When Matt Mullenweg announced last year that Josepha Haden and Joost De Valk would take significant new roles in WordPress leadership, I was excited. My excitement with Josepha is in evidence in a post about some of her public work from February. What I hoped would happen is that the stepping in of two independent people with annointed roles would be the creation of something resembling a leadership structure. Clearly, per Joost’s testimony, that isn’t quite what happened (for his part). I’ll lead you to get the full details from his very good and honest (seeming) post.

But I do want to highlight this bit. I highlight it, primarily, because this is what I’ve expected/known for a while, and it’s interesting (and a little frustrating) to know how true it is:

I’ve not encountered (or been brought into) any discussions about our product vision, something I would need to translate into day-to-day actions. I was expecting there to be some backchannels where these discussions were had and these decisions were made, turns out these simply don’t exist. Matt takes his input from core devchats and lots of other chats and then decides what the roadmap should look like. I honestly think that process needs opening up, even though I do appreciate that Matt has so far been pretty good at bringing the product forward.

I’m not going to read too deeply into this, buried in the middle of Joost’s post. But it seems clear, and has seemed clear for a while, that WordPress isn’t really led. Instead, a few people push in a given direction when they have the time and energy, and are able to muster the political will. This is both understandable, natural, and not the greatest thing to learn if you expect that it is otherwise.

I received with great interest this latest post from the folks over at Delicious Brains. They successfully highlighted the most compelling part of their data to me: how much money people who identify as WordPress developers make. But more than that, they also captured a number of other interesting facts and figures about the roughly 400 people who answered their survey.

A few of the things that I found interested (and a little analysis of it):

• They skewed heavily to 30-49 year old men from North America and Europe. This fits the industry as a whole, for better and worse.
• The vast majority people who responded said they’d been coding for more than 8 years.
• Yet, only about half of respondents said that coding was their first job. (The breakdown of the prior work is interesting and fun, but a reason for you to click through 🤓)
• There was a fairly even split between “I’m employed by someone else” and “I’m self-employed.”
• Of those who replied on the money question (while it’s the headline stat, I’d feel remiss if I left you hanging), a quick analysis points to a mean salary of about $50,000 US. A lot of the low end are people who are probably hobbyists, and the high end shows a good chunk of people (roughly 10%) reporting over $100,000 in salary.

Hopefully I got you interested enough to click through. I felt like I could have summarized every point Callie made in the article, as both their survey and charts were quite good. But for precisely that reason I want to make sure you look yourself.

What are the trends with eCommerce?

This is a fantastically detailed report and worth a read even if you only have a passing interesting in eCommerce. This is generally more focused on physical products than, say, WordPress plugins, but there are plenty of fascinating stats: from average conversion rates on desktop and mobile, to the most popular software for various different requirements, to what store owners and struggling with and focused on. You can also see the breakdown for sellers on their own site vs on Amazon, and the various trends involved in selling on Amazon vs elsewhere. It’s pretty interesting! Even if you just want to benchmark conversion rates for your or client sites, I’d check this out.

This post first appeared in MasterWP, a weekly newsletter for WordPress professionals.

It looks like the WordPress.org plugin review team (which often means “Mika Epstein,” who is without a doubt the most dedicated and prominent member of said team) is looking to clarify and extend the guidelines about plugin admin notices in WordPress. You know those things that clutter up *a lot* of screens on *a lot* of the Dashboards of WordPress sites clients, friends, etc show you? Yes, let’s celebrate Mika’s pushing to clarify the rules and make these a little less common.

Mika’s work keeping the WordPress.org plugin directory sane is a huge boon to the community. She’s not alone in the work, but she’s at the forefront having the important conversations publicly and making sure that the guidelines are adhered to. And we all owe her a debt of gratitude for that.

I think this proposal all looks very good to me. And it doesn’t only change things around plugin notices, that’s just the biggest focus. In any case, it’s good to know what’s happening and changing, so I urge you to give the post a look.

I’ll be honest: Since Gutenberg launched, I’ve used the Classic Editor plugin to disable it on every site I work on. I do this for a few reasons:

• Gutenberg isn’t a good enough layout builder to build complex pages, such as landing pages or homepages. Beaver Builder is just so many times better, starting with the fact that it’s on the front end.
• I find that Gutenberg is actually a bit tough to use relative to the Classic Editor for everyday post creation. That could be just a function of being so much more experienced with the Classic Editor, but there it is.
• Some plugins, such as Public Post Preview, haven’t been updated to work in Gutenberg. These issues are rare but they’re enough to create some friction using it.

