Post Status Podcasts

Welcome to The Excerpt Episode 4, part of the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can find on iTunes. With The Excerpt, we cover a few of our favorite stories from the Post Status Club over the last week or two. The primary goal is to keep it short and informational: we keep the podcast to around 15 minutes. In Episode 3, I'm joined by Daniel Espinoza, who is a WordPress developer with a focus on eCommerce, and he also owns ShopPlugins, an eCommerce plugin marketplace for EDD and WooCommerce. Stories discussed: Automattic versus WordPress WordPress 4.2, RC 1 Clever use cases for the WordPress REST API. Taxes! (members only) Big marketing for hosted website solutions. Also in Notes (members only).

Welcome to The Excerpt Episode 3, part of the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can find on iTunes. Draft consists of two formats: long form interviews like I’ve done for a long time, and The Excerpt for a summary of news around the WordPress ecosystem. With The Excerpt, we cover a few of our favorite stories from the Post Status Club over the last week or two. The primary goal is to keep it short and informational: we keep the podcast to around 15 minutes. In Episode 3, I'm joined by Beka Rice, who writes the excellent eCommerce blog SellWithWP and is a partner at eCommerce company SkyVerge. Stories discussed: Mesh by Automattic, an in-progress app I discovered by accident. Release leads for WordPress 4.3, and 4.4 were announced. April Fools' roundup (Club only, but we talk about them individually), including my own about Jetpack bundling WordPress. A theme shop's year in review. I also covered this in the Club.

StoryCorp is an organization that aims "to provide people of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share and preserve the stories of our lives." Featured stories are broadcast nationally on NPR. StoryCorp has published more than 50,000 interviews with almost 100,000 participants since they launched in 2003. A small to mid-size non-profit organization, StoryCorp's interviews are logged in the Library of Congress, and over the years they have created new and ingenious ways to enable story telling. There are recording booths in a number of cities throughout the country where anyone can go and record and interview or story. The first was in Grand Central Station, though it's since shut down due to budget issues. However, booths are open in Atlanta, San Francisco, and Chicago where anyone can make a reservation to record. They also have an Airstream trailer that travels the country and records interviews all over the place. Creating ways for people to share stories is the heart of StoryCorps mission. [caption id="attachment_12144" align="aligncenter" width="752"] The StoryCorps MobileBooth. Credit: StoryCorp Flickr[/caption] One WordPress developer that worked on the StoryCorp project told me, "I cry almost every time" as they listen to StoryCorps on their local NPR station every Friday morning. The stories to tend to be very powerful. I was nearly brought to tears by one where a lady hugs her son's murderer. Another moving story (from my hometown no less), features a father that comes to terms with his daughter's homosexuality. Or there's one where President Obama interviews a boy who overcame adversity to join My Brother's Keeper. Record stories anywhere The latest initiative for creating ways for people to share their story is via StoryCorps.me, a website and companion apps that make it easy for anyone with a smartphone to record an interview and publish it. StoryCorps.me is built on WordPress, and utilizes the WordPress REST API to enable access to a customized content architecture. The StoryCorps app utilizes the API to consume data and publish stories from the app back to the website. I interviewed Dean Haddock, Director of Digital & Technical Innovation at StoryCorp, about how the idea for the app came about, how they use and think of WordPress, and other insights from their short three month development period. A national day of listening Dean says he thinks the StoryCorps app really dates back to a program they ran three years ago called A National Day of Listening, where instead of shopping on Black Friday, they hosted an event where people could tell stories. Dean's team expanding on the idea, and the event turned into a micro-site using SoundCloud's API that made that process easier. That project eventually expanded into the idea that would become StoryCorps.me. Funding for the app The StoryCorps app was funded thanks to StoryCorps founder Dave Isay winning this year's TED Prize Winner. He gave a TED Talk in Vancouver just a few weeks ago, where he shared how everyone has a story to tell. [caption id="attachment_12145" align="aligncenter" width="752"] Dave Isay at TED[/caption] The TED Prize is awarded to an individual with a creative, bold vision to spark global change. By leveraging the TED community’s resources and investing $1 million into a powerful idea, each year the TED Prize supports one wish to inspire the world. - TED Prize website His wish after winning the TED Prize was to "to grow this digital archive of the collective wisdom of humanity." During the TED Talk, he noted that StoryCorps is "the single largest collection of human voices ever collected." The new app makes this mission even more plausible, by having almost no barrier for interview creation. The $1 million TED Prize made it possible. Development of the StoryCorps app With "one tap", interviews can be created and uploaded to the StoryCorps.me website and the Library of Congress archive. Dave shared some of his vision for the app during the TED Talk: Imagine, for example, a national homework assignment where every high school student studying U.S. history across the country records an interview with an elder over Thanksgiving, so that in one single weekend an entire generation of American lives and experiences are captured. Development of the app was managed on three levels. The StoryCorps team did project management, communication, and handled RFPs for app and website development. They also ensured that everything fit the StoryCorps model, and ensured that the new website and app talked to existing StoryCorps software and APIs properly. 10up built the website infrastructure, manages scalability issues, and managed the integration of the WordPress REST API. MAYA design designed and built the app for the end-user, utilizing PhoneGap so that the app could be launched simultaneously to both iOS an

Welcome to The Excerpt, part of the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can also find on iTunes. Draft consists of two formats: long form interviews like I’ve done for a long time, and The Excerpt for a summary of news around the WordPress ecosystem. With The Excerpt, we cover a few of our favorite stories from the Post Status Club over the last week or two. The primary goal is to keep it short and informational: we keep the podcast to 15 minutes. Content covered in The Excerpt will largely be samples from the members only content, but may also cover free articles and resources. You don’t have to be a member to enjoy The Excerpt, but it is a nice way to preview what members get every day. Here’s Episode 2, which Julie Kuehl hosted with me: Shiny Installs removed from 4.2, in Beta 3 release, (Beta release and Aaron's post). Pagely and WP Engine are growing. Finding your place, by Rarst on HeroPress 1.2 of the REST API (Original release post).

