Tag Archives: product

Pedraum Pardehpoosh Joins Automattic as VP of Product – WP Tavern

[ad_1] Last week, Automattic announced Pedraum Pardehpoosh as its new Vice President of Product. Though a new face in the WordPress arena, he brings extensive tech experience from both startups and major corporations like Walmart, Apple, and Airbnb. In the announcement, Automattic shared, “As VP of Product, Pedraum will oversee product excellence across Automattic, beginning by immersing himself in the open source WordPress ecosystem that drives innovation for 43% of the Internet.”  I’m thrilled to be joining Automattic. My top focus will be to understand the WordPress ecosystem deeply, first and foremost. After that, I hope to help foster a culture of product development, befitting a company of Automattic’s stature. With so much talent and so many great ideas that go along with that, I expect the top challenges will be prioritization and focus. – Pedraum Pardehpoosh Automattic’s product portfolio includes WordPress.com, Woo, Jetpack, WordPress VIP, Simplenote, Longreads, The Atavist, WPScan, Akismet, Gravatar, Crowdsignal, Cloudup, Tumblr, Day One, Pocket Casts, Newspack, and Beeper.  Pedraum’s appointment comes during an exciting time for Automattic as they migrate Tumblr to WordPress. The company is actively hiring for this migration and other roles, with open positions listed here. [ad_2] Source link

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“It Has Become Clear to Me that AMP Remains a Google Product” – WP Tavern

[ad_1] Jeremy Keith, a web developer and contributor to the web standards movement, has resigned from the AMP Advisory Committee. Keith was selected for the committee last year, despite his well-documented criticisms of the AMP project. In his resignation email, he cites Google’s control of the project and its small percentage of open source parts as reasons for his growing resentment: I can’t in good faith continue to advise on the AMP project for the OpenJS Foundation when it has become clear to me that AMP remains a Google product, with only a subset of pieces that could even be considered open source. If I were to remain on the advisory committee, my feelings of resentment about this situation would inevitably affect my behaviour. So it’s best for everyone if I step away now instead of descending into outright sabotage. It’s not you, it’s me. During his time with the committee, Keith worked on defining what AMP is and pushing for clarification on whether the project encompasses more than just a collection of web components. The Google-controlled AMP cache and validation aspects of the project were the most concerning in evaluating his continued participation. Although the AMP Validator is open source, the rules for validation are controlled by Google: I was hoping it was a marketing problem. We spent a lot of time on the advisory committee trying to figure out ways of making it clearer what AMP actually is. But it was a losing battle. The phrase “the AMP project” is used to cover up the deeply interwingled nature of its constituent parts. Bits of it are open source, but most of it is proprietary. The OpenJS Foundation doesn’t seem like a good home for a mostly-proprietary project. When AMP joined the OpenJS Foundation in 2019, skeptics hailed the transfer as “mostly meaningless window-dressing.” What Keith witnessed during his time with the advisory committee lends credit to these early doubts about AMP being able to gain independence from Google: Whenever a representative from Google showed up at an advisory committee meeting, it was clear that they viewed AMP as a Google product. I never got the impression that they planned to hand over control of the project to the OpenJS Foundation. Instead, they wanted to hear what people thought of their project. I’m not comfortable doing that kind of unpaid labour for a large profitable organisation. Even worse, Google representatives reminded us that AMP was being used as a foundational technology for other Google products: stories, email, ads, and even some weird payment thing in native Android apps. That’s extremely worrying. Keith’s experience echoes some of the claims in the ongoing antitrust lawsuit against Google, led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and nine other state attorneys general. The complaint states that the transfer of the AMP project to the OpenJS Foundation was superficial: Although Google claims that AMP was developed as an open-source collaboration, AMP is actually a Google-controlled initiative. Google originally registered and still owns AMP’s domain, ampproject.org. In addition, until the end of 2018, Google controlled all AMP decisionmaking. AMP relied on a governance model called “Benevolent Dictator For Life” that vested ultimate decision-making authority in a single Google engineer. Since then, Google has transferred control of AMP to a foundation, but the transfer was superficial. Google controls the foundation’s board and debates internally [REDACTED]. Keith was originally inspired by fellow dissenter Terence Eden to join the committee in hopes of making a difference. Eden eventually resigned from the committee in December 2020, after concluding that Google has limited interest in making AMP a better web citizen: “I do not think AMP, in its current implementation, helps make the web better,” Eden said. “I remain convinced that AMP is poorly implemented, hostile to the interests of both users and publishers, and a proprietary and unnecessary incursion into the open web.” Three days after Keith’s resignation, the foundation published a post titled, “An update on how AMP is served at the OpenJS Foundation.” The post seems to address Keith’s impression that Google does not intend to hand over control of the project. “When the AMP project moved to the OpenJS Foundation in 2019, our technical governance leaders shared a plan to separate the AMP runtime from the Google AMP Cache, and host the AMP runtime infrastructure at the vendor-neutral OpenJS Foundation,” OpenJS Foundation Executive Director Robin Ginn said. “OpenJS is happy to report that this complex task of re-architecting the AMP infrastructure is making tremendous progress thanks to input and guidance from the AMP Technical Steering Committee (TSC) and AMP Advisory Committee, as well as thanks to the AMP Project and OpenJS teams for coming together despite the work and life challenges that were sometimes faced during the pandemic.” The statement reiterated AMP’s status as an open source project multiple times. Ginn did not elaborate on the “tremendous progress” but did announce a new development – the decision to be more hands-on in hosting AMP infrastructure. “What’s new is that after disentangling the AMP runtime from the Google AMP Cache, the OpenJS Foundation will manage the servers that deliver the AMP runtime files (the download server and the CDN),” Ginn said. “As planned, the OpenJS Foundation has been involved in the implementation of hosting the CDN and has been spending additional time to fully understand the technical requirements.” The OpenJS blog had not communicated any updates on the AMP project for nearly a year. While this post seems like a reaction to the news of Keith’s resignation, it publicly confirms that the teams are still working on the infrastructure transfer. In the end, this may not be enough to convince critics that AMP is not simply a Google product with a fancy affiliation designed to make it more appealing to detractors. So far, the project’s new home at the OpenJS Foundation has done little to bolster public opinion in the face of allegations that identify AMP as having an important role in Google’s anti-competitive practices. Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link

