The WP Minute

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WP User Avatar, a plugin that was acquired by Collins Agbongama with over 400k active installs, took a hard pivot in it’s latest 3.0 version. The WordPress tavern reports what the plugin looked and functioned like, before becoming ProfilePress, it’s new name.

Lots of end users share their opinions in the comments of the Tavern, and as you can imagine, they aren’t too happy. I reached out to Collins to learn more about him, his company, why the change to ProfilePress, and what he plans to do next. Read the interview to find out the back story.

Release the themes!

WP Engine’s head of Marketing for StudioPress, Chris Garret, shares the upcoming changes to WordPress once beloved framework for new developers. Most notably:

• ProPlus customers will get access to Genesis Blocks Pro and Genesis Custom Blocks Pro
• Genesis Framework and the Sample Theme will be available for free.
• StudioPress-made themes will no longer be sold individually

Hosts go round’n’round

More from WP Engine includes their latest investment in hosting large-scale WooCommerce sites offering, which looks more like window dressing than a more unique & robust solution from the likes of LiquidWeb.

Speaking of LiquidWeb, they launched a completely new plugin brand and portal to wrangle all these darn acquisitions lately! Check out StellarWP for more information.

Let’s get to the core

When WordPress 5.8 is released in July of this year, Internet Explorer 11 will no longer be supported. Shaun Andrews shares some of the ongoing work of what what the Patterns Directory is starting to look like in the second iteration. If you’re interested, you won’t want to miss the screenshots shared on the post.

From the grab bag

“If we are only able to focus on high quality work for 4 hours, yet we work for 8 or more, what do we spend the other 4+ hours doing? “

• Matt Mullenweg wishes Squarespace good luck in their S-1 direct listing announcement in a post summarizing his admiration of CEO Anthony Casalena and the product. Squarespace will trade under ticker SQSP
• Pippin Williamson of Sandhills development plans to experiment with 4-day work weeks starting this Summer. Citing: “If we are only able to focus on high quality work for 4 hours, yet we work for 8 or more, what do we spend the other 4+ hours doing? “
• I interviewed Kristen Youngs co-founder of coachingnocodeapps.com on the Matt Report

That’s it for today’s episode, if you enjoyed please share it on your social media, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser!

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Liquid Web continues to expand it’s nexus of acquisitions with it’s latest grab of GiveWP. From GiveWP’s own blog post:

1. The future of GiveWP remains a top priority.
2. Every team member is critical to our success.
3. Leadership of the team and product are staying the same.

You can check out our own interview with the GiveWP’s leadership team, Devin Walker and Matt Cromwell at thewpminute.com and friend of the show Joe Casabona featured a chat on the How I Built it podcast.

Can’t get enough audio/video? How about over 2+ hours on the future of WordPress?!

The WP Cafe podcast sat down with Josepha Haden Chomphosy & Matt Mullenweg to highlight the project’s future as of May 10th 2021. As you’d imagine most things point to Gutenberg, Full-site editing, but one particular discussion I thought was interesting was the term Universal Themes. Give this show a listen to learn more about that or attention a scheduled Universal Themes Hallway hangout on Friday May 14th at 14UTC

WP Builds hosted a discussion as part of their Page Builder Summit event with 3 employees from Automattic titled “Preparing for the future of WordPress” This time a much more technical and tactical illustration of the project. Tune in to listen to Marjorie Asturias Director of Growth R&D, Anne McCarthy Developer Relations Wrangler, and Donna Cavalier a Technical Content Writer.

With the future comes the…past?

Tonya Mork and Andrew Ozz collaborated on a plugin that halts the block-based widget functionality for those of us needing to opt-out of that potentially critical component of a WordPress site. The plugin notes that support will carry through 2022.

WordPress Tavern reports that Jetpack has made more features available without connecting to WordPress.com. But not to be outdone by it’s own updates, learn why the .com connection is important over at Jetpack.com. It also serves as a great resource for the features you can use without the connection.

From the grab bag!

• Freemius has taken their massive library of WordPress business content and compressed it all into a nice cheat sheet for you.
• And I launched version 2.0 of my plugin, Easy Support Videos, make supporting WordPress clients fun using video inside the WordPress admin.

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I had the chance to sit down with Devon Walker and Matt Cromwell of GiveWP to talk about their sale to Liquid Web.

GiveWP has been the dominant WordPress donation plugin over the last few years. This move makes sense for Liquid Web as they continue to round out a complete managed WordPress solution for their customers.

Liquid Web acquisitions have been on a steady increase lately, with their most recent large acquisition of the Events Calendar plugin.

I hope you enjoy today’s episode with Devon and Matt.

Liquidweb acquires GiveWP

[00:00:00] Matt Medeiros: [00:00:00] We were just chatting before we hit record. Devon, you were mentioning that things were getting wrapped up started to get almost wrapped up last week.

