Caseproof, makers of MemberPress, has acquired WishList Products, the parent company of WishList Member and CourseCure. The Wishlist team, with the exception of co-founder Tracy Childers, will continue supporting and developing the products under the leadership of Caseproof founder Blair Williams.
WishList Member is one of the longest running WordPress membership plugins with a 14-year history. The plugin has been downloaded and activated on more than 119,275 membership and community sites since 2008. Pricing currently ranges from $149.50/year to $249.50/year.
“WishList Member was a pioneer,” Williams said. “It was the first membership plugin I ever used, and it really inspired me to get more involved with WordPress.
“It showed me that a plugin could be a powerful catalyst, capable of transforming WordPress into a highly sophisticated membership platform.
“Ever since then (and all the while growing my own membership plugin, MemberPress), I’ve had a soft spot for WishList Member – and its founders.”
Caseproof has been scooping up smaller WordPress membership plugins lately, adding MemberMouse to its products earlier this year.
“To be 100% clear, as with MemberMouse and MemberPress, our goal is not to discontinue WishList, or to combine it with another membership plugin,” Williams said.
The most significant change coming to WishList Member as part of the acquisition is that the CourseCure LMS features will be rolled into the plugin. Those who purchase WishList Member now will get access to CourseCure for free. Childers said once the plugins are combined the price will go up. The company plans to deliver the same level of support and is not planning to change prices for existing customers.
WordPress’ Themes Team has released a new block theme called Stacks as part of the Community Themes initiative proposed earlier this year. The goal is to bring together representatives of the team to build block themes year round, the same way that default themes are built and officially supported.
Stacks was designed for one purpose – to create slide decks that can be used for a presentation. It was designed and built by Saxon Fletcher with help from Automattic-sponsored contributor Ben Dwyer.
The theme includes a simple setup flow. After installing Stacks and clicking ‘Customize,’ the user is taken to the Site Editor where a set of five slides is already pre-filled on the home page in a warm and inviting color palette.
Slides can also be created on any post or page using the “Stacks” pattern. After creating a new page, the user is presented with the option to start the page by inserting the Stacks pattern. This loads the same five sample slides that are included on the home page by default. They can be easily edited so that any page or post contains its own unique slide deck.
The Stacks theme looks just as good on mobile as it does on desktop, making it easy to follow along from different devices.
The theme was built for a small niche use case – people who want to host their own slides – and is not likely to be widely adopted but presents an interesting use of the block editor for creating slides. Some users may find this to be more user friendly than working with a third-party application to build their presentations.
Since a different deck can be hosted on each page or post, someone who wants to create a website devoted entirely to hosting their own slide presentations could easily save them all in the same place, share links to the different decks, and avoid having to use a hosted service that may not be around forever.
Stacks is available for free on WordPress.org and users can expect these Community Themes to have some level of support as they are being hosted by the official WordPress.org account.
WordPress’ Marketing team has launched a new campaign called “From Blogs to Blocks” in anticipation of the project’s upcoming 20th anniversary. The WordPress community is celebrating this major milestone through various activities and local meetups that are being held around the world throughout the month of May.
“Each daily action symbolizes the millions of individual actions that have come together to make WordPress what it is today.”
The new campaign will feature 20 days of WordPress-related prompts for users to engage in different actions designed to start conversations and stir memories. Daily prompts will be published for different ways of participating through blogging, developing, designing, photography, and community. For example, participants may be invited to submit photos to the WordPress Photo Directory, post videos, art, or share a block or theme they created.
The daily prompts will begin May 7 and will run until the 20th anniversary on May 27. They will give the community an opportunity to reflect on what WordPress means to them, their experiences, and personal milestones along the way.
Participants are encouraged to use the #WP20 hashtag and may be eligible to receive recognition from the Marketing team in the form of a WordPress.org profile badge. Those who publish contributions on all 20 prompts before WordCamp US in August may also receive additional unspecified acknowledgments. Subscribe to the Marketing blog to get all the prompts in your inbox.
Tickets for WordCamp US 2023 went on sale this morning and quickly sold out within a few hours, leaving many hoping for another opportunity in the next round. WCUS, WordPress’ flagship event in the Western Hemisphere, is happening August 24-26, 2023, at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland.
Tickets cost $50 and include access to 40 speaker presentations in the main event, workshops, networking meetups, lunch each day, snacks and beverages, the WordFest party, a t-shirt, and a surprise gift. Contributor Day tickets are separate and will be available soon.
WCUS organizers have confirmed that there will be additional rounds of tickets released in the future. Those who missed this opportunity can follow @WordCampUS on Twitter to be notified of the next ticket release.
