In this episode of WordPress Weekly, I shared a couple pieces of information such as the WordPress Weekly podcast has now been properly archived within the WPWeekly category here on WPTavern. I also explained what I’ve been up to regarding the Tavern forum as well as some miscellaneous stuff. After discussing some news stories during the week, I interviewed Lance Willett (@simpledream on Twitter) who is head of the theme wrangler team for Automattic to not only talk about themes in general, but the big news concerning commercial themes now available for WordPress.com users. There interview went off very well and I’m grateful Lance could spend part of his weekend with me.
P.S. Check out the newly designed ThemeShaper.com, the main site for the Automattic Theme Wranglers.
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This episode of WordPress Weekly is sponsored by WebDevStudios.com more specifically, their awesome collaboration plugin called CollabPress. CollabPress is a project and task management plugin that transforms WordPress into powerful collaboration software with the abilities to assign due dates, unlimited project, task list, and task creation, the ability to use built-in WordPress accounts and much more. CollabPress is guaranteed to work on WordPress 3.1 and is compatible with Multi-Site as well. If you run into any issues, there is a support forum dedicated solely to the plugin that is free for public use. You can find more information about this plugin at collabpress.org.
Matt Mullenweg was recently interviewed by KTEH who produces the program, “This Is Us“. The interview goes over a bunch of information such as Automattic, Matt’s enjoyment of WordCamps, the GPL licensing, and more. This is a great 5 minute spotlight for anyone that is not familiar with Matt. One of the best things he said during this interview was that:
It’s never good to see something you put your heart and soul into, being used for morally odious purposes. But, ultimately, the freedom to use the software for any purpose is far more important than the fact that I might disagree with some folks who use it.
He even talks a little bit about the legal action threat against Chris Pearson earlier this year.
I’m a day late and a dollar short on this story but it’s great to see Microsoft migrate their users to a robust platform that is actively developed rather than shutting down their doors without providing their users any recourse. Upon reading a lot of feedback on the deal, it’s become clear that there is still a large amount of people who don’t understand the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress the open source project. When folks just say WordPress, that enhances the confusion even further. How many times has this nightmare played itself?
Another thing I’ve seen mentioned a number of times is that there are now only two services where blogging can be done for free, WordPress.com and Blogger. This is not the case. You still have TypePad, Tumblr, and a few other services, despite the argument that they are mostly meant for short-hand publishing. There is a part of me however that would not like to see Blogger be absorbed into WordPress.com because things get pretty boring when you’re not chasing the #1 spot. As confirmed by Matt, the largest group of importers into WordPress.com are from Blogger. Since that’s the case, there is no reason to go after Blogger because Blogger is coming to them, slowly by surely. WordPress.com is in a great position as a hosted publishing service.
To all those who think WordPress can’t scale or be used for large websites, I suppose we’re about to find out as Automattic doubles their user-base. I’m looking forward to a post by Matt or Barry within the next few months that explains what had to be done to make the transition as smooth as possible. Congratulations to all those involved with the deal.
Peter Westwood who is a core comitter for the WordPress.org project and has been involved with the community for the majority of the projects existence has announced on his personal blog that he now become the newest member of the Automattic team as a “Happiness Gardener”. I’ve lost count but for the conspiracy theorists out there, this now makes one more Automattic employee with committ access.
This level of enjoyment has led me to consider at a number of points in time whether or not I should switch job and work full-time on WordPress.org as a freelance consultant or as an Automattician. In the end it felt like the right thing for me to do was to apply to be an Automattician. This will hopefully ensure that I have a dependable long-term income stream and the ability to spend my spare time on the things I love: Music, Photography, Food, and of course WordPress.
Congrats on the move Peter. Look forward to getting the chance to meet you at a future WordCamp.
We haven’t heard much about VaultPress since its launch on March 31st but today, the site has started to roll out the first round of beta invites. Considering the nature of the service where backups are a continous event, they are controlling the growth of the service through the invite system. What’s interesting and what may spark a lot more interest is the fact that early customers are getting a lifetime discount applied to their subscription while the price will go up to the premium level once VaultPress goes public.
To generate buzz and perhaps allow people to move ahead in line, Matt encourages you to blog about why you want to use VaultPress and then link to the blog post. Alternatively, you can use the hashtag #vaultpress on twitter. So far, I’ve yet to receive my invite but I’ll be keeping an eye on my inbox. If you were lucky enough to snag an invite, let us know about your experience in the comments.
While WordCamp Malaysia was just a few weeks ago (May 22nd) the folks who produce the This Week In Asia podcast caught up with Naoko McCracken who is a happiness engineer with Automattic. Within this interview, she talks about what that role entails, her work within the WordPress community, and WordPress usage in Malaysia. Here is a stat for you: Malaysia is the 16th most popular language used on WordPress.com.
