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10 episodes with BuddyPress
11 episodes with BuddyPress
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4 episodes with BuddyPress
2 episodes with BuddyPress
2 episodes with BuddyPress
2 episodes with BuddyPress
2 episodes with BuddyPress
It's the WP Minute! Support independent WordPress news like this, join the Slack membership, or purchase a classified listing in the weekly newsletter at thewpminute.com/support And now a word from our sponsor. You know how it goes, everything I mention here will be linked up in the newsletter and the blog post. Check out thewpminute.com for the links.Most ImpactfulThe uncertainty surrounding social media providers like Twitter has sparked interest in alternatives. Mastodon and other Fediverse networks have received a look. But longtime WordPress users may recall a self-hosted option: BuddyPress.The venerable plugin can turn any WordPress website into a social hub. It still boasts over 100,000 active installs. And even if you haven't heard much about it lately, it's still very much in development. Version 11.1 was released back in February.And as Sarah Gooding of WP Tavern reports, a Virtual Contributor Day will be held on April 20. It coincides with French WordPress Community Contributor Day in Paris.Taking the current social media climate into account, BuddyPress may have an opportunity to grow. That's not to say it will overtake Twitter or Facebook anytime soon. But it could become an attractive option for those who want to build smaller, tight-knit communities.Links You Shouldn't MissIf you've purchased (or are planning to purchase) any commercial extensions from the WooCommerce Marketplace, you may notice some price increases. The WP Minute has confirmed that emails are being sent to customers announcing higher costs for yearly renewals. In an email exchange, a WooCommerce support representative stated that “Only a subset of extensions had their prices changed.” We've reached out to WooCommerce's official press channels but have not yet received any comments. Have you been impacted by a price hike? Let us know on Twitter @thewpminute.WordCamp Europe is all about the kids! Sarah Gooding at WP Tavern reports that the event, held from June 8-10 in Athens, Greece, will feature free childcare. This will allow attendees of the conference and Contributor Day to bring their children along. And a special workshop for kids will take place on June 8.Last week, we told you about Joe Hoyle's integration of AI within the WordPress block editor. The Human Made co-founder and CTO has posted a follow up that demonstrates some new features. Content streaming and content-aware editing add a new level of convenience to the tool. As Hoyle says, “small incremental improvements make a large difference to productivity and quality of life.” These experiments are worth keeping eye on.From the Grab BagNow it's time to take a look at some other interesting topics shared by our contributors.In acquisition news, WP Minute member Justin Ferriman reports that plugin developer SnapOrbital has been scooped up by writer and entrepreneur Andrei Tapalaga. SnapOribital is known for their premium add-ons for LearnDash.The 4th annual Atarim Web Agency Summit will take place from April 25-28. The virtual event will feature 40+ sessions aimed at helping agencies grow their business. WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy is listed among the presenters this year.If you're a WordPress product maker seeking investment, Emilia Capital is encouraging you to make an in-person pitch at WordCamp Europe. The firm is run by Marieke van de Rakt and Joost de Valk of Yoast SEO.Developing WordPress plugins within the browser may soon become a reality. Automattic developer and WordPress Playground creator Adam Zielinski shared three examples of how it could work over on the Make WordPress blog.WordPress Playground relies in part on the SQLite database engine. Core contributor Ari Stathopoulos has posted an update on the proposal to add official support within WordPress.The COVID-19 pandemic took a toll on in-person events - including WordPress Meetups. They're slowly starting to come back. That now includes Boston, which will reconvene on April 24.Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today: Justin FerrimanOutroThanks to you, dear listener, for tuning in to your favorite 5-minutes of WordPress news every Wednesday.You can support independent content like this by purchasing us a digital coffee at thewpminute.com/supportOr join the #linksquad membership for $79/year to support the show and become a producer of the WP Minute at thewpminute.com/supportThat's it for today's episode, if you enjoyed it, please share it wherever you do social media and jump on the mailing list at thewpminute.com. ★ Support this podcast ★
The WordPress news from the last week which began Monday 6th February 2023.
The WordPress news from the last week which began Monday 6th February 2023.
State of the Word 2022 has just completed another hybrid presentation. A mix of livestream on the official WordPress YouTube channel and in-person attendees traveled to NYC to watch Matt Mullenweg and others update us on all things WordPress. We'll cover some of the highlights in today's post. Tune in to listen to the complete recording of the event on our podcast or in the player above. Thanks for being a WP Minute reader/listener/viewer! Consider supporting us through a virtual coffee or joining our membership. Video highlights Key takeaways Gutenberg will be bigger than WordPress itself. To mobile apps and the web. bbPress forms now have Gutenberg Using Blocks Everywhere plugin. Will be embedded in BuddyPress. PEW Research using Gutenberg Day One App using Gutenberg in web app Mobile Gutenberg is dual-licensed GPL & MPL Tumblr using Gutenberg 500 meetups doubled their events in 2022 1 WordCamp in 2021 to 22 in 2022 Community Summit is coming back WordPress is turning 20 next year Doing a new 10 year update to the "Milestones Book" 12,000 People took a Learn.WordPress course New blog and showcase pages on WordPress.org bringing Jazz design languages over 22 million images. 1.1 million audio files. OpenVerse scours the web for Creative Commons images & other media. Now launched audio."Not fully embedded into WordPress yet" Create themes just using blocks & style variations We're at the end of Phase 2 of Gutenberg initial development Create block theme "plugin" allows you to make themes from blocks Zen mode is a new writing experience Showing off "locked-in patterns." A way for consultants to pass sites off to clients. 1399 Release contributors New core contributors to WordPress. "Think of them like the Wikipedia super-editors" WordPress is what it is because of community "Think of WordPress.org as an App Store for WordPress" Matt likes to think of the community as fractal Allow theme & plugin developers to self-identify as what their project goals are through a new taxonomy. Will be launching this month. Phase 3 Gutenberg: Collaboration. Improvements for editorial workflows. Also bringing in OpenVerse. Share your experience with the WordPress 2022 survey Matt was excited about OpenAI and Stable Diffusion WordPress Playground. A way to experience the entirety of the WordPress stack in the browser, without installing dependencies. 100% in the browser using web assembly. How can we make WordPress that is a gift to the world for decades to come? "WordPress belongs to all of us, but really we're taking care of it for the next generation." Important links wordpress.tumblr.com Engineawesome.com using Gutenberg communitysummit.wordpress.org/2023 WP20.wordpress.net learn.wordpress.org wordpress.org/openverse https://wordpress.org/plugins/create-block-theme/ Make.wordpress.org https://developer.wordpress.org/playground
The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 21st November 2022.
The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 21st November 2022.
The idea of using WordPress to power a social networking site isn't new. The BuddyPress plugin has offered this functionality since 2009. But Elon Musk's recent takeover of Twitter (and the ensuing chaos) has WordPress community members taking another look at what's possible. Mike McAlister recently shared a concept for OpenPress, a plugin that would turn your WordPress install into a microblogging platform. Your site's content can then be connected with, and followed by, other sites using OpenPress. The aim is to build a network of related content that allows creators to maintain ownership. As McAlister puts it, the network “is powered by individuals, but connected as a community.” Who knows where the OpenPress concept will go. But it's an interesting proposition for those looking to ditch Twitter and other corporately-owned communities. Links You Shouldn't Miss The WP Minute's Eric Karkovack is intrigued by the potential of managed WooCommerce hosting. He took a look at what it can and can't do to simplify the eCommerce platform. In an effort to decrease the barriers to contributing to WordPress core, project lead developer Helen Hou-Sandí has proposed using GitHub Codespaces. The tool allows for the rapid setup of a development environment. Sarah Gooding has the details at WP Tavern. In a tongue-and-cheek effort to compete with Twitter's new account verification system, Tumblr is selling two “useless” checkmarks for a one-time fee of $7.99. Yes, that's one penny less than Twitter's service. The microblogging platform is owned by Automattic. To paraphrase CEO (and WordPress co-founder) Matt Mullenweg's tweet, two checkmarks are cooler than one. What's your top WordPress-related story for 2022? The WP Minute wants to know! Share your thoughts with us on Twitter. Classifieds listings buy yours Equalized Digital Get 50% off Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker November 20-30 with coupon code BlackFriday22 and start making your website accessible. From the Grab Bag Now it's time to take a look at some other interesting topics shared by our contributors. WordPress 6.1.1 was released on November 15 and fixes a total of 50 bugs. If you missed out on WordCamp Italia 2022, a nearly 9-hour recording of the event is available for viewing. How would you like the WordPress Site Editor to work? What pain points would you like to see resolved? The project has put out a call for user feedback. It's been a long time coming, but WooCommerce 7.1 is finally adding the ability to store orders in a
Und schon wieder ein WordCamp mit Menschen vor Ort. Dieses mal war es das WordCamp Niederlande. Jessy und Sven waren für euch vor Ort und berichten vom WordCamp aus einem Zoo. Außerdem war Matt Mullenweg (WordPress Co-Founder) auf dem letzten WordCamp US Contributor Day sehr fleißig und hat jetzt wohl auch dafür gesorgt, dass WebP dann doch nicht als Standard kommt. Dies und vieles mehr gibt es in der heutigen Folge des WP Sofas.
The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 12th September 2022.
The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 12th September 2022.
El equipo de BuddyPress ha decidido lanzar sus feature plugins en el repositorio, y se comienza con el cambio de URL personalizadas.
Dass sich Pagebuilder im Zuge der Einführung des Blockeditors warm anziehen können war klar. Die Überlebensstrategie aber eher nicht. Elementor machts nun vor und bietet ein eigenes, kostenpflichtiges Hosting an. Außerdem gibt es BuddyPress mittlerweile in der Version 10. Über dies und viele weitere News berichten euch heute wieder Robert, Udo und Sven.
This week's WordPress news for the week commencing Monday 10th January 2022
This episode is sponsored by Ninja Forms About Rocío Valdivia: Community Wrangler at Automattic. Deputy of the Global Community Team of WordPress.org Computer engineer by the University of Seville. Started building websites in 2007. Open Source advocate. I love traveling and meeting personal challenges. I specialized in BuddyPress, a tool for developing social networks. I […]
Openverse ya es una realidad, y también una larga lista de versiones de WordPress, Gutenberg, BuddyPress y, también, de PHP.
Openverse ya es una realidad, y también una larga lista de versiones de WordPress, Gutenberg, BuddyPress y, también, de PHP.
This week's WordPress news for the week commencing Monday 15th November 2021
Gwangi – PRO Multi-Purpose Membership, Social Network & BuddyPress Community Theme Unlimited website customization with unlimited use of colors, fonts, spacing, buttons, blocks, parallax sections, Video Hero background, galleries, menus and many more elements. All are customizable in a few clicks and require no coding skills. Five child themes to get started quickly! All our code is WP Standards Friendly: No crappy SQL code and no greedy queries for top PHP performance. Developer Friendly: Hundreds of Hooks, filters and actions to extend themes, child themes & plugins. Download Gwangi here: https://freewp.io/gwangi-pro-multi-purpose-membership-social-network-buddypress-community-theme/
Vikinger – BuddyPress and GamiPress Social Community develop the next generation WordPress + Buddypress Social Community! Odin_Design has carefully designed this theme so that you have all you need to build an amazing community full of profiles, reactions, groups, badges, quests, ranks, credentials use and much more! Download Vikinger here: https://freewp.io/vikinger-buddypress-and-gamipress-social-community/
Nueva versión de Gutenberg en el que destacan los colores, y mucho foco en lo que llegará a finales de 2021: WordPress 5.9 y BuddyPress 10.0.
Now that WordPress 5.8 is here, what's next? Many people have been using WordPress 5.8 since the release last week. Joe Casabona does a great review on his YouTube channel which covers improvements in the block editor, embedded pdfs and table improvements. Justin Tadlock over at WPTavern does a rundown of plugins that test the theory that many features of WordPress 5.8 can be disabled until you are ready to address them yourself. And the fun won't stop…Hector Prieto tells us What's next in Gutenberg stating: Full Site Editing is the lighthouse goal for Phase 2 of Gutenberg. As such, it's good to remember it is a collection of projects that allow site editing with blocks, bringing powerful capabilities for a smooth editing experience. Don't get left behind (and don't complain) about the features being shipped when you can see a lot of the conceptual work being done around Full Site Editing on make.wordpress.org. Patterns all around me WordPress.org/patterns might be the most exciting “release” around WP 5.8 for me, anyway. A browsable collection of block patterns that you can literally copy/paste into your WordPress page is really exciting. I'm looking forward to seeing what others contribute to the directory when it's available. WordPress on the rise…but not plugins? David Bisset, Post Status chief curating officer, alerted us to a recent decline in active plugins through the year 2021. In contrast to the growth of WordPress, David reached out to others in the community to help draw a pattern: There’s no reason to panic but plugin authors and business owners should be aware of the trend and keep an eye on it. I think the sudden dip is what caught my (and others) eye. While noteworthy, the ecosystem could be “adjusting” as other industries are going through similar trends. Pull up the post on Post Status for more visuals, including riveting graphs. A win for accessibility + WordPress Also over at WPTavern, Sarah Gooding covers the recent decision for Colorado to become the First State to Require State and Local Government Websites to Meet Accessibility Standards. Colorado has more than 4,268 active local governments using WordPress and those responsible for local sites will need to begin the process of creating a plan to ensure they are accessible before July 1, 2024. The WordPress.org Themes Team announced an open discussion and a date for a Zoom meeting with theme authors. This meeting is scheduled July 28th at 2:00 p.m. The team is proposing a new set of guidelines that reduces and simplifies what is currently in place. The BuddyPress team released their block widgets 9.0. The new BP Widget Blocks are Legacy Widgets, rebuilt as BP Blocks. You can also access them in the Block Editor for use in your posts or pages. Events
BuddyPress 9.0 llega justo para el lanzamiento de WordPress 5.8 GA, una de las versiones más esperadas de WordPress desde el lanzamiento del Editor de Bloques.
Se acercan días de lanzamientos: Gutenberg 11.0, BuddyPress 9.0 y WordPress 5.8, entre otras actualizaciones de plugins y temas.
Take 10% of your time, energy, and even money and start investing it systematically in a “Next Chapter” project.In this episode of Post Status Excerpt, David Bisset and Cory Miller talk about how to build a "career raft" for yourself — something Cory wishes he did when he sold iThemes and went looking for new ventures. Cory explains how to identify what might be a good fit for your "next chapter" project and how to maintain your motivation, whether you are a developer, marketer, or entrepreneur.Also covered in this episode: Cory and David congratulate James Laws and the entire team at Ninja Forms who are celebrating their 10th anniversary this week. They proved that there was room (and then some) for another form plugin in the WordPress space.Browse our archives, and don't forget to subscribe via iTunes, Google Podcasts, YouTube, Stitcher, Simplecast, or RSS.