Welcome to The Excerpt, part of the Post Status Draft podcast, which was submitted to iTunes recently. Draft will consist of two formats: long form interviews like I've done for a long time, and The Excerpt for a summary of news around the WordPress ecosystem. With The Excerpt, we'll cover a few of our favorite stories from the Post Status Club over the last week or two. The primary goal is to keep it short and informational: we set a hard stop at 15 minutes. Content covered in The Excerpt will largely be samples from the members only content, but may also cover free articles and resources. You don't have to be a member to enjoy The Excerpt, but it is a nice way to preview what members get every day. Here's Episode 1, which Brian Richards hosted with me: Stories discussed: WordPress Beta 1 & Beta 2 — April 22nd live date Recommendationss to improve the WordPress editor by Mark Root-Wiley. Yoast, WooCommerce, AffiliateWP, and others’ security updates. Growth from free themes. I will try and have guest hosts as much as possible. They may rotate or it might just be a few people that are relatively consistent. We'll see how it goes, and your feedback will always be welcome. Let me know what you think about the new show.

Jonathan Williamson is the co-founder and COO of CGCookie, a membership website that provides as an educational resource for computer graphics and modeling. CGCookie has been around since 2008, and today is a network of five websites, has thousands of paying members, a team of six full time employees plus a number of contractors. CGCookie is built completely on WordPress and has a built in membership component. Some astute readers may recognize both the site and Jonathan's name; Jonathan is Pippin Williamson's identical twin brother, and Pippin has worked with Jonathan on CGCookie many times. So, in this interview, you're not listening to me talk to Pippin -- though it sounds like it -- but I'm talking to Jonathan Williamson. Jonathan is as passionate about CG, modeling, 3D printing, and the software that surrounds these disciplines as Pippin is about WordPress and programming. It was a pleasure to talk to Jonathan about what it's like to run a membership site that runs on WordPress. I think this interview will be beneficial for those that want to run a membership site, and also those that work with clients who make their living off of their website. How CGCookie evolved CGCookie started as a blog with news, tutorials, and resources for CG enthusiasts. The first form of its monetization was by selling the source files for the various tutorials. Within about two years, Jonathan and co-founder Wes Burke decided to add a membership component that ended up working far better than they anticipated. Jonathan has been working full-time on CGCookie since around the summer of 2009. They originally launched on aMember, before eventually migrating to Pippin's Restrict Content Pro plugin, along with Easy Digital Downloads. Today, CGCookie has more than 120,000 free users, and they have around 4,700 paid members. Since 2008, CGCookie have managed to not have a full time web developer until February of 2014, when they hired Nick Haskins. You may recognize Nick as the founder of Aesop Stories as well. Nick manages front-end development for the site, and they still don't have a backend developer -- though a backend developer and designer are on their roadmap. How CGCookie's eCommerce setup runs Considering Jonathan is using his brother's own plugins in the real world, it makes for a great avenue for feedback and insight for Pippin to improve those products. CGCookie is using Restrict Content Pro for memberships themselves, and EDD for their store. We talked about whether EDD could be used for both, or if there is room for improvement in the marriage between the two systems, and he believes there is and that it's a goal for the two plugins. For instance, currently, reporting and user management and a number of other features are independent between each plugin even though often times the users that utilize the system may overlap. I asked Jonathan about scaling WordPress and eCommerce for their large user base. He says that scaling for eCommerce has not been difficult, but with over a hundred thousand users, some default WordPress functionality has not scaled well; for instance, some admin areas create dropdowns for all users, which does not work well. Fortunately, there are some trac tickets in place currently to help solve some of these problems. Prioritizing goals for a membership site When discussing challenges running a membership site, Jonathan highlights the internal battles: balancing new features versus iterative improvements. Based on my short experience managing this membership site, I completely agree. For an example, Jonathan told me about a potential question and answer system to help his members get answers for specific technical topics that may be beyond the scope of a specific course. They believe a Stack Exchange style setup that allows them to refer their courses to specific questions would allow them to better serve their customers with the same content they already have. How do you get people to find your content that answers their question, but you don't have a way of just explicitly saying that these are the questions this course answers? They're considering a method of post to post relationships that direct courses as question answers and vice versa. For this feature and others, they try to do things with a short return on investment, but they also don't want to be a slave to it. They sometimes do things "that are important to the quality of CGCookie, that never make a dime." They removed ads last year under that very premise, to make CGCookie a better learning experience. Not the only place to learn Jonathan knows CGCookie isn't the only place to learn, so they focus on creating an excellent community and learning experience for their customers. Realizing that our sites aren't the only way to get certain information is an important thing to know to be able to better focus what we create for our users and why we create it. Pricing for CGCookie CGCookie has pricing for monthly, quarterly, or yearly pri

Last week, I was in New York City for WordCamp and some client meetings. The event was a huge success, with four full tracks of expert designers, developers, and WordPress professionals sharing what they’ve learned. I had a great time with everyone there. I saw old friends, and met new friends. I had my recording equipment with me, and I asked a question to some folks there: how has WordPress changed your life? Here are their answers: http://s3.amazonaws.com/PostStatus/DraftPodcast/how-has-wordpress-changed-your-life.mp3 Direct Download And here are just a few of the pictures I took, from WordCamp and some just from around the city. I’m not much of a photographer, but feel free to use any of these however you wish: I’d like to thank the organizers for their efforts, the sponsors for their investment in the WordPress community, the speakers for their wisdom, and the attendees for their hunger to learn and connect with like-minded individuals. If you’ve never attended a WordCamp — especially one outside of your own city — I highly encourage you do. They are so fun. There are a number of events coming up that I’ll be at as well, so I hope you’ll say hi there: WordCamp Birmingham (August 16th), WordCamp San Francisco (October 25-26th), and PressNomics (January 22nd-24th).

