Podcasts about delicious brains

# Contributing Through WordPress Training & EducationIt's the WP Minute! Let's talk about contributing through WordPress training, education and content! Coming right up! Something that's been on my mind as I loosely plot out my YouTube world domination: Contributing to WordPress through content.I recently interviewed Mark Szymanski [Home](https://markjosephszymanski.com/) for an upcoming WP Minute+ episode, where we explored the opportunities to contribute back to WordPress for “newcomers” like him. Does it always have to be with code? WordCamps? Chatting in GitHub issues? Or can it be through content like this, where we support and encourage the use of WordPress through the content we're creating. There's a host of ways to go about creating content that achieves this: - Blogging- YouTube- Podcasting- Newsletters- SocialOr a grab bag of it all, like we do here. I know I'm bias, but I do feel like if you're consistently creating content, even if it's for a narrow part of the WordPress space, you're doing your part to help WordPress thrive — and that's one of our goals, isn't it? So the message today is quite simple: If you're looking for ways to give back to WordPress, maybe start blogging again. If you want to educate users on new ways of design, development, or simply “how to WordPress” then YouTube could be for you. If you have strong opinions about a topic near and dear to you — start that newsletter. Want to attract a younger audience to WordPress, hop on TikTok, Lord knows I can't. You will be amazed with how much you learn about end users touching WordPress for their very first time. Dare I say even a bit more compassionate about a stance you otherwise hold more rigidly. So, what content will you create? Hit reply and let me know or chat with me on Twitter/X!## Don't miss this WordPress contentNow it's time for some important links I don't want you to miss!- Security updates are available for Delicious Brains products. Check that out if you're running any of their plugins. [Security Releases Regarding the Use of unserialize() in Delicious Brains Plugins](https://deliciousbrains.com/security-releases-unserialize/)- WordPress industry veterans Tom Willmot and Joost de Valk discuss funding WordPress projects. https://dothewoo.io/funding-wordpress-projects-with-tom-willmot-and-joost-de-valk/- WP Tavern might be serving up the goods again. [It's alive!](https://wptavern.com/its-alive)- The WordPress foundation has published their 2023 report. https://wordpressfoundation.org/2023-annual-report/- Michelle Frechette interviews Matt Mullenweg [Special Episode with Matt Mullenweg](https://stellarwp.com/podcast/special-episode-with-matt-mullenweg/)- WP Fusion has a fantastic 2023 business recap https://wpfusion.com/news/2023-in-review/- Don't miss this interview: Lessons Learned After a 37% Drop in WooCommerce Dev Busiesss [Lessons Learned After 37% Drop in WooCommerce Dev Business](https://thewpminute.com/lessons-learned-after-37-drop-in-woocommerce-dev-business/) ★ Support this podcast ★

This week, it is time to put your questions to a panel of excellent experts in one of our Q&A shows! We are going to be investigating if truth serum really exists, what would happen if the Earth stopped rotating, and just how much nutrition is there in the human brain? Plus, we have a science quiz based on today in history and going back to school. See how you fare against our experts... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Para cerrar el tema de las compras/ventas/adquisiciones dentro de WordPress quiero compartirte mi sentir con relación a la compra que hizo WP Engine a Delicious Brains

Para cerrar el tema de las compras/ventas/adquisiciones dentro de WordPress quiero compartirte mi sentir con relación a la compra que hizo WP Engine a Delicious Brains

Síguenos en: ¡Buenos días! Hoy no vamos a entretenernos hablando sobre nuestra semana porque Nahuai ha estado en Oporto para la WordCamp Europe y tiene muuuuucho que contar.... Contenido Nahuai 6 nuevos tutorial en Código Genesis, de los cuales destaca: Crear y actualizar un campo personalizado usando la API REST de WordPress Tema de la semana: Oporto y el venue (Super Block Arena - Pavellón Rosa Motta) ESPECTACULARES Contributor Day800 contribuidores (record)Mesa de revisión de temas desiertaMucho pasilleoOrientación de voluntarios. Segunda experiencia en WordCamp Europe, primera como speaker assistant.Día 1 - El presente de WordPressCharla de Maja Benke - Accesibilidad para dislexiaCharla de Alain Schlesser - Nos estamos cargando la webTaller de crear tema de bloques con Daisy OlsenCharla de Greg Ziolkowski - Repaso a todo lo que se puede crear con bloquesMesa redonda sobre aquisicionesDía 2 - El futuro de WordPressCharla de Vicent Sanchis - Contraste de color en accesibilidadCharla de Piccia Neri - Diseño para convertirCharla de Pablo Postigo (cofundador de Frontity) -  El futuro de WordPress desde el punto de vista de frontendFilosofando con Ari StathopoulosPreguntas a Matt Mullenweg y Josepha Haden ChomphosyPregunta de Nora sobre sostenibilidad web -> Creación de un canal de Slack dedicado (+80 miembros)CenasSocial (voluntarios, organizadores...) ubicación espectacularFiesta WP Engine al lado del ríoAfterparty - Lo que pasa en la afterparty se queda en la afterpartyAnécdota -> Foto de Celi con Matt Mullenweg Algunos números: 2746 tickets vendidos2304 asistentes70 ponentes91 organizadores164 voluntarios Novedades WP Engine adquieres los plugins de Delicious Brains. Elementor adquiere el hosting Strattic. Nelio Software se convierte en un partner tecnológico de WordPress VIP.

Síguenos en: ¡Buenos días! Hoy no vamos a entretenernos hablando sobre nuestra semana porque Nahuai ha estado en Oporto para la WordCamp Europe y tiene muuuuucho que contar.... Contenido Nahuai 6 nuevos tutorial en Código Genesis, de los cuales destaca: Crear y actualizar un campo personalizado usando la API REST de WordPress Tema de la semana: Oporto y el venue (Super Block Arena - Pavellón Rosa Motta) ESPECTACULARES Contributor Day800 contribuidores (record)Mesa de revisión de temas desiertaMucho pasilleoOrientación de voluntarios. Segunda experiencia en WordCamp Europe, primera como speaker assistant.Día 1 - El presente de WordPressCharla de Maja Benke - Accesibilidad para dislexiaCharla de Alain Schlesser - Nos estamos cargando la webTaller de crear tema de bloques con Daisy OlsenCharla de Greg Ziolkowski - Repaso a todo lo que se puede crear con bloquesMesa redonda sobre aquisicionesDía 2 - El futuro de WordPressCharla de Vicent Sanchis - Contraste de color en accesibilidadCharla de Piccia Neri - Diseño para convertirCharla de Pablo Postigo (cofundador de Frontity) -  El futuro de WordPress desde el punto de vista de frontendFilosofando con Ari StathopoulosPreguntas a Matt Mullenweg y Josepha Haden ChomphosyPregunta de Nora sobre sostenibilidad web -> Creación de un canal de Slack dedicado (+80 miembros)CenasSocial (voluntarios, organizadores...) ubicación espectacularFiesta WP Engine al lado del ríoAfterparty - Lo que pasa en la afterparty se queda en la afterpartyAnécdota -> Foto de Celi con Matt Mullenweg Algunos números: 2746 tickets vendidos2304 asistentes70 ponentes91 organizadores164 voluntarios Novedades WP Engine adquieres los plugins de Delicious Brains. Elementor adquiere el hosting Strattic. Nelio Software se convierte en un partner tecnológico de WordPress VIP.

The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 30th May 2022.

The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 30th May 2022.

News Big acquisition news happened last week when Delicious Brains, owned by Brad Touesnard, sold five of its plugins to WPEngine. You may use one or all of these plugins starting with Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), WP Migrate, WP Offload Media, WP Offload SES, and Better Search Replace. Some of the product teams will be moving to WPEngine and the other support teams and developers will continue as usual as issues are escalated to them. Listen to Brad's interview with Matt Medeiros right here on the WPMinute. Other ecommerce News DTC Patterns, an ongoing Barrel research project has compiled over 100 articles where their teams buy real products from brands many of us are familiar with. They highlight interesting and effective ecommerce user experiences and marketing interactions. These observations are called “patterns” where over 100+ articles were written showcasing various ways brands engage with customers before, during, and after the purchase process. Events WordCamp EU is over and it looks like many in the WordPress community had a great time getting together in person and talking about all the new things arriving in WordPress 6.0, Gutenberg and the future of WordPress. It was announced that WordCamp EU will be in Athens, Greece. The WPMinute's writer, Eric Karkovac wrote about the feelings of WordCamps and David Bisset shares his takeaways from WordCamp EU. I donated $100 to A Big Orange Heart for 20 selfies taken with Matt Cromwell out in Porto. He matched the $100 along with Michelle Frechette's WPCoffee Talk and StellarWP. I challenge you to match a $100 donation too! If you are using a Pagebuilder with WordPress this is a heads up that the Pagebuilder Summit is right around the corner June 20 - 24 2022. Registration is open for this event. From Our Contributors and Producers John Locke shared this Podcast episode from MasterWP about Capitalizing the “P” in WordPress. Nyasha Green and Rob Howard discuss this article about why the capital P in WordPress is such a big deal and why this one letter influences how some people think about it when hiring developers.  Speaking of hiring developers, Rachel Cherry is looking to fill a 20/hr a week developer position at Cornell University College of Business. Check out the Tweet for more detail. Community Segments this week by: WP Security Minute by Chris Wiegman Learn WP minute by Hauwa Abashiya New Members We would like to welcome Austin Ginder as a Producer and Brian Coords to the WPMinute Community. Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today: Joe CasabonaJohn Locke

If you haven't heard, Brad Touesnard has sold his suite of Delicious Brains plugins to WP Engine. In this interview, I ask him the following question: 1. The million-dollar question: Why sell a suite of WordPress popular, profitable and beloved plugins -- of which was ACF which you only acquired merely a year ago? 2. The multi-million-dollar question: How much did WPE acquire the set of software for? 3. Who approached who first and how long did the deal take? 4. What made this deal, aside from the buy-out #, feel so much different than other deals you've done in the past? 5. Is part of the DB team going to WPE? What does a restructure look like if any is happening? 6. SpinupWP becomes the main focus, until you sell _that_ to WPE in the future, does this sale help extend the runway or will you seek more traditional funding routes? 7. Dive into the business builders mind: What kind of clarity or relief (if any) does this give you? 8. Do you think you'll ever transition to a proper WP host with standard support protocols and hosting fees? (Don't lie there's big money there) 9. Any regrets so far? 10. Any parting words of advice, promos -- the platform is yours. 

News WordPress turned 19 this year on May 27th. Sarah Gooding over at WPTavern wrote an article covering the beginning when Matt Mullenweg partnered with Mike Little and released the first version of WordPress based on the b2/cafelog software. The highlight of this year's anniversary celebration was on the wp19.day website which has video blogs from people all over the WordPress community about how WordPress has changed their lives and how much the community has played a part in its growth. Is WordPress getting more difficult? Lesley Sim has many responses over on her Twitter thread. It is weird that many responses do not include WooCommerce - which has a lot of catching up to do. Jetpack announced that it's breaking up…it's modules, anyway. You can now install the most popular Jetpack modules like Backup, Protect, Boost, Social, Search, and CRM. WooCommerce The first release candidate for WooCommerce 6.6 is now available and currently on track for the planned release date of June 14, 2022. If you would like to check out the changes and test the latest go ahead and download the release from wordpress.org. Events WordCamp EU officially starts this week, June 2 - 4. There are many informal updates occurring on Twitter right now. The WPMinute is donating $5 for every selfie with Matt Cromwell (up to $100) with @learnwithmattc. You can share on this thread at #WCEU to @aBigOrangeHeart. From Our Contributors and Producers Last week the WPMinute reported that the new WordPress Starter plan is available for just $5/month on WordPress.com. This interview with a few questions to Dave Martin, CEO of Automattic, covered the refactoring and pricing of the new WordPress.com. Go check out the interview and provide your feedback on Twitter. If you've been using InstaWP to launch sandbox WordPress websites, things are about to heat up for that platform led by Vikas Singhal. In an exclusive interview with WPMinute producer, Daniel Schutzsmith and Vikas shares how he landed a seed funding round from Automattic and how he plans on using the funding for his company.  Are you looking for a WordPress database management plugin or maybe a way to just see what's in your database?  Delicious Brains launched the SQL buddy plugin and it is available in the repository. If you are currently using phpMyAdmin and looking for a lightweight plugin, it may be worth checking out this plugin for database management. Oxygen 4.0 was released with many fundamental changes to the builder. The shortcodes are now converted to json. You can check out the latest update on their YouTube video. Joost de Valk shared this Tweet about a potential new search engine from Apple. @Scobleizer says Apple will introduce a new search engine at WWDC. Joost noticed that there has been increased crawling with applebot over the last few months and it will be interest

News WordPress 6.0 Beta 3 is now available for testing. These releases are moving along and testers are needed for the most recent release. If you would like to check out the release schedule you can go over to make.wordpress.org. It was just announced that Matt Mullenweg will be speaking at WordCamp Europe in Porto, Portugal June 2-4 2022. If you plan on attending this event you may want to listen to a podcast from Delicious Brains that gives some great ideas on how to make the most of your WordCamp visit. WooCommerce WooCommerce has released 6.5 RC2. This puts them on track for the May 10, 2022 release date. Testers are needed for this release as well. From Our Contributors and Producers Sarah Gooding over at WPTavern writes about how the WordPress subreddit blew up this week with reports of MemberPress locking users out of the plugin's admin if they do not renew their subscriptions. MemberPress is a popular membership plugin for WordPress that does not have a free version available. They do clearly outline the subscription policy but cutting off access to the plugin's admin screens leaves users without the ability to manage the membership functions of their sites once their subscriptions lapse. It will be interesting to see if this “change” impacts their customer base. David Vongries tweeted that he is looking for a new home for Kirki. If you are looking to venture into the Gutenberg product market this may be a great opportunity for you. Reach out to David if you're interested. Amber Hinds also tweeted about two plugins that need to be rehomed. They have become a distraction from the main focus on accessibility. Go check out the thread on Twitter and reach out to Amber if you're interested in her plugins. MasterWP has announced their WordCamp US 2022 Travel Sponsorship Program. Rob Howard explains how to apply. Go check out his blog post to apply to be a speaker to WordCamp US and possibly receive sponsorship. If you would like to contribute to helping send somebody to WordCamp you can head on over to DonateWC. Chima Mmeje was interviewed over on the Matt Report about how and why to raise your freelance rates. Go listen to this interview to discover how entrepreneurs can raise rates through grit, perseverance, confidence, and ultimately discovering self-worth. Next up: Block Editor Dev Minute by Aurooba Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today: Daniel SchutzsmithEric Karkovack