Birgit Pauli-Haack and Grzegorz Ziolkowski discuss Theme.json, Dev Notes for WordPress.5.8, Gutenberg 10.9 and Upcoming BuddyPress Release 9.0 Music: Homer Gaines Editor: Sandy Reed Logo: Mark Uraine Production: Pauli Systems Show Notes / Transcript Subscribe to the Gutenberg Changelog podcast via your favorite podcast apps!
If you’ve ever worked for a bigger company, you know that it’s easy to get bogged down by software and other restrictions in the name of security. Heck, I was once told I couldn’t work off-site because of it, and we had a VPN! Well, Jason Meller was sick of that and he suspected others were too, so he started Kolide. We talk all about what inspired him to take the leap and start a company, how he and his team built the software and the honest security manifesto! In Build Something More, we talk about cybersecurity and fear-mongering. (more…) View on separate page Transcript Joe Casabona: Real quick before we get started, I want to tell you about the Build Something Weekly newsletter. It is weekly, it is free, and you will get tips, tricks, and tools delivered directly to your mailbox. I will recap the current week’s episode and all of the takeaways, I’ll give you a top story, content I wrote, and then some recommendations that I’ve been using that I think you should check out. So it is free, it is a weekly, it’s over at howibuilt.it/subscribe. Go ahead and sign up over at howibuilt.it/subscribe. Hey, everybody, and welcome to Episode 218 of How I Built It, the podcast that asks: how did you build that?, the podcast that offers actionable tech tips for small business owners. My name is Joe Casabona, I’m your host. Today our sponsors are TextExpander, Restrict Content Pro, and the Events Calendar. You’ll be hearing about them more later in the show. Right now I want to bring on our guest, Jason Meller. He is the CEO and founder of Kolide. We’re going to be talking about restructuring, how SAS products are built, how comprehensive solutions can impact scalability, and of course, we’ll learn a little bit about Kolide. Jason, how are you today? Jason Meller: Good. Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. Excited to talk about SAS. Joe Casabona: Likewise, thanks for coming on the show. When y’all reached out to me, I was excited to kind of hear… You know, we’ve talked about SAS before on this show, but a lot of stuff has happened since that episode. The global pandemic is one thing that happened. But also we still… Jason Meller: Just a little thing. Joe Casabona: Yeah, just that small thing that’s been going on for a year now as we record this. But also we’ve seen a big rise in things like no-code solutions and things like that. So I’m excited to talk more. The show is also pivoted from a big focus on WordPress products, so just general technology products. So I’m excited with that in mind to get started. But before we talk about all things SAS, why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do? Jason Meller: As you said, my name is Jason Meller. I’m the CEO and founder of Kolide. But before that, my whole career has really been about cybersecurity. And not just securing devices and organizations and things like that, but actually building products for other folks that are in cybersecurity discipline. I found out very early on in my career that while I really enjoyed the practitioner part of being an incident responder and looking at it like cyber intelligence and things like that, as an engineer and someone who’s really obsessed with product, I found I got way more out of actually building the tools and capabilities that made those people a lot smarter, better, and faster for jobs. I found that out my first real job doing this professionally at General Electric on their Computer Incident Response Team, where I was hired on the team to really be doing intelligence type stuff, and then I just kind of was like, “Man, I really want to build really cool tools for these really smart people in my team.” And I ended up doing that and then basically building an entire career out of that. I moved on from GE to a company called Mandiant. They were sort of the company that you would call if you were compromised by one of those super advanced threat actors. I’m talking about nation states like Russia and China. You would call this company and then they would send these consultants in suits and ties. We were called the million-dollar company because if you gave us a call and we actually sent out consultants, you were probably going to be paying us at least a million dollars to deal with a major incident response effort. So in that context, it was a lot of fun building products there. And then over time, I realized that I was really good at the business side of this as well, and I wanted to strike out and do my own thing. And that’s how I started to Kolide. In 2016 is really a point in my life where I decided, “You know what? I think I can build my own product. I want to build a business around it. I want to do a startup.” And I transitioned from my last organization to starting the company. Joe Casabona: That’s fantastic. It sounds like you’re doing some really… I was going to say high level stuff, but it’s probably more low level stuff, right? You’re building products help with cybersecurity. Mandiant, it seems like they’re probably pretty busy given the current events that are going on and all the breaches that we’ve been hearing about lately. Jason Meller: Yeah, yeah. The CEO there, Kevin Mandia, he was actually just doing a congressional testimony a week or so ago over the solar winds hack, where they found basically all this malware in this very, very popular security product that most companies have and directly attributing it to major nation state that was using it to do reconnaissance and other types of really scary stuff on all our organizations. So, when I was working there, Kevin was always on the ground floor of probably the most important incidents of that time period. We were responding to all the major ones that were happening when I was there in the early 2000s. You mentioned I really like to kind of go low level into the stuff. The reality is, is the reason why I got into building products in the first place is I actually like distilling down really complicated topics to people who have never been exposed to them before. So a big part of what we do at Kolide is we try to make these really complex topics, something that’s accessible to someone who’s entering the industry, they’re a first time practitioner, or even end-users who have this type of software endpoint monitoring software on their devices. I’ll talk a little bit about that later in terms of the ethics around that. But ultimately, I really love talking about these types of topics with beginners and people who are just interested in the industry. Joe Casabona: That’s really fantastic. And cybersecurity is definitely something that I am interested in as well. I want to dig more into it. I think that’s probably a great topic for us to talk about in Build Something More. So if you are a member, you will get that in the episode you’re listening to right now. If you’re not, you can sign up over at buildsomething.club. So we’ll talk about cybersecurity in Build Something More. I’m really excited about that. Let’s get back into SAS stuff because I just started thinking about all these questions for later. So your current SAS, Kolide, is focused on cybersecurity or data security in some way, right? Jason Meller: Yeah, we actually call it HONEST Security. A big thing that I wanted to tackle when we started Kolide was I just felt that the current security industry was really almost sick, in the sense that we as engineers and people who work for large organizations, we started these companies, and then we are provisioned these laptops or sometimes we’re even allowed to bring our own and all this cybersecurity software sort of foisted onto that laptop. Now that we’re working from home and everything, it just felt weird to me that the software which can open up programs, it can really understand what your web browser history is, and you do all these things in the name of security, it just felt like to me that we really need to explore the privacy and the rules of engagement for how the security team should really be interacting with end users. End users in the security don’t really have like a really good relationship at most companies, even really technical organizations. The people who are building stuff feel really frustrated by the limitations imposed by the security you get in these laptops, they’re super locked down. “Oh, I can’t get Docker working. Is it because my firewall is messed up. And oh, I can’t even play with the firewall because all the options are grayed out.” This is pretty typical. And there’s just no one out there that was really thinking about this. So I wanted to build a security product that really focused on making that relationship between the security team and the end users a lot better, and actually putting them on the same page on a lot of different cybersecurity issues, like keeping their computer up to date and working properly without having to lock it down. So while cybersecurity and endpoint security are huge technical topics. Our application is actually really simple. It’s actually a web app and it also is a Slack app. So we work with companies that use Alack and we use an application that we built and we serve from the Slack App Store. And we actually work together with them to build this experience where you can actually work with the security team and collaborate on all the maybe the issues that you have in your device, like the firewall being off or you’re missing patches. And it’s really about having a hand on your shoulder from the security team, letting me know how you can manually get your device into a secure state without having to opt in to all this additional management, which could really impact productivity. So I wanted to build a product in that space, which is not a space that exists. So I had to write a whole manifesto about what HONEST Security was. That’s free. It’s on a website called honest.security. That’s the whole domain. So if you go there and check it out, you can kind of get a sense of what we’re going for with that entire topic. But yeah, that’s what the product is in essence. Sponsor: This episode is brought to you by Restrict Content Pro. If you need a fast, easy way to set up a membership site for yourself or your clients, look no further than the Restrict Content Pro WordPress plugin. Easily create premium content for members using your favorite payment gateway, manage members, send member-only emails, and more. You can create any number of subscription packages, including free levels and free trials. But that’s not all. Their extensive add-ons library allows you to do even more, like drip out content, connect with any number of CRMs and newsletter tools, including ConvertKit and Mailchimp and integrate with other WordPress plugins like bbPress. Since the Build Something Club rolled out earlier this year, you can bet it’s using Restrict Content Pro. And I have used all of the things mentioned here in this ad read. I have created free levels. I’ve created coupons. I use ConvertKit and I’m using it with bbPress for the forums. I’m a big fan of the team, and I know they do fantastic work. The plugin has worked extremely well for me and I was able to get memberships up and running very quickly. Right now, they are offering a rare discount for how I built it listeners only: 20% off your purchase when you use RCPHOWIBUILTIT at checkout. That’s RCPHOWIBUILTIT, all one word. If you want to learn more about Restrict Content Pro and start making money with your own membership site today, head on over to howibuilt.it/rcp. That’s howibuilt.it/rcp. Thanks to Restrict Content Pro for supporting the show. And now let’s get back to it. Joe Casabona: You know, I was self-employed for a long time, then I worked for my alma mater, the University of Scranton, which for all intents and purposes most higher education are giant corporations with nonprofit budgets. There was a back and forth between me a web developer who likes to try out new tools and new local development environments and the lockdown nature of my machine. I couldn’t access certain ports. I had to put in requests with the other department in our IT area to get. And it would take me a couple of… I just started bringing my own laptop and doing things. Jason Meller: There you go. That’s exactly the problem we’re trying to solve. Because I think there’s a lot of security teams out there that believe that they are actually solving a security issue by locking down these devices. But what they’re really doing is they’re actually killing their own visibility into the issue because people are bringing their own laptops in because they feel so you’re trapped by these restrictions. They can’t get their work done. And they need to. I mean, it’s their livelihood, they have projects, they have expectations that they’ve made with their boss. You don’t really want to wake up like 10 minutes before you’re about to give a presentation and realize, “Oh, I can’t even turn off screen lock, my demo is going to get all interrupted when I’m recording because it’s like set to some insane degree.” At Kolide, we believe that end users really do have enough capability and knowledge to manage the security of their device. They just need to know what to do, and understand what the expectations are of the security team. It should be giving a little bit of nuance and I would say some latitude in terms of how they really can manage that based on the circumstances that they’re in. If I’m in an airport, that’s probably the right place for me to really set the screen lock to be like two minutes, because I might get up, I might go to the bathroom, I’m going to leave the whole thing out. But if I am at home, and we’re all home from COVID-19 working remotely, I don’t need it to be two minutes. I’m here. I’m surrounded by trusted family. No one’s coming over. Those are decisions I can make. As long as I’m staying within the parameters of what the security team really expects me to do and I can have a conversation with them, then that’s a much better solution than just wholesale locking down everybody to the worst possible level because that’s the only way you can do it. Joe Casabona: Right. And not to mention… I mean, I’m a savvy enough person to know what I should and shouldn’t be doing on the internet. Most times. I’m not saying I’m foolproof. But the big warning signs are there. But for the faculty at the University who might not know better, who are equally as frustrated, who then bring their laptops in, they might be even more compromised now because now they’re currently on the network, they’re doing stuff. We one time… maybe this is a story for Build Something More. But we one time had this JavaScript inserted into every single page of our content management system. So maybe I will tell that story and Build Something More. But it’s frustrating. It seems like you had the passion for this, you have the domain knowledge. Did you do other research to see if this was something that was viable from a market standpoint? Jason Meller: Yeah. I guess a piece of advice for the folks out there thinking, “I want to do a startup and maybe I want to build SAS products specifically.” I remember when I was a lot younger, I would often have ideas and then the first thing I would do is I would go on Google and I would go and see if anyone else had thought of that idea before. And then if I found any version of that idea out there, I was immediately discouraged. I was like, “Oh, this isn’t a new thing. I don’t want to do it.” But what I’ve learned over time is that oftentimes your passion for something doesn’t necessarily… just because there’s something out there doesn’t necessarily mean you have to avoid doing it. You can have a better iterative take on something out there that already exists without… you don’t have to come up with something completely brand new novel 100% in order to be successful in business. Sometimes it’s just an improvement or just a spin on something that exists out there. For HONEST Security, there was really nothing out there that I would say existed that really kind of focused on this issue. But there’s an entire industry of endpoint security products that are out there that have maybe little aspects of this. Like they have Slack notifications, but maybe they’re not interacting with end users. I think it would have been foolish for me to kind of look at those little starts and fits that other companies are doing and say, “Okay, they’re clearly going to head in that direction so I’m just going to give up.” I think if you’re really focused and passionate about a problem, you should still go for it if there are existing incumbents in the space. And sometimes you’ll find, you know, as you build out the entire idea and actually go through iterations of building it and getting in front of real people, that where you started from actually changes completely by the time you actually ship something by the end of it, and you ended up in a completely different direction, but you’re grateful for that journey. So I think if you’re passionate about a problem, sometimes doing your market research can help but I wouldn’t let that influence your decision 100% or whether or not you should actually move forward with it or not. Joe Casabona: I think that’s great advice, and it harkens back to a few previous episodes of great advice I got. First of all, maybe there’s a pre-existing product that doesn’t tell a good story or present the solution as good. So there’s that. If there is a pre-existing product, it means that there is a market for what you want to do, right? Jason Meller: Right. Joe Casabona: So just because there’s competition it doesn’t necessarily… I mean look at all the calculator or weather apps on the App Store. Then the other one is from a friend of mine, Scott Bollinger, who talked about kind of what you said about getting it out there into the hands of users. Get an MVP out there as soon as possible and start getting feedback. Because ultimately, the users will shape the direction your product goes in. Jason Meller: And there’s a good example of that. At Kolide, when we first started this process, we really wanted to focus on connecting the security team with the end users. And the first step of that was really the security team be able to convey what issues are on those devices and give users step by step feedback. But when we did that, we realized that it felt really strange for an end user who didn’t even know what Kolide was to suddenly get this ping out