On Tuesday, September 19, I’ll be attending the California Government Innovation Summit in Sacramento. alongside Director of Account Strategy, Brian Bourn, and Direct of Client Strategy, Shannon Swenson. 10up is proud to sponsor a Summit focusing on driving digital innovation for all sectors of California’s government.
We’ll be frequenting WordPress VIP’s booth, as we jointly share how we each leverage open source and WordPress to propel digital transformation and innovation in California government. If you’re interested in learning more about 10up and WordPress VIP’s partnership in government innovation, check out our brochure.
Today, I’m proud to announce a merger months in the making with a fellow premium digital services agency whose work and leadership I’ve come to admire: Fueled.
Fueled is to mobile and enterprise-grade online applications what 10up has been to WordPress and online content management and publishing: an innovator and leader driven by the values of customer service, creativity, and craftsmanship. Fueled has built stand out iOS and Android apps – several of which I’ve personally used – for clients like Warby Parker, Verizon, the United Nations, and even Apple themselves. Just as 10up has built some great mobile applications, Fueled has executed notable works in the web application space for clients like Wall Street Journal and The New York Times – but content management systems and editorial experience has never been a core focus and strength. Until now.
Earlier this month, WordPress released its 6.3 update, “Lionel”, bringing with it significant advancements to the Block Editor, notable performance improvements, and other core updates such as accessibility and internationalization enhancements. Seventeen 10uppers made contributions to the release, making a total of 290 contributions to improve the world’s most popular CMS.
The latest 2.1 and 2.2 releases of ClassifAI incorporate new applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) within WordPress, adding new simplifications and enhancements to common editorial workflows.
ClassifAI can now offer SEO-friendly title suggestions generated by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, by analyzing post content and identifying clear words and phrases best suited to boost SEO. This feature offers editors three title suggestions, which can be edited directly in the suggestions interface before making a selection.
Next week, I – and ten other 10uppers, including President & Founder Jake Goldman and CEO John Eckman – are traveling to National Harbor, Maryland (just outside of Washington DC) for WordCamp US. The largest WordPress conference in the United States, this annual event takes place August 24 – 26 and expects nearly 2,000 attendees.
On Thursday night, the evening before the WordCamp begins, Jake will be joining a panel to discuss how governments and civic tech can modernize with WordPress during the inaugural “Run with VIP: WordPress for Government Summit”. The event is independent of the WordCamp, free to attend, and includes time for networking — you can still register here.
I’m looking forward to several presentations from my 10up colleagues during the three-day event:
Dmitry Mayorov, Lead Front-End Engineer, is presenting “From Comfort Zone to Cutting Edge: Embracing Lean Principles in Front-End Projects” — where he will introduce ideas to help developers stay on the cutting edge of the CSS by shifting their mindset.
Jeff Paul, Director of Open Source Initiatives, will be giving a lightning presentation on “Using a GitHub Action to Ensure Your Plugins Are GPL Compatible”.
Peter Wilson, Lead Web Engineer from our Open Source Practice, is speaking on a holistic approach to WordPress security in his talk, “The Enterprise Approach to WordPress Security”.
Some other attending 10uppers will include SVP of Engineering Taylor Lovett (a local!), VP of New Client Strategy Brad Miller, Director of Client Growth Strategy Steve Meyers, and VP of Platforms & Systems (and ElasticPress product lead) Vasken Hauri.
WordPress VIP has named 10up its Top Gold Agency Partner for Q2 of 2023. 10up’s partnership with WordPress VIP continues to create success for our shared clients and drive innovation for the CMS that powers 40% of the web: WordPress. Thank you, WordPress VIP for partnering with us to make a better web.
If you’re interested in learning more about how we work alongside partners like WordPress VIP to build finely crafted websites and tools on open source platforms like WordPress, get in touch.
On Monday, June 26th, I’ll be presenting at Boston’s WordPress Meetup on ways Artificial Intelligence (AI) can integrate with WordPress. The presentation, “You Got Your AI In My WP: WordPress and Artificial Intelligence”, will explore a few tools available that utilize AI to assist content creators on WordPress — including 10up’s own ClassifAI and Jetpack’s AI Assistant.
The Boston WordPress Meetup is free to attend (registration required) and starts at 6:30 PM with a networking hour. If you’re in the Boston area, sign up here — I’d love to see you there.
Drawing from lessons learned building and supporting dozens of headless sites for our clients, 10up architected HeadstartWP: a jumping-off point for decoupled builds, powered by WordPress and Next.js. HeadstartWP delivers premium 10up craftsmanship with time-saving efficiencies for developers. In keeping with our commitment to giving back to the open web ecosystem, HeadstartWP is now available as a free and open source framework.
A light-weight, highly flexible, and extensible toolkit, HeadstartWP is everything a developer needs to start building a decoupled site using modern, broadly adopted technologies.
The latest 2.0 release of ClassifAI — our open source plugin that utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) to augment content creation within WordPress — comes with OpenAI GPT and DALL·E integration, expanding the plugin’s capabilities in aiding editors.
On March 29, WordPress released its first major update of 2023, WordPress 6.2 (“Dolphy”), with major improvements to the site editor experience. “Dolphy” also marks a shift in WordPress’ trajectory, with future releases emphasizing authoring workflows and collaborative experiences instead of theme-level customization.
Some major updates to the site editor experience and workflow include:
A new sidebar experience that makes editing site navigation more efficient.
Block Settings are now split into settings and styles to make the UI easier to understand.
Add new blocks easier with drag and drop capabilities for media and a split view option so you can swiftly navigate categories and previews.
Search for free-use images on Openverse directly in the editor.
Write completely distraction-free by hiding panels and controls.
Copy and paste complete styles from one block to another.
Easily push style updates of a block to apply globally.
Jake Goldman
Jeff Paul
Phil Crumm
Taylor Lovett
