Official Blog
10up speaking at ZendCon 2015
Taylor LovettThis year, Lead Web Engineer Eric Mann and I are attending and speaking at ZendCon, the largest global gathering of the PHP community, on October 19-22, 2015 in Las Vegas. ZendCon brings together industry thought leaders, recognized PHP experts, enterprise PHP adopters, as well as independent developers for four days of professional development and networking.
On October 19, Eric will present his first talk, “Sandboxing your Development Environment with Vagrant”, which covers best practices in developer-side virtualization and some of the options available for runtime system configuration. On Wednesday, he’s talking about WordPress and unit testing in “A Tale of Two Test Suites.” Eric will cover fundamentals like API mocking, and comparing and contrasting the standard WordPress integration test suite with mock-powered unit testing alternatives.
Also on Wednesday, I’ll present “Best Practices for WordPress Enterprise”. I’ll explain how 10up successfully builds highly efficient and scalable WordPress websites for some of the world’s largest companies and organizations. Although I’m focusing on engineering, I’ll also touch on team coordination and workflows.
Reiterating our commitment to an open web
Helen Hou-SandiIt’s easy to take open-source software for granted, and to forget that the Internet we use every day depends in part on the freely donated work of thousands of programmers. If open-source software is at the heart of the Internet, then we might need to examine it from time to time to make sure it’s not bleeding.
I’m proud to be a part of 10up because we are eager to support a platform we use heavily and that powers a significant percentage of the web. I am sponsored full-time as one of the six lead developers of WordPress, and am very excited to announce further expansion of our support for WordPress. As a fellow committer for WordPress, Drew Jaynes will now also be enabled to work full-time on WordPress. Drew has been instrumental in creating awareness, standards, and output in our developer documentation, as well as contributing in many other areas in the core software and in community projects such as the WordPress.org site itself.
As a part of this expansion, we’ve created a Platform Engineer position and transitioned Drew to his new title. While we’re not currently hiring for the position, we’ve intentionally left the title open-ended as we continue to grow our support for and even build web platforms. We’ve dedicated significant resources to WordPress as well as projects like sanitize.css and VVV, and envision a future in which we continue to do the same elsewhere.
10up also has the rare opportunity to take advantage of a confluence of timing, a core WordPress initiative, and an employee who already runs the effort. We are doing this by donating 100 hours of Scott Kingsley Clark’s company time to the ongoing Fields API project, starting today. Scott has already assembled a strong group of contributors and laid a solid foundation and roadmap, and we feel strongly that supporting this initiative will help move it into a viable state for potential inclusion in a near-future release of WordPress. As a company with a central mission of creating great publishing experiences, the user and developer experiences a fields API can improve are something we are particularly well-versed in.
Blocked: An In-Depth Special Report on iOS 9 Content Blockers
Ben Ilfeld on
Editor’s Note: This summary and report was co-authored by Lead Audience & Revenue Strategist Ben Ilfeld and President & Founder Jake Goldman.
On September 16, Apple launched iOS 9 with a suite of enhancements. One buried feature has the web content industry talking: content blocking. The immediate and obvious use case being blocking of ads and third-party scripts often used for site metrics. Less than one week in, a $0.99 ad blocker is atop the iOS App Store’s paid app charts, and a $3.99 ad blocker trails right behind it.
Much has been said about the ethical implications and hypothetical impact. Clients who look to 10up for web and online revenue strategies were, naturally, less interested in debating whether content blocking is fair, and more interested in modeling their potential impact and adapting. While we couldn’t help touching on the ethics – an open web is core to 10up’s DNA – we focused on analyzing technical realities, data informed predictions, practical industry implications, and potential strategies publishers can apply to face a changing landscape.
Read on to review highlights from the report, or skip ahead and download our free eBook in PDF or ePub format.
Microcopy can make a macro impression
Taylor Dewey on
A newly hired UX Designer once quipped, “I could spend all day obsessing about word choices.” It’s true, we could! Those small fragments of text—a phrase, a sentence fragment, or even a word—can make an interface really work. We call it microcopy.
Microcopy sits unobtrusively alongside user interface, ready to provide contextual information for a user that needs that extra bit of help or information. It makes visitors feel confident and can help reinforce a client’s brand through tone and style. Typically you see microcopy near interactive elements. Here are some prototypical examples of microcopy found online:
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- Status Messages: Google drive keeps you informed that your hard work is okay.