In the News The release of WordPress 5.9 is coming this month. There are many performance enhancements that will be part of this release. In addition to editor and front-end performance enhancements, lazy loading images changed, resulting in a 30% faster page load - in some cases. Go over to make.wordpress.org to check out the numbers. Sarah Gooding, over at the WPTavern covers the new API in Gutenberg that will be released with WordPress 5.9. This new API will allow you to lock individual blocks and override template locking which had been the only way to lock blocks. Events As WordPress 5.9 comes out at the end of January, there is a Mega Meetup to provide information that WordPress professionals should know about. You can sign up for the meetup which will be held Thursday, January 20, 2022. Look for some great exploration of Blocks and what to expect around design changes.  WooCommerce Updates Heads up. Starting with version WooCommerce 6.5 (scheduled for release in May) WooCommerce will require PHP 7.2 or newer to work. PHP is rapidly changing and it was determined that PHP 7.2 was the version that still had a significant number of WooCommerce active installs running. If you have an older version of PHP running it will still work, but you will not be able to continue to update this plugin. You also risk the usual performance and security issues by running older versions. From Our Contributors and Producers There are several more 2021 “year in reviews” from the WordPress community.  Brad Touesnard from Delicious Brains shares a nice post about how the company's growth has tripled and how the team is growing.  He also covers the ACF (Advanced Custom Fields) acquisition along with other updates. The article is worth a few minutes of your time to read. WPCloudDeploy shares the blogpost of how they had 10 versions of their product released in one year. They rolled out more than 50 new and improved features last year. This is a pretty impressive post representing a lot of work from that company.  There is also an update from Rich Tabor. He announced that WP Experts has acquired his Login Designer plugin. Did you know that NFT marketplace aggregator Flip, co-founded by UpOnly podcast host Brian Krogsgard (yes the guy from Post Status), has raised $6.5 million in a seed funding round? What is Flip you ask? Flip aggregates NFT marketplaces under one roof on its platform, allowing users to easily navigate through available NFTs to buy.  Ever wonder why competing with Google search is next to impossible? Well, a new search engine needs an index of the web. And many sites don't welcome any web crawler that isn't Google or Bing. This article from Fast Company covers the challenges of competing with search that crawls sites with automated software. Brave, which is a privacy-focused web browser, had seen continued growth in 2021 with 50 million users. The Brave browser does not track your searches or share any identifying data with third-party companies. If you would like to break free from the big companies, you can give them a try. WordPress News is hard to turn into a real business. This week over on the Matt Report Rae Morey shares how she built The Repository newsletter with her background as a journalist. Two Great Segments: The Learn Minute with Hauwa Abashiya Transcript Happy New Year. It's Hauwa Abashiya here from the Make training team here with your Learn WordPress minute. If you're not familiar with Learn WordPress, it is a learning resource on .org for anyone who wants to learn how to use, build for and contribute to WordPress. The Make training team wrangles all the content on Learn and we use the Sprint methodology to determine what we are working on and our timeframe for delivery. This month we are focused on creating content for 5.9 and need your help. We have identified a number of existing lesson plans and workshops that need to be revised, as well as the new features coming to 5.9 that need a corresponding lesson plan and workshop. For the full list see our January 2022 Sprint post on .org, links provided in the show notes. If you're interested in helping create content, leave a comment on the post or drop us a message in the training team Slack channel. We also have some great workshop videos that you can follow. As a reminder, workshops are practical on-demand videos that show viewers what they can do with WordPress. Lesson plans are guides for facilitators to use while presenting at events or within educational environments. Visit make.wordpress.org/training for more information and check out learn.wordpress.org The WooMinute with Bob Dunn Transcript Hey, it's BobWP from Do the Woo, here's your 1-minute of WooCommerce The innovation we see happening with WordPress will reflect directly on WooCommerce. When I asked Matt Mullenweg at the State of the Word to give me some Woo, he said "in 2022, the thing I'm most excited about is embracing Gutenberg and the block interfaces for everything with Woo. Woo still has some ways of doing things which are more tied to the Classic Editor, or shortcodes, or other ways of creating pages. There are some plugins and experiments around Gutenberg and blocks. And I think that I would love if Woo was one of the best plugins in the world for embracing how to use Gutenberg. Then back in September when we had WooCommerce CEO Paul Maiorana on the podcast, he added his insights, "because as we're able to see things like full site editing coming around the corner for WordPress itself, and as we are able to take some of the lessons learned from that and apply them to WooCommerce as a whole, we're going to be able to utilize the lessons learned in just the FSE experience in general, for making that experience great for store owners earlier." So I can safely say, hang on to your hats with Woo in 2022 as I'm sure we are going to see some very cool things playing out. And you can find these conversations and moreover on DotheWoo.io. Thanks for listening. Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:  Birgit Pauli-HaackLiam DempseyNigel Bahadur ★ Support this podcast ★

This week's WordPress news for the week commencing Monday 29th November 2021

I often find myself wondering how many people expect jeans to last a lifetime. There's no disclaimer on jeans saying you need to buy more...but it's understood that every year we need to continue to pay for the privilege of wearing pants in public. In today's episode, I ask why it's so hard for people in the WordPress space to think the same thing of software. See, Delicious Brains caused quite an incident when they asked their lifetime subscriptions to consider switching to annual to continue supporting development. Then a certain YouTuber found this to be so offensive that he had to fuel the fire...a missed opportunity in helping WordPress users see what good value to dollar ratios look like. Well, I'm not going to miss that opportunity. Show Notes WordPress 5.9 Revised Release Date Confirmed for January 25, 2022 State of the Word 2021 Will Be Broadcast Live from New York City on December 14 ACF Solicits Lifetime License Holders for Contributions, Urging Them to Purchase Annual Subscriptions On Buying Jeans and App Subscriptions - Joe Casabona Why Not Wanting to Pay for Software is Holding Your Business Back – How I Built It WordPress, the multi-billion dollar software industry that has us begging for money - The WP Minute Sitewide Sales: WordPress Sale Design and Reporting Tool Create Consistent Content, Make Money, and Get Sales | Creator Crew A Podcast to Help You Leverage Tech - How I Built It

This episode is brought to you by Mindsize. If you’re looking for monthly WooCommerce support, look no further than Mindsize.com 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. In the News There was a lot of excitement this week around LTDs (LifeTime Licensing Deals). There were several posted reactions to the email sent from Delicious Brains, the new owners of Advanced Custom Fields. The email was not well-received (to say the least) by some users that have had Lifetime Licensing because it was asking for a part-time donation for the product. Twitter exploded with reactions and many in the WordPress community responded as well. We covered this on the WPMinute and Sarah Gooding also wrote about both perspectives — positive and negative — in her article over on the WPTavern. The bottom line is that the lifetime licenses are tough, and very few still remain in the WordPress space. ACF (read: Brad) will continue to honor the pricing for legacy customers. With the recent delay of WordPress 5.9 the team is looking for testers for Beta 1. Angela Jin posted the link for the helpful testing guide. Feel free to participate and let them know how you “broke” it. Testing is very important for a successful release. A JSON Schema for theme.json and one for block.json are now available to help with building block-based themes. The schema can be used by code editors to provide things like tooltips, autocomplete, and validation while editing theme.json or block.json. The WP Live Streams Directory pick of the week “Building Modern WordPress Plugins With Plugin Machine (Part 2)*” presented by Josh Pollock, formerly of WPCaldera, on December 7th at 11pm UTC / 6pm EST / 3pm PST. In Part 1 of his talk, Josh laid the foundation of the mess that modern tooling has become for plugin development. In Part 2, Josh will show us a demo of Plugin Machine, a new app he’s building that helps developers create plugins and add features to them easily. You can catch this by registering for the Pittsburgh WordPress Developers and Designers meetup. Other News From Our Contributors Shopify Engineering announced that they had their biggest Black Friday Cyber Monday ever in 2021. They were proud of the uptime and traffic across the infrastructure along with their partner Google Cloud. Liam Dempsey shared this post by Andy Stitt thanking WordPress for helping him find Digital Accessibility. This is a great article of how WordPress helped Andy advance and allow him to concentrate on accessibility now. Giving Tuesday And now, I'd like to introduce you to Mary Job, who's leading the

In the News WordPress.org was in the news again. This time there was a lot of confusion about WordPress rejecting plugin submissions with the WP prefix. They said this was to address potential trademark abuse. As you can imagine, this sparked some interesting debate (read: controversy) on Twitter and Slack channels. This information ended up being misinterpreted as WPSteward reported, but it generated responses across the entire Community in record time. People legitimately freaked out because of how the information from WordPress.org has been handled in the past. We all have kind of felt this. There has been a track record for this type of communication and folks generally feel as though they are not being heard. Sarah Gooding over at WPTavern and Jeff Chandler over at WPMainline went into further detail about how this was “making mountains over molehills”. Go check their articles out for different perspectives on this news flash. This is also time for a joke. Like what happens when two train conductors walk into bar…ok. Gutenberg keeps chugging right along with the roadmap to WordPress 5.9 and Gutenberg 11.3. Birgit Pauli-Haack and Grzegorz Ziolkowski discuss the preliminary roadmap on the 50th episode of the Gutenberg Times Changelog podcast. Congratulations on number 50! As more and more of us are being asked to pay attention to the changes in the Block Editor in Gutenberg, go check out what Iian Poulson writes. He sees the negative talk turning into more optimism. There is a great long post for developers over at Delicious Brains to review. Getting back to business Immerseus founder Jack Kitterhing tweeted that Immerseus had been acquired in full. His eight-month-old company generated $100k in sales from apparently a single Facebook group marketing channel…and he has a day job…and like 5 other products. I think I should have him on the Matt Report to give us the map to this gold mine… Events WordPress meets education at WPCampus online September 21 and 22nd. Although the conference is advertised for Web Accessibility, go and check out the schedule. There are many panel discussions and general lectures that can help you in your agency. The second annual WPMRR (WP Monthy Recurring Revenue) Virtual Summit will run online-only this year from September 21 – 23. Joe Howard is hosting the event alongside guest host Brian Richards, the organizer behind WordSesh and WooSesh. Justin Tadlock covers all the details over on WPTavern. From the Grabbag Are you seeing yourself leaning towards unhealthy habits in 2021? David Bisset and Cory Miller talk about developer overload on the latest podcast of

In this episode of the Delicious Brain Waves podcast, Brad and Iain chat about the recent Delicious Brains acquisition of Advanced Custom Fields. Taking a deep dive into the process, they cover everything about the acquisition, from the first discussions with Advanced Custom Fields creator Elliot Condon, how Brad evaluated the product to determine a value, financing options, performing due diligence, when and how to get lawyers involved, all the way up to the final closing and handover. If you’re looking at buying or selling a WordPress product business, this episode is an interesting look into the nitty-gritty details of the process, what to look out for, and things to avoid. Show Notes: The official announcement Advanced Custom Fields Iain on Twitter Brad on Twitter Open positions at Delicious Brains Let us know your thoughts on Twitter

In this episode of the Delicious Brain Waves podcast, Brad and Iain chat about the recent Delicious Brains acquisition of Advanced Custom Fields. Taking a deep dive into the process, they cover everything about the acquisition, from the first discussions with Advanced Custom Fields creator Elliot Condon, how Brad evaluated the product to determine a value, financing options, performing due diligence, when and how to get lawyers involved, all the way up to the final closing and handover. If you’re looking at buying or selling a WordPress product business, this episode is an interesting look into the nitty-gritty details of the process, what to look out for, and things to avoid. Show Notes: The official announcement Advanced Custom Fields Iain on Twitter Brad on Twitter Open positions at Delicious Brains Let us know your thoughts on Twitter

Raising eyebrows in the WordPress community — especially among developers — Delicious Brains announced they have acquired Advanced Custom Fields (ACF). Elliot Condon is the creator and has been the sole developer for ACF for about a decade. While Elliot will be involved in the transition, he will not stay with the Delicious Brains team in the long term, according to his blog post.In this episode of Post Status Draft, Cory Miller talks with Brad Touesnard of Delicious Brains following the announcement that his company has acquired the Advanced Custom Fields plugin from Elliot Condon.