On May 28th, 2012, I was virtually introduced to Chris Lema. He had 653 Twitter followers at the time. I know so, because that’s how we were introduced — through an email from Twitter telling me he was now following me. At the time, he’d not even started daily writing on his personal blog; he didn’t start that until September of that year. It’s hard to imagine a time where I didn’t know who Chris Lema was, or a time where I wasn’t learning from him. Today, Chris is a significant voice in the WordPress world. He was just announced, deservedly so, in the first batch of speakers for WordCamp San Francisco. He’s been blogging nearly every day for two years. I’ve met him at a number of events. We’ve shared meals together. We’ve had phone calls where Chris gave me advice for my career and life. We even spent a week in Cape Town, South Africa traveling together for a WordCamp that I won’t forget. Chris Lema is my friend, and a mentor. I owe him a tremendous amount for his advice, his continuous generosity, and his kindness toward me. And I also know I can’t pay him back; giving to others is his passion, and I’ll never be able match that in return. What I know I can do is pay it forward. As I gain knowledge, and maybe even a shred of my own wisdom, I can pay forward that mentorship to others that are up and coming in their careers, and be to them as Chris has been to me and as others have been to Chris. I’m one of many, many people that feel this way about Chris. He now has 6,500 followers on Twitter — something I note purely as a way to compare to the beginning of this post, and highlight how many people he’s impacted in such a short time. He’s also a direct mentor to dozens of people who make their living with WordPress. What if Chris did WordPress full time? Incredibly, Chris has had this influence and impact on the WordPress community without having a full time WordPress job. For eight years, he’s been at Emphasys Software — a successful company, but not one you’d know of in the WordPress ecosystem — and he’s been coaching WordPress companies and blogging in his spare time. It makes you wonder, what would he do if his full time job were WordPress-centric? I certainly have thought so. And as Chris notes in our interview, I asked him this question while we were in Cape Town. I wanted to see what would happen with Chris full time in the WordPress world, and now we’re about to find out. Joining Crowd Favorite as CTO Chris is announcing today that he’s joining Crowd Favorite full time as its new Chief Technical Officer. Chris was already on the board of the VeloMedia Group, which has utilized the Crowd Favorite brand since its acquisition of the company late last year. CEO Karim Marucchi has wanted Chris to be a full time part of the VeloMedia group for some time as well. But the logistics weren’t easy to work out. However, in the last month or so they really pushed to make it happen, and now Chris will be the CTO as well as a chief strategist for Crowd Favorite and other companies within the VeloMedia group. Chris will focus heavily on reaching out to the enterprise space, via consulting opportunities and a variety of other concepts they are working on. Hear about Chris’ journey to full time WordPress In this interview, Chris and I talk about his journey to working full time with WordPress. We talk about his career, his entry into blogging and the WordPress community, about the structure of Crowd Favorite, and the WordPress economy in general. http://s3.amazonaws.com/PostStatus/DraftPodcast/chris-lema-post-status-draft.mp3 Direct Download It was an absolute pleasure to talk to Chris, and I’m thrilled to see him join Crowd Favorite full time. You can see Chris’ announcement on his blog, as well as Crowd Favorite’s. Also be sure to follow Chris on Twitter, and definitely tell him congratulations on this new journey.