But here’s the thing: I still believe that Gutenberg is what WordPress needs. A high-quality layout language shared across WordPress unlocks so many possibilities.

That’s why it’s cool to see that Gutenberg is—slowly, step-by-step—improving its layout capabilities, specifically the way that grouped (nested) blocks and columns work. These are the baby steps forward that Gutenberg will need to become the kind of serviceable layout builder that would give me an actual reason to use it.

The giant leap forward, as I’ve written in various places before, will be to put it all on the front end. In my opinion, that’ll be a job for third-party plugin developers, not WordPress Core. But the Core team continuing to move forward on building a good foundation is to everybody’s benefit.

Your actually good guide to the best WordPress hosting. (Other than ours 😝)

WordPress hosting is the only other requirement – other than WordPress itself – to run a WordPress site, and it’s an extremely competitive space. One of the ways hosting companies recruit new customers is large affiliate referral fees. This makes it difficult to trust any reviews as the vast majority are driven by sites trying to get the biggest possible referrals.

One of the few WordPress hosting reviews you can trust is Review Signal, which collates hundreds of thousands of reviews and runs an annual benchmark of nearly all WordPress hosts’ performance. These just look at performance – not support, features, etc – but when read with the other reviews on the site they’ll give you a good guide.

You can sort by six different monthly price options, from budget to enterprise, and get the benchmarks in detail across the difference in price points. It’s interesting to compare: as you’d expect hosting gets a lot better as the price goes up, but it does seem the $25-100/month range is getting better than ever. WordPress hosting is an incredibly competitive market, so it’s a credit to the innovation this drives, and Review Signal for picking up on it! Next time you’re looking for hosting, this is the benchmark set to look at.

This post first appeared in MasterWP, a weekly newsletter for WordPress professionals.

This week, I had a client send me a bug that only appeared in iOS Safari. As much as I’d love to say “tell your visitors not to use iOS Safari,” it’s definitely a popular enough way to browse the web to merit fixing the bug.

The issue is that I don’t have ready access to an iPhone when my wife’s not home—and even then, I have no idea how to inspect things in iOS Safari to see what’s actually going on. What to do?

So I started searching browser-based emulators of mobile devices, and was surprised to learn that there’s basically nothing out there that’s very good, at least that I could find.

What I finally found is Ripple. It isn’t perfect, but it could at least reproduce the iPhone Safari bug. It’s free, as well, and sits nicely in a little Chrome extension that you can toggle on and off at any point. Worth a look anytime you run into mobile-device browser compatibility issues.

WordPress made easy, as a service – a fascinating product.

This is interesting from a product point of view: this “All in One WordPress Website Builder” came to my attention last week but seems to have been around for at least. It’s essentially “easy-to-use hosted WordPress as a service” (ETUHWAAS for short, which I’m sure will catch on).

You get Google Cloud powered hosting with Elementor and a bunch of plugins for anything between $10 and $100/month. This has a nice dashboard which has a WordPress installer, which presumably bundles a bunch of plugins. It’s not clear if you get the standard WordPress Dashboard or a simplified version, but everything else is “builder-ified”.

This is very much aimed at the mass market and “x million small businesses without a website” we hear about, and it’s interesting that its main selling point can be “WordPress is hard to use”, and that – as they’ve been around for over a year – that more or less by itself is a value proposition which stands up in the marketplace.

It’s also interesting how this is pieced together: you get a bunch of plugins bundled and the sales pitch leverages how many installs and reviews these plugins have as social proof for why their product is good. And yet, their bundled eCommerce solution is a plugin with only 1,000 active installs. It may well be a great plugin, but it’s curious such specific solutions are being chosen.

If you’re interested in products the execution of this is fascinating.

This post first appeared in MasterWP, a weekly newsletter for WordPress professionals.

Businesses big and small, and doing great WordPress work

Rich has been doing some of the most exciting and innovative work around Gutenberg, and recently had his theme shop ThemeBeans, and Gutenberg project CoBlocks (plus others) acquired with him joining GoDaddy as a Senior Product Manager of WordPress Experience.