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Termly Acquires GDPR/CCPA Cookie Consent Banner, Turns Free Plugin Into a Commercial SaaS Product – WP Tavern

[ad_1] Company A sells its plugin. Company B picks it up and moves forward with an overhauled version that looks and feels much different than the original. Users are outraged by the changes. It seems to be a repeating theme in 2021, almost as a rule rather than an exception. Last month, Termly announced its acquisition of the GDPR/CCPA Cookie Consent Banner plugin. The plugin was a simple tool for adding and styling a consent banner for the front end. It is now a SaaS (Software as a Service) product that requires a Termly account to operate. According to the team’s blog post, such changes were necessary. “Termly’s products, including the cookie consent management platform, are designed to cover the EU GDPR, the ePrivacy Directive, UK GDPR, and the CCPA. These laws require more than just a cookie consent banner to be compliant. Termly can help you build a privacy policy, create a Data Subject Access Request form, and comply with other privacy law requirements.” In the past couple of weeks, users have taken to the WordPress.org review system, handing out 21 of the plugin’s 29 total one-star ratings. The project has over 200,000 users, so more should be expected if the general consensus is that this was a poor move by the company. One of the complaints from users is the commercialization of the plugin. In the past, it was completely free to use. While there is still a free tier, users are limited to a mere 100 monthly unique visitors on a single domain. After hitting that limit, the banner will stop collecting consent records. The next level up costs $15 per month if paid annually. New pricing options for the Termly service. As Pattaya Web Services pointed out via Twitter, “GDPR/CCPA Cookie Consent Banner for #Wordpress has been purchased by #Termly and will now cost most website owners $180 per year.” Termly must get a return on its investment. The company has developers to pay, and they have families to feed. But, I suspect the average user will not warm up to the so-limiting-that-it-is-free-in-name-only introduction level. Having to pay for features that have been free for years will not sit well with many. Of course, there is always the option of using the old version, but Termly has no plans of maintaining it or ensuring that it meets compliance. The only alternative for small site owners who cannot afford to pay is to opt for another solution. “I guess GDPR Cookie Consent banner, now operated by @Termly_io didn’t learn anything from [the] fiasco with WP User Avatar plugin reported by @wptavern earlier this year,” wrote user Gennady Kurushin on Twitter. I believe they did. There are differences, and Termly’s handling of this showed a willingness to be transparent. And, I cannot stress this enough: the new plugin is not an entirely different one unrelated to its core purpose. It was overhauled and turned into a SaaS product. At the end of the day, it is still a cookie consent management plugin — just different and costs a lot more for most users. Unlike Dark Mode and ProfilePress, Termly did not make the changes in the dead of night. At least the company was upfront about everything. The team included an announcement in a point release two weeks before sending out the overhauled version. It disabled automatic updates so that users would not accidentally upgrade without being aware of what was coming. It even published a public blog post detailing what was happening. Prior notice of upcoming changes in 3.0 and disabled auto-updates. If anything, Termly took just about all the necessary steps it could have taken to prepare its user base. If a “right” way existed for a complete and utter makeover of a plugin, the company did as much. That level of honesty is a bit more than we have seen in the past. The changes may still leave a bitter taste in the mouths of many users, but Termly should at least get a few points for making them in the light of day. The result may be the same: fundamental changes in how the plugin operates, but users had a chance to ditch it or continue using the old version before anything went into effect. For some users, it may not be much, but that’s worth something. I won’t be breaking out my pitchfork today, but I do not use the plugin. As more and more users upgrade to 3.0+ and realize they are essentially on the line for $180 per year, the reviews could get ugly. Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link