Today is an interview with Brad Touesnard, founder of Delicious Brains, talking about his recent acquisition of Advanced Custom Fields. A series of questions I’ve provided him, where he’s recorded answers to via audio. I hope you enjoy today’s episode and learn more about one of WordPress’ most historic acquisitions. Check the transcript at the bottom of the post and please share this episode out on your social media channels! Transcription [00:00:01] It’s the WP minute. This episode is brought to you by easy support videos, support your WordPress users by placing videos right in the WordPress admin. Get it@easysupportvideos.com.[00:00:12]Today is an interview with Brad two Nard, founder of Delicious Brains, and talking about his recent acquisition of advanced custom fields, a series of questions he’s recorded answers to via audio. Let’s dive right in.[00:00:24]Can you give us a sense of how you vetted a product company like ACF? What was attractive besides the obvious..[00:00:29] Revenue, especially recurring revenue, definitely looked at that right away. I looked at the customer base and what their expectations were.[00:00:40]there is obviously more to it with due diligence, . In terms of verifying all those numbers and making sure everything was accurate , and legit, but the accountants and lawyers handled most of that anyway and just provided reports.[00:00:57]ACF’s pretty simple company Elliott set up a really kind of simple thing for 10 years by himself. There weren’t a lot of moving parts , to really vet , in this deal, in terms of what was attractive, obviously…[00:01:10]ACF isa great product that has a passionate and large community of users and customers. The thing that particularly appealed to me is that the customers are the same as our customers.[00:01:24]I think the thing that was the most attractive, it was like, this is a way for us to really kind of step into more mainstream WordPress world, I think. And that seems to be, I’m definitely feeling that over the last few days as the, after the announcement , was made, the, it was really, it’s almost overwhelming how much noise has been kicked up on Twitter especially around lifetime licenses.[00:01:53]How do you weigh this decision amongst the existing product lineup at Delicious Brains?[00:01:58] I’m confident that we can hire folks and handle ACF and scale up what we’ve been doing all these years with our existing products. And, we’ve added, within the last few years we’ve doubled our products.[00:02:11]this is just an extension of where we’ve been already going. It makes complete sense. It’s kind of a supercharging, right? If we were adding two new products over the next, three years, that’s a lot different than adding, a massive product, overnight. it is a big jolt to the business.[00:02:30]Can you hint at the size of the deal?[00:02:32] Nope. Moving on[00:02:34]Will pricing and existing licenses be honored for customers.[00:02:38] Yes. We made that very clear in the announcement posts that we won’t be changing pricing anytime soon.[00:02:46] And if we do

It’s been an action-packed couple of weeks in the WordPress space! Just this week, 2 more acquisitions were announced. One from Delicious Brains, and one from Liquid Web. We’ll get into all the news, as well as answer the big question: what do all of these acquisitions mean for the WordPress ecosystem? (more…)

Los creadores de SpinupWP: Delicious Brains han sacado la chequera y han comprado ACF ¿Qué podemos aprender de esta compra/venta?

Los creadores de SpinupWP: Delicious Brains han sacado la chequera y han comprado ACF ¿Qué podemos aprender de esta compra/venta?

In a surprise tweet overnight (at least here in the US timezone), somewhere in Australia Elliot Condon announced the acquisition of his iconic WordPress plugin, Advanced Custom Fields by the Delicious Brains software company. WordPress News: ⁦@dliciousbrains⁩ acquires ⁦@wp_acf⁩ | 10 Years of ACF – A truly wonderful time https://t.co/ytgpkcQ0l8— The WP Minute (@TheWPMinute) June 2, 2021 Delicious Brains of course famous for WP DB Migrate Pro and DIY WordPress hosting, SpinupWP. I have reached out to both Brad Touesnard, founder of DB and Elliot for comment, I hope to have those replies back to publish a blog post soon. Rob Howard, CEO of Howard Development & Consulting announced the acquisition of the Understrap theme framework, ironically in a Medium post. Reportedly a $50,000 investment. It's the first time I've heard of Understrap: “The UnderStrap package allows you to quickly and easily build search engine optimized websites with WordPress.” “I anticipate one of our first steps will be the addition of a Bootstrap 5 version (which has already been started as an offshoot project), since that's been one of the most important roadmap items for a while now.” Not to be outdone on acquisitions, Chris Lema tweets that LiquidWeb has acquired Iconic, makers of a suite of WooCommerce plugins. Ok, this one is one of the ones I've been waiting for. I'm so thrilled to welcome @iconicwp to the @liquidweb / @stellarwp family.https://t.co/04Lmjw9oe8— Chris Lema (@chrislema) June 2, 2021 “With Liquid Web backing us up, we'll have more fuel to add to our fire. Our existing team is sticking around and so is our customer-focused ethos. “ WordPress tur

A Focus On Mental Health And Long-Term StabilityIn this episode of Post Status Excerpt, Cory Miller and David Bisset discuss the recently announced acquisition of Advanced Custom Fields plugin by Delicious Brains Inc. After having time to absorb community feedback and listen to a pre-recorded interview with those involved, David and Cory share why this move is a win for the WordPress community in the long run.Also covered in this episode: For freelancers and solopreneurs with projects and products that grow close to an unmanageable size: where do you draw the line between owning your product and handing the reins of your creation to someone else? (Controlling your destiny is great, on the one hand, but having full responsibility and the stress that comes with it is tough to sustain, on the other hand.)Every week Post Status Excerpt will brief you on important WordPress news — in about 15 minutes or less! Learn what's new in WordPress in a flash. ⚡Browse our archives, and don’t forget to subscribe via iTunes, Google Podcasts, YouTube, Stitcher, Simplecast, or RSS.

