By Jeffro on April 14, 2010
GravityForms recently made a big announcement that will affect new customers who make a purchase after May 1st. Currently, all customers who purchase a single or developer support license receive unlimited upgrades for life.
On May 1st we will be changing the Gravity Forms Terms of Service. Support and automatic updates will change to a 1 year term for all NEW purchases beginning on that date.
Customers who purchase before May 1st will NOT be impacted and will continue to receive lifetime support and updates for the license they currently own.
Not only will the 1 year of support and upgrades be tied to the single site license, but the developer license as well. Customers who make a purchase before May 1st will get lifetime support and upgrades as well as those who upgrade to a developer license. If you haven’t purchased your copy of GravityForms, now may be the best time to do it so that you’re set for life when it comes to support and upgrades.
If you need a reminder of what GravityForms is capable of doing, check out this recent review from BloggingPro.com.
Also for existing GravityForms customers, check out Joost De Valks GravityForms widget.
Posted in News | Tagged gravityforms, service, support, upgrades |
By Jeffro on April 7, 2010
Gravatar has yet to live up to the G (Global) in its name but it’s slowly getting there. Beau Lebens has published a few more developer resources that have been submitted to the Gravatar site including a Gravatar extension to the Yii framework, extension to the TYPO 3 CMS, and a Django custom tag.
I remember in 2009 when I asked why Gravatar was not mainstream, despite the service existing for a number of years now. It’s not as if Gravatar needs to completely replace avatar systems. It just needs to be one of the choices when configuring your avatar. I was very surprised to find out that VBulletin does not have built in support for Gravatar nor is there an extension to add support for it. I’d think that there is a benefit to using Gravatars on a forum instead of uploaded custom avatars because the images are loaded from a third party service and that means less space in the database being used by all of the uploaded avatar images.
Since the avatar system still does not have global support just yet, I was happy to read the news regarding Gravatar Profiles. This definitely gives Gravatars more oomph. I wonder if support will be added to show the most recent blog posts or other things on the Gravatar profile.
Posted in News | Tagged avatar, developers, global, gravatar |
By Jeffro on April 7, 2010
PollDaddy has introduced a new feature today that enables users to share the results of their survey with other people without giving complete access to their account. Survey reports are password protected and you can set exactly which parts the sharer can view. This feature is only available to Pro and Corporate account holders. More info on how to utilize this feature can be found here.
I’d like to see something like this for Woopra. Right now, the only way you can share statistics with someone is if they have a registered account with Woopra.com and you give that account access to see your stats. Instead, I’d like to create a private URL that expires in a given amount of time to someone interested in detailed stats. Something like what PollDaddy has introduced would be a good time saver and not require the person I want to share stats with to have an account with Woopra.com
Posted in News | Tagged polldaddy, reports, service, sharing |
By Jeffro on April 2, 2010
Time.com is looking for a seasoned front-end WordPress developer. As the job posting shows, you need to know your stuff if you’re going to apply for the position. If I even know half of the requirements that are needed, I’d be in good shape. Since jobs are few and far between, I thought it would be good to push this one out into the open considering many developers and consultants read this site.
Posted in News | Tagged developer, job, time, vip, wordpress |
By Jeffro on March 31, 2010
The biggest news of the week so far in the WordPress world happened yesterday when Automattic launched a new service called VaultPress. Instead of explaining what VaultPress does, Matt Mullenweg published a comment on Techcrunch that sums it up nicely.
- It can handle any amount of stuff. For example my site (ma.tt) has about 30,000 photos on it, totaling about 33 gigabytes.
- It’s an all-in-one package. You don’t need one thing to back up your database, one thing for your files, one thing for your themes, et cetera.
- It’s real-time. You make a post and it’s in the cloud seconds later.
- It’s enterprise-grade and not reliant on one provider, including us. Your site is stored on no fewer than 2 cloud services in addition to our own copies.
- It going to do more than just backup. The VaultPress engine will be able to push hotfixes to zero-day security vulnerabilities, for example.
- There’s even more I can’t talk about yet.
