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Post Status Comments (No. 1) — Monetization of WordPress Plugins

Our first episode of Post Status Comments features a conversation from Twitter Spaces on May 28, 2021 on the monetization of WordPress plugins. Speakers included Cory Miller, Joe Casabona, Joost de Valk, and David Bisset (host) — along with many others commenting live in Post Status Slack.

The aim of Post Status Comments is to provide a stage for WordPress professionals to exchange ideas and talk about recent 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.

🎙️ Browse our Podcast archives, and don’t forget to subscribe via iTunes, Google Podcasts, YouTube, Stitcher, Simplecast, or RSS. 🎧

WordPress enters its majority 🎂

Matt Mullenweg shared some thoughts this week about the pivotal time WordPress has reached. On the occasion of its eighteenth birthday, he wrote:

“I consider myself so lucky to have co-founded the project alongside Mike Little… I blogged these anniversaries when WordPress was five, ten, fifteen, and last year at seventeen, but as the project reaches an age that, if it were a child, it would be heading off to college.”

At WP.org you can read the post that started it all. You can also review 40 key milestones that “helped shape WordPress through the years.” On Twitter, many people celebrated by sharing photos of themselves 18 years ago. I shared the schedule and photos of the first WordCamp in San Francisco that Matt linked to in his post.

Eighteen years is quite a milestone for a human being, but it's an incredible length of time for web software. Even for those who got into WordPress only a few years ago much has changed. Who would have thought we'd reach a 41%+ marketshare valued in billions of dollars just shy of the two-decade mark?

Many of the key milestones are obvious. Here are three less known moments from my early WordPress days:

• Kubrick Theme – This clean blue blogging theme by Michael Heilemann was popular when WordPress first started to gain serious traction. It went into core in 2005. Kubrick seemed to be everywhere before yearly default themes became a thing in 2010. I'll never forget it; it's burned into my memory. 🎨
• WordPress Multisite – Who remembers when this was a separate download/product that was a pain to configure and set up? But once it worked it was amazing — for its time. Today it’s taken for granted. 🤹‍♂️
• The Trojan Emoji – A security fix was included in WordPress core under the guise of emoji support. Here's a Post Status summary. 🕵️‍♂️

Onward and upward to 19!

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Pagely introduced its Really Rich Results plugin. It generates Schema.org structured data, empowering you to take advantage of Google’s Rich Results and featured snippets. ✂️

Pippin Williamson notes that Sand Hills Development will be experimenting with a four-day workweek during the summer: "The goal of this experiment is to better enable deep work, improved productivity, and happier and healthier team members." 😃

I'm looking forward to seeing what Sand Hills learns from this experiment. Remote work is gaining ground thanks to COVID — will a shorter workweek be the silver lining to this difficult period?

Brad Parbs created a WordPress plugin that quickly outputs a 404 for static files that aren't found, rather than loading the normal 404 error page. This prevents more resources from loading and results in a faster page experience. 4️⃣0️⃣4️⃣

Dhara Shah from Mumbai writes about shifting to a focus on WordPress and finding satisfaction and joy in that new career. 😂

Understrap, a WordPress theme framework, has been acquired by Howard Development & Consulting. Rob Howard, who owns the firm, shares why he made the purchase — for around $50,000 USD — and he offers some insight into his commercial plans:

"Over the next few months, we’ll be surveying the community and creating a number of cool new commercial products and services related to UnderStrap, as well as releasing a separate software-as-a-service tool for WordPress developers."

While it's a little funny this is posted on Medium (and not a WordPress blog), this is important news to Understrap users and something to keep an eye on. 👀

Here's our previous note on Understrap's last owner putting it up for sale. 🗒️

Stripe announced its new Payment Links recently. They allow you to create a payment page without a website or much (if any) code. 🔗

📆 Upcoming Events

• The Speak Up! Black Speakers in WordPress Workshop hosted by WP Engine is still accepting signups. It will kick off on June 5th. 🧑🏾
• WordCamp Europe 2021 has announced it will take place online, June 7-10. 🏕️
• WordCamp Japan 2021's schedule is available, and the event is happening June 20-27. 🗾
• The World's Largest eCommerce Event is being held by Ecom World from June 28-29. 🛒
• 🆕 WordFest Live 2021 is happening on July 23. They are currently looking for volunteers. 🧡 Free registration for attendees is now open.
• WPCampus 2021 Online is a free online conference for web accessibility and WordPress in higher education happening on September 21-22. 👩‍🎓

🤝 WordPress Jobs: The Post Status Job Board

💼 There are currently 19 Active Job Listings on the Board. We don't 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!) »

❓Help us understand how you're hiring! Take our short, one-question poll. »

Current Listings:

• Happy Prime needs a full-time, remote WordPress Developer.
• LionSher Technologies wants a WordPress Plugin Developer.
• WP Engine is looking for a Senior Web Developer and a Lead Software Engineer, both based in the United States.
• Barn2 Plugins needs a Web Developer.
• WebDevStudios wants to fill several Engineering Positions.
• Delicious Brains is searching for a Senior WordPress Plugin Developer.
• ForGravity has a part-time position for a Full Stack WordPress Developer.
• Whistle Stop Digital is seeking a US-based Software Engineer.
• Crowd Favorite has an opening for a Digital Project Manager.
• Liquid Web wants a WordPress/WooCommerce Product Manager.

