[ad_1] Google Analytics is powerful if you know exactly what kind of metrics you want to investigate, it but can be overwhelming if you just need a simple overview of your traffic and referrals. Search Console Insights is a new tool from the Google Web Creators team that is aimed at making content performance easier to understand at a glance. It combines data from Search Console and Google Analytics for a user-friendly overview of important metrics for content creators. Search Console Insights can help users quickly ascertain which pieces are their best performing content, how new pieces are performing, and how people are discovering the site. Clicking on the little academic cap icon offers more information about understanding the data and tips for improving content engagement and performance. The first section shows a site’s content performance trend for the past 28 days using page views and page view duration. The next card displays a carousel of new content with page views, average page view duration, and badges for content that has high average duration compared to other content on the site. Other cards include the most popular content within the past 28 days, top traffic channels, top Google Search queries, referring links from other websites, and social media. The performance cards are not configurable but they give you a starting point if you want to dig deeper into Google Analytics. It would be helpful if each graph was linked to more data where you could adjust the date range. Search Console Insights doesn’t include all the features unless you are using Google Analytics and associate it with your site’s Search Console property. Users can access the tool’s overview page by visiting the link directly. In the near future, Search Console Insights will be available in the iOS and Android Google apps when you tap your profile picture. The tool is now in beta but Google plans to roll the experience out gradually to all Search Console users in the coming days. Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link
Continue readingTag Archives: wordpress
Getting To Know the Upcoming WordPress 5.8 Template Editor – WordPress Tavern
[ad_1] WordPress 5.8 is slated for release on July 20. In just over a month, many users will get their first taste of one of my favorite new features: template-editing mode. The template editor is a new tool that allows end-users to create custom templates without ever leaving the post-editing screen. It exists as a stepping stone toward the eventual site editor, a feature that will hand over complete design control to those who want it. The downside to the new feature in WordPress 5.8 is that users will not have access to their theme’s header, footer, sidebar, or other template parts. It is a blank slate in which they must put on their design caps to create the entire page. With these limitations in place, what is the point of the template editor launching with WordPress 5.8? Landing pages. A blank slate is not always a bad thing. There is a reason all the best themes include page templates named Blank, Empty, Canvas, Open, or something similar. Sometimes users want control over the entirety of the page’s output. And WordPress 5.8 is bringing that capability to every WordPress user. I have been editing templates for months now, but always in the context of a block theme. I have built both a photography portfolio and WordCamp landing page as part of the FSE Outreach Program. Despite some hiccups, it has been a worthwhile journey being involved as the feature has come to fruition. However, most of my testing was on top of the TT1 Blocks theme. It was time to put it to a real-world test with themes that are actually in wide use. Will It Work With My Theme? The question many users will have on their minds will be: will this new template editor work with my theme? The answer is that it depends. Generally, yes, it will work to some degree. However, because older designs were not created with the template editor in mind, not all experiences will be the same. I wanted to really put this theory of working with every theme to the test. So, I loaded up Twenty Fifteen, one of my favorite default themes from the past decade. Perhaps I jumped too far back. Twenty Fifteen has a two-color background meant for sidebar and content. The block editor did not exist back when Twenty Fifteen was built. Its use of a box-shadow technique on the page background meant the entire page had two colored columns running down it. The design team had to use some hacky methods for equal-height sidebar and content backgrounds. Ahhh…the good old days before developers had access to CSS flex-box and grid. It is these sorts of problems that could limit some older themes. In the case of Twenty Fifteen, I could hide the background with a Group or Cover block over the top of it. Users will likely get better results when using something more modern, at least a theme built during the block era. Even something as simple as wide-alignment support will change the WYSIWYG nature of the template editor. If a theme does not support the feature, the front end will not match the editor. I jumped ahead a few years. Twenty Nineteen was the first default WordPress theme to support