhere in the industry, Jake grew 10up from 1 employee – himself – to more than 100 in less than 5 years – without an ounce of outside investment.
The name 10up comes from finishing that last 10% — the difference that extra polish, that extra level of attention, makes. –Jake Goldman
Pick three words that describe your agency culture.
Dedicated. Our team understands that we’re a services business; our values are rooted in an empathy and dedication to the needs of our clients and colleagues, as well as the broader open-source and WordPress community. 10uppers consistently go above and beyond expectations to jump in and help when a client or fellow teammate needs support.
Creative. This is a team of problem solvers – strategists, designers, engineers, and so on. Whether it’s a discreet and specific solution to a customer need or an innovative approach to synchronizing developer environments or managing new standards like Ads.txt, this team is constantly finding new ways to solve the challenges we face every day.
Welcoming. Maybe it’s something about our remote culture, our in-depth orientation, or a high growth team culture… but almost everyone who starts at 10up comments on how inviting their team lead, fellow teammates, and craft leadership are in welcoming them aboard and offering support through their beginning and tenure. Even though we’re infrequently in the same room together, there’s a palpable sense of camaraderie and cheer at our annual all-hands summit.
10up team members roll up their sleeves in a client project work session
Tell us about a client project you are especially proud of.
Where to start! If we had to pick one, we’d highlight our work with Mayo Clinic, building out an internal knowledge portal and management intranet that tens of thousands of nurses use every day, around the country, to collaboratively participate in advancing patient care. It was a multiyear project, and our team did a brilliant job of designing the user experience, engineering a scalable solution, supporting change management, and training both developers and administrators. As a service-centric organization, it’s immensely rewarding to know that our work is helping other incredibly dedicated service professionals (nurses) and their patients, every day, in some small way.
What are you most excited about in the WordPress community right now?
We’ve been very focused from day one on the experience of creating and managing content – the back end and editorial user flows that can have an enormous impact on the efficiency of the business and the happiness of the staff responsible for pushing out content. It’s why we chose WordPress as our platform – a user experience-centric ethos to our practice.
With that said, it’s hard not to call out the massive effort to revamp the writing and content layout experience – Gutenberg.
It’s exciting in the sense that it shakes up the way we think about editorial page creation and curation, and forces us to think about some old and stale paradigms in new ways. It’s cause for us to go back and take another look at some of our solutions and plugins, and breathe a bit of new life into them. Some of the principals of the block-based layout authentically offer an opportunity to improve the way we think about modules. That’s been especially evident as we approached support for the classic and new editor for some new open source projects – like Simple Podcasting – and found that the user interface made a lot more sense in the new context.
What’s your favorite conference or event of the year, and why?
We love seeing the WordPress community evolve a set of professional industry and market-specific conferences. WP Campus and WordCamp for Publishers provide a nice, focused iteration of the wide-appeal community events.
On a very different note, our team also gets quite a bit out of the Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA) event, in terms of professional development and peer inspiration.
(And the sixth: Ask yourself a question and answer it)What are you looking to accomplish in 2018?
We’re pushing on several fronts. Our team is growing again this year; we expect to expand our team by ~25-30%, and we hope to achieve that while retaining an engaging and supportive culture and employing systems that ensure we uphold the highest standards for craftsmanship. Some major growth areas include the 10up Europe team and our strategic consulting including Audience & Revenue.
We’re also more invested than ever in contributing to and helping WordPress succeed as a platform, through our Open Source Practice. We want to see growing adoption of some of the solutions we’ve put out there that push WordPress forward as a platform, like our Distributor plugin.
We also want to do a better job of communicating the exciting and innovative work we’re doing, and the ways in which we’re growing, to our customers and a larger community interested in 10up. Expect to see more stories from 10up and more effective ways of staying apprised of those stories.
Editorial/administrative user experience and workflow design
Audience and revenue strategy
Integrations and migration between WordPress and other platforms
High scale and forward-thinking implementation of WordPress
Internal communication & workflow tools
Team augmentation
24/7 site management
Currently working with: Microsoft, Facebook, Google, The New York Times Co, the State of California, Walmart, ESPN, and AARP
Agency highlights:
More than 150 full-time staff working from around the world.
In-house expertise includes Front and Back End Engineering, Visual Design, UX Design, Systems/Cloud Infrastructure Engineering, Online Advertising, Analytics, SEO, and general project management and strategic consulting.
Delivered hundreds of successful, enterprise-grade projects over our 7.5 years of existence.
Two of our interactive projects with AMC Networks were nominated for Emmy Awards. Our client projects have been nominated for numerous Webby Awards, with several wins under our belt.
We’ve produced outstanding projects across most major verticals, including collaborations with household brand names in finance, healthcare, media and publishing, academia, retail, food and beverage, and nonprofits … to name a few.
