Displaying 1 To 30 Of 50 Comments Matt Mullenweg Interviewed By Om Malik At LeWeb I was in the audience, it was definitely one of the best talks at LeWeb. For me, the most interesting part was when Matt talked about how the purpose of WP has developed since its inception and how its potential as an application platform will characterize the next few years. » Posted By donnacha of WordSkill On December 7, 2012 @ 6:54 AM ManageWP To Soon Be Available As An iOS App Jeff, the concerns raised about ManageWP’s pricing were not the usual case of whiners complaining about not getting everything for free; the point that I and others have made is that, by targeting the high-end, they misread the market and missed out on a massively bigger opportunity. Just to be clear, the ManageWP service itself is superb, absolutely superb, and getting better all the time. I participated in the beta and Vladimir very kindly lifted the usual limit to allow me to manage a very high number of sites, so, I can tell you from personal experience that, if you manage dozens or even hundreds of sites, ManageWP is an amazing experience. In fact, I would be one of their 2000 paying customers today, for at least some of my sites, but I was unable to get their payment system to accept any of my credit cards before the early-bird deadline – they were using Plimus and it is the only payment system that has ever refused to take money from me, bloody frustrating! Even if I was a paying customer, however, I would still say that their decision to change their pricing strategy represents one of the biggest missed opportunities in the WordPress world. Jeff, I don’t know if you still run guest articles but I would love to expand properly upon this subject at some point, because I think this whole story carries some important lessons. » Posted By donnacha of WordSkill On April 25, 2012 @ 1:09 AM WordPress Stats Infographic Making The Rounds Even more impressively, 38% of the 100,000 WordPress developers listed on Freelancer.com have actually used WordPress at least once or know someone who has. » Posted By donnacha of WordSkill On April 17, 2012 @ 8:53 PM VaultPress – Not An Option For Non-Profit MultiSite Installations? @David Coveney – great insight into the actual experience of using VP and you hit the nail on the head, knowledge costs money. @Chip Bennett – Absolutely agree, in a heartbeat, I was genuinely shocked when VP announced their multisite pricing, with such a massive variation in the size of WP sites it is crazy to treat them all the same. It would not matter if large networks of small WordPress sites were an edge case but, as we see the stats creep up towards half of all websites running on WP, I believe that networks account for most of the growth and are an almost unimaginably massive market. I understand that services such as VP and ManageWP don’t want to cannibalize the perceived per-site value of their service but it seems foolish not to completely abandon such a large potential market. I would argue that the difference between a huge single-site install and a network of 100 hundred tiny niche sites is artificial construct, and illusion, that if the bandwidth and CPU burden is the same but you want to charge 100 times more, your pricing is broken. I would also argue that if you don’t have some sort of cap or sliding scale built into your pricing, and using your service would cost that network owner the same as actually hiring a fulltime engineer, your pricing is broken. Surely there has to be some midway point at which such services could address the massive market of micro-site networks and offer them a package that isn’t so ridiculously expensive that everyone has to go and learn to do it all themselves? What a waste of human effort when these services could so easily save all those man-hours while making money they would not otherwise get. » Posted By donnacha of WordSkill On April 16, 2012 @ 12:13 PM @Jeremy Lee is absolutely right, first impressions are hugely important, an unfinished site exposes a lack of attention to detail and that kills, stone dead, any trust people might have in your ability to provide an important service. Forget priorities (plural), either make finishing your website your only priority this weekend or stick up a “Coming Soon” notice until you are actually ready to go public. Working on multiple services at the same time is a questionable practise, even for large companies, but launching them before they are even at MVP stage is just plain nuts. Don’t let people write you off this early as amateurs. Sorry if that sounds harsh but you’ve got to be careful not to start believing your own excuses. » Posted By donnacha of WordSkill On April 14, 2012 @ 1:06 PM @Jeremy Wright – if the increased cost to you of additional sites is mostly or entirely the Amazon S3 cost, consider creating a tier in which you charge for actual usage or, even smarter, allow bulk users to hook up their own AWS accounts and let them pay that directly to Amazon. The goal would not necessarily be to profit from the big fish but, rather, to win them as long-term users who: 1. Will influence others to become your customers. 2. Will evangelize your future offerings. 