blocks. It is old but not ancient in internet years. Editor vs. front end of Twenty Nineteen. There are some differences between the editor and front-end views. The Cover block padding is off, the vertical spacing does not match, the search input’s font size is different, and the search button’s border radius is round on the front end. However, it is nearly a three-year-old theme now. It held up better than expected in this simple test. Jumping ahead a couple of years, I activated Twenty Twenty-One, WordPress’s most recent default theme. Editor vs. front end of Twenty Twenty-One. The editor is a pretty close approximation of what you see on the front end. The most noticeable differences are the inconsistent padding for the Cover block and the light gray border for the search input field in the editor view. It was time to put the template editor to the “real” test. I activated the latest version of Eksell, one of the most well-rounded block themes in existence. Editor vs. front end of Eksell. Obviously, the theme outputs a black section on the left. That is intended for the theme’s sidebar/menu flyout. However, because the user has no access to the template part that outputs that element, it may be impossible for some to create custom templates with this theme. I am sure that Anders Norén, the developer, will address this problem. Similar, unknown issues will arise with the many thousands of themes in the wild. It does not mean a theme is necessarily bad. It just means it was not built with the template editor in mind. Users may need to throttle back their hopes a bit until they have thoroughly tested template-editing mode with their active theme. Oh, and that ugly whitespace that shows the content background at the top of the editor? You will see that with literally every theme. I am clueless as to why the development team thought that it would make for a good default. Nearly every web design I have looked at over the years zeroes out the page’s <body> element padding. For those theme authors who are reading, you will need to deal with this. If you have already been building for the block editor, you are likely a pro at handling such quirks. If we look at a custom theme I have been building, you can see no alignment issues between the editor and front end. Editor vs. front end of custom block theme. The difference for my theme is that I am building when the template editor is already a part of the Gutenberg plugin. The others were all created earlier. It is not fair to compare them. However, users should know that older themes
Continue readingMapLibre Project Gains Momentum with MapLibre GL Native Release – WordPress Tavern
[ad_1] The MapLibre project is picking up speed with the release of MapLibre GL Native, an open source mobile SDK for Android and iOS. As anticipated, MapTiler’s fork of Mapbox’s mobile map SDKs are coming under the MapLibre umbrella. This free library enables developers to write native applications that can display vector maps on mobile devices, with advanced functionality like custom map styles and integrating specific business data. The project was formed by Mapbox’s open source contributor community after the company announced that Mapbox GL JS version 2.0 would be released under a proprietary license. MapLibre GL founders include a diverse group of companies who are contributing to this healthy, community-led fork, including MapTiler, Elastic, StadiaMaps, Microsoft, Ceres Imaging, WhereGroup, Jawg, Stamen Design, and more. MapLibre GL Native is developed and maintained as an independent mobile SDK, led by the MapTiler team in cooperation with Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and the MapLibre community. MapTiler forked Mapbox’s last version released under the OSS license in December 2020, and ensured that developers can migrate their apps with just a few lines of code. The release post identifies a few critical changes in the MapLibre SDK: Tracking of end-users (telemetry) has been removed OSS license: community ownership ensures it stays open-source forever Updated distribution model: the library is now distributed via the Maven Central repository for Android and as a Swift package for iOS Optional usage of authorization: access token requirement depended on the map provider and its policy WordPress core doesn’t include a Map block but WordPress.com and Jetpack both use Mapbox GL JS 1.13.0. This is the last open source version before Mapbox updated to its proprietary license. I created a ticket to put it on the Jetpack team’s radar, and it looks like they may consider migrating to MapLibre in a future release. Plugin authors using Mapbox will also be at a crossroads when it comes time to update beyond version 1.13.0. MapLibre is the strongest alternative to Mapbox’s proprietary 2.x update. Migration instructions are available in the MapLibre GL readme file. Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link
Continue readingWordPress 5.8 Beta 2 Ready For Testing
[ad_1] WPLift is supported by its audience. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. WPLift / WordPress News / 2021 / Weekly WordPress News: WordPress 5.8 Beta 2 Ready For Testing Last Updated on June 18th, 2021 Published on June 18th, 2021 Tags: Automattic, WordPress 5.8 [ad_2] Source link
