fidzu : WordPress

A federated Wikipedia by Jon Udell talks about the ossification happening in the Wikipedia community, caused in part by its attachment to rules that were created with the best of intentions. All open source communities, including WordPress, have to be vigilant against this. Sometimes we have to throw out what worked before to create what will work tomorrow.

31 Jan 2015 10:50pm GMT

I write novels. And with just about every novel I write, I try to do something new or different that I haven't done before, in order to challenge myself as a writer, and to keep developing my skills. In The Android's Dream, of example, I wrote in the third person for the first time; in Zoe's Tale, I had a main character-a sixteen year old girl-whose life experience was substantially different from my own; with The Human Division, I wrote a novel comprised of thirteen stand-alone "episodes."

And now? With Lock In? What new thing have I done to stretch myself as a writer and teller of tales? Well, I'll tell you; it's something I'm really proud of, actually:

I've written a novel entirely free of semicolons.

John Scalzi in Pacing Doesn't Just Mean Wearing a Groove in the Floor.

31 Jan 2015 5:03am GMT

photo credit: TerranceDC - cc

Earlier this month, I described how the features as plugins first model is a mess. Drew Jaynes, who is leading the development cycle for WordPress 4.2, is already making headway into improving the model. Unlike previous release cycles, feature plugins that are likely to be merged into WordPress have been assigned a core mentor at the beginning of the cycle. Assigning mentors at the beginning of the dev cycle should help make the merge process smoother and keep each project within scope.

Improved Communication

One of the biggest issues I have with feature plugins is the lack of communication regarding their progress on the Make Core blog. This issue is being addressed with weekly updates that explain what's changed, things to test, and where focus is needed. The following plugins are candidates that may be included in 4.2:

• Press This - Uses the Press This tag on the Make Core blog.
• Customizer Theme Switcher - Uses the Customer Theme Switcher tag on the Make Core blog.

Improved Testing Opportunities

If you browse to the Add New plugins screen in a development version of WordPress, you'll see a Beta Testing tab. The tab provides easy access to feature plugins that are currently in development. My primary gripe with testing feature plugins is that they're usually not synched with their Github counterparts where most of the development occurs.

WordPress core developer, Dion Hulse, created a script specifically to sync feature plugins on Github to the WordPress plugin directory. This allows feature plugins to have nightly releases which are available from the plugin directory. This small but important change makes it a lot easier to keep up with and upgrade feature plugins.

WordPress 4.2 Feature Plugin Beta Testing Tab

It's still early in the development cycle, but I'm impressed with Jaynes organizational abilities. He's addressed some of the largest pain points to the feature plugin process. If the changes put the experimental model back on track, future lead developers will have an easier time managing the program.

30 Jan 2015 11:32pm GMT

Online community building is like gardening. Whether you're running an active blog, moderating forums, or managing a social network, you will encounter challenges in maintaining growth. Experienced community builders have a wealth of knowledge to share with those who are new to it, especially when it comes to recognizing and mitigating toxic elements, fertilizing to encourage growth, and responding to community changes.

Last year, StackExchange opened a Community Building beta to test the waters for a new Q&A site dedicated to building, administering, managing, and cultivating digital communities. It's been in beta for approximately six months and has attracted 877 users with an impressive 100% of questions answered.

While the Q&A site is not oriented around WordPress (WP Developers have their own thriving Stackexchange), many of the questions and topics relate to issues that WordPress site managers deal with every day:

• How do you choose the software that runs your community?
• Can't watch 24×7; how do we keep comments under control?
• How to handle a shill?
• Forum war because of a new rule and a banned user
• Pitfalls to avoid when transferring community ownership?
• Do long-term "icebreaker" threads foster quality discussion?
• How and when do I attract experts to a young site that doesn't yet have much expert content?

WordPress users have a diverse array of community building software available to them for creating interactive comments, forums, and social networking sites. These plugins make it possible for anyone to build a community, even with very little technical knowledge. However, even with the best tools at your disposal, a community is an organic thing that requires skill and dedication to cultivate.