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WooCommerce Advanced Product Labels Plugin Review/Tutorial (2021)

[ad_1] Have a WooCommerce store and wish to stand out from other merchants selling online? Try adding product labels. Product labels are a great way to showcase important details about your product, display special offers, and highlight ongoing sales in your store. And if you brighten them up with eye-catching colors and interesting graphics, they’ll look pretty dang appealing to anyone who visits your store. Today, we’re going to explore the capabilities of a plugin that makes it simple to add and manage product labels. Its name? Advanced Product Labels. WooCommerce Advanced Product Labels is a powerful WordPress plugin by BeRocket offering a range of attractive templates, label content options, advanced styling, and more. It’s designed to help you improve conversions by making products dynamic, engaging, and noticeable. It’s hard to describe the label effect with just text, so you can check out the plugin in action here and here to see what I mean. These are live examples of what Advanced Product Labels helps you create. The plugin has almost 30,000 installs and has been on the market since 4 years. In our hands-on WooCommerce Advanced Product Labels review, I’ll give you a detailed look at how this plugin works and how you can use it to add labels to your products. WooCommerce Advanced Product Labels Review: The Feature List In a nutshell, BeRocket Advanced Product Labels is a product personalization, and enhancement tool specifically built for WooCommerce and WordPress. It helps you create product labels that stand out on your site with features like: Article Continues Below 50+ ready-to-use templates, including customizable CSS templates, discount timer templates, and image templates Various content types and product conditions Label style options like font color and custom label borders Opacity & Gradient modification and shadow effect The tool also lets you choose the type of label you want to add to your products. For example, you can select the “In title” label to place the label to the right or left side of the product title. As BeRocket Advanced Product Label is a WooCommerce-specific tool, it plays nicely with the core WooCommerce installation. All you have to do is install it on your WordPress WooCommerce site, permit it to access your WooCommerce functionality via the WordPress API, and you’re good to go. Hands-On with BeRocket Advanced Product Labels Now, let’s dive in, and I’ll show you how the different features of WooCommerce Advanced Product Labels work. 1. Creating a New Label To get started, you open up your WordPress dashboard and click BeRocket → Advanced Labels. Your next step is to add a label. To do so, click the Add Label button beside the Advanced Labels heading at the top of your screen. BeRocket will now redirect you to an area where you’ll find tools to create a new custom label from scratch. First, you’ll enter a title for your label. You could write “Sale” or “Bestseller” depending on how you wish to promote your items. Then, you can choose from the 17 conditions available for your product label. At this point, you can decide if you want to mix conditions using “AND” or “OR” operators. When creating a Sale label for my product, I selected On Sale as the first condition and Page ID as the second condition. Then I used the AND operator to form a relation between the two. Next, go to Advanced Label Settings and pick a template you want to use for your label. As you do that, BeRocket will give you options to hide the label on mobile, tablet, and/or desktop. Check the box for the device you don’t want the label to appear on. You also get to select from 8 content types for the label: Article Continues Below Depending on the option you choose, the plugin will modify the text, background image, and image title of the label. Once done, click Save to create your new label. 2. Modifying a Label’s Style Not content with the existing style of your label? No problem – you can tweak it through the Style tab in Advanced Labels Settings. Let me show you how it’s done. First, I’ll create a new label, this time to showcase stock status. Then, I’ll click the Style tab and select a new background color. There’s a lot of options to play with. You can modify the font size, width, height, border radius, border width, and more for your label. Two options that stood out to me are Opacity and Shadow effects. Used correctly, these two effects can draw attention to your best deals. 3. Changing a Label’s Position Another neat option in the Advanced Product Labels tab is Position. This setting allows you to decide between keeping the label in its current position, putting it on the image, or placing it in the product title. Based on the option type of position you choose, BeRocket will let you adjust the label for the positions left, right, and center. You can also adjust the padding and margin of the label and rotate it as a part of an A/B test to see if a uniquely positioned label improves your conversions. 4. Using Tooltip BeRocket Advanced Product Labels also lets you create a tooltip. Also known as a hint or info tip, a tooltip is a graphical UI element that displays a text box containing information about an element when a user hovers over it. You can create a tooltip for any label to inform visitors about its function or convey what a particular abbreviation stands for. BeRocket allows you to enter the content you want to display and upload a custom tooltip image.  Article Continues Below The plugin also lets you decide whether you want the tooltip to appear or close after a delay, whether it should have a dark, light, or translucent style, and more. Further, you can adjust the tooltip for positions top, bottom, left, and right. Place it wherever you think your visitors are most likely to