Continue readingExtendify Adopts EditorsKit, Increasing Its Block Plugin Collection – WordPress Tavern
[ad_1] Extendify has been scooping up some successful block-related plugins in recent months. It acquired the Redux Framework in November 2020 and followed it up with a purchase of Editor Plus and Gutenberg Hub in December. Its latest pickup? EditorsKit. This ownership change was an adoption rather than an acquisition. The company is compensating Jeffrey Carandang, EditorsKit’s creator, for helping during the transition. “The main motivation was to ensure that EditorsKit has a good home,” said Extendify co-founder Chris Lubkert. “Jeffrey had taken a full-time role with 10up, and the plugin hasn’t seen any updates in 9 months. So we are both excited about Extendify building on what Jeffrey has built and continuing to serve the user base.” EditorsKit is a playground of extensions on top of the existing blocks. From visibility logic to text formatting to extra block options, it has a little bit of everything. Carandang has often launched features long before something similar has landed in WordPress. It has grown to over 20,000 active installs since he first submitted it to the plugin directory. Taking on a new role with 10up as a web engineer left him little time to devote to the plugin. “My time was occupied by my full-time work and adjusting through my shifts, personal stuff, and with what’s happening in the world due to lockdowns; and the covid virus,” he wrote in his own farewell post. “I hate to admit it but I think I’ve neglected my role in the EditorsKit plugin/community that I’ve built for the past couple of years. With this, my sincere apology to the plugin users and the whole community.” Changes to EditorsKit When a plugin changes owners, users sometimes must brace themselves for changes. Right now, EditorsKit is the same plugin it has always been. However, the Extendify team has introduced some additions. The first is a part of what will eventually be a commercial aspect of the plugin: the Extendify Library. The team added this feature to both the Redux and Editor Plus plugins earlier this year. EditorsKit users will see a new “Library” button at the top of the editor. Once they click it, it opens an overlay for importing patterns and templates from Extendify’s collection. Popup library for importing Extendify patterns and templates. The amount of imports allowed is limited to three without signing up. “EditorsKit users have access to the same library of patterns and templates and can import three patterns and/or templates,” said Lubkert. “Anyone who signs up for the beta program will then receive unlimited imports during the beta period. We expect this to continue for a few more weeks.” Essentially, the commercial aspect of EditorsKit, Editor Plus, and Redux will be a shared library from the Extendify team. Users of any one of the plugins can continue using their preferred plugin with the option of importing patterns and templates. Lubkert said they still have no plans of rolling all of the plugins into one “super plugin,” keeping them each as a separate project. “It makes sense for us to invest our energy into a single library and creating the best experience possible for our users,” he said. The second change the team has implemented is making the EditorsKit Typography add-on a free download. The plugin allows users to select from a list of hand-picked Google Fonts and use them anywhere. It also has a customizable set of default font combinations. It makes sense to drop the commercial aspect of this add-on. WordPress is already starting to provide theme authors with the tools for typography options at the block level. EditorsKit Typography may be the better of the two right now, but the average user will not need it as the core platform continues to improve. ShareABlock and Other Projects The handover includes Carandang’s related sites. ShareABlock, CopyGlphys, and CopyGradients are all tools for helping WordPress users build on top of the block system. The Extendify team plans on keeping them alive. Carandang launched ShareABlock in December 2019. Essentially, it was a block patterns directory. Only, block patterns were merely an idea in the bowels of the Gutenberg GitHub repository at the time. The upcoming pattern directory, expected to officially open next month, was not even a blip on most people’s radar. ShareABlock homepage with downloadable “patterns.” ShareABlock has had time to mature. Its designs are more modern than the current offering from the pattern directory. The downside is the reliance on EditorsKit to import them via a JSON file instead of copy-paste block HTML code. With a few tweaks, it could be a serious contender as an alternative directory. If the WordPress development team follows through with a ticket I opened for allowing third-party vendors to hook into the system, it would be easy to do. “In general, we don’t see ourselves competing with the pattern directory (or anything else in core Gutenberg),” said Lubkert. “We’d like to solve unmet needs for the community and do so in a way that is complementary to core.” The team already has the patterns in place. Hooking in its existing library would be more of a value-add. The official directory is limited to what can be done with core block options. Extendify would have the wiggle room for adding designs built with its more robust EditorsKit and Editor Plus toolsets. Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link
