WordPress 5.3 was released yesterday, featuring block editor refinements that deliver more intuitive interactions and improved accessibility, new editor features that give designers more control over visual design, and the block-based Twenty Twenty WordPress theme. Several 10uppers contributed to this release during its development cycle, including Jeffrey Paul and Adam Silverstein, who are recognized as Noteworthy Contributors.
Thank you for helping make WordPress:
Ashar Irfan, Christian Chung, Helen Hou-Sandi, Mario Aguiar (emeritus), and Ryan Welcher.
Each year, we participate in dozens of industry events around the world. One highlight is WordCamp US, the largest official WordPress conference in the United States. This year, we’re heading to St. Louis, Missouri for three days.
Speaking
We’re proud to have two speakers leading off this year’s event. In the presentation Open Source, Open Process, Open Web, Helen Hou-Sandi, Director of Open Source Initiatives, will examine the histories of open source and the open web, and discuss how they apply to WordPress.
Jeffrey Paul, Open Source Practice Manager, will answer the question, “I’m not a developer, how can I contribute to WordPress?” in the presentation Contributing to Core, No Coding Necessary.
The News Project has launched its first customer on its new SaaS platform for small to mid market publishers, and we couldn’t be more thrilled.
You may have read about The News Project—and our involvement—earlier this year on Axios. As a long-time digital partner for publishers and news organizations around the world, 10up is proud to be the technical strategy and implementation partner for The News Project, helping bring to life its vision for a “news business in a box”. In engineering the core platform atop WordPress, we worked closely with its first customer—CALmatters—to provide customizations and ensure a successful launch.
Drive.ai uses artificial intelligence to create self-driving cars. OpenAI, a nonprofit research company backed by Elon Musk, created an artificial intelligence model called GPT2 that can generate text relevant to topic, tone, and feeling based on only a few words. Navigation services use artificial intelligence to decipher hundreds of thousands of data points to provide real-time traffic data.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are revolutionizing technology and when applied to digital publishing, the opportunities available to streamline internal workflows, enhance visitor experiences, and increase revenue are endless.
Artificial Intelligence vs. Machine Learning AI is the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior. Machine learning is a subset of AI with the ability to modify itself when exposed to more data; i.e. machine learning is dynamic and does not require human intervention to make certain changes.
Search engines like Google rely on AI and machine learning to “understand” what your content and site are about and how it should be ranked. But have you ever wondered if search engines interpret your content the same way you do? Or have you ever considered how these cutting edge technologies could be used to improve your content strategy or reduce resources?
These are the questions we’re asking at 10up as we look to the future of publishing technology and explore practical solutions that streamline editorial processes, increase audience engagement, and boost profits—solutions like our new plugin ClassifAI.
ClassifAI is a free, open-source plugin that leverages leading cloud-based services like IBM Watson and Microsoft Azure AI to augment WordPress-powered websites with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technology.
With years of experience working with some of the largest digital content creators, 10up understands that AI and machine learning will play an important role in the future of content creation and website experiences and we’re committed to driving this technology forward in the WordPress community. Today we are excited to share merely the first steps for ClassifAI: automated content tagging and classification as well as the automatic creation of image ALT text.
Iconography design might seem an uncommon undertaking for a developer, but Senior Engineer Nate Allen recently saw an opportunity to make WordPress’s Dashicon library more inclusive. He took the initiative to tackle the design challenge himself, learning Adobe Illustrator in order to supplement the existing “businessman” icon with additional icons for “businesswoman” and “businessperson.” These icons, along with many more new icons, will be released with WordPress 5.2.
Nate’s determination to stretch his core skills and proactively contribute a creative, open source solution is a small but meaningful representation of the 10up way. Thanks for your dedication to the community and your craft, Nate!
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.
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.
In our seventh year, we built on our investment in culture and storytelling by expanding our team and depth of services, and by redoubling our investments in open source and creativity.
We welcomed more than 30 new clients to our portfolio in another record sales year. We launched new websites along with web and mobile apps for major brands across verticals as diverse as finance, healthcare, academia, high-tech, big media, consumer packaged goods, food and beverage, and fitness… to name a few.
In a milestone event, we completed an acquisition of Lift UX, a boutique, Emmy-nominated agency that focused on user experience for design-driven websites powered by WordPress. Intended to strengthen our experience design expertise and resources, this investment added executive design leadership and expanded our portfolio of design stories.
A renewed approach to our All Hands Summit yielded our largest and most memorable team event to date. Held in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, our team gathered from around the world to take over a former Carmelite convent for a week of learning, sharing, building memories together, uniting around company goals, and celebrating our successes. Among the conference highlights, we held our first client panel, featuring leaders from companies like Microsoft, McClatchy, and Beasley Radio sharing insights on agency partnerships.
The first WordCamp curated for publishers begins Thursday in Denver, and features sessions for engineering, product, and editorial teams at news rooms big and small.
With our mission to make a better web for content creators, it’s no surprise that many of our clients are publishers, from storied giants like The New York Times and Time Inc to breakout digital voices like 9to5mac and Uproxx. Combined with our committed support for open platforms like WordPress, we’re proud Gold Sponsors of WordCamp for Publishers, the highest tier publicly offered.
I’ll be participating in the event along with fellow 10uppers Ben Ilfeld, Whitney Yadrich, Jay Moore, and Derrick Koo. We’re eager to learn, and eager to share: four of us will present at the event.
We’re delighted to announce that after nearly one year of discussion and due diligence, 10up has completed an acquisition of Lift UX: a boutique, distributed, Emmy-nominated agency that specializes in making user experience design driven websites powered by WordPress. The Lift team, including its founding partners, Chris Wallace and Brad Miller, join 10up effective immediately.
Founded as a boutique digital creative