The new WordPress editor Gutenberg hit a major milestone in July, completing its MVP feature goals and moving its focus to bug fixes and compatibility. VIP client Quartz shipped v.5 of their site, an incredible fifth full version in six years and this one faster than ever. We welcomed Slack’s SlackHq.com to the VIP family. And Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg joined Kara Swisher on her Recode Decode podcast to talk about WordPress, the future of the open web, and lots more.
Read on for updates from all over, including an in-depth client spotlight with the founders of Civil, and a talk by Airbnb content lead Hayley Nelson on the content strategy principles behind major brand marketing campaigns. We’ve also added a platform updates section, where you can get a quick summary of all of the changes to our platform in the last month.
The latest tools, demos, and updates around the block-based editor coming to WordPress 5.0.
Gutenberg is officially considered ‘feature complete‘ as of version 3.2 released in early July! Two successive releases this month (July 20 and July 30) included a multitude of improvements, from strengthening the API surface to converting existing content to blocks.
We explored one of the more frequently asked questions about Gutenberg – plugin compatibility – and shared our findings and advice for evaluating your own plugins.
Gutenberg Times curated this list of 20 Gutenberg talks on WordPress.tv.
Inpsyde’s David Remer gave a talk on Gutenberg’s state management, introducing the Slot/Fill concept
Every other week, Zac Gordon and Joe Casabona get together and talk about the latest developments in Gutenberg and WordPress 5.0.
News and Releases
Updates from around VIP, our clients, and our agency and technical partners.
Congratulations to the entire Quartz team on their launch of the latest version of QZ.com, which we’re honored to host on VIP. Earlier this month, Elan Kiderman, senior product designer at Quartz, shared his approach to building ambitious editorial projects (Map of the Internet, anyone?).
The open source WordPress Coding Standards (WPCS) project released milestone version 1.0. This project has had 54 contributors in its 9 year span including 5 from VIP.
Kara Swisher interviewed Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg on the Recode Decode podcast, covering current industry issues like data privacy and advertising, the future of the open web, and our approach to distributed work at Automattic.
Facebookannounced that starting in August, third-party tools like Publicize (the tool for WordPress.com and Jetpack-powered sites that connects your site to major social media platforms) will no longer share posts automatically to Facebook profiles. VIP clients can consult this Lobby post for details on navigating the change.
The Wikimedia Foundation announced a global collaboration to increase offline access to Wikipedia and the Wikimedia sites.
Adam Silverstein of 10up published a guest post on Google‘s Open Source Blog reflecting on his experiences as a contributor, and received a Google Open Source Peer Bonus for his work bringing MathML to AMP.
HumanMade helped UNISON tell a story of digital adoption inside a trade union. Libby Barker was interviewed at WordCamp Europe about how a decoupled WordPress admin can make enterprise sites more flexible and engaging.
Inpsyde launched a new composer package, Inpsyde Assets.
Efficiency was the name of the game at Reaktiv Studios this month. Nick Croft wrote about jumpstarting projects with WP CLI scaffolding and Chris Ford discussed her recipe mix of project management tools at the Dungeons & Dragons-themed WordCamp Orange County.
Earlier this year, Trew Knowledge and the Canadian Olympic Committee were named an official honoree in the 2018 Webby Awards for best Sports Team website.
July has been a busy month of enhancements, releases, and maintenance for our VIP Go platform. If you haven’t tried out our VIP CLI tool for our VIP Go platform yet, please give it a go. We also added support for using a continuous integration service to build Javascript, CSS, SVG, etc. If this floats your boat and would improve your workflow, we have some documentation for you.
Maintenance: Removed TLS v1.0 from our VIP Go platform on July 11 (Lobby post)
Media and Marketing Notes
Research and perspectives on the business of media and the practice of marketing.
There’s a strong parallel between what Disney has accomplished and what today’s brands are trying to do: Find the intersection of strong stories, customer emotions, and constantly evolving technology. For marketers, that can be a hint—not only at how to approach creative problem solving—but also how to explore new approaches to your hiring and staffing strategies.
Time and again tech reporting gets caught in the hype rather than reality; a super-fast but impractical rail alternative proposed by Elon Musk gets tons of coverage, but it’s difficult to get real rail projects funded … Maybe we should simply scrap the idea of a “tech desk” altogether.
James Ball makes the case for a new model of tech journalism.
Civilis a new WordPress-based platform using the blockchain to support, distribute and protect journalism, developed by partner Alley and launched recently on VIP. Civil’s first fleet of newsrooms launched earlier this summer and continues to grow. Read more about the project and its underpinnings in this extended spotlight interview. And watch for the CVL token launch, the token that allows a journalist to open a newsroom or a citizen to have a stake in challenges and votes, on September 18.