3. Will not fund your direct competitors. 4. Will probably be experienced WordPress users who will not soak up your time with newbie support questions but, rather, will provide invaluable feedback and ideas. Keep pricing very simple at the entry level, certainly, but it is okay to have a more tailored approach at the level where people have dozens or even hundreds of sites. Create a special, break-even pond for the big fish to swim into and they will bring, in their wake, lots of smaller fish to fill up your simple, entry-level ponds. Always be aware of what your competitors offer in terms of value (as opposed to simply price). For instance, BackupBuddy is a mature plugin with lots of users (enhancing its credibility, a value in itself) and the ability to not only backup WordPress (both SingleSite and MultiSite) but also cloning, an increasingly important feature. ServerPress makes it easy to migrate sites from your server to your desktop for local development before deploying back to your server again. ManageWP makes it easy to backup and update all your sites at once. Page.ly offers backed up WordPress hosting with fully-automated upgrades etc. Lots of different teams are tackling essentially the same problems from different angles, what you have to figure out is how to addresses the problems of managing WordPress in a way that adds sufficient unique value that people choose your solution over others. Personally, in terms of branding, I would not place sole emphasis on backup because, although it is of central importance, your feature set will inevitably gravitate towards doing much more and, anyway, you really need to have the .COM of your name if you want to be taken seriously. » Posted By donnacha of WordSkill On April 13, 2012 @ 7:50 PM VaultPress can charge a premium because they are Automattic, although I suspect they may be making a mistake in not offering some form of bulk or usage-based pricing – the majority of self-hosted WordPress installations out there are not big, regularly updated blogs in the sense that we usually expect but, rather, much smaller micro-niche sites, usually part of a big network of similar sites. Such sites would not justify a $15 a month but there are a LOT of them, much richer market overall if you get the pricing right. ManageWP, with its updating features, is arguably better than VaultPress if you are willing to pay for the “Professional Package” (which is the first to include backup features) but their decision to abandon the pricing they suggested during the beta period, and to instead target the same high-end market as VaultPress, that alienated a lot of beta testers and killed most of the buzz that should have accompanied their launch – I originally believed that ManageWP would be the blockbuster hit of 2012 and fundamentally change the WordPress landscape, I even gave a talk along those lines at WordUp Edinburgh, unaware of their imminent change in strategy. ManageWP is still an excellent service if your individual sites are large enough to justify their per-site pricing, but they messed up on pricing overall and failed to capitalize on being the first service of that type. While I am sure that they are making plenty of money, you still don’t see that much buzz about ManageWP on Twitter or in blog comments. That leaves them vulnerable from above to VaultPress introducing similar features and, of course, even more vulnerable from below to someone creating something similar enough but getting the pricing right and capturing the vast swathes of micro site networks. Whoever is the first to get real scale will ultimately win the whole ball game because lots of users earns you the cooperation you need to get commercial plugin and theme authors to join your updating system and, of course, that opens the door to the future possibility of becoming a trusted platform for the sale of plugins and themes, a hugely lucrative opportunity that is, surprising, still wide open. So, services such as BackupPress could have a very bright future but they need to stay realistic about how they actually stack up against VaultPress in terms of overall impression and to remember three things: 1. The most important thing is to remain as competitive as possible in terms of both pricing and features, worry about cashing in AFTER you have your first million users. 2. Don’t make the mistake of hiring expensive marketing idiots who will persuade you to increase your prices so that they can have an advertising budget to play with. Offer such good value that your users will be your evangelists, that is the only marketing that really works. 