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My Journey From Freelancer To Product Maker

[ad_1] Like many others in our industry, my WordPress journey started a while ago. I built my first website using GeoCities when I was 14 years old, 21 years ago (boy am I getting old). At the time I was obsessed with skateboarding, the website was for friends I used to hang out and ride around with from school. I remember how excited I felt when I could see that my website was online and I would literally show it to everyone I could, even though looking back at it now it was extremely brightly coloured and scrappy! Back then, with my family’s 56k connection, whenever I connected to the internet it would take over the landline, so I was only allowed to go online for an hour per day. So I spent the days fiddling with Front Page, just waiting for my 1 hour to upload the code and share the updates with my MIRC friends (kinda like a Stone Age version of Slack). That’s about the time I also picked up a guitar for the first time…. Music, business and websites To start I borrowed a super cheap electric guitar from a friend to learn how to play, and impress a girl I liked. After playing all evening, I felt so inspired that the guitar ended up next to me while I slept in bed. It was love at first chord. Because I was so obsessed, I couldn’t stop practicing and quickly I became pretty good (for a kid). So much so that I formed a band with some friends and started performing wherever we could. For the next decade, I focused on becoming the best rock musician I could. I didn’t want to just play the guitar in a band that was performing at local events and school, I wanted us to go places and started treating it as a business. I began studying business by reading every book I could, which led me to take courses and become a certified business and digital consultant. During my studies, I learned WordPress and the entire Adobe suite. This was my first introduction to WordPress and it made me love designing and developing websites even more than I already did. I had fun during this time, but they were some tough years and despite all of my efforts, my band wasn’t doing very well. After everything I had put into it, I thought I’d have my own episode on MTV Cribs already! We decided the band needed a change. We rebranded, wrote new stuff, this time in English to maximise our reach, and did an online launch using everything I learned. Within a month of the launch, my local band from a small town in Israel was signed to release an album worldwide through a British label. We were stoked! We decided to drop everything, come to the UK and start touring Europe. And so we did! Starting from scratch, we began building our audience at small venues and pubs, while really pumping things up online, using WordPress to build our website and promote! We went from playing to sometimes less than 10 people to hundreds, then thousands. Playing with some of the artists we grew up listening to. It was pretty amazing, but I was still broke surprisingly! Luckily though, from my efforts in promoting the band using our website and designs on social media, my work began to get noticed and I started to attract clients. With little to no money in my bank account, I started freelancing out the back of our tour van and built clients websites while touring Europe. Free McDonalds WiFi became my best friend and no matter where we went, there was always one nearby. While I drew in more clients and started generating revenue for myself, unfortunately my band ended up splitting up. It was unavoidable and in the end, it was the best thing that could have happened to me (even though it was devastating at the time). I then thought, “you know what, I’m going to start taking this freelancing thing seriously.” I started building my own business, using my rediscovered passion for the web and WordPress in particular. As I got deeper into building websites, I began to insert myself more into the WordPress community, which filled the void of being “the band guy”. As my time now wasn’t being taken up by touring, I employed my first designer and this is where my agency took off. We managed to pull in 6 figures within the first year, and we kept growing! Within a few years, my agency grew to 12 employees. As I acquired more clients, I realized there was something holding me back. From Agency To Product Maker As we began dealing with more and more clients day-to-day, it became blindingly apparent that we simply did not have the correct tools to deal with the volume efficiently. So, I went on the hunt for a platform or tool that could help organize and deal with client requests quickly and easily. We already had a ticketing system in place, while using emails, phone calls and face to face meetings, but it was just all a mess. There are solutions to the problems of project management BUT I struggled to find a purely dedicated platform that was for a web design agency. I arranged a meeting with my team and we decided, let’s just build our own solution. We had the designers and developers to make it happen, so…we did! We developed a simple WordPress plugin that we could use to take requests from our clients across all of their websites, and after it was implemented, it worked like a dream. Being the person I am though, I didn’t stop there. I thought, “other people should be using this” and that’s where my product, Atarim, was born. I reached out to the WordPress community wherever I could and got a bunch of beta testers to try it