New community managers are eager to learn how to chase rabbits and moles out of their gardens while not disrupting community growth, as evidenced by the many questions submitted regarding managing user behavior. The "problem-users" tag is so far one of the most popular on the site, followed by other related topics, such as conflict resolution, new users, content curation, forums, and site growth.

This new Q&A site is still navigating through its beta period but still needs to demonstrate progress. So far, the beta is healthy in terms of questions getting answered, but it needs to generate more questions on a daily basis, attract more experienced members, and gain more traffic before it can graduate from its final beta.

Part of the StackExchange mission is to provide answers without distraction for users who are asking practical, detailed questions. The new Community Building beta site is not a place to vent but rather a place to get solid, actionable advice from experienced community managers. This site is an excellent resource for anyone who is involved in online community building, even if you simply have a blog that receives a steady stream of comments. If you want to contribute, sign up at StackExchange to get started.

30 Jan 2015 11:11pm GMT

Restaurant themes don't often land in the WordPress Themes Directory. In fact, there are barely a dozen listed among the 3,000+ themes on WordPress.org.

One problem with many commercial restaurant themes is that they are usually marketed as a complete package with everything built into the theme, including menu management. The lack of separation of menu data from the theme means that users are locked into that theme and their content is not transferable.

That's not the case with Auberge, a new free theme from Oliver Juhas of WebMan Design. Last week we featured Juhas' Modern theme, which was built to showcase portfolios. Modern requires Jetpack for managing portfolio posts, and Auberge takes the same approach for menus.

The theme's home page features a large header image, with blog posts and/or an optional food menu preview displayed beneath.

Check out the live demo to see how the menu page is divided into sections. The menus are responsive and each item can be assigned an image, price, and description.

Auberge requires the WebMan Amplifier plugin, available on WordPress.org, in order to extend the theme to include the custom "ingredients" taxonomy and recipe metaboxes. The theme also requires Jetpack to support many of the features you see in the demo, including:

• Food menu posts
• Featured content setup (banner area)
• Tiled galleries
• Image lightbox zooming effect
• Infinite Scroll
• Sharing buttons
• Site icon, favicon, and image logo
• Related posts, CDN, etc

Auberge utilizes WordPress' native customizer to offer layout options for the placement of the blog posts and food menu sections on the home page. You can also customize the header background and text colors, accent color, footer and widget colors. The customizer also contains options to set the basic font size and select Google Font combinations based on recommendations from the Google Web Fonts Typographic Project.

If you like the layouts seen in the demo site, the theme's author has prepared all the markup for each page to copy into your pages. You can find this in the "Demo Content Page Layouts" section of the theme's documentation.

Auberge has support for post formats as well as the unique ability to split posts and pages into multiple parts. It also supports Schema.org markup, Google Recipe View, and Theme Hook Alliance action hooks.

Auberge was built based on Automattic's Underscores starter theme. Juhas designed it to be lean, so any extra functionality comes in the form of plugins. The theme itself contains no shortcodes, sliders, or page builders.

If you're looking for a restaurant or cafe theme that includes menu content the right way, Auberge is a solid option. It allows you to select a different theme further down the road without losing all of your content. You can find it via your admin themes browser or download it directly from WordPress.org.

30 Jan 2015 8:20pm GMT

You might remember a few years back I talked about why Automattic has a creed, and shared ours. Here it is again:

I will never stop learning. I won't just work on things that are assigned to me. I know there's no such thing as a status quo. I will build our business sustainably through passionate and loyal customers. I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and I'll remember the days before I knew everything. I am more motivated by impact than money, and I know that Open Source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation. I will communicate as much as possible, because it's the oxygen of a distributed company. I am in a marathon, not a sprint, and no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is by putting one foot in front of another every day. Given time, there is no problem that's insurmountable.

One of the parts of Automattic that has grown the most over the past few years is our design corps, now over two dozen people. This group, led by creative director Dave Martin, has come up with a supplemental Designer's Creed for followers of their craft at A8C:

I take pride in my craft. I ensure that everyone - regardless of ability or device - can use my designs. I routinely ask for feedback, even when it's uncomfortable. I regularly watch people use my designs, because testing leads to clarity. I will never stop at "good enough."

