Author Archives: WordPress.com VIP

Six Questions with Big Bite Creative

This post series profiles each of our featured partner agencies.

Big Bite Creative has been a WordPress.com VIP Partner since 2015 and has been building big with WordPress since 2011. They are based in the UK, and work with clients from around the world, like Penske Media Corporation, NewsCorp, DMG Media and Metro UK.

What’s your agency’s origin story?

Big Bite was born in 2011 and we decided from day one that we were going to build the agency we wanted to be in the future: no shortcuts, lay the groundwork before we needed it, experiment and embrace what’s new. All three of us — Iain, Jason, and Mark — were working our first jobs in the industry. We were eager, a little naive, learning hard lessons fast, and quickly realizing that there was an opportunity to do things differently.

We wanted Big Bite to be a place where talent and ideas mattered more than background or fancy job titles and in 2012 we got the chance to really put that concept into practice. Our work with Elizabeth Weil, the Corporate Design & Development lead at Twitter, generated the interest of our first international clients like Netazine and a large project for Clicksco allowed us to start hiring new talent. Those new people, from experienced devs and designers to self-taught interns who are now permanent members of the team, kept pushing us onto bigger and better things. Soon a number of our clients were being acquired by Dropbox and we started peaking the interest of some of the biggest names in digital publishing.

As a WordPress.com VIP partner we’re regularly building innovative apps and doing high-traffic site migrations for the likes of DMG Media and Penske Media Corporation. We’ve won awards for our work and business, taken more prolific clients, and are pushing the future of WordPress with things like Gutenberg, but we’re still very much plugged into our local community. We’ve grown in size and grown up, but we’ve managed to keep what makes us unique intact and we’re very proud of that.

Pick three words that describe your agency culture.

Curiosity – Many of us started on this road by taking apart computers to see what made them work or by teaching ourselves to code. We decided early on to embrace curiosity and create space within the company for people to experiment, whether that was a fun project for the office, an open-source product for the web, or coming to grips with whatever promised to be the next big thing in our industry. It keeps things interesting, encourages creative thinking, and we can offer our clients work that’s built for the future rather than just being ‘on trend’.
Community – The web’s ability to transcend borders is amazing and is the reason a company like ours can have a global reputation without being based in London or San Francisco. But it’s also an ocean where it’s easy to find yourself adrift. We’ve always thought of community as our anchor and that’s only become more important as we’ve grown. We started by attending local industry events, then helped organize a few, and now we sponsor a new wave of them. Our team still collaborate on open source projects within the WordPress community and we’re as happy hosting barbecues for the our local creatives as we are to hop on a flight and share notes with our peers at events like WordCamp US.
Agility – Big Bite was never typical. We stayed local when the consensus was that you had to move to a big tech hub. We focussed on developing a small team with a depth of talent rather than mass hiring. We decided to grow slowly and keep control of our own agency in order to adapt to the changing industry. It allows us to think about the future and build for it in a way that a lot of bigger agencies struggle with, but it’s also helped define who we are, as well as the kind of forward-thinking businesses that work with us.

Tell us about a client project you are especially proud of.

We excited to be soon launching an internal news and comms app for one of the largest global financial institutions and their 200,000+ employees around the world. That’s a point of pride for us of course, but most interesting is how we did it.

We built it using the soon-to-arrive Gutenberg. Not only was getting the opportunity to work in an interesting new way a thrill, it allowed us to push what’s possible for a project on that scale and that level of complexity. We regularly deal with extremely high-traffic sites and apps, but this project required developing two apps for Android and iOS in React Native and also exploring building the product as a progressive web app (PWA). PWAs are still relatively new, only being supported by iOS 11.3 onward for example, but are sure to become a more and more important aspect of web development for global organizations in the coming years.

What are you most excited about in the WordPress community right now?

Honestly, just how much it’s grown and evolved. In some ways our story has mirrored WordPress’ in that way. Most of us have been a part of the WordPress community from back before we had our first jobs, before starting Big Bite. The fact that WordPress is increasingly the go-to solution for enterprise on the web is exciting, and a confirmation of our long-held belief in it as a platform. We’ve achieved a lot of firsts with WordPress, but we’re just as excited about what comes next. Our team is already building great things with Gutenberg, for example, and we’re excited to see what happens when the whole world realizes its potential.

What’s your favorite conference or event of the year, and why?

We’ve been attending the various WordCamp events around the world for years now and they never fail to be a fantastic opportunity to share notes, as well as a few drinks, with our peers and colleagues. That sense of community is often an inspiration, but this year’s WordPress.com VIP Workshop in Napa Valley was particularly poignant. Jason and Mark both turned 30 while we were out there. We celebrated with vineyard visits and hot air ballooning, but it was also powerful moment of reflection, looking out across these amazing views while taking stock of everything we’ve achieved both personally and with Big Bite.

Yet some of our favourite events of the year are the least dramatic. Our infamous Big Bite barbecues are informal affairs where friends, colleagues, and everyone from the local creative industries gather, rain or shine, to eat, drink, and relax. It’s rejuvenating and being able to offer that sort of thing for the people in our local community is a point of pride for us, plus it keeps our feet planted firmly on the ground.

(And the sixth: Ask yourself a question and answer it) What will change the way you work most in the near future?

Right now that’s Gutenberg, no question.

We feel like we’ve already begun proving its potential with our recent work, but we know there’s so much more that can be done with it. Our clients are already realizing that embracing something new, especially with all of Gutenberg’s benefits, ensures they’re ready for the future instead of playing catch up. The ability for us to provide clients with blocks means that we can offer them more control over their content. It offers a flexibility that stops changing parameters or requirements derailing projects. It also means that clients don’t have to come back to us for every little change, saving them time and money, while we get to work on the next big thing.

