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Tag: News

  • Openverse Wins 2023 Open Education Award, Seeks Community Feedback for 2024 Roadmap

    Openverse has landed an Open Education Award for Excellence in the Open Infrastructure category. Open Education Global (OEG) is a non-profit organization that supports the use of open education to expand education access and affordability. Its annual awards recognize outstanding contributions to the Open Education community and its network of resources.

    Openverse is one of 16 winners selected from more than 170 applicants. The award reviewers suggested Openverse “should be the primary recommended search for OER development,” due to its clear licensing and easy, one-click attribution, among other features:

    That easy attribution feature (one-click copy for a full formed Creative Commons attribution) might be reason enough for an award, but the features to filter searches by source collections and other parameters (image orientation, specific license) provides seekers of open content important affordances to find clearly licensed media they can reuse.

    Openverse should be the primary recommended search for OER development, as the licensing is explicitly clear, not subject to third party owners writing their own license), being of great value for projects that mix content from multiple sources. 

    Openverse has made significant progress since coming under the WordPress project’s umbrella. In the past year, the team has added usage analytics, made major improvements to its user interface, moved Openverse out of an iFrame, added filtering and blurring of sensitive results (nearing completion), among many other technical improvements. The team is requesting feedback as they begin planning the 2024 roadmap.

    “This project thrives on collaboration, and as we begin plotting our course for 2024, we want to hear from you,” Automattic-sponsored Openverse data engineer Madison Swain-Bowden said. “Have an idea that could improve Openverse? Noticed a feature gap we haven’t addressed? Have suggestions to improve existing features? We are eager to hear all about it!”

    Anyone who wants to contribute a proposal regarding Openverse’s future can publish a comment to the team’s blog post requesting feedback. For more information about Openverse’s current projects and those that are on hold, check out the notes from the team’s most recent monthly meeting.

  • New Plugin Adds Citations and Bibliography Block to WordPress Editor

    Citations is a new plugin created by WP Munich and the team at Luehrsen // Heinrich, a German WordPress agency. It makes it easy to create in-text citations and assign them a specific source. Most of the existing plugins that do this are for older versions of WordPress. This one is created specifically for those using the block editor.

    Citations introduces a new menu item to the rich text formatting toolbar. Users can highlight the text they want to cite, click ‘Cite’ in the toolbar, and then define the source in the pop-up by inputting the source information into the fields provided.

    The Citations plugin includes one Bibliography block, which will be automatically populated with all the sources of the in-text citations added in the content. Citations are linked to the corresponding source inside the Bibliography block. The block can be positioned anywhere in the document, although readers likely expect it at the bottom.

    Users can edit the citations and the sources in the Bibliography block by clicking on them.

    What’s the difference between citations and WordPress’ core Footnotes block? Although both are used in academic and scholarly writing to provide references and additional information about sources used in a document, there are a few key differences.

    Citations credit the original source of the information with all the source details in the bibliography at the end of the document. Footnotes are more flexible in that they can include additional context or comments at the bottom of the document, to keep the text from becoming too cluttered with explanatory notes. They may also be used to source citations with the author, title, and publication details, but do not always follow the bibliography format.

    The Citations plugin also includes a pattern that will insert some Lorem Ipsum paragraphs with citations and a sample bibliography with sources at the bottom. This gives users an idea of how the plugin can be used to structure a document for citing sources, if they are just getting started. Users can search for “Citations Demo” in the pattern search bar to find it.

    Download the plugin for free from WordPress.org, or give it a test drive using WordPress Playground.

  • WordCamp US 2023: Welcoming the Future, One Contribution at a Time

    Although summer was coming to an end, the weather and the people at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center were equally sunny thanks to WordCamp US 2023!

    The flagship event – held in National Harbor, Maryland, from August 24-26, 2023 – drew over 2,000 WordPress enthusiasts. Since the first-ever WordCamp was held in the US, it’s always nice to see the WordPress community come together in the region.

    This year, Hostinger participated as a Super Admin sponsor. Some of our team members also attended the Community Summit, participated in Contributors Day, and volunteered for the event. Read on as we walk down the memory lane and relive the good times.

    Community Summit

    Before WordCamp’s three-day main event began, there was the Community Summit. Participants gathered in person at the Summit for cross-project discussions to advance the WordPress open-source project.

    The Community Summit took place on August 22-23, 2023, at the same venue as the rest of WordCamp US 2023. Not every WordCamp has a Community Summit, so this year’s WordCamp US was even more special.

    a WordPress Community Summit signage at the entrance of WordCamp US 2023 main hall

    The Summit was an invitation-only event to ensure everyone present could actively participate. The organizers attempted to include WordPress contributors from various backgrounds to cover as many perspectives as possible. This year, it was attended by 125 participants.

    It’s worth noting that the Summit is not intended to be a space to see “who’s who” in WordPress. The participants were a mix of new and experienced contributors, facilitating more inclusive dialogues.

    The topics discussed during these two days were pretty comprehensive. They ranged from technical ones like aligning processes and contributions between WordPress Core and Gutenberg to human-oriented issues like ensuring Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB) for all contribution teams.

    No decisions were made at the Summit. Instead, the event focused on identifying issues the community should address in the project’s future.

    Fortunately, notes about each discussion are available on the Make WordPress website so that contributors who couldn’t attend the Summit can catch up with the conversations.