When asked whether VaultPress was designed for self hosted WordPress sites or WordPress.com users, Toni Schneider responded with:
VaultPress will be available for WP.org installs (and was in fact primarily developed for WP.org users).
This should help mitigate the confusion. Also further in the comments on the initial launch post, Matt said that VaultPress is technically on a different infrastructure than WordPress.com.
I didn’t see VaultPress coming but it doesn’t surprise me that something like it was launched. I mentioned a few weeks ago on Twitter that I noticed a bunch of backup plugins and services specifically tailored to WordPress showing up in my FeedReader. In fact, I reviewed one of them called Backupify. VaultPress is in the middle of stiff competition when you consider that most webhosts enable backups through cPanel, or free WordPress plugins that back up the database of the website or, commercial plugins such as Backup Buddy which I’ll continue to use in favor of VaultPress because I feel that VaultPress doesn’t take away what a good product BackupBuddy is. Also, Backup Buddy has the ability to make migrating a site from one host to another as easy as pie. Right now, VaultPress only backs up and restores to the same site.
The one feature that intrigues me is that VaultPress will be able to monitor your site:
The VaultPress engine will be able to push hotfixes to zero-day security vulnerabilities, for example.
I know Matt would love to have a way to push a button and have a bunch of sites upgraded to the latest version of WordPress. Well, this gets him part of the way there and there is cash involved to boot! What I don’t want to happen is some sort of major delay between the 0 day fixes being available for all WordPress users versus those who have paid for that type of comfort. I doubt that will happen but I think the benefit here is that by using VaultPress, you’ll be one of the first to get the fixes so you don’t have to worry about any upgrades.
It’s interesting to note that there is no price listed anywhere on the site. That’s because the service is in beta. In fact, if you browse to their beta application page, you’ll notice that one of the fields specifically asks how much you would be willing to pay per month to cover all of your WordPress powered sites. I put in $5.00 per site because it seems reasonable to me. $60.00 per year is not much to ask for when you consider everything that is going on behind the scenes of VaultPress to make sure it doesn’t disappear like other companies that couldn’t find a way to stay in business.
However, I hope that the team at PluginBuddy.com does not get discouraged because of the launch of VaultPress. Right now, their backup solution offers more bang for the buck although without the convenience of having the data in the cloud. Their price is only $25.00 and that covers two websites. This price also covers upgrades to the plugin and one year of support. $25.00 for an entire year. VaultPress will need to be pretty darn cheap or offer as many features as Backup Buddy in order to be considered an awesome commercial alternative.
Posted in News | Tagged backup, backupbuddy, service, valutpress |
By Jeffro on March 29, 2010
Brian Casel has a great post over on DesignM.ag that showcases the various opportunities that exist to run a freelance business around WordPress. Developers, designers, and copywriters all have a ton of opportunities to make money around WordPress. I suppose I would fit into the freelance journalist category even though I don’t consider myself to be a journalist. I know I’ve mentioned WP125 before to manage advertising on your site but Brian linked to one other advertising system that may suit your needs called Advertising Manager. Based on the features page, this looks to be a nifty plugin. I might review this at some point in the future.
Posted in News | Tagged business, freelancing, wordpress |
By Jeffro on March 29, 2010
Back on March 11th, I mentioned that Toni Schneider would be one of the guest speakers at the Freemium Summit held in San Francisco on March 26th. The summit focused on the freemium business model. That is, offering a free service with the chance to upgrade and that upgrade costing money. While GigaOm has a nice overview of the Summit from the various panelists, WebNewser took a keen interest in Toni Schneider’s session.
The thing that is most interesting to me is that WordPress.com does not work on a tiered model. Instead, everything is individualized à la carte style so that users can pick and choose the features they want. This enables WordPress.com to routinely release new features that they can charge for. I also like their method of only charging for the hard stuff although some would argue that editing CSS is not that hard and should be a free feature. However, you only have to hang out in the WordPress IRC channel for awhile or browse around the WordPress.org forums to see that many people have difficulty editing CSS.