Thank you, Big Bite Creative!

WordCamp Europe in Belgrade: bigger, bolder and better than ever

More than 2,000 WordPress users, designers, developers and entrepreneurs, from across Europe and beyond, gathered in the Serbian capital, Belgrade last week for what proved to be the biggest WordPress event in history.

WordCamp Europe, now in its sixth year, has become a fixture of the global WordPress calendar. Each event seems a little larger, a little more polished, and a little more mature than the last: and this year was no exception. Few of us knew much about Belgrade before we arrived; but we left with many fond memories of a unique and welcoming city.

With two tracks of uniformly excellent speakers over the two days, plus extended workshops and fringe events, it was impossible to see everything and everyone. But the two sessions which seemed to get most people talking were:

WordPress project lead Matt Mullenweg‘s session on day one, laying out the roadmap for the integration of Gutenberg, the new WordPress content editing experience into the core software (session now available to watch online, helpfully summarised by Birgit at GutenbergTimes); and
Google’s Alberto Medina, ably supported by Thierry Muller from VIP agency partner XWP, on the thinking behind the AMP format, and the work to build AMP compliance into WordPress core.

Both subjects represent significant evolutionary changes in what WordPress does, and how it does it. Inevitably, passions have been stirred: but those passions are the fuel which drives WordPress forwards.

I was struck to see both Matt and Alberto wasting no time in acknowledging and addressing the community’s concerns. The audience was left in no doubt about the depth of consideration and planning which has gone into both initiatives.

As in previous years, VIP’s agency and technology partners were highly visible at the event: in addition to those already mentioned, Human Made, 10up, Inpsyde and Yoast were all represented on-stage at various times. VIP has chosen these companies as partners because we believe they are at the top of their game. It’s great to see their talents also being recognised by the speaker selection processes for these events.

The main conference tracks were all live-streamed; and are now being edited for posting on WordPress.TV in due course. If you weren’t at the event – or even if you were! – you’ll be able to catch up on everything you missed on-demand shortly.

In keeping with tradition, the conference’s final act was the announcement of next year’s host city. WordCamp Europe 2019 will take place next June in Berlin: a city known for its creative community, in a country more devoted than most to the principles of the open web. It’s certain to be a great event.

If you can’t wait that long, the next major gathering will be WordCamp US, returning to Nashville, Tennessee in early December. But before then, there are dozens of smaller, local WordCamps happening all around the world: check out the full schedule at central.wordcamp.org.

Thanks to the organisers for the fantastic ‘aftermovie’, embedded above; and our fellow Automattician Clicky Steve for the featured image.

A Command Line Interface (CLI) for your VIP Sites

We’re excited to announce VIP CLI, a new and direct way for developers to interact with applications hosted on VIP.

We’re excited! We’re really looking forward to this CLI tool making our workflows much easier. We’re particularly pleased about the flexibility to adapt data sync to our sites, adding our own custom functionality to clean out our specific production credentials, production options, and change things up.
– Bob Kirkemo, Lead Software Developer with VIP Client
Digital First Media

Control vs power

We’re creating the preeminent platform to empower WordPress developers and accelerate our client’s business. The faster developers can deliver value, the faster the business can differentiate in the market.

The VIP platform allows companies to run sites confidently in the face of remarkable traffic levels while maintaining a strong security posture and remaining performant, all without an in-house Systems and Operations team. Until now, the tradeoff has been that our team has handled the control of your site on your behalf, as well as relaying information as requested.

In contrast, roll-your-own cloud hosting provides a lot of raw power to development teams, but requires dedicating company time and energy to architecting and operating the infrastructure. On a hosting platform designed and operated in-house, everything can be done by your team but everything has to be done by your team.

Power and tools

When we talk to our client developers, they tell us they want more direct ways to work with their sites and applications, and more immediate methods of feedback. They want the best of both worlds: our hands-on support when they need it, and direct access when they don’t. We agree. We are determined to meet our clients’ developers on their own terms, and deliver the access and control they demand while retaining the benefits of a fully managed platform.

When you want direct assistance, we will anticipate it and be there for you. And when you don’t, you should be able to proceed smoothly and without extra steps or encumbrances. We think about the latter as empowerment… and empowerment is a key focus as we develop the VIP Platform and tooling.

Any time we can get something done ourselves rather than fire up a ticket, it saves us time and keeps our team’s heads in what we’re doing. I’m excited to see VIP keeping a focus on enabling us to tackle more tasks ourselves.
– Erick Hitter, Principal Software Developer at VIP Partner Alley

CLI: The first building block

We wanted our first tool to address as broad a range of developer scenarios as possible, and the obvious answer was to build a command line interface (CLI) tool. Many developers are familiar with issuing CLI commands in a terminal, and using those commands to script interactions with WordPress sites via the official WP CLI tool, so we knew we were working with an established paradigm.

This week, we’re proud to release VIP CLI, and the first commands you can run with it, including triggering a data sync to synchronise data from your production environment to non-production environments, facilitating faster debugging and QA. To get started, please read our documentation for installation instructions.

Below you can see a video of the tool in action:

What’s coming

We know that using a CLI tool is not for everyone, so we have a web-based dashboard in the works. Watch this space.

Please get in touch if there’s anything you want to discuss about the VIP developer experience, or anything we can help with.

May 2018 VIP Roundup

There’s been a lot to celebrate in the enterprise WordPress world this month: WordPress celebrated its 15th birthday, Gutenberg introduced its plugin API, AMP for WordPress introduced Native AMP, and we hosted our seventh annual VIP Workshop!

May’s update contains a host of new releases, partner updates, and envy-inducing summer event opportunities. Scroll on down for all that, plus a spotlight on Stand Up To Cancer and exciting news about our participation in WAN-IFRA.