A few months ago we heard from Amber Hinds about the importance of accessibility and how her WordPress plugin can help you create more accessible content. She also said that you need a human being to catch most accessibility issues – that’s where Bet Hannon comes in. Bet tells us all about what to look for when auditing your website, and how to execute a sampling audit. We also talk about a TON of tools. In Build Something More, listeners get a pre-and post-show. The pre-show is all about beer. The post-show is about database queries. (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 219 of How I Built It, the podcast that offers actionable tech tips for small business owners. That’s a relatively new tagline I’m trying. It used to be “the podcast that asks, ‘how did you build that?'” But we’re expanding beyond that and I’m really excited about that. First, before we get into it, I want to thank our sponsors: TextExpander, Restrict Content Pro, and The Events Calendar. You’ll be hearing about them later in the show. But first, I want to bring on Bet Hannon. Bet Hannon is the CEO of Bet Hannon Business Websites. We are going to be talking about their website accessibility sampling audit. In an earlier episode, I spoke to Amber Hinds about accessibility in general, their tool, the Accessibility Checker. Now we’re going to learn how an agency actually goes about doing an audit and helping their clients not get sued and have a more accessible website. So Bet, how are you today? Bet Hannon: I’m great. Glad to be here. Joe Casabona: Thanks for coming on the show. For those of you who are not Build Something Club members, bet and I had a fantastic pre-show conversation about craft beer. So if you are interested in that, you should become a Build Something Club member over at buildsomething.club. But for now, Bet, before we get into the nitty-gritty, why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do. Bet Hannon: Great. So I run an agency that’s focused on WordPress. I got involved with WordPress in about 2008 after I had worked for 15 or so years in nonprofit management and doing some techie geeky things for the organizations that I served. But my position got downsized in that financial crisis and kind of stumbled into starting to do a little freelancing and then develop that into an agency. And have been loving it. I love problem-solving for people. Every project is like a little puzzle to solve. Joe Casabona: Yes, absolutely. That is what I also enjoyed about. When I was doing the full-time freelance website making thing, that was always my favorite part. I wrote a plugin recently, the first one in a while and I was like, “Man, I miss this.” So I’ll have to make it a habit of coding regularly. You lose it too. I guess it’s kind of like riding a bike. But men, things change. Bet Hannon: I know. I’m missing more. I’m doing more. I’m doing less and less of that myself, you know, as I’m running the agency. But it is nice to get in. What I miss is diving in and doing Gravity Forms customization. Joe Casabona: Nice, nice. Well, not nice that you miss it, but nice that you would do it. I always liked customizing Gravity Forms. So you got into WordPress in 2008. So this is your second recession, we’ll say. As we record this, there’s still a global pandemic. Bet Hannon: We actually have been doing okay. I was kind of worried for a bit. You know, a lot of folks really just figuring out they need websites or they need to revamp their websites, or they need to repurpose their websites. So we’ve been doing okay. Joe Casabona: That’s great. That’s interesting. I had a conversation with Brad Morrison back in May 2020 about that very thing. Like we were both kind of making websites in 2008, 2009. And I feel like whenever there is a recession, people realize they need to pivot or improve their online presence. I mean, especially true with this current one because…yeah. Bet Hannon: Right, right. Figuring out how to get information out there about when they’re going to be open or how they’re going to do curbside pickup or all of that stuff. I am kind of notoriously bad for giving unsolicited feedback about websites. So when I go to the local restaurant and I’ve looked up their thing, and I go, “Hey, your colors here are not accessible and this is terrible on mobile.” Joe Casabona: Man, I would do the same thing, where I’m like, “This should really be like that.” However, the PDF doesn’t download or whatever. Your website not…” Bet Hannon: Last week I went to the dentist. I paid the dentist bill from a couple months ago, but there’s no way to pay it online. I had to call and give them and do it over the phone. So when I went in, I said, “You should really not be taking those numbers over the phone. It’s easy to make a payment form. Call me.” Joe Casabona: Yeah, exactly. “Let me know.” I’m always incensed when you can’t pay for something online or whatever. So you have a WordPress agency now. Would you say that your main focus is accessibility or it’s just something you bake into every website? Bet Hannon: Well, it’s something we bake into every website. We got started with accessibility almost four years ago now. We had a client where we were doing administrative maintenance on their site and they are… they’re still our client. They were our a big agricultural Water District in California. And because of the way they’re connected to the state of California, they became aware that they were going to have some accessibility requirements. And they asked about what needed to happen. We said, “Oh, we could refer you to somebody.” And they said, “Well, we want to work with you. Let’s all learn this together.” Joe Casabona: Wow. Bet Hannon: So we dived in, and our entire team got trained and learned a lot about accessibility and worked through a lot of that with the client and just really got hooked. When you start diving into what makes the site accessible, but also the power of making the website available to more people and usable by more people and seeing how it really can impact people’s lives, whether they have a permanent disability or a temporary disability even, you know, to be able to use the sites. And so we just really got excited about that. Some of the best advice I got as an agency owner was never ever put accessibility in a proposal as something to be refused. That you should never put yourself in a position of allowing the client to throw people with disabilities under the bus in terms of bringing down the cost. That for me it’s staking our reputation as an agency on… everything we do has accessibility baked in. And I truly believe that accessibility is going to be what mobile responsive used to be five or 10 years ago. In another five to 10 years, everybody will be doing accessible websites and it’ll just be what every self-respecting developer does. So we’re just kind of on the early curve for that. Joe Casabona: I love that. When you said that it reminded me a lot of responsive web design. Because that was something that I felt I got in on early. I saw Ethan Marcotte talk about it super early. I put it in my proposal as like, “Do you want a responsive website?” And then I was like, “Why am I even asking? It’s just going to be part of it. It’ll be part of the cost. If they want to buy a cheap website from someone else, they can.” Bet Hannon: Yeah. And quite frankly, more often than not, when I talk to clients, and I say, “Look, this is part of what we do. We bake it into everyone. There are some legal requirements that you may or may not have. You need to do this,” and they’re like, “Oh, yeah, thanks. I hadn’t even thought about that yet.” So they’re usually grateful for having it or the topic being brought up. Joe Casabona: Absolutely. I mean, it’s our job right to advocate on behalf of our clients and inform them, right? When I go to a pizza shop, the pizza shop should expect that I know how to make the perfect pizza. I shouldn’t expect that they know how to make a website. Right? Bet Hannon: Well, it’s kind of what we do as freelancers and agencies. The client comes to us and they may say, “I want this one inch of website.” And we start looking at their… our job is to kind of take a consultative approach and to say, “If you added this on, this would really impact your business in a positive way. You can really grow your business by adding this thing on,” or “tell me about how you do the sales process. Oh, we can help automate that for you.” You know, so that you’re taking more of a consultative approach to helping people understand what they might need that they don’t yet know that they need. 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: So you mentioned that your team got trained. What was that like? Is there a certification process for accessibility? Bet Hannon: Mm hmm. Joe Casabona: All right. I was going to add a second part of that question, but your face lit up. So go for it. How was it like? Bet Hannon: There are. They’re both. There’s some online journey. There’s a ton of training that you can do out there. So if you’re just starting out and you’re wanting to learn more about website accessibility, some free options for doing that are going to WordPress TV. And there have been a bunch of presentations at various WordCamps on some of the technical pieces for accessibility. I’ll just be the first to confess that I’m not the lead developer at our agency. So some of those kind of technical pieces are not where I would necessarily be helpful to people. But there are tons of presentations from WordCamps to start getting going. There are some LinkedIn Learning pieces. Joe Dolson, who’s an accessibility advocate within WordPress has a great LinkedIn Learning course on Accessibility and WordPress. Very helpful. And then we had our folks do Deque, D-E-Q-U-E, deque.com, they do services around accessibility, but they also have some learning pieces. You can buy basically a membership for a year to do their self-paced online learning pieces. So we have everybody in our group do their base level, which is just awareness about disabilities, and what different accommodations are. So just kind of educating our team about what those are. And then our lead developer has been doing more advanced pieces in preparation for taking a certification exam. So there’s the International Association of Accessibility Professionals. They actually have some certification pieces. Those are several levels, in fact. Those are kind of where our folks are going. So as you may or may not have guessed, one of the ways that you might you would test a website for accessibility might be to use yourself a screen reader. So screen readers are what people who have visual impairments might want to use, and it reads out loud things that are on the web page. We’ve done that, and our developers done that for a long time. But we became aware like, I don’t know, maybe like six months ago, sort of like, well, you can use these tools, but are you using them like a visually impaired user would use them? So I did a little networking and found the consultant and agency, that is the Oregon Federation for the Blind refers people to. So if I experienced blindness and I needed to get training, my state would send me to this guy to learn how to use a screen reader. And we sent her to do training with him, our lead developer. And that was amazing because we had known for sure, but sure enough, people who are blind or visually impaired use screen readers differently than maybe we had anticipated. And so that then helps us be better at testing what we’re doing and how we’re building things out. Joe Casabona: Wow, that’s really interesting. I’ll mention one more resource that I read. Because there’s a chapter in my book on accessibility. But I read “Accessibility for Everyone.” It’s a book by Sarah… Oh, my gosh. Her last name is escaping me right now. I’m very sorry, Sarah. Oh, no, it’s not even Sarah. It’s Laura Kalbag. Laura Kalbag. That’s right. Sorry. But the book is fantastic. I will link that and everything that Bet just mentioned in the show notes over at howibuilt.it/219. Your mention of using a screen reader is very interesting because for my book, there’s a video component where I tried using one in order to show my readers how to use it to test. And honestly, it’s just I had never used one before. So I don’t think it was the most effective demo. But that leads me to ask another question, which is there must be resources in general for testing accessibility with a target audience. Right? So for example, I have transcripts for this podcast. I suspect that there’s a way for those who… Forgive me, I don’t know that I… The proper terminology is escaping me but people who are deaf or have hearing impairments. Is that the right way to put it? Bet Hannon: Mm hmm, hard of hearing. Joe Casabona: Okay. Someone got upset with me for saying hard of hearing Bet Hannon: Well, all kinds of groups, there are a variety of takes on things. Hard of Hearing is what I do see often. Joe Casabona: Okay, cool. That’s what I thought too. Okay, cool. But in any case, I guess, are there resources for you to test accessibility features with those who are most likely to use them? Bet Hannon: Do you mean doing testing with disabled users? Joe Casabona: Yes. Bet Hannon: The actual disabled users? Joe Casabona: Yes, yes. Bet Hannon: Well, people with disabilities often are chronically underemployed, and so if you have a way that you want to do a lot of testing, you could certainly do some networking to find people who could help you with testing. I think you should never ever ask a disabled person to test for you without getting compensated. Joe Casabona: Of course. Bet Hannon: I mean, think that’s just rude. We have several folks that test for us and consult with us when we have questions. Sometimes you’re testing a site and it’s just really hard to get a sense for… you know, if you tagged into this in a certain way, it might get you into a trap that you couldn’t get out of. You know, what are the clues? And so, just kind of having people do some testing for us. So we have a few people that do that for us. Joe Casabona: Got you. Bet Hannon: But resources for finding those people, I don’t… I mean, that’s going to vary quite widely. Joe Casabona: Got you. But there are resources available if you do some networking, like you said, and ask around. Bet Hannon: Yeah. You know, I would ask around. I mean, there’s some state agencies in your state, probably. You could network around about where do they send people when they need training? And then those people who are doing training on those things may often do some consulting like that on the side. Joe Casabona: Awesome. That makes perfect sense. This has already been super informative. Now, you have a website accessibility sampling audit. In a previous episode, I think I mentioned this earlier, with Amber Hinds, we kind of talked about like the WCAG ratings and things like that, which is sort of an automated thing, right? You go to a website, you get a rating. If it’s double, great. If it’s triple, even better. But we still need a person auditing your website, right? Bet Hannon: Yeah, yeah. Right. There are a variety of tools that are out there, automated tools there where you can test your site. And wave.webaim.org is the one that Amber was probably talking about. That’s one of the best known. Lighthouse is another one. It’s a Chrome extension that you can put in in the specter tools and you can look at there. They’re great. Those automated tools are really good and important to us because they can help save you a lot of time. The important thing to remember about them is that they only catch about 30% of the accessibility issues. And you may get some false positives and false negatives. And you’ll always need humankind of… you’ll need to look at things with a human eye. Those testing tools are never going to be enough to say that you’re fully accessible. So, for instance, an AI tool can tell you “yes or no, there’s an alt tag for this image.” Yes is good, No is bad. But if the alt tag is the name of the file, jpg49678, that’s not compliant. So it can give you the false negative that you had all the alt tags are taken care of when they’re not really. So you want to make sure that you’re using those tools as they’re intended, to do some basic screening, but at the same time that you’re really looking at things. Even the tools that Amber and her team have put together are great but they really require you to engage. And that’s the thing with accessibility. There is really no just put a plugin on or just pay to make it go away. You really have to learn what’s accessible and what’s not and implement it regularly. Accessibility has some parts for WordPress, and that’s what we deal with almost always. For WordPress, some parts of accessibility are in the theme. So whether your menu is accessible or not is largely controlled by your theme, for example. Your color contrast of your buttons and your color contrast is set by your theme. But a huge piece of accessibility is your content. So when you’re putting in content, are you making sure that the images have alt tags? Are you making sure that the H tags and the headings are nested without skipping any levels? So a lot of that content piece is stuff that people are just going to have to learn and learn to implement correctly as they go. Joe Casabona: That’s a really important point. I think Amber made the same point, right? Because Accessibility Checker… I don’t know if you’ve used it. Bet Hannon: Oh, yeah. Joe Casabona: She gave me a pro version. That was an inaudible “oh, yeah.” But the education part is really important. When I look at my blog posts and I see the kind of score I get, it’s like, “Hey, you have two h2 tags in a row here and you skipped an h2 tag or whatever it is.” Because I always forget if the… maybe this is a question you can answer for me. The site title is an h1 in most themes, which means your blog post… Bet Hannon: No, the page title is the h1. Joe Casabona: The page title is the h1. Okay. Bet Hannon: Yeah, yeah. Joe Casabona: So if I’m looking at a blog post… gosh, I should know this, but I don’t right now. If you’re looking at a blog post, should the title of the blog post be an h1 or an h2? Bet Hannon: Well, the title of the post or the page will be the h1. And that should be taken care of in the theme. The theme should handle that for you. And then when you start putting in H tags for kind of organizing your content, you should start with h2s. And you can go you can skip from an h2 to an h2. You just can’t go from an h2 an h4. Joe Casabona: Right. Bet Hannon: I think people often don’t quite understand or get that you shouldn’t use the H tags to style font. Right? Joe Casabona: Right. Bet Hannon: An H4 four can have as big a font as the h3 or the whatever. But you’re kind of organizing the content. I sometimes say it’s like when you were in high school English, and you had to do that outline with the Roman numerals and the capitals and then the lowercase Roman numerals and lowercase letters, and you have to kind of build it out in that way. My team doesn’t like that because “who learns to do that in English class anymore?” is what they tell me. Then I feel old. Joe Casabona: Really? Hold on. We can talk about this in Build Something More because it’s a sidetrack. People don’t learn how to do that in English class anymore? I’m outraged. Bet Hannon: Ohhh, yes. Well, you graduated before No Child Left Behind really diminished education. Joe Casabona: Oh, gosh. Bet Hannon: My wife is a college professor and sometimes what people have not learned in high school is quite astounding. Joe Casabona: Ah, that saddens me. Bet Hannon: Yeah, it is. My team sometimes talks about it as nesting file folders. That’s a different example that you can talk about. Like the whole drawer is the h1 and then you can have h2s and then nested folders. But you have to make sure that you don’t skip any. Joe Casabona: That’s interesting. I’m going to bet like most of my blog posts are inaccessible because I guess it was just always like a mental block for me. I thought the site title was h1, the page titles h2. So I always started in on h3. Bet Hannon: Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. Joe Casabona: I better go back and fix all those. I reckon that there’s like… Bet Hannon: A few at a time. And that’s the thing. When people realize that they’ve been doing something incorrectly… I mean, know better, do better. That’s the thing. When you know better you can do better. And so when you realize that you may have not done that correctly over time, it can seem insurmountable. I mean, it just seems like this overwhelming task, I mean, if you have hundreds or thousands of posts to deal with. So the key is start and do a little at a time. Just make a goal to do two of them a week or three a week. It doesn’t take very long once you figure out what you’ve done. And then just kind of make your way through them. There are some tools for doing that. There’s a couple of really great alt tag checker tools. So there’s a free one in the repository—and now I’m going to forget its name, but we can put it in the show notes—that basically when you install the plugin, it’ll show you all the images in your media library and just show you which ones are missing alt tags. Joe Casabona: Oh, great. Bet Hannon: But then you still need to go back and fix them. And then there’s a paid tool, and it costs like $200 a year. I don’t remember the name of it, either, we’ll get into the show notes… Sorry, guys. I know it’s two, guys. Well, one is written by my friend Andrew Wilder and his team, but the other one I don’t even know. But anyway, the paid tool is really nice because it pulls in all existing alt tags. It will use AI to try and generate an alt tag based on what’s there. You have you still have to go in and kind of like say, “Oh, that’s not quite right. Let me actually fill this out.” But it gives you that help, that start. And then when you fix it there using that plugin, it fixes it on every post that’s used that image. So if you have a lot of images, it’s probably worth getting that paid tools. Joe Casabona: Yeah, for sure. For 200 bucks saving you hours of work. That’s really interesting. Because as we’re talking about this, I thought I could probably make a plugin that loops through the content of all of my posts and just bump up the heading. I’d still need to check. Bet Hannon: Yeah. If you knew it, you could do that, I suppose. Joe Casabona: I’d have to make sure it doesn’t go above h2. So I’d have to say, “Is this an h3 change to an h2, or whatever.” It would have to be smarter than just looping. Bet Hannon: If you knew you were consistently making the error, right? Joe Casabona: Yes. For me personally, I’m confident I consistently make that error. You know why I’m confident? I write in Ulysses, which is a fantastic writing app. It’s markdown, and it exports directly to WordPress. And I always start with an h2 for the document title, and it bothers me, and then I do h3 for all subsequent headings. So I know for a fact. Bet Hannon: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you start fixing it, you could do that. You might be able to do that. I got into doing more database query stuff a couple of years ago. We had a really large site with a ton of stuff, and very active site. We were going to be doing a new theme for them. And there’s always that problem where you have the active site where there’s WooCommerce, or an active blog, or whatever, and then like, you’ve got to pull that back together. So I was experimenting with a plugin that purportedly was going to merge in the changes from the production site. And in the testing, it looked all great. But during the time we had it in development, it got stuck in some kind of a loop with Gravity Forms entries. And I had 15 million, with an M, additional extraneous entries. I just had to start learning how to write queries to get stuff out because it was so huge. I couldn’t even get it to load. Joe Casabona: Jeez. That’s horrifying. Bet Hannon: It was crazy. Joe Casabona: There was a plugin a few years back that I guess was not viable market wise. It was bought by Delicious Brains. Bet Hannon: By the time I was looking at this, they’d already pulled that off. Joe Casabona: Oh, man. Bet Hannon: This was another one. But it’s a difficult problem. It’s not an easy problem to solve. Anyway, I learned how to do a little bit of SQL. Joe Casabona: Very nice, very nice. We can talk about that in Build Something More because I have some fun stories. Sponsor: This episode is brought to you by TextExpander. In our fast-paced world, things change constantly, and errors in messaging often have significant consequences. With TextExpander, you can save time by converting any text you type into keyboard shortcut called a snippet. Say goodbye to repetitive text entry, spelling and message errors, and trying to remember the right thing to say. When you use TextExpander, you can say the right thing in just a few keystrokes. TextExpander lets you make new approved messaging available to every team member instantly with just a few keystrokes, ensuring your team remains consistent, current, and accurate. TextExpander can also be used in any platform, any app and anywhere you type. So take back your time and increase your productivity. But that’s not all it does. With its advanced snippets, you can create fill-ins, pop-up fields, and more. You can even use JavaScript or AppleScript. 