“I accept chaos, I'm not sure whether it accepts me.”
— Bob Dylan
Howdy and Whew! 💦
This week we saw acquisitions of two major plugin companies in WordPress — Sandhills Develpment (a Post Status partner) and LearnDash. Sandhills' founder, Pippin Williamson, as I mention in our interview together, is a highly respected founder-developer in our community and rightly so. On our Draft podcast Pippin shared a look back at WordPress over 10+ years, a look ahead, and some excellent advice for other founders.
Our newest contributor, Michelle Frechette, shares an important and neglected perspective — the one from the people on the teams who are part of these acquisitions. In “Your Company Has Been Acquired. Now What?” Her reminder is something I’ll be playing on repeat for all of us:
“In this ever-changing WordPress ecosystem, let’s remember to put people before software, and community before code.”
WordPress is fundamentally about and for people. ALWAYS. That’s what David and I hit on deeply in this week’s Excerpt podcast as Paul Lacey wondered on Twitter where he fits now with all this change.
If you’re asking that too — “Where do I belong?” — here’s your answer: It’s still in WordPress. And for those who make their living with WordPress, your home is always here — in Post Status. So if you haven’t joined Post Status yet, I humble invite you to do so today. It’s where I found my home again.
Why are so many acquisitions happening in the WordPress space? Why now? What’s the motivation to sell? How does it affect WordPress?
Post Status Comments exists to provide a stage for WordPress professionals to exchange ideas and talk about emerging topics and trends. It's a way for our members to share experiences, analyses, and feelings that matter to the Post Status community and beyond.
Our second episode will feature a conversation in Twitter Spaces on September 29, 2021. 👈 SAVE THE DATE 📆
The topic for this discussion will focus on the motivations behind some of the biggest and most prominent acquisitions in the WordPress space: Why so many?Why now?And how may it change WordPress?
We'll talk with some key people that have played a part in making the decisions that have rocked the WordPress community in the past few weeks.
Invited Speakers:
Justin Ferriman, Founder of LearnDash
Marieke van de Rakt, CEO of Yoast
David Bisset, Curator at Post Status, will host the conversation.
Join us and add your voice inside Twitter Spaces or comment live during the event in Post Status Slack.
Following the announcement his company has been acquired by Awesome Motive, Sandhills' founder Pippin Williamson joined Cory Miller for some reflection on the past and thoughts about the future of WordPress. Pippin offers some advice to developers and product owners today. He also identifies what he sees as the biggest threat emerging for WordPress today. 🦈
“We are getting to a point where WordPress is so big and there is so much money involved in the WordPress ecosystem that it is now very much in large companies' interests to create their own version of WordPress.” — Pippin Williamson
It’s been a boom time in recent years for edutech companies. LearnDash, which debuted almost a decade ago, was well-positioned to ride the wave. Arguably the leader in the WordPress space for online learning, LearnDash makes WordPress into an effective Learning Management System (LMS). A growing ecosystem of addons and integrations has grown around it, so we're not surprised to learn that LearnDash will be joining Liquid Web's StellarWP brand. Chris Lema, Vice President of Products at Liquid Web, is stepping in as the General Manager of LearnDash.
Get an inside look at the latest big deal in WordPress acquisitions with Chris on the latest episode of Post Status Draft. 🎙️
Everything your website needs — from start-up to success story — is at Bluehost. Whether you’re looking to create a website, blog, or online store, Bluehost will get you started with an all-in-one website platform tailored to your specific needs. Get a free domain name in your first year, free 24/7 lifetime support, and total design freedom with WordPress at Bluehost.
Mark Zahra asks if there’s a future for smaller WordPress businesses in the midst of all the recent acquisitions. One thing seems certain — if you’re a solopreneur or developer looking to make an exit like Pippin Williamson in 5 or 6 years, that’s probably not going to happen. 🙂
Mark shares a possible future for WordPress as a platform and an industry that is worth considering deeply. Recent acquisitions may give some companies a unique advantage:
“…if you’ve opted into usage tracking, there are a few things that are tracked that can be used in market research… this potentially gives one company access to information about the WordPress market as a whole that no one else has.”