The courtyard at VIP Workshop

Food trucks and bluegrass

WordPress.com President Kinsey Wilson

Gutenberg design lead Tammie Lister

Gutenberg News and Notes
The latest tools, demos, and updates around the block-based editor coming to WordPress 5.0

Gutenberg plugin v3.0 is out as of this week, with a long list of great enhancements including support for child blocks, updates to the block library, and opt-in registration for presentational styles. This followed on v.2.9 which, among other updates, introduced the new Plugin API.

Gutenberg and the Ramp plugin are now available on VIP Go (Lobby post for VIP clients and partners)! The latest Gutenberg plugin is available and defaulted to “off.” It’s easy to selectively enable it with a single line of code added to your theme. Remember that Gutenberg is still in active development and subject to regular updates and changes. We will be releasing a public version of the Ramp plugin shortly.

From our latest partner profile with rtCamp

News and Releases
Updates from around VIP, our clients, and our agency and technical partners.

In May, we had the distinct pleasure of hosting clients, partners, special guests, and Automatticians for our seventh annual VIP Workshop in Napa, California. Watch dozens of the sessions including speakers from Airbnb, Google, Cloudinary, the VIP team, our agency partners, and many more on this YouTube playlist. You can also read the recap and flip through many of the decks from the presentations.
WordPress 4.9.6 privacy and maintenance release was deployed in late May. This included new tools to support GDPR compliance. (Lobby post, official announcement post, update guide). Jetpack 6.1 privacy and maintenance release also went out in May (Lobby post).
Alley had a major presence at the American Alliance of Museum’s MuseumExpo 2018. Tom Harrigan spoke with the Freer Gallery of Art’s Courtney Dawn about using Alexa apps to augment museum collections. Pattie Reaves shared a post on rethinking accessibility for maximum benefit.
Peter Wilson from Human Made posted a thorough look at how they overhauled the edit screen for client Fairfax Media from the ground up with the WordPress REST API. Rian Rietveld wrote a piece on best practices for automating accessibility testing during development. Their team also celebrated WordPress’s 15th birthday by adding up their cumulative years of WordPress experience. Any guesses?
XWP announced initial support for AMP Native is now available in v0.7 of the AMP for WordPress plugin. Congrats to everyone who contributed to the project! Thierry Miller gave a talk at Google I/O alongside Google’s Albert Medina on building progressive websites in WordPress. Luke Cabris appeared on the WP Bosses podcast.
Read the latest edition of Six Questions, our partner profile series, to learn how rtCamp is strengthening WordPress training in educational institutions, part of a virtuous cycle that will keep the enterprise ecosystem strong. And check out their brand new office.
Trew Knowledge just released version 2 of its GDPR plugin, which helps a Controller, Data Processor, and Data Protection Officer (DPO) with compliance. It’s reached over 100,000 downloads and is now available in 11 languages.
10Up is conducting a usability study for professional writers with Gutenberg. Their New Relic for WordPress plugin added support for the REST API. Anthony Garand contributed a bug fix for lazy loading to Jetpack 6.1. In the spirit of data privacy, they updated the popular Restricted Site Access plugin with more granular site security permissions. And in July, CEO John Eckman is speaking about CMS for higher education at WP Campus 2018 in St. Louis.
The Inpsyde team is growing. This month they welcomed two new employees, project manager Rich Winterstetter and developer Cristiano Baptista, and also released BackWPup 3.5 with the long-desired restore feature.
Communication Arts featured Hello Design’s work on the new Tillamook Cheese website, which shows how their famous cheese sauce comes together.
Skyword v.2.4.5 became available in May, adding integration with Co-Authors Plus and other enhancements(Lobby post).
Playbuzz v.1.1 is now available, including shortcode support and bug fixes. For information on updating, check out the Lobby post.
Apester v.2.1 is available, which brings functional and performance enhancements(Lobby post).

Media and Marketing Notes
Research and perspectives on the business of media and the practice of marketing.

“How important is privacy to the on-line community?”

This Wall Street Journal time capsule from 1996 shows we’ve been grappling with the same privacy questions for over 20 years. And that ‘online’ used to have a hyphen.

“Ad exchanges used by many news sites reportedly saw an immediate drop in demand of between 25 and 40 percent.”

The Columbia Journalism Review analyzed the initial effects of GDPR on publishers.

“Cameron, for example, a musician and video game enthusiast, put it succinctly when he suggested that “news should come looking for me, I shouldn’t go looking for it.”

Nieman Lab published a story on recent research studying the information intake behavior of so-called news avoiders.

Launch Spotlight: Stand Up To Cancer

Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C’s) mission is to raise funds to accelerate the pace of groundbreaking translational research that can get new therapies to patients quickly and save lives now. SU2C brings together the best and the brightest researchers and mandates collaboration among the cancer community. By galvanizing the entertainment industry, SU2C has set out to generate awareness, educate the public on cancer prevention, and help more people diagnosed with cancer become long-term survivors. All of us across Automattic are particularly proud to power SU2C’s digital platform in their pursuit of scientific breakthroughs.

