Official Blog
Early Perceptions of the New WordPress Editor
Sarah James on
Prior to the release of WordPress 5.0, I conducted a survey asking WordPress users with Gutenberg experience to offer their perspective on the new editor. The survey was conducted as part of a broader user-research effort designed to understand more about how content publishers view page-building and site-building tools, and how the new content editor matches expectations. This research was intended to explore the behaviors and opinions of people who had already tried Gutenberg. Updates to the new editor based on this research are being tracked on Github and MakeWordPress.org.
At 10up, we believe that the web is better when we prioritize equal access to digital content, regardless of age, size, ability, or disability. Over the last several months, our Director of Front End Engineering, Tim Wright, has been working to resolve accessibility challenges in the new WordPress content editor, code-named Gutenberg. In addition to contributing code to the new editor, Tim joined the vendor selection committee for an accessibility audit sponsored by WPCampus, adding agency representation to a committee largely comprised of higher education advocates. An audit overview and update were presented as part of WPCampus Online 2019.
Introducing GitHub Actions for WordPress (Plugins)
Helen Hou-Sandi
Do you develop your WordPress plugins on GitHub? Then here’s a treat for you! We’re excited to release a GitHub Action that deploys to the WordPress.org Plugin Repository whenever you tag a new version on GitHub. You’ll be able to manage your entire development lifecycle in GitHub—no more futzing with local Bash scripts or controlling commit/push access in multiple places.
Keep reading for more details about GitHub Actions and how to get set up, but the gist is this: you reference our action in your plugin repo’s workflow file, filtered to only run when a tag is pushed, and set your username/password secrets. After that, each time you tag a new version on GitHub, whether by pushing a Git tag from the command line or making one using the GitHub releases interface, your plugin will be deployed to WordPress.org.
10up’s 8th Anniversary
Jake Goldman on
10up’s eighth year saw significant team and financial growth, all while we renewed our dedication to the values of openness and ownership. Our ethos of collective ownership drove us to find creative solutions, looking beyond the short-term to consider how our ideas scale, fit into product roadmaps, or impact the overall technology stack. And through it all, we increased revenue and grew our team—each by 30%—and welcomed more than 40 new clients across industries as diverse as media, publishing, high-tech, finance, food & beverage, and architecture.
Introducing WP Acceptance
Taylor Lovett
WP Acceptance—a team-centric tool we’ve built for writing reliable, scalable acceptance tests—is now available in beta. Part of our pursuit of finely crafted web experiences, we think that WP Acceptance will help ensure stable releases and fewer regressions for WordPress applications. This toolkit lets developers and continuous integration (CI) pipelines test codebases through version-controlled acceptance tests and sharable, defined file and database snapshots.
We’re considering this a public beta release. It won’t adversely affect your application or introduce instability, but it has not yet been thoroughly tested as a framework and may have some bugs. Through our own testing and community involvement, we’ll further solidify WP Acceptance as it approaches a full, public release.
Happy Holidays!
Christine Garrison
Once again, we’ll be taking some time away from our desks as we close out the year so that we dive into 2019 refreshed and ready to deliver outstanding service and innovative tools. 10up will be closed from Monday, December 24 through Tuesday, January 1, returning to work on Wednesday, January 2nd.
Here’s how some of our team will be spending the break:
Gearing up for WordCamp US
Thorsten Ott on
#team10up is returning to Nashville for WordCamp US 2018, the largest official WordPress conference hosted in the United States! Being part of the open-source community is a big part of our identity, and we’re especially happy to be participating in so many ways this year, from speaking, to co-sponsoring events, to facilitating and attending, we’re here to immerse ourselves and help foster a great event.
Presenting
Helen Hou-Sandi, our Director of Open Source Initiatives, will be speaking on Saturday, December 8th at 11 a.m. Through her work building editorial experiences in WordPress core and for 10up solutions, Helen has seen the need to innovate beyond familiar UI elements like metaboxes, which are sometimes overly relied upon. In “Metaboxes Considered Harmful” she’ll be reviewing some creative solutions from the past that have broken outside of the bounds of metaboxes and other form-centric interfaces while still maintaining that WordPress “feel.” She will look at practical examples where rethinking the editorial experience and interface led to significantly better outcomes for both builders and content creators alike.
After her talk, she’ll be at the Happiness Bar until lunch to chat and answer any questions.
Testing the Gutenberg Publishing Userflow
Sarah James on
The WordPress Design Team recently had an in-depth conversation in Github about enhancing the publisher flow in Gutenberg. After watching Gutenberg go through several iterations since our last user test, I decided to try testing the current flow to see how well it was received by publishers. I hoped to identify friction or pain points in the Gutenberg authoring experience in the interests of helping refine the publishing flow.
StoryCorps and Google team up to honor veterans, with a 10up assist
Jay Moore on
We love what we do here at 10up—solving problems and creating digital experiences for our clients. The partnerships we’ve been privileged to form not only make the work more rewarding, they open doors to some really … just cool opportunities.
Our friends at StoryCorps are being featured on the Google Doodle today, and we designed a landing page for the occasion.
It’s our mission to make tools that enable simple and affordable digital story telling. We’ve been pleased to work with StoryCorps, and help them to “preserve and share humanity’s stories in order to build connections between people and create a more just and compassionate world.” Through our collaboration, we’re not just making the internet better, we’re making the world just a little bit better.
What can we build together?
Distributor publicly released with Gutenberg support and Enterprise service offering
Jake Goldman on
We are proud to announce that Distributor has exited beta and is now openly available. Distributor is a free WordPress plugin that makes it easy to syndicate and reuse content across your websites—whether in a single multisite network or across the web with the REST API.
With Distributor, content creators can “push” or “pull” content between multiple sites, while retaining updates from the original source and preserving SEO. Copy, media, metadata, and categories all come along, and our fully extensible, open-source code base empowers developers to adapt it to even the most complicated workflows. To get the release version, and enable simple updates, head to DistributorPlugin.com and fill out the short registration form.
More than 100 organizations and developers participated in our Distributor beta program. Their feedback has helped us ensure that Distributor can be the trusted solution for sharing content between WordPress sites. We’ve already integrated many improvements contributed by beta testers, including 10up clients. Distributor has been approved for use on WordPress.com VIP and is ready for enterprise implementations. We have a roadmap of planned enhancements, with ambitious plans including more advanced media distribution and sophisticated “take down” features for the forced removal of distributed content.