This week: WP Notify, Sage 10, WordPress fonts, WordFest Live lectures, and much more
As a writer and editor as well as part of the HeroPress team, Cate has wandered around WordPress and interacted with the community on a variety of levels. She’s seen the good, the bad, and the truly amazing. Currently she’s employed as a Community Engagement Specialist sponsored by Automattic.
Community. Love it or hate it, there’s power in it. Harnessing that power can be a great equalizer in the success of your WordPress business.
Building or engaging a community that is connected to your product or service doesn’t take the same financial and creative resources that traditional marketing requires, and that can be a real benefit to small businesses and solopreneurs.
But don’t be misled. Tapping into the hive mind of an audience and keeping people coming back still requires skills and effort that many struggle to grasp.
Social listening (learn more from Hootsuite), being open to constructive criticism, putting aside preconceived notions, and giving your community the freedom to grow organically can all be very difficult for most of us, and often more so for entrepreneurs.
Fortunately for you, I have a cheat sheet of articles to help you get your community-building off to a healthy start!
Just like any other organic being, communities need care and feeding. Unfortunately, with a community made of widely varying individuals, it can be really difficult to know where to focus your valuable time and limited resources.
These 4 tips touch on key factors that cause communities to flounder, the vital areas you can invest in to help build success from the start!
It’s really easy to think that the number of members is the best metric for judging the health of your community. But simply having people registered or signed up for a mailing list doesn’t mean they’re actually active in your community.
According to Weaving from the inside out, “Healthy communities need a center of gravity with dense and trusted relationships. Otherwise they are hollow and unsustainable.”
Focusing on building a strong, healthy core can give you raving fans within your community that are excited to do a lot of the community building work for you. Not only that, but they’re also available for testing and often act as ambassadors for your product or service outside of the community.
I’ll be honest, this was a new idea for me. I’ve spent most of my life looking to smooth friction out of it. I want my kids to sit quietly and behave, I want the house to be in a constant state of tidy, and for the love of all why can’t my hair just stay as I styled it.
However, this article was a real perspective changer.
It dives into solid reasons to embrace friction and how important friction is to keeping life, and your community, from going stale. While it’s nice to be comfortable, friction is a powerful motivator to make us reevaluate where we are, what we’re doing, and very importantly, what we might be missing.
The pandemic changed us. We’re not the same.
It seems like the most obvious of statements, but until I read through this post from Andrea Middleton I hadn’t really thought about it.
And as I write this now, I realize it’s not just the pandemic. Here in the US, we’ve been through a season of painful growth and revelation. So many things have happened to both unite us and divide us even more. Now, a senseless war rages on and we face the further weight of what we can do.
Your community’s likely struggling with the same questions, changes, and hardships. Reach out. Check in. Stay authentically connected.
One of the most difficult things you’ll likely face in growing your community is giving it the time and space to develop into what it wants to be. You can guide it down a path, but ultimately it will decide where it’s going.
While this article looks at burnout from an employee-employer relationship, it can also be applied to burning up too many of your resources within your community.
Holding too tightly to the direction or putting too much pressure on your community to be what you think it should be burns up relationships, opportunities for innovation you might never have considered, and causes a lot of stress and tensions within the vital cores that can be such a powerhouse for your success.
It’s one thing to fight with your community to overcome a hurdle. It’s completely destructive – and a waste of your investment – to fight against a community that only wants to support you.
The notification system in WordPress is ailing, to put it mildly. On top of it, there is more and more news of spam popping up in the panel. Hence the importance of the WP Notify project. Find out how such a system should look like according to Jonathan Bossenger
Sage 10 has seen the light of day. Apart from Sage itself, we have also got another version of Acron, i.e. a library that facilitates connecting the WordPress world with Laravel.
The Custom Post Type UI plugin is now celebrating its 12th birthday. Can you imagine that someone (Brad and WebDevStudios to be exact) has been keeping it up and developing it for so many years?
LearnDash is taking cutting-edge e-learning methodology and infusing it into WordPress. Trusted to power the learning programs for major universities, small to mid-size companies, startups, entrepreneurs, and bloggers worldwide.
Aurooba Ahmed has created a really helpful plugin that allows you to add another entry or duplicate it directly from Gutenberg.
Tonya Mork’s story is available on WordPress.org. In her case, WordPress changed her life.
The Webfonts API has been incorporated into the Gutenberg plugin for now, and then it will come to WordPress 6.0. Thanks to this API, we will finally be able to manage fonts universally.
Marius Jensen describes the problems he has encountered maintaining the Health Check plugin, from the moment it became to some extent a part of the WordPress core.
An engaging article on sysadmin’s job has popped up on Ymir blog. It also shows how expensive can our cost-cutting become.
Andrew Kepson shows how to easily integrate Yoast with GraphQL-based headless solutions.
Though fairly old, this article fits perfectly in the discussion on WordPress Multisite. Multi-Tenant WordPress is a different view on this topic.
On WordFest’s YouTube channel, you can watch all recordings from the conference.
Tom Willmot has summarized 2021 for Human Made.
Those of you who use the Ray tool to debug your code will be pleased to learn that the global-ray library has just been created.