Upcoming Events

We are proud to participate this week as a lead sponsor in The World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA)’s World News Media Congress in Cascais, Portugal. WAN-IFRA’s 80 member publisher associations represent 18,000 publications in 120 countries. VIP recently joined WAN-IFRA as members and we’re excited to partner with an organization passionate about media freedom and a sustainable news industry.
Next week, we will be in Boston to attend and support Forward, the brand storytelling conference hosted by VIP partner Skyword. Keynotes include author and entrepreneur Westley “Wes” Atendi Omari Moore; comic book author and artist Lynda Barry; CMO of Eastern Bank, Paul Alexander; and Storynomics founder Paul McKee.
WordCamp Europe is almost here! This year it goes down June 14-16 in Belgrade. Lots of folks from across the VIP family are contributing as speakers and organizers, including folks from Human Made, 10up, and XWP in addition to a strong showing from across Automattic. Check out #WCEU to follow along.
SRCCon takes place June 28-29 in Minneapolis, and they just released round two of tickets. Now in its fifth year, SRCCon attracts an eclectic mix of over 300 journalists, technologists, newsroom leaders, and others working to change journalism for the better. We’re thrilled to support it and think you should jump on those tickets.
The second annual WordCamp for Publishers will be August 8-10, 2018 at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law in Chicago. Tickets are still available, and if you haven’t bought one yet, watch the videos from last year and you will see why this is such a special event. Applications for travel scholarships opened this week, and close June 15. If you know someone early in their career or who doesn’t have the means to get there, encourage them to apply!

April 2018 VIP Roundup

When you scroll through the list of updates from April, the projects, tools, and releases just keep coming. To highlight just a handful, there’s Gutenberg development and prep work in progress all over including at rtCamp and 10up, Alley‘s new feature rollouts for Kaiser Family Foundation, a new plugin from Human Made, and big updates to our Liveblog and Co-Authors Plus plugins.

We also cheered VIP client Explore Parts Unknown for taking home a Webby in a category near and dear to our hearts, Website Best Practices. And we welcomed Yoast as an official VIP technical integration. Read on for all of this and lots more.

Chris Scott introduces BigWP NYC at USA Today’s NY offices

Gutenberg News and Notes
The latest tools, demos, and updates around the block-based editor coming to WordPress 5.0

As we have shared in previous updates, we’re developing a plugin to help make it easy to test and implement Gutenberg at the Page and Post level, and so that teams can plan their own smooth transitions. We’ll have more to share on that soon!
We’ve released a second round of educational videos at Vipgutenberg.com, covering hands-on topics like converting shortcodes and ACF fields to blocks, and access control. These are free and available for everyone. Get the full details including a list of topics in this week’s spotlight, further down in this post.
As one of our BigWP flash talks, Andrew Fleming from the Dow Jones Media Group shared the story of how their publication Moneyish is approaching the transition to Gutenberg. You can view a highlight now, and the full video of Andrew’s talk is coming soon.
You can share the Gutenberg content creation experience with colleagues easily by sending them to our Testgutenberg.com site, which has been updated with the latest version of the plugin.
rtCamp has been focusing on all things Gutenberg over this month: They formally released their Fields Middleware project that makes registering fields for Gutenberg blocks less repetitive (GitHub here). They wrote about their experience of moving their website to Gutenberg. And Daniel Bachhuber gave a technical introduction for the WordPress community in North Jersey.
Daniel Bachhuber has also been extremely active in the community in helping collect and curate plugin readiness research and leading the development of a migration guide. If you’re interested in either of these initiatives, jump in and help.
Special thanks also to 10up for their work identifying and addressing plugin compatibility issues.
Keep up with everything having to do with Gutenberg at VIP and a list of helpful resources in this regularly updated doc.

News and Releases
Updates from around VIP, our clients, and our agency and technical partners.

Exciting updates on VIP plugins Liveblog and Co-Authors Plus! Both released updates this month, version 1.8 and 3.3 respectively. Liveblog introduced media library integration and enhancements to the editor interface, which VIP clients can read more about on this Lobby post. Co-Authors Plus v3.3 establishes a new foundation for development, reflecting months of work from 30 contributors across VIP, our clients, and partners (Lobby post).
We shared an update on our plans and preparations for implementing the GDPR‘s principles in this helpful Lobby post.
We’re thrilled to welcome SEO household name Yoast as an official VIP technical integration.
WordPress 4.9.5 security and maintenance release came out on April 3 (Announcement post, Lobby post for VIP clients.) Version 4.9.6, focusing on privacy and personal data tools in support of GDPR, is already in beta.
Jetpack 6.0 was deployed to VIP Go (Announcement, Lobby), bringing new privacy-related tools and settings among other enhancements.
PHP 7.2 was rolled out across VIP Go in early April as well (Lobby post.)
Watch highlights from April’s excellent BigWP NYC talks in this playlist. In addition to Andrew’s mentioned above, we had Paul Schreiber from FiveThirtyEight on the importance of U2F security keys, Bradford Campeau-Laurion from Alley with a proof of concept for using WP_Query to source remote data on the Hachette Book Group project, and Kevin Langley from Human Made with highlights from the Fairfax Media case study.
We couldn’t be more proud of VIP client Explore Parts Unknown for their Webby win! They took home the People’s Voice award in Website Best Practices, defined as “an industry benchmark for the most current, innovative, and advanced practices in web development.” Kudos to the team at ANML for the beautiful design.
Go in depth with XWP in the latest edition of our partner profile series, Six Questions. XWP is currently recruiting beta testers for the next release of the WordPress AMP plugin.
10Up released ElasticPress 2.5 with a new faceting widget to make it easy to filter content and support Elasticsearch 6.2. Their popular container-based environment, WP Local Docker, now bundles WP Snapshots for really streamlined team-based development; they also added some detailed tutorials to make it even easier. Pete Nelson shared his slides and code tests from a talk on custom roles and capabilities for publishers, including tips for Gutenberg.
rtCamp’s Joel Abreo conducted a session titled “WordPress: An Overview of the Ecosystem & Opportunities” as part of FOSSMeet 2018, a two-day conference at the College of Engineering in their home city of Pune.
Alley launched two new features for the Kaiser Family Foundation last month, both hosted on VIP. The KFF State Data tool now allows users to create, share and download Custom Data Reports, whilst Pre$cription For Power is a searchable database allowing people to investigate the relationships between patient advocacy groups and Big Pharma.
The latest “Inside Inpsyde” features Tobias Zimpel on the challenges of remote work.
Human Made built a new plugin for SquareOffs, a social voting poll that helps publishers receive direct feedback from their audiences.
Aaron Jorbin created Cafe.com/100 in 2.5 days thanks in large part to open-sourced code from Human Made and Alley. The CAFE 100 is a group of one hundred change-makers taking action to address some of the most pressing problems in America and around the world.
Hello Design was nominated for a Webby for their work on the Electric Daisy Carnival event app.
Chris Ford of Reaktiv Studios joined the OfficeHours.FM podcast to share how she uses automation tools to save time on web development projects.
Trew Knowledge cooked up a fresh UX design for Chef’s Plate, an eco-friendly Canadian meal kit delivery service.