3. Never forget that the potential market is absolutely massive and, once you have scale, the range of further opportunities will be mind-blowing. Don’t settle for merely being profitable, go for the real prize and build a business that really makes a difference. As Tony Hsieh, the founder of Zappos, once said “Whatever you’re thinking, think bigger”. » Posted By donnacha of WordSkill On April 13, 2012 @ 3:16 PM Links In Image Captions Possibly Coming In WP 3.4 Yeah, I usually end up monkeying around with the code of whatever lightbox script I’m using to insert the attribution link but it is far from ideal. If you think about it, this is an opportunity for WordPress to standardize polite gratitude. It would be even better if they also took the opportunity to standardize unobtrusive DCMA takedown request links for every image, a pretty important precaution you or your users upload images that you believe to be CC but may, in fact, not be. » Posted By donnacha of WordSkill On February 10, 2012 @ 1:32 PM Couldn’t agree more, so important to give a link as attribution, it is pretty much the only benefit received by photographers and artists kind enough to add their work to the Creative Commons, other than the warm glowy feeling. » Posted By donnacha of WordSkill On February 10, 2012 @ 1:18 PM http://blog.page.ly/2012/01/building-page-ly-part1-identifying-the-opportunity/ » Posted By donnacha of WordSkill On February 6, 2012 @ 10:26 AM Akismet 2.5.4 Adds Easy Link Removal Button I guess it is a nice option to have but site owners should think long and hard about the particular dynamic that persuades users to visit and contribute comments to their site. I suspect that for many commenters the link is seen as a small, mostly symbolic, “payment” for contributing their time and thoughts. My own site gets quite a few visitors from the comments that I make on various sites (mostly probably motivated by the question “Who is this asshole?”) and, although that is of no monetary value to me, it is certainly something I am aware of. I also value being able to quickly visit the site’s of other commenters, so, yeah, I suspect that removing links from comments that you otherwise judge to be worth publishing is likely to make your blog worse, not better. If it is spam, delete it, otherwise let it stand. One funny thing I have noticed is that, very occasionally, a site owner will remove text from my name, the “from WordSkill” part, seeing that as a form of spam, although I only use that in order to avoid people confusing me with Automattic’s Donncha O’Caoimh – it would be so unfair if he was to get blamed for my rants :) » Posted By donnacha of WordSkill On January 12, 2012 @ 9:47 PM New Years Resolutions Related To WordPress Functionality plugin is a good idea and Dave’s site seems to be a trove of useful stuff. I like your WordCamp resolution, hopefully I’ll bump into you at one sometime over the next few years. » Posted By donnacha of WordSkill On January 9, 2012 @ 10:55 AM Plugin Created By A 10 Year Old It works really well and no problems with multisite. I think this would be particularly useful to anyone running a lot of sites and multisite installations, jumping quickly between dashboards – a quick glance tells you that the site is displaying correctly without having to separately visit the homepage. It would be even more useful if the site preview widget could appear on the Manage Themes page, it would make testing different themes a lot quicker. Honestly, I’m beginning to think that this should be a standard part of the WordPress dashboard. » Posted By donnacha of WordSkill On January 3, 2012 @ 7:44 PM @Chris Wallace – 4 is the perfect age to start withholding parental affection and expressing your disappointment in his poor coding skills. » Posted By donnacha of WordSkill On January 2, 2012 @ 5:53 PM That’s actually pretty useful, this plugin might become part of my standard toolbelt. Well done Jesse and thank you! » Posted By donnacha of WordSkill On January 2, 2012 @ 2:52 PM WordPress App – The Best Thing On Peter Brights iPhone I am totally going to steal Peter Bright’s iPhone. Ssshhhhh!!! » Posted By donnacha of WordSkill On October 11, 2011 @ 12:24 PM Drupal And WordPress Founders Share The Same Stage Both Drupal and WordPress are wonderful laboratories, owned by all of us. » Posted By donnacha of WordSkill On October 10, 2011 @ 10:01 AM 5 Questions To Consider Before Using WordPress or Drupal @Meg Heckman – I understand that the frustrated tone of my comment may have struck you as a personal attack but my frustration is with this phenomenon, which is playing out in newspaper markets everywhere – local, national and international. That is why I made my comment here, on Jeff’s blog, rather than yours, because my argument isn’t against you specifically. That the guy using WordPress is not your direct competitor is precisely the sort of nit-picking that journalists call “fact checking” but which I call deflecting attention from the important point. Let us, however, put aside the temptation to enter into a lawyerly quarrel and let’s get to the heart of the matter. I did not take issue with your use of Drupal as much the fact that you and your colleagues somehow felt it was normal to embark on a one year ballet of expensive IT department pirouetting to set up what appears, both stylistically and functionally, to be a very mundane, run-of-the-mill and, frankly, charmless Drupal site. People in traditional publishing have been brain-washed into accepting that, somehow, a year of “development” is necessary to implement what boils down to very simple functionality. When I responded to the actual result, your newspaper’s website, with a concise “WTF”, I was not trying to be