Upcoming Events
We’re starting to make packing lists for #ONA18, the Online News Association‘s annual conference, Sept. 13-15 in Austin, Texas. VIP is proud to support ONA as both a sponsor (look for our booth at the Midway!) and as a hosting and support provider for journalists.org and ONA’s other sites. Don’t miss our very own Steph Yiu serving up double the trouble at the event: she’ll be hosting a Table Talk and presenting alongside New York Times’ senior editor Hamilton Boardman in a session called, “OMGWTFBBQ: Breaking News Without Breaking Your Site.”
The next BigWP London meetup, our gathering of developers, product people, and editors who work on enterprise WordPress sites, is set for September 18 and will fill up fast. Reserve your place now. Here’s a YouTube playlist with talks from last December’s BigWP London event.
WordCamp for Publishersis right around the corner, August 8-10 in Chicago. The full tickets have closed, but you can still reserve your spot to attend without the guarantee of swag and evening social event attendance. It’s a fantastic event and we are proud to both sponsor and participate again this year. Hear directly from one of the organizers on what to expect.
Rumor has it Tracy Levesque will grace the stage at WordCamp Philly, which goes down October 27 and 28. Call for speakers closed this week, so keep a close eye as the first presentations get announced. In the meantime, you can enjoy Tracy’s talk, “Diversity Works” from this year’s VIP Workshop.
Major WordCamps are going down this month in Montréal, Moscow, Minneapolis, Mexico City, Omaha, and so many more. Check out the full schedule for your next chance to join the fun.
Hayley Nelson has spent the past two decades of her career bringing digital tools and technology to journalists. Among other accomplishments, she helped shepherd the New York Times into the era of digital media by launching its first blogs, built an award-winning digital team at Wired Magazine, and launched CNET in four Asian markets.
As head of content at Airbnb, Hayley is focused on value-based storytelling that engages consumers across platforms and devices. Her work has been building off their 2018 We Accept Superbowl commercial.
In her talk, “Content Ecosystem Thinking” at the 2018 VIP Workshop, Hayley outlines a path for marketers to leverage the tricks of the publishing trade to put the reader at the center of their digital efforts. The most successful brands, she argues, are tying every piece of content to their company’s core values. Think Everlane’s transparent factories and the commitment from Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson to hire 10,000 refugees. “Who are we, and what are the values that we want to stand up for? How do we bring our mission to life? … It’s the brand’s job to become a great storyteller.”
Patagonia did a documentary on people whose lives are transformed by the sea. One person profiled is this woman who is a deep-sea spearfisher who catches fish and makes sushi, another is this surfer guy in Tahiti, and it’s just a really compelling documentary — and you hardly notice but they may or may not be wearing Patagonia swimsuits. That’s how subtle it is.
Watch the full video to go behind the scenes on Airbnb’s Not Yet Trending campaign, which ties beautiful videography of destinations on the cusp of trending into two of the brand’s core messages, “it’s a host-led world,” and “the magic of travel,” to drive would-be travelers to book on the platform.
I want you to think of us as that edgy, underground friend that’s telling you where to go because it’s the most interesting place in the world — and maybe you come back six months later when you’re ready to book a trip.
You’ll also learn her ten-step process for organizing a global content strategy, including the non-trite way to capitalize on social media holidays and how introducing agile to marketing processes has transformed the way she approaches campaigns.
If you weren’t able to join us at VIP Workshop this year, you can still catch dozens of the sessions, including speakers from TechCrunch, Google, Cloudinary, the VIP team, our agency partners, and many more on this YouTube playlist.
Congratulations to the open source WordPress Coding Standards (WPCS) project for its recent milestone release of version 1.0. WPCS provides WordPress-specific rulesets for PHP Codesniffer (PHPCS) to help developers learn about and adhere to WordPress coding conventions. The 1.0 release contains important breaking changes and “tons of bug fixes”.
The release of version 1.0 is a landmark moment and a culmination of 9 years of work. We are very proud of our participation in the WPCS project over the years, and will continue to do so into the future. With 54 contributors since the project began, 5 of them from VIP, and 7 for this latest release, WPCS has been a hugely successful team effort.
WordCamp London 2017 Contributor Day, photo by Pradeep Singh.
Of the many changes present within this release, the deprecation of the WordPress-VIP ruleset is probably the most relevant to VIP clients. This ruleset has not been valid for some time, as we have our own VIP coding standards, available for public use. VIPCS rulesets include WordPress-VIP-Go and WordPressVIPMinimum.
If you are a VIP client and you are not using the alternative rulesets, then we would strongly recommend switching to these. If you used the WordPress-VIP ruleset for any other reason, you should use WordPress-Extra or WordPress instead.
As with all open source projects, WPCS are always grateful for any contributions, from reporting bugs in the current rulesets to assistance with the actual code. If you are interested in assisting them, please get in touch with them via their Github page.
Featured image credit: WordCamp London Contributor Day 2017, photo by Pradeep Singh.
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