    Contributors Day

    Next, it was time for the WordCamp US 2023 main event!

    As usual, WordCamp kicked off with Contributors Day. Here, attendees could join any of the 22 Make WordPress contributor teams and get actively involved in the project.

    What’s wonderful about Contributors Day is that it’s open to everyone, regardless of skill level. So, the more experienced contributors could help newcomers onboard and share hands-on guidance to navigate the tasks. Attendees could also join multiple tables and were highly encouraged to explore their interests.

    Hostinger Head of Content Emma Young and Documentation Team Rep Milana Cap at the Documentation team table at the WordCamp US 2023

    What was new about Contributors Day at WordCamp US 2023 was the room setup. Instead of everybody gathering in one big room, they were spread into multiple rooms.

    Closely related teams were put in the same room to encourage deeper cross-collaboration initiatives. Although the camaraderie of being in the same room with all the other contributors is unrivaled, it was nice to have a more focused space to elaborate on an initiative.

    Hostinger has some sponsored contributors involved in the Five for the Future initiative. Some of them attended this Contributors Day alongside other Hostingerians.

    “I joined the chat about cross-team collaboration to translate WordPress documentation and training material,” says Leonardus Nugraha, our WordPress Content Specialist and a Documentation team contributor. “This idea had been brewing for a while. At the WordCamp US Contributors Day, we had all the reps from the different teams we needed.”

    Hostinger Affiliate Partnerships Manager Aditya Remy Shah during a discussion at the Sustainability team table at WordCamp US 2023

    Meanwhile, Aditya Remy Shah, our Affiliate Partnerships Manager, joined the Sustainability team’s table. “We had a discussion from the hosting brand’s point of view. We brainstormed ways WordPress can become more sustainable from four angles – social, economical, event, and environmental,” he says.

    By day’s end, contributors connected and gathered actionable ideas. As contribution is at the heart of WordPress, Contributors Day is surely one of the most effective ways to strengthen the collective effort.

    Conference Days

    Moving to the second and third day of WordCamp US 2023 – the Conference Days! This is when attendees got to join various talks and workshops.

    More than 30 talks and workshops covered a broad spectrum of WordPress-related topics, from core web vitals to community building.

    One talk wasn’t directly related to WordPress, but it spoke to the anxiety surrounding AI and the future of the writing profession. Ken Liu, an award-winning fiction writer, delivered “Tell the Story You Want To Tell”, where he talked about rediscovering storytelling’s meaning in human lives. His session challenged attendees to rethink how and why we, humans, tell stories.

    Another interesting talk was “For All Userkind: NASA Web Modernization and WordPress”. During this talk, Abby Bowman and J.J. Toothman discussed the beta.nasa.gov website redesign, which uses WordPress.

    In a breakout session afterward, they took attendees on a site tour, including its back end. Some people still think WordPress only suits small businesses or personal websites, so it was fascinating to learn how big organizations like NASA utilize the platform.

    the homepage of NASA's new WordPress-based beta site

    And since the WordCamp US 2023 venue is only around a 30-minute drive from the nation’s capital, it’s only fitting that we had a session about the most high-profile WordPress website in the US – whitehouse.gov.

    Presented by Andrew Nacin and Helen Hou-Sandí, the session chronicled the behind-the-scenes story of the site’s launch by those who led the project themselves.

    the homepage of the White House website

    All the talks are now available to watch on the official WordPress YouTube channel. The presentation slides will also be available shortly on the WordCamp US 2023 website’s session pages. And like other WordCamps, the talks will also be public on WordPress.tv.

    Hostinger Booth

    Standing tall in the Sponsor Hall with our signature violet-and-black colorways, attendees stopped by the Hostinger booth to chat about our services, try our features, or collect merchandise.

    Hostinger's team members at Hostinger booth at the WordCamp US 2023

    Opening a booth is one way to connect better with our customers, IT professionals, and tech enthusiasts. “WordCamp is a perfect opportunity to hear our customers’ feedback directly so we can continue to deliver the best managed WordPress hosting experience,” says Domantas Gudeliauskas, WordPress Marketing Manager at Hostinger.

    Among the features attendees could try at our booth, they were mostly excited about Hostinger’s WordPress AI Assistant. Most attendees said they loved the way it can speed up the website creation process.

    Hostinger team members explaining Hostinger services to customers at WordCamp US 2023

    Another crowd favorite was hPanel, Hostinger’s own custom control panel. We were glad many customers and attendees found hPanel easy to navigate and informative. Advanced users were also enthusiastic about Pro Panel, which empowers users to handle multiple websites efficiently.

    The Future of WordPress

    In a recognized WordCamp tradition, Conference Days usually wrap up with two signature sessions.

    The first session by WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy reviewed important conversations and ways to drive the project forward.

    WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy giving closing remarks on stage at WordCamp US 2023

    During “Josepha Haden Chomphosy on the future of WordPress”, Josepha reflected on how WordPress has evolved in the past 20 years and how it keeps growing thanks to the WordPress community.

    Josepha emphasized the importance of making WordPress accessible for everyone, so that it can thrive in the future and last longer than the community who builds it. “We deserve an open web that is secure in the future,” she says, highlighting WordPress’ vision to democratize publishing and give voice to the voiceless.