provocatively profane. Trust me, I was speaking for anyone who as any familiarity with how long these projects take. Even the greenest beginner, in Drupal, WordPress or any other PHP+MySQL CMS, would look at that site and refuse to believe that it took anything more that a few weeks, possibly a month, tops, if you include training. I have created hundreds of Drupal sites, WordPress now happens to be better for most projects (especially those involving non-technical end-users) but Drupal has served me well in its time. It is good software and there is simply NO WAY it is possible to spend a year developing such a site UNLESS the magical, triple-punch stopping power of organizational dysfunction, managerial laziness and departmental free-riding is brought to bear. Look at your website, look at Bangor Daily News, look back at your website, now look back at the Bangor Daily News … … they both look like shit but are both doing essentially the same thing and the key difference is that your WordPress-using non-competitor did not piss away an entire year on unnecessary bullshit. The entire print industry is arriving way late to the digital party but you guys let yourselves be talked into arriving a whole year later. We wanted a laboratory in which to push the boundaries of digital storytelling and local news presentation, one that allowed us the flexibility to make real — as opposed to ‘superficial’ — changes in the way we publish news. Oh God. Please. Stop. The only boundary that got pushed is that, in stretching this job out to a full year, your developers scored a legendary win that will be the toast of Slashdot for years to come. In your “laboratory”, they discovered a way to string you along for a year before leaving you holding a heavily-customized bundle that will guarantee plenty of IT department overtime for years to come. WordPress might have been an equally appropriate choice, but we happened to already have some Drupal expertise in house. Frankly, whether you used Drupal or WordPress is immaterial because neither should have taken anywhere near that long. Already having some “Drupal expertise in house” should have shortened, not lengthened the development process. Take any reasonably bright high school graduate who has no previous experience of any CMS but, also, does not habitually smoke crack. Sit him down at a Mac with access to the Internet, point him at Google and tell him to spend a week learning all he can about about Drupal. Come back a week later and ask him to spend a week setting up a test website using Drupal. “Oh, sorry” he will say, “I already have … I did that back on the first day, I thought that was the obvious thing to do. Sorry”. Magnanimously forgive him and ask him to instead spend this second week experimenting with the various already existing extensions that make Drupal more suited to newspaper sites and familiarizing himself with all the options, both free and commercial. Come back a week later and, sitting by his side, look at all the options, make some judgement calls – knowing that, this being software, you can always change them later – and give him a week to polish it up and port some existing content into that sucker. Then, ask him to spend his forth and final week training you and your colleagues on how to paste stories into text fields and how to press the “Publish” button (perhaps you could split the week so that you can properly focus on each of those weighty concepts in turn). So, there you go, there’s a Drupal site every bit as good as what you’ve got but it took one man-month to create, not a team of people haemorrhaging time and money for a year. WordPress might have been less of a headache for the end-user journalists and editors, but it doesn’t really matter, the point is that it took a month in total and you haven’t needlessly drained money from a newspaper that could probably use it to, you know, pay writers and photographers. Say whatever you want about me, my newspaper’s site or journalism in general. I will, however, vehemently defend my colleagues in IT and web development. They are some of the smartest, hardest working (and nicest) people I know… and I couldn’t do my job without them. Like I said, Stockholm Syndrome. Look, you don’t know me from Adam and these are real people who play a role in your day-to-day life. It is natural to think well of your colleagues but, seriously, go and talk to other people, even people on Drupal forums, and ask them how much actual development should be involved in setting up a newspaper site, even one that “pushes the boundaries of digital storytelling and local news presentation”. Politely ignore the gales of laughter and, then, listen carefully to what they have to say and ask yourself: is there any justifiable reason why the development of your site should have taken so very much longer? Clearly, you trusted people to make technical decisions that you felt you, yourself, would be unable to make – although, honestly, an evening with Google would have given you all you needed to now. There was probably a lot of conversation, a lot of coffee, a lot that smiling thing that nice people do and, in the end, you had no reason to suspect