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By Jeffro on May 7, 2013
The folks behind Pressnomics have announced the dates for this years conference. It will be held on October 17th-19th. For those that don’t know, Pressnomics is a conference centered around the services and products that have created a successful and diverse economy around WordPress. Tickets go on sale June 19th at 10am PST and will be released in batches. From what I understand, there are a few folks that will be selectively invited to attend the conference, just like last year.
I didn’t have the opportunity to attend the event last year but from all of the posts and tweets I read, it was one hell of an event I missed. I will do what I can to be in attendance this year. The primary reason I want to attend this conference is because most of the WordPress business movers and shakers are under one roof and there are a ton of things to learn from them. I want to seize that knowledge from these folks and pass it along to you.
Here are a few links from attendees of last years event to give you a better idea of what this conference is all about.
Alex King – Pressnomics 2012
AZ Tech Beat – Key Takeaways From Pressnomics 2012 Day 1 – AZ Tech Beat
WebSavvy Marketing – PressNomics: People Are The True WordPress Core
WebDevStudios – Pressnomics – Not Just Another WordCamp
Posted in Meetups | Tagged commercial, economy, pressnomics |
By Jeffro on November 25, 2012
Over on the Automattic Theme team blog, Michelle Langston has published a great primer on distributing themes whether they be free or commercially based. Besides the tips offered for distribution, the tutorial also covers a number of things all theme authors should consider doing before releasing there theme into the wild such as making sure it’s adaptable, adding a right to left style sheet and avoiding hard coding. I was happy to see that with regards to licensing, there wasn’t much fluff added. One other thing I noticed that theme authors should find helpful is a codex article that lists resources that are GPL-compatible such as Fonts and icon sets.
Posted in Themes | Tagged commercial, distribution, free, Themes
By Jeffro on May 4, 2012
In what I believe is the first of it’s kind, PressNomics aims to bring together the various commercial entities that are successfully making a living around WordPress. The conference is being held in Chandler, Arizona which by the way, is a great name for a city between November 8th and 10th, 2012. There is room for around 150-200 attendees with ticket prices starting at $150.00. The tickets go on sale starting in June but most of the attendees will be personally invited. While Joshua and Sally Strebel are among those organizing the conference, this is not a Page.ly focused event. Among the list of confirmed speakers thus far include Mark Jaquith and Mikkel Svane, the CEO of ZenDesk.
When I asked Josh why he’s helping to put on this event, here was his response:
I had this idea for a while and finally decided to execute on it after discussing it with others. People seem to agree that having a meet up of sorts to discuss best practices and learn from each others experiences and stories would be helpful. The programming is for the benefit of the businesses that drive the WordPress economy, not so much the end user of WordPress. + it is a good excuse to get together with our peers.
Sounds like a great idea to me. There is already a lot of collaboration between commercial WordPress entities in the community but I think this will do a lot of businesses some good to get together in person, especially to share success and failure stories. One thing worth noting is that this is definitely not a WordCamp event as illustrated via their disclaimer.
This is not a WordCamp, and it has not been endorsed by or is affiliated with the WordPress Foundation. WordPress is a trademark of the WordPress Foundation, respect.
While organizing an event like this is not easy, it has to be considerably easier to be able to put on a conference about a specific aspect of WordPress with 0 restrictions.
Related But Not Required Reading:
– The Concept Of A PressNomics Conference
Posted in News | Tagged commercial, conference, economics |
By Jeffro on February 3, 2012
Congratulations goes out to Luke McDonald as one of the themes produced by Press75.com has been selected to be part of the WordPress.com commercial theme store. The theme is priced at $50.00 and is called Debut. It’s mobile ready right out of the box along with having post format support. Speaking of post formats, Debut is especially interesting because when users select the Audio post format, it expands into a multi-track playlist. You can see the theme in action via the WordPress.com theme showcase.