We’re not sure the increasing complexity of the tech and the ecosystem are the major motivator for established WordPress business owners exiting in a sale. One could look at the glass half full — instead of losing something, WordPress has joined the modern web, and even if you prefer the old web, it’s hard to see how this progression could be avoided.
We do think Chris and David are right that web hosts will continue crafting custom experiences that target their own audiences. Echoing Jon Penland and Pippin, this seems to be the one thing everyone agrees on. How it is good and bad, and who it is good and bad for are the important emerging questions.
We think there’s always an opportunity for anyone to start small. These “big” acquisitions don’t necessarily close out a space — not forever. Smaller players can come in and move faster to niche markets than larger companies can. We’ve seen it before. Back to Mark who mentions this too:
“You could build something completely new or just take a new approach to an existing problem. Differentiating yourself from the existing, larger solutions out there will be key if you choose to do this, but again, it can pay off nicely.”
But for small, new players to have a decent shot at success, the WordPress platform has to be everyone’s playing field. As the hosted platform space gets more competitive and more refined in creating unique WordPress experiences, it could wall off certain segments of the market — niche products and their users as well as developers. This would complicate the cooperation needed to move WordPress core forward.
Pippin Williamson, Founder and Managing Director of Sandhills Development, announced this week that Awesome Motive has acquired his company — their whole team and plugin portfolio: Easy Digital Downloads, AffiliateWP, Sugar Calendar, WP Simple Pay, and the Payouts Service. Syed Balkhi, Founder and CEO of Awesome Motive, outlines the commercial plugins and notes the deal includes several free plugins as well. From Sandhills, Chris Klosowski, Andrew Munro, and Phil Derksen will be joining Awesome Motive as partners, and Chris will continue to lead Easy Digital Downloads. Pippin, however, intends to take a very long break from WordPress and software development.
Pippin’s post about the sale of Sandhills is also a farewell letter. He says he intends to retire from WordPress after the transition — and close his laptop for a long time. There are a lot of reasons why a founder might make their exit, but there are only three ways it can happen, as Pippin notes. His choice is to pass the great products and team he built to a friend — and a customer.
As Syed stresses, he built his own business with Easy Digital Downloads and is intimately familiar with it and the other plugins he’s acquiring. According to Pippin, Awesome Motive has already “built a lot of really cool internal tools and extensions” that he is sure “will benefit the community at large.”
Passions, people, and companies come and go, so it’s good to see continuity amid the change. Syed’s vision and energy bode well for the future of the products Pippin and company pioneered and sustained for so long.
Congrats to Pippin, Sandhills, Syed, and the growing team at Awesome Motive. 👏
— Dan
LearnDash co-founder and CEO Justin Ferriman wrote a fascinating account of the year-long sale process of his company — it’s a detailed and thoughtful retrospective on how challenging success can be. It’s worth a careful read if you think an acquisition may be in your future.
The StellarWP Team has put together a list of six questions to consider before selling your WordPress business. While you make sure your books are clean and that you understand the acquiring company’s goals, it’s important to consider the impact the sale may have on you and your employees.
Also important: Ask other founders about their experiences selling their companies. Many founders in the WordPress community are open and generous with their insights.
With all the acquisition news within the WordPress space, I thought including this story from Brian Casel on his sale of a non-WordPress product — Audience Ops — might offer a different perspective on the why, the how, and the lessons learned from a sale.
Brian used MicroAcquire, a relatively new marketplace that I haven’t heard about. I agree completely with one of the lessons Brian relates about building an audience:
“Doing podcasts, writing newsletters, attending conferences, etc… if you do those things, you meet more people. And more people know who you are. That means more people—sometimes important people—are more reachable with an email…. [and] might buy your business.”
—David
Keanan Koppenhaver announced that he has acquired Branch and WPPusher.
Keanan posted similar announcements both to Branch’s homepage and the WPPusher site, relating to his newly acquired audience of developers: “As a fellow developer, I’m overjoyed at the idea of helping WordPress developers deploy their code more easily, no matter where they’re hosted and without having to resort to FTP.”