Continue readingAutomattic Launches Mayland Blocks, Its Second FSE Theme on WordPress.org – WordPress Tavern
[ad_1] Automattic released its second block theme to the WordPress theme directory last week. Mayland Blocks is geared toward photographers and other users who want to showcase their projects. It is the child of Blockbase, a sort of starter/parent hybrid the company’s Theme Team recently announced. I had high hopes for Mayland Blocks going in. I have kept a loose eye on its GitHub repository in the last couple of months. It was one of the first 100% block-built themes the team seemed to be working on. While block themes are still experimental at this stage, I was admittedly disappointed. Maybe my expectations were too high. I was eager to be wowed when I should have gone into this review more level-headed. However, I am who I am, and that is someone who is genuinely excited each and every time a new block theme comes along. I am ready for the next big thing, but Mayland Blocks did not fit the bill. As I began the process of testing the theme, the first order of business was to recreate the Masonry gallery as shown in the theme’s screenshot: Expected gallery layout from Mayland Blocks My first thought was that the default gallery output would automagically work. It did not. Then, I looked for a Gallery block style. Nothing there. I searched for a custom pattern. Nothing there either. In short, it was impossible to recreate the gallery shown in the theme’s screenshot — one of the primary features that drew me to it. Bummer. I was looking forward to seeing a Masonry-style gallery of images built on top of the block system. Standard gallery output with Mayland Blocks. With a tiny bit of sleuthing and peeking under the hood of the theme’s demo on WordPress.com, I saw that it was using the CoBlocks plugin by GoDaddy. The thing that made the theme special had nothing to do with the theme. After a quick install, I converted my existing gallery to the CoBlocks Masonry block. Success! Masonry gallery output via CoBlocks. At that point, I began to wonder why I was even testing Mayland Blocks at all. Its claim to fame hinged on showcasing photography. The core Gallery block works well enough, and I can use CoBlocks with any theme. Most decent ones provide the sort of open-canvas template that is no different than Mayland’s front page. What would have made it a great theme would have been living up to its screenshot’s promise. This was also a missed opportunity to showcase some alternate Gallery block styles and patterns. If we want more users to buy into this system, some of our best design and development teams need to take that one extra step. For such a simple theme, one well-suited as a one-page design, this was the moment to lean into the photography angle. Provide users a Polaroid picture frame option: Add a “no gutter” block style: Bundle a few patterns that combine the Gallery block with others. Give us a little flavor. Mayland Blocks works well as a WordPress.com child theme because its suite of plugins is available to all users out of the box. For a publicly-released project on WordPress.org, it is a little disappointing that it was a straight port. The child theme is essentially its parent with an open-canvas front page template and some trivial font and color changes. Surprisingly, it made it into the theme directory with so few alterations. Two days later, another child theme was outright rejected for just adding “some minor changes which can be made directly from the parent theme.” The inconsistent application of the guidelines by different reviewers has long been a thorny issue, especially when more subjective rules come into play. However, block themes have more wiggle room at the moment. There are so few for users to test that it makes sense to let things slide. One of the Themes Team’s previous hard lines has been that bundled front page templates must respect the user’s reading settings. This meant that if a user explicitly chose to show blog posts on their front page, the theme must display those posts. Mayland Blocks is the first that I have seen get a pass on this, a hopeful sign of more leeway for directory-submitted themes in the future. Block themes are a different beast. HTML files are not dynamic, and there is no way to put a PHP conditional check in a front-page.html file in the same way as themers once did in a front-page.php template. There is a technical workaround for this, but I do not think it is necessary. Block themes are changing the game, and the guidelines will need to follow. I love seeing the contribution — any contribution, really — of another block theme to WordPress.org. However, I want to see more artistry on top of the Blockbase parent theme. Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link
Continue readingAlex Denning and Iain Poulson Launch FlipWP, an Acquisitions Marketplace for WordPress Companies – WordPress Tavern