Posted in Themes | Tagged commercial, formats, Themes, wordpress.com
By Jeffro on January 18, 2012
In-depth article by Siobahn McKeown that breaks down how commercial plugin developers are monetizing their efforts through the WordPress.org plugin respository. The article covers the guidelines that plugin authors should follow, examples of successful plugins as well as plugins that didn’t meet the guidelines, and various ideas plugin authors can try. One of the things I learned through that article is the existence of a detailed plugin guidelines page which didn’t exist before. It’s about time something like this was created as it answers questions up-front instead of leaving a ton of uncertainty up to the plugin author. ∞
Posted in Plugins | Tagged commercial, guidelines, Plugins |
By Jeffro on December 19, 2011
One of my favorite WordPress plugins of all time WP Ajax Edit Comments, will soon be free again for all to use. According to a recent email sent out by iThemes, as of January 1st, 2012 they will no longer be supporting Ajax Edit Comments as a premium plugin. Instead, the full version will be uploaded to the WordPress.org plugin repository where users will be able to continue using the plugin with free updates. For iThemes customers that have recently purchased the plugin, they’ll have two options. The first is to request a full refund. The second is to receive a six month upgrade to the PluginBuddy Developer Suite which is valued at $100.00.
This is yet another twist for this particular plugin. Over the past few years, it’s gone from a small, free plugin to having a site built specifically for it with paying customers, managed by Ronald Huereca. Soon after, Ajay D’ Souza stepped in as co-developer of the plugin. Then, Ronald joined the team at iThemes which placed Ajax Edit Comments behind their pay wall. Coming back full circle, it will be available again for free.
Posted in Plugins | Tagged comments, commercial, free, plugin |
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 September 9, 2011
The WP 101 Tutorial Plugin is a combined effort by Shawn Hesketh and Mark Jaquith. The premise of the plugin is simple, to showcase video tutorials of WordPress from within the back-end of WordPress. After using the plugin and watching a few videos, I think it delivers on all levels.
A view of the player within the back-end of WordPress
From what I could tell, the video player is powered by Vimeo but don’t go to Vimeo.com looking for a way to view these videos for free, I already tried that. The player supports watching videos at full screen or in HD which is a nice touch. The audio within the videos is easy to understand and follows the flow of the animation. As far as the settings go, there is only one to worry about, your API key. Once you pay for your monthly subscription, you’ll be given an API key that gives you access to the videos.
I believe there are two groups of customers that will really benefit from these videos. The first are consultants. I’m sure many WordPress consultants dread the time they spend having to teach someone where to click and what does what in WordPress when they could be spending their time doing something else. The second group are those looking for educational materials at a low cost. There are 17 videos in all covering everything from the Dashboard to the media library, to changing the theme. Basically, just about everything a novice WordPress user should know before they decide to tinker with the inner workings of WordPress on their own. So, for $48.00 for one month, you can cram in all 17 videos and then cancel your subscription. In this instance, I think $48.00 for one month of viewing is a great value for this content considering the production quality. However, $48.00 per month for 12 months is $576.00 per year which is a hefty price to pay as a user who just wants to learn about WordPress. This is why I think the majority of customers for WP101 will most likely be consultants who are the ones with recurring revenue through jobs that can afford subscriptions lasting three months or more.
Overall, the plugin is simple to install, simple to use, and definitely delivers when it comes to professional quality training videos for WordPress. You can watch a sample video that’s part of the package here.
*Update*
As mentioned in the comments, this video package is different than the one offered on WP101.com where individuals can access the same video content by paying a $19 one time fee for a lifetime membership which is extremely more affordable for individuals than this package. They are the same videos but clearly, the Plugin reviewed in this post is aimed at consultants, not at individuals.