I love it when other podcasts interview employees of Automattic, especially ones I’ve never heard from before. WordCast Conversations, episode twelve features an interview with Maya Desai who is charge of operations for Automattic. She is also the one WordCamp organizers most likely talk to when it comes to planning an event or having Automattic employees show up. In the interview, we find out how she became an Automattic employee (it’s a funny story), what it was like to transition from a corporate environment to a virtual one, and some other experiences she’s had. One tidbit of information that I picked up in the interview is that the WordPress store will be moved and run in-house. No word yet if there will be any new products added to the store. I’m waiting on a hat or a long sleeve shirt.
This episode of WordPress Weekly featured two individuals who are in the midst of running a successful service around WordPress while the other individual didn’t quite make it that far. The round-table consisted of Joshua Strebel of Page.ly, Daniel Bachhuber formerly of CoPress, and Raanan Bar-Cohen of Automattic. During this episode, we talked about the difficulties involved with running a service around WordPress. I was especially interested in the topic of Automattic running a commercial service along side free, open-source software. Daniel was able to offer a unique perspective as CoPress didn’t end up being successful in the long run and he tells us why. Joshua gave us some insight into the business strategies he thought of before launching the service. One thing Joshua mentions during the show is that if you’re going to run a service around WordPress, make sure you’re profitable from the first customer. Another theme that developed during this episode is the lack of trust in the Freemium model. If you are thinking about starting a commercial service around WordPress, this is the episode for you.
Smashing Book Contest:
Week Two Winner - jb510
Want to win a copy of the Smashing Book and a chance to participate in our wrap up episode on April 24th? Help us publicize the special WordPress Weekly series on commercialization! Just follow @WPTavern and guest co-host @jakemgold on Twitter, and Tweet a message mentioning us both with a link to the most recent episode. We’ll randomly pick one of our favorite tweets right before the next show.
We’ll be giving a book away for each of the episodes (excluding wrap up). You can participate each week. Each contest starts at 2pm on Saturday with the show’s recording, and ends the following Friday evening. You may participate if you’re outside of the contiguous United States, but will be asked to cover shipping expenses.
If we get over 500 participants in the contest, before the wrap up show, we’ll also give away one copy of Smashing WordPress to one participant after the last episode!
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This episode is also sponsored by EnvironmentsForHumans.com This is an organization that brings together expert speakers on a given topic exploring that topic from different angles. While they recently had a WordPRess Workshop, the next event will be a UX Web Summit on Wednesday, April 21, 2010 from 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM (CT). This event will teach people how to improve their websites so that they are more responsive to visitors as well as making this more usable. If you’re interested in this summit, visit UXWebSummit.com
The last part of the series will be held on Saturday, April 24th where we encourage everyone to send in their feedback or be part of the live show to discuss what you learned throughout this series.
Automattic recently hired yet another theme wrangler to join their theme team that they are putting together. His name is Lance Willett.
I’m stoked about my position as “Theme Wrangler” with Automattic. I’ll be working on web design and development projects, mostly revolving around themes and WordPress.com. I’m sure I’ll also use my Spanish and French skills since people all around the world use Automattic products.
Congratulations to you Lance for landing an awesome job with an awesome company.
In my post show discussion with Matt Mullenweg he mentioned to me that Lance was recently hired. I inquired what exactly the theme team was supposed to do for Automattic. The theme team is comprised of individuals that will focus initially on creating and porting themes for WordPress.com. One of the most requested items from WordPress.com users is the ability to choose from more themes. Themes that stand the highest chance of being ported over into WordPress.com are the ones found within the theme repository. However, as they have done in the past, Automattic may choose to contract out a theme design from a commercial theme company. On top of that, if a company such as WooThemes or StudioPress developed a theme exclusively for WordPress.com, Matt has no problem with the credit link going back to that companies home page.
Automattic is planning on putting together a theme team of about 5 or so people. So far, Lance Willett and Ian Stewart are part of that team. Maybe Justin Tadlock will submit his application to Automattic to be part of this team. He obviously has the skills necessary but I wonder if he has the interest in working for Automattic or if he’s even submitted an application already. At any rate, I figured I’d give you the opportunity to name your dream theme team consisting of 5 people.
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?
In this episode of WordPress Weekly, I shared a couple pieces of information such as the WordPress Weekly podcast has now been properly archived within the WPWeekly category here on WPTavern. I also explained what I’ve been up to regarding the Tavern forum as well as some miscellaneous stuff. After discussing some news stories during the week, I interviewed Lance Willett (@simpledream on Twitter) who is head of the theme wrangler team for Automattic to not only talk about themes in general, but the big news concerning commercial themes now available for WordPress.com users. There interview went off very well and I’m grateful Lance could spend part of his weekend with me. 