[ad_1] Alex Denning and Iain Poulson launched FlipWP today, a private marketplace to facilitate acquisitions for WordPress companies. WP Engine’s recent published research, which estimates the WordPress economy at $596.7B, has inspired confidence in the ecosystem. An increasing number of acquisitions announced over the past month is also reinforcing the need for a more centralized marketplace for these opportunities. “Iain and I started talking a lot more regularly a year ago, when he started Plugin Rank,” Denning said. “He was getting people asking him for acquisition opportunities, and with Ellipsis I was getting clients asking for help evaluating acquisitions and with sales. There was no go-to marketplace, so in March we started talking about working together on solving the problem.” Sellers can list on FlipWP privately for free and buyers handle their own sales, with no exclusivity obligation. The site doesn’t charge for listings and it doesn’t take commission from any sales. The $299 membership for buyers opened today, which offers access to FlipWP’s email list of acquisition opportunities. Listings include business data, such as ARR and monthly profit, the asking price, and commentary about the opportunity from FlipWP. Buyers can reach out directly to sellers with no middleman involved. In the past, finding a buyer for a WordPress company required having a wide network, knowing the right people, or posting on various marketplaces like Flippa and MicroAcquire. “Every week I was hearing about another acquisition, getting an email from someone looking to buy a plugin business, or emails from developers asking the best way to sell,” Poulson said. “The need for a WordPress specific acquisition marketplace became more and more apparent.” The Acceleration of Acquisitions in the WordPress Ecosystem There is a lot of buzz on Twitter lately, questioning whether an active acquisition market is a healthy development. Some have expressed concern about small, independent tools getting bought up by larger companies and worry that consolidation will lead to lack of competition. Eric Karkovack wrote in a post speculating on the future of plugin acquisitions, entertaining the possibility that “a few big players simply set the rules for everyone else to follow:” Frankly, it’s becoming a lot harder for solo entrepreneurs or small development shops to manage a popular plugin. Supporting a large userbase while also focusing on the future could become overwhelming. Thus, it’s not surprising to see that some of these products are being sold off to larger firms. We saw something similar happen with internet providers back in the early 2000s. The more mature the market, the harder it became for a small company to carry out its mission. Pretty soon, they were just about all bought up by corporate interests. While that may not fully reflect the case here, it seems to at least be trending in that direction… It will take some time. But there might come a day when a typical business website runs plugins from perhaps only a few big development houses. Not everyone shares this same bleak outlook on the potential effects of consolidation. During Matt Mullenweg’s Q&A at WordCamp Europe, Brian Krogsgard asked what these acquisitions mean for the health of the WordPress economy. Mullenweg sees it as a positive development that should spur more creation: It’s a really exciting time because it feels so robust and healthy. The fact that these exits are happening then creates more incentives for something new to be created, either from the alumni of these companies or by people that know that they can get something to a certain point and sell it to one of these companies. It’s actually not very different from Google and Yahoo and all of these companies that buy up lots of startups. Guess what, that created way more startups, some of which became Airbnb and Uber and challenged the tech giants. That’s the beauty of how the ecosystem works. Poulson and Denning are also optimistic that FlipWP will open up more opportunities for business owners to get connected and accelerate the process for all parties involved. “The acquisition trend is indicative of WordPress maturing,” Denning said. “If WP Engine thinks the WordPress economy is worth $597 billion dollars and the biggest public companies in WordPress are worth ~$20bn, we’re about $577bn short. A lot of that number will be made up through the small businesses we see getting sold, and until now they’ve not had a way of selling other than ‘post it on Slack.’ If that study is right, then the one-most-weeks rate of acquisitions might actually be significantly too low, and those businesses are being undervalued, too. We can make it much easier for buyers to find quality WordPress listings, and we can make it much easier for sellers to get the best price.” Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link
Continue reading#4 – Dan Maby on the Importance of the WordPress Community – WordPress Tavern