We are curious to learn what Keanan plans on doing with both these products.
SomewhereWarm — the ten-year-old company behind WooCommerce plugins Product Bundles, Composite Products, and Gift Cards — has joinedWooCommerce.
“This is a huge opportunity for us to help shape the future of WooCommerce, having a clearer view of the path ahead, more resources than ever before, and the support of like-minded people.”
There are no plans to retire any SomewhereWarm extensions “in the foreseeable future,” according to WooCommerce CEO Paul Maiorana.
WP Landing Kit was created by Jason Schuller and Phil Kurth at the beginning of 2020. It has been acquired by ThemeIsle. ThemeIsle CEO Ionut Neagu explains that with Neve (ThemeIsle’s flagship theme) and Otter (ThemeIsle’s package of Gutenberg blocks and templates) they have a solid DIY solution for landing pages with WordPress.
Existing customers can continue using WP Landing Kit, and all existing lifetime licenses will be honored by ThemeIsle.
David Mainayar had a little fun in Post Status Slack recreating a Monopoly board for WordPress. I shared a recent Twitter thread with some suggestions from the community on how the game would be played. Maybe we’ll see a real WP Monopoly game someday.
"Remember to put people before software and community before code."
In this episode of Post Status Excerpt, David and Cory recover from an overwhelming week of acquisition news in the WordPress space. Four well-known WordPress companies announced acquisitions almost back-to-back. Next, Cory notes Michelle Frechette's article on Post Status about the challenging and difficult choices some employees of newly acquired companies may have to make.
Also covered in this episode: David shares what has (and hasn’t) changed in the WordPress space in terms of business and opportunities. Then he considers the possible ways developers can look at acquisitions as a whole.
The release schedule for WordPress 5.8.2 has been set for Tuesday, October 5th for the release candidate and October 12 for the final release. Currently, there are 19 open tickets for consideration in the 5.8.2 milestone.
Look for a 5.8.3 release around November 10th.
WooCommerce 5.7is out — and with it come some bug fixes (product variations manual menu ordering) and redesigns, like better styling and usability for the Marketplace section. There is also new local currency formatting support and a number of enhancements and bug fixes for blocks.
Mike Schrodershares some tidbits from the latest release of the Gutenberg plugin, including Block Gap support. This allows users to choose the distance between items within a block, and it is now an opt-in feature. Flex Layouts are supported within the Social Links and Group Blocks, Global Styles are available to themes by default, and the Heading Levels menu has been redesigned.
In the .org repo, Mika Epstein notes a change in how long active plugin reviews can remain open: you will now have three months to complete your review before it is rejected. Since the beginning of 2021, plugins that have been reviewed and are waiting for a reply have increased — and “that rise is out of step with the number of plugin submissions.”
Three months seems perfectly fair to me.
—David
Mark Uraine has an insightful post with a theory about five groups of people in the WordPress community: visitors, users, extenders, contributors, and leaders. Mark explains how they influence each other and the WordPress community as a whole:
“WordPress group dynamics generally depend upon the duty of care and levels of influence. The more one cares about other groups, and those in one’s own group, the more likely that person will influence the community in a positive way.”
Francesca Marano shared the 2021 Yoast Diversity fund recipients: Milana Cap, Mary Job, TC Cazy, David Towoju, Estela Rueda Landeros, and Abel Lifaefi Mbula.
The 2021 Diversity fund offers financial sponsorship to people who work on a project that benefits WordPress. Projects should help add diversity to the community and could range from teaching a group of people how to work with WordPress to writing patches for Core.
Many people have started to notice this brilliant new WordPress theme from Anders Norén called Tove. It’s built entirely around the Full Site Editing features coming in WordPress 5.9.
I was reading this article from The Verge on the next generation (“Gen Z”) and how — thanks to modern technology, operating systems, and Google — university professors are being forced to rethink their lesson plans. For example, when a professor asked where students saved their projects they didn’t understand the question:
“[The professor] came to the same realization that many of her fellow educators have reached in the past four years: the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.”