of nowhere. Like, “Hey, your devices missing these patches and your firewall is disabled, and here are the steps of how you can resolve that.” It’d be like if you know someone just burst in your house and there’s just demanding things. That wasn’t something that we… It sounds funny in hindsight but it wasn’t something that we thought about when we were building the MVP version of this experience. So we spent a lot of time thinking about how can we really put people at ease on the privacy aspect of this. And we actually arrived at an area where they actually self-install the agent. So we actually reach out to them via slack as an introduction, explain what this whole thing is, and then you actually install the installation package that puts the endpoint agent, that thing that gets all the telemetry on the device. Yourself versus it just being sort of foisted upon you by the IT security team. And that’s something that doesn’t exist. We’re the only security company that I’m aware of that actually encourages you to have the end users to install the main piece that makes it work. That was not something that we just got in the room and we thought of just out of the sky. It was based on talking with real people and hearing their concerns. So the most novel parts I think about our system are due to the feedback that we’ve had from our earliest iterations, not things that we thought of before we embarked on building anything. Joe Casabona: That’s such a great story and it makes perfect sense. I want to ask you the title question here, “how did you build it?” before pivoting into the more blue sky philosophical sort of questions, I guess. So you mentioned that this was a web app and a Slack app? Jason Meller: Yes. Yes. Funny story. We built it twice. The first time we did not build it well, and I think it’s because we took a very traditional I think VC-backed startup approach to how are we going to build our MVP. And we kind of embraced all the hot tech that was out there. We were like, “Okay, what’s the…” This is going all the way back to like 2017 or so. Like, “We want to build it in Golang because Golang is really good right now, everybody’s really talking about that, we’re going to host it on Kubernetes because Google just released their own container, you know, hosted version of Kubernetes, so let’s put it on there. And we want to, of course use React, and we want this to be micro services,” and so on and so forth. What we ended up realizing was that we didn’t suit the technologies that we chose to the actual talents that we had within the organization. We just assumed, I would say, sort of naively that we could just instantly transitions from tech that we had known and grown up with to I think really modern tech. And that ended up causing a lot of issues. In fact, most of the discussion at the company and the innovation that we were building was really just on the technical aspects of managing all these components, versus what we should have been talking about, which is actually building the product and having product discussions in order… what is the user experience of this going to look like, and not really worrying so much about the architecture. So we kind of crashed and burned pretty hard, I would say, at the end of 2018 or so, and we decided, “You know what? We are just building on top of this shifting sand and we just need to start over.” And that’s exactly what we did. The model from that point forward was “let’s keep it as simple as possible and let’s not concern ourselves with these major architectural designs and future scalability issues.” I think that a lot of engineers really worry too early about scalability when it’s not warranted. In fact, they’re worried that they’re going to have to scale up really, really fast, and they’re not going to be able to do it. Like their product is just going to be so successful, it’s going to be like the next Twitter, or they’re going to have the same reaction that Clubhouse is having right now. And then suddenly, they’re going to be completely hosed and they’re going to lose their moment. But that is so rare in practice. In fact, the thing that you should be optimizing for is that scaling up, but scaling down when your idea isn’t quite right. If you make all of these financial investments, financial investments in the form of your time as an engineer, but also shelling out money to, you know, Google Cloud Platform and AWS for all these expensive servers and container frameworks and things like that, it becomes really, really hard to actually scale that down to a financially feasible slow burn as you actually get your first few customers in the door and really understand what your product is. I think it’s more important that you protect yourself from not the outcome of your products going to exceed past your wildest machinations. It’s can you actually protect yourself in a scenario, the most likely scenario where your product isn’t going to do well? And you need to learn a lot more about why. And you need to at least a year or two of timeframe to really be able to do that and make the iteration is necessary. So try to figure out how you can scale your solution and your architecture down or make it so that it’s easy to do that, so you have as much time as possible. In Kolide, for us specifically, I was always a Ruby on Rails developer. I started off in PHP and then I really kind of fell in love with Ruby around the time. PHP really started taking off with classes and things like that that really, really kind of just grabbed me in. So we just focused on that. Instead of like trying to host it ourselves, we just went to Heroku and we hosted the whole thing there. And you know what? It turns out these platforms as service providers, like Heroku and some of the other ones that are out there, they’re probably the Laravel community and everything, they are really, really good at helping you scale when you are successful. So right now the biggest part of our app that’s I think challenging from an architecture perspective is the fact that we have all these devices out there for our customers, like tens of thousands of devices, and they’re all checking in on a regular interval to our device server. And there’s a lot of traffic to handle there. But the reality is is that it’s web traffic, and we can put the data in the database. And we don’t need all these crazy, hot technologies to layer into that to perform I would say, very, very basic operations. Like data comes in, we save it in the database, we visualize it in a web app that’s built-in Ruby on Rails. And then on the Slack app side, Slack has made it really, really easy with some very basic API [unintelligible 00:24:43] to have a really compelling experience. So we built that inside of the Rails app as well. And it’s really, really simple. and it’s something that we can maintain with three or four engineers, not like this hoard of hundreds of engineers that are really focused on the infrastructure and the operations and “oh, we need a front end engineer, and that front end engineer needs to collaborate with someone who’s going to really be building a back end API so they can plumb everything together.” That’s just not the reality of how the financials work at an early stage startup. You need to be able to have features go out the door without a lot of different hands touching them. The companies that have built all these crazy new technologies that are not so much new now, they’re huge. And they built these technologies to solve organizational issues at their size. That doesn’t necessarily mean these technologies are appropriate for companies that only have two or three people in them because those problems are just non-existent at a company of that scale. 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I can type out full instructions for my podcast editor, hi, Joel, in just a few keystrokes. Another one of my favorite and most used snippets is PPT. This will take whatever text I have on my keyboard and convert it to plain text. No more fighting formatting is I’m copying from Word or anyplace else. Last month I saved over two hours in typing alone. That doesn’t even take into the account the time I saved by not having to search for the right link, text, address, or number. You have no idea how many times I want to type out a link to a blog post or an affiliate link and I can’t remember it and then I have to go searching for it. That generally takes minutes. But since I have a TextExpander snippet, it takes seconds. TextExpander is available on Mac OS, Windows, Chrome, iPhone, and iPad. I’ve been using it a lot more on my iPhone lately because I’ve been working from my iPhone more because there are days when I’m just not in front of my computer right now. If you’ve been curious about trying TextExpander or simple automation in general, now is the time. Listeners can get 20% off their first year. Just visit textexpander.com/podcast and let them know that I sent you. Thanks so much to TextExpander for sponsoring the show. And now let’s get back to it. Joe Casabona: I’m a web developer… I’m sure this is for all programmers, but it’s like, “Oh, did you see the new thing? .js or whatever? We should use the new thing .js.” And I’m like, “I don’t want to use it. Why do I need to learn a new thing when I don’t know if I’m even going to need it?” I was working on an app for a hosting company a couple of years ago and they’re like, “We should make this headless WordPress and use Gatsby.” And I’m like, “Why? There’s no reason for us to use Gatsby. I don’t know Gatsby. And if I have to learn Gatsby, I’m going to charge you the hours it takes me to learn Gatsby because we don’t really need it.” So I think you’re absolutely right. Actually, this conversation here is timely to when we record this because I was lamenting how I was going to build out the community aspect of the membership. Again, I’m a web guy, I’m a WordPress guy, I was like, “I’ll just use like bbPress or BuddyPress, two plugins that bolt on the community. But no offense to the people who maintain bbPress, but it definitely looks like it was made in 2004 and I wanted something that looked nicer. And I was like, “I could invest all of my own development time to make bbPress and BuddyPress work the way I want, or I could just pay Circle.so 30 or 40 bucks a month and have everything. And on Twitter, I got a lot of well like, “You should just build it yourself. That’s what I did.” Someone said like, “That’s what I did, though nobody’s using the community.” They kind of said tongue in cheek. And I’m like, “So you invested all this time for nobody to even use the community.” Jason Meller: Right. That’s right. Joe Casabona: In two months, if nobody’s using the community, I can just stop paying for Circle instead of burning hours. You triggered me a little bit there but in the best way possible. Again, do the minimum viable thing instead of burning development hours when you don’t need to for the sake of trying the new thing or using this tool that you want to try out. Jason Meller: Yeah. I think that you touched on something. You said you’ve been doing web development for a while, and I have as well. And I think that there’s almost like a self-deprecating ages and thing that can kind of come up when you reach a certain age and you suddenly feel like there’s all this new technology that’s… it was a slow burn, like it was really kind of coming up, and then it just appeared and then everybody started using it. And then you almost feel like, “Oh, my gosh, am I becoming that old dude that doesn’t know what’s going on anymore? Am I going to be left behind.” I think that type of anxiety and that sort of self-deprecating “am I really in the mix anymore?” can force really bad errors of judgment in terms of “You know what? I need to learn something” that you really don’t need to learn, and in fact, might actually be worse than the thing that you already know. I think that when you’re really young and inexperienced, everything is brand new and you don’t have the benefit of the history of how all these things came together. So something that may not be optimal is fine by you and you’re going to learn that thing. But when you’re older and you have experience, you can compare and contrast how this new thing works compared to how used to build stuff. And sometimes the new thing is way worse. And you’re just like, “Why did I do this when I actually was much happier and more productive and there’s more maturity in the libraries and there’s more things for me to be able to kind of plug into this thing? What am I doing?” I think that’s where we ended up. And it sounds like it’s a very easy problem to avoid. But when you get in your own head, and you start thinking about those things, it can really force these errors that really just don’t need to happen early on in your company. Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, in the WordPress space, Gutenberg is the big thing, and everyone’s like, “You need to learn React.” I haven’t learned React yet and so far I’m okay. I’m like, “I haven’t lost a job because I haven’t learned React. I’m reluctant. I mean, now it’s probably I know it’s around to stay. But I learned Angular Version 1 and then Angular was like, “We’re changing everything in Version 2.” And then React came out, and then Vue came out. And I’m like, “I’m just going to solve the problem the best way I know how.” So I think that this is really important. Jason Meller: True. Joe Casabona: This can be translated to… Jason Meller: I was just going to say, by the way, don’t feel bad about learning React. We don’t build a stitch of React that Kolide and we have an incredibly successful web application. I am 100% anti-React. That’s basically what I was alluding to earlier when I said there’s these new things. I’m 100% on this camp of let’s bring as much back to the server side as possible. I grew up in an era where when you were coding for the web and you got to pick whatever language you want. It didn’t have to be JavaScript. You could pick anything. You could build a web app in C++, you could build it in COBOL if you wanted to. It really didn’t matter. And that’s the thing that’s really special about the web is that if you know HTML and you want to build something on the back end, you could do it in anything. And that is not the case with really any other platform that’s out there. Like if you want to build an iOS app, yes, there’s Electron and React Native and all these other technologies. But if you really want to build a good app, you have to do it in Swift or Objective-C. Like you just have to. That’s the lingua franca of the device. But on the web, that isn’t the case. And I feel like these React folks are now bringing like Server-side React, and they’re trying to make JavaScript the language of the web on both sides, which is fine for them. But someone who hates JavaScript, I don’t want to go there. I think that that actually is really important that we preserve that aspect of the web and how it came from and the flexibility and the freedom that’s there. So my hope is that React maybe can stand the client side and doesn’t end up being this thing that just eats the world. Because I think you can build really, really well-designed web apps that are performant, that are exciting, and making millions of dollars without even writing a stitch of it. And I hope that that continues to be the case. And I’m advocating for a world that exists. I didn’t expect to say that on this podcast, but here I am. Joe Casabona: Oh, that’s perfect. We can talk about more on this in Build Something More if it suits us because I have a lot of opinions about that as well. Jason Meller: Sure. Joe Casabona: Now that we’ve gotten really nerdy I’ll probably add chapters, like podcast player chapters to this one because I do want to bring it back to the small business owner who is maybe interested in building a SAS, but we’re a year into a pandemic as we record this, maybe there’s some economic uncertainty. It seems like the outlook changes every week. Why would we want to build a SAS right now? Jason Meller: It is a really great question. I think it’s very counterintuitive to say that actually it’s a really good time to start thinking about new business ideas, and specifically SAS products right now. But that’s actually how I feel. When you have these big societal shifts like the pandemic and everybody working remotely, they create opportunities that were none existed before. That’s very much the case at Kolide. We started it before the pandemic but we realized, because of the pandemic, people’s attitudes were really shifting about how security agents and the surveillance they were having on their device, the context of that just felt different when everybody was working from home than when you’re in a cubicle or in an office that’s really maintained by your employer. Suddenly, solutions like Slack and Microsoft Teams and all these things were way greater use than they were, most startups were using them and engineering style organizations were, but not every company on the earth. And now suddenly, these organizations, they’re looking for ways to use the existing apps that they’ve always used but now in a context where everybody is remote. And they really want them to be integrated in these chat-like experiences. So we just happen to be in the right place the right time. But my advice to folks who are thinking about how do you capitalize on this pandemic specifically is start looking at what is the ideal interactions that these business owners and business employees are really looking for in terms of dealing with their HR app, and how do I deal with expenses and things like that. Suddenly, all the incumbents in the space are on their back foot because new players can enter in and really offer a compelling experience that feels way more relevant to folks who are really not working from home, and doing 100% of their communication through a chat window or maybe Zoom. I think that that’s the seed that can generate this entire ecosystem of new stuff. Obviously, the pandemic is really scary, and people are losing their jobs, and there’s a lot of uncertainty there. But if you are someone who has an entrepreneurial spirit, you’ll often find opportunity in those lowest points. Now, I’m speaking from a position of privilege because I had the money to be able to kind of have the savings to be able to strike off and do it on my own. I had some investors come in and things like that. And not everybody has that opportunity. But I encourage folks who can do that and feel confident in their ability to do that, to find an opportunity, see where something isn’t working and draw from your own experience. If you’re frustrated by something, it probably means there’s tons of other folks that are frustrated by that exact same thing. It doesn’t have to be this huge, massive multimillion-dollar startup, it can just be something small that you sell online, and you just get on gumroad and just throw something out there. It doesn’t have to be even technology. It could just be an idea that you codified into a book that eventually can become something that’s backed by software or something else that you can sell a subscription for. So I encourage folks to take these dark times and look for opportunities there because that’s where new solutions can be born out of just changing circumstances. This pandemic is certainly a big example of that. Sponsor: This episode is brought to you by the Events Calendar, the original calendar for WordPress. This free plugin helps you with calendaring, ticketing, and more powerful tools to help you manage your events from start to finish. Whether you run school events, concert at a venue, or fundraisers for nonprofits, the Events Calendar gives you the tools you need to make it your own. And with the Events Calendar Pro, you can create custom views, recurring events, add your own custom fields to events, and much more. Run virtual events? No problem. 