You can read more about it on Dave's blog. »

30 Jan 2015 1:15am GMT

WordPress plugin authors have a great deal of liberty when it comes to structuring and organizing their code. There's no prescribed file structure, so when you look under the hood of a plugin, you often need to poke around a bit to find out how the author is organizing things.

Jason Agnew found this to be confusing when he went to build his first WordPress plugin. Agnew is the technical director at Big Bite Creative, located in Middlesbrough, England. He often collaborates with both front and back end developers on projects, which drove him to find a better way to write plugins that are organized for multiple team members.

This week Agnew introduced Herbert, a new open source framework for building WordPress plugins. "We believe the current approach to building plugins is unorganized and difficult to understand," Agnew said. "It makes working in teams or taking over from a previous developer time consuming. Its early days for Herbert but our aim is to solve this."

Prior to creating Herbert with his team, Agnew did his homework to see if there was an existing tool to solve this problem. He discovered the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate project, but determined that it wouldn't work for his agency's needs. "Although WPPB would be a great starting point, it seemed best suited to the quick development of smaller plugins," Agnew said. "We needed something more suited to scale."

He checked out some of the most popular WordPress plugins, hoping to find a common thread among them for a semantic, structured method of plugin creation. "To our surprise, there wasn't any sense of uniformity or consistency of implementation among them," he said. At that point, he rallied his team to write their own WordPress plugin framework.

The open source Herbert project was born out of this effort. The framework aims to keep business logic separate from template code, so that back and frontend developers aren't tripping over each other. "It offers a file structure to keep your code organised, with a solution as simple as all your routes belonging in the plugin/routes.php file," Agnew said. "It no longer ties you or your development team to the WordPress Database Object ($wpdb), allowing you to use the power and effectiveness of Laravel's Eloquent ORM to handle your database queries."

Herbert utilizes Composer to handle the framework's dependencies. Template code is stored in views, which uses the Twig PHP templating engine. The framework may not be everyone's cup of tea. However, if you like separating your code into routes, views, and controllers, then Herbert may save you some time when spinning up new plugins.

The Big Bite Creative team plans to maintain the framework and will add plugin examples in the future. "We plan to introduce an interface to the WordPress post object for Eloquent, along with tests for your code," Agnew said. They are also considering adding a WordPress-specific frontend framework to work alongside Herbert. The project is open to contribution, so feel free to fork Herbert on GitHub and send code back to the team.

29 Jan 2015 11:55pm GMT

One of my favorite sessions at PressNomics 3 is now available to watch for free on YouTube. Although sessions weren't recorded or live streamed, Chris Lema used his own gear to record his presentation. He shares the lessons he's learned throughout his career on managing time and energy.

One of my favorite tips is writing down three things you want to get done each day. Each completed task builds confidence and over time, you end up with a lot of accomplishments. So far, the technique is working and as long as I complete two out of three tasks each day, I feel pretty good about myself.

29 Jan 2015 10:23pm GMT

The WordCamp Europe organization team announced today that the 2015 event will be held in Seville, Spain from June 26 - 28 at the Barceló Gran Hotel Renacimiento. Last year's WordCamp in Sofia, Bulgaria was a tremendous success with nearly 800 attendees, a world-class speaker lineup, and a strong local community of volunteers.

Ordinarily, the WCEU organizers select a host city based on applications from various European WordPress communities after an open call. However, this year is an exception. WordCamp Central prevailed upon the team to have the event in late spring or summer in order to accommodate WordCamp US, which is expected to take place in the fall.

"As we had to move WordCamp Europe to the first half of the year, we were quite limited in time," organizer Petya Raykovska said. "So instead of publishing an open call for applications, we decided to reach out to some of the best established WordPress communities in Europe that have experienced teams of local organizers and asked them to prepare bids to host WCEU 2015. We received three very good applications from three different teams."