Despite the high demand for tickets, the event’s August dates prevent some from attending, including families sending their kids to school and European community members who may still be on summer holidays.
In Europe August is the summer holidays which makes it tough to attend with kids off school etc. Not sure I can swing it this year either https://t.co/GlPzhu1gZa
WCUS will also be hosting a Community Summit this year. Applications for attendees are still open and contributors are also welcome to submit topics for the event.
WordCamp US has updated its website with a design inspired by the colors and mood of the local area’s springtime cherry blossom blooms. Organizers are also updating the programming this year with a call for outside voices. The hurdles placed on potential speakers in previous years were not inclusive of those who haven’t been speaking at local WordPress events and this tends to lead to a stale pool of speakers.
WCUS organizers are trying something new this year in order to enrich the community with more diverse voices:
We are targeting experienced, seasoned, professional speakers at the top of their industries who are not currently active members of our unique community to speak at this year’s WCUS program. There are WordPress agency owners who have never been to a local meetup; plugin developers who don’t know what a WordCamp is, and there are scholars and academics who have never heard of Matt Mullenweg.
WCUS organizers may do a bit of recruiting to make this happen. They are collecting suggestions for speakers and programming topics in order to invite industry-leading speakers from outside the WordPress community. This will not replace the traditional call for speakers, which should be forthcoming.
Today, I’m extremely excited to announce that WPBeginner Growth Fund has taken an investment stake in HeroThemes, the parent company behind the popular WordPress knowledge base theme and plugin called Heroic KB and KnowAll Theme.
Over 26,000 smart business owners use HeroThemes’ plugins and themes to create an extensive knowledge base and offer best-in-class customer support to their customers.
About HeroThemes
HeroThemes is a UK based WordPress company founded by Chris Hadley and Richard Long.
They specialize in building tools that enable you to deliver great customer service on your WordPress website.
With HeroThemes’ plugins and themes, you can
easily manage all your support tickets and emails
add a fully-fledged knowledge base to your site or build one on a dedicated customer support portal
improve support response time with helpful FAQs
… all within your WordPress website.
In a nutshell, HeroThemes transforms your WordPress website into an excellent customer support platform.
Let’s take a detailed look at different HeroThemes products.
Heroic KB: #1 WordPress knowledge base plugin that helps you add a customer support portal to your existing business website.
KnowAll: It’s a dedicated knowledge base theme that enables you to build a knowledge base website and also offers deep integration with Heroic KB plugin.
Heroic Inbox: The #1 WordPress powered help desk & customer support plugin that lets you manage support tickets and customer emails right in your WordPress site.
Heroic FAQs: It lets you publish frequently asked questions to improve support response time and avoid receiving repetitive customer emails.
Background Story
4 years ago, I published a post celebrating WPBeginner’s 10 year anniversary. In that post, I asked our readers to share their WPBeginner story as a video and explain what they have learned from WPBeginner and its impact on their business.
I got tons of user videos, and in there one of the video responses was from Chris Hadley, so I connected with him at that point.
Chris has been a longtime follower of WPBeginner. He learned about WordPress super loop from one of our articles on WPBeginner in the early days, which played a critical role in building the HeroThemes business.
Several of our own knowledge base sites are also powered by Heroic KB plugin, and our other doc sites use a lot of the functionality that we forked from this plugin in the earlier days.
Going into 2023, we eventually decided to join forces.
I invested in the HeroThemes through the WPBeginner Growth Fund and will be advising the team on how to expand their business.
Sharing our combined knowledge with HeroThemes will help all of us better serve the larger WordPress community.
I’m really excited to be working with Chris, Richard, and the entire team to help accelerate their growth in 2023 and beyond. They will be joining me at our next Mastermind.
Michelle Frechette, Director of Community Engagement at StellarWP, has launched a new independent project called WP Speakers that helps event organizers find available speakers for WordPress meetups, WordCamps, podcasts, and other events. The site offers a database of speakers that is free to join and free to search.
When speakers sign up, they include a bio, headshot, location, languages they speak, topics, expertise, and contact information. They can also specify if they identify being from an underrepresented group. In the short amount of time the site has been live, WP Speakers has added 149 registered speakers who are ready and willing to share their WordPress knowledge at both virtual and in-person events.