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Joe Casabona: It is important to highlight that certain people are afforded certain opportunities more than others. But I still in 2020, I am a firm believer in the American dream and I know that there are a lot of people who are still able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and do things in a way to put themselves in a better situation. Jason Meller: That’s true Joe Casabona: With the government handing out money right now, if it’s a little extra money that maybe… I’m not a financial adviser. But if it’s extra money that maybe you can put aside, invest in yourself a little bit and put that money towards having an MVP developed or something like that. Jason Meller: You know, everybody’s situation is a little bit different. There’s Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—you got to take care of your essentials before you can really start thinking about these things. I don’t want to get into the whole social-economic situation of our country right now, but the reality is, is that when you don’t have a lot of money, and I know this from experience, graduating from college and not having a lot of money, it weighs on you mentally. Suddenly, a simple trip to the grocery store, where today I can fly into the grocery store, now I don’t even go. I just order online and they just deliver it to me. But before, like last year, I would just go and I really wouldn’t be looking too hard at the prices because I didn’t have to. But when you’re on a really tight budget, suddenly something as simple as going to the grocery store becomes very exhausting because you’d have to do all this math. “Oh, is this check going to bounce if I got this extra thing?” And it can add up over time. I’m hoping that the relief from COVID-19 I think helps folks. I think it has a chilling effect that maybe all those anxious thoughts, and maybe people can start thinking about higher order activities like career and building things and things like that. That’s what that aid can sometimes help with. And my hope is that people see it that way. Joe Casabona: That’s a much better point than I made. Listen to Jason. Awesome. Well, man, we covered a lot of ground here: cybersecurity, how things are built, starting a SAS, socio-economic conditions. Before we wrap up, I do need to ask you my favorite question, which is, do you have any trade secrets for us? Jason Meller: Yes. I kind of gave it away earlier. I was saving that for the trade secret. But again, taking stock into how things change over time and then understanding where the opportunity is generated. And I just talked about how that was the case Kolide with this pandemic and people really starting to wake up from the work from home situation. But there’s things like that that happen all the time. And they don’t have to be these monumental society shifts. Sometimes it’s more of like a slow burn. Sometimes they’re political, sometimes it’s something that’s in the news. But things change all the time. And we sometimes just take for granted that all the things that we’re doing today are going to be the things that we do forever. But it was just 20 years ago that we’re driving to Blockbuster and renting movies that way. And everything has changed if you really think about it. It’s very important to kind of pinpoint those moments where it tips just a little bit too much where suddenly something that made a lot of sense and everybody wanted to do, it doesn’t make any sense anymore and nobody wants to do it. And that’s where you need to seize that opportunity and see that moment before anyone else does, and then hyper-focus on building something that solves a problem. And it’s very important not to think about that academically. You want to think about it from your own experience. Because if you’re feeling that pain, others are feeling it as well, and you’re solving a real problem, versus like I think this is a problem, I’m just gonna take a guess. The second best thing to do is talk to people. But even better than that is you just have so much empathy for the problem because you are facing it. Those are the best places to start. You can save a lot of time and shortcut, a lot of market research if you know the problem inside and out because it’s one that you have. So that’s the trade secret is pick the problems that suit you because you’re not going to have a lot of time to like meet thousands of people that experience this problem and come up to speed and then build a whole thing yourself. Solve problems that you’re familiar with and you understand because then you can get on podcasts like this and passionately talk about them without having to do a ton of research because they’re just part of you. So that is my trade secret is solve problems that you have. And you can build businesses on top of that if you do it well enough. Joe Casabona: I love that. I feel like you read the blog post I published a couple of weeks ago where I basically say that. It’s called What Baby Clothes Can Teach You About Your Business or something like that. Basically, how we have these baby clothes that must have been designed by a parent because they’re so easy. In the pre-show… I don’t know if you want to make this public or not. Jason Meller: No, it’s fine. Go for it. Joe Casabona: In the pre-show, we were talking about how you’re a new parent, eight-month -ld baby girl. I have an eight-month-old son. Man, that smile on your face right now that nobody can see but me is just the pure joy that a kid brings you right before they throw up all over you. Jason Meller: That’s right. Joe Casabona: So you’ve probably been awake in the middle of the night trying to change your kid. And these pajamas—this is a tangent—they have a reverse zipper on them so that you zip up to unzip them. They must have been designed by a parent. Because the snap-on ones are definitely just designed by some random person who’s never touched a kid before. But the reverse zipper ones, this person understood the problem, the way that Jason is telling you to understand and solve problems. So bringing it back, Jason, this has been such a great conversation. If people want to learn more about you, where can they go? Jason Meller: I mentioned this earlier in the podcast. But if there’s one thing that you want to look into me about is I want you to read HONEST Security. You can find that just by going to honest.security. That’s the whole URL. If you want to learn a little bit more about Kolide, you can visit us on the web at Kolide.com. Kolide with a K. And if you want to follow me on Twitter, you can hit me up @JMeller. Joe Casabona: Awesome. This has been absolutely fantastic. Stick around for Build Something More, where we’re going to talk about cybersecurity, maybe Clubhouse and JavaScript tools. There’s a lot that we could cover honestly. For all the show notes as well as a link to the club, you can go over to howibuilt.it/218. Thanks so much to our sponsors: TextExpander, Restrict Content Pro, and the Events Calendar. And Jason, thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Jason Meller: Thanks for having me. Joe Casabona: And until next time, get out there and build something. Sponsored by:Restrict Content Pro: Launch your membership site TextExpander: Get 20% off your first year by visiting the this link. The Events Calendar Source
In this episode, Megan and Cory talk to John James Jacoby of Sandhills Development about what he’s working on and how it can help us make better websites. John, AKA JJJ, contributes to Core and Meta, is a BuddyPress & bbPress lead, speaks at WordCamps, and is very generous with his time and knowledge. John was great to talk to, and we have have an extra-long episode jam-packed with a myriad of topics ranging from Gutenberg versus page builders, getting started contributing, remote work on tiny screens, and surgeons, with a sprinkling of useful plugins John is working on like Sugar Calendar, WP User Profiles, and BerlinDB. If you have questions about WordPress website development, contributing, or anything else web-related that you’d like to hear us discuss, go to blackbird.digital/podcast or send an email to podcast@blackbird.digital. You can also find us on Twitter as @InTheLoop_WP. ## Links Sandhills Development: https://sandhillsdev.com Sugar Calendar Plugin: https://sugarcalendar.com WP User Profiles Plugin: https://github.com/stuttter/wp-user-profiles BerlinDB: https://github.com/berlindb GiveWP 100k Celebration: https://givewp.com/givewp-100k-celebration-invitation/
Choosing where to house your new membership site is a major decision. And you are not alone in feeling confused and uncertain about the options. In this episode of the Membership Guys Podcast, we will provide some clarity around this topic and hopefully, you will get the facts you need to choose what works best for you. In case you were wondering, we are not talking about which web hosting company to use, or whether you should use shared hosting or a dedicated server. We are talking about whether you should: a) have your membership site hosted as part of your main website, b) have the site live on its own with a separate, dedicated domain, or c) have the site live on a subdomain. We will discuss these three options and the pros and cons of each. Essential Learning Points: The three key implications that could impact your decision Why a single site is more appealing to the tech-averse folks How branding can factor into your decision What your long-term plan is for your membership site and why that’s important Important Links & Mentions: https://www.facebook.com/groups/membersitemastermind (The Membership Mastermind Facebook Group) https://www.membershipacademy.com/ (The Membership Academy) https://woocommerce.com/ (WooCommerce) https://buddypress.org/ (BuddyPress) http://www.bbpress.org/ (bbPress) http://www.kajabi.com/ (Kajabi) http://www.thinkific.com/ (Thinkific) https://analytics.google.com/ (Google Analytics) Key Quotes: “If you’re going to ask your users to register for a free community on your main site, but then ask them to register on a completely different website to join your membership then this causes a disconnect and is not great from a user experience perspective.” “Having everything under one roof gives you a single point of failure. If something goes wrong with that single website, then everything is offline.” “If you have separate sites for your main and your membership, then the decision making for the membership site is done in isolation. This can greatly uncomplicate things.”
Síguenos en: ¡Buenos días! Arrancamos la semana de carnaval (aunque algunos no lo sepan) comentando un tema muy de nuestro día a día... ya sea para rediseños, ajustes, pruebas, solución de errores y actualizaciones... solemos necesitar un duplicado o versión de staging de los sitios web para poder "trastear" sin riesgo a tener problemas o imprevistos en el sitio en producción. Pero antes, como siempre... ¿Qué tal la semana? Semana esther Organizando el time blocking para incluir una mañana dedicada a la gestión de TWP, temas administrativos, onboarding para el nuevo soporte, ideas de mejoras y crecimiento… Semana Nahuai Aprobados un par de presupuestos. Añadir bolsa de encargos en el Slack de NED Pro (vincular Gravity Forms con Slack). Trasteando con Restrict Content Pro y BuddyPress. Contenido Nahuai 3 tutoriales nuevos en código Genesis del cual destaca: Tema de la semana: Cuando o porque hacer versión en staging de una webDonde: local, servidor pruebas, servidor clienteComo: duplicator / all in one migrator / herramientas propias del hostingRestaurar en producción: opción de restaurar completamente o subir e implementar cambios de nuevo.Cosas a tener en cuenta:Ojo caché.Desactivar plugins no necesarios o con conexiones externas (analíticas, pasarelas de pago, webhooks…)No incluir carpetas muy pesadas (backups, documentos / pdfs…)Anotar todos los cambios y pruebas realizados por si han de repetirse luego en producción Episodio en el que hablamos de duplicar: http://freelandev.com/podcast/7-clonar-y-duplicar-en-wordpress/ Novedades Nos publican un guest post en el blog de StudioPress: https://studiopress.blog/osompress-uprising-theme/ + 100 descargas en Osom Login Page Customizer (+1.000 descargas todos los plugins) + 100 seguidores Twitter OsomPress Subida de precios de Sugar Calendar el próximo 1 de marzo: https://sugarcalendar.com/pricing/ Nelio Unlocker https://wordpress.org/plugins/nelio-unlocker/ Próxima Meetup conjunta de Terrassa y Granollers será el 16 de febrero a cargo de JuanKa que hablará de ACF. Tip de la semana All in one migrator: Subir copia seguridad por FTP o Panel del hosting directamente a la carpeta /wp-content/ai1wm-backups Plugin Bill Erickson para usar los medios de la página de producción. Tutorial para activar desactivar plugins dependiendo del entorno de WordPress. Menciones Muchas felicitaciones por la publicación en el blog de StudioPress. Pablo dice que aumenta el valor en un 9,7 en Osomness scale. ???? A Josué le gustó el Perspectiva WP y la entrevista con Flavia. Gracias a: Este episodio está patrocinado por StudioPress, los creadores de Genesis Framework, el entorno de trabajo de temas más popular de WordPress. Ya está disponible Genesis Pro para todo el mundo, 360$ anuales que dan acceso a: Genesis FrameworkChild themes de Genesis de StudioPress1 año de hosting en WP EnginePlugin Genesis Pro (Diseños y secciones, restricción de bloques por usuarios…) y Genesis Custom Blocks Pro.
Are you using BuddyPress (a free version of BuddyBoss, basically) to build a social media type community site using WordPress? If so, you're pretty smart. But you may be getting discouraged on your "Activity Feed" page by the actually community activity feed not loading. Are you just stuck on a screen that says "Loading Community Updates?" But you are seeing them on the Member Profile Page Activity Tab! What gives? This shows you how to fix it and keep those community updates flowing on the Activity Feed page. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/paulhickey/support
John founded bbPress in 2005 while he was looking for GPL forum software with profile pages and hierarchical categories, BuddyPress shortly thereafter, and WordPress as a result. https://jjj.blog/ https://profiles.wordpress.org/johnjamesjacoby/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnjamesjacoby/ johnjamesjacoby@me.com
John founded bbPress in 2005 while he was looking for GPL forum software with profile pages and hierarchical categories, BuddyPress shortly thereafter, and WordPress as a result. https://jjj.blog/ https://profiles.wordpress.org/johnjamesjacoby/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnjamesjacoby/ johnjamesjacoby@me.com
Every Friday at 8:30 am PST we host the WP-Tonic Round-table Show where we discuss the latest WordPress and the general web news of the week. You can watch LIVE the show on our WP-Tonic Show Facebook page:https://www.facebook.com/wptonic please also support the show by going to our YouTube channel and subscribing: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiUEZxnxscyWKHJxgeFD2oA?view_as=subscriber This Week Show's Sponsors Kinsta: https://kinsta.com/ LaunchFlow: https://launchflows.com/ Our Special Guest Panelist This Week is Andrew Palmer #1 -State of the Word 2020: WordPress Moves Toward Full Site Editing https://wptavern.com/state-of-the-word-2020-wordpress-moves-toward-full-site-editing #2 - In 2021, we need to fix America’s internet https://www.theverge.com/22177154/us-internet-speed-maps-competition-availability-fcc #3 - Introducing Learn WordPress https://wordpress.org/news/2020/12/introducing-learn-wordpress/ #4 - Death of an Open Source Business Model https://joemorrison.medium.com/death-of-an-open-source-business-model-62bc227a7e9b #5 - Own your website content to control the experience https://pixelgrade.com/upstairs/own-control-content-website/ #6 - BuddyPress 7.0.0 Adds 3 New Blocks and Admin Screens for Member and Group Type Management
Every Friday at 8:30 am PST we host the WP-Tonic Round-table Show where we discuss the latest WordPress and the general web news of the week. You can watch LIVE the show on our WP-Tonic Show Facebook page:https://www.facebook.com/wptonic please also support the show by going to our YouTube channel and subscribing: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiUEZxnxscyWKHJxgeFD2oA?view_as=subscriber This Week Show's Sponsors Kinsta: https://kinsta.com/ LaunchFlow: https://launchflows.com/ Our Special Guest Panelist This Week is Andrew Palmer #1 -State of the Word 2020: WordPress Moves Toward Full Site Editing https://wptavern.com/state-of-the-word-2020-wordpress-moves-toward-full-site-editing #2 - In 2021, we need to fix America’s internet https://www.theverge.com/22177154/us-internet-speed-maps-competition-availability-fcc #3 - Introducing Learn WordPress https://wordpress.org/news/2020/12/introducing-learn-wordpress/ #4 - Death of an Open Source Business Model https://joemorrison.medium.com/death-of-an-open-source-business-model-62bc227a7e9b #5 - Own your website content to control the experience https://pixelgrade.com/upstairs/own-control-content-website/ #6 - BuddyPress 7.0.0 Adds 3 New Blocks and Admin Screens for Member and Group Type Management
Das Jahr geht zu ende und wir stimmen uns langsam schon mal auf die Festtage ein. Diese Folge ist die letzte Newsfolge für das Jahr 2020. Kommendes Jahr gibt es dann hoffentlich endlich wieder mehr gute Nachrichten!