    Next, WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg’s session, to discuss current and upcoming technical improvements, followed by a live Q&A.

    WordPress co-founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg giving closing remarks on stage at WordCamp US 2023

    During “Gutenberg: Next with Matt Mullenweg.”, Matt discussed the then-newly released WordPress 6.3, and highlighted improvements on the upcoming WordPress 6.4.

    This next WordPress release is being led by a squad of gender-underrepresented contributors, which only happened once before with the historic WordPress 5.6, code-named “Simone.”

    WordPress 6.4 will come with a new default theme, Twenty Twenty-Four. Unlike past default themes, Twenty Twenty-Four is a multipurpose theme. It can look equally beautiful for displaying lots of images or chunks of text.

    Matt also highlighted that Gutenberg is now entering the third phase of its development, which will focus on collaborative workflow. Users will soon be able to work simultaneously with their team on the same post or page and see who made which edit. This could be a game changer for a team of remote workers.

    As Josepha said in her talk, “We exist for as long as people want to use our software.” Indeed, the upcoming collaborative improvements can be one more reason for people to stay with WordPress.

    The post WordCamp US 2023: Welcoming the Future, One Contribution at a Time appeared first on Hostinger Blog.

  • Developers Claim Damaged Trust Following Public Confrontations with WordPress Leadership

    The WordPress community is ending two days of heated discussions that rapidly descended into a mire of unbridled emotional confrontations across multiple social channels, following a tweet from John Blackbourn that raised concerns about WordPress.com plugin listings outranking WordPress.org on Google Search.

    Developers expressed concerns about the SEO impact of the practice of cloning WordPress.org’s plugin directory for use on WordPress.com, with no backlinks to the original plugin. Another concern is that it perpetuates the longstanding confusion between WordPress.org and WordPress.com.

    “I don’t think the SEO concern is real, and by that I mean that besides John’s screenshot, which I think is related to the .org en-gb subdomain decision/bug,” Matt Mullenweg told the Tavern when asked whether WordPress.com will considering not indexing these pages that duplicate content from WordPress.org.

    “For general searches I’m seeing .com 5 pages down,” he said. “Just looking at traffic to those pages, they don’t seem to be getting much if any from search engines! So I’m not really concerned about SEO of those pages.

    “The vast majority of the traffic to those is to logged in users. When they click ‘manage’ they can easily install it across multiple sites or see where it’s already installed, which actually works across .com and Jetpack sites.”

    He offered a similar explanation to Freemius founder Vova Feldman on X, who claimed that WordPress.com has an SEO advantage over independent plugins.

    Plugin developers also expressed concerns about new users arriving to a plugin’s duplicated page on WordPress.com and seeing that the plugin is Free only on the (paid) Business plan. This gives the visitor the impression that the plugin isn’t available for free elsewhere, because there is no link back to WordPress.org with an explanation.

    Many WordPress.org plugin authors were not aware until recently that their plugin pages are being scraped for use on WordPress.com. Yesterday, Patchstack updated its readme file to ensure that WordPress.com users and visitors are made aware that the plugin is available for free in the official WordPress plugin repository, using the following text:

    This plugin can be downloaded for free without any paid subscription from the official WordPress repository.

    “I was at a Python conference last week and a guy came to our booth and said he has a WordPress site but he hasen’t been able to purchase any plugins yet,” Patchstack CEO Oliver Sild said. “I told him that they are all free, and then it turned out he had a WordPress.com site where he has to pay to install any plugins. These people think that THIS IS the WordPress.”

    When asked if WordPress.com could at least link back to the .org plugin for logged-out views to eliminate some of the confusion, Mullenweg confirmed that he told Sild that WordPress.com would work on adding links to the .org equivalent page this week.

    “But that confusion that people claim is causing huge issues for WordPress isn’t supported by the numbers or growth of non-.com solutions over 17 years now,” Mullenweg said.

    “So at some point we should stop accepting it as within our top 100 issues for WordPress.

    “It’s much more likely like a road bump for some newbies, than an actual blocker, not unlike learning the difference between categories and tags, or how to identify a normal-looking comment that’s actually spam.”

    In response to WordPress developer Daniel Schutzsmith saying that WordPress.com is causing confusion for OSS, Mullenweg contended that it “creates a false dichotomy between WP on .com and ‘open source software.’ Every site on .com is part of the OSS community as much as on any other host.

    “When there is confusion, it assumes that it’s a top issue for WordPress. Nothing about WP’s growth, including vis a vis other projects, indicates that the existence of a .com and .org with the same name has held us back.”

    In support of his claims about the growth of non-WordPress.com solutions, he cited a W3Techs report on hosting company usage stats with extrapolated revenue on Post Status Slack.

    “On revenue: If you extrapolate out public domain numbers with plan pricing, and look at public filings like the amount GoDaddy makes from hosting and what % of that hosting is WP-powered, you pretty quickly see that GoDaddy, Newfold/Bluehost, Siteground, Hostinger, and WP Engine make more than .com from WordPress hosting.,” Mullenweg said. “You can check out those companies on the five for the future page.”

    Mullenweg has previously criticized large hosting companies for what he perceives to be a lack of support for the open source WordPress and WooCommerce projects in proportion to how much they benefit from the use of these platforms. His comments in Post Status yesterday indicate that while he is still unsatisfied with their core contributions, he acknowledges these companies as important to WordPress’ overall growth.