“I think it would be really good for WordPress developers to really read and absorb this piece and think about how things are currently approached in the UI and explaining what WordPress is and how we can actually be effective in a mental model of apps and no file system.”
SpinupWP has recently added some new features: toggling notifications for specific servers or sites and the ability to add scripts to automate the manual tasks after you spin up a new WordPress site. Brad Touesnard also hints at upcoming features like a REST API, “domains” screen, and support for DigitalOceanOAuth.
Jason Colemannotes that the Sitewide Sales version 1.2.0 is available now with support for Easy Digital Downloads, as well as a “custom” module to integrate with other plugins. Designed for restaurants and cafes, the theme includes over 40 different block patterns, including six different header designs and seven different footer designs.
GiveWP has taken the packaging off its new Peer-to-Peer Fundraising add-on. You can host your peer-to-peer fundraisers directly on your site, and your branding will carry through on your peer-to-peer donation forms. It includes fundraiser profiles, leaderboards, sponsorship options, team and individual fundraising pages, and more.
Matt Cromwell told Post Status the add-on “allows website visitors to participate in individual and team fundraising on behalf of the host organization.” It certainly looks slick, and I might be giving this a kick in its tires in the near future.
💼 There are currently 23 Active Job Listings on the Board. We don't always have space for them all here, so be sure to check online too.
☀️ Employers: Get your job opening in front of many of the best and brightest members of the WordPress community. List your job opening with Post Status today. (Get a 20% discount as a Post Status Club Member!) »
If you’re interested in block pattern translations and how to handle them, here is a proposal that outlines how to translate all the new strings — including an option that might skip GlotPress entirely and allow end-users to translate block patterns through the block editor.
If you’re concerned about PHP market share — don’t be. As Jim Salterexplains at arstechnica, according to a reportW3Techs released recently, PHP doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon:
“Apart from PHP — which held a 72.5 percent share in 2010 and holds a 78.9 percent share as of today — only one other server-side language ever broke a 10 percent share…. [T]here doesn’t appear to be any clear contender for PHP to worry about in W3Techs’ results.”
Needless to say, this is one thing WordPress developers don’t have to worry about.
“I do strongly encourage the addition of a new HTML element that represents—and can consequently obviate the use of—the ARIA search landmark role. A search element would provide HTML parity with the ARIA role, and encourage less use of ARIA in favor of native HTML elements.”
Andy Fragen is working on a plugin that adds time-dismissible admin notices to WordPress. Apparently, it’s a fork of a framework library from Collins Agbonghama.
“Code that’s hard to understand is often a result of an accumulation of things… the code was written at a time when the language/framework didn’t do then what it does now… [or] was written a while back and the fashions and “best practices” back then were different.”
If you’re ever concerned about the quality of code that you or someone on your team wrote, this is worth a read.
Videos
DAVID'S PICKS 📬
📺 Here are my video picks:
What's the Difference Between A Freelancer And An Agency? This video from INPUT, a new venture of the Gravity Forms team, features Brad Miller from 10up sharing his freelancer-to-agency story. Brad explains what he thinks the main differences are between the two.
Images Are Hard: Dave Rupert and Chris Coyierreview a massive checklist for publishing an image on the web the correct way.
Podcasts
DAVID'S PICKS 📬
🎙️ Here are my podcast picks:
WPWatercooler is 9️⃣❗— Congrats to the gang for nine years and on their 400th episode. Also don't miss Jason Tucker's post on how WP Watercooler got started with a look back over the years into various side quests and some favorite recurring topics. 🎂
Women in WP: The Women in WP team talks withD.J. Billings who is a writer, illustrator, and WordPress geek.
WP Briefing: Only got a few minutes to learn what's coming up in WordPress 5.9? Give Josepha Haden Chomphosy that time with this update.
Shop Talk Show: Topics covered in this episode of the ShopTalk Show include getting your team on to the same tooling, cool things in VS Code, and the new Chrome API eye dropper.
Indie Hackers: Courtland AlleninterviewsJohn O'Nolan of Ghost about the early decisions he made that constrained how and why Ghost grows.