Media and Marketing Notes
Research and perspectives on the business of media and the practice of marketing.

“For news organizations, the GDPR may actually prompt a return to first principles, where a focus on quality content beats adapting to the latest social media algorithm.”

Susan McGregor, Assistant Professor at Columbia School of Journalism and Assistant Director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, in a Columbia Journalism Review article summarizing a report on the impact of Europe’s new General Data Protection Regulation.

“Accessibility should be as important to your ongoing practice as good writing and content.”

Robert Stein, EVP and Chief Program Officer, American Alliance of Museums, at Museums and the Web 2018 in Vancouver. He spoke alongside Seema Rao, principal, Brilliant Creative Studio, in a talk titled, “To Journey In Twitter Canoes: Methods To Understand The Mechanisms And Meaning In Twitter Conversations.”

“My numbers are lower, but in the long run more meaningful (interaction, retention rates/dwell times, uniques and so on).”

Esra Dogramaci, Senior Editor, Digital at Deutsche Welle, in ‘Metrics that matter,’ notes from her talk at the International Journalism Festival.

Spotlight: Gutenberg educational videos

We asked some of the biggest enterprise users of WordPress what they most wanted to know about the new Gutenberg editor. These videos, which include both overview and hands-on material, are the result. The topics listed below are available for anyone to view, whether or not you’re a VIP client. Register for free and watch them at www.vipgutenberg.com

Converting Custom Content to Gutenberg

Shortcodes to Blocks
ACF Fields to Blocks
CMB2 to Blocks

Access Control & User Permissions

Controlling access to blocks
Controlling access to blocks based on user roles
Creating Block Templates
Applying User Roles to Block Templates

There are additional videos available on the site as well, which will appear automatically for VIP clients.

Upcoming Events
We can’t wait to see many of your at our favorite event of the year, WordPress VIP Workshop, May 14-17 in Napa Valley, California! Joining the keynote and session leads, our recently announced line up of Flashtalks feature agency partners Dekode, Alley Interactive, 10up, rtCamp, and XWP on topics ranging from AMP to IoT. Take a look at the complete session list for more details. Attendees, look out for an email with travel instructions and make sure you’ve accepted the invite to our Slack channel to get this party started.

We are excited to participate in Brand Marketing Summit as a silver sponsor, May 30-31 in San Francisco. Designed to create the Chief Marketing Officer of the future, tracks include the science of storytelling, personalizing customer journeys and the next generation of social media. It’s not too late to register, and VIP clients and friends can use this discount code: VIP300
We hope to see you in Boston for Forward, the annual brand storytelling conference from technical partner Skyword, June 14 in Boston. Forward is adding an optional “Storynomics” seminar this year taught by Robert McKee, whose former students include 63 Academy Award winners (and Jimmy Fallon).
WordCamp Europe is just around the corner, June 14-16 in Belgrade. Our own Simon Dickson will be reprising his role as MC, and the schedule of speakers is chock full of folks from across the VIP extended family. Organizers recently released a fresh batch of tickets. They also compiled these tips for a night out on the town in Belgrade, in case you like to plan ahead.
SRCCon returns for its fifth year, this time in Minneapolis June 28-29. VIP is thrilled to sponsor and we always seek to send as many folks as we can to this event, which attracts over 300 journalism-technologists, newsroom leaders, and others working to change journalism for the better. Sound like your people? Here’s more about how to attend.
We are excited to support ONA Insights: Revenue and Engagement, a one-day deep dive into audience engagement for digital journalists, newsroom leaders, managers, executives and entrepreneurs. It all goes down in Toronto on May 11 at the Globe and Mail Headquarters.

Six Questions with XWP

This post series profiles each of our featured partner agencies.

XWP has been a WordPress.com VIP Partner since 2013 and have been building big with WordPress since 2009. Their earliest at-scale WordPress gig was a 50 brand migration with Rogers Media, followed by 9 more years of leading the industry.

XWP team at work

What’s your agency’s origin story?

In the beginning there was XHTMLized…

Some companies are born in a moment, and others emerge over time. XWP is one of the latter. Part of the X Company family, we started as the WordPress team within X-Team, one of our sister companies. 2014 was when we officially spun into our own company with our first major project being the high-stakes migration of 15 News Corp Australia properties to WordPress. This project set the standard for the type of work we would pursue and excel at over the next 4 years: complex, business-centric engineering for high-traffic websites. The News Corp Australia project also established something fundamental to who we are now as a group of people: a team committed to contributing to the Open Web and the Open Source Community. Translating the work we do with clients back in to WordPress was something kicked off with News Corp Australia, and has been something we have brought to every project and client relationship since.

Today, we continue to adhere to the characteristics of our earliest projects. We take on projects that are complex, interesting, and reciprocally valuable to the WordPress ecosystem. Our remote team has grown from the original 8 to 45 and now covers 14 different countries across 6 continents.