    “By the way, despite not looking great for core contributions, I think each of those companies has been essential for the growth of WordPress, and particularly the work they invest into upgrade PHP, MySQL, core auto-updates, plugin auto-updates, and security are crucial for the health of our ecosystem,” Mullenweg said.

    “It’s ‘cynically cool’ to hate on some of the bigger ones, but it’s a free and open market, none of their WP users are locked in and could easily switch to other hosts if they weren’t happy with the price and value they were getting. In fact by that measure, you could argue they’ve all done a much better job than .com at connecting with customers. Maybe I spend too much of .com’s engineering and investment on things like 2fa/passkeys, reader/notifications, stats, the mobile apps, Gutenberg, and Calypso and not enough on marketing or paying off affiliate host review sites.”

    The Damaging Community Impact of Public Confrontations

    Mullenweg continued to be active on Post Status Slack and X (Twitter) throughout the day, attempting to debunk claims that Automattic is exploiting open source contributors for profit. These interactions included personal attacks which followed after Mullenweg blocked WordPress Marketing Team co-rep Sé Reed who claimed that he is standing in the way of contributors improving the open source project and that he was “vilifying, dismissing, and insulting” the WordPress community.

    Some perceived him blocking Reed as him shutting down criticism, despite the fact that he said this is the first person he has ever blocked on Twitter. Although her comments were tangential to the original issue (the impact of the WordPress.com plugin listings), they became a focal point after Mullenweg lashed out at developer and product owner Dan Cameron who accused him of “actively doing more harm than good.”

    I reached out to Automattic-sponsored WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden-Chomphosy who said she did not have additional comments about what has happened with the recent confrontational exchanges, nor the impact on the community.

    “I find it kinda refreshing to see Matt throw an elbow or two and stick up for himself,” WP All Import Product Manager Joe Guilmette said in Post Status Slack.

    “It’s not the greatest look, but that’s for his PR people to sort out. I don’t have any idea how I’d handle being criticized so heavily for years by the people who built businesses and careers on a project that I helped bring in to the world, but it probably would be a lot worse than calling a few people out on Twitter.”

    Others who gathered in various Slack instances, watching things play out on Twitter, felt collectively traumatized by witnessing the interactions between Mullenweg and different community members.

    “I think Matt did way more damage this time than ever before,” one prominent WordPress consultant said, requesting to remain anonymous. “It generated good but quite wearied and sad expressions of grief and anguish in my company Slack and no doubt many others.

    “The instantly and deeply (however crudely researched) personal nature of Matt’s attacks leads people to paranoid fears that he has a shitlist of enemies who are just regular people, not giant companies etc. It’s a fearsome kind of punching down where the community gets stuck in the psychological position of the children of an abusive parent. Different personalities and different perspectives based on our own experiences lead us to different coping responses. But it’s very ugly now to have the paranoia confirmed as Matt basically taunted the fact that he feeds on what he’s told second or third hand about things others say about him in private.”

    Matt Cromwell, Senior Director of Customer Experience at StellarWP, said that discussions that start and stay on X/Twitter generally have very little fruit, especially when resolving something as complicated as the WordPress.com plugins SEO issue.

    “The community keeps leaning on this platform for these discussion but things like the impact of duplicate content on two sites both called ‘WordPress’ requires more nuanced and trusting conversations which Twitter can’t provide,” Cromwell said.

    “Mullenweg used the whole thing as an excuse to make so many of the plugin owners that drive WP adoption feel small. It was extremely hurtful to the trust product owners put into the leadership of the WP project. I expect to see more product owners prefer to build SaaS integrations with WP rather than dedicated products because they don’t trust that Mullenweg has their mutual interest in mind at all anymore – and I don’t see a way for him to ever put that genie back in the bottle after this behavior both on Twitter and in Post Status Slack.”

    WordPress developer and contributor Alex Standiford said Mullenweg’s public confrontations yesterday are “a bad look for WordPress, and deflate the passionate contributors who genuinely believe in WordPress.” Despite recent events, he continues to believe in the larger impact of people building open source software together.

    “I believe that WordPress isn’t software,” Standiford wrote on his blog. “It’s not community. It’s not a single person, no matter how significant that person thinks they are. I believe that WordPress is the manifestation of a belief that the web is at its best when it’s open. If I genuinely believed that forking WordPress would be good for WordPress, and the web, I’d contribute to it over the existing platform in a heartbeat.”

  • WooSesh 2023 Publishes Speaker Lineup, Launches Seshies Awards

    WooSesh 2023, the virtual conference for WooCommerce store builders, will be broadcast live on October 10-12. This year’s theme is “Next Generation Commerce.” Registration is not yet open, but the speaker lineup and broadcast schedule have just been published. Over the course of three days, WooSesh will feature 31 speakers across 23 sessions.

    The event will kick off with the State of the Woo address, delivered by WooCommerce CEO Paul Maiorana and other product leaders from the company. Speakers will cover a wide range of topics like complexities of sales tax and product taxability, accessibility, block themes, security, AI tools, and automation, with case studies and workshops mixed in.

    New in 2023: The Seshies

    WooSesh organizer Brian Richards is launching “The Seshies” this year, a community awards ceremony that will recognize the best examples of the WooCommerce ecosystem across six categories: Innovation, Store, Extension, Agency, Developer, and Community Advocate.