Chris Coyier is not a stranger to most of us web workers. He’s a designer at CodePen, a writer at CSS-Tricks, and a podcaster at ShopTalk. He uses WordPress on all three of his primary projects. For years, Chris has been a consistent advocate for the platform. He develops his own websites with WordPress, but his day-to-day interactions are as a user. Chris brings a unique perspective, I believe. He did some client work early in his career, but he’s been more involved in SaaS projects and membership websites; his current membership websites are on WordPress (CSS-Tricks) and Ruby on Rails (CodePen). I asked Chris about his projects, his perspective on various aspects of WordPress, and the community around it. I enjoyed learning from him, and I hope you do too: http://s3.amazonaws.com/PostStatus/DraftPodcast/chris-coyier-post-status-draft.mp3 Direct Download What have you learned from working on membership websites? It’s just a good dang business idea. Chris was sold on the idea of membership websites from his tenure at Wufoo and SurveyMonkey (where he worked once they acquired Wufoo). He uses Pippin Williamson’s Restrict Content Pro for managing The Lodge on CSS-Tricks. At CodePen, they spend time thinking about pricing, churn, and other membership metrics. They talk about some of these things (and much more) on the CodePen Radio podcast — an awesome podcast for anyone interested in SaaS, not just CodePen. Delivering value Another aspect Chris noted about membership websites is how it makes you want to continually deliver value for customers. He always wants to make people feel like they’re getting excellent features and value for the price of their membership. Another thing he and the CodePen team are learning is prioritizing feature requests. When you are building for members, you want to build features members want; and sometimes that goes against other fixes that are less glamorous. So they are consistently trying to balance time spent on customer-facing features versus behind the scenes development. Build the feature, get the reward Chris talked about how important it is for him to build something, then be rewarded for the work he does, versus selling something and then having to build the feature for it. He experience this with his big Kickstarter project for a CSS-Tricks redesign a couple of years ago, and said that mentality was really difficult for him. What do you appreciate more now about WordPress, after using other software? WordPress comes with a lot of built-in features that many of us (I do at least) may take for granted. Need a user system? Check. Need comments? Check. Need categorization? Check. Building CodePen, Chris is able to appreciate (even more than before) just how powerful WordPress is and how much thought goes into every feature. We dove into something seemingly simple as an example: tags. It turns out that something even that simple takes a lot of thought, consideration, and user experience considerations. What it ends up as, is something you’ll have to iterate on for years to get anywhere close to how good the WordPress one works already. And that’s like the tiniest thing we could think about. Think about the login system, or something else. So his advice was to focus on simplicity and decisions when building features, because required effort grows rapidly as a feature gets more complicated. How would you compare the WordPress community to other web communities? Chris has exposure to a much broader web community than I do. I’m pretty locked into the WordPress bubble. He sees the Ruby on Rails world, the more generic web world, and attends and speaks at a slew of non-WordPress conferences every year. Even though he says he’s mostly in a WordPress bubble himself (he’s not exactly attending Drupal conferences, he notes), he thinks that the WordPress community is pretty top-notch, and hasn’t seen other communities that are “better” than the WordPress community. There’s definitely no other CMS that I’m jealous of that community. What questions about WordPress are you always seeing on the ShopTalk Podcast Chris and his co-host Dave Rupert (seriously, follow Dave and gain laughs and knowledge in life) get a lot of questions about WordPress on the ShopTalk Podcast. Some of these questions are repeated pretty frequently, and they see trends of common issues. Working locally and syncing remotely For WordPress, the most common questions tend to come around syncing the local development environment with the live environment. They’ve been recommending WP Migrate DB Pro for people trying to get around that, though Chris says he doesn’t think it’s perfect for huge websites like CSS-Tricks. I think, to a degree, the common confusion is logical. WordPress development is really centered around three different layers of “stuff”: the content (posts, pages, etc), the files in the directory, and the site management database options. I think there is plenty of room for confusion when it’s not easy to d

Finally, finally someone has done it. They’ve combined the power of self-hosted WordPress with the ease of hosted WordPress.com. Evermore is WordPress for everyone. It comes with “the most important functionality built in.” There aren’t loads of tiny upsells like other hosted services (I’m looking at you, WordPress.com), and there are only two plans. It is not free. You can pay $50 per month, or $75 per month, and each plan comes with a 10x setup fee. But the result is exactly what you’d hope for: a very powerful, functional, easy-to-use website. http://s3.amazonaws.com/PostStatus/DraftPodcast/evermore-cliff-seal-draft-podcast-poststatus.mp3 Direct Download If I had to give Evermore a competitor, I’d say it’s much closer to Squarespace than WordPress.com. But it’s built on WordPress, meaning you can leave Evermore any time and take your install with you. In fact, they sell the ability to leave Evermore as a feature. Because they should. Evermore offers you true portability and freedom: as your needs outgrow it, we’ll help you move to another service by giving you all the files and instructions you need. We’ll even suggest new hosts that will take care of you and your site. I just love that. It reminds me of Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street sending people to another store instead of trying to side-sell them what they don’t want. Little will help establish my loyalty to a service like the ease one offers me to leave it. I have no desire to take WordPress and try to hijack the open source process and make people feel like they’re closed into another product system. Who is behind Evermore? Evermore is a project by Cliff Seal and Kyle Bowman. Cliff is a respected WordPress developer and works full-time at Pardot, a division of SalesForce. Kyle is an accountant and avid WordPress fan who has invested heavily in the concerns of WordPress users. In our interview, Cliff accounts many Evermore decisions to Kyle’s attunement to the end user. Together they make Evermore, a service that represents exactly three clients — or a 50% increase since I interviewed Cliff. Yes, Evermore is a new service. But I haven’t been this excited about a relatively generic WordPress product in a long time. For one, I think Cliff is a great developer. He’s the type of guy that will work through the difficult technical challenges a hosted service will inevitably face. For instance, he helped work on the ability to symlink plugins in WordPress 3.9 before launching Evermore so he could more easily share directories between sites. Second, I love that Kyle has recently faced some of the same concerns as many of their future customers face. This allows him to be empathetic to their needs and better serve them. His business savvy as a self-described “recovering CPA” probably won’t hurt either. Why a hosted solution? More than Cliff and Kyle’s qualifications to operate a service like Evermore, I just like their motivations. Cliff and Kyle felt that there was a gap in the market for web design, development, and maintenance services. They would run into users and site owners with common frustrations: frustrations with getting their initial site setup, managing their hosting and updates, finding the right plugins to use for particular functionality, and more. They decided they had an opportunity, and they wanted to see if they could fill the gap. The process Evermore is a multi-stage process. First, there’s a setup fee. With this fee ($500 for the base plan, $750 for the secondary plan), they’ll walk you through getting a new domain or using your own, choosing a theme and setting up your site with demo content, including sample menus and widgets. The setup period is currently 24 hours, since they haven’t automated every aspect of it. They are going to force themselves to scale in this arena, versus automating things that don’t need it yet. They also want to have that time to do the kind of individual site testing they want to do with early customers. Once you get setup, they have some generic guides for helping clients manage their site. But for the most part, they don’t have an interest in massively changing the admin. They want people to feel like they are in WordPress. The features Evermore is baked with a number of features. Some highlights: Forms eCommerce Google Analytics An events calendar A slider Podcasting functionality They are also willing to add functionality over time to enable customers to do more with Evermore. However, you will never be able to add your own plugins on Evermore. It is restricted in that sense just like other hosted website solutions. This is for support and maintainability reasons. You have to have this critical mass of knowledge to operate — even the best CMS out there. So, instead what we’ve chosen to do is say, curate themes and plugins for you. Especially with plugins, we’ve gone through and combined some of the best plugins specific to features. The plugins they use are a blend of commercial plugins they pa