Pick three words that describe your agency culture.

People (are of the Highest Value): We treat them with care, respect, and generosity, always.
Visionary: We believe in the Open Web and its undeniable value to humanity. We work to ensure it has the strongest possible future and look for opportunities to break new ground on open source projects.
Best Practices: We champion development best practices in the community and bring this commitment to our clients and projects.

Tell us about a client project you are especially proud of.

We’ve been incredibly fortunate to work on some very cool projects with some very cool companies. One recent project that stands out was a front-end performance engagement we did with Heavy.com. Our engineers were given the ultimate brief: “Make it blazing fast!”. The team seriously went to the next level in diagnosing, building, and testing and have achieved results on low-speed devices/connections that the majority in the industry didn’t think was even possible. It was very fun to see this project unfold and very rewarding to hear of the impact it’s made on the client’s business.

Our partnership with Google is also worth mentioning. We’ve worked with them on a couple of projects, including the Coding Standards project Tide. More recently we’ve worked with them on AMP and its intersection with WordPress. Not only are we bringing the latest of AMP to the WordPress plugin, but we’ve been able to technically contribute directly to the AMP Project, engage and educate the WordPress community on AMP, and even present on the work at this years AMPConf.

XWP Engineer Thierry Muller sharing on the AMP Plugin at AMPConf 2018 in Amsterdam.

What are you most excited about in the WordPress community right now?

We shared this question with the whole team. 🙂 Their responses can be best summarised under: Gutenberg, Tide (Coding Standards), and the impact of Design.

Gutenberg: I dare anyone to suggest Gutenberg is not the biggest deal in WordPress this year. Its impact seeps through every layer of WordPress. It will change the editing experience for all, small blogs to big media. It will change how developers, of themes and plugins, architect their work. It will ~~change~~ transform the entire site building experience for WordPress users in years to come. It’s bold, ambitious, and convinces us that WordPress has an important role to play in the Open Web for next 15 years of its life.
Tide (Coding Standards): Coding best practices have alway been a core part of who we are. We’re excited that code quality, and general coding standards, is receiving even more attention by the community. Our contribution through this with Tide reflects the importance we place on this and our commitment to helping the community in this area.
Impact of Design: Over the last year we have deepened our appreciation for UX and design-led projects. The understanding of the user experience and allowing it to influence product development is something we believe is really going to unlock the potential of WordPress even further. It’s been inspiring to see these kind of practices in those working on WordPress Core.

We’ve been seeing amazing work from the team tackling Gutenberg, design support for major Core focused initiatives, and organizational changes for how design and development can work together. – Joshua Wold

What’s your favorite conference or event of the year, and why?

This is a great question and the responses from the team have been interesting. The big theme though is something along the lines of “whatever event is next”. This sounds a lot like a cop-out answer, but the reason is we are a remote company and there are only a couple of cases where 2 or more people live and work in the same city. Events for us represent opportunities to get together and get some face time with friends. Connecting with the open source community IRL is fantastic as well, but time together with colleagues is something we enjoy finding excuses for.

With that said, we are big fans of LoopConf, with its deep dive focus on engineering, and WordCamp for Publishers, launched just last year, with its focus on an industry we work closely with.

(And the sixth: Ask yourself a question and answer it) What does “building a better web” practically look like?

Our company call-to-arms is “Let’s build a better web”. It’s unpacked further in the statement “We work for a future where the open web is more performant, secure, reliable, and accessible.”

The application of this could be as simple as that when we work for our clients, we adhere to best practices and ensure we build the best possible version of what can be built. We do do this, but “building a better web” is even more than that. Just as we go deep on the work we do for clients and partners, we look for opportunities to go wide and influence the standard of the whole internet. If we can improve that standard by even a small percentage, how many lives and businesses will be positively impacted. Two current examples of this kind of work are Tide and our work on the AMP project. Tide will help improve the quality of code across the entire WordPress ecosystem (that’s 30% of the web) and AMP represents a widely used standards based technology.

Building a better web means adhering to best practices ourselves and lowering the barrier of entry to best practices for everyone else.

Thank you, XWP Team!

Welcome Yoast SEO!

We’re excited to announce Yoast as a VIP technical partner! Over the last year we’ve been working with the Yoast Premium plugin on our VIP Go platform with a number of our clients with great success, and we are proud to add them to our VIP technical integration program.

Yoast is a household name for anyone in the professional and enterprise WordPress community. As one of the most popular plugins perennially in the WordPress.org marketplace, their SEO tools help over 8 million websites to optimize their pages for search engines. With their easy-to-use guidance, you can easily write and maintain optimized pages for the keywords you want to rank for.

A screenshot of the Yoast SEO analysis window, showing problems, improvements, and good results.

Yoast guides you with focused recommendations for both SEO and human readability, and provides easy-to-update interfaces to test and refine over time. These analyses and recommendations are evaluated and adjusted on a frequent basis, to match the latest developments in SEO.

The Premium version, recommended for enterprise WordPress teams, offers a ton of helpful features including the following:

Optimize every page for up to 5 keywords
Internal linking suggestions for better cross-linking
Redirect manager: your visitors don’t get stuck on a 404 Not Found page
Preview of your page in social media
Content insights: are the keywords you’d like to rank for in line with what you’re actually writing about.

Additional specialized Yoast tools include Local SEO, Video SEO, News SEO (optimized for Google News), and WooCommerce and Local WooCommerce options.

“VIP is an excellent platform for enterprise WordPress applications. It only made sense to formalize our connection. We’re excited to work with VIP and continue to fulfill our mission of SEO for everyone,” said Joost de Valk, CEO and Founder of Yoast.