[00:00:06] I’m sure this has been a process. When did this start? What does the timeline look like for some kind of acquisition this size? 

[00:00:15]Devin Walker: [00:00:15] We’ve known Chris Lema for a while now. I’ve known him probably 10 years almost.  Around November of last year, I received an email from him that said, Hey, would you be interested in talking about how potentially we could work together, more liquid web? And what does this look like? And throughout the rest of 2020, we kind of went back and forth , “Hey, what does this look like?”

[00:00:36] What it, what does it potentially mean for you? What does it mean for us? And then come the new year we landed on. Okay. Potential acquisition could be in the cards. And then a lot more negotiation around that into the LOI phase. And eventually we settled on something that made sense for the both of us  our company and liquid web, but our entire team.

[00:00:59] And [00:01:00] then once we went through that, we got into more of the due diligence process, which was a very interesting and. A good learning process for everybody involved and then eventually closed on April 30th of last month. 

[00:01:12]Matt Medeiros: [00:01:12] Same brand new parent company, more resources to the customers.

[00:01:17] As people listen to this today, not much is going to change. Matt, Devin turns to you and says, “Hey, we’re thinking about getting acquired by liquid web from a CEO’s perspective, where do you start going to dot the I’s cross?

[00:01:27] The T’s? What was that whole process like as somebody who kind of sees every oversees, everything?”

[00:01:32]Matt Cromwell: [00:01:32] Don’t mess with my tools. I got stuff going here. The biggest thing Devin and I always have been on the lookout for is more resources. The ability to, to inject more energy into the stuff that we’re doing.

[00:01:43]One of the most important resources we have all the time as our team. So that was definitely my very first thing is do they want the whole team? And the immediate question answer to that was, yeah. They understand. And they see that the team makes the product. 

[00:01:57]Most folks, I think listening here know what it’s [00:02:00] like to, to run their companies on their own and bootstrapping all their resources as best as they can. And it, stretches everybody thin, but we’re always trying to look for the best way to support our people.

[00:02:11] And I do feel like this is a win-win across the board for all of our team members.

[00:02:16] Matt Medeiros: [00:02:16] Devin when you first start to have these conversations with Chris and you say, Hey, it’s great to add more resources, but man, this is my baby. I mean, you and I, you were a guest co-host of the Matt Report for a little while years ago, when you started giving WP, we’ve obviously met up at word camps and certain sort of senior journey highlighted your journey.

[00:02:35]How do you start putting up the mental guardrails to say. Okay. This is, this is for the greater good of everyone.

[00:02:41] I’m sort of giving this up. This, this passion, this dream, how do you do that? 

[00:02:47] Devin Walker: [00:02:47] Yeah. Well, one, one major thing was they want the leadership to come along with the product. And so. Matt and myself, Matt C CommonWell here, and me are not going anywhere. We are still fully in charge [00:03:00] of the destiny of our product, and of course we’ll have lots of good advice and good, good mentoring that now we don’t have to pay for 

[00:03:08] Matt Medeiros: [00:03:08] using Chris’s clarity line.

[00:03:10] Devin Walker: [00:03:10] That was, that was painful to pay that bill every month. But no, we, we Yeah, you’re right. Like my ownership and mats ownership. We, we no longer have that any more, but we have great incentives in place to meet certain goals that they’ve set and we’ve sat and and a lot more resources to do that.

[00:03:28] So, while w it was sad to see kind of my ownership go away in the product. It was, at least gratifying to know. We’re we still have. The ability to pull the levers that we’ve always 

[00:03:39] Matt Cromwell: [00:03:39] had. Yeah. It’s a really good question though, because I feel like folks who build things that grow and scale and get larger.

[00:03:50] At some point you do start to recognize that this actually is. Larger than me. And one thing that, I already mentioned, one thing we’re super proud of is our [00:04:00] team. We start to recognize that our team really is the people that have built this over time. And, and no product that has this much success is, is, is just on the back of one person anymore.

[00:04:11] So, But the ability to just say, okay, I’ll just do this different with our business. We don’t have that ability anymore, but give in itself really gets to continue and and go strong and probably stronger than we could have done it on her own. So, yeah. 

[00:04:26]Matt Medeiros: [00:04:26] We’ve the three of us have chatted personally about the business and some of the clients you’ve had, I won’t say the names here, but I’m sure they’re on your website and you can feel free to say some of your notable clients, active WP, but you have some.

[00:04:37] Really notable clients, some really big brands use your product and something like this, like you said, this is, this is bigger than us. There’s no longer can we just play with some of these not plays, not also, not a great word to use, but we can’t just focus on, on, maybe even doing things the WordPress way anymore.

[00:04:55] Maybe we have to broaden our horizons, open up the different technologies and in [00:05:00] a place like liquid web is going to have. Some real broad reaching technologi...