WP eCommerce is one of the oldest WordPress plugins you’ll find. That it’s an eCommerce plugin — built on WordPress, well before such a thing seemed sensible — is even more of a testament to just how impressive this plugin is. It’s been under development for eight years, and is nearing 3 million downloads on WordPress.org. Today, WP eCommerce is working to shed layers of duplicate functionality that can now be replaced by WordPress core. It’s a wicked thing for a product to be ahead of its time. An eCommerce plugin built on WordPress is clearly — we know today — a viable thing. But for years, as WP eCommerce chugged along, many were skeptical that eCommerce and WordPress could — or even should — be harmonious. That WP eCommerce is so old is its blessing and its curse. The blessing is that it was the only major player for a long time, allowing it to achieve great success, relative to other commercial plugins of the time. Its curse is that it gained a reputation for bugginess and as a product that was trying to be a round peg in a square hole. It’s safe to say that WP eCommerce has passed the time where anyone should doubt it’s a viable product. But the question remains: can something old be new again? Dan Milward and Justin Sainton believe so. And they are now 50 / 50 partners to ensure it. For years, Dan ran WP eCommerce under the umbrella of Instinct Entertainment. While WP eCommerce wasn’t Instinct’s only project, it was its largest for a long time. Dan hired support staff and developers to help maintain the product and manage customers of their premium support tokens. Justin Sainton has been contributing to WP eCommerce since 2010. He’s written nearly 70,000 lines of code and deleted nearly 30,000 lines of code from the codebase, just since they started tracking activity on Github in 2011. He’s got more commits to the project than any of the other 39 contributors. At times, Justin has been the lifeblood of WP eCommerce development. Now that the two are partnered, they are ready to move ahead with full steam. Or catch the audio: http://s3.amazonaws.com/PostStatus/DraftPodcast/wp-e-commerce-audio.mp3 Direct download Born out of need Dan was building websites with b2, pre-WordPress. He remembers when the repository was on a third party website, with only twenty or so plugins. He had a customer looking to sell plumbing related supplies online. Dan looked at osCommerce and Zen Cart to see if they could do the job. The hosted solutions we know today, and even Magento, didn’t exist yet. Dan had the wild idea to build it in WordPress, and the client let them release it to the public. The world’s first eCommerce plugin for WordPress was born out of a need to cater to plumbers. That was in 2006. Instant growth The plugin took off very quickly. Dan remembers launching “Gold Cart”, their premium version of WP eCommerce, on a Friday, and was blown away by the transaction history he saw the very next day. The success was unexpected. They never thought it’d be the kind of plugin “that would end up being used by millions of people around the world.” And if he could go back, he says he probably would’ve done it differently. Today, WP eCommerce powers sites large and small. They know of sites with upwards of 100,00 products and / or seven figures in revenue. Impressive numbers. Retro-fitted One of the hardest parts of development of WP eCommerce has been growing with WordPress and retro-fitting the plugin to utilize functionality and APIs that WordPress offers in core. The best example of this is for custom post types. Custom post types were not introduced until WordPress 3.0, meaning that it took a significant effort and change of the WP eCommerce codebase to utilize custom post types, and all the benefits that go along with using them. The Jetpack of WP eCommerce Gold Cart is what Dan calls the Jetpack of WP eCommerce. In an attempt at longevity, WP eCommerce was an early player in the commercial plugin market. They quickly offered a premium version of WP eCommerce. They now monetize in two ways. They have support tokens, as well as commercial add-ons. Support for WP eCommerce is managed via Help Scout. Justin’s entrance to WP eCommerce Justin also got into eCommerce with WordPress due to client work. He’s been working with WordPress since 2007, but he’s been doing eCommerce since 2005. So he quickly searched for WordPress eCommerce integrations, and therefore found WP eCommerce. By 2008 and 2009 he was using WP eCommerce for client work, and he reach out to Dan to figure out how he could start contributing. Justin got heavily involved with WP eCommerce when they were making the switch to using custom post types. He helped guide the plugin from using around 40 custom tables to 13 custom tables today. He’s been the biggest contributor to WP eCommerce ever since. With the release of WP eCommerce 3.9, their new partnership becomes official. The new structure of Instinct Instinct is now focused on WP eCommerce, and Dan’s ot