“At VIP we’re relentless about providing our customers great flexibility in addition to performance, speed, and security. As a part of our vision to make it easy to take advantage of the very best that enterprise WordPress has to offer, we seek to identify the tools and technologies clients rely on most, and forge a deeper tie with them and their development teams. As Yoast is a trusted component of many of our clients’ ongoing SEO testing and optimization cycles, we’re excited to welcome them officially as a VIP technical integration,” said Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress.com VIP.

March VIP Roundup

If you aren’t yet a part of the wave of activity around Gutenberg development, experimentation, and planning across the WordPress community, now is a great time to join in. We have a slew of March updates and tools to share on that front in this roundup, along with news from across the community, and a run-down of Spring and early Summer events including our own VIP Workshop!

Read on for all this, plus a spotlight on TechCrunch‘s redesign, rebuild, and relaunch on VIP.

From Enterprise Happiness Engineer Shannon Smith’s talk at the Montreal WordPress meetup

Gutenberg News and Notes
The latest tools, demos, and updates around the block-based editor coming to WordPress 5.0

Have teammates who haven’t yet played around with the Gutenberg editor? No problem! They can use our TestGutenberg.com site to try out the latest version on a standard WordPress site.
For VIP clients, we’ve partnered with well-known WordPress educators Zac Gordon and Joe Casabona to develop our own videos on the Gutenberg project. Get all the details on how to access these videos on the related Lobby post.
We are committed to helping all of our clients integrate the new editor into their workflow smoothly. We’re working on a tool that will help you incorporate Gutenberg in to your production environments by Page and Post. The Gutenberg Ramp plugin will allow you to make granular choices about where Gutenberg appears so that you can get teams working with it sooner on live sites, test all of your customizations, and get everything squared away ahead of WordPress 5.0 deployment. Once we have this tested and in place on our platform, we’ll release a public version as well that anyone can use. More on that soon!
Automattic Product Designer Mel Choyce presented at LoopConf on the future of Customization in the post-Gutenberg world. And Enterprise Happiness Engineer Shannon Smith gave a talk on Gutenberg and the future of WordPress, including a demo of our new TestGutenberg tool, for the Montreal WordPress community.
Jay Hoffman at Reaktiv posted a helpful step-by-step guide to getting started with Gutenberg block attributes.
In the month of April, rtCamp is offering complimentary 30 minute technical introductions to Gutenberg.
Keep up with everything having to do with Gutenberg at VIP and a list of helpful resources in this regularly updated doc.

News and Releases
Updates from around VIP, our clients, and our agency and technical partners.

Our new, streamlined Data Sync process for VIP Go allows you to easily and quickly replicate all of your production data to non-production environments. A self-service option is on the way soon!
We have an amazing group of speakers lined for VIP Workshop May 14-17th in Napa, California. Ticket sales end next Friday – more details below in Upcoming Events.
AMP version 0.6.2 rolled out across WordPress.com, including VIP sites hosted there (Lobby post).
Ads.txt manager, developed and maintained by featured partner 10up, is now available on VIP Go. This helpful tool allows you to manage and validate the contents of your ads.txt file through your admin interface (Lobby post).
Jetpack 5.9 General Maintenance rolled out this month (Lobby post, Announcement).
The PHP 7.2 upgrade has rolled out to all WordPress.com servers (Lobby post). It’s scheduled to deploy this week (#) on VIP Go.
Technical integration Ooyala version 3.0 is now available (Lobby post).
Trew Knowledge shared a look back at the work they did in collaboration with us at VIP in optimizing Olympic.ca and Olympique.ca for the heavy traffic expectations of the 2018 Games. The site’s visitors enjoyed gold medal performance throughout, despite it’s “exceeding projections by more than 200% and doubling what was generated in Rio 2016 with more than 17 million page views.”
Human Made released a trio of tools: React-wp-scripts for development tooling, Repress for smart Redux stores, and react-oembed-container to simplify oEmbed rendering. And Peter Wilson presented on a major media company replatforming at LoopConf.
10up’s Helen Hou-Sandí was featured in NY Magazine’s “Ask A Tech Person” highlighting her favorite gadgets. And Adam Silverstein wrote up his experiences contributing MathML support to the AMP project. 10up has also made accessibility standard WCAG 2.0 Level A a baseline requirement for all projects, and updated their Engineering Best Practices to include specific standards.
Alley Interactive launched the 2018 State Science and Engineering Indicators data visualization project for the National Science Foundation.
rtCamp celebrated the company’s 9th anniversary at their annual team gathering in Goa.
Weston Ruter, CTO of XWP, and Alberto Medina, Developer Advocate with the Web Content Ecosystems team at Google, were featured in an episode of WPWeekly this month on the AMP Project.

Media and Marketing Notes
Research and perspectives on the business of media and the practice of marketing.

“One of the biggest challenges facing newsroom innovators is transferring one-off prototypes to product teams. This can be exacerbated when there are simply too many new experiments for any one team to take ownership of.”

-Allie Schultes, Social media and outreach producer at BBC Labs, in notes from the team’s first Media Innovation Unconference.

“We spent a lot of time literally watching them use it on their phone. When does their face light up because they love it, or their eyebrows scrunch up because they’re stuck?”

-Arizona Daily Star product manager Becky Pallack as quoted by Meg Heckman in the Columbia Journalism Review, on the research they did in developing and evolving chatbots.

Client Spotlight: TechCrunch

Big congratulations are in order for Nicole Wilke and the entire TechCrunch team, along with Human Made, for launching a brand new TechCrunch on VIP in March. It was a complete rebuild from the ground up, including design, user experience, and architecture. Nicole’s introductory post traces the project from first principles all the way through to launch, and explores the rationale behind the TechCrunch team’s choice of a decoupled setup.