I had the pleasure of working with Rich on CoBlocks, and I was very very impressed with him. Rich is has superb vision for the future of WordPress and the web, and this interview on Post Status treads a nice line between Rich’s future working on WordPress at a bigger scale at GoDaddy, and his past experience running multiple successful WordPress businesses:

All of which is a way of saying when Rich gives advice like this, he has “skin in the game” in having done it. Well worth a read, and well worth keeping an eye on GoDaddy’s WordPress experience in the near future.

This post first appeared in MasterWP, a weekly newsletter for WordPress professionals.

I know, you know: “not very realistic” is the knock against hacking in the movies. It’s like an old joke for people in the know.

Mostly this is for simple reasons: watching a person write code in a realistic way is way too boring for television and movies. It’s just a lot of silence, some random exclamations of disbelief or cursing, and then and exclamation of excitement that “IT worked!” Not the most compelling pitch I’ve ever heard. Any way, I just thought this was a fun an interesting little diversion relevant to the topic of WordPress security, that I’ve been focusing on for a while. And it’s pretty cool that it turns out that some of the sequences the video highlights actually merit “pretty realistic” explanations. Anyway, without further ado, get to watching:

This week I’m running a (my first ever) fundraiser for a non-profit where I do a lot of volunteer work, Code for Fort Collins. And I figured it make sense to share it pretty widely. And that may as well include right here on WPShout.

If you don’t live in Fort Collins (I know most of our readers don’t; it’s a single mid-size city in the middle of the USA), you might want to check out either the rest of the Code for America Brigade Network or the Code for All set of such organizations around the world. The hashtag #CivicTech is the meeting point for a lot of people around the world who want to make their community and country better by using technical skill to do good. Think of it like the WordPress do_action events, but without the WordPress focus.

Anyway, back to my specific pitch: Code for Fort Collins has done a lot of good things in the community, but it could do even more with a few hundred dollars in working capital. So that we can entice new volunteers to meeting with pizza, pay for some basic server costs, and a few other such things. We have realistically modest goals for our relatively small scale. Anyway, I wrote up a fuller pitch (plus a party invitation that truly makes sense only if you live near Fort Collins) on the Code for Fort Collins blog.

While yesterday’s story about security was just about common *WordPress* security issues, today I want to share a cool site that helps you more with overall personal security planning. It’s got one of those cutesy URLs: SecurityCheckli.st. But other than that, there’s a lot to recommend the site. Primarily: it lists all the tools you should know about if you’re trying to be holistically security conscious in all areas of your life. And they’re all presented in a clear context with a simple and elegant design.

Like my recommendation from yesterday’s article about having a password manager. But SecurityChecklist lists not just the big three that come to my mind, but at least a few others I’ve never heard of. While I do think most people will be happier with 1Password, LastPass, or Dashlane, highlighting other options (and elegantly showing what computing platforms they support) is very cool and helpful.

Hat tip due to Post Status‘s email newsletter, where I found this one.

Akin to Fred’s thorough answer on “the best page builder for WordPress”, Ryan Sullivan recently published over on WP Site Care a thorough analysis of six of the biggest form plugins for WordPress. He goes in depth, and doesn’t leave out much I could think to have wanted compared. So if you’ve already got a favorite form plugin, and or want to know how your personal favorite compared, give it a look.

To not reveal any spoilers, I’ll pull for you his quick summary of the six he did compare:

1. Caldera Forms (Freemium) – Caldera Forms is an intuitive grid-based form builder with a free option and premium upgrades like their PDF add-on and backend services for more reliable email delivery.
2. Contact Form 7 (Free) – Contact Form 7 may be the original WordPress forms plugin and is extremely popular. It also has a library of add-ons available in the WordPress plugin directory.
3. Formidable Forms (Freemium) – Formidable is a fantastic free form builder with premium add-ons to take on advanced calculations and display beautiful reports based on form submission data.
4. Gravity Forms (Premium) – Gravity Forms is unique in that it’s always been a paid plugin. It has an extensive add-on library that streamlines integrations with third-party services and software.
5. Ninja Forms (Freemium) – Ninja Forms is a simple and streamlined forms builder with powerful options and a paid extension library to take its functionality even further.
6. WPForms (Freemium) – WPForms is touted as a “beginner-friendly” forms plugin that focuses on the user experience. It provides pre-made templates (additional template available with paid upgrade) and  has a marketing-focused approach to form creation.