Mike McAlister has been an active member of the commercial WordPress theme space since 2009. He started by selling themes on ThemeForest. He transitioned to the Okay Themes brand in December of 2011. And at the end of March of this year, Mike transitioned yet again to Array. While these transitions may seem like arbitrary branding, to me they represent broader shifts both in Mike’s style and the direction of the commercial WordPress space in general. He’s never really attempted to fit anyone else’s mold, but I believe he’s done quite well at predicting the market and staying ahead of the pack; and that’s why I love following his work. Mike consistently challenges himself to succeed in a saturated space by attacking the market in a different way than the rest of the crowd. http://s3.amazonaws.com/PostStatus/DraftPodcast/mike-mcalister-post-status-draft.mp3 Direct Download Selling WordPress themes on ThemeForest In 2009, Mike discovered WordPress and saw the opportunities of the commercial WordPress space. He quickly got his first ThemeForest theme put together, which he admits was probably sub-par code; but it got him started on his journey to consistently sell themes at a fairly early stage of the market. ThemeForest has always been a controversial space. From a consumer side, with nice designs and a huge selection, it’s an easy way to discover themes — hence the popularity and explosive growth of the marketplace. From the non-ThemeForest developer side (developers dealing with ThemeForest themes), it’s often a frustrating marketplace because good code is very difficult to quantify on ThemeForest themes, making it difficult to steer people away from bad themes. But there’s also the seller’s viewpoint. Exclusive sellers on ThemeForest start by making 50% of the revenue on a sale. Once they hit elite status ($75,000 in cumulative sales), they max out at 70%. But for non-exclusive partnerships, sellers only make 33.33% of the sale, which strongly encourages exclusive authorship for ThemeForest community members. More than four out of five ThemeForest authors are exclusive authors. Moving the market forward Selling on ThemeForest means that you accept the terms of the marketplace, both as a buyer and a seller. Over the years, this has resulted in a variety of public debates. Mike started one such debate on pricing, when he advocated for a change in the pricing model. The debate Mike helped start is what led Envato to establish the elite program, which at the time gave elite authors more flexibility for pricing, and higher rewards for various achievements. Throughout his tenure on ThemeForest, Mike was part of a core group of authors that helped move the marketplace forward. I saw Mike participate in community conversations regarding price, bucking design trends, methods for offering theme support, licensing themes, and more. Authors like Mike helped make Envato a better place. Establishing Okay One of the things Mike discovered as he became a more experienced theme developer was that support was easier with simpler themes. Also, simpler themes allowed him to make design decisions versus offering design options. In December 2011, Mike made the transition to simpler themes official with the launch of Okay Themes. I don’t want that to be the bulk of my business. I don’t want to be answering questions about settings. You know, that seems adverse to everything I’m trying to do. So, yeah, I started ripping things out slowly over the years, taking out various settings and going with the mantra of ‘decisions not options’ – that kind of thing – and really just spending the time to make these decisions, you know, add the details where I thought they needed to be and just whitling it down to a very, very simple theme that just works. Such a decision doesn’t come lightly. When the proven model is options-centered, taking the other route takes guts. Mike’s themes evolved into much simpler products. He tried to make a specific theme for a specific purpose versus creating a generic theme for any purpose that could be reused for dozens of sites. Okay Themes had successes and failures on ThemeForest, but Mike was able to establish a reputation and a brand around well designed, simple themes that are reliably free of the bloat ThemeForest is infamous for. It’s what made his themes a go-to recommendation for many WordPress developers, myself included. Over time, Mike realized he wanted to fully separate from Envato. Despite all of the positive change over the years from Envato leadership, it doesn’t make the consumer’s decision making skills any better. And Mike’s style of theme didn’t really fit perfectly any more with the style of customer ThemeForest tends to have. Selling themes on WordPress.com One way Mike has reached out to more user-centric customers, versus “flippers”, is through the WordPress.com marketplace. Mike was invited to the WordPress.com marketplace and launched Publisher in August of 2013. The experience was e

I was privileged to be joined by six core contributors to WordPress 3.9 for a Google Hangout where we talked about the new release, contributing to WordPress, and more. To learn more about WordPress 3.9, check out our summary. You can watch the full video right here: I was joined by an all-star cast. Of course, keep in mind, these six people are amazing, but a whopping 267 people made WordPress 3.9 happen. That said, here was our panel: Andrew Nacin Lead Developer, 3.9 Lead ( Twitter | WP Profile) Favorite feature of WordPress 3.9: No more “Paste from Word” in TinyMCE Least favorite feature of WordPress: Settings screens and Mulitsite Mike Schroder 3.9 Co-lead ( Twitter | WP Profile) Photo Credit Favorite feature of WordPress 3.9: WP Views / Customizer enhancements Least favorite feature of WordPress: The plugin editor Gregory Cornelius Contributing Developer ( Twitter | WP Profile) Photo credit Favorite feature of WordPress 3.9: Widget Customizer Least favorite feature of WordPress: Managing page hierarchy Helen Hou-Sandí Core Committer ( Twitter | WP Profile) Photo credit Favorite feature of WordPress 3.9: Widget Customizer Least favorite feature of WordPress: Admin Menus Scott Taylor Core Committer ( Twitter | WP Profile) Photo Credit Favorite feature of WordPress 3.9: Customizer improvements Least favorite feature of WordPress: List Tables Weston Ruter Core Contributor ( Twitter | WP Profile) Photo credit Favorite feature of WordPress 3.9: Media improvements Least favorite feature of WordPress: Magic quotes Brian Krogsgard Post Status editor, Panel Host Favorite feature of WordPress 3.9: Image editing Least favorite feature of WordPress: Default comment handling