The WCEU organization team landed on Seville after considering various factors, such as the local organizers' preparation of the budget and venue research. "We chose Seville because of the excellent job they did with the application," Raykovska said. "But also because of the great, experienced local team, because it's a great location with a very different vibe from Sofia - it's affordable, well connected with the rest of Europe, and has a very strong local WordPress community."

The WordPress community in Seville has held a local WordCamp for the past several years. The city's metropolitan area has approximately 1.5 million residents, making it a decent-sized city for hosting an event. Attendees should expect to pack for warm weather, as the Seville's average high temperatures in the summer often reach above 35 °C.

Siobhan McKeown will be leading a team of 18 organizers for the 2015 event, including five experienced local organizers and a global team of organizers from all over Europe.

Tickets will go on sale at the beginning of February, and the organization team will be calling for speakers and sponsors in the next few days. Unlike last year's event, WordCamp Europe 2015 will include interpretation for the local language. While all sessions will be given in English, a Spanish translation will be offered simultaneously.

29 Jan 2015 8:37pm GMT

Jetpack ships with more than 30 different modules including, Jetpack Comments. One of its primary features is allowing people to login using credentials from their WordPress.com, Twitter, Facebook, or Google+ accounts.

Jetpack Comments Form

This module has replaced the WordPress native comment form for nearly two years on WP Tavern. It makes it easier for people on social networks to post a comment, but the convenience comes with several drawbacks.

Lack of a Graceful Fallback

Out Of Fuel

In early 2014, several Tavern readers experienced Service Temporarily Unavailable errors when trying to submit a comment. The error was caused by a security setting with mod_security on DreamHost and exposed the lack of a graceful fallback. Instead of displaying an error, the iFrame should have been replaced with the native comment form. I created an issue on Github explaining the problem and although it gained immediate attention, not much has happened since.

Annoying Page Refreshes

It's normal for articles on the Tavern to have several comments with multi-threaded conversations. I've discovered that Jetpack Comments will sometimes take me to a different part of the page after I reply to a comment instead of taking me to where the comment is published. It doesn't happen all the time, but when it does, it's annoying.

It's 2015, 10 years after the term Ajax was coined by Jesse James Garrett. Ajax stands for Asynchronous JavaScript + XML. It's a collection of technologies that provide near real-time interaction with page elements. For example, if you leave a comment on a site running the P2 theme, it will appear on the site without refreshing the page.

Page refreshes are distracting, annoying, and break the flow of a conversation. I'm not the first one to request Jetpack Comments be Ajaxified. In an issue on Jetpack's Github account, George Stephanis, who is a member of the Jetpack development team explains that, while theoretically possible, it's not high on the priority list.

It's theoretically possible passing the event through JS window.postMessage - but to actually render the comment would take some theme integration that we can't presently assume. If someone wanted to write this I'd be fine accepting a pull request that fires an event and passes some limited data back, like the comment ID and status or something, but it's not high on the priority list.

The ticket has gained little traction with no signs of Ajax support being added anytime soon. His response is similar to Matt Mullenweg's in episode 130 of WordPress Weekly, when I asked him why comments haven't changed much in WordPress over the years, "It's very difficult to iterate comments as it's hard to get those changes to be compatible with every WordPress theme in the world."

It's Not Highly Extendable

One of the biggest problems I have with Jetpack Comments is that it's not easily extendable using plugins. Since it's an iFrame hosted on WordPress.com, it's hard to manipulate and is an all or nothing approach.

The Old Comment Form

In 2011, I used a collection of plugins to add features to the native comment form so it felt more like a reply box on a forum. Readers had the ability to style and preview comments without having to write code. They could also subscribe to the thread and edit their comment afterwards for up to 10 minutes.

However, my favorite feature was the Reply link next to each comment. When clicked, the name along with a link to the comment id was automatically added to the comment form. For example, @<a href="#comment-11784″ rel="reply">Name of Awesome Commenter</a> - Comment text here. Since the theme didn't support threaded comments at the time, this feature came in handy.