Posted in Plugins | Tagged commercial, plugin, service, Tutorials |
By Jeffro on April 5, 2011
In a interesting business move by WooThemes, the commercial theme company has announced that they will be re-focusing their efforts to be a WordPress centric theme company, again. Another example as to how time flies, it wasn’t too long ago when WooThemes began releasing themes for Expression Engine, Tumblr, Drupal, Joomla, and Magento. This was a move to diversify their business and expand into different markets but after a year into the experiment, it turns out that there is more to it than cranking out themes.
- We have no knowledge of these platforms, which meant we had to partner with collaborative developers to help us expand onto these other CMS’s. We luckily found brilliant partners passionate and committed to their niche CMS strengths. Collaborations have their own little intricacies and our experience with these platforms & development processes was just never the same, as it was with WP.
- We realized that we had no knowledge of these communities, which meant that it was hard for ourselves to get a firm foothold there. Our roots are firmly in the WP community and as a result we always tried to replicate our WP ideas in these other communities, but we eventually realized that we had to tailor our approaches accordingly. The decision to focus our attention on WP instead is simply due to team capacity, budgets & priorities.
- In our hearts, and without trying to step on anyone’s feet, we could never get as excited about a new Drupal or EE theme in the same way we do before every WP release. Passion is always important.
It’s great to see that WooThemes is taking measures to ensure that their non WordPress platform customers will be taken care of by the end of April. So is it a risky move by WooThemes to reorganize into a one platform theme company again? Of course, but it’s not like WordPress is going any where and it doesn’t seem to be crumbling down anytime soon. How long WordPress continues to be king of the hill remains to be seen but I’d venture to guess it will be at least a couple more years. Hopefully longer.
Posted in News | Tagged commercial, drupal, woothemes, wordpress
By Jeffro on March 29, 2011
I’m not sure if you noticed as much as I have but there seems to be a commercial theme sorter popping up on every corner. At least, that’s the impression I get as I’ve routinely been receiving emails lately from people letting me know about the launch of their theme sorter. The newest one to launch which has over 500 themes from 19 sellers listed with a goal to reach over 1,000 by this summer is called ThemeSorter. ThemeSorter provides different ways to browse through their listing such as color, specific niche, ratings, styles, etc.
Talk about an easy business model. There are so many commercial themes being developed by established companies with brand new commercial theme businesses opening shop every week that it makes sense to create a directory of sorts to try and make sense of everything. The directory has to be easy to browse, contain affiliate links to their respective theme authors and hope people go through you to purchase the theme. Special deals from those sellers wouldn’t hurt either.
The question I have about all these different theme sorters is which one will gain critical mass? That is, which one will end up having a community of people or users that rate and review themes similar to customers reviewing items that have purchased from Amazon? Which one will be the go-to place that has the largest and most legit listing? I’ve heard many people request that there be a place similar to the WordPress.org theme repository but for commercial themes and these theme sorters seem to fit the bill although they don’t contain any files to download. They are informative only.
If nothing else, these commercial theme aggregation sites make for a good place to get inspiration or find out what the latest designs are from the commercial theme ecosystem surrounding WordPress. How many of you have actually used one of these sites to purchase a commercial theme?
Posted in Themes | Tagged commercial, sorting, Themes |
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The folks behind Pressnomics have announced the dates for this years conference. It will be held on October 17th-19th. For those that don’t know, Pressnomics is a conference centered around the services and products that have created a successful and diverse economy around WordPress. Tickets go on sale June 19th at 10am PST and will be released in batches. From what I understand, there are a few folks that will be selectively invited to attend the conference, just like last year. 
WP Ajax Edit Comments To Be Free Again
By Jeffro on December 19, 2011
This is yet another twist for this particular plugin. Over the past few years, it’s gone from a small, free plugin to having a site built specifically for it with paying customers, managed by Ronald Huereca. Soon after, Ajay D’ Souza stepped in as co-developer of the plugin. Then, Ronald joined the team at iThemes which placed Ajax Edit Comments behind their pay wall. Coming back full circle, it will be available again for free.
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Posted in Plugins | Tagged comments, commercial, free, plugin | 3 Responses