By Jeffro on November 16, 2011
The big news over the past 24 hours is that Automattic has made their second investment, this time in a WordPress hosting company called WP Engine. WP Engine is a relatively new hosting company that manages WordPress.org installs for roughly 30,000 clients. The other side of the news is that a new partner program by Automattic called VIP Support For Webhosts which aims to provide VIP Support for Web Hosts including advanced systems and developer support for infrastructure-wide issues and improvements; annual review of the client’s entire stack as it relates to WordPress hosting; annual security audit and review of best practices and more.
Pretty cool to see Automattic making investments in WordPress centric companies. But what I want to know is, who can afford $50.00 a month for webhosting? By the way, the usual price is $100.00 per month. Congrats to WP Engine though for landing the funding and becoming the first partner program company for VIP support.
Posted in News | Tagged automattic, investment, wpengine |
By Jeffro on November 15, 2011
VaultPress has announced that the latest edition of the plugin now supports WordPress Multisite. This has been a killer feature that owners of large multisite installs have been waiting for. VaultPress will automatically backup each site that is installed within the network. However, it must be noted that only the Network’s main site will have their users table, plugins, and themes backed up. For non-main sites, VaultPress will not backup users, plugins, or themes.
The money maker for VaultPress lies within the fact that each site within the network will require it’s own subscription as if they were individual sites. There is not a plan that specifically covers multisite installations. Unless the sites within your network are making you some decent cash, this could potentially wipe you out from month to month and you’ll need to decide as a site administrator how much that peace of mind is going to cost you. On the flip side, the way they have structured their plans allows you to only backup the most valuable sites within your network providing you with more flexibility.
With regards to plan pricing, Pete Davies responded to a comment by Donnacha regarding a sliding pricing scale. It looks like it’s an opportunity that could be tapped into in the future.
Posted in News | Tagged Plugins, security, services, vaultpress |
By Jeffro on November 15, 2011
bbPress has released version 2.0.1 which is considered a maintenance release. However, if you have anonymous posting enabled, you’ll want to upgrade as soon as possible as this release addresses an issue where anonymous posters could potentially be able to edit topics and replies. If upgrading from 2.0, try upgrading through the dashboard as you would with WordPress as 2.0 introduced easy upgrades.
Posted in News | Tagged bbPress, forums, Plugins, security
By Jeffro on November 11, 2011
Matt Mullenweg announced on Twitter this morning that Automattic has now reached 100 employees. By Monday, November 14th the company will reach 102. If you would like to be part of the next 100 employees at Automattic, check out their jobs page.
By the way, a new position has opened up that doesn’t really require coding experience but rather being in the San Francisco area to be Toni Schneiders right hand man in managing the new Automattic Lounge. The most interesting aspect of this job posting is that no one knows where exactly the new Automattic Lounge is located. While @beaulebens is responsible for publishing the job posting link on Twitter, even Otto42 doesn’t know where the new lounge is located.
The previous lounge for Automattic which was located within Pier38 in San Francisco was shut down due to safety and building code violations.
Posted in News | Tagged automattic, jobs, lounge, pier38 |
By Jeffro on November 11, 2011
WordPress.com has crossed over yet another milestone in that they now host over 60 million blogs. After the GigaOm article has been updated, it now appears that half of the 60 million blogs are hosted on WordPress.com while the other half is on the self-hosted version of WordPress. This is a big number but unless those 60 million blogs are broken down into active sites, spammers, sploggers, dead sites, etc. then it will remain nothing but a big number. Touting big numbers is cool but showing how that number is figured out is even better.
Asides from the big number, I also wanted to point out the article that GigaOm published regarding this milestone. It has to be one of the most confusing articles I’ve ever read that mixes up WordPress.com and the open source project known as WordPress. For example, this sentence threw me for a loop:
Meanwhile, WordPress doesn’t plan to abandon its core allegiance to open source standards as it continues to expand as a for-profit company.
The sentence starts off with WordPress, then mentions open source standards and concludes with for-profit company. Even if you added the .com to WordPress that still wouldn’t make sense. Outside of all the confusion, the article itself is not bad considering it has a number of quotes from Matt when he participated in an on-stage interview with Mathew Ingram at the GigaOM RoadMap conference.
The big take away is that WordPress.com will be receiving a heavy dosage of social and mobile development.
Posted in News | Tagged blogs, confusion, stats, wordpress |
By Jeffro on November 10, 2011
For those looking to take polls or collect survey data out in the field should check out this primer published on the PollDaddy blog on how to use their iOS app on the iPad to substitute the typical clipboard and paper routine. Probably one of the best features regarding the app is the ability to collect information without an internet connection. When one becomes available, the app will automatically synchronize with your Polldaddy.com account. ∞
Posted in News | Tagged ios, ipad, iphone, polldaddy
By Jeffro on November 9, 2011
In a recent discussion amongst those on the WordPress Documentation mailing list, Scribu brought up the question on whether or not links to commercial solutions were allowed within the Codex. Lorelle VanFossen summed things up pretty nicely in the following quote:
A fantastic article that helps spell out the details of the Codex article on a site that isn’t selling “commercial content” other than hosting advertising and such (normal stuff) more than producing free, “open source,” shared content is allowed as it is considered external reference material. These are set usually in the “More Resources” section not within the Codex article.
