The developer release of Advanced Custom Fields PRO two weeks ago caused quite a stir in the WordPress community. It sparked a debate about backward compatibility, business models, and developer entitlement with free plugins. However, for me this debate actually highlighted wider issues around WordPress site development and perhaps more importantly the community. So in […]
Writing code is easy. Marketing is hard. I have been marketing on a small scale since launching the premium version. This has been mainly through Twitter engagement and blogging. In the beginning I tried using Google AdWords but found the return on investment was low and didn’t pursue paid advertising methods any further. When I […]
Recently I have been thinking about pricing premium WordPress plugins, specifically around pricing trends and how I price my own products. When I first started selling back in June 2012 it was available at a single price point of $35 for use on unlimited sites with unlimited support. Since then a lot has changed in […]
Last year my wife Michelle launched Print Play Learn (formerly Harriet & Violet), a free teaching resources site for teachers, parents and children specialising in Early Years and Primary education. Last week the site turned one! School teachers have a variety of resource websites to use, but Michelle, a Primary school teacher herself, constantly found […]
I am excited to announce the acquisition of WP App Store from Brad Touesnard. WP App Store is an exclusive deal site and mailing list for WordPress plugins, themes and products, allowing you to get great deals in your inbox every two weeks. This is the second incarnation of WP App Store which started out […]
WordPress core development has recently adopted a features-as-plugins model for incorporating large changes into major releases. This has come about largely in response to the WordPress 3.6 release, which saw its Post Format UI changes backed out late in the day. As a plugin developer wanting to keep up with changes that might affect my […]
Last year I attended, and was a micro sponsor of, my first WordCamp – WordCamp London 2013. I expected to sit and listen to some great talks, but not really knowing anyone there I didn’t anticipate to chat to many people. Halfway through the morning I sat next to Kevin, a developer living in Liverpool, […]
Last week I read an extremely in depth article from Brian Casel about the logistics of growing customers for a SaaS business. What particularly intrigued me about Brian’s tips and techniques was the use of as his CRM (customer relationship manager). Trello is a project management tool that uses cards and boards to represent components […]
When building WordPress sites for clients I generally try to use different environments for development, testing and deployment to live. This means that there are three areas of the site that need to be synchronised across environments; the code, the database and any media uploads for the site. Managing code deployments can be a smooth […]
Although I have built many WordPress plugins in the last few years, the plugins that are popular, continually developed and endure are those that prove useful to me personally and for my professional development. Pippin Williamson is a plugin author extraordinaire and has written about the subject of plugins that scratch an itch, where he […]