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: We haven’t even talked about the service yet, the website accessibility sampling audit. Tell us how that works, how you put it together, why you put it together, all that fun stuff. Bet Hannon: So you might want an accessibility audit of your site to help you know what things are wrong. Like you have been doing some of these things to try and fix things, but there may be still things that you are not sure are problems yet. And it is difficult with accessibility to know… It’s kind of like SEO—knowing where you’re kind of moving toward. It’s a moving target or that’s kind of fuzzy sometimes. So getting an audit is a great thing to do. Traditionally, an accessibility audit would look at every single page in detail and give you a detailed report of every single page of your website. And as you might imagine, that’s a labor-intensive thing because that’s a lot of work. So even if you have a moderate-sized site, it could run you into tens of thousands of dollars. And so what we discovered is that, by and large, if you have problems on with accessibility on your site, you can catch a lot of those with a sample of your content. So we developed an audit that was taking a sample of your content, and then you as the site owner can get this report. And then you have to extrapolate from there. If on your site audit we note that you have images without alt tags, you probably have a lot more than those then on the pages we looked at. So we try to work with folks to do around 25 URLs or so. Even sites that are really big blogs with thousands of posts, you really don’t need more than about three or four posts to do that. Unless you have a blog with a variety of authors. So we try to tell people, you know, try to get all of your page templates represented, try and get a good kind of representative sample of content through time. So like maybe if you start changing and doing better with your H tags now… but we’re only looking at those, we might not pick up that you still have that problem earlier. Joe Casabona: Got you. Bet Hannon: So we want to look at content creation through time. We want to get a variety of the authors on the blog. So maybe one person is continuing to do this one thing that is creating accessibility issues. Look at various features. If you’re doing a WooCommerce site or some other eCommerce site, you know, you want to look at the checkout process, you want to look at its membership site, looking at the process for doing that, and just try to work with them to come up with around 25 URLs to look at in terms of doing that. Joe Casabona: That’s right. And then we produce a big report. Often the reports are more than 15 pages. We actually give them a list of everything we looked for whether or not they violated it so they know what we checked for. We use those automated tools, but then we have human beings checking the page. And then if we run into something where we’re not sure about, we’ll call in our consultants and have people with actual disabilities looking at the content as well. And then we do include an hour of consultation time at the end. So then you can jump into a Zoom call, we can explain it to you, we can demo problems for you, show you why it’s a problem. Some people find that really helpful. If you want, you can bring your… we don’t need to do the remediation. But if you have a regular developer you work with, you can bring them on the call and we can make it more of a technical call about how they might need to fix that or what they might want to do to fix a problem. Joe Casabona: That’s great. That sounds a lot like when Gutenberg first rolled out I created a course, and I basically said like, “How to audit your website to see if it’s ready for Gutenberg.” Very similar. Page templates. I said just like, “Pick a sampling of old and new posts.” But content through time is a very nice, snappy way to put it. I know exactly what you’re saying and I think that’s great. Authors, various features, things like that. And then the one-hour consultation at the end. Patrick Garman came on the show a few weeks ago. They have in a WooCommerce performance site audit, also includes some consultation time. This was not a planned question or anything like that, but do you think that the audit has been a good addition to your business? Do you think it’s helped your business a lot? Because it seems like it’s an idea that’s catching on more, at least in the WordPress space. Bet Hannon: It is. I do think we have to be careful about taking on too many. It takes about two weeks start to finish and we only onboard one a week just because it represents a pretty good chunk of labor for us. And keeping up with our other projects is kind of priority in terms of paying the bills. But it is a good thing. Because most of an accessibility audit is done from the front end, we’re able to do audits on sites that are not WordPress. We can do a Shopify site or a Wix or Weebly site. But those folks don’t tend to want to do those kind of things. But you can do it on any kind of other platforms that someone might want to do. I think people are increasingly concerned. I’m seeing that more niche-driven. So for a bit, we had a ton of audits for food bloggers. So a pretty well-known food blogger got sued around accessibility, and it just raised that awareness for everybody that they… On the one hand, a good number of them are like, “I don’t want to get sued.” But what they also do know that it’s an important thing to do. They can increase their audience, it gives more people access to their content. So they definitely aren’t just anxious about being sued. And I want to be careful about not throwing around the fear-monger kind of thing. Joe Casabona: Right. Right. Bet Hannon: I mean, it is about not getting sued at one level, but it’s also that there are a lot of really great reasons to make your site accessible. Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve said this on the show before. People ask me how I grew my show so quickly, and I think one of the big growth points in the show’s history is when I added transcripts. I saw a definite increase in traffic to the site and even an increase in listenership. Sometimes it’s not just the deaf and hard of hearing who want to read the transcript. It’s people who maybe can’t listen at that moment and or maybe they want to read along while they listen. Bet Hannon: I have seen statistics go by that say that 80% of the videos on LinkedIn are played without sound. Joe Casabona: Wow. Bet Hannon: 80%. It’s very high. It’s pretty high like that for Facebook, too. I think about that, well, one of the times when I’m surfing LinkedIn is in the early morning when I don’t want to wake somebody up, or when I’m in a waiting room somewhere, pre-COVID, or where I just can’t listen. But I sure watch videos go by and yeah, the captions. Joe Casabona: For sure. I mean, that’s super interesting. 80%. That’s wild. For me, it’s usually maybe I listened or watched something and I remember a phrase and I want to find that phrase. So even for those who do listen or watch with the sound on, the transcript or the captions, the searchable text is invaluable to a lot of people. Bet Hannon: Well, you’re getting the search engine juice from that too. Joe Casabona: Yeah, exactly. Bet Hannon: Right? Joe Casabona: Yeah. Bet Hannon: When you think about captions, you have to think about whether it is… if it’s a video, often you’re doing captions because the video is conveying something of the conversation or the interaction as well. But for a podcast, doing the transcript… Well, I often do listen to podcasts at time and a half or, you know, I bump it up. If you got a transcript for me to read, it’s much faster. I can read a lot faster than I can listen. Joe Casabona: Yeah, yeah, for sure. Awesome. Bet Hannon: So it’s not just situations where I might be time pressed and I just want to skim through stuff. 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. With the Virtual Events add on you can quickly and easily manage your online-only or hybrid events. With deep Zoom integration, custom virtual event coding for search engine optimization, and the ability to embed video feeds directly on your website, the Events Calendar makes putting virtual and hybrid events together easier. And I can’t stress this one enough. Let me tell you, I have tried to roll my own webinar software, my own live stream event software, and it is difficult. And I have 20 years’ experience making websites. The Events Calendar is the tool that you need to make virtual events a lot easier. You can even sell tickets and only show the stream to ticket holders. If you run events, whether in-person or online, you need the Events Calendar. Head on over to howibuilt.it/events to learn more. That’s howibuilt.it/events to start running your events more efficiently today. Thanks so much to the Events Calendar for supporting the show. And now let’s get back to it. Joe Casabona: I know some well-known, big time podcasters who have kind of poo pooed transcripts because they don’t feel the added cost is worth it. And I’m just like, “First of all, you’re making more money than I am podcasting.” Even if you don’t use… Rev is expensive. My virtual assistant transcribes the videos I sent her so I know that she understands the task at hand, and she transcribed a 30-minute video in like three hours. Worth it. Worth it to pay her that. It’s cheaper than Rev. Bet Hannon: And there’s some other services that are up and coming too. And I think we will see more and more of those. Joe Casabona: I’ve been using otter.ai. Any place that offers an educational discount, I’ll grab it. Bet Hannon: I just heard about Otter today in another… I was in a meeting this morning and somebody mentioned that one. Joe Casabona: How funny. Bet Hannon: I hadn’t heard about it. Joe Casabona: What’s that called? That’s called something. You hear about it once and you hear about it everywhere. Bet Hannon: Synchronicity Joe Casabona: Oh, man. Bet Hannon: Oh, no. Joe Casabona: There’s something effect. I’ll look it up for the post-show. But anyway, we could talk tools all day. I mean, I guess that’s helpful, right? It’s an accessibility show. But otter.ai and Descript both offer educational discount, so if you have a .edu address, you can get it at like half price. So I’ll just snag those. I’ve been pretty happy with Otter. There’s a few things, but it’s AI, transcription. Bet Hannon: Right. And I don’t know if it kind of produces a transcript, but I do know that I’ve been seeing going around that Zoom is giving… For Zoom, they’re giving free on the fly too closed captioning for meetings. Joe Casabona: Yes. Bet Hannon: But if that gets saved in a file, that would be checked out. Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. Bet Hannon: There’s a way to turn that on in your account. Even if it’s live transcription, stuff like that is often a little buggy. But at least you’ve got something to start with from there. Joe Casabona: Again, you can hire an editor to edit it or have your virtual assistant read through and just spellcheck. It’s probably easier for them. So yeah, absolutely. Gosh, this has been super great. As we wrap up, if somebody wants to get started, maybe they have a website, and they’re not sure if it’s accessible, what are some tips to get started? Bet Hannon: Well, the first would be don’t be tempted by what are called the overlay plugins. So it’s big business right now. Those overlay plugins have huge amounts of venture capital pouring in. So their ads are everywhere, and they want to suck you in with just “buy our service and everything will be taken care of.” And they don’t. So don’t get sucked in with that. And then just start educating yourself about what needs to be there. I’d say the very base kinds of pieces are the things that we’ve already talked about in this podcast. You know, your alt tags and you’re heading tags, and then just start trying to work your way through testing your site, getting your content squared away. But ask questions. There are tons of people out on Twitter and LinkedIn and other places that are, if you have a question, willing to look at that and give you some, you know, not free consulting, but point you in the direction of some resources. Joe Casabona: Awesome. That’s fantastic. And with alt tags—again, I think I brought this up on the show previously, but I do want to drive this point home—it should be as descriptive as reasonably possible. Is that kind of the way to put it? Bet Hannon: Right. Yeah. We have a blog post that should come out on our site in another couple of weeks about alt tags. We’re in process with it. But yeah, you want to make it descriptive of the image, but you never want to put in the word image or photo or graphic or anything like that, because the screen reader reads that out loud. The screen reader already tells someone that it’s an image. And so you would just say, you know, “Father and child playing on the beach on a sunny day.” You know. It shouldn’t be too horribly long but it should be… If it’s a photo of a person, it can say, “Photo of Joe Casabona, an incredibly good-looking Italian man.” Joe Casabona: Well, thank you. You’re making… Bet Hannon: You can embellish your own text. Joe Casabona: Yeah, there you go. People will probably picture like Fabio or something. Maybe Fabio is like old-timey reference and newer, good-looking Italian man. That’s interesting. So “father and daughter on beach on a sunny day” is good. But maybe like, father and daughter on beach sunny day with red pale and father’s wearing like green swim trunks. That’s too much. Bet Hannon: Too much detail. Too much detail. Right. Yeah. Well, the thing you don’t want to do is you don’t want to put anything in a meme-like image with text on the top. People do that a lot. They just go to Canva and they’ll make a little meme thing to promote an event or to promote whatever. The thing is, when you do that, you need to make sure that you’re providing alternatives for that. So you can do it but you just want to make sure that… For instance, we have clients where they’re doing a lot of events driven pieces. They might make that graphic, but then in the text of the post, they need to… so that the alt text on the graphic can say, “Graphic promoting this event, details in the post below.” And then the person can skip into the content and get the details. Joe Casabona: Yeah, details in the post below. That’s another thing that I think Amber mentioned. Go ahead. Bet Hannon: But the thing is, if you only put that little Canva image that’s kind of meme, like, Google can’t see that text either. So you’re not getting any search engine juice off of that. Joe Casabona: That’s really interesting. So you wouldn’t necessarily want to have that exact text in the alt tag if it’s also like the title of the post and mentioned in the post below. Is accurate that accurate? Bet Hannon: Right, right. It becomes repetitive. Joe Casabona: Okay. Cool, cool. Bet Hannon: And actually, people who are using screen readers, which the alt text is about people who are using screen readers, like the rest of us, they skim through content. When we all go to a website, we just skim through, and we’re looking at the headings, and we’re looking for what interests us. We’re not really reading every word. So people who are using screen readers are skimming through, and they’re skimming through to look at the headings, H tags, come back to play on the links. And you want to make sure your links are set up so that the link text, the part that gets underlined or made into a colorable or whatever that effect is, but that link text is descriptive because often they’re just skimming through the text and having the screen reader read out that text to them. So if all of your link texts say “click here,” “click here,” “click here,” there’s no context. They’re gone. Joe Casabona: Oh, jeez. Wow. All right. Lots of really good… Bet Hannon: So “click here to learn more about accessibility. Click here to do blah, blah, blah. Click here to download a blah, blah.” Joe Casabona: Yeah. Love that. Right. And then I guess the same with buttons. You don’t just want to say like, “Click here.” You want to say like, “Enroll today” is usually what I put. But maybe I put “enroll today in Podcast Liftoff” or whatever. Bet Hannon: Right. I mean, yes, potentially. And then you remembering that buttons are really just links. Joe Casabona: This will be the last question before we wrap up. We’ve been talking forever. Bet Hannon: [inaudible 00:51:51] Joe Casabona: I know. I know. It’s just such a great conversation. This is mostly for me, and I hope the listeners are getting something out of it. With anchor tags, you can add a title text, right? Bet Hannon: Mm hmm. Joe Casabona: What’s the utility of the title text? Can I say like, “Enroll in the clickable tags” and then have a title that has more context? Or is that kind of like frowned upon? Bet Hannon: Oh, you’re asking me more of a technical question now. I’m sure there’s an answer, but I don’t know. Joe Casabona: All right. I mean, that’s a good answer too because that means at least you weren’t presented with some hard opinion on it. I’ll find something… Bet Hannon: You gotta remember I’m very rarely any more in the content in that way. Joe Casabona: I’ll find the link for the show notes for that because that’s… Bet Hannon: Cool. Joe Casabona: Again, we didn’t talk about that. It just came to my brain and I wanted to ask. Bet Hannon: Yeah, for sure. Joe Casabona: Before we wrap up, you gave us some great tips, do you have any trade secrets for us? Bet Hannon: Oh, yeah. Just don’t get hooked into those overlay things. They are… I really try not to say this very often, but they’re really kind of evil. A, they purport to fix all your problems, but they can only deal with the 30% that’s AI. They kind of make it sound like you won’t get sued if you use them. But that’s not really the case. Actually, we’re seeing some cases where people are being targeted because they’re using them. And the predatory lawsuit people know that they can’t take care of everything. They’re hooking people in a way that just feels kind of manipulative and not very… just not a good heart behind that. Joe Casabona: It’s snake oil. Bet Hannon: It’s snake oil. It really is. And because it’s an overlay, so it’s fixing some of those accessibility problems on the fly as your page is loading, which is adds extra bloat, slows your site down, do those increasingly focusing on speed. So it’s not great for your search engine kind of results and all of that as well. And when you stopped paying for that service, all of those problems are still there. You haven’t fixed anything. You’re paying all that money to the service over time and nothing’s getting fixed. Joe Casabona: That’s really interesting. So these overlay products are not like, “Here’s what’s wrong.” It’s like, “Here’s what we’re telling you is wrong and we’re just going to add a little JavaScript to fix it or whatever.” Bet Hannon: It’s like, “We will try and fix the things we can fix.” So they’ll use AI to put in alt tags, which may or may not be correct. They’re just guessing at the alt tags. And then they put these little, they put some little tools over on the side. Well, if you are a person that has a tool, an accessibility tool that you use on the web, if you have a screen magnifier or you already use some kind of colorblind filter thing, you have tools that you already are familiar with that you have installed that you want to use. And so those little accessibility tools things, it’s kind of like, look at me, I’m trying to be accessible is what it comes down to. And for people with disabilities, it’s sort of like saying to them, “Hey, you should leave the tools that you like and all the shortcuts for to use my second rate thing that’s going to come…” Because those tools conflict them. They create a conflict. So you should leave the tools that you know, and like, and know all the shortcuts to and use my special tool over here that I paid minimal bucks for.” Joe Casabona: It’s almost like a virtual signal. Bet Hannon: It’s frustrating. It’s a virtue signal but it’s really… it’s like telling the person in the wheelchair, “You got steps in front of your restaurant, you need to go around and use the ramp and come to the kitchen.” Joe Casabona: Jeez. Bet Hannon: It’s really offensive. Joe Casabona: Absolutely. And it just goes to show you, right? Because… Bet Hannon: I get that people want to be concerned about accessibility, but take some time to think it through in. Joe Casabona: Yeah. I mean, be concerned and then find an actual solution and not some Band-Aid that you bought at the dollar store. Bet Hannon: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Those services are not cheap either. And that’s the thing. Over time, you’re paying a lot of money, but it’s not really getting fixed. It’s just a kind of a cover-up that’s going to go away when you stop paying. Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. It just goes to show you that the best way you can be accessible is to write good semantic HTML and know the best practices. That’s just… Bet Hannon: Yeah, exactly. Joe Casabona: Awesome. Bet Hannon: Know better and do better. Joe Casabona: Yeah, know better and do better. I love it. Bet, this has been such a great hour we’ve been talking for. We may talk about other stuff in Build Something More. So be sure to catch our pre-show where we talk about craft beer, our post-show where we talk a little bit more over a build something club. Bet, if people want to learn more about you, and they should, where can they go to find you? Bet Hannon: You can find me on Twitter @BetHannon, and then our website is bhmbizsites.com. Joe Casabona: Fantastic. I will link those and lots of stuff that we talked about. This is a tool-heavy episode. So it’s going to be long show notes over and howibuilt.it/219. Bet, thanks so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it. Bet Hannon: It’s been great. Thanks for having me. Joe Casabona: Thanks to everybody listening. I really appreciate it. Thanks to our sponsors, TextExpander, Restrict Content Pro, and the Events Calendar. 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 today’s episode, Joe and Christie talk with Brad Touesnard, Founder and CEO of Delicious Brains Inc and SpinupWP. As founder of Delicious Brains Inc, Brad has worn many hats. He now spends most of his time managing the product teams and growing the business. Before starting this company, Brad was a freelance web developer, specializing in front-end development.   Joe, Christie, and Brad discuss the challenges of finding good people when competition for remote job posting is high, what it’s like for entry level people in companies with limited resources, traditional and unconventional hiring process, and making dependable employees stay.   Tune in and learn about the best hiring practices in the open source environment.   Episode Resources Delicious Brains - “We make super awesome products for WordPress.” SpinupWP - Your Own Extremely Fast WordPress Server Brad is on Twitter Leave an iTunes review or binge watch past episodes Send questions to yo@wpmrr.com for the next Q&A pod Visit the WPMRR website Tweet Joe Tweet Christie   What to Listen For: 00:00 Intro 00:35 Let’s welcome Brad Touesnard of Delicious Brains Inc 02:24 Rebranding concepts for different company products 07:12 How's 2020 job hiring been for you? 10:12 Challenges competing with more remote companies in finding new hires 17:00 On people switching careers and learning new skill sets 22:55 Hiring entry level person with limited resources 25:16 Vetting candidates before going through a trial project 30:27 Finding the right people is super difficult 32:36 Keeping people for years 37:31 Promotion and position changes 40:22 Active recruitment won’t go away