Comment Form Used on The Tavern in 2011

Although some of the features are replicated in Jetpack Comments, the old form felt like a better experience to me. If you're a long time commenter on the Tavern, I'm curious if you feel the same way?

I Don't Recommend Jetpack Comments

In an era where Twitter, Facebook, etc. provide the ability for real-time communication, Jetpack Comments and the default comment system in WordPress feels like ancient technology. If all you need is an easy way for people to login using their social media accounts to post a comment, Jetpack Comments is a good solution. However, if you need something more robust, look elsewhere.

Unless the team adds Ajax support for comment submissions and makes the module more extendable, I can't recommend it as a viable alternative to the native comment form in WordPress.

29 Jan 2015 6:54pm GMT

photo credit: BBC Nature

Last week, Pressable was engaged in a 24/7 struggle to keep its customers' sites operational. The recent outages caused some customers 24+ hours of downtime and many closed their accounts in favor of finding an alternative host. Today the company announced that the root cause of the outage customers experienced the week of January 19, 2015, was an intentional attack on Pressable's systems.

A post on the company's blog further breaks down the attack: "Ultimately, the reason for this outage was a well crafted attack on our systems. The attack was a variant of the "Slow-Loris" attack discovered in 2009."

The attack went undetected because of the insidious manner in which it was executed. Pressable has been working with security professionals to get the attack under control and announced all systems operational on Monday.

A week ago, after hearing about Pressable's continued struggle with downtime, I asked CEO Vid Luther if the company was being intentionally sabotaged. At the time, he didn't think that an attack was a real possibility:

I do not believe that anyone who has an agenda against Pressable is behind these issues. I'm not aware of anyone who has an agenda against Pressable, besides the general competition in the WordPress hosting space, and currently, some of them are acting like vultures. But, I don't think those guys have the ability to orchestrate something like this. So, unfortunately, no conspiracy theory from our side.

While working to mitigate customer downtime, the Pressable team discovered the coordinated attack on their systems. The attacker's sophisticated method of sabotaging Pressable went undetected, because it was made to appear that the host's infrastructure was being overloaded.

The knowledge of the attack came after multiple apologies from Luther, who originally identified Pressable's lagging infrastructure as the cause. Luther told the Tavern that he has an idea of who the attackers are but will be digging into it further before calling out any parties publicly.

28 Jan 2015 10:43pm GMT

GenerateWP, the popular WordPress code generator site, is celebrating two years in operation this week. The site, founded by Rami Yushuvaev, launched with five code generators and now has more than 20. Yushuvaev sees the site as an educational tool that helps WordPress developers learn more about coding best practices.

Before launching GenerateWP, Yushuvaev created three code generators to serve the Israeli WordPress community. The site was an instant success, which prompted him to translate it into English and launch GenerateWP in January 2013.

The first week after launching, Yushuvaev was approached by a major brand that offered to buy the site and a few developers made offers to finance more generators. "I decided that it wasn't the right time to give up the site, since I had big plans for it and for the WordPress community," he said.

The site has 15K+ registered WordPress developers and averages 100,000 visitors per month, most of whom are designers and developers. During the past two years, Yushuvaev worked with contributors Maor Chasen and Ohad Raz to rewrite the entire code base to use object-oriented programming and make it work better with WordPress.

In celebration of the site's two year birthday, GenerateWP is introducing custom code snippets, which will allow users to save their own snippets in a public and/or private library. "Front-end designers use codepen.io to showcase their code, JavaScript developers use jsfiddle.net, Bootstrap developers have bootsnipp.com, and now WordPress developers have GenerateWP.com," Yushuvaev said.

The site now includes a collective library of public snippets shared with the community. Users can also browse public snippets by author.

Individual snippets allow users to share, download, or clone the code into their own libraries. Developers can embed snippets on their sites, send them to Pastebin, or create a GitHub gist.

Future Plans for Expanding GenerateWP

Yushuvaev has plans to monetize the site further down the road but said that the generators and code snippets will always remain free. "The money will come from other services," he said. "I can't reveal our plans but you can expect a game changing feature for our premium users."