    The Seshies will include a community awards ceremony that will celebrate the winners. Anyone can nominate candidates for the awards, and participants can even nominate themselves and their own WooCommerce projects.

    “These awards are something that have been on my heart for quite some time,” Richards said. “And now, after 6 years of hosting WooSesh and 10 years of running WPSessions, I think I’ve amassed enough authority and (critically) a wide enough reach to deliver awards, on your behalf, that have real meaning.”

    The week before the event, Richards plans to publish the top three nominees in each category. The community will vote throughout the first two days of WooSesh and the winners will be announced on the final day. Winners will receive a digital badge of recognition and Richards said he is also working on producing physical awards to ship to winners anywhere in the world.

  • ActivityPub 1.0.0 Released, Introducing Blog-Wide Accounts and New Blocks

    Version 1.0.0 of the ActivityPub plugin was released this week with major updates that make it possible to have a blog-wide account, instead of just individual author accounts, where followers receive updates from all authors. This new feature allows people to follow blogs on decentralized platforms like Mastodon (and many others) with replies automatically published back to the blog as comments.

    In the ActivityPub plugin settings, users can check “Enable blog” to have the blog become an ActivityPub profile. Authors can be enabled at the same time as a blog-wide profile.

    Activities originating from a Blog profile can be further customized through the existing post content and image settings. Users can also set the activity object type to default, article, or WordPress post format which maps the post format to the ActivityPub object type. Supported post types include posts, pages, and media. Note that the blog-wide profile only works with sites that have rewrite rules enabled.

    An experimental hashtags setting is also available, which adds hashtags in the content as native tags and replaces the #tag with the tag link. Users should be aware that it may still produce HTML or CSS errors.

    ActivityPub 1.0.0 introduces two new blocks – one for displaying Fediverse Followers and the other for displaying a “Follow” button to allow people to follow the blog or author on the Fediverse. The Follower system has also gotten a complete rewrite based on Custom Post Types.

    Other notable updates in this release include the following:

    • Signature Verification: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/spec/security/
    • Simple caching
    • Collection endpoints for Featured Tags and Featured Posts
    • Better handling of Hashtags in mobile apps
    • Update: Improved linter (PHPCS)
    • Fixed: Load the plugin later in the WordPress code lifecycle to avoid errors in some requests
    • Fixed: Updating posts
    • Fixed: Hashtag now support CamelCase and UTF-8

    Automattic acquired the plugin in March 2023 from German developer Matthias Pfefferle, who joined the company to continue improving support for federated platforms. Next on the roadmap for the ActivityPub plugin is threaded comments support and replacing shortcodes with blocks for layout.

  • Developers Raise Concerns About WordPress.com Plugin Listings Outranking WordPress.org on Google Search

    WordPress core developer John Blackbourn sparked a heated discussion yesterday when he posted an image of his WordPress User Switching plugin ranking higher for the WordPress.com listing than the page on WordPress.org.

    Blackbourn later apologized for the inflammatory wording of the original post, but maintains that .com plugin listings being displayed higher in search results is not healthy for the open source project.

    “This was a frustrated 2AM tweet so I could have worded it better, but the point still stands,” he said. “The plugin pages on dotcom are little more than marketing landing pages for the dotcom service and they’re strongly competing with the canonical dotorg pages. That’s not healthy.”

    Several others commented about having similar experiences when searching for plugins, finding that the WordPress.com often ranks higher, although many others still see WordPress.org pages ranked highest.

    Blackbourn said his chief concern “is the process that introduced the directory clone on .com either disregarded its potential impact on .org in favor of inbounds or never considered it in the first place – both very concerning given the ranking power of .com.”

    The tweet highlighted the frustration some members of the open source community feel due to the perennial branding confusion between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. Nothing short of renaming WordPress.com will eliminate the longstanding confusion, but this is unlikely as Automattic benefits from tightly coupling its products to WordPress’ name recognition.

    “Duplicate content confuses the human + search engines,” SEO consultant Rebecca Gill said. “Search engines won’t like it, nor will humans trying to find solutions to their problems. There is already enough confusion w/ .org + .com for non-tech folks. This amplifies it. Noindex .com content or canonical it to .org.”

    Participants in the discussion maintain that the duplication of the open source project’s plugin directory “creates ambiguity and confusion” but WordPress co-creator and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg contends it also gives plugin authors greater distribution.

    “It’s providing distribution to the plugin authors, literally millions and millions of installs,” Mullenweg said. He elaborated on how the cloned plugin directory is integrated with Calypso, WordPress.com’s admin interface:

    .com has its own plugin directory which includes the .org one, it provides more installs and distribution to the plugin authors, which helps their usage and for commercial ones gets them more sales. The plugins are not altered. .com takes no cut for the distribution.

    When participants in the discussion suggested that other hosts doing the same thing would create a wild west situation for plugin rankings, Mullenweg said he would not mind if the plugins were “duplicated and distributed by every host and site on the planet,” as they are all licensed under the GPL.

    Outrage against distributing WordPress.org plugins in this fashion was not universal in the discussion. A few commenters support this strategy and see it as beneficial for the long-term health of the open source project.