Welcome to Delicious Brain Waves, the first ever podcast episode from Delicious Brains. This is the start of a semi-regular podcast where talk about all things development, coding, and WordPress. Brad Touesnard is the host and each week he chats to a member of the team. This week he talks to Pete Tasker, lead developer of WP Migrate, about rebuilding the WP Migrate UI in React, what he's learnt, and the challenges he's faced. Show Notes: Sam Selikoff on React How to Create Custom WordPress Editor Blocks in 2020

Welcome to Delicious Brain Waves, the first ever podcast episode from Delicious Brains. This is the start of a semi-regular podcast where talk about all things development, coding, and WordPress. Brad Touesnard is the host and each week he chats to a member of the team. This week he talks to Pete Tasker, lead developer of WP Migrate DB Pro, about rebuilding the WP Migrate DB Pro UI in React, what he's learnt, and the challenges he's faced. Show Notes: Sam Selikoff on React How to Create Custom WordPress Editor Blocks in 2020

We discuss creating mastermind retreats and building WordPress tools for developers with Brad Touesnard the founder and CEO at Delicious Brains in this LMScast hosted by Chris Badgett of LifterLMS. In addition to being the founder of Delicious Brains, Brad is the creator of a mastermind ski retreat called Big Snow Tiny Conf, and he shares how he built his mastermind program and how that has evolved. Many entrepreneurs working online are located in remote areas where there are not many local events happening related to tech, or even more specifically WordPress or web development. In many large cities there … Creating Mastermind Retreats and Building WordPress Tools for Developers with Brad Touesnard the Founder and CEO at Delicious Brains Read More » The post Creating Mastermind Retreats and Building WordPress Tools for Developers with Brad Touesnard the Founder and CEO at Delicious Brains appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

We kick off 2020 learning about Brad's products and how they play a major role in the WooCommerce space. Brad also shares his own experiences with WooCommerce, having run it on their site since the inception of Delicious Brains.

We kick off 2020 learning about Brad's products and how they play a major role in the WooCommerce space. Brad also shares his own experiences with WooCommerce, having run it on their site since the inception of Delicious Brains.

In this episode of Syntax, Scott and Wes talk with Brad Touesnard of Delicious Brains about migrating, deploying, and hosting WordPress. Netlify - Sponsor Netlify is the best way to deploy and host a front-end website. All the features developers need right out of the box: Global CDN, Continuous Deployment, one click HTTPS and more. Hit up netlify.com/syntax for more info. Hasura - Sponsor Hasura is an open-source GraphQL engine that helps you instantly setup a scalable and realtime GraphQL backend. Hasura makes your team super productive by dynamically composing a schema backed by databases and services that you can securely query from frontend clients. Get started at hasura.io to try it out in 30 seconds! Show Notes 3:50 - Why did start Delicious Brains? 5:25 - What plugins does Delicious Brains make? 11:40 - Migrating WordPress 16:50 - Migrating databases 24:20 - How do you do version control with WordPress? 37:06 - What’s the easiest way to deploy and host WordPress? 40:23 - What are some examples of managed WordPress hosts? 46:58 - What does your deployment process look like from beginning to end? 50:22 - Thoughts on headless WordPress 53:12 - Is serverless WordPress a thing? Links Delicious Brains WP Migrate DB Pro WP Offload Media WP Offload SES SpinupWP Heroku Now.sh WP Engine Flywheel Advanced Custom Fields Composer WP Packagist WordPress.org React Laravel Pagely Kinsta GoDaddy WordPress.com SiteFround Buddy Digital Ocean Laravel Forge npm Codeship Gatsby Laravel Vapor Installing via Composer WordPress deployment workflow Managing your WordPress site with Git and Composer ××× SIIIIICK ××× PIIIICKS ××× Brad: Teppanyaki Grill Scott: Succession and The Righteous Gemstones Wes: Magnatiles Shameless Plugs Brad: All Products Scott: Svelte For Beginners - Sign up for the year and save 25%! Wes: All Courses - Use the coupon code ‘Syntax’ for $10 off! Tweet us your tasty treats! Scott’s Instagram LevelUpTutorials Instagram Wes’ Instagram Wes’ Twitter Wes’ Facebook Scott’s Twitter Make sure to include @SyntaxFM in your tweets

This is a little bit different. Today we talk to Brad Touesnard from Delicious Brains about Spinup WP their new service which aims to make it trivially simple to get your WordPress website up and running on a cloud hosting provider - in fact just about anywhere. You login to their platform, fill out a few form fields and then go and grab a coffee. By the time that you're done your WordPress optimised server will be ready and just waiting to get WordPress installed on it. This all sounds so simple, but there is a very large amount of heavy lifting going on in the background, heavy lifting that you'd have to learn and do your self. If you've ever wanted to install WordPress on a cloud provider, then check this podcast out...

This is a little bit different. Today we talk to Brad Touesnard from Delicious Brains about Spinup WP their new service which aims to make it trivially simple to get your WordPress website up and running on a cloud hosting provider - in fact just about anywhere. You login to their platform, fill out a few form fields and then go and grab a coffee. By the time that you're done your WordPress optimised server will be ready and just waiting to get WordPress installed on it. This all sounds so simple, but there is a very large amount of heavy lifting going on in the background, heavy lifting that you'd have to learn and do your self. If you've ever wanted to install WordPress on a cloud provider, then check this podcast out...

Gilbert Pellegrom is a Scottish software engineer with an impressive resume working with the likes of WooCommerce, ThemeZilla, Dunked and now Delicious Brains. He is also a side-project heavyweight and the man behind the popular NivoSlider jQuery plugin used by thousands including Dell, AOL and eBay. Gilbert and I chat about nightmare NDA situations, the state of online privacy, Biffy Clyro and if all side-projects should be monetized.Links and transcription:https://onepagelove.com/podcast-007

Brad Touesnard founded Delicious Brains, makers of WP Migrate DB and SpinupWP. I love asking about failures of successful people, and Brad and I got into what he did before Migrate DB was a profitable enterprise. I first heard Brad's name from his product WP App Store, which tried to be a marketplace inside of a WordPress plugin. It failed for a number of reasons, including the fact that starting a marketplace is really hard. What I never knew before is that he took on investment money for the project, and when it failed he decided to pivot their investment into Delicious Brains. That meant that those investors in WP App Store now owned shares in Delicious Brains, and he eventually bought out all but one. Brad created WP Migrate DB because he had trouble migrating client sites while working at an agency. He was scratching his own itch, and he didn't really think much of it. The product gained lots of installs, and he eventually released a pro version. In the podcast we also talk about Mergebot, a product that his team worked on for 2 years and killed before launch due to insurmountable technical issues. I love Brad's philosophy of working on products he thinks are cool, and scratching his own itch. SpinupWP came out of this, and I think it will be a success. We discussed funded startups vs. lifestyle businesses, 32 hour work weeks, selling your company, and more. Enjoy!

This week we chat about how we go about working out what features to work on next for our side projects. I talk about the approach we take on a larger scale for our plugins and products at Delicious Brains, and about the challenges I face with my Instagram plugin reliant on Instagram’s API. This …

Brad Touesnard is a well known developer in the WordPress community, and CEO and Founder of Delicious Brains, a company that makes fantastic WordPress products. You might know them best from WP Migrate DB Pro, but they do lots more! Brad tells us all about their new product, SpinupWP, why they decided to solve this […] The post Brad Touesnard and SpinupWP appeared first on How I Built It.

Matt Medeiros continues Season 8 with the roundtable format asking the question is there change in the WordPress ecosystem?  John Turner and Phil Derksen are the special guests that share what significant changes they have made in their careers and what they see in the  WordPress ecosystem. Listen to this episode: Matt Report - A WordPress podcast for digital business owners Why exiting solopreneurship is the right move Play Episode Pause Episode Mute/Unmute Episode Rewind 10 Seconds 1x Fast Forward 30 seconds 00:00 / 00:47:53 Subscribe Share RSS Feed Share Link Embed Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 00:47:53 John Turner joined Awesome Motive through their customer accelerator portal to help his company grow. Syed Balkhi, Awesome Motive's owner,  suggested that John join the company as a partner since his product and strategy aligned with Awesome Motive. (3:10) Phil Derksen recently joined Sandhills Development LLC after running a one-man shop company called WP Simple Pay, which is a stripe payment and subscription program.  Sandhills Development, LLC  has a whole suite of products that was founded by Pippin Williamson. (4:20) What you will learn in this Episode: Startups in the WordPress economy were easy to start as a fully bootstrapped business. It can be a roller coaster ride of going solo and joining a company, then trying to go solo again. (6:48) John – Worked for 6 or 7 years and did not feel like he was continually growing. When the opportunity became available with Syed and Awesome Motive John decided to give it a try and take the growth to the next level. It was difficult where the uncertainty and change is concerned, but he is excited to be a part of the company.  (7:48) Phil – Phil had many happy customers with his product and support. Although he had a level of comfort with his company, he did not feel like he could release the features that customers were requesting. For example, EDD could offer many things that his product couldn't do. Phil had one product to focus on, but it was distracting to jump from being a developer, then marketing and support. It is exciting to work with a team and see the growth of the products. (11:11) Product Growth – Marketing or the Product Alone? Phil – Product features and planning for the future is critical. Then the focus needs to change to marketing to get the word out to the customers. (11:59) John– Marketing is the most important focus and the lesson to learn. You can have an awesome product, but you need to have the time and focus on marketing. (12:23) Matt – For people to scale their business they need to market their product successfully and make more money. It takes a lot of time and money to do marketing correctly.  (13:41) Marketing John – There is no magic bullet when it comes to marketing. When you find out what is working you need to concentrate on it. When your business is small, you don't have a lot of money to spend on marketing. You need to focus on one or two channels (like Facebook and Content Marketing) and focus on what is working for you. It could take awhile. (15:19) Phil – Phil has recently spent money and time on content marketing. Finding what works and knowing that changes over time are important. It is tough to get noticed with new plugins or themes on WordPress.org. Sandhills Development has a marketing team that reaches out and promotes products. (17:19) Matt – Some businesses try a blanket approach with marketing and cover too much. The person in the WordPress Community that is doing marketing well seems to be Brad Touesnard from Delicious Brains. His company does a great job with their brand and content marketing. Pagely is another company that does a great job with their quality and material. Phil: Chris Badgett at LifterLMS does a great job with content marketing and his podcast concentrating around learning systems. John: LifterLMS has very focused content with their brand and audience. The material has intent. Content Marketing Focus: Matt – Content Marketing is very expensive and very hard to do as a business owner. If you are preparing webinars and podcasts, it takes a lot of time when launching a podcast. It can be hard to produce quality content consistently. (19:54) John – To test the market in the WordPress space getting on WordPress.org is the best place to start and get some eyes on your product. It is essential to focus on the product name and reviews. You need to start somewhere and then figure out how to rank it. (21:03) Phil  – Some people go to the content route first without a free version of their product. Phil likes the podcast/YouTube style. Joe Howard has started the WPMRR Podcast and focuses on monthly revenue. When you find something that is working, you can double down on it.  While you are adjusting your approach, you should be concentrating on your email list. (22:09) John – Many niches are very competitive in the WordPress space. You need to build up the business and take baby steps slowly. It is not easy. (22:53) Matt – There are two sides to this. You can try to rank in WordPress. org. But as competition starts to grow, some new business owners find they start too late with the ideas for marketing. One great idea is to leverage customer stories with a podcast and repurpose the content.  (24:21) Forecasting the Future of WordPress: Matt – WordPress is becoming more competitive, and pricing in the marketing is still a challenge.  How is pricing changing in the WordPress space? (26:07) John – Many themes and plugins have gone to automatic subscription. Many customers are renewing without a discount in subsequent years (especially with hosting or SaaS products) (26:46) Phil – Larger companies can adapt to charge more because they have a reputation and support behind the product. The customer can count on them with staying power. (28:04) Matt – Prices in the space are tiered for support for products. Customers seem to value the product and as an end user, they see the value. (28:50) John  – Customers are buying the products and making money. There was a positive response from his customers with his joining a larger company. Phil – There were no complaints coming from customers when features were released and annual subscriptions were occurring. SaaS products seem to do this annually. Phil got a great response from his customers when he joined Sandhills Development. They were excited with the partnership and the solutions that can be offered. (30:32) Balancing User Requests and Feedback: John:  He would produce a yearly survey to stay on pace with his customers including the feedback that he received over the year. Every feature that you include will be a support burden down the line. (33:16) Phil – Sent out a survey as well as tracking support requests that looked like new features. Phil collected responses all year and weighed those requests with what it would take to develop and support. Phil was very cautious about adding features while trying to not take any feature away. (33:59) Monetization with Gutenberg and WordPress 5.0 John – Waiting to see what happens after the release. There seems to be a lot of opinions about what will happen with the newest release. (35:47) Phil – Is expecting support to be overwhelmed after the release. Documents and videos will help people with the release. WP Simple Pay will not be that impacted. The page builder and themes could be impacted but uncertain by how much and in what way. (36:36) Matt – There are a lot of folks jumping into the opportunity around Gutenberg with an opportunity to sell to customers. The release seems to be a way to create a SaaS around WordPress.org. With Jetpack enabled you will be able to remind the customer about what is coming and create upsells. (38:45) To Keep in Touch: John Turner: Hooked on Products Podcast Twitter – @johnturner seedprod.com Phil Derksen: Twitter – @philderksen Phil Derksen   Episode Resources: Awesome Motive MemberPress Formidable Forms Syed Balkhi Sandhills Development, LLC EDD Affiliate WP Restrict Content Pro Sugar Calendar Delicious Brains Pagely LifterLMS LMSCast WPMRR Jetpack To Stay in Touch: Watch the panel discussion on Matt's YouTube channel. To stay connected with the Matt Report, head on over to mattreport.com/subscribe. If you like the show, please leave a 5 Star review over on the Matt Report on iTunes. ★ Support this podcast ★