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Product Redirection for WooCommerce Review: Redirect Visitors Easily

[ad_1] Managing and scaling a WooCommerce shop is not easy. You need to take care of so many things at once, such as inventory, prices, design, constant updating, and whatnot. In between all of this, it’s possible to miss out on smaller tasks like stock running out or hurting your SEO due to deleting a product. To make sure this does not happen to you, Poly Plugins created a plugin to make WooCommerce redirection easier. In this article, I’ll review the plugin in-depth and will check out its features. Review: Product Redirection for WooCommerce Product Redirection for WooCommerce provides a solution for a specific problem that most big products in the WooCommerce space do not provide. Even if there are products that provide a similar solution, they are often bloated with other unnecessary features and end up slowing down the website. And I am sure we all know how important speed is when it comes to growing WooCommerce stores. So, What Does the Product Redirection Plugin for Woocommerce Do? The purpose of this plugin is to help WooCommerce store owners who are not familiar with SEO by allowing them to easily add redirects to deleted product pages. The plugin allows you to prevent deleting WooCommerce products and assigns required redirection instructions and notices for deleted products. This way, you can redirect the traffic you are getting on a specific page to a different one easily. Why is Redirection Necessary? When a user sees a 404 error, most of the time, they just go back and visit a different link, and this is not at all good for the business. Instead, you can lead the user to a different page and tell them, “The product is no longer available. Consider checking our other products.” Once the product is deleted, it does not tell Google to stop ranking it in search results. If someone looking for “AC DC Tshirt” lands on your product page and sees a 404 notice, they will just go back. This will give a negative signal to Google, and it will affect your rankings. On top of that, the increased bounce rate will become another problem altogether. To prevent this from happening, you need to provide proper (301 and 302) redirects. Features of Product Redirection for WooCommerce While exploring and using the plugin, I came across some useful features which I found worth sharing. Here are some of the notable features:  You can show a popup on the deletion of a product in the store backend suggesting to add a redirect or a notice. This would help you keep up with things even if you forgot to add redirects. For every product, you can easily add a redirect, display a notice or add a landing page for products. You can show related products under the notice. If any product goes out of stock, you can show an out-of-stock notice and can showcase related products below the notice. Since the product also handles the SEO aspects of redirection, you don’t have to worry; even if you are getting 50,000 hits per month on a product page, they will be redirected to the page you want. Hands-on with Product Redirection for WooCommerce In this section, I will install and explore the plugin’s features on a local WordPress installation.  The plugin has two versions: Free and Pro. The free version is available on the WordPress repository, and with the free version, you get the following features: Article Continues Below Warning notice to not delete products. Custom redirect options: parent category, custom URL. In addition to these features, you get these features in the pro version: Notices on product pages if the product is out of stock. Auto out of stock product management. Custom redirect to landing pages. Recommended products below notices. For this tutorial, we will check out the pro version of the product. Installation and Activation The product installation is simple and straightforward like any other plugin. You can download the plugin once you’ve purchased it. Go to Plugins > Add New. Upload the plugin and click on the Install button. If you do not have Advanced Custom Fields installed, you need to install it as well. However, you might not need to do that in the future, as the devs have plans to remove ACF dependency in the upcoming updates. And of course, this goes without saying; you’ll need a WooCommerce store set up to use this plugin. Backend and User Interface All settings and options are available in a single space in the WooCommerce tab. To access these settings, go to your WooCommerce website’s dashboard. Now click on WooCommerce > Redirection. We’ll be going into a bit of detail here, so sit tight! Here you will see four tabs: General, Out of Stock, License, and Support. General Tab Popup: This triggers a warning popup when you click trash or delete any product. The popup will look like this: Disable Trash/Deletion: When enabled, admins or any other users won’t be able to delete any product. Out of Stock Tab In this tab, you can define what happens when a product goes out of stock. Out of Stock: This check box enables all the options below. Out of Stock Notice: This option lets you set a custom notice when the product goes out of stock. Out of Stock Recommendations: Enabling this option will start showing related products from the parent category. Recommendations Product Count: This option allows you to select the number of products to recommend. Recommendation location: You can select the location for the recommendations. You can select from 9 different locations. License Tab In this tab, you can insert the license for your product. Probably, this is the first tab you’ll visit after installing the plugin. Article Continues Below Support Tab Although it is available as a tab, this option leads you to a new page where you can get support if you face any problems. How to Set Redirects for WooCommerce Products While most options are

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