that a timeline of one year was unreasonable. Here’s the thing, though: these “nice” people took you and your colleagues on a ride that not only wasted a year of your lives but also put your newspaper a year behind where it should have been as a business. That is unforgivable and you should be angry about it but, like so many victims of fraud, you still believe that your manipulators actually did you a favor. But, hey, this isn’t just about you and your ability to sense when you are being conned, I am telling you that I see this story played out again and again, in practically every type of organization. The nature of IT departments and, indeed, any select few who become gate-keepers to knowledge necessary to keep the wheels turning, is that some people will initially be honest but, over time, the trend is to favor immediate departmental needs over the good of the greater organization and, when an industry is disrupted, it’s auto-immune response kicks in and perceives newer, easier, better ways of doing things as a threat that must be stopped at all costs. Journalists need to wipe the ink off their hands, embrace the fact that, now, WordPress or, God help you, Drupal are your most important tools and you need to get to know them, intimately, yourselves, not farm out the effort of learning something new to your IT departments, they are the very last people who should be making these decisions. Writers should chose their own tools and, when they do, they choose WordPress. » Posted By donnacha of WordSkill On October 7, 2011 @ 9:11 PM @Matt – The support forums are restricted to paying users but there should a publicly accessible forum for pre-purchase questions. If there is no forum for pre-purchase questions just email them but I doubt they will tell you how to avoid hard-cropping, that would be a support request not a sales enquiry. I’m not sure but I suspect you could probably get access to the support forums if you buy just one add-on and the cheapest is $15 – I’m just guessing but you could ask if that is the case. Realistically, you’re probably going to need to buy some add-ons anyway if you want to run a real online store. » Posted By donnacha of WordSkill On October 1, 2011 @ 8:24 PM @Jeffro – I’m waiting for the WPTavern-branded single malt whisky. » Posted By donnacha of WordSkill On September 30, 2011 @ 10:09 PM @Jeffro – It was actually my first time trying to add a link during an edit, when the usual “link” button isn’t present and I couldn’t remember whether your comments use bbcode or HTML. Sorry about that. Go ahead and delete my comments on this subject if they are distracting from the intended discussion. Off the top of my head, I don’t know of any comment flagging plugins but it would certainly be a pretty sweet addition to Ajax Edit Comments. » Posted By donnacha of WordSkill On September 30, 2011 @ 2:16 PM @rgregory – Yes, I agree that this type of plugin is something you use to make money and, therefore, is not as price-sensitive as plugins in other categories. It would still, however, be a good idea for potential users to look past the FREE and acquaint themselves with the ultimate cost – for instance, realistically, even the simplest online store serving the European market is going to need the VAT Exemption add-on. The importance of fully acquainting yourself with pricing structures before investing your time applies to any complex product. With regard to support, I noted in the discussion on the Woo blog about pricing, that the cost of providing support was a major consideration in their decision to break from their previous “all-you-can-eat” approach. This suggests that they intend to do a good job of supporting Woocommerce users. » Posted By donnacha of WordSkill On September 30, 2011 @ 2:02 PM @Jeffro – I agree that “5 or more links” sounds like a fair setting but I wonder why just one link is triggering it? Yes, I appreciate that you can hang around waiting to approve comments, I appreciate that you are doing this at all and, yes, I understood that the two WordUp Edinburgh organizers got caught by the previously approved comment rules, it was just unfortunate. I wonder if, for a site as popular as this, it might not be a better idea to use some sort of flagging by users? Allow all comments to appear but put them into moderation if they are flagged by one of your readers. I would certainly be happy to zap any spam comments that got through. » Posted By donnacha of WordSkill On September 30, 2011 @ 1:57 PM Jeff, you have your comment spam filter set way too high – I spent time writing a comment and now it is stuck in your moderation queue because I tried to include a link. I tried to remove the link but was not allowed to submit the edit … because the comment was now considered to be spam! I notice that a lot of the discussions here become disjointed because important comments appear, in order of their original posting time, much later. The WordUp Edinburgh discussion is a good example, where the organizer had to email you personally in order for her comment, which clarified a lot of important details, to appear a day after she posted it. This is the number one thing that puts me off making