“As a meetup organizer for my local WordPress meetup, I’m constantly searching for speakers to present,” Frechette said. “On one hand the pandemic made it harder to keep coming up with fresh meetup content, but on the other hand, it allowed me to connect to speakers globally as all of our meetings were moved online. But even with all of the speakers in the world now able to present, it was still hard to think of topics and then source speakers. As well-connected as I am in WordPress, I couldn’t even imagine how much more difficult it might be for someone who didn’t know a lot of speakers personally. So WP Speakers was born.â€
Frechette has a knack for bringing people together and helping them find their place in WordPress. In addition to her open source contributions, she maintains WPCareerPages.com, a site that connects job seekers with WordPress companies, and publishes a weekly tweet thread with available positions.
Frechette is supporting her efforts on the project through sponsorship funds, which allow her to keep the resource free.
“It’s important to me that the ability to belong on the site as well as be able to search for speakers always remains free,” she said. “That way no one is denied from being able to participate. A resource like this should be available to all.â€
Frechette plans to continue adding to the speaker resource page and an event organizer resource page is next on the roadmap. Anyone who wants to be listed on the site can fill out the “Join As a Speaker†form and new profiles will be approved in 1-3 business days.
Jetpack and WordPress.com announced they will no longer support the Twitter API in their products. Last month Twitter suspended WordPress.com’s access to its API, which broke Jetpack Social Sharing – the mechanism that auto-tweets published posts.
Although WordPress.com’s access to the API was reinstated for a few weeks, the company has now been priced out of offering features that rely on Twitter’s API:
Twitter recently notified Automattic that it was dramatically changing the terms and pricing of the Twitter API. The cost increase is prohibitive for us to absorb without passing a significant price increase along to you, and we don’t see that as an option. We have attempted to negotiate a path forward, but haven’t been able to reach an agreement in time for Twitter’s May 1 cutoff.Â
Given that, we have decided to discontinue using the Twitter API.
WordPress.com did not detail its estimated API usage, but Enterprise access starts at $42,000/month for 50 million tweets and scales upwards based on usage, with 100 million tweets priced at $125,000/month and 200 million priced at $210,000 per month. This astronomical price increase will swiftly cull many applications, institutions, and large scale publishers that don’t have an extra $500k/year – $2.5M/year in the budget for Twitter API access.
In October 2022, Jetpack started monetizing this feature with a paid plan that limited the free version to 30 social shares per month (to any social network), a controversial decision that sent many users in search of alternatives. Passing the cost to the customer here was already beyond what most users wanted to pay for these features and is not sustainable.
WordPress.com will be removing Twitter from Jetpack Social and refocusing its efforts on other social media sharing capabilities. The company is adding Instagram and Mastodon to its auto-sharing lineup soon. Auto-sharing for Tumblr, Facebook, and LinkedIn still works.
Starting, today, users who want to share their published posts on Twitter will need to share the link manually through the Twitter app. For clarification, sharing posts by clicking the Tweet button will continue working. This change only affects auto-sharing.
The massive increase in API pricing has competitors fired up to support users migrating away from Twitter. Automattic, which also owns Tumblr, took a stab at Twitter in the conclusion of the announcement: “If your recent experiences with Twitter have left you dissatisfied, go take Tumblr for a spin — we hear it’s quite a party over there.”
In February, Mastodon promised that the platform would never charge for API access. After Automattic’s announcement today, Mastodon tweeted they are excited to see the company expanding support for the platform in Jetpack.
Many of Twitter's most recognizable features were invented in third-party apps, and we're thrilled to see what those developers are now doing with Mastodon. Powered by open source, we can promise: Mastodon will never charge for API access!
— Mastodon (@Mastodon@mastodon.social) (@joinmastodon) February 3, 2023
Twitter may be shooting itself in the foot by making it more costly, in terms of time and automation, to have incoming content from the open web. It’s becoming more cumbersome for publishers to share their content. This has further aggravated Twitter’s user base who is used to coming to the platform for up-to-the-minute news. Too many smaller apps are now priced out of providing these kinds of updates. Some users have started encouraging their followers to follow them on other networks to be alerted when posts are published.
“This is an example of the minor annoyances that will ultimately make people look for alternatives to Twitter,” WordPress.com user @MoviesSilently said. “Frictionless sharing isn’t a make or break but it’s nice.”
I guess I need to go fire up my Tumblr account again or make a new one, and possibly see what Mastadon is all about. I'm not getting any reach on Twitter anyway.
Today’s news has added to users’ compounding disappointment with Twitter. Not only has it is become more costly to have an active voice but advertising has a stranglehold on the feed. As major brands have ceased advertising on the platform, the quality of ads has declined to where scrolling the app has become like wading through a flea market. Twitter users may soon be in for more changes to their feeds as any content originating from WordPress.com or Jetpack-powered sites will require a manual share to be found on the platform.