In the meantime, the team plans to create new code generators, including a tool to generate widgets, a meta box generator, and admin menu page generators. In the coming weeks, the site will also provide an oEmbed option to embed snippets using nothing but the URL.

Currently, the most popular generators on the site are the ones for creating custom post types, shortcodes, and custom taxonomies. Yushuvaev is optimistic that the site will continue to grow as more developers discover how much time they can save with the generators.

I was writing the same code over and over again (post types and taxonomies) for different clients," he said. "Creating an automatic generator to save some time was the next logical step." He found that writing code eats up plenty of time and did not want to utilize free plugins, as they often do not remain in active development.

GenerateWP is quickly becoming a popular tool for WordPress educators. "The site is used in WordPress classes around the world to teach new developers how to properly code using WordPress coding standards," Yushuvaev said. "We managed to confirm a class in Thailand, universities and colleges in Israel, United States, Canada, and Germany.

"We also have received requests to translate our tools to other languages," he said. The GenerateWP team plans to add translations in the near future to open up the site to more international users.

28 Jan 2015 9:20pm GMT

Slack Buys Screenhero To Add Screen Sharing And Voice Chat To Its Work Messaging Platform, which I'm very excited about as a daily user of Slack (on 5 teams now) and through Audrey an investor in Screenhero and a big fan of their vision. As the article mentions, Automattic has been a Screenhero customer as well.

28 Jan 2015 7:47pm GMT

Created by Matt Mullenweg in 2009, when the plugin directory hosted only 4K plugins, Thank a Plugin Author Day (January 28th) motivates users to thank plugin authors.

There are several ways to celebrate the event, such as visiting the plugin author's website. The link is usually available via the plugin's page on WordPress.org. You can also find a link to the author's website by searching for the plugin in the backend of WordPress. Also, most plugins in the directory have a link to give a monetary donation.

Plugin Donation Link

Another way to thank plugin authors is to rate and review their plugins. Ratings and reviews are an easy way to send feedback directly to an author. Make sure to provide actionable feedback instead of one or two-word reviews. A side effect of rating and reviewing plugins, is that it's one of many ways to contribute back to the WordPress project.

photo credit: opensourceway - cc

Since the holiday's creation, over 31K plugins have been added to the directory which results in nearly 36K reasons to use WordPress! Thank you to anyone who has ever published a WordPress plugin whether it's on the official directory or on GitHub. Without so many plugins, I wouldn't be able to customize WordPress to make it my own.

28 Jan 2015 7:05am GMT

PressNomics Introduction

Last week, I attended the third annual PressNomics conference in Phoenix, AZ. The event focuses on the business side of the WordPress ecosystem and provides opportunities for business owners to learn from those who are blazing a path towards success. On the evening before PressNomics, I joined several business owners for dinner.

A half hour into the meal, I listened intently to various conversations taking place around the table. Topics of conversation included: market segments, customer satisfaction, and business partnerships. At this point I realized I was definitely at a business conference.

The Family Delivers Opening Remarks

Joshua and Sally Strebel along with their kids, appeared on stage and delivered the opening remarks. It's as if the family invited every attendee into their home for a family reunion.

#PressNomics is getting started! pic.twitter.com/DqFGdEidK4

- Brian Krogsgard (@Krogsgard) January 22, 2015

Despite several competing businesses, companies, and products under one roof, I witnessed so many small groups of people discussing strategy as if they're all friends. I felt a positive energy amongst the crowd and several attendees left the event in high spirits, ready to take their businesses to the next level.

Session Highlights

Name the people in this image

The room was packed with attendees for every session since PressNomics chose not to record or live stream the event. The following is a list of memorable points from the sessions I enjoyed most.

Joshua Strebel interviews Dre Armeda

Joshua Strebel Interviews Dre Armeda

Joshua Strebel interviewed Dre Armeda on stage with a bottle of scotch. Aremda described how he became involved with WordPress and founded Sucuri, where he turned a two-person part-time hobby into a multi-million dollar, 30+ employee company. He also talked about his role as Vice President of Operations for WebDevStudios.