comments here, the fact that I don’t know what will later appear higher up in the discussion, changing the entire context. I do understand that moderating these discussions is a lot of work and, of course, I appreciate you providing this space for discussion. » Posted By donnacha of WordSkill On September 30, 2011 @ 10:38 AM WooCommerce is free which is a price you can’t beat. There are already 9 extensions along with 6 compatible themes with more of both on the way. I think the WooThemes crew is going about this the right way by providing a stellar e-commerce product at a free price while offering pay for add-ons to increase the functionality. Free is only a gimmick if you cannot realistically run a store without having to buy the add-ons. I haven’t had a chance to look at Woocommerce, I might well use it, but users should always look past the marketing bullshit and investigate the real, long-term costs before investing time into any plugin. Woo have an established reputation, managing to make it into the final 32 Theme companies by popular vote in WPCandy’s Theme Madness competition earlier this year, but they tend to be expensive and their prices will be rising in January. On a related note, I would love to see a review of how easy or complicated it is to keep all these add-ons updated. Splitting off functionality into add-ons is a commercial/marketing decision – one also taken by Shopp and WP E-commerce among others – but I wonder if that makes automatic updating trickier. Having to update all those add-ons on a bunch of different sites could chew up a lot of your time. » Posted By donnacha of WordSkill On September 30, 2011 @ 10:22 AM When Will Automattic Be Acquired? Strategically, Automattic would be worth the most to Facebook because all those WordPress.com blogs represent a substantial portion of the Web and shifting/merging WordPress.com comments to Facebook identities would be right in line with their goal of becoming our main form of identity online. Providing ads for all that content would also be a huge asset to anyone who harbors serious hopes of challenging Google’s ad network, a business in which scale is everything. Some candidates there would be Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, or some sort of combination of two or all three. Potential buyers would be willing to pay quite a premium in return for being able to expand their reach so rapidly. Facebook, too, would value the opportunity to operate an advertising network beyond the confines of their own site and the relatively social nature of blogs would be suited to their existing expertise in matching ads with social content. Google will, of course, seek to block any attempt by Facebook to increase it’s already terrifying social reach and, without a doubt, they will do all they can to stop any competing ad network getting such a vital boost – Google know all too well that, despite all their varied activities and products, advertising is still the only thing that brings in any real money. Facebook’s main problem is that, dogged by irritating legal challenges and worryingly shaky market conditions, they have not yet been able to launch their IPO, which they need in order to make any large acquisitions and, make no mistake, Automattic will be a seriously large acquisition. If Facebook does manage to have a good IPO, they will try to rope in a few major acquisitions early on, to counter the predictable claims that their growth has peaked and that the stock is ridiculously overvalued. Targets will include Automattic and smaller fish such as Disqus. Twitter has most likely already made a deal with Apple to give it first refusal on any Facebook or Google offers. Google knows that it needs to block any Facebook acquisitions but they also know that, until the IPO actually happens, they are not under any real pressure to make pre-emptive offers. Automattic and their investors know, too, that they will not get the amounts they really want until Facebook is in play and Google has to counter offers with real money behind them, so, don’t expect anything to happen on the Facebook vs Google front until after the IPO, possibly next year but it could be pushed back much further if the markets continue to spasm. Microsoft Microsoft has clearly been courting Automattic for quite some time but, although it has plenty of money, it has nowhere near the same level of strategic synergies – Automattic is simply worth far less to Microsoft than would be to Facebook. Having said that, acquiring such a pro-Open Source company – and the willingness of that company to be purchased by Microsoft – would be yet another attempt to signal to the world that Microsoft has changed. Although currently still ludicrously profitable, Microsoft is living on old glories and their image desperately needs a revamp. Some would even argue that, far deeper than image, the company actually needs a completely new direction and an infusion of fresh blood from Automattic might be just what they need to re-energize their online efforts. Ballmer is very much part of the original Microsoft and has failed to lay out a credible vision for the future. The rumor is that he will soon be