To celebrate episode 100, Wes and Scott are talking about Syntax - their most popular episodes, stats, Q&A, and a bunch of cool stuff about what it’s been like making this show for 100 episodes. Sentry - Sponsor If you want to know what’s happening with your errors, track them with Sentry. Sentry is open-source error tracking that helps developers monitor and fix crashes in real time. Cut your time on error resolution from five hours to five minutes. It works with any language and integrates with dozens of other services. Syntax listeners can get two months for free by visiting Sentry.io and using the coupon code “tastytreat”. Freshbooks - Sponsor Get a 30 day free trial of Freshbooks at freshbooks.com/syntax and put SYNTAX in the “How did you hear about us?” section. Show Notes 1:45 - Celebrating 100 episodes 04:18 - Our first episode Syntax001 - React Tools 06:23 - Our first sponsor Delicious Brains 09:37 - Most popular episodes 10 - Syntax074 - 11 Habits of Highly Effective Developers 09 - Syntax039 - Is jQuery Dead? 08 - Syntax046 - What’s New in Javascript 07 - Syntax048 - VS Code Round Two 06 - Syntax050 - Progressive Web Apps 05 - Syntax018 - All About CSS Grid 04 - Syntax051 - Our Workflows: Design, Development, Git, Deployment 03 - Syntax066 - The React Episode 02 - Syntax043 - 20 JavaScript Array and Object Methods to make you a better developer 01 - Syntax044 - How to Learn New Things Quickly 21:35 - Top countries Just passed 3 million downloads 10 - Poland - 38,731 downloads 09 - Brazil - 40,475 downloads 08 - Netherlands - 47,601 downloads 07 - India - 50,724 downloads 06 - Sweden - 55,378 downloads 05 - Australia - 80,654 downloads 04 - Germany - 109,842 downloads 03 - Canada - 138,250 downloads 02 - United Kingdom - 231,835 downloads 01 - United States - 1,220,519 downloads 27:34 - Top players AppleCoreMedia Overcast Chrome Pocket Casts iTunes 30:35 - Lessons learned about sponsors Pays the bills - editing, hosting, etc… Podcast Royale - Podcast production Libsyn - Podcast hosting They want hard numbers Conversions are hard to track It’s really cool companies and users that enjoy the product hook up How do we get them? 35:10 - Favorite episodes Wes - Syntax043 - 20 JavaScript Array and Object Methods to make you a better developer Scott - Syntax044 - How to Learn New Things Quickly 38:49 - Q&A Q: What’s your favorite soundboard sound? Q: What’s your recording process like? Do you each record your streams locally then edit them together or are there any “hax” you guys have cooked up as developers? A: Pay someone who is good at editing We both have good recording gear We record separate files and send them our production team, Podcast Royale, for editing We do show notes in Dropbox Paper, which are also edited by Podcast Royale Q: Does Scott practice his segues, or do they just come to him on the fly? A: On the fly

Yaa-yaah!—"Greetings!" (in Ewokese)   Nom, nom, nom… delicious brains aren’t just for zombies. In today’s episode, an Ewok named Brad Touesnard of Delicious Brains spills the gray matter on all things pricing and how scratching your own itch can be a great starting point when you’re new to business. We also talk about how honesty is the best policy when it comes to raising existing prices. You don’t want to miss this!

This week on Episode 266 of the WP-Tonic Podcast Sallie Goetsch, Chris Badgett, Adam Preiser, and John Locke joined host Jonathan Denwood to discuss several recent stories in the WordPress and online community. Featured stories included the latest update of WordPress 4.9.4 released to fix the auto update feature that was broken in 4.9.3, a proposal to stop configuring WordCamps in a track format to allow more interaction of diverse users, Five reasons people redesign their websites, 2017 in review by Delicious Brains, and a public service announcement explaining Google’s latest declaration that all sites need to be using an SSL certificate by summer 2018. More Detailed Notes

This week on Episode 266 of the WP-Tonic Podcast Sallie Goetsch, Chris Badgett, Adam Preiser, and John Locke joined host Jonathan Denwood to discuss several recent stories in the WordPress and online community. Featured stories included the latest update of WordPress 4.9.4 released to fix the auto update feature that was broken in 4.9.3, a proposal to stop configuring WordCamps in a track format to allow more interaction of diverse users, Five reasons people redesign their websites, 2017 in review by Delicious Brains, and a public service announcement explaining Google’s latest declaration that all sites need to be using an SSL certificate by summer 2018. More Detailed Notes

All The Things In this episode, I am chatting with Morten Rand-Hendriksen. As someone who has taken most, if not all his courses on Lynda.com - all I can say is WOW - this is awesome. Let's get started! Morten Rand-Hendriksen Instructor, educator, speaker at LinkedIn Learning, helping people master WordPress, the web, and online communication. Since joining forces with Lynda.com (now LinkedIn Learning) in 2010, Morten has 60+ published courses on WordPress, front-end web design and development, and web standards, reaching hundreds of thousands of viewers from all over the world. He also contributes to the web community as a public speaker, author, educator, web developer, and design philosopher. This episode of Rethink.fm is sponsored by: Delicious Brains - They make super awesome products for WordPress If you’re a developer who’s looking to speed up their workflows so you can work less but bill the same (effectively increasing your hourly rate), WP Migrate DB Pro is for you. Or, check out their blog at deliciousbrains.com. (Developers really like it) This is one of the plugins I renew every year. It speeds up development time. It's keeps my local and remote database synced during development, keeps my media files synced and is built by a team that I trust. --Jackie D'Elia Rethink.fm listeners - Save 10% off today! (Limited time offer - Coupon expires June 30, 2017) Listen to Episode 15 Show Notes Morten's Website @mor10 on Twitter Linkedin Articles Some topics we discussed: Twentyseventeen The Case for WordPress Telemetry WordPress Theme Customizer Creating Web Icons with SVG Essential Javascript Training Migrate DB Pro course on Lynda.com WP-Tonic Podcast A takeaway worth noting: What should WordPress developers be focusing on? You need to learn how to build things without WordPress. WordPress is a tool in your toolkit but it cannot be the tool you stand on when you do all your work. WordPress is literally a content management system that uses PHP, HTML, CSS and Javascript to create front-end content. --Morten Rand-Hendriksen All Morten's Courses on Lynda.com Transcript Jackie The guys at Delicious Brains make super awesome stuff for Wordpress developers. If you’ve ever experienced the pain of trying to copy your Wordpress database from one install to another - dev to staging and back again, you’re going to seriously want to check out their WP Migrate DB Pro plugin. It not only makes migrating databases easier, but by saving you so many hours, it effectively increases your hourly rate. Definitely a must for any WordPress developer working on client sites. Check it out deliciousbrains.com. Open PDF transcript in a new window. Jackie Hey, everybody. It's Jackie D'Elia with another episode of Rethink.fm. This is Episode 15. I have my very special guest, Morten Rand-Hendriksen who is a senior staff instructor at Linkedin Learning. Hey, Morten. Morten Hi. Jackie Thanks for joining me. Morten Good to be here. Jackie For those who don't know you, and I can't imagine there is a lot of people that listen to this show that don't, is there anything else that you want to fill in about what you do? Morten Well, my main job is as an instructor at Linkedin Learning and Lynda.com, I also contribute to the WordPress Project in odd and unusual ways. I don't really write a lot of code patches for WordPress but I ask a lot of questions about decisions that are being made. I propose things that should be done. I also contribute to the Community Project, like we're working on something. I'm peripherally involved in a non-hard and heavy code sense in that project. Jackie Well, before we jump into that, I've just got a couple of questions for you. How did you get started teaching? Morten At random. Let's see. This must have been 2009, 2008, something like that. I was working on a project, just some random client project.

On today’s episode, Corry Maass and Sam Brodie are talking with Brad Touesnard. Brad is an entrepreneur, developer, and designer living in Nova Scotia, Canada. Brad runs a successful business called Delicious Brains which is known for two popular products called WP Migrate Pro and WP Offload S3. Brad discusses his approach to SaaS  (Software as a Service) and the challenges of getting users to participate in a beta release and provide productive feedback during testing. (more…)

On today's episode, Corry Maass and Sam Brodie are talking with Brad Touesnard. Brad is an entrepreneur, developer, and designer living in Nova Scotia, Canada. Brad runs a successful business called Delicious Brains which is known for two popular products called WP Migrate Pro and WP Offload S3. Brad discusses his approach to SaaS  (Software as a Service) and the challenges of getting users to participate in a beta release and provide productive feedback during testing. Matt Report - A WordPress podcast for digital business owners S5B: E7: Brad Touesnard from Delicious Brains Play Episode Pause Episode Mute/Unmute Episode Rewind 10 Seconds 1x Fast Forward 30 seconds 00:00 / 00:48:18 Subscribe Share RSS Feed Share Link Embed Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 00:48:18 Guest: Brad Touesnard is the founder of Delicious Brains Inc. Brad wears many hats; from coding and design to marketing and partnerships. Before starting Delicious Brains, Brad was a busy freelance web developer, specializing in front-end development. Brad also has a podcast which he co-hosts with Pippin Williamson called Apply Filters which is dedicated to WordPress development. What you will learn from this episode: Delicious Brains has two successful products Migrate DB Pro and WP Offload S3 Delicious Brains has now grown to eight full-time employees and is working on a new SaaS effort called MergeBot. (4:27)  There is always the problem of how do you merge database changes from the local site to the live database? (7:30) When merging data in a database, most people keep track of all changes made and differences from the local to the live database. All these changes become the deployment list. (8:28) Developers have been asking for about four years for a way to merge local and live databases for their web customers.(9:50) Mergebot launched early and was created from requests made to the Delicious Brains support channels to address database changes between local and live databases. It is now in an open beta with a limited amount of seats. (11:03) The modifications that are made to Mergebot are prioritized through the support channel and then added to the beta to address the amount of pain that the customer is experiencing. (13:00) The limitation to Mergebot that needs to be addressed is the 1000 query limit and the multisite restriction. (16:46) Building a SaaS (Software as a Service): There is hype around SaaS right now. (13:48) SaaS is a good fit for Mergebot because it provides a platform for collaboration for changes between users. (14:11) Changes to the database can be streamed to the cloud application where conflicts can be addressed. (15:00) Merging data is CPU intensive. (16:22) When selling products SaaS is a safer business model allowing you to get more money up front than you can from a WordPress plugin. (18:23) SaaS applications are often being offered with annual plans. This helps with having the cash needed for marketing your product up front. If customers do not renew the subscription, they will not have access to the software. (19:33) As more and more businesses are moving to SaaS you will see more sign-ups for annual subscriptions. (20:36) Starting a business from scratch without an existing customer base is difficult. (24:43) Marketing Validation when consideration SaaS for Mergebot: The Mergebot launch relied on the current customer base of Migrate DB Pro. (28:38) When you are launching something new you are constantly making assumptions. (31:00) The beta of Mergebot is a charged service. You want the active participation of early adopters and have their commitment. (32:33) When you purchase Mergebot's beta product, you also get invited to the Slack channel. This allows you to see what users are struggling with and to provide support when needed. (35:37) You can easily cancel the beta product if it is not what you anticipated. The first phase of the Mergebot beta was a “private” beta where the onboarding process was reviewed with clients. (37:00) Mergebot will do another round of feedback from customers before marketing a product launch. (43:44) EPISODE RESOURCES Delicious Brains Mergebot on WordPress.org Mergebot Hipchat Follow Brad: Brad on Twitter Brad's Website email: Brad@deliciousbrains.com If you like the show, please leave a 5 Star review over on the Matt Report on iTunes. Sponsors: Pagely Gravity Forms ★ Support this podcast ★

Welcome to the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and via RSS for your favorite podcatcher. Post Status Draft is hosted by Joe Hoyle -- the CTO of Human Made -- and Brian Krogsgard. Live from the A Day of REST workshops, Brian, Joe, and Zac talk about the state of working with JavaScript -- including several popular JavaScript frameworks -- and WordPress. They go through the pros and cons of using each one, what to watch out for when working with them and WordPress, and ways they think the process can improve. Links JavaScript for WP React Vue Backbone Underscores Angular A Day of Rest Sponsor: WP Migrate DB Pro Today’s show is sponsored by Delicious Brains. WP Migrate DB Pro makes moving and copying databases simple. They also have an exciting new project for merging databases, called Mergebot. Go to Mergebot.com for updates on that, and deliciousbrains.com for more information on WPMigrate DB Pro. Thanks to the team at Delicious Brains for being a Post Status partner. Special Thanks: Bocoup Special thanks to Bocoup for allowing us to record this podcast episode in their office. Bocoup was a partner and workshop host for A Day of REST, and were incredibly hospitable. Checkout Bocoup to learn more about how they embrace open source as a consulting agency.