A little insight into the amount of revenue Automattic makes by charging for premium features on WordPress.com.
His company now makes 40 percent of its revenue from premium services like domain mapping, with the remainder from ad sales and enterprise products. But he said the problem with this approach is customers may not know of services they could receive, because it’s harder to market them individually.
I also think some of the points raised by the commenters on the GigaOm article are worth reading. The Freemium model doesn’t work for everyone but more and more companies are going down that road. As a customer, I like companies that use this model. Generally, I get a good enough feel for the product or service throughout the life of the free version that at some point if I need an additional feature or some other value add on, I won’t have to think so hard about giving them my money. Actually, this sounds a lot like Trialware. Would that make a good comparison between the two models or are they the same thing?
Posted in News | Tagged automattic, freemium, model, wordpress
By Jeffro on March 25, 2010
Andrew Nacin who is one of the core developers of WordPress has published a post that should have come with a package of Tylenol. The post goes into the reasons behind why the terminology within WordPress MU was changed and why it’s created a soup of confusion. I’ve read the post three times in a row and it still hurts my head to try and make sense of it all.
When the merge began, the core developers began to use multisite internally to mean many blogs (well, sites), shortened to “ms” where possible, thus removing the “mu” and “wpmu” prefixes on files and functions.
Surely, we can make this more difficult. And so, just as the UX decision was made to call a blog a site, we decided to call a multisite a network.
So if you’re wondering why things are named the way they are in the merged edition of WordPress MU, give his article a read. Bonus points if you can read it once and not get lost.
Posted in News | Tagged merge, multisite, network, terminology, WPMU |
By Jeffro on March 20, 2010
After what seems like a week of technology hell dealing with webhosting companies, I think things have started to calm down with a working solution. Right now, WPTavern is being hosted through HostGator after my first host, AnHosting told me there was nothing they could do to stop a Distributed DOS attack from happening to WPTavern.com. After AnHosting, I picked up and moved to WPWebhost but soon after I uploaded my plugin files, at least six of them failed to function properly. I was not in the mood to diagnose the problem as well as the issues I had with email so I moved to HostGator where I also had email issues but I think domain propagation had something to do with email. However, I also think the lack of clear instructions which don’t work on the Cpanel Email account setup page are also to blame.
Also with HostGator, I have no idea what was causing the problem and neither does the tech support but at random times on different files, WPTavern.com would hang. Whether it was a CSS file, an image, or something else, these files would cause the loading of the site to stop for extended periods of time. Today, I wiped out the install of WordPress and installed a fresh copy. I then imported the SQL database and installed all of my plugins from scratch. I’ve also installed WP-Super Cache as well as getting rid of two images that were almost 100K in size while also fixing a call to an image that produced a 404 error. I’m happy to report that so far today, the site and the forum have been loading faster than I’ve ever seen it after spending two years with AnHosting.
If you are browsing the site or forum today, please tell me in the comments how fast the site is loading for you or if you notice the site hanging.
Posted in News | Tagged downtime, hosting, problems, wptavern |
By Jeffro on March 12, 2010
Mallary Jean Tenore of Poynter Online has published an interview she conducted with Daniel Bachhuber, co-founder of CoPress which announced they were closing their doors a few weeks ago. It’s apparent from the interview that a lack of motivation on the part of student organizations as well as having CoPress be easily accessible created the conditions where the support system could not scale.
There’s so much you can learn on the Internet if a) you have the motivation and b) you know how to look and ask the right questions and participate responsibly,” Bachhuber said, noting that he’d like to see all student news organizations have developers on staff. “There’s a little bit of hand-holding that can be done, but what it requires most importantly is initiative
Definitely some interesting business lessons to be learned from Daniels experience at CoPress. Furthermore, Daniel will be one of the panelists featured in April when I produce an episode of WordPress Weekly with a round table of guests that are currently or have in the past, offered services around WordPress as their business model only in this case, Daniel will be providing insight from the other side of the business coin.
Posted in News | Tagged copress, services, shutdown |
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