shown the door and, who knows, perhaps his successor will attempt to establish his new vision with the purchase of a company full of Open Source hippies who just happen to be sitting on some prime Web property. Talented, experienced, respected new blood is also a very rare asset and, as bizarre as it may sound, I could well imagine Matt being groomed to become the CEO of Microsoft in a decade or so. On the whole, though, I don’t see Microsoft making a serious attempt to buy Automattic until Ballmer is gone and, even then, I don’t see how anyone at Microsoft could justify the amount that would be needed to beat both Facebook and Google. Implications for WordPress.org None. Any buyer will bend over backwards to be seen as being respectful to the Open Source project. If anything, it is likely that more employees will be funneled in, resulting in more code contributions over the longterm, not less. Obviously, some people will rage that Automattic is selling out and that the larger company is Satan but the likely result of WordPress.com being integrated into a larger company, especially Facebook, will be an increase in the number of people blogging and the number of people reading those blogs. That, in turn, will increase the number of people who become interested in the Open Source project and the WordPress community. My impression is that the Automattic folks would get a rougher ride within Google, as their interests don’t really coincide with Google’s main focus, Google tends to neglect purchases and, unlike Facebook, PHP is not held in very high regard in the Googleplex. I believe that there is zero chance of Apple ever buying Automattic. » Posted By donnacha of WordSkill On September 27, 2011 @ 11:50 PM WordPress Has A Smaller Community Than Either Drupal Or Joomla The guy is just trying to generate traffic, he knows his claims are nonsense. It is worth noting that his own site runs on WordPress. » Posted By donnacha of WordSkill On September 26, 2011 @ 10:07 AM @Jeffro – Hmmm, I hadn’t seen that article, very well-written, thanks Jeff. Interesting that so many people – and not the usual suspects – are starting to voice their worries at around the same time, I wonder if this is the start of a wider trend? » Posted By donnacha of WordSkill On September 26, 2011 @ 6:20 PM @Kevinjohn Gallagher – I know what you mean, the sense of a wall going up and, for me, the surprise has been how needlessly tight that circle has been drawn. With so much enthusiasm and goodwill towards WordPress, I would have imagined they could have been much more open – when you are already on a roll and people are already so willing to follow your lead, you should have to confidence to open up even more, not batten down the hatches. Matt and Jane already have natural authority, certainly enough to weather the possible consequences of small politenesses such as consulting the UK WordCamp organizers on important rule changes before introducing them. You asked if the rules are actually online, yes, I believe they are on a specific section of the WordCamp.org site and their sudden appearance there was the first that the UK organizers knew of them. So, astonishingly, even those guys, who have been so committed and volunteered so much of their time, are outside the circle. This past weekend, I happened to have a Skype chat with someone who is fairly connected and he was saying that, professionally, I made a huge mistake in mentioning this problem in this thread and that, now, no matter what I do, I will always be seen as an enemy of the inner circle. He said that a lot of people are upset about the way things are going but that it simply isn’t worth mentioning it and getting blacklisted. I don’t know if it is true, about the blacklisting, but screw that, the Internet and WordPress itself should be about freedom of expression and open debate, not nervously censoring what you say for fear that a small cabal will decide that you no longer officially exist. » Posted By donnacha of WordSkill On September 26, 2011 @ 1:19 PM @Matthew McGarity – I think we’re saying pretty much the same thing and I would agree that, yes, just going ahead and organizing independent events is itself a (rather indirect) way to influence the direction of the WordPress Foundation. It is just a pity that, in the process of providing that valuable input, those brave organizers will miss out on the support of a central organization and, as you say, many will risk taking a bath. It is even sadder that many events that could have happened will not happen at all, to the detriment of WordPress. What I am not feeling is your optimism that time and experience will resolve the gap between the foundation’s current deafness and the best interests of the WordPress community – organizations that start out with such a single-minded emphasis on rules rarely become less bureaucratic over the years. As I say, however, I am not complaining, it is what it is, we work with the reality we have and WordPress is still a wonderful part of my life. » Posted By donnacha of WordSkill On September 26, 2011 @ 12:43 PMComments Posted By Donnacha of WordSkill
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