Welcome to the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and via RSS for your favorite podcatcher. Post Status Draft is hosted by Joe Hoyle -- the CTO of Human Made -- and Brian Krogsgard. In this episode, Joe and Brian talk about various third party publishing apps available and how they work with WordPress. They dig into apps that currently exist, how the connect to WordPress, how the future of WordPress could improve the third party ecosystem, and many of the challenges that must be tackled when interacting with WordPress as a third party application. Apps We Discussed WordPress mobile apps Ulysses Desk Byword MarsEdit Windows Life Writer Evernote to WordPress Zapier iA Writer OneNote to WordPress Zapier Editor Interfaces TinyMCE (web editor) QuillJS (web editor) DraftJS (web editor) WordPress iOS editor (native editor) Other Links WordPress REST API Vienna Sponsor: Delicious Brains Today’s show is sponsored by Delicious Brains. WP Migrate DB Pro makes moving and copying databases simple. They are also working on an exciting new project right now for merging databases, called Mergebot. Go to Mergebot.com for updates on that, and deliciousbrains.com for more information on WPMigrate DB Pro, and thanks to the team at Delicious Brains for being a Post Status partner.

Welcome to Episode 21 of Mastermind.fm! Today our masterminds Jean and James will continue last week’s discussion of product launches and gaining traction for your new product. Last week they covered getting a website together, building a mailing list and social media presence, and a handful of other great advice for making your product launch successful. What else will they talk about today? Come find out! As always, show notes are below but listen in for  the whole conversation so you don’t miss a thing! Engaging Your Users What are people saying about your product? There are a few good places you can test the pulse of your product from and use to draw more interest with your own feedback to users. WordPress.org Support Forums Reviews Social Media Facebook Twitter In the early days of any product, there are bound to be bugs and a shifting of focus/use cases from your original intent. Pay close attention your first customers, engage them, make fans and cheerleaders of them. Word of mouth in the early days is critical! Build a great reputation as an engaged developer right out of the gates. Content Marketing Building a foundation of great content surrounding your community and product is a great way to draw attention while contributing back to your community. Delicious Brains is a great example of blogged content built up around products. Offering content via email is another great way to reach people. Affiliate Marketing Joining in with others raises visibility and lends credibility to your product. You’re essentially paying people to promote your product, but in James’ words: if you believe in your product, what does it matter how people discover you? Get it out there to them however you can if you’ve got something that’s going to make their life better. Plugin Partnerships If possible, team up! Partnering with theme companies can be great promotion and ensure that your product looks great in popular themes. Hosts are another good potential partner. GoDaddy for example is moving to a heavy focus on the WordPress ecosystem, partnering with popular plugin developers to offer a great experience to WordPress users. Attend business conferences like Pressnomics and be prepared to lay out how your product can be a solution to a company’s needs. Translate WordPress reaches a much greater audience than just the English speaking world. Provide a translated readme.txt and work towards getting translated into as many languages as possible. This not only gives you a wider potential audience, it gives you a huge advantage over non-translated competing plugins. Even if you can’t afford to hire a translator, there are other incentives you can offer, such as free licensing. Featured On The Show: Ninja Forms WP Mayor WP RSS Aggregator Post Status WP Tavern Delicious Brains Optin Monster Envato Astoundify UpThemes Parallelus GoDaddy PressNomics SiteKick Pro WPML MailPoet

Welcome to Episode 16 of Mastermind.fm! This week our masterminds Jean and James delve into the topic of hiring and support. Look for this week’s conversation to revolve mostly around support, and then turn to hiring next week. You’ll find a brief overview below as always, but be sure to tune in for the full scoop! You won’t want to miss it! How Can We Offer Great Support for a WordPress Plugin or Business? James kicks things off by laying out his philosophy on support: instead of looking at support as the inevitable thing we have to do because we have a product, look at it as an opportunity to engage with your customers. The goal of support shouldn’t be to close a ticket or end one conversation so you can move on to another one, but to build trust and relationships. Jean addresses logistics. As a beginning business, how much of your small team’s time do you devote to support and development? You have to manage setting priorities and scaling as your company grows. What’s the factors to consider in managing this aspect of your growth? It’s a reality for almost everyone. The ‘passive income’ of a plugin that doesn’t need support is a reality to varying degrees, but it’s tantamount to chasing unicorns. You need to plan for support! How Can You Plan for Support? In a nutshell, target and address top issues for your customers proactively. Look for gaps in your product: specific problem areas that users struggle with. Address these proactively. Implement a series of steps/troubleshooting guide/faq inside the support form prior to submitting it. “Intelligent forms” so to speak. Team Structure Support can, in Jean’s words, “quickly take over your life”. How do you handle it within your team? For James and Ninja Forms, a key quality in a support team is to act as customer advocates. People that can show empathy and relate to the customer. Someone who can solve a problem for the customer and, when warranted, come back to the development team and suggest changes. They’re not just ‘question answerers’, but team members that are actively engaged in shaping the direction of product growth. They are support-first hires rather than developers that handle support too. For Jean, the nature of his team’s work require developers in the support role. That’s a common arrangement shared by other organizations like Delicious Brains and MailPoet. This brings a high degree of technical know-how to the support aspect of the business. Jean’s team uses a three-tiered system for support where tickets are delegated based on the nature of the individual ticket and which developers are best suited to address them. Find a Help Desk Solution Email or form support may work ok in the very early days, but both Jean and James strongly recommend adopting a help desk solution early. Even a homebrew support method is going to be overwhelmed quickly by your evolving needs. Don’t be afraid to research and experiment with different systems, but look into a professional solution early. Featured On The Show: WooCommerce Easy Digital Downloads HelpScout Desk.com Delicious Brains ZenDesk

Welcome to the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Stitcher, and via RSS for your favorite podcatcher. Post Status Draft is hosted by Joe Hoyle -- the CTO of Human Made -- and Brian Krogsgard. Software as a service (SaaS) is often viewed as a holy grail for successful online business. The ability to generate recurring revenue that doesn’t require hours-for-dollars is attractive to most entrepreneurs. WordPress can be a helpful tool to get a lot of SaaS functionality out of the box. In today’s episode, we discuss WordPress and SaaS in two contexts: one, using WordPress as a technology basis for a SaaS in another industry, and two, creating a SaaS catered to the WordPress world. Links We mentioned the following SaaS products, and probably some others too. Happy Tables  Restaurant Engine  Event Smart  Faithmade  Varsity News Network  Rainmaker  WordPress.com  OptinMonster  iThemes Sync  WP Remote  Akismet VaultPress  Today’s podcast is sponsored by WP Migrate DB Pro by Delicious Brains, the tool that makes syncing your databases effortless. Check out WP Migrate DB Pro and all their other great products on their website.

When your business is young and cash isn’t exactly pouring in, it’s tough to know when to take financial risks. Sometimes it’s a $40 risk on a plugin, sometimes it’s a $4,000 risk on hiring some help. But how do you make sure you’re taking the right risks? Being the owner/operator of your business means you will need take financial risks to grow, so the question is not “will I take risks”, but rather “how do I be smart about risks?” Join me on this episode with Brad Touesnard of Delicious Brains (if you don’t recognize his company, you’ll like recognize his flagship product: WP Migrate DB Pro). Brad started as an independent web developer and has grown into a full-on business-owner, supporting his career and the folks that work with him. We’ll talk about the evolution of freelancer to employer and hear Brad’s experience on taking risks to grow a busines

  In Episode 11 of the WP Elevation podcast I spoke with Brad Touesnard from Delicious Brains, home of WP Migrate DB. Brad has been through the experience of launching the WP App Store, which included investment from Adii Pienaar at WooThemes and Carl Hancock at Gravity Forms. The WP App Store ultimately failed and Brad has lived to tell the tale. Brad presented recently at the Boston WordPress MeetUp about the evolution of his business and why his pricing model is the way it is. Brad has teamed up with Pippin Williamson and launched a podcast called Apply Filters which is aimed at WordPress developers. I tried to find a screenshot of Flippa.com from 2008 but the way back machine kept redirecting so I gave up. However you can see the screenshots on Brad’s blog. Brad is currently reading Judas Unchained: The Commonwealth Saga by Peter F Hamilton. You can reach out and thank Brad on his blog or on Twitter. Brad suggested I interview Jason Schuller who’s fame includes Press75 and more recently Dropplets and Leeflets. Keep your eyes on your inbox Jason. Hint: to enter the competition, leave a comment below telling us the #1 feature you’d like to see in WP Migrate DB Pro. The post Episode #11 – Brad Touesnard appeared first on WP Elevation.

What goes up must come down or in our case, what went down came back up?! You be the judge in my latest interview with Brad Touesnard of Delicious Brains and WP Migrate Pro plugin. Before Brad was helping you migrate WordPress databases, he had visions of bringing an app store like experience to WordPress. It's what he described as a failure to which has brought him new sucess. Perhaps the idea was too early for it's time? You be the judge in Episode 46! Interview with Brad Touesnard of WP Migrate Pro Listen to the audio & subscribe on iTunes Matt Report - A WordPress podcast for digital business owners Episode 46: The benefits of failure Play Episode Pause Episode Mute/Unmute Episode Rewind 10 Seconds 1x Fast Forward 30 seconds 00:00 / Subscribe Share RSS Feed Share Link Embed Download file | Play in new window The journey of success and failure Sound familiar? That's right, it's the intro of the podcast. Brad knows this all too well, but it's something that has brought him on to new roads in the WordPress marketplace. Without the failure of his first product, he wouldn't have made the pivot to his new widely popular product WP Migrate Pro. Something new to my cache of interviewees? The angel funding and advisory role Carl Hancock of Gravity Forms along with Adii Pienaar of WooThemes play to the success of Delicious Brains. We chat about how they got invovled and how that experience has shaped Brad's role from developer to entrepreneur. Methodical success Our favorite part of the show is when we get into the nitty gritty and how-to of launching the product. Brad shares his secrets for capturing leads, marketing and determining price. If you follow WordPress news, you know there's a healthy debate going on about sustainable WordPress businesses and we'll chat about that with our hero today. Random fact, Brad spent hours on crafting an e-mail that was no longer than a couple of tweets put together. Learn why he did that and if it was worth it in this episode. Outro music: http://www.jamendo.com/en/track/1120/jaoranary ★ Support this podcast ★

What goes up must come down or in our case, what went down came back up?! You be the judge in my latest interview with Brad Touesnard of Delicious Brains and WP Migrate Pro plugin. Before Brad was helping you migrate WordPress databases, he had visions of bringing an app store like experience to WordPress. It’s what he described as a failure to which has brought him new sucess. Perhaps the idea was too early for it’s time? You be the judge in Episode 46! (more…)

Jerk Radio gets ultra-spooky! And not like the traditional sense! Adam, OHak, and Trace babble a little bit about the Halloween event, then things go way off the beaten path and we talk about other video games and game shows(?).

In this episode of PressThis, we interview the founder of Delicious Brains Brad Touesnard, and the founder of WP Engine Jason Cohen about the sale of Delicious Brains' wildly popular plugins Advanced Custom Fields, WP Migrate (fka WP Migrate DB Pro), Better Search & Replace, WP Offload Media, and WP Offload SES to WP Engine. Brad and Jason share why they thought the transaction made sense, what they're doing to make sure those very helpful plugins will continue to be useful to those who rely on them, and what the future has in store for ACF and the other plugins WP Engine acquired. Delicious Brains' plugins have played a historic role in the evolution of WordPress from everything from elegant database management to helping to define WordPress as a true CMS, so we're very proud to bring you this exclusive insider interview with these two pillars in WordPress! If you rely on ACF or the other acquired plugins for the sites you build or if you are just curious about what goes on behind the scenes of a big acquisition in WordPress, don't miss this episode of PressThis. Listen now!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/press-this-wordpress-community-podcast/donations

In every episode of PressThis, host David Vogelpohl asks guests for their WordPress origin story. In this episode of PressThis, enjoy some of the top origin stories including those from Rachel Gogos with BrandID, Chris Badgett of LifterLMS, Jon Henshaw of Coywolf (and founder of Raven Tools), Jason Cohen of WP Engine, Brad Touesnard of Delicious Brains, Meryl K. Evans of Meryl.net Digital Marketing, Rachel Winchester of DigitalCube, and Mary Job of How to Do You Tech.Listen now!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/press-this-wordpress-community-podcast/donations