    “I’m all for it to be honest,” WordPress developer Cristian Raiber said. “Anyone could scrape those pages but not everyone gives back to WordPress and makes sure it’s here to stay for the next decades. Controversial, I know. But I prefer we build together instead of alone.

    “I fail to see how this is not an advantage to anyone who hosts their plugins (for FREE) on w[dot]org ?” Raiber continued in a separate response. “Is it about being outranked in Google’s SERPs for brand kws? Why has this generated so much outcry when the intent is clearly beneficial?

    “This FINALLY solves a friction point for potential buyers. Streamlined plugin installation and usage vs ‘here’s a list of 55 steps you have to take to install my plugin.’ Users want options, different uses cases and all. I want wp.com to make money so they keep growing this product.”

    XWP Director of Engineering Francesco Marano suggested that WordPress.com has benefitted from the branding and reputation of .org, which is built by volunteers. She also proposed that Automattic “has the resources to do a whole rebranding which would ultimately benefit both projects.”

    Mullenweg responded to these comments, defending WordPress.com’s efforts in fending off early WordPress competitors and cited Automattic’s preeminence in contributing back to core, despite taking in less revenue than some larger companies making money from the software:

    Since its foundation, .org has benefitted from the branding and reputation of having a robust SaaS version available from .com, including a free version, something basically no other host does. Over 200M people have used it, and countless started on .com and then migrated to another host. The shared branding made it very difficult for services like Typepad to compete. You want to see what WP would look like without it? Go to Joomla.

    .com has also been the source of countless performance improvements, we deploy pre-release versions of core to millions of sites to find bugs and do testing, making WP releases way more stable for regular users and hosts. No company contributes more, even though many make more from WP than .com’s revenue. It would have been way easier to fork the software, not merge MU. Most hosts (and many community members) bad-mouth .com while not contributing a fraction back to core. Hosts spend tens of millions a year on ads against .com. I get attacked constantly.

    In 2010, when the WordPress Foundation was created, Automattic transferred the WordPress trademarks to the Foundation, after having been the temporary custodian of the trademarks until that time. As part of the transfer, the Foundation granted Mullenweg use of the WordPress trademark for WordPress.com.

    This trademark was deliberately secured, and the company does not appear to be open to renaming the platform. This doesn’t mean WordPress.com can’t do anything to mitigate the confusion that scraping the WordPress.org plugin directory creates. Participants in the discussion suggested that WordPress.com forego indexing the pages they created for plugins that developers submitted to the open source project.

    “You can control SEO by telling search engines to not index those pages of open source software developed for .org on the .com domain,” WordPress plugin developer Marco Almeida said.

    “I have 20 free plugins on the repository and I don’t see how my plugins will benefit if we open this pandora box and normalize cloning these pages and diluting the WordPress.org importance on search engines.”

    Developers who are just now discovering their WordPress.org plugins cloned to WordPress.com listings are also wanting to know how many of their installs come from WordPress.com so they can better understand their user bases. Mullenweg suggested developers who want a different listing for WordPress.com users can sign up for the .com marketplace.

    Tensions remained high as the heated discussion continued throughout the day and into the evening with criticism flowing across X (Twitter), Post Status Slack, and other social channels, as many developers learned for the first time that their plugin listings have been cloned on WordPress.com. As long as a commercial entity shares the open source project’s branding, these types of clashes and friction will continue popping up.

    “Personally, I can’t help but empathize with plugin authors that chose to support OSS and find the directory cloned in a commercial service, albeit free, with no access to stats,” Francesca Marano said. “As I mentioned before, the main issue is the confusion around the two projects.”

  • WordPress.org Plugin Developers Renew Demands for Better Plugin Metrics

    It has be nearly one year since WordPress silently turned off active install growth data for plugins hosted in the official plugin repository, a key metric that many developers rely on for accurate tracking and product decision-making. “Insufficient data obfuscation” was cited as the reason for the charts’ removal, but this opaque decision landed without any communication from those who had made the call in a private discussion.

    In a ticket originally titled “Bring back the active install growth chart,” RebelCode CEO Mark Zahra made the opening plea for thousands of plugin developers who were asking for the return of this data. From those who simply host hobby plugins and enjoy the thrill of watching people use software they made to business owners who need this data to make critical decisions, the overwhelming consensus was that this data is valuable and should be available to those who are contributing to WordPress through plugins.

    In an appearance on the WPwatercooler podcast last year, Audrey Capital-sponsored meta contributor Samuel “Otto” Wood confirmed the decision was made through private channels via Slack DMs in a discussion initiated by Matt Mullenweg. He also revealed that the active install growth chart was removed because it was giving inaccurate data and that the data one could derive from it was inaccurate:

    I read through all that discussion and we worked, they worked on it for a long, Scott and several people tried various things before removing it. They adjusted the values, they adjusted numbers. They, they went through a ridiculous amount of iteration and in the end, none of it worked. People were still using it even though it was giving them basically garbage. So finally removing it was the only thing to do. We did have a plan for replacing it. We just didn’t have a plan for replacing it immediately. Nevertheless, giving them active install count numbers that are wrong is more harmful, we felt, to both users and developers interests than simply not giving them at all. 

    Wood offered an explanation on the podcast that should have been delivered weeks earlier by those involved in the discussion on official channels. Despite the earlier data being flawed and “insufficiently obfuscated,” developers still want access to the raw data, not interpretations of that data.