[ad_1] Sure. So as a charity, we always intended to have some form of larger in-person event. Events have been something that’s had a real passion for a very long time. The ethos of bringing people together, helping reduce social isolation of lone workers is something that really fits well with everything that we’re doing in terms of Big Orange Heart. So we wanted to enable people to come together. That had always been on the cards from the very early stages of Big Orange Heart. Of course, when we got thrown into this situation with the pandemic, as I say, we moved into the virtual environment for our monthly events, that platform that I’ve been discussing, we actually opened up to other communities. So we’ve enabled other communities to be able to run their events through our platform, without any charge to them. We just simply wants to be able to create a solution for those communities to continue to come together when they couldn’t deliver them in person. What that actually meant was that we, in the first 12 months that we were delivering events through our live dot Big Orange Heart dot org site, we’d had over 12,000 attendees come through that platform, which has meant that we’d obviously had a huge amount of feedback and we’d been able to iterate very quickly across that solution to get to a point where we actually decided that we want to deliver a larger scale event. It’s always been on the cards. Why not do that as a virtual conference or virtual festival? That’s really where the concept of WordFest was born. And I want to, again, when we give a huge shout out to Brian Richards, particularly of WordSesh. WordSesh has been around, you know, as a virtual WordPress focused virtual event for many years, I can remember way back in the early days of the first WordSesh, the first few WordSesh’s, which were 24 hour events and had a lot of fun attending those. And I remember attending my first one and actually attending for the full 24 hours. So this wasn’t something that was new in our space. We were very aware that there was a desire for it, but we wanted to wrap together the two elements of what we do. Our hearts really are in WordPress, but our focus is really around wellbeing and mental health, positive mental health. So this concept of WordFest was about bringing those elements together. So if you attend WordFest, you will find content that focuses on both WordPress and our individual wellbeing as remote workers. It really was about this concept of a global celebration of our community. We talked about different ways of delivering it. We talked about do we do over multiple days because we appreciate time zones, how do we, how do we factor in a way of enabling anybody that wants to attend to be able to attend? But we didn’t want to just say here’s a set time on this day, here’s six hours that would deliver it or, over a period of days, we’ll do, it was a real challenge. So we, we kept coming back to this 24 hour concept because it would end up, if somebody wants to attend over that one day, there was some point in the day that hopefully they would be able to join us. And it has mushroomed. It’s grown and grown. We set out to deliver the first one back in January, this year, 2021, we set a target of 2000 attendees to the event we had just over two and a half thousand attend. So it was, we completely smashed all our expectations in terms of people attending the event. But also we completely smashed our expectations in terms of the number of sessions that we were delivering. We initially set out a wanting to deliver 24 sessions over the 24 hours. That turned into 36 sessions actually ended up being 48 sessions through the first event. I’m really happy. I’m not sure it’s the right word, but I’m really happy to say that this time around we’ve actually got 66 sessions that are going to be delivered in the 24 hours. It’s been a phenomenal experience, delivering this as again, as a wonderful team of volunteers, sitting behind this people like Michelle, Cate, Hauwa, Paul, just wonderful people that are really enabling us to be able to continue to grow this event into a much larger scale event than it ever was initially. So the next WordFest live is taking place on the 23rd of July. So we’ll be featuring 66 sessions over a 24 hour period. And it is, I think one of the most wonderful things I took away from the last WordFest was, as an organizer, having organized many in-person events, there’s always a connection with your co-organizers. Certainly if you’re running a larger event, such as a WordCamp, for example, you build up this rapport and you build up this relationship that on the day of delivering the event often it’s, it’s, it’s tiring. There are, yeah, there are moments of challenges, but there are just wonderful moments as well. But you experience all of those things together as a team. What I took away from WordFest live, which was a genuine surprise to me was we managed to create that same experience. We managed to create that same shared experience as we were delivering the event. I’ll never forget sitting here, I think I was in about hour 36 of because I’d been up some time before the event and I was sitting there and just the silence that was actually happening as a bunch of organizers, we all knew how, what we were experiencing in that moment. And it was just a real special time. We use various tools to deliver it. And one of the key secret ingredients for us as organizers was Discord.