We discuss this week's best WordPress & internet news stories. We also have a great panel of WordPress community and marketing internet junkies. #1 - WooCommerce Payments Allows Shop Owners to Manage Payments Without Leaving WordPress Admin https://wptavern.com/woocommerce-payments-allows-shop-owners-to-manage-payments-without-leaving-wordpress-admin #2 - Want Your Content to Succeed? Make it Resonate with the Right Audience (no, not that one). https://sparktoro.com/blog/want-your-content-to-succeed-make-it-resonate-with-the-right-audience-no-not-that-one/ #3 - 18 things we’ve learned from building and selling WordPress plugins (good and bad) https://woorkup.com/building-wordpress-plugins/ #4 - Here Are 5 High Growth Startups To Watch For In 2020 https://medium.com/swlh/here-are-5-high-growth-startups-to-watch-for-in-2020-490d9ac04041 #5 - BuddyPress 6.0.0 Released with New Group and Members Blocks https://wptavern.com/buddypress-6-0-0-released-with-new-group-and-members-blocks Zoom Panelist URL: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_cgmweJZ8TPKZ0HLBM4bzLA Kinsta https://kinsta.com/ LaunchFlows LaunchFlows customizes your WooCommerce Checkout Experience with Elementor. It liberates the function and design layout of your individual checkout components into powerful selling tools....so you can turn your vision into reality with No Coding Required" Use this coupon code WPTonicRocks to get a 25% discount - https://launchflows.com/
We discuss this week's best WordPress & internet news stories. We also have a great panel of WordPress community and marketing internet junkies. #1 - WooCommerce Payments Allows Shop Owners to Manage Payments Without Leaving WordPress Admin https://wptavern.com/woocommerce-payments-allows-shop-owners-to-manage-payments-without-leaving-wordpress-admin #2 - Want Your Content to Succeed? Make it Resonate with the Right Audience (no, not that one). https://sparktoro.com/blog/want-your-content-to-succeed-make-it-resonate-with-the-right-audience-no-not-that-one/ #3 - 18 things we’ve learned from building and selling WordPress plugins (good and bad) https://woorkup.com/building-wordpress-plugins/ #4 - Here Are 5 High Growth Startups To Watch For In 2020 https://medium.com/swlh/here-are-5-high-growth-startups-to-watch-for-in-2020-490d9ac04041 #5 - BuddyPress 6.0.0 Released with New Group and Members Blocks https://wptavern.com/buddypress-6-0-0-released-with-new-group-and-members-blocks Zoom Panelist URL: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_cgmweJZ8TPKZ0HLBM4bzLA Kinsta https://kinsta.com/ LaunchFlows LaunchFlows customizes your WooCommerce Checkout Experience with Elementor. It liberates the function and design layout of your individual checkout components into powerful selling tools....so you can turn your vision into reality with No Coding Required" Use this coupon code WPTonicRocks to get a 25% discount - https://launchflows.com/
This weeks WordPress news - Covering The Week Commencing 18th May 2020
BuddyMeet da a BuddyPress la posibilidad de añadir una videoconferencia de Jitsi. Con un pequeño shortcode podés hacer eso mismo en cualquier pagina dentro de tu WordPress
BuddyMeet da a BuddyPress la posibilidad de añadir una videoconferencia de Jitsi. Con un pequeño shortcode podés hacer eso mismo en cualquier pagina dentro de tu WordPress
This weeks WordPress news - Covering The Week Commencing 30th March 2020
No podemos negarlo, tanto Ana como yo tenemos una debilidad especial por Rocío Valdivia. Hay gente que se hace querer y Rocío es de esas. Pero además de cariño sentimos una profunda admiración por esta mujer que además de ser un tía fantástica, es una desarrolladora web de referencia en el plugin BuddyPress, es speaker […] The post Episodio 24: De currar en Automattic y ayudar a difundir el software libre con Rocío Valdivia appeared first on Un billete a Chattanooga.
Ya estamos aquí una semana más! En este episodio os contaremos las novedades de la semana inclyendo muchos proyectos en WordPress, leeremos vuestro feedback y os recomendaremos herramientas para migrar posts de WordPress. Antes de comenzar con las novedades profesionales, repasamos algunas noticias de interés relacionadas con eventos como el Branding Day, el nuevo rival de Tinder (Facebook...Origen
Die Sommerferien sind im Gange, aber wir machen weiter! Heute mit News zu BuddyPress 5.0, WordPress-Microblogging mit Telegram, Google schafft noindex in robots.txt ab, Terminen und mehr.
Automattic empresa detrás de WordPress, bbPres, BuddyPress, Woocommerce. Esta experimentando con una nueva forma de crear páginas para las web's: Full Site Editing
Automattic empresa detrás de WordPress, bbPres, BuddyPress, Woocommerce. Esta experimentando con una nueva forma de crear páginas para las web’s: Full Site Editing
Learn about creating online social learning membership sites with web development agency owner, BuddyPress expert, and StudyChurch founder Tanner Moushey in this episode of the LMScast podcast with Chris Badgett of LifterLMS. Chris and Tanner dive into what BuddyPress is and how you can use it on your sites to create a powerful social media experience on your site. BuddyPress is a plugin for WordPress that allows you to turn your website into a social media platform of sorts. You can have user profiles, an activity feed, groups, forums, and notifications. You can even associate forums with specific groups. With … Creating Online Social Learning Membership Sites with Web Development Agency Owner, BuddyPress Expert, and StudyChurch Founder Tanner Moushey Read More » The post Creating Online Social Learning Membership Sites with Web Development Agency Owner, BuddyPress Expert, and StudyChurch Founder Tanner Moushey appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.
This weeks stories that we discuss during the show 1A- Facebook's Not Listening Through Your Phone. It Doesn't Have To https://www.wired.com/story/facebooks-listening-smartphone-microphone/?mbid=BottomRelatedStories 1B - The Ethos of Big Tech On L2inc YouTube Channel Discussion With John Battelle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvtOCKJnZBY ———————————————————— 2A - Plugins Hosted on WordPress.org Can No Longer Guarantee Legal Compliance https://wptavern.com/plugins-hosted-on-wordpress-org-can-no-longer-guarantee-legal-compliance 2B - Pulling the plug on legal compliance plugins http://webdevlaw.uk/2018/04/17/pulling-the-plug-on-legal-compliance-plugins/ 2C - Everything You Wanted to Ask a GDPR Expert but Were Afraid to Ask https://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/everything-you-wanted-to-ask-a-gdpr-expert-but-were-afraid-to-ask/ ———————————————————— 3 -Design Thinking Is B.S. https://www.fastcodesign.com/90166804/design-thinking-is-b-s ———————————————————— 4 - BuddyPress 3.0 Beta 2 Released https://wptavern.com/buddypress-3-0-beta-2-released ———————————————————— 5 - Divi 3.1 Has Arrived! Introducing The New Divi Developer AP https://www.elegantthemes.com/blog/theme-releases/divi-3-1-has-arrived-introducing-the-new-divi-developer-api
Vamossss, mitad de semana, no me bajen los brazos! Hoy les traemos una idea fantástica… aprovechar para hacer leña del árbol caído… jajajaja. Les contamos como montar gratis… seeee gratis, su propia red social. Y que Mark Zuckerberg se las arregle solo con el Congreso Norteamericano… jajaja… plata no le falta al pibe. Para tal […] La entrada 058. Aprovechando que Facebook tambalea… Buddypress – Marketing Tursini! se publicó primero en Tursini Media.
WP Builds Newsletter #6 - It's all numbers - PHP 7, WordPress 4.9.5, BuddyPress 10, Elementor 2
WP Builds Newsletter #6 - It's all numbers - PHP 7, WordPress 4.9.5, BuddyPress 10, Elementor 2
Our special guest this week is John James Jacoby the joint presenter of WordPress Weekly podcast and the lead developer of both BuddyPress and bbPress since 2010. John has worked at Automattic on a wide variety of projects ranging from WordCamp.org to WordPress.com VIP.
We have a great show here with our special guest John James Jacoby who helps us discuss how to setup and use WordPress Multisite. John over the years has been a WordPress core contributor and lead a developer for both the BuddyPress and bbPress projects plus he was Director of Web Engineering at 10up. John also recently has taken up being the co-host the popular weekly WordPress podcast WordPress Weekly. We in the first half of the show discuss these leading WordPress new stories. 1 - WordPress 4.9 Will Support Shortcodes and Embedded Media in the Text Widget https://wptavern.com/wordpress-4-9-will-support-shortcodes-and-embedded-media-in-the-text-widget 2 - WordPress 4.9 Beta 4 Removes ‘Try Gutenberg’ Call to Action https://wptavern.com/wordpress-4-9-beta-4-removes-try-gutenberg-call-to-action 3 - A New Themes Experience in the Customizer https://make.wordpress.org/core/2017/10/24/a-new-themes-experience-in-the-customizer/
The second part of our interview with Bernardo Smith-Feitosa from Membership Authority shares how he uses BuddyPress, Memberium, Learndash, BadgeOS, and Intercom to build GraceSmithTV.com
Bernardo Smith-Feitosa from Membership Authority shares how he uses BuddyPress, Memberium, Learndash, BadgeOS, and Intercom to build GraceSmithTV.com
David Bisset is a WordPress developer who also happens to plan one of the biggest WordCamps in the United States. Their 9th one happened recently so I sat down and talked to David about what goes into planning a WordCamp, especially one this big! Show Notes David Bisset David on Twitter Make WordPress WordCamp.org BuddyPress […] The post Episode 36: David Bisset & WordCamp Miami appeared first on How I Built It.
Lee Jackson returns to talk his other company, Event Engine. This is a web agency devoted entirely to website design for conferences, events, and expos. We look the unique challenges faced by conference website managers, and some great tips for digital marketing for events, expos, and conferences. Links Event Engine The Event & Expo Podcast Angled Crown ================== Our episode this week is sponsored by LiquidWeb. Liquid Web is offering a 33% discount for your first 6 months of managed WordPress hosting. Head over to https://LiquidWeb.com/wordpress and use the code WPTONIC33 at checkout for your discount. ================== Table of Contents for Episode 185 0:00 Podcast intros. 3:29 What made Lee choose events and expos as a vertical? What led to him developing the Event Engine CMS? 6:50 What research went into adding features and modules to the Event Engine CMS? (built on top of WordPress). How did this product evolve? 11:09 How do they get in front of these event companies? What marketing methods work? 13:13 The benefit of publishing content year round for conferences and expos that only happen once a year? 17:07 Why giving away free content year round doesn't hurt ticket sales, but rather helps it. Tools for building a social element on a conference website. 19:40 Using the Facebook Pixel for retargeting and follow-up marketing. You can also do this on Twitter and LinkedIn. 22:39 Tips for marketing in person. 27:09 How Lee decided what to keep and what to turn off by default in the modules of Event Engine. Thoughts on the possibility of modules in WordPress. Backwards compatibility in WordPress. 30:28 Thoughts about WordPress growing the market share, and what it is happening to the market as a result. 37:10 Overcoming design by committee, and how Lee's process has changed over time to smooth this out. 41:22 Working with WordPress with outside apps using the REST API. 43:51 Podcast outros. =================== Additional Links mentioned during the show: BuddyPress 165 WP-Tonic: Mojca Marš – All About Facebook Ads WP Innovator Podcast WP Innovator YouTube channel =================== Find bonus content for this episode on the WP-Tonic website: https://www.wp-tonic.com/podcast/185-event-website-design/ =================== Subscribe to WP-Tonic on iTunes https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/wp-tonic-wordpress-podcast/id893083124?mt=2 =================== WP-Tonic is a WordPress maintenance company, and the publisher of a twice weekly WordPress business podcast.
Hoy os traemos un episodio completo donde hablamos sobre BuddyPress, un plugin para WordPress que nos permite crear una red social. A partir de varios casos de uso, contamos como funciona, que características trae y damos varias recomendaciones en forma de plugins. Y aquí los enlaces que hemos comentado: WordPress VIP Plugin para registro/login con Facebook […]
Hoy os traemos un episodio completo donde hablamos sobre BuddyPress, un plugin para WordPress que nos permite crear una red social. A partir de varios casos de uso, contamos como funciona, que características trae y damos varias recomendaciones en forma de plugins. Y aquí los enlaces que hemos comentado: WordPress VIP Plugin para registro/login con Facebook […]
Why let Facebook own your community when you can build and control your own. We unpack tools to help you build, grown and monetise your own community on your WordPress websites. BuddyPress - https://buddypress.org/ BBPress - https://bbpress.org/ PeepSo - https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/peepso-core/ Membership Pro 2 - https://premium.wpmudev.org/project/membership/ WooCommerce Membership - https://woocommerce.com/products/woocommerce-memberships/ Subscriptions - https://woocommerce.com/product-category/woocommerce-extensions/woocommerce-subscriptions/ --- OUR EVENT: Do you want to make real change in your business? Join us at our in-person event Agency Transformation Live Meet Troy Dean; Lee Jackson, Chris Ducker, Kelly Baader, Amy Woods, Paul Lacey, Dave Foy and other legends in this fantastic conference focused on actionable steps that you can use to transform your agency. --- See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
On this week’s episode, we’re joined by Tonya Mork of Know the Code. Tonya likes to rethink the way she does things to find a better path, one that is more efficient, effective, leads us forward, and is balanced with intent. She likes to share ideas, plant seeds, and inspire folks to consider a different approach. Her blog (Hello from Tonya) is all about the way she thinks. It’s meant to inspire you to stop, assess, and rethink the way you are doing things. In this 30-minute episode Brian Gardner, Lauren Mancke, and Tonya Mork discuss: Tonya’s 30-year career Not letting an ugly twist in life stop you Monetization strategies for an educational business Being an expert before you’re an educator Expanding beyond your current training areas Opportunities in the community for educators Listen to StudioPress FM below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes The Show Notes Follow Tonya on Twitter Follow Know the Code on Twitter Hello from Tonya Know The Code Visit Know The Code on Facebook Finding your Purpose in Life The Transcript How to Build an Online Education Business Jerod Morris: Hey, Jerod Morris here. If you know anything about Rainmaker Digital and Copyblogger, you may know that we produce incredible live events. Well, some would say that we produce incredible live events as an excuse to throw great parties, but that’s another story. We’ve got another one coming up this October in Denver. It’s called Digital Commerce Summit, and it is entirely focused on giving you the smartest ways to create and sell digital products and services. You can find out more at Rainmaker.FM/Summit. We’ll be talking about Digital Commerce Summit in more detail as it gets closer, but for now, I’d like to let a few attendees from our past events speak for us. Attendee 1: For me, it’s just hearing from the experts. This is my first industry event, so it’s awesome to learn new stuff and also get confirmation that we’re not doing it completely wrong where I work. Attendee 2: The best part of the conference for me is being able to mingle with people and realize that you have connections with everyone here. It feels like LinkedIn Live. I also love the parties after each day, being able to talk to the speakers, talk to other people who are here for the first time, people who have been here before. Attendee 3: I think the best part of the conference for me is understanding how I can service my customers a little more easily. Seeing all the different facets and components of various enterprises then helps me pick the best tools. Jerod Morris: Hey, we agree — one of the biggest reasons we host a conference every year is so that we can learn how to service our customers, people like you, more easily. Here are just a few more words from folks who have come to our past live events. Attendee 4: It’s really fun. I think it’s a great mix of beginner information and advanced information. I’m really learning a lot and having a lot of fun. Attendee 5: The conference is great, especially because it’s a single-track conference where you don’t get distracted by, “Which session should I go to?” and, “Am I missing something?” Attendee 6: The training and everything, the speakers have been awesome, but I think the coolest aspect for me has been connecting with both people who are putting it on and then other attendees. Jerod Morris: That’s it for now. There’s a lot more to come on Digital Commerce Summit, and I really hope to see you there in October. Again, to get all the details and the very best deal on tickets, head over to Rainmaker.FM/Summit. Voiceover: StudioPress FM is designed to help creative entrepreneurs build the foundation of a powerful digital business. Tune in weekly as StudioPress founder Brian Gardner and VP of StudioPress Lauren Mancke share their expertise on web design, strategy, and building an online platform. Lauren Mancke: On this week’s episode, Brian and I will discuss ways to build an educational Genesis business with Tonya Mork from Know the Code. Brian Gardner: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to StudioPress FM. I am your host, Brian Gardner, and I’m joined, as usual, with the vice president of StudioPress, Lauren Mancke. I’m very excited about today’s show because we’re continuing our series where we talk to members and experts, mind you, of the Genesis community. Today, we’re joined by Tonya Mork of Know the Code. Tonya likes to rethink the way she does things to find a better path, one that is more efficient, effective, leads us forward, and is balanced with intent. She likes to share her ideas, plant seeds, inspire folks to consider a different approach. Her blog, Hello from Tonya, is all about the way she thinks. It’s meant to inspire you to stop, assess, and rethink the way you are doing things. Tonya, it’s a