Seems like a good compromise to me as it should prevent commercial entities from being able to use the Codex for link juice. Although that should be a lot more difficult considering new user registration for the Codex was disabled a few months ago to try and thwart spam attacks.
Posted in News | Tagged codex, commercial, links, registration |
By Jeffro on November 4, 2011
Akismet has started an experimental partner program. Based on the information presented, it looks like this is aimed more at consultants who deal with clients and instead of possibly using their own Akismet API key, they’ll now be able to refer them to Akismet via a special link which indicates the three plans that users can choose from. What caught my eye regarding the different account levels is how they have been structured.
Pro ($59/yr or $5/mo)
For individual sites, up to 80,000 comments/mo.
Enterprise ($550/yr or $50/mo)
For multiple medium size sites, up to 80,000 comments/mo (total).
Corporate ($3950/yr or $395/mo)
For corporate sites, up to 300,000 comments/mo with key monitoring, priority service and annual invoicing.
What constitutes a comment? Are we talking about all comments in general that need to be filtered or 80,000 legitimate comments? A little clarity on that part would be good. Those who are chosen to be part of this strictly invitational program only, will receive $24.00 for Pro subscriptions while Enterprise subscriptions will net them $240.00. I’m very hesitant on calling this a referral program because of the following text presented on the page:
This partner program is intended for use with your existing clients. Linking to your referrer code on the internet, or in any way promoting it to people that aren’t your customers is prohibited, and will result in your being removed from the program. The plan here is to have less spam, not more!
If you’re interested in being a guinea pig for this program, you can sign up here but keep in mind that just because you register doesn’t guarantee you will be accepted. By the way, WPCandy was able to receive 25 openings which may help boost your chances of being accepted.
By far, the most interesting aspect of this entire partner plan is the fact that the links people receive will contain ONLY the plans for which users must pay for. I wonder if this will translate into more paying customers for the service or if users will shy away and either use an alternative anti-spam solution or figure out how to get by using it for free. The only way we’ll know the answer to that is if Akismet shares the data they collected during the beta portion of the program.
Posted in News | Tagged akismet, comments, services, spam |
By Jeffro on November 3, 2011
Snowshoe Magazine has recently switched over their website from a Coldfusion installation into WordPress with the help of Serafini Studios. During the switch, Gabriel created custom code that exported 1,131 articles in 48 different categories as well as 1,184 events from ColdFusion into WordPress. According to the sites source-code, a custom theme is being used called Snowshoemag2011 with a myriad of familiar plugins such as Contact Form 7, Google Analytics by Yoast, All In One Event Calender and Featured Posts Scroll.
All in all, the site looks pretty good. The thing that gets me though is that I never knew snowshoeing was actually a sport.
Posted in News | Tagged coldfusion, snowshoemag, wordpress |
By Jeffro on November 3, 2011
Who doesn’t love a good infographic? Oli from WPLift.com has gone through the work of collecting all of the infographics related to WordPress that have been released so far this year into one long post. What’s neat about seeing all of these images on one page is the diversity in displaying relatively the same information. Also, quite a few of these would make for a good poster to hang on the wall. ∞
Posted in News | Tagged images, infographic. wordpress |
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The big news over the past 24 hours is that Automattic has made their second investment, this time in a WordPress hosting company called WP Engine. WP Engine is a relatively new hosting company that manages WordPress.org installs for roughly 30,000 clients. The other side of the news is that a new partner program by Automattic called VIP Support For Webhosts which aims to provide VIP Support for Web Hosts including advanced systems and developer support for infrastructure-wide issues and improvements; annual review of the client’s entire stack as it relates to WordPress hosting; annual security audit and review of best practices and more.
Akismet Testing Out Partner Program
By Jeffro on November 4, 2011
Pro ($59/yr or $5/mo)
For individual sites, up to 80,000 comments/mo.
Enterprise ($550/yr or $50/mo)
For multiple medium size sites, up to 80,000 comments/mo (total).
Corporate ($3950/yr or $395/mo)
For corporate sites, up to 300,000 comments/mo with key monitoring, priority service and annual invoicing.
What constitutes a comment? Are we talking about all comments in general that need to be filtered or 80,000 legitimate comments? A little clarity on that part would be good. Those who are chosen to be part of this strictly invitational program only, will receive $24.00 for Pro subscriptions while Enterprise subscriptions will net them $240.00. I’m very hesitant on calling this a referral program because of the following text presented on the page:
If you’re interested in being a guinea pig for this program, you can sign up here but keep in mind that just because you register doesn’t guarantee you will be accepted. By the way, WPCandy was able to receive 25 openings which may help boost your chances of being accepted.
By far, the most interesting aspect of this entire partner plan is the fact that the links people receive will contain ONLY the plans for which users must pay for. I wonder if this will translate into more paying customers for the service or if users will shy away and either use an alternative anti-spam solution or figure out how to get by using it for free. The only way we’ll know the answer to that is if Akismet shares the data they collected during the beta portion of the program.
Posted in News | Tagged akismet, comments, services, spam | 5 Responses