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We have a quick run down this week…let’s Do the Woo! (Hi, Bob)

WooCommerce has invested in one-click checkout platform, PeachPay. According to PeachPay’s PR post:

Cart abandonment is a significant problem for eCommerce businesses – in 2021, the global average rate has risen from previous years to 78.65%. PeachPay aims to significantly reduce this by providing shoppers with a frictionless, one-click checkout experience.

Robert Jacobi covered the investment:

So if we do a little math, the investment for PeachPay is no more than $450,000 (assuming that the 30% filled of $1.5 million includes the recent investment).

View his link in the show notes to read through his interview with David Mainayar, co-founder and Chief Growth Officer of PeachPay.

Other Woo news: Automattic purchased woo.com for an undisclosed sum of money.

Yoast has re-shaped their Diversity Fund project in the wake of COVID and the challenges of travel, stating:

We want to keep our Diversity fund alive and we want to keep helping people in the WordPress community. That’s why our Diversity fund will now be used to sponsor people that work on a project that benefits WordPress. This can range from teaching a group of people anywhere in the world how to use WordPress to writing patches for Core.

Speaking of travel, Will We See In-Person WordCamps in 2021? An Open Discussion on a Path Forward, asks Justin Tadlock of the WordPress Tavern.

One commenter states:

I don’t see why this is so complicated. If large, indoor gatherings are legal in the host country, then WordCamps should go ahead with no extra restrictions beyond those prescribed by the local law. People can then decide to attend or not.

Matt Mullenweg replies: “This is a good way to approach it.”

FluentCRM wins Torque Mag’s Plugin Madness 2021 — congrats FluentCRM, but I still can’t wrap my head around putting my CRM into my CMS…

I stumbled across WPStackable which is setting its sights on launching a new v3 for Gutenberg soon. Which looks like a competent suite of Gutenberg blocks.

Finally, WordFest Live call for speakers is now open, The festival of WordPress kicks off July 21, 2021.

This week on the Matt Report, I ran a “play it forward” episode highlighting 3 other podcasts in our space, WP Coffee Talk, Women WordPress, and Hallway Chats.

That’s it for today’s episode, if you enjoyed please share it on your social media, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser!

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Let’s start with the good news, before we get into the…not so good news.

Matt Mullenweg announced that CC Search is joining the WordPress project stating that the WordPress community has long advocated for a repository with GPL-compatible images. I think this is timely and needed with the not-so-recent announcement of Unsplash being acquired by Getty Images.

Now time for the not so good news — What the FLoC?!

First, what is FLoC? Well, here’s the definition straight from Google:

Federated Learning of Cohorts, FLoC enables ad selection without sharing the browsing behaviour of individual users. FLoC provides a privacy-preserving mechanism for interest-based ad selection.

As a user moves around the web, their browser uses the FLoC algorithm to work out its “interest cohort”, which will be the same for thousands of browsers with a similar recent browsing history. The browser recalculates its cohort periodically, on the user’s device, without sharing individual browsing data with the browser vendor or anyone else.

One might think that sounds…okay? Well, until the Electronic Frontier Foundation chimes in stating FLoC is a terrible idea.

“The third-party cookie is dying, and Google is trying to create its replacement.”

“Google is leading the charge to replace third-party cookies with a new suite of technologies to target ads on the Web. And some of its proposals show that it hasn’t learned the right lessons from the ongoing backlash to the surveillance business model.”

“FLoC is meant to be a new way to make your browser do the profiling that third-party trackers used to do themselves: in this case, boiling down your recent browsing activity into a behavioral label, and then sharing it with websites and advertisers. The technology will avoid the privacy risks of third-party cookies, but it will create new ones in the process.”

Alrighty, now I’m a little concerned along with WordPress contributors who want to treat FLoC more as a security concern than a privacy concern. Read through the comments to find the different takes around the community. There’s even a Trac ticket to monitor the concern.

Pull up a seat at the Tavern

Pour yourself a cold one over some of this week’s notable articles from the Tavern! The upcoming Pattern Directory is set to launch with WordPress 5.8. The Jetpack team has launched yet another project, called Jetpack Boost. Interesting to see them launch this as a standalone plugin since Mullenweg has always flexed on the fact that Jetpack is modular.

An interesting conversation around banning companies that run competitive ads against WordPress from sponsoring WordCamps is open, well, until today.

Check out the conversation happening in the thread on the post. I think on the surface that makes sense, but then there’s also the grey area of even how Automattic leverages the cross-branding of WordPress.

Time for the grab bag!

• Get Ellipsis https://getellipsis.com/blog/user-personas-for-wordpress-businesses/
• DoTheWoo https://dothewoo.io/wordpress-core-and-blocks-with-grzegorz-ziolkowski/
• GravityForms 2.5 https://www.gravityforms.com/two-five/
• Brainstorm Force https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLY_JnFeW7U

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