Pantheon is a website development, deployment, and hosting platform. But they aren’t just any host. They like to think of their product as a hosting killer, because in their mind, they do much more than just hosting. I heard about Pantheon for the first time last year, when it was a Drupal-only platform. When Pantheon announced last week that their platform would now support WordPress, I knew I had to check it out. I spoke with Josh Koenig, one of the co-founders of Pantheon, and the Head of Developer Experience for the company. You can listen to our entire half hour conversation here: http://s3.amazonaws.com/PostStatus/DraftPodcast/pantheon-josh-koenig-post-status-draft.mp3 Direct Download How Pantheon works Pantheon markets itself differently than most hosts. For one, they target developers. They think about developers all the way down to the way to pay for services; they have a feature for developers to invite a client to pay for a service they’re managing, versus a client needing to share access with their developer. The way Josh describes Pantheon, it’s more like Heroku than a traditional host in terms of how it runs. A Pantheon customer, like a Heroku customer, is on the exact same platform as every other customer. For scaling, Pantheon simply adjusts the number of containers that are running, similar to Heroku’s Dynos. The containerization is much more nimble and much more efficient than virtual machines are. … If you have a bunch of virtual machines that are all running websites, they’re probably all running the same server software, using the same libraries, but they’re doing many copies of that for every virtual machine, whereas we have one host endpoint and that can share all the common binaries, all the common libraries, for all the containers that are located there. Containers can spin up in ten or fifteen seconds, much faster than scaling your website from one type of hosting (like a shared environment) to another (like a VPS) with a traditional host. How Pantheon compares their platform to traditional hosts Using Pantheon Every new user gets two development environments with Pantheon for free. To begin, it asks you to start a new project or import a site. I was able to easily download my files and database into one zip file from WP Remote, and I purposefully did nothing special to make it easier on Pantheon. When I uploaded my backup, I was amazed that in around one minute, it had perfectly imported my site, extracted and connected the database, edited my config file for the Pantheon setup, and my development website was ready to go. There were some UX things with the dashboard that were a little weird to me. It took me a few minutes of digging around and figuring how where and how to do things. But once I got the hang of it, I could see how I could easily get used to a system like this. As far as developing with Pantheon, you can work locally very easily, as their dev sites come setup as a Git repository and the Git clone URL is ready and waiting from the start. Or a developer can quickly grab SFTP connection details from the dashboard and edit their site straight in the development environment. Once you are happy with your website, Pantheon makes pushing to testing and live servers easy, right from the dashboard. Pantheon also has a paid feature called MultiDev, which allows for Git branching through the dashboard to quickly create entirely new installs for testing, training, feature building, etc. From a branch, users can then merge the code back to the main site through the dashboard. Is Pantheon different from other Managed WordPress hosts? I was curious how Pantheon is really different from a WordPress managed host like WP Engine, Pressable, or Pagely. They certainly aren’t marketing themselves as a managed host. They are trying to expand their marketability beyond that. The way Josh describes it, what makes Pantheon different is the smoothness of the development workflow, with automatic and simple management of development, testing, and live environments. Another item Josh highlights is that Pantheon allows for more than just WordPress websites. This is something I’d never really considered, because I’ve never had a need beyond a WordPress website, but I can totally understand why a development shop that does both Drupal and WordPress work would really enjoy this. Finally, Josh says that the smoothness of their scaling experience with their containers sets them apart. Pantheon is one platform. Our biggest sites and our free sites all run on one coherent platform. So we really can say, ‘If you can make it work on your free dev site and you like the performance you got there, we can scale that to millions of users and you won’t have to, like, go through a migration.’ Josh said that they are pushing billions of pageviews per month on the platform right now, most of which are currently Drupal sites since the WordPress setup is so new. While his statement about a single platform makes sense

The ecosystem of businesses that have been built around WordPress is huge, but shallow. Few companies are both large (relatively speaking) and central to a broad WordPress community. With 60+ employees, some of which are very well-known WordPress developers, 10up has quickly become a central figure in the WordPress world. Big WordPress companies with significant community influence Until recently, Automattic has always been the primary example cited as a mature company in the WordPress space. But it’s hardly the only company using WordPress as a primary tool. Envato is similarly sized (just over 200 employees, and 50+ more this year), but Envato’s business spans well beyond WordPress themes and plugins on ThemeForest and CodeCanyon. A 60+ person team doing web consulting is not particularly unique either. There are loads of more traditional design agencies, ad agencies, and regional web firms that do a good bit of their business using WordPress. But there aren’t very many companies in general, much less the size of 10up, that are so engrossed within the WordPress community. Yet, as WordPress gains more and more traction as the CMS of choice for the web services and consulting industry, there are now WordPress focused service agencies that are growing quite rapidly. 10up leads this pack, despite being quite a young company; they just celebrated their 3 year anniversary. Meet John Eckman, 10up CEO 10up Founder Jake Goldman has just announced that they’ve hired a CEO, John Eckman. The hire is representative of a new era for 10up, a company often analyzed by other agencies and professionals in the WordPress ecosystem. I was fortunate to be able to interview Jake and John together to talk about the announcement, a number of other topics around running 10up, and the WordPress ecosystem in general. John Eckman is from the Boston area, and is an organizer of WordCamp Boston. Prior to his new role at 10up, he was the managing director of ISITE Design‘s Boston office. John has experience working for and managing teams in a number of service companies over the years. He’s generally an open source advocate, with specific interests in Drupal and WordPress. Jake and John met in 2009 during planning for WordCamp Boston. Jake has been thinking about bringing on a CEO for about a year and a half. Jake interviewed a number of candidates for the position, but specifically wanted someone with ties to the WordPress community, understanding of engineering disciplines, and experience managing teams within large web-based organizations. This is the first interview Jake and John have done together. We talked about a number of things, largely around decision making and running a business. Mini 10ups within 10up One of the things I was interested in was the growing pains. If you are like me, you’ve watched, flabbergasted, as 10up grew at an amazing rate. And Jake admitted that a significant challenge has been realizing when architecture needs to change. The company was mostly flat until they scaled beyond a dozen people. At that time, they established a leadership team, most of whom have now evolved into Vice President or Director roles. However, he also notes the early lesson they learned that great engineers don’t always make great team managers and mentorship doesn’t have to be exclusive to managers. When they got to around 30 employees, they switched to a pod system, with pod leaders. Each pod has dedicated production employees, a pod leader that acts as a manager and lead strategist, and they are now introducing a “producer” role to help the pod leader manage day to day managerial duties. From what I could glean from the conversation, a pod within 10up basically functions like its own little agency, with each pod handling a variety of projects. The design pod, however, is independent from the others. 10up is better known for programming and implementation than design — something they are working to change — and currently the design pod acts more like an outsourced element from each pod on a per-project basis as needed. Turnaround projects and managing cashflow I was curious about cashflow and managing clients when you have a lot of teams. If 10up was only doing new projects and not maintaining relationships longer term, it seems like it would be difficult to constantly manage everyone’s time. While they didn’t downplay these challenges, both Jake and John highlighted how recurring revenue from large customers and also engaging customers beyond “positioning yourself as a coder” and simply doing what is asked. He notes that those who do so set themselves up for short term clients, and instead 10up offers advice for engaging a client long term. In those early phases, bring value, bring strategy, bring ideas that help them build their business; to show that you’re a partner that has business solutions, right, that you create those kind of relationships. It’s why we call everybody at 10up engineers, instead of developers. Because the