    These are the posts that track the history and development of developer’s pleas to reinstate access to the data:

    During the height of this discussion, developers made many suggestions for different data points that would be meaningful for tracking their efforts, and Matt Mullenweg responded that he was amenable to showing more stats to plugin authors about their plugins. No progress on this effort has been reported since then.

     StellarWP Product Marketing Director Taylor Waldon has reopened this discussion nearly a year later, calling on Mullenweg to stop restricting access to plugin data from people who are hosting themes and plugins on WordPress.org.

    “I talked to a bunch of folks at [WCUS] contributor day,” Paid Memberships Pro co-founder and CEO Jason Coleman said in response to Waldon’s tweet. “As far as I know, there isn’t any other current effort to update or replace the install count numbers or old ‘growth’ chart.’”

    Coleman put together a draft proposal with some ideas from his conversations. The document describes a common scenario where plugin developers are left in the dark about the growth or decline of their plugins’ active installations:

    Imagine a developer with a plugin with 150k active installations. That developer has effectively 0 quantitative feedback on whether users of his plugin are growing or falling. The download count has a trend, but there is no separation between new downloads and updates. The download count tracks developmental pace as much as user growth. A bump in downloads could be due to a security vulnerability being patched or an influx of new users. The current active installations count is severely rounded and offers no feedback until such a plugin either gains or loses 33% of its users, which are drastically different outcomes.

    Coleman contends that plugins hosted outside of WordPress.org are able to gather more meaningful metrics. Popular plugins have resorted to including features in non-WordPress.org add-ons or simply removing their extensions altogether from the repository for lack of data.

    His proposal includes a few metrics that would help developers better track their plugins, even if that data is only shown to the authors themselves:

    • Share a more accurate active installations count with the owners of a plugin.
    • Share more accurate version number counts with the owners of a plugin.
    • Differentiate the download count by type: website downloads, dashboard installs, dashboard downloads, updates, other (hits to the zip file).
    • Allow plugin developers to define custom event triggers to be tallied and displayed to the plugin owners on the plugins .org profile page.

    Coleman’s draft is still in progress. He was not immediately available for comment when I asked about the next step once the proposal is further developed.

    WordPress.org has always been the most popular distribution channel for the most widely used plugins, but the data available has not kept pace with developer and business needs. Releasing the raw data, while respecting any privacy limitations, would allow developers to extract their own interpretations of that data and allow services to present it in creative ways.

    At the very least, this data should be available to developers (even if it’s not public) to help them better track the trajectory of their plugins and the efficacy of their marketing efforts. More data can only serve to improve the WordPress ecosystem’s ability to continue powering a multi-billion dollar economy. There are undoubtedly many technical requirements for supporting the release of this data, and they need to be prioritized if WordPress.org is to continue attracting the best products for distribution.

    “This is not about vanity metrics or inflating numbers for marketing purposes,” Coleman said. “This is about getting valuable feedback on the relative use of a plugin hosted in the .org repository so developers can make informed decisions and investments in those plugins.”

  • WordPress Training Team Seeks Community Feedback on Learning Pathways

    Earlier this year, the WordPress Training Team published the results from the Individual Learner Survey completed in 2022. The goal of the survey was to identify the most useful and high-impact resources and content for Learn.WordPress.org and guide the future development of this community learning tool.

    One of the main takeaways of this survey was the need for a clear, structured, and user-friendly approach to presenting Learn WordPress content. This need was also confirmed by feedback from WordCamp Europe Contributor Day attendees.

    As a result, the training team launched the Learning Pathways on Learn WordPress project in July of this year. The objective of this project is to create and launch progressive user-friendly learning pathways tailored to different types of Learners on Learn WordPress. The training team anticipates that this project will be a year-long effort, working collaboratively with multiple different teams, including the Meta and Marketing teams. 

    Since WordCamp Europe, the Training Team has started the process of drafting rough outlines for learning pathways intended for Users, Designers, and Developers.

    In August, Automattic-sponsored training team contributor Wes Theron published a post on the training team blog, asking for community feedback on the proposed learning pathways. 

    I asked Theron why he feels this project is so important, and what feedback he would like from the community:

    The Learning Pathways project focuses on improving the educational experience on Learn WordPress by creating personalized learning journeys for various learner profiles. These tailored pathways aim to enhance the Learn WordPress platform’s effectiveness and user-friendliness.

    We have drafted the rough outlines for learning pathways intended for Users, Designers, and Developers. We’re excited to get the community’s thoughts and ideas to help shape them further before moving forward.

    The Training Team has set the deadline for feedback for the 15th of September 2023. If you would like to review the proposed learning pathways and provide your feedback, you can do so from the Looking for feedback: Learning pathway outlines post on the Training Team blog.

  • 10up Merges With Fueled, Backed by Insignia Capital

    10up, a leading development agency and contributor to the WordPress project, has merged with Fueled, a technology consultancy that specializes in mobile and web application development. Together, the companies now employ more than 400 full time team members, forming a digital powerhouse with expanded market reach across mobile and publishing sectors.

    “Fueled has built stand out iOS and Android apps – several of which I’ve personally used – for clients like Warby Parker, Verizon, the United Nations, and even Apple themselves,” 10up President Jake Goldman said. “Just as 10up has built some great mobile applications, Fueled has executed notable works in the web application space for clients like Wall Street Journal and The New York Times – but content management systems and editorial experience has never been a core focus and strength. Until now.”