Continue readingAutomattic Acquires Day One Journaling App – WordPress Tavern
[ad_1] Automattic has acquired Day One, a journaling app available on iPhone, Android, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch. The app makes it easy to create journal entries on the go, offers end-to-end encryption for privacy on its paid tier, and has offline capabilities. While most users compose private entries, Automattic’s acquisition announcement promises integrations for publishing to the web: That doesn’t mean that everything you journal has to stay private, though. When you want to share specific entries – or even entire journals with the world – you can expect seamless integrations with both WordPress.com and Tumblr to do just that. On the flip side of that, importing your favorite content from WordPress.com and Tumblr into Day One is on the near-term roadmap. In a post on his personal blog, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg said he has been a user of Day One since 2016 and spoke highly of the app’s infrastructure: Day One not only nails the experience of a local blog (or journal as they call it) in an app, but also has (built) a great technical infrastructure — it works fantastic (when) offline and has a fully encrypted sync mechanism, so the data that’s in the cloud is secured in a way that even someone with access to their database couldn’t decode your entries, it’s only decrypted on your local device. Combining encryption and sync in a truly secure way is tricky, but they’ve done it. A journaling app is a surprising acquisition for Automattic, which has traditionally gravitated towards snapping up publishing-related companies and tools. WordPress is capable of powering nearly every kind of public-facing website, but private publishing has never been its strong suit. Though many have used WordPress in a sort of “private” mode for journaling, or set up local installations, the software is not streamlined for this particular use case. Day One expertly handles this niche that has remained relatively untouched in the WordPress ecosystem. In explaining the acquisition, Mullenweg also touched on his “vision of making Automattic the Berkshire Hathaway of the internet,” a notion shared by Tiny Capital and often applied to Alphabet and its diverse holdings. One distinction is that Automattic’s acquisitions tend to complement one another technologically, often introducing the potential for improvements that can be shared with other products through open source software. Day One Community Remains Trepidatious About the Acquisition Why did Automattic buy the company? Day One customers are curious, as some of them perceive Automattic to be another “corporate giant” gobbling up a scrappy startup, ready to squeeze every possible drop of revenue out of the app’s loyal customers. Many long-time Day One users have never heard of Automattic and they are understandably leery of seeing their beloved app change hands. Perusing the comments on the Twitter announcement and in the app’s community on Facebook, the news has precipitated a stream of cancellations and exports as users explore alternatives. Numerous customers were disheartened by one particular ambiguous statement in Day One’s announcement, which left the door open for future changes to the privacy of the app: Rest assured there are no current plans to change the privacy of Day One; safely protecting memories and creating a 100% personal space is the foundation upon which this company was built. The statement has since been updated to be more reassuring to users, although it still doesn’t explicitly promise no changes. It does contain a hint at why Automattic was interested in acquiring the app: Rest assured that Day One’s commitment to protecting your privacy remains unchanged. Safely protecting memories and creating a 100% personal space is the foundation upon which this company was built. (In fact, our technical capabilities around privacy are a large part of what Automattic finds valuable in our company). I have never seen a more engaged community with such a strong reaction following an acquisition. Many are deeply invested, having poured years of their lives and private memories into Day One. “Oh, great. I find a journaling app I really like and have 10 years of entries invested, and they get gobbled up by a bigger fish,” one user commented in the app’s Facebook community. “What will become of our beloved app? Will the safety, security, and integrity of our data be assured? Time to back up all of my data local.” Users have concerns about Day One’s updated privacy policy and whether the company might share data with affiliates. Many embraced the app because it was free of any ties with social media platforms. They have sewn themselves into this app in the most vulnerable way, and they are worried about how their private data will be handled in the future. Automattic may have a long road ahead in easing customers’ concerns so that they don’t feel the pressure to export and look for alternatives. As someone who considered using Day One years ago, I think I would be more likely to use it now, knowing that Automattic is usually in it for the long haul. I passed on Day On at the time because apps come and go and it’s not always easy to predict which ones have the right business model to stay afloat. One of my worst recurring nightmares is that I accidentally throw away my paper journals or that my house burns down with my journals inside. Putting trust in a company to keep your electronic data safe and private is an intensely personal decision. Knowing that a larger company with more resources is behind Day One, along with leadership that bears a genuine appreciation for its underlying tech, it seems like a safer pick for a journaling app that will be around for the next ten years. The company’s founder and CEO Paul Mayne will continue to lead his same team at Automattic and is convinced that the move will be beneficial for “the preservation and longevity” of the app. Given how passionate Day One’s user base is about protecting the app’s future, I’m eager to how Automattic handles the