huge pleasure to have you on StudioPress FM. Welcome to the show. Tonya Mork: Hi, Brian. Hi, Lauren. Hi, everybody. Glad to be here with you guys. Lauren Mancke: Yeah, we’re glad you’re on the show. Brian Gardner: Now is this the first time you guys have talked to each other, probably? Tonya Mork: Yeah, it is, actually. Lauren Mancke: In person, yeah. Brian Gardner: Cool. Yeah, Tonya and I have had a couple of good calls, which we’ll allude to throughout the course of the show. I’m going to just kick off and start a little bit personal. Tonya, on the home page of your personal blog, you have 16 circles of words that describe you. I’m going to make it fun, and I’m going to ask you to pick three of those that most personify who you are, and why do you think that those three would be the top three? Tonya Mork: Wow. Try to define a person in three different characteristics. That’s a tough thing. Brian Gardner: Well, 16 seems like a lot, so I figured if we narrowed them down to the best of the best, you could tell us in a nutshell who you are. The Three Characteristics That Define Tonya Tonya Mork: Okay. I think what defines me the most is that I unlock potential. I’ve been doing that my entire career — not only with people, but processes, with technology, and so on. The way that I do that is that I’m able to see what could be possible, what’s not there right now, and then I’m able to map out a way to move us to where we want to be. If I were to look on that page, I’d say, okay, potential unlocker is one, and then the visionary leader is another. It takes a lot of vision to not only educate people, but lead people, manage people. To build websites, too, it takes a lot of vision. The other thing to know about me is I’m a very happy person. Everything that I do, even back in engineering days when there was some tough problems, it didn’t matter. If I was in a boardroom or on the floor, I like to have fun. There’s a time for being serious, but you can still temper that with making sure that you’re having a good time and enjoying what you’re doing. Lauren Mancke: You mentioned you’ve been in engineering. We know that WordPress has been around for just over 10 years of that time, but you’ve got a career that lasts more than 30 years. Can you give us a little bit of background about what you were doing before WordPress? Tonya’s 30-Year Career Tonya Mork: Sure. I’ve been in engineering since the mid-1980s. I used to be in the high-tech world, so the automation world. This world, for folks who don’t know, if you can think about anything — your computer that you’re looking at, your phone, your car — all these things are mass-produced. To put those things together, it takes a lot of automated equipment, robotic, different cells, instrumentation, quality-type processes that go through and they assemble, test, make, those types of things. That’s the world that I used to belong to. I held many different roles in that. I started off as a tech, and then I moved into engineering. Then I went into some project management. I went into staff management, executive management, and so on. I had a whole path and trajectory that I went through long before I came to WordPress. Then life threw me a curve ball. There’s a chapter two that I know we’ll talk about. Then I found WordPress. This is how I ended up here, and we’ll talk about that here, I’m sure, as we move along in the interview. Brian Gardner: Yeah. There’s so many people in the WordPress community, many of which are really new, new to blogging, new to development or design, or any of that. One of the things I like most about you and I’m going to say this with no disrespect because you have a long career. We just mentioned you’ve been around for 30 years, which means you’re older than some people in our field. This comes out in your website and in the way you talk and in the way you explain things — you have a tremendous amount of knowledge for process, for analyzing things. There are not many people that I know of, if at all, who probably bring to the table what you do. To our community, I’m so thankful that you can bring that area of expertise because I think there’s probably holes and gaps here and there that exist. You certainly fill a big one. Thank you for that. Tonya Mork: Thank you. Gosh, that was very nice of you. I appreciate it. Brian Gardner: Okay. You alluded to a chapter two, and I hope that this is okay to ask. I read the very personal story you shared on HeroPress about finding your purpose in life. Clearly, you have a story to tell. You talked about it just a few minutes ago. In 2007, in your words, your life took an ugly twist. In whatever detail you feel comfortable, talk to us about that because I think that formulated kind of who you are now and where you’re at. Not Letting an Ugly Twist in Life Stop You Tonya Mork: Sure. It’s a big shift, and I wrote that article for a couple of purposes. One is to explain how can someone with the experience that I have, why aren’t I back in that market? Why am I here in WordPress, and why am I trying to help people? It needed to be told so that people wanting to know who I am and trust me as I’m trying to help folks and the reason, the impetus why. That’s why I wrote it. Then, two, I wrote it to kind of help inspire that sometimes life does just take an ugly twist. We all go through things. It can be anything from losing somebody to divorce, to losing your job, whatever. What happened to me in 2007, my engineering company was flourishing. We were doing really, really well, very profitable, and then I got ill. That’s one of those things you can’t predict. The kind of illness that I had, they basically went down a path and said, “You have something that’s extremely rare. I mean very rare, and there’s basically nothing we can do for you.” I had to lock myself away because everything in the world made me so ill that I wasn’t able to function. I basically became a prisoner in my own home. If you can imagine what that feels like to be so ill that lights, noise, a bird flying, being in a car watching things go by would send you into a seizure and then put me into the type of situation that was life-threatening, you can imagine how my life would be then. I was pretty much stuck here in this house except when it was time to go to a doctor or the hospital. That was it for many, many years. Going from being a type-A person who had a company, who had people, families that were counting on me, was very, very difficult. We lost everything. We watched them take everything from us. I lost friends. We lost our home. Everything that we had built throughout our career was all gone, all the savings, all gone, everything. The people that I employed were my friends. They were part of a family, and they lost everything, too. We’d built this together, and they had to go out and find different employment that didn’t have that same feel to it. It took them a while to get back on their feet again as well. It was a devastating loss for all of us. I was black for a while, just in a hole of darkness. Then somewhere along the way, I got sick of that. I got to get back to the essence of me, and that is I got to be happy again. I made a conscious choice that, “Okay, I’m locked in these walls. So what? I can extend out and do something in the world outside these walls, and I can do it virtually so that things outside, I could still control my environment so that I’m not ill, but I have a way of still being able to do something and have a purpose in the world.” That’s where I found WordPress. We were using it in my engineering company just for the blog, so I knew about it. Then I started a nonprofit to help people that were like me, and we spun up BuddyPress. I spun up the website for it. Then I started tinkering. And, “I really want to know this thing.” That engineer came out in me again, and then that educator came out. It was like I was looking at questions people were asking, and it’s like, “Wow, folks come from a different background than what I’m in. They don’t necessarily understand software principles and the fundamentals.” So I started answering questions. That led me on the path that I’m on now for helping people. Brian Gardner: Thank you, first of all, for sharing your story. I know it’s not easy. I’m a person who has had multiple chapters in my life as well, some online, some off. I think we have a tendency to glorify life online and being an Internet entrepreneur. Especially with social media, it’s so easy to portray just how good life is. Instagram, Facebook, all of that stuff, filters, all of that stuff. I’m a huge proponent of trying to keep it real. One person that comes to mind is Cory Miller, who speaks very much about mental health and trying to help those who are online doing things, entrepreneurs, that kind of thing. I hope to have him on the show in a future episode just to talk to that. I think there’s a reality that we all — whether we’re business owners, writers, bloggers, designers, or whatever — there is parts of our life that aren’t happy. It’s okay to go there and to figure that out so that you can become happy. For our listeners, those who are listening, understand that Tonya has a great story, and we’re just thankful for hearing that. Tonya Mork: Thank you. I’m thankful to the community because the community gave me purpose. If you go read my story, you’ll see that I found my purpose because of this community, you guys all welcomed me in, that I could then contribute. So many people contributed to the knowledge that I have in my brain. I just want to give that back to people. The end story of chapter two was that I got so ill, my body gave up, and I passed away. I got a miracle, and I came back. I said, “That’s it. I’m going to be a different person now, and I want to give back.” That’s what I’m trying to do now to help all of you guys to do more, make more money, be more efficient — obviously, I love Genesis — to help you to be able to know, to maximize what you can do for your clients with it. Brian Gardner: That’s a great segue. Lauren Mancke: I think there’s a lot of appeal with Genesis and in the WordPress community to have the flexibility, your schedule, and things that you can do that you might not be able to work in a traditional work environment. I think a lot of people can relate to that. When did Genesis become part of your picture? Why the Efficiency of Genesis First Attracted Tonya Tonya Mork: Let’s see, pretty much close to when Brian put it together. I forget the article that I saw, but something drew me to it. I started looking at it. I like to break things apart and just understand how they work. As it started progressing, it was like, “Hmm, I like the way this is put together.” It really feeds that developer sense that you can go in and do what you need to do. Out of the box, it comes up. You’re able to build a site immediately. Then just with a few tweaks here and there, you can get a custom experience. I like that versus just every time out of the box, you’ve got to go and write a totally different experience. That’s not highly effective to be able to do that, whereas Genesis allows you to be very effective and efficient. That’s what drew me to it. I would say it was pretty close to the beginning, not obviously right at the beginning, but pretty close to it. Brian Gardner: One of the things I like about the Genesis community, aside from the people that are in that, is the array of multiple opportunities that folks can … WordPress is kind of the same way. I always feel like Genesis is a smaller version of WordPress in that there’s just so many different ways to make money. You can design. You could develop. You can train. There’s just so many different opportunities there. One thing that, as I alluded to earlier, there’s gaps, or there were gaps, in the Genesis community, the educational side of Genesis and WordPress, coding, and developing, all in itself, that was sort of there. A lot of people take for granted, I do all the time, in my eyes, how easy it is to pick things up and to learn, and how to move things around. But I fail to understand or embrace, a lot of times, the reality that there’s hundreds and thousands of people who were once like me way back in the day — new to it all, don’t understand it, need a little handholding, and stuff like that. When I came across Know the Code, I was, first of all, instantly like, “Who is this person? What is she doing, and why is she doing it?” It just was an onslaught of this awesomeness. I was like, “I got to pay attention to this and put this on my radar.” I reached out to you shortly after it to just touch base and all of that. Obviously, Know the Code is a passion project of yours. You’re passionate about what you do. It’s something that I’ve seen you sort of, and we’ve talked about a little bit, very intentionally and smartly, might I add, monetizing because we all have to make money. Passion is great, but if you have the opportunity to make money from it, that’s also great because we need jobs, right? Tonya Mork: Right. Brian Gardner: What is the hope you have behind it? Obviously, you’re teaching and training people, and enabling them to pursue their version of a journey. From your perspective as an entrepreneur, but also from the perspective of the customer of yours, what is your hope there? Monetization Strategies for an Educational Business Tonya Mork: Just to be clear so that people understand what Know the Code is, yes, I teach Genesis, but I teach web development. I teach software principles, which feeds anybody from any stage in their career. It can start from a beginner through a seasoned pro like myself. It’s part of feeding that continuous learning process that we all have to do. It’s technology-based. It’s intentionally targeted at professional developers or people who want to be professional developers, who maybe along the way got into writing some code. They didn’t learn about things like solid principles and modular design, configuration designs, and how to troubleshoot and write code in such a way that it’s very efficient and reduces your cost. These are types of things that I teach. From an entrepreneurial standpoint, if you’re going after people who are going to make money off of what you’re teaching them, then it makes sense to monetize that. “I’m helping you to make more money, so okay, you should then pay something to me for my expertise as I’m enabling you to go off and make more money.” That’s why I put a monetizing paywall up in front of it. There’s a lot of free content, too, that people can then use as well. Again, that’s the educator in me. I’d love to be able to give everything away for free, but I got to eat, too. Brian Gardner: Yup. Tonya Mork: I have bills to pay, too. I’d like to live in my house in chapter three, you know? Brian Gardner: Although your advantage, though, is you live up in Wisconsin in Two Rivers, right? Tonya Mork: Yup, right. Brian Gardner: There’s a much lower cost of living there. At least you have that going for you, whereas I live in Chicago. Tonya Mork: Absolutely. Brian Gardner: I get hosed on my property taxes. There’s more pressure for me. Tonya Mork: I could imagine living where you’re at, yeah. We intentionally moved here. We used to live in downtown Milwaukee, so I know how expensive it can be. We moved here intentionally for the lower cost. From the perspective of my clients and customers who come to me, you’re the type of person who just wants to do more. You want to be more effective at what you do, you want to better serve your clients, and you want to make more money. You’re a professional, and that’s what I’m helping you to do. Lauren Mancke: What have been some of your challenges that you faced when you started Know the Code? Is there some unexpected things that you’ve had to deal with that you didn’t foresee? Challenges Tonya Faced When Starting Know the Code Tonya Mork: Everybody who ever starts a business always has some things that you learn, right? It’s one of those where I tell people, they want to know what entrepreneurship is like, well, you’re standing on an edge of a cliff, and it’s black out there. You have a vision in your mind, and you jump out. You start flying. Sometimes you’ll sink a bit. You’ve got to be innovative enough to be able to see that coming, then be able to adjust your path, so you can start to soar again. With Know the Code, some of the things are I produce a lot of content. Because of the format and how I do it, I’m able to just turn on the camera and just do a brain dump from me to you. It’s more like a cable, from my head to yours. That means I can produce a lot of content fast. One of the things I didn’t foresee was, “Wow, how am I going to organize all of this content, so you can quickly find it?” You can’t just dump it into a library. People aren’t going to be able to find that easily, so what I’m doing right now is going through a process of content discovery and working on the user experience, too, that you can, within a few clicks, find what you’re looking for. Brian Gardner: Sounds like a Dewey Decimal System, if we’re using the library analogy. Tonya Mork: Sure. Brian Gardner: I have a 30-second timeout because I want to ask you a fun question. Are you personally responsible for the designs both behind Hello from Tonya and also Know the Code? Tonya’s Hand in Designing Her Sites Tonya Mork: First one, yes. Second one, no. Yes, I did my personal site. It’s just something I’ve been playing with. I like playing in the sandbox, so you’ll come back it may be different. It’s just my expression of that designer that’s been unlocked in me. Know the Code, though, has a team behind it. We have a couple of professional developers who are designers who put that together. Brian Gardner: I kind of had a suspicion that you had your hands in at least one of the site designs. They’re both great. I love them both. I love the color schemes in them all. I can tell that you’re as meticulous with the design of your site as you are with the content on the site — so kudos to you. Tonya Mork: Thank you. Now, I did influence the color palette on Know the Code, because you’re going to notice I like green. That’s my favorite color, so yeah, I did influence that color there. I also like orange. There’s orange everywhere. Lauren Mancke: Speaking of Know the Code, do you have some sort of process in which you determine the types of things that you teach there? Do you have a way to determine what will resonate with your audience? Being an Expert Before You’re an Educator Tonya Mork: That’s a good question, Lauren. When I first started, I thought, “Well, who knows me the most? Where do I start?” Web development, software development is huge. Just the principles alone that you go through to learn how to sit down and write code from scratch. That’s what I’m trying to get folks to do, write it from scratch. There’s a lot to it. What I said was, “I’ve been in the Genesis community. The Genesis folks know me, so I’m going to start there.” I look at questions that people ask, and I say, “Hmm, okay, I can answer that question for you, and name that tune in X amount of notes.” That’s what I try to do — look at what questions people are asking, and then put that together. Then I kind of have a path for myself. I have a road map that I put together, and I’m taking you on a journey from where you’re at today. I looked at a big part of the market and where I believe the skillsets are at today and where I’m trying to drive you to, which is to be able to build anything and code from scratch if you want to. I’ve put together a trajectory for that. I’m sprinkling in some of the questions that you have to make sure it resonates with you because I’d really like to break it down into the basic elements so that it’s easy for you to adapt and take it away, not just one context, and trying to sprinkle in some of those questions with answers so that it clicks on the lightbulbs for you. Brian Gardner: That makes a lot of sense. I love that. I really do. On a recent call we had, you and I, we discussed the possibility of branching out with your business plan, right? Tonya Mork: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Expanding Beyond Your Current Training Areas Brian Gardner: We agreed that, as great as Genesis is, to the greater of the Internet, it’s just a very small sliver of audience and opportunity. I’m not territorial about that. I encourage anybody who’s building a Genesis-based business to think outside of the box, outside of the Genesis community, because there’s so much more opportunity to reach people on a broader level. The same can be said about WordPress to some degree because, even outside of WordPress, there’s still more space. We talked about broadening the training and the types of things you’d teach to cover ‘business people’ as opposed to ‘WordPress or Genesis people.’ Where are you at with that? I know it was only about a week or so ago we talked, but have you started thinking more about just things about general business? For example, I know we talked about things like legal types of things, such as trademarks, and all that kind of stuff. Tonya Mork: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Right. Know the Code itself is about writing software. It’s not just WordPress. I teach you PHP. I teach you jQuery, SQL, everything. That can allow you to build any kind of site that you want. If you think about it, as you just said, there’s this whole business side, even for developers. You’re stepping out, and you’re really good at code. Or you’re a designer and you’re really good at designing — but do you have that business ability as well? It takes a lot. There’s sales. There’s marketing. There’s all the legal stuff. There’s accounting. There’s a lot to running even your own little agency or freelance business. What Brian and I were talking about that I had mentioned was, after I did the Matt Report, some folks started asking me questions about, “Okay, well, how did you run businesses?” because I used to run a multimillion dollar businesses. “How did you do that?” What we’re doing to start with is I’m going to start writing just blog posts about business, just to share some ideas. That’s part of what my personal blog site is, just to get you to think about different ideas. I started a Little Green Book series. Some of those will be code. I just published a book, Refactoring Tweaks, which is on code to make your code better. The next one will probably be something in business. I can write these quick little ebooks that are less than 100 pages, or around 100 pages, to teach you something about technology or something about business, whether that’s marketing or whatever. Then that can then lead into something else that you and I talked about, too, which is then, “Okay, well, you’ve got a book. You’ve got written content.” Then we can move into something like maybe master programs where I can spin up a webinar or some sort of course and take you on a path. Brian Gardner: Now, Lauren is going to run the rest of the show while I go out and register KnowtheBusiness.io, because that’s how my brain thinks. Immediately, as you were talking, I’m like, “I’m going to recommend that you go off and think about what would be … ” If in fact you do get that response from people on your personal blog, people who are interested in starting a business and learning all of that stuff, what is the Know the Code version of what that website might look like? Tonya Mork: Oh sure, I’m on there right now registering it. Boom. Got it. Brian Gardner: I wouldn’t doubt it. Tonya Mork: Might as well while we’re talking, right? Brian Gardner: What’s $8? Tonya Mork: You inspired the idea. Lauren Mancke: Do you see any holes in the community as it stands now for different types of training, like on Know the Code? In other words, are there other opportunities that people can come in and offer something of value, that they can then make money at? Opportunities in the Community for Educators Tonya Mork: Oh absolutely. The whole thing, if you’re going to be an educator, you really need to know your stuff. You need to be able to do this. Let me take just a moment to teach you something, too, and then I’ll answer the question. You need to be able to start where that person’s at, and then map out a trajectory that moves them from where they’re at to where you’re trying to move them to. Then make it adaptable so that they can go off and make it their own, and not just teach one use case. Okay, I teach you how to build this one widget. “Well, great. I know how to build one widget. Whoopee.” No, it’s, “I know how to build a widget, which means I know how to write code. I know how to do this.” Okay. From an education standpoint, that’s what great educators do. They know how to get you to think and adapt the information that they’re giving you, and then that inspires you to go do other stuff. In the space, I’m here to help teach code, the proper way of building code to be efficient and make money at it, but there’s other things. Think about WordPress and what we’re doing. There’s content strategies, right? So you could be someone who needs to be out there teaching how to work with your clients to make the content first. Designs are great. We can put a pretty label on something and so on, but what’s going to keep people coming back to a website is that content. If the content isn’t right, then people are going to look at the pretty site, and they’re just not going to come back. Teaching strategies on content strategy itself, how to work with clients, that’s an area that could easily be done up. There’s things in SEO. There’s lots of different opportunities. You may think, “Well, that’s kind of saturated. Some folks are already doing that.” Find a way to do it differently. Find a way that’s uniquely your voice and that you have a true expertise in, and then you can go out and share that knowledge and educate others. Just remember, though, it’s about others. It’s not about you. It’s making sure that you’re truly delivering value to help other people do more things. Brian Gardner: I love what you said there. Last year at our Authority conference, Sally Hogshead was one of the main speakers. One thing she said, and you just basically said the same thing, was, “Different is better than better.” First of all, there’s a lot of people who claim to be knowledgeable in doing what they’re doing, not necessarily in the Genesis community, but there’s a lot of fluff out there where people are really good marketers, could design a good sales page, or something to that effect. One thing that I for sure know about you is that you completely back it up, almost more than you need to, not really, but a lot of people you can just tell, “Oh, this is a good sales page,” but there’s going to be not much to it after that. With you, it’s like you open the door, and there’s a mansion of knowledge. Development, for me, isn’t as interesting as design is. That’s just me personally, but there’s a ton of people out there in the WordPress space, in the Genesis space, and even outside of all that, just who are mega developers or people who want to just develop and don’t have the artistically creative side where design would appeal to them. For them, it’s all about code and knowing the code. I sincerely think you have an opportunity to do a lot more good work for the people everywhere. Tonya Mork: Thank you. Yeah, design is another area where folks could jump there’s a lot of elements to design that you could go in and start teaching with. Brian Gardner: Now you’re going to register KnowtheDesign.io. Tonya Mork: No, no. Brian Gardner: KnowtheEverything.io. Tonya Mork: Well, I’m not a designer. I will tell you right now, I am not a designer. I wouldn’t even want to try to teach that. There are great eyes out there, and mine aren’t it. If you want to know ones and zeroes, that’s me. Brian Gardner: Well, that’s the great thing about a good ecosystem — everybody knows their skills and their part, and they kind of just play and usually stay within that, which is good. Then it gives people a place, a good resource to go, to learn, and to do all of that stuff. Tonya Mork: Yeah. If you’re thinking about education and helping others, make sure that you really have an expertise in that. You’re right. I get a lot of emails where people say, “I could teach you how to blah, blah, blah.” My first question is, “Have you done it successfully? What’s your background?” That’s why I tried to push my background out there, so it didn’t just sound all fluffy and, “Well, okay, why is she teaching this? Does she really know her stuff?” I think you need to make sure you know your stuff and be able to back it up and prove that, yeah, you really do. Brian Gardner: Yup. Those are great words of wisdom. I want to do this with a number of the people that we have on the show because I feel like we could just keep going and talking and talking and talking. In the spirit of trying to keep this to a digestible level, I want to for sure have you back on the show, either in a follow-up fashion or to just pick your brain in another area that would be applicable to those who are listening. Where to Learn From Tonya Brian Gardner: I do want to ask our audience, as I always do at the end of the show, I have a question for you. Do you want to be a more awesome and in-demand professional developer? If you do, learn how to level up as a WordPress developer with Tonya at Know the Code, and get a hands-on, practical web development approach with screencasts which will help advance you to the next level in your career. For more info, visit her website, KnowtheCode.io. If you like what you heard on today’s show, you can find more episodes of StudioPress FM at, you guessed it, StudioPress.FM. You can also help us hit the main stage by subscribing to the show in iTunes. It’s a great way to never ever miss an episode. Thank you so much for listening, and we’ll see you next week. Tonya, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you for your time. Tonya Mork: Thank you, Brian. Thank you, Lauren. Lauren Mancke: Thank you.
This week I share why using a Support Ticketing system is the way to go. Upcoming Events No WordCamps next weekend. Segment 1: In the News WordPress 4.5.3 update – 17 bugs updated BuddyPress 2.6 released WordCamp Los Angeles is officially.. site is live.. and speaker subs are open! Segment 2: Why I’m going to…
This week I share why using a Support Ticketing system is the way to go. Upcoming Events No WordCamps next weekend. Segment 1: In the News WordPress 4.5.3 update – 17 bugs updated BuddyPress 2.6 released WordCamp Los Angeles is officially.. site is live.. and speaker subs are open! Segment 2: Why I’m going to…
Blair Williams is a software engineer and entrepreneur. He is the owner and lead programmer for Caseproof. Caseproof has four products on the market Pretty Link, MemberPress, Affiliate Royale, and Buy Now for Stripe. Pretty Link is a WordPress plugin to manage link redirection on WordPress websites, MemberPress is a product to manage membership sites, Affiliate Royale is a product to manage your affiliates, and Buy Now for Stripe is a product that allows integration with Stripe to sell products on a website without an SSL certificate. Please see Disclosure* (below) concerning affiliate links on this page. Key Segments [0:02:39] After getting a degree in computer science, Blair worked as a programmer, software architect, and CTO at various companies. But while he was working these jobs, he was moonlighting on Caseproof doing freelance web development for clients and then got into WordPress plugins. [0:03:56] His passion was all about the web. He created Caseproof to both learn about the web and get started helping people build websites. When Blair first started building web apps, he thought he needed to use the most bulletproof technology he could find, something that could scale massively and be solid. He chose Java Struts [see Apache Struts] and Enterprise JavaBeans. It took him about a year to create his first web app, which was basically a file browser. After that experience, he switched to PHP. He wasn't sure how PHP would scale but felt that he would be able to get things done in a reasonable amount of time. [0:06:16] While working at Franklin Covey, he started working on larger applications that had been written in PHP and were out of control. He heard about Ruby on Rails. Since Rails uses a Model-View-Controller (MVC) as Struts does, he felt it had the strength of Struts while using a beautiful scripting language. He switched to Rails for several years, even using it after he started working with WordPress, and today still uses some Rails apps to facilitate the sale of MemberPress and other plugins. [0:07:21] He later began to work for a client doing more Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Internet marketing work and started fiddling around with WordPress to develop microsites. As part of this, he wanted to start tracking links in pay-per-click campaigns independent from Google to have secondary confirmation. That's when he wrote Pretty Link for WordPress. He also wrote Pretty Link in such a way that he could use his own domain name instead of Bitly, or something like it, to shorten links. He put Pretty Link on the WordPress Plugin Directory and found that other people wanted to track their links too. [0:08:58] After Pretty Link, came Affiliate Royale, MemberPress, and Buy Now for Stripe. Pretty Link is a WordPress plugin. MemberPress is also a WordPress plugin but uses a license server on the backend running a Rails-based service. The backend issues and revokes licenses, and facilitates updates. Upgrades and support for a year come with a license. [0:10:30] “When I first got into this, I thought this was gonna be this primarily programming job. I was gonna just be in my basement coding all the time, and it was all about the software. I was just gonna make the software better, and that is a really important part of the business, but the thing I have found is that it's really not a software business; it's a support business [slightly edited].” MemberPress handles e-commerce, protecting pages, and keeping the life-cycle relationship with the customer intact. People use it to run their businesses. Blair's team takes support seriously, and that costs money. [0:12:36] “We take it just as seriously as you take your business, and we wanna make sure that you're up and running, that you are able to make money. That's our whole goal: to help you make money.” [0:12:51] Most of Caseproof's support team are developers. They can go in and fix things for people. Ron had a very positive support experience with the Caseproof team and, knowing how expensive support is, felt a little guilty for the time they spent fixing the problem [relative to the cost of Pretty Link Pro]. Blair's response was: “But that's what they're there for, and we try to fix as may things as we can.” [0:13:51] Blair attributes part of the strength of MemberPress to WordPress but notes that there are thousands of plugins, themes, and web hosts in the self-hosted WordPress environment. Testing every permutation is impossible. Support in this environment requires masterful troubleshooting skills. [0:16:04] Pretty Link, the free version, will do basic, server-side redirects (301, 302, and 307), which Blair explains. [0:19:15] Pretty Link Pro also allows JavaScript redirects, meta refresh redirects using HTML, cloaking, pixel tracking, Tweet automation, social bars, Tweet counters, keyword replacement, alternate base URLs, and geographic redirects. Cloaking is a technique to hide target URLs from the user. Cloaking is legitimately used to retain branding when redirecting but has also been used for questionable reasons to trick people. Pretty Bar Redirect is a form of cloaking that puts a bar at the top of a linked page with brought-to-you-by branding. Pixel tracking, where a one-pixel image is loaded with a page, is also provided to track page views and hits. Tweet automation tweets to connected Twitter accounts when designated pages are initially published. Keyword replacement will replace occurrences of keywords throughout a site with a predefined link (such as an affiliate link). An alternate base URL can be used to provide a short URL for a long URL, such as SaaSBP.com as a substitute for SaaSBusinessPodcast.com. Geographic redirects will redirect based on a user's location. [0:31:11] With MemberPress, you can control who has access to content by limiting access according to rules established by the admin. Access can be granted or revoked for posts, pages, categories, tags, feeds, communities, digital files, and custom taxonomies. Community access allows integration with BuddyPress or bbPress to limit access based on topics. You can manage subscriptions, manage transactions, and resend welcome emails. MemberPress centralizes the rules for access to all of your content. There are also developer tools to integrate with external systems such as SaaS products. MemberPress can revoke access if payments lapse. Membership levels control price, subscription period, trial period, access to content, and recurring billing. Registration pages can be set up for each