    The merger transaction was made possible by investment from Insignia Capital, a firm that previously invested in Fueled. Insignia has made Fueled’s merger with 10up its first major growth investment, paying to restructure the companies’ ownership model. All parties invested in the merger hold meaningful shares, with none of them holding a majority share.

    Goldman said 10up owners rolled over meaningful equity into the joint business, “but there was also a very healthy purchase of 10up equity to make this possible.”

    10up’s announcement hinted at more acquisitions in the newly combined companies’ future.

    “Insignia brings a whole new class of financial and investment capabilities to 10up and Fueled, with an appetite for responsibly paced growth through acquisition,” Goldman said. “They don’t just bring capital – they also bring expertise and impressive connections.”

    He further elaborated on their acquisition strategy as seeking to expand their combined capabilities “to compete with the biggest digital transformation agencies:”

    In the broadest of terms, I think that we’re pretty open minded to what we find in the market, but opportunities that meaningfully expand what we can offer – shoring up weaker spots in our capabilities – are going to be the most attractive. As examples, while we’ve each done CRM and CDP integration work and strategy, I’d imagine a first rate CRM and/or CDP consultancy with some great case studies and clients would be the kind of opportunity that would be particularly interesting.

    Open Source Contribution Will Continue To Be a Priority at 10up

    Nearly 12 years after Goldman started 10up with what he said was “a small personal savings account and the sweat equity of more than a decade making websites and other media,” he is no longer the sole leader of the organization and will take on the role of Partner in the merged companies. Integral to the success of 10up, which Goldman has scaled to $40M+ in annual revenue, is its consistent commitment to supporting the open source ecosystem from which it has derived millions of dollars in value. Fueled acknowledged this in its announcement about the merger:

    10up has long held a commitment to the open web, and open source contributions as a core value. This will remain a priority, especially towards the WordPress community, and will be further strengthened by the additional market reach gained from the merger.

    Fueled shares this same ethos, which they intend to continue cultivating following the merger.

    “Fueled has always been supportive of open source, even if their part of the market (mobile apps) hasn’t embraced that model in the way web CMS has,” Goldman said. “They have open sourced projects (in fact, we incidentally found that we were using one!), and, like 10up, have fully embraced and focused on open technology solutions like NodeJS and React for web applications.”

    For the most recent WordPress 6.3 release, 10up had the second most contributions by company, with 290 contributions from 16 people, superseded only by Automattic, which boasts 83 contributors.

     

    image credit: WordPress 6.3 contribution stats

    10up has consistently been among the top contributors to the software, which has been essential to the world-class publishing experiences the company has built for its clients.

    “That commitment to giving back to the web, making sure there’s a ladder for the next generation of developers to climb, and helping open technologies thrive remains with us,” Goldman said. “Our new business partners understand that this is deeply intertwined with 10up’s identity, and perhaps more importantly, our success. It’s not just a generosity thing – it’s also good business.

    “Merging with and investing in 10up would be pretty foolish if you aren’t comfortable with the tools and platforms we use and prefer, most especially the web’s most popular open source CMS, and you can bet that being comfortable with that, and researching that question, was essential to their comfort with merging. In many ways, that’s a validation for WordPress.”

    10up and Fueled Will Gradually Merge Services and Administration, Pursuing Large Scale Digital Transformation Clients

    10up and Fueled will largely operate as two companies and close partners for the time being, sharing leads and pursuing customer growth together. Goldman said the vision is not to simply have web publishing/WordPress customers and separate mobile app customers but rather to go after large scale digital transformation projects.

    “That means having a fully integrated way to deliver everything from the mobile apps, to the website and CMS, to advanced e-commerce and CRM integrations (even if we may only provide one of those services to some clients),” he said. “That means we’re not just operating as separate companies in the future, but truly merging and unifying our companies from leadership and sales on down through project and product management, user research and design, and engineering delivery.”

    Given that both brands hold considerable weight and influence in their respective markets, Goldman said they agreed “it would be incredibly foolish to discount that and rush to a single brand.” Instead, they plan to explore how the companies can work together.

    “We honestly don’t know where we’ll land on the external brand question, and didn’t think it was fundamental to the question of merging,” Goldman said. “We’ll be exploring and researching that question together, and any change would, again, be gradual and planned.

    “We all similarly agree that when we think out into the future, whether that’s 12 or 24 months from now (probably something in between), that we probably don’t want two separate, external, top line company brands competing for attention and oxygen in the space, to say nothing of competing for internal focus and resources.”

    He said that could play out in a number of ways, and may be a data driven decision. For example, 10up could evolve to be the brand name for the WordPress engineering services team or the company’s open source and productized solutions. Nothing has been predetermined about the branding.

    In the meantime, it appears to that the combination of companies will be a more gradual merging of services and administration.

    “In the mid term, maybe the next year, we want to focus on building a highly collaborative world class sales and growth operation, unifying back office (benefits management, financial operations, recruiting ops, etc), and looking at where some of our smaller capabilities and disciplines that aren’t very specific to 10up or Fueled delivery might benefit from joining forces and achieving some economy of scale,” Goldman said.