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- Form Help: WordPress admin
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- Forms: Hotels.com lets you know what you can search for.
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- Expectations: BBC lets potential signups know that it won’t post to your feeds.
“Microcopy is small yet powerful copy. It’s fast, light, and deadly. It’s a short sentence, a phrase, a few words. A single word… Don’t be deceived by the size of microcopy. It can make or break an interface.”
— Joshua Porter, 2009
Marrying Brightcove and WordPress
Jaimee RatliffWhen it comes to providing enterprise-class cloud solutions for video delivery and monetization, Brightcove is the biggest game in town.
10up recently teamed up with Brightcove to create Brightcove Video Connect: a beautiful WordPress plugin that leverages the new Video Cloud API to power an intuitive experience for content creators designed to look and feel like an organic extension of WordPress. The plugin features the functionality that media publishers value most, such as easy video uploads and playlist management. We even designed the plugin with extensibility in mind, so that major media companies with unique workflows and presentation requirements can customize and extend their experience.
Sponsoring Sanitize.css
In keeping with our commitments and contributions to important open source projects, we’re proud to take on stewardship of sanitize.css. An incredibly popular project by 10up’er Jonathan Neal, sanitize.css makes it easier to engineer website front ends that render consistently across popular browsers.
Elegant in its simplicity and superbly documented, the project already more than meets our engineering standards. More importantly, tools like sanitize.css serve 10up’s mission to create outstanding, dependable content-centric website experiences from front to back, for our clients, and for a bigger open web.
You Got Your Content in My Web Design
John Eckman on
I’m very excited this week for the Design and Content Conference in Vancouver BC. The conference theme is “Designers and Content Strategists: We’re Better Together,” and the speakers list is a who’s-who of the web design and content strategy worlds, including Ethan Marcotte and Karen McGrane, whose Content Strategy for Mobile was the first detailed, extended discussion of how design and content come together in a multi-device world.
For me, the most important shifts in the web design and development industry in the last decade have been:
- The recognition of content strategy as a discipline, and the inclusion of content strategy-driven thinking in web teams. (See Kristina Halvorson’s The Discipline of Content Strategy and Content Strategy for the Web)
- The acknowledgement of the impact responsive web design has on the design process, activities, and outputs (See Marcotte’s Responsive Web Design and Responsive Web Design).
As these authors pointed out, neither concept was entirely new. Ethan’s article referenced “A Dao of Web Design” which prescribed “pages which are accessible, regardless of the browser, platform or screen that your reader chooses or must use.”
Catch four 10up speakers at WordCamp Europe
Drew Jaynes on
WordCamp Europe is this weekend, and four 10uppers have made the trek to Seville, Spain to mingle and share insights.
I will be presenting on Friday on the experience of setting up WordPress for new users, raising questions about how WordPress can continue to drive adoption by catering to that audience. I’ll also be teaching attendees how to write documentation for the handbooks, inline docs, and examples for the code reference.
Director of Platform Helen Hou-Sandi is presenting Developing for Capabilities, covering approaches for mobile, responsive, and accessible development. Lead Engineer Eric Mann will be giving a short talk on Saturday on how to sandbox a development environment with Vagrant. Finally, Senior Engineer Adam Silverstein will talk about Backbone.js and WordPress, in Putting a little Backbone in your WordPress.
With a packed schedule and huge attendance, WordCamp Europe looks to live up to its name once again as the premier WordCamp abroad.
10up spans the globe, including Brazil! I will be speaking this weekend at WordCamp Belo Horizonte. I will be presenting on modernizing WordPress search using the 10up plugin ElasticPress. 10upper Thiago Ponte will also be in attendance.
Wanted: Project and Account Managers, Reward for Capture
Christine Garrison10up is widely known for the complex and unique web experiences we produce. We consistently create unparalleled experiences for our clients and while engineering and design is a large part of that, senior project and account management talent are critical to the success of 10up and its clients.
In an effort to thank you for helping us find our next 10upper, we’ll offer you a finders fee of $500 if we decide to hire who you referred. We’ll even go a step further and throw in an additional $500 when they complete a successful 6 month review just to show our appreciation.
We have a talented team of strategists consulting with enterprise clients, leading our engineers and designers, coordinating site launches, and resourcing/planning/managing some pretty exciting projects – and better yet, we are looking to expand the team!