level. Customers have account pages to view billing history, edit their information, and can be given the option to cancel subscriptions. The admin can also manage coupons with options to define the frequency of use, expiration, discount levels, applicable products, and trial periods. Members are not restricted to a single subscription level but may have multiple subscriptions defined within the site. MemberPress can calculate proration for membership level upgrades. [0:43:49] If customers require custom MemberPress development work, Caseproof maintains a list of trusted vendors and can provide referrals. These are vendors who are familiar with MemberPress and maintain a relationship with Caseproof to resolve problems. Caseproof does not receive payment from vendors for referrals made. [0:44:43] For payments, MemberPress integrates with PayPal for Business and Stripe(and Authorize.net for the developer version). Caseproof is working on integrating with Braintree and, for Australia, eWay. With Stripe and PayPal, the integration is tight, so you can tell if someone has purchased or canceled, and an admin can manage subscriptions from the membership site without needing to log into the gateway. All three services can notify MemberPress of payments made; MemberPress can then issues receipts to the user. [0:50:17] MemberPress also provides analytics to see how your membership site is doing. It will report by week, month, year, and product allowing you to see who has been buying what and when. You can measure traffic, money coming in, and lifetime average value of users. The data is live and displayed using Google's Visualization API [see Google Charts]. [0:52:28] Affiliate Royale allows you to manage a complete affiliate program. It will track affiliate commissions, and if you refund a transaction, it will automatically calculate the correction. Currently, it only supports payments to affiliates using PayPal. You can have a tiered commissions structure of up to 100 levels. It generates a dashboard allowing affiliates to see how much they have been paid or are currently owed, to see a leaderboard, to get affiliate links, banners, or other assets you have provided, and to enter an SSN or EIN for tax purposes. In addition to MemberPress, it integrates with Easy Digital Downloads, WooCommerce, Shopify, and other e-commerce platforms. And since Affiliate Royale is a WordPress plugin, all this is managed from your site with the same look and feel of the rest of your site. [0:56:00] Blair's software products came about organically. He started by searching for a tool that eventually led to the development of Pretty Link. He tried to find solutions but found none that completely solved his problem. [0:57:07] “Initially with Pretty Link, I didn't even have any idea that it would make money. I just put it out there on the repository thinking: well, this is what you do. You put software back out there into the community and give back a little bit. And there was kind of a big uptake. I think the first day there were almost 200 people who downloaded it. Just the first day! I was pretty excited about that, and over the next few months, I thought: ‘I wonder if there is a way I could make money at this?' [slightly editted]” [0:57:43] “WordPress, in general, does not make it easy to monetize plugins.” Anyone who sells premium plugins that can do automatic updates has to reverse engineer WordPress a little bit and create their own server that the plugin can talk to and get updates from. “It's pretty involved.” Initially, they were using FTP to copy files into WordPress, but over the years, they have gotten better at utilizing the plugin management facilities of WordPress. [0:59:07] Affiliate Royale and MemberPress were also needs that Blair had identified while working with other software or clients in those fields. He found things that were good, but not exactly what he needed, so he decided to build it himself. With the update mechanism from Pretty Link in place, he had an advantage with the other products. For the most part, the products were a “scratch-your-own-itch kind of thing.” [1:00:54] For resources, Blair recommends the book The Personal MBA, getting a good accountant, and GoDaddy Online Bookkeeping. The Personal MBA is his number one from the many business books he has read. “If anybody has one book to read, they should read The Personal MBA.” GoDaddy Bookkeeping integrates with Stripe and PayPal allowing them to track numerous small transactions. With BuyNow for Stripe, Caseproof gets a couple of cents per transaction as a fee. They must have software to track thousands of transactions. He has also heard good things about Xero and Less Accounting. FreshBooks is another great resource. Concerning accountants, Blair feels that you can't replace the in-depth professional knowledge of a good accountant. [1:05:03] Buy Now for Stripe is a plugin that allows users to accept credit card payments from a WordPress website without an SSL certificate. It's the most SaaS-like of their products. The backend is a Ruby-based application. For a credit card payment, it redirects to a secure payment server for the payment and then back to the original site when complete. It is similar to a PayPal flow without a PayPal account. It uses Stripe Connect, so it uses your Stripe account and is connected to the Buy Now for Stripe service. They facilitate the transaction, but the money goes straight into your account minus a small fee. They assess a transaction fee on top of Stripe's fees (for which they have gotten some flak), but if you weigh the transaction fee against the cost of an SSL, it's less expensive in many cases. If you're doing high volume, investigate getting an SSL. Buy Now for Stripe also has some features to facilitate the delivery of products; for example, it will send a receipt to a user with a link to where a product can be downloaded. They have had a lot of requests to integrate with MemberPress to allow transactions from MemberPress without an SSL, so they are looking into that. Resources Mentioned Affiliate Royale – a WordPress plugin that allows you to manage a complete affiliate program. See above or listen at [0:52:28]. Apache Struts – an open-source, Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework for creating web applications based on Java. It is extensible using a plugin architecture. It has plugins to support REST, AJAX, and JSON.Java Struts – see Apache Struts. Authorize.net – credit card processing. bbPress – a WordPress plugin to create online forums. Bitly – a link shortening and tracking service. Braintree – online payment processing. BuddyPress – a WordPress plugin to help you build a community website with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more. Buy Now for Stripe – accept payments on your WordPress site without an SSL certificate Caseproof – Blair Williams' company, makers of Pretty Link, Member Press, Affiliate Royale, and Buy Now for Stripe. Easy Digital Downloads – e-commerce web app for digital products. Enterprise JavaBeans – server-side software based on Java to encapsulate business logic. eWay – online payment processing. eWay Australia – online payment processing for Australia. FreshBooks – small business accounting software. GoDaddy Online Bookkeeping – online bookkeeping. Google Charts – interactive charts for use in browser and on mobile devices. Google's Visualization API – API for Google Charts. Java Struts – see Apache Struts. Less Accounting – online accounting software. MemberPress – WordPress plugin to manage membership sites allowing you to accept payments, control access, and sell digital products securely. PayPal – web app to pay for online transactions. PayPal for Business – a service to accept online payments using PayPal or credit cards. PHP – a script-type programming language used by WordPress and widely used on the web embedded in HTML. Pretty Link – Caseproof's WordPress plugin to manage affiliate links on WordPress sites. Pretty Link Pro – the paid version of Pretty Link. See above or listen at [0:19:15]. AddsJavaScript redirects, meta refresh redirects using HTML, cloaking, pixel tracking, Tweet automation, social bars, Tweet counters, keyword replacement, alternate base URLs, and geographic redirects. Ruby – a script-type programming language with an elegant syntax. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, has said that he is “trying to make Ruby natural, not simple.” Ruby on Rails – on open-source Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework for creating web apps based on the Ruby programming language. Shopify – e-commerce web app. Stripe – web app to accept credit card payments. Stripe Connect – service to enable payments for sellers, vendors, contractors, etc. The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business – book by Josh Kaufman covering the essentials of business. WooCommerce – e-commerce web app. WordPress – software to create web pages (websites, blogs, and apps). WordPress Plugin Directory – the official WordPress repository for plugins. Xero – online accounting software. *Disclosure: Some of the links on this page may be affiliate links. I may earn a commission if you purchase through these links. These commissions help to cover the cost of producing the podcast. I am affiliated only with companies I know and trust to deliver what you need. In most cases, affiliate links are to products and services I currently use or have used in the past. I would not recommend these resources if I did not sincerely believe that they would help you. I value you as a visitor/customer far more than any small commission I might earn from recommending a product or service. I recommend many more resources with which I am not affiliated than affiliated. In most cases where there is an affiliation, I will note it, but affiliations come and go, and the notes may not keep up.
Au programme Pour ce quinzième épisode du #VFTPodcast, nous avons eu la chance, l’honneur et le privilège d’échanger avec Boone B. Gorges. Boone est un américain qui parle très bien notre langue comme vous pourrez le constater. Il est à la fois freelance, Core Committer sur le Projet WordPress, Lead Developer du projet BuddyPress et […]
MailPoet Newsletters es un plugin para crear campañas de marketing online, boletines de noticias, respuestas automáticas… sin necesidad de salir del panel de administración de WordPress. En esta ponencia de WordPress Day Marbella 2015, Rocío Valdivia explica paso a paso todas sus funcionalidades así como las novedades que incorporará la nueva versión de MailPoet 3 que integrará el primer servicio de envío de mailing 100% integrado con WordPress. Rocío Valdivia (https://twitter.com/rociovaldi) desarrolladora de WordPress, especializada en BuddyPress, actualmente trabaja en el servicio de soporte premium de MailPoet. Co-autora del libro "WordPress para dummies". Moderadora de los foros en español de wordpress.org y validadora de las traducciones de WordPress y BudddyPress. Esta ponencia ha sido grabada por HangoutON. Si deseas ver el vídeo está disponible aquí https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxVxuXj1Ryo
Matt Report - A WordPress podcast for digital business owners
Since the early days of BuddyPress plugin, David Bisset has focused his freelance developement business around integrating it into his highly customized client projects. He has been able to add value to his client projects by suggesting the addition of a social layer using BuddyPress during the early stage of development. Considering the additional specifications of BuddyPress in the early planning stage of a web project is important since it is more difficult to add later. David Bisset is well-known in the WordPress community for the time and energy he has dedicated as one of the founding organizers of WordCamp Miami. WordCamp Miami celebrated it’s 5th anniversary in May of 2014. In 2013 and 2014 David included a BuddyCamp component in the WordCamp Miami program to create more conversations and learning about using BuddyPress. In addition to organizing WordCamp Miami, David Bisset is an advocate for getting out to participate and organize local WordPress meetups and create working connections between WordPress professionals. The connections made at WordPress gatherings can be a source of new business for developers. (more…)
Matt Report - A WordPress podcast for digital business owners
Since the early days of BuddyPress plugin, David Bisset has focused his freelance developement business around integrating it into his highly customized client projects. He has been able to add value to his client projects by suggesting the addition of a social layer using BuddyPress during the early stage of development. Considering the additional specifications of BuddyPress in the early planning stage of a web project is important since it is more difficult to add later. David Bisset is well-known in the WordPress community for the time and energy he has dedicated as one of the founding organizers of WordCamp Miami. WordCamp Miami celebrated it's 5th anniversary in May of 2014. In 2013 and 2014 David included a BuddyCamp component in the WordCamp Miami program to create more conversations and learning about using BuddyPress. In addition to organizing WordCamp Miami, David Bisset is an advocate for getting out to participate and organize local WordPress meetups and create working connections between WordPress professionals. The connections made at WordPress gatherings can be a source of new business for developers. Listening options Itunes:subscribe to MattReport Stitcher:subscribe to MattReport Viewing What was discussed during the conversation between Matt and David Bisset (Times correspond to video) 1:20 Tell us about David Bisset. 3:20 What sparked the initial idea to start a WordCamp in Miami? How did starting WordCamp impact your career? 5:30 Why doesn't the rest of the world know about WordCamps? 8:20 Should WordCamp advertising and marketing budgets be increased? 11:45 Why did you focus your freelance business on BuddyPress? BuddyPress picked me. 15:15 How did you implement BuddyPress on a car parts website? 17:00 How do you introduce the social layer in BuddyPress into the project? 20:30 What should freelancers know if they will be working on a project that will include BuddyPress or a social component? 25:00 Do you have a minimum project price level? 27:15 What advice do you have for a freelancer that is struggling to find the right clients? Resources WordCamp Miami 2015 BuddyPress DavidBisset.com @DimensionMedia ★ Support this podcast ★
Hoy hablaremos de BuddyPress, que nos puede servir tanto para crear una red social, como para crear nuestra propia intranet. Veámos como.
Introduction Nous vous proposons un nouveau rendez-vous WordPress : le #vft podcast! Régulièrement nous partagerons avec vous des discussions autour de tout ce qui touche à WordPress, de près ou de loin. Nous y aborderons les dernières news, des trucs ou astuces ou encore des opinions et nous profiterons de l’expérience d’un invité de marque pour enrichir […]
In Episode #23, I had the pleasure of speaking with Paul Gibbs from BuddyPress and WordPress VIP. Stay tuned to learn the systems that Paul has in place to make sure he doesn't accidentally break WordPress along with how he deals with the Imposter Syndrome. The post Episode #23 – Paul Gibbs from BuddyPress and WordPress VIP appeared first on WP Elevation.
In this episode of our podcast David Bisset was kind enough to join me to discuss his upcoming event WordCamp Miami, BuddyPress, and other noteworthy WordPress news of the week. David even gets greedy and offers up somewhere around 3 or 4 WordPress picks for the week. Honestly, I lost count. You can follow David […] You just finished reading WPCandy Podcast 36: Sticker Furniture with David Bisset on WPCandy. Please consider leaving a comment! The post WPCandy Podcast 36: Sticker Furniture with David Bisset appeared first on WPCandy.
Horst JENS, Johnny ZWENG und Harald PICHLER plaudern über freie Software und andere Nerd-Themen. Mehr Information, Links, Bilder, Videos, Tags, Transkripte, extra-soundfiles etc. gibt es in den Shownotes: http://goo.gl/TE5Ju (bzw. http://biertaucher.at ). Bitte nach Möglichkeit diesen Flattr-Link anlicken: http://flattr.com/thing/1090645/Biertaucher-Podcast-Folge-085
With this episode of WP Late Night we crossed twenty episode threshold. Wait, does that mean we have to keep doing these now? In this episode we discussed WordCamp San Francisco a good deal, updates to BuddyPress, and the announcements regarding the WordPress Community Summit. You just finished reading WP Late Night #20: "Speaking in cursive" on WPCandy. Please consider leaving a comment! The post WP Late Night #20: “Speaking in cursive” appeared first on WPCandy.
Believe it or not, I have never — ever — properly interview John James Jacoby, also know as JJJ or J-trip. John is the lead developer on the BuddyPress and bbPress projects, and has been working for Automattic since November 2010. In this interview we talk about the futures of both BuddyPress and bbPress, or “the bbs”, […] You just finished reading Community Interview with John James Jacoby on BuddyPress, bbPress, and social on WPCandy. Please consider leaving a comment! The post Community Interview with John James Jacoby on BuddyPress, bbPress, and social appeared first on WPCandy.
In this episode Mark and Shawn discuss our their experiences with Wordpress and the BuddyPress set of extensions.
Wordpress Core Developer Mark Jaquith, BuddyPress developer John Jacoby and head of User Experience Jane Wells preview the eminent launch of WordPress 3.0, including how it has been catered for SEOs, its security modifications, and more.
Wordpress Core Developer Mark Jaquith, BuddyPress developer John Jacoby and head of User Experience Jane Wells preview the eminent launch of WordPress 3.0, including how it has been catered for SEOs, its security modifications, and more.
Wordpress Core Developer Mark Jaquith, BuddyPress developer John Jacoby and head of User Experience Jane Wells preview the eminent launch of WordPress 3.0, including how it has been catered for SEOs, its security modifications, and more.
Part 2: Alensa eCommerce Tools and Strategies for the Independent Pharmacy Business o (Alensa Interview) Alex Savic / Alensa AGOerlikoner str. 78057 ZürichSwitzerlandTel. +41 44 363 13 14Fax. +41 44 362 33 57Mob. +41 79 358 3685Skype ID : sashsavicTwitter : @alensaBlog : http://blog.alensa.com o http://www.alensa.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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