Ben Chan

Envato Stats via Ben Chan

Ben Chan is the Director of Growth and Revenue at Envato. The statistics he shared confirm that Envato is a huge player in various markets such as WordPress themes, audio files, and plugins. His slides are not available online, but I archived a few stats using Twitter. "Note that the earnings are before Envato takes their cut."

• In the first 30 days, the Automotive theme on ThemeForest had 300+ sales generating over $15K in sales.
• In less than 10 months, the WPlus theme had over 4K+ sales.
• In 2014, Visual Composer was the best selling plugin on CodeCanyon. The second best product is built on top of it.
• Easy Social Share buttons plugin by Appscreo has over 6K+ sales on CodeCanyon.
• Of the top 50 selling WordPress themes in 2014, 67% are new to the list versus 2013.
• 79% of themes describe themselves as responsive, but make up 93% of overall earnings.
• Only 4% of themes in the ThemeForest marketplace have earned less than $1K in their lifetime.
• Envato supports initiatives in the WordPress community. One example is funding John James Jacoby to work on GlotPress, bbPress, and BuddyPress full-time for six months.

Selena Larson

Helpful tips from @selenalarson on how startups can pitch, including getting known thru good comments #Pressnomics pic.twitter.com/c3hufKKspb

- Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) January 23, 2015

Selena Larson who writes for the Daily Dot, shared tips on how businesses can receive press by improving their pitches. I agreed with pretty much everything she said on the matter and hope those in attendance took notes. Here are a few highlights:

• Stop using jargon to pitch a product because no one talks like that.
• Describe your product, service, or business in two sentences or less.
• Balance your innovation with something that's familiar. Don't talk to reporters as if they're investors because they're not.
• Product Hunt is a good way to test the market or pitch a product without involving the press.

As bonus material, be sure to read our guide on how to promote newly released plugins.

Danny Sullivan

SEO With Danny Sullivan

Danny Sullivan, who is a Founding Editor of Search Engine Land, presented on the topic of SEO. It's a topic I've stayed away from and don't talk about much, but Sullivan's presentation was not only entertaining, it was enlightening. He showed a brief history of the Google homepage and described why numerous claims of SEO being dead are false.

The one thing I took away from his presentation is that SEO will never die, but continue to evolve. Because of Sullivan's presentation, I'm going to open my mind to SEO instead of writing it off.

Chris Lema

Things @chrislema does daily #pressnomics #gtd pic.twitter.com/WIBAlTCTkW

- Remkus de Vries (@DeFries) January 23, 2015

The CTO and Chief Strategist at Crowd Favorite, Chris Lema, is one of my favorite speakers. He knows how to tell a story and keep the audience engaged. For this presentation, Lema shared tips and disciplines for getting things done. My favorite tip from his session is to start the day writing a list of three things you need to get done. Getting 2-3 items finished each day builds confidence and provides a historical record of things that are done.

His stance on putting family first is an important strategy I need to work on. So far, listing three things to accomplish each day is working. I feel better about myself and it's helping me figure out when I've had a good day.

The last session featured Joshua Strebel interviewing Matt Mullenweg on stage, but I'm going to dissect that session in a separate post.

A Lot of Fun

Not only are the Strebels great hosts, they donated over $10K of proceeds from the event to the CureSearch for Children's Cancer charity. If there's a PressNomics 4 and you're involved in the economics of WordPress, I highly encourage you to attend.

My goal was to be a fly on the wall for as many conversations as possible and I feel like I've accomplished that goal. I wouldn't be surprised if several strategic partnerships are announced in the next few months with PressNomics being the birth place of the conversation.

If you can't wait for PressNomics 4, consider attending Prestige Las Vegas, NV, February 27-28th. Similar to PressNomics, it's a conference focused on the business side of WordPress.

Here are a few other photos from the event.

Click to view slideshow.

28 Jan 2015 6:00am GMT

I hopped on a podcast with Kitchensink WP to chat about the latest in the WordPress world.

27 Jan 2015 11:35pm GMT