📺 Post Status Live

Making Online Summits Work with Nathan Wrigley and Anchen le Roux

🙅‍♂️ Bernhard Kau reminds us why you shouldn't put theme code in plugins:

"Running theme code in plugins (and vice versa) can very easily cause issues... which might be hard to debug, especially when they only occur in rare cases (like a core database update)."

Peter Davis writes about the results of an SEO experiment on the Kapwing site. He offers "seven different ways to identify articles that could benefit most from updates with minimal overlap and identifiable metrics for improvement." 📏

Nicole Kohler pointed me to Peter's article and commented, "If you're not refreshing your content, you're losing users, money, clicks. Proof [is] in the pudding [of Peter's results]."

Tom Parandyk has a short summary of ten years of design engineering research with eight "first principles of software design." 🎱

Chris Coyier shares some insights on how to tackle auto-generated social media images. One way in WordPress is with the Social Image Generator plugin, which Chris describes in detail. 🔌

Chris Johnson has designed a tool to identify ways to improve the flow of your site, which he calls "Logical Content Flow." This describes "the natural hierarchal flow when headings are applied to HTML content correctly as per the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines." 🧑‍🦯

Low Tech Magazine demonstrates the sustainability of solar-powered websites by building one. This detailed post is based on their own self-hosted, solar-powered, off-grid website that has been running for 15 months now. ☀️

CSS Hell is a blog that holds a collection of common CSS mistakes and how to fix them. Love the title font. 😈

Eric Wu open-sourced his SEO tool that bulk checks IPs to validate Googlebot IPs. 🤖 Why is this important?

"Often there are various requests by spoofed user-agents pretending to be official search engine crawlers like Googlebot. In order to have an accurate understanding of the site's crawl rate, we want to verify the IP address of the various crawlers."

This isn't directly WordPress-related, but as a developer, I admire Pedro Duarte's attention to detail in coding a custom code block. 👨‍💻

Alexis Collado outlines 70 ways to get started in UX and Product Design. There are some excellent, focused suggestions for designers, but some of Alexis's tips apply to other fields too. 👍

🎬 If you've been thinking about live streaming, then read Joe Casabona thoughts on what he's learned after investing his time in some experiments:

"Pick a theme... and a time that works for you and your audience. Interact with them."

💬 Charles Copley has a unique use for BBPress that I never considered:

"Normally I would use Google Tasks for this (as I can access it from both my Pixel and laptop), but I did update my BBPress plugin to include these in case I ever need to make my forum go live as a Discord alternative, for the sheer ease of it."

The Designer Experience (DesignEx) team at Automattic is focused on hiring designers, onboarding new designers, and fostering the growth and development of the design team. Monika Burman wrote a great piece about their culture and community-building programs, which aren't often featured. 👩‍🎨

Video Picks

📹 Here is my video pick of the week:

• WordSesh: This is an easy pick this week! If you missed any of the talks from this multi-day event you can watch them all here. The live sessions spanned many time zones, so it's likely some happened when you were asleep. 📺
• Underrepresented in Tech: Allie and Michelle discuss some ways for employers and supervisors to advocate for underrepresented employees and team members. Their discussion is based on a recent article from Forbes, "Employers, Here Are 4 Ways You Can Advocate For Your Underrepresented Employees." 🙋‍♀️

Podcast Picks

🎙️ Here are my podcast picks:

• Start The Snowball is a Podcast for builders and creators "just getting started." It's hosted by Cory Miller and Brad Osborne. In the latest episode, they discuss a step-by-step method you can use to know exactly what people want to buy. Then you can know exactly what to sell and how to sell it without having to guess what your customers want. ❄️
• Do The Woo hosted David Mainayar from PeachPay. David talked about entering the WooCommerce space and his competitors. (Automattic recently invested in PeachPay, apparently after David connected with Matt Mullenweg in Post Status Slack.) 🛒
• Thunder Nerds got legendary web designer Jeffrey Zeldman to share his experiences, background, and lessons learned on his career journey. Zeldman also has some ideas for building a better bat cave. 🦇
• WPMRR Podcast features Joe with Marc Benzakein, the Operations Manager at ServerPress LLC. They discuss opportunities for young startup founders and the best work practices to avoid burnout.
• Distributed Podcast host Matt Mullenweg connected with Sid Sijbrandij to talk about GitLab, transparency and growing a distributed company. 👨‍💻
• Reverse Engineered featured Joe Howard sharing what he feels are the secrets to entrepreneurship. Learn about Joe's early strategies for attracting new clients and why you should vet prospective clients to ensure they’re a good fit for your business. 👩‍💼

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