Continue readingIs It OK To Provide WordPress Admin Credentials to Plugin Support Staff? – WordPress Tavern
[ad_1] No. Nada. Nah. Nope. That’s a negative. Under no circumstances. My mama didn’t raise no fool. Heck naw. Not on your life. And, the other thousands of ways to tell anyone asking for site credentials to bugger off, even plugin support staff of a “trusted” WordPress development company. That is my way of saying that I do not trust anyone. Neither should you. However, there are cases where it is necessary to provide admin permissions to a plugin’s support staff. Today’s installment of the Ask the Bartender series comes courtesy of a reader named Niko. Because the entire text is over 1,000 words, I will simply link to the transcript via a .txt file for those who want to read it in full. Here in the post, I will stick to the vital bits. Or at least the parts that I want to address. One of Niko’s Facebook group members kicked the discussion off. ‘Is it okay to send FTP details for a plugin developer to troubleshoot the issue we are having with WooCommerce. We have already provided WordPress Admin credentials.’ This is pretty normal practice in the WordPress world, right? Plugin developers helping out on issues, and if they can’t replicate an issue, they need the access so they can check if it is a plugin issue or a server issue and fix things? Over the years, I have seen this become more of a common practice. However, it is not a practice that I recommend from either the user or developer end. Any site owner should ask whether they trust the person to whom they are giving credentials. If the answer to that question is no, you have the answer to the first question. In over a decade of running a theme and plugin shop, I never needed admin or FTP access to deal with a support question. It did not matter if it was a large and complex plugin or a small one. Because I was the sole person at the company, I also personally answered hundreds of thousands of support questions over the years. Still, not once did I log into a user’s site to help them. That always seemed like a liability issue for me, but I also used such scenarios as teaching moments about trust and security. Users sometimes provided credentials to me without me asking. Often they posted them in plain text in forums, email, or Slack (also, you should never do that). If on-site code needed changing, my users performed the task themselves or installed a bug-free version of the theme/plugin I handed over. If they did not know how to perform a task via the admin, FTP, or otherwise, I took the time to teach them. Yes, that required more energy on both ends, but I believe we were the better for it. More than once, those moments led some users down the path of becoming developers themselves, or it was at least a tiny stepping stone for them. I remain friends with many of them today and am proud that they started with my little solo WordPress shop. Some cases were rougher than others. Many times, I would replicate their setup (plugins, theme, etc.) on my machine. The majority of the time, this led me to the solution — I was using __doing_it_wrong() long before WordPress introduced the idea. In the long run, I was able to pass countless bug fixes upstream to other developers. I made a lot of developer friends this way too. I have no doubts that the road I traveled was the longer of the two. There were times when I spent an hour, two, or even more addressing one user’s needs. Popping into some of their WordPress admins would have been a quicker course. However, my theme and plugin users never needed to worry about whether they trusted me enough to provide that level of access. Plus, I had no chance of accidentally breaking their site by making custom changes. Are there times when a plugin’s support staff really needs access? Probably. The original question was regarding WooCommerce. It is one of the most technically advanced plugins in existence for WordPress. Replicating a user’s setup off-site for it is trickier than most others. There may be rare times when you need to provide some access, but you should never trust anyone. The second part of Niko’s question revolves around the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and user data. It is a vital part of dealing with those times when you decide to hand over the keys to your website. Alright so here comes the issue after we think about GDPR. If this developer happens to be outside the EU, then you would need to anonymize customer data and make an NDA agreement with that exact dev or company that is behind the plugin so they can come around and fix things. I will preface this with the usual I am not a lawyer. However, protecting user data is always a legal and ethical priority on any site you run, regardless of what jurisdiction you fall under. In those — again, rare — cases where you need to provide access to your WordPress admin, there are steps you could take to better protect your site and its data. Regardless of the trustworthiness of a developer or a support staff member, there is always one rule of thumb when dealing with website security: trust no one and trust nothing. The first step should always be having a backup system in place. On the off chance that the support staff breaks something, you will want to revert the site back to its previous state. Never provide complete admin-level access. I recommend installing and activating a role and capability management plugin. This will allow you to create a custom role for support help and limit the areas of the site they have access to. You would then create a user account for them with this
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