I had the pleasure to interview Drew Strojny, founder of The Theme Foundry, about their work at The Theme Foundry, their philosophies about themes, and their latest theme release, Oxford. http://s3.amazonaws.com/PostStatus/DraftPodcast/Post-Status-Draft-3-Drew-Strojny-ThemeFoundry.mp3 Direct Download Drew is a former Duke football player that spent a few years in the NFL before he started a small business doing general marketing. Over time, his clients started asking for websites, so he discovered WordPress. His work with web projects led him to start designing WordPress themes, and he ended up being an early player in the commercial theme market in 2008. Competition with themes over time In 2008, there weren’t many people selling themes. Chris Pearson was selling Thesis, Brian Gardner was selling Revolution, pre-Genesis. WooThemes was just underway. But the demand was enormous. Well, I thought we’d just throw our hat into the ring and try a design and see how it goes, and we got a really huge response. It was really great timing on our part. It was one of the best times to get into the theme market. The WordPress theme space really exploded for a few years. Drew notes that they haven’t seen the explosive growth in the past couple years compared to the first two The market is maturing and there are a lot more companies in the space, and a lot more options. Setting themselves apart I asked Drew how The Theme Foundry sets themselves apart from the competition, considering just how many theme providers there are now. They like to tout their “world class design and clean code” when they market their themes. They do most of their design in house, but they also commission some designs to get outside the bubble of the “WordPress theme” concept, and those commissioned themes help them expand their work. John Hicks designed Shelf. Ryan Essmaker designed the Anthem theme, Dave Ruiz designed the Avid theme, and most recently Veerle Pieters designed the Collections theme. The Theme Foundry notably doesn’t use any form of framework and attempts to limit theme options as much as possible. When they sell a theme to a customer, they want it to “just work” and be reliable over time. The impact of selling themes on WordPress.com The Theme Foundry was one of the first providers invited to sell commercial themes on WordPress.com. They released the Shelf theme in early 2011, and today nearly their entire collection is available. However, WordPress.com wants as many great themes in the marketplace as possible, so over time the overall impact WordPress.com plays on The Theme Foundry’s business has been reduced, but it’s still an important part of what they do. Making big splashes with themes The Theme Foundry has made a number of big splashes in the theme market. Shelf, at the time, was an innovative theme, making use of post formats and responsive design when hardly anyone was doing it. Collections has a single page app (SPA) feel, using Backbone for loading pages, and Basis has a drag and drop builder that made a lot of waves. Drew says that they don’t like to just put out themes, but prefer to create themes that target a specific concept, and then build the theme to fit well into that concept, without bloating the theme with unnecessary functionality. Oxford theme and Typekit integration Their latest theme is another that’s ready to make a splash. To date, no theme company has automated Typekit integration; as in, if a theme customer currently wants to use Typekit fonts, they need a separate account for it. With Oxford ( demo), The Theme Foundry is including Typekit support, without a Typekit account, as part of the yearly licensing deal. What this means, is that Oxford offers the theme plus the Typekit font integration, for $79. And the yearly renewal fee is reduced to $39 for support, updates, and a continued Typekit font license. The Typekit integration is the first of its kind in the WordPress theme landscape. To date, it’s a world limited by Google web fonts for hosted custom font integrations. There’s nothing wrong with Google web fonts, but Typekit is certainly a level up, and I’m excited to see this happen. All of The Theme Foundry’s themes will be integrated with Typekit over the coming weeks. You can read more on their announcement post. The Theme Foundry, Post Status, and what’s next Drew and I had a fifty minute convesation discussing the topics above and much more. We also spent some time talking about advertising, content marketing, and The Theme Foundry’s partnership with Post Status. If you’re interested in our relationship and Drew’s motivation for supporting what I do, I hope you’ll give this interview a listen. It was a pleasure to talk to Drew, and I look forward to seeing what The Theme Foundry has coming next. You can follow Drew on Twitter, The Theme Foundry on Twitter, and check out their website.