WordPress core committer Pascal Birchler has published a Periodic Table of WordPress Plugins to celebrate the software’s upcoming 20th anniversary. The table showcases 108 of the most popular free plugins on WordPress.org.
Ten years ago Birchler created a website that showed the most popular plugins in a similar table layout, ranking them by number of active installations. This chart has been updated and is now available at plugintable.com.
“Today, I am actually ‘re-introducing’ this project, complete with a modernized look and feel, more curation, and more useful information than before,” Birchler said.
The website is interactive, so cards can be expanded to see more information about each plugin, including the author, install count, star rating, and the date it was first published.
Approximately 57% of the plugins included have 1 million or more installs, so it gives you a chance to see all of the most successful WordPress.org extensions at a glance. 600k is the lowest number of active installs for plugins included in the chart.
After making the chart, Birchler noted that he was impressed by the stats for the Really Simple SSL plugin, which has more than 5 million active installs and a 5/5-star rating. He also highlighted Site Kit by Google as being the youngest “element” first released in October 2019, with 3+ million active installs in just over three years in the directory. The XML Sitemaps Generator plugin is the oldest among those included, released in 2005 just before Akismet.
“Another plugin that has caught my eye is WP Multibyte Patch by @eastcoder, which offers improvements for Japanese sites,” Birchler said. “With over 1+ million installs it makes me wonder why WordPress core itself doesn’t have better support for multibyte characters.”
If you like the Period Table of WordPress Plugins and want to see it hanging on your wall, Birchler has set up a Shopify-powered store where you can purchase a high-quality print version. The poster comes in light and dark modes and is also available framed. He plans to donate the proceeds of the store to the WordPress community.
Big Bite, a UK-based enterprise WordPress agency, has launched a new survey called State of Enterprise WordPress to gather data and insights on how the platform can best serve large-scale brands.
The survey takes approximately 5-7 minutes to complete and covers budgets, publishing processes, platform strengths, user frustrations, custom functionality, infrastructure, architecture, and ongoing maintenance. It also attempts to gauge whether enterprise users have embraced the block editor and what other CMS’s the organization is using in addition to WordPress.
“This particular survey is focused on brands that are using WordPress, in any part of their estate,” Big Bite CEO Iain McPherson said. “Maybe it could be a small blog, powering an intranet or a large publishing site. I want to understand why and how they are using WordPress, but then drill down into other valuable metrics such as team size and budgets.”
The survey will be used to create a new report that summarizes the findings from enterprise organizations. McPherson said if the report is well received in the WordPress community, his team may continue publishing the State of Enterprise WordPress on an annual basis.
The survey most directly applies to the people who are responsible for the enterprise organization’s website, as opposed to the business owners.
“We find with companies of these sizes; multiple people are managing their WordPress products,” McPherson said. “Also, multiple respondents from the same company is totally OK, too.
“This is one of a couple of initiatives I am working on to raise the brand awareness of Big Bite, but more importantly, show that WordPress should be considered as an enterprise CMS.”
According to W3Techs, WordPress’ current CMS market share is at 63.3% of all the websites where a CMS can be detected. Enterprise organizations help keep this market growing, so insights about how they are using WordPress and their particular pain points could be helpful in developing solutions that benefit this segment. Data from the survey will be aggregated and anonymized and will not be attributed to the respondent or the organization.
Human Made is organizing the community’s first ever AI for WordPress online conference on May 25, 2023. The time and schedule have not yet been announced but registration is open.
Attendees can expect to see demos of Human Made’s current AI projects and highlights of what others are doing in the space. The organizers plan to discuss the impact AI will have on the WordPress industry and share predictions and insights.
Human Made is among a few WordPress product makers that have been experimenting with Gutenberg-native AI block and content assistants. CTO Joe Hoyle published several videos demonstrating how prompts can work across various blocks with AI natively integrated into the block editor. His prototypes have progressed with the addition of Content Streaming that renders content, blocks, and layout in real time. Users can also cancel the streaming output while it’s in progress to refine the guidance given to the AI.
We've made some progress on the WordPress Gutenberg AI integration. Specifically: Content Streaming– blocks are now rendered as they come in to provide more immediate feedback and guidance. pic.twitter.com/D8lw5lBIun
The agency has gone all in on exploring the possibilities AI opens up for this industry and has created a guide titled “76 ways AI could transform WordPress.” The document covers content, marketing, publishing, engineering, delivery, and impact in the enterprise.
The virtual AI for WordPress event will feature industry leaders who are also creating things in this space. WPfront.page is tracking more than three dozen AI products that have popped up in the last few months, so there is no shortage of developers experimenting. Organizers will announce more speakers and sessions ahead of the event on May 25.