Upcoming Events

Tickets sales for our favorite event of the year, VIP Workshop (May 14-17th in Napa California), will end April 13th. In addition to kickoff talks by Kinsey Wilson, Howard Rheingold, Miguel Fonseca, and Tammie Lister, session leaders include VIP clients like TechCrunch, Nielsen, and FiveThirtyEight, agency partners Dekode, Alley Interactive, 10up, rtCamp, and XWP, and Automatticians Simon Wheatley and Matt Perry. We keep the event deliberately small to make sure there are lots of opportunities for chance conversations and informal breakout discussions. Book soon!

BigWP NYC is coming up on Wednesday, April 11th! If you’ll be in the area and want to attend, RSVP soon via the meetup group to hear talks by Paul Schreiber from FiveThirtyEight, Andrew Fleming from Dow Jones, Tom Harrigan from Alley Interactive, and Kevin Langley from Human Made. It will take place at USA Today’s new offices in Midtown. Doors will open at 6:30pm. Space is extremely limited.
SRCCON 2018 will be June 28-29 in Minneapolis and the call for participation of all kinds is open! It’s the fifth anniversary for the event that gathers over 300 journalism-technologists, newsroom leaders, and others working to change journalism for the better. VIP typically sends as many folks as we can to this event and it comes highly recommended.
VIP Happiness Engineer Shannon Smith will be giving a talk on code review April 11 at Web a Québec, the largest French-speaking digital event in North America.
rtCamp is sponsoring FOSSMeet at College of Engineering Pune (COEP), one of oldest and top engineering institutes in India, April 7-8. Rahul Bansal, rtCamp’s CEO, will be speaking there about the WordPress ecosystem.
We will be sponsoring ONA Insights: Revenue and Engagement in Toronto, May 11th at the Globe and Mail Headquarters.
The awesome WordCamp for Publishers returns August 8-10 in Chicago and ticket sales are now open. Follow the Twitter handle @WCPublishers for updates. Check out our post from last year’s inaugural event to get a sense of what to expect.

Getting Ready for Gutenberg

WordPress 5.0 will bring the biggest and most exciting change to the WordPress editor experience, ever, and we want you to be ready. Much of this post will be useful for anyone running enterprise WordPress applications, anywhere, but it also mentions some things we’re doing specifically on the VIP platform or for our customers. Wherever possible we’re taking the tools we’ve developed for our own systems, and making them available for the community to take advantage of as well.

Try out the Gutenberg editor as a front-end experience. At our TestGutenberg.com site, you can easily try out the latest version of the Gutenberg editor on a standard WordPress site to get a feel for what it’s like to compose and edit with blocks. If you don’t already have a test environment with Gutenberg set up, this is an easy way to introduce your whole team and everyone who touches the WordPress admin to the new interface. This site is free and available for anyone to use.
Prepare your teams.There are a wealth of learning materials across the community thanks to the work of countless creators, including both free resources and videos and courses offered for a fee. Our documentation page points to a number of community resources and write-ups, and Gutenberg.news tracks just about everything that comes out across the community.
For VIP clients, we’ve partnered with well-known WordPress educators Zac Gordon and Joe Casabona to develop our own videos on the Gutenberg project. VIP clients can get all the details on how to access these videos on the related Lobby post.
Test your customizations. No matter where your projects are hosted, you’ll want to start testing and planning now. We recommend developers to set up a local testing environment in which you can test all customizations and integrations to see how they work with Gutenberg prior to exposing it to users. To assist with that effort, we are working on compiling Gutenberg readiness information from partners and will share it when available. There is also a recently released Gutenberg compatibility library that may be helpful: https://github.com/danielbachhuber/gutenberg-plugin-compatibility#gutenberg-plugin-compatibility
Plan for a smooth transition. Based on testing and conversations with your teams, determine how and when you want to implement the new interface in your workflows. As mentioned previously, installing the Classic Editor Plugin will allow you to maintain the legacy editing experience after you install WordPress 5.0.
For VIP clients, we’re developing a tool that will give our clients fine control over how Gutenberg surfaces at the Post and Page type level, both before and after 5.0 is deployed. This will give teams the ability to test more granularly ahead of time and phase the new editor in as needed based on team needs. It will also allow them to easily set a state that will persist after 5.0 launches, and we will have it set it to keep the legacy editor on by default.

We are working on a public version of this plugin as well and will aim to release it shortly after we have it squared away for use on our own systems. More on this soon!

We’ll keep this documentation page updated with all of the latest information about Gutenberg at VIP.

An Amazing Slate of VIP Workshop Speakers

With ticket sales ending on April 13th, you’ll want to register soon for VIP Workshop, our annual enterprise WordPress gathering taking place May 14-17th. This marks the seventh year for a very special event that gets the whole extended VIP family together, including clients, partners, and community.

The speaker lineup is nearly complete, and it is shaping up to be a phenomenal three days in Napa, California. Topics run the gamut from big picture thoughts on organizational change, fostering diversity, and the future of digital, to the latest advanced topics with the Gutenberg project, to retrospectives, case studies, and best practices.

Throughout the week we’ll hear from VIP clients like TechCrunch, Nielsen, and FiveThirtyEight, agency partners Dekode, Alley Interactive, 10up, rtCamp, and XWP, and Automatticians Simon Wheatley, Miguel Fonseca, Tammie Lister, and Matt Perry.

And kicking us off will be WordPress.com President and veteran of The New York Times and National Public Radio Kinsey Wilson, and celebrated technology author and lecturer Howard Rheingold.

The schedule is split in to business and developer tracks, and includes ample opportunities for informal networking and conversations among the whole group. Session formats include joint-track full conference discussions, individual track case studies and featured topics, and flash talks. Get the full details on speakers, formats, and topics, and all of the logistics on the Workshop site.