[ad_1] WooSesh kicked off this week with a keynote session from WooCommerce CEO Paul Maiorana, who gave an overview of the current state of the ecosystem. More than 3.4 million websites use WooCommerce, according to Builtwith, including 25% of the top million online stores. It is by far the most popular solution among WordPress sites with e-commerce, capturing 93% of the market share. Maiorana covered some industry-wide trends taking shape in 2023. WooCommerce merchants are uncertain about the economy and while some are optimistic, others do not see it improving soon. Although growth has slowed since the pandemic-fueled rapid acceleration towards e-commerce in 2021, Maiorana said revenues are projected to gain steadily through 2025. WooCommerce core is entering a transformative time, as the new admin has been fully merged and Cart and Checkout blocks are now part of core (in beta). The plugin is becoming more block friendly with more than 40 blocks available now. WooCommerce has seen a 319% increase in the usage of block themes and is aiming to have full out-of-the-box compatibility with any block-based theme. The Market for Hosted WooCommerce Products Is Heating Up One of the biggest announcements from the event was that WooCommerce is developing its own hosted, turnkey solution in collaboration with hosting partners. WordPress.com will be the first to pilot the product in February 2023. Maiorana said the goal of the solution is to improve onboarding and retention with the following : WooCommerce pre-installed, activated, and hosted A pre-packaged set of essential plugins Simplified onboarding that works with partners’ systems to improve conversion Competitive monthly price to reduce churn Co-marketing and revenue share with hosts WooCommerce’s hosted solution will be in direct competition with other hosts that have recently launched their own products. In November 2021, GoDaddy acquired Pagely with the intent to deploy a new SaaS WooCommerce product. Pagely was paired with previous 2020 acquisitions of Poynt, a payment processor, and SkyVerge, a popular WooCommerce plugin development company, to create an integrated solution. Last month, GoDaddy launched an open access preview of Managed WooCommerce Stores to US-based customers. GoDaddy’s solution boasts the ability to sync across marketplaces, including Amazon, eBay, Google, Walmart, Etsy, and YouTube, with a single dashboard managing payment processing, marketing, shipping, and inventory. It is integrated with GoDaddy Payments for both online and in-person transactions, which incur a transaction fee of 2.3% + 30¢. The hosted WooCommerce preview plans range from $99.99/month – $249.99/month. At WooSesh today, Beka Rice, Senior Director of Product Management at GoDaddy, gave an overview of multichannel and omnichannel sales for e-commerce merchants during her presentation. Enabling multichannel store management seems to be one of the main selling points of GoDaddy’s offering. Bluehost is another recent contender in the managed WooCommerce hosting space, having launched its product last month. In March, Newfold Digital, Bluehost’s parent company, acquired YITH, a WordPress plugin company with more than 100 WooCommerce extensions. Bluehost’s managed WooCommerce packages include a curated set of YITH plugins to help merchants extend their stores to offer gift cards, bookings and appointments, wishlists, product filtering, and more. Bluehost offers two plans. For the first year, when billed yearly, customers pay $9.95/month for a simple store or $12.95/month for selling across various marketplaces. Customers on the more expensive plan have the option to manage product inventory across Etsy, Amazon and eBay from a consolidated dashboard via Ecomdash. At the budget end of the WooCommerce hosting spectrum, Bluehost’s offering has an emphasis on creating a user-friendly, guided onboarding experience. Bluehost conducted an internal research study last year and found that its small business customers were looking for solutions that would allow them to sell online, but many of them are first-time website creators. The company created this new WooCommerce offering to eliminate the hassle of navigating themes and the many plugins required to launch a store. Bluehost uses YITH’s Wonder theme as the stores starting theme, which we reviewed in August. “Our theme is built for WordPress, utilizes the block structure that modern WordPress websites are beginning to adopt (one of the early block-basedWooCommerce block themes) and also includes three full-page patterns for different homepage layouts and designs,” Newfold Digital SVP of Digital Presence and Commerce Jason Cross said. “This not only provides users with a modern looking store, but also allows them to continue to customize it with ease in the future. YITH Wonder comes with six different style variations that make it easy to customize the accent color combinations and typography for the site.” Bluehost’s offering is aimed at catering to the merchants who will be building the stores themselves. The company has not created its own payments solution but connects to popular payment providers such as PayPal and Stripe and offers cash on delivery and in-store pickup options. WooCommerce is at the start of its journey towards launching a hosted solution but the company also plays a different role in the ecosystem as the maintainer of the core software. In an interview with the Tavern after his keynote, Maiorana said the vast majority (+90%) of ongoing WooCommerce core development is done by the WooCommerce team at Automattic. “One important difference is that we are really focused on the WooCommerce ecosystem – including the thousands of web hosts that help support and drive WordPress and Woo adoption across the globe – as our most important ‘customer,’” he said. “And what we’re hearing from these customers is that it is challenging to compete with the simplicity offered by proprietary, turnkey e-commerce solutions. At the same time, many web hosts don’t have the capabilities to address things like onboarding, conversion, and retention holistically – they need our help to compete and win.” Many of the major hosting companies that serve WordPress customers, like WP Engine, GoDaddy, and Bluehost have already developed their own hosted WooCommerce solutions, although there are many smaller companies that do not offer curated plugins, themes, and friendly onboarding that may be more open to partnering with the makers of WooCommerce. “We’re also working with
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WPBeginner Releases a Comment Moderator Solution Often Needed for Large Teams – WP Tavern
[ad_1] Last week, WPBeginner released Comment Moderation Role to the WordPress plugin directory. The plugin does a simple job of creating a single user role that can only moderate comments. The most common use case for such a role — named “WPB Comment Moderator” in the admin — is for larger teams that need a separate user account to tackle moderation. WordPress has no built-in way of handling this. For one of the most extendable CMSs on the planet, this is one area where it has always fallen short. It almost feels like yesterday. In reality, it was 10 years ago when I stumbled upon a (then) year-old ticket for a bug that was a breaking point in a project I was working on. I needed to grant specific users on a WordPress site permission to moderate comments but not allow them to edit other things in the admin. Some of you may be thinking that the moderate_comments capability should allow that. And, you would be correct in thinking that it should. However, that is not how it works at all. For users to edit comments, they must also be able to edit posts. It is a bit of a convoluted mess if you do a deep dive into the core code only to find hard-coded permissions checks that are impossible to override without rewriting large chunks of code. I would run into the same issue multiple times in the years since. I have built a few hacky, one-off workarounds for specific projects, but they were never ideal. And, I was never interested in maintaining a plugin that solved this problem because I knew it had the potential to be a bit of a pain. While I have seen a few other solutions, each fundamentally flawed, I am happy to see someone tackling this without exposing permissions issues. WPBeginner’s Comment Moderation Role plugin works in the same way that I think such a plugin should work, at least with the roadblocks that WordPress currently puts in the way. Site administrators can add WPB Comment Moderator to any account via the user management admin screen. The process is the same as adding or removing any other role in WordPress. Granting the WPB Comment Moderator role to a user. After adding the role to a user, that user can access the Comments admin screen. They can also see both the Dashboard and their own Profile in the admin. Except in the cases where they have another role added via a different plugin, they will not have permission to access other screens. Comments admin screen for user with the WPB Comment Moderator role Because of core WordPress’s hard-coded permissions check, the plugin must create its own comments management screen. Most users will not notice this because it is all under the hood. The plugin only adds it when necessary, and it does not look or function any differently than the default screen. It is just a lot of code work and duplication to fix an 11-year-old reported bug in WordPress. Until the foundational issue is addressed in core WordPress, Comment Moderation Role is the best plugin for this job. After extensive testing, I can now say that it is now nestled firmly in my toolbox, ready to pull out when needed for a project. Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link
Continue readingNewsomatic Review: Feature-Rich Autoblogging Solution
[ad_1] Autoblogging is not a new concept and has been around for years. For those of you new to this term, Autoblogging is a process that allows you to fetch content from various sources and publish blogs with that content automatically without any need for human intervention. It just needs selecting specific feeds, setting up the schedule, and starting the machine. The autoblogging tool starts populating your website with content from selected feeds. In this article, I will be reviewing one of the most popular auto blogging tools — Newsomatic. I will also give it a test run to see its features and functionalities. Let’s dive in! Newsomatic Review Newsomatic is an automatic API-based content importer that you can install on your website and start pulling content from your favorite feeds or sources. If you are into auto blogging, this tool is the ideal automation machine that makes post publishing and populating blogs super easy. While most auto blogging tools stick to news and similar niches, Newsomatic covers various niches as there are more than 70 listed sources that work with the Newsomatic API. You just need to set up the cycle once, and it starts importing content from the listed websites. How does it work? Newsomatic is powered by its functional API that makes pulling content from other websites easy. The new and upgraded API version enables easy starting up, and you can begin populating your website with helpful content within minutes. Since the plugin has its dedicated API, the users get full control over it. So, if you want to add new sources, you can do it just by contacting the plugin devs. Features of Newsomatic When I first gave this tool a test run, I was amazed by the number of options and granular control it offers. It won’t be possible to cover every feature in this review so that I will be covering all the prominent features only. Easy import: With Newsomatic API, you can easily import content and blogs from popular websites and start publishing on your website in minutes. Customization: Resulting posts are fully customizable like any other post based on some predefined rules. Control over content: You have full control over links, images, titles, content, featured images, and even post status. Translation: With Google translate support, you can translate the blog posts to any language of your choice effortlessly. Posting directions: You can define the minimum or maximum limit of the post titles and can choose to post only if the article has an attached image; define banned and allowed keywords. Text Spinner: The plugin comes with a powerful words spinner that replaces words with synonyms to beat plagiarism issues. Auto replaces images: The tool allows you to automatically replace images in blog posts with images from copyright-free sources like Pixabay, Pexels, and Flickr. Random sentence generator: This feature creates random, meaningful sentences that work for both crawlers and readers. Skipping posts: You can set up different rules to skip posts that do not match your preferred criteria. Information meta box: This gives a detailed information meta box to give extra information about automatically generated posts at the end of every post. Search articles easily: This feature allows you to search for articles by keyword in any language. Alright, that’s enough about features. Let’s take Newsomatic for a test spin and see how it works. Hands-On with Newsomatic I created a test environment to try out Newsomatic, and in my experience, the installation was pretty straightforward. Simply uploading, installing, and activating the plugin like any other would do the job. Since the plugin is distributed from Codecanyon, you need to add the purchase code in the plugin settings tab and the Newsomatic API key. Article Continues Below The main settings page is a huge list of customization options that we will get into later. First, let’s see how you can start importing posts from other websites. Automating Custom News to Posts To start the autoblogging engine, you need to go to WP Admin > Newsomatic Post Generator > Custom News to Posts. Here you can add as many sources you like for your website. Let’s say I am setting up an automatic engine for a Gaming website. Here’s what I’ll do; Select the article source from the list of options. I am choosing GameSpot. Now for the schedule, I am setting it up to run every 2 hours. To limit the maximum number of posts, enter the number of posts. Post status is set to publish. Item type to fetch is set to Post since I want to import blog posts. Set the author I want to byline. You can even import the author from the source. Click on the Active checkbox to set the rule to active. For more granular options, click on the Settings button. Here you’ll get access to the advanced settings. If you want to change the search query string, source country, generated text title, content, format, you can do it all from this menu. One notable feature that deserves to be mentioned is that a help tooltip box accompanies every customization option. If you are not sure about any option, you can simply hover over the question mark icon, and it will tell you exactly what the option is supposed to do — no need for back-and-forth referring to the documentation. Now once you’ve set the changes, click on the Save Settings button. Now you can select an action for the rule. For that, just click on the Select an Action button and select the option you want to run. For example, I want to run this rule and import blogs from GameSpot. I just need to choose the “Run This Rule Now” option and click ok on the prompt message displayed. All the posts from that niche will be imported. Likewise, you can set up other sources as well. Plugin Main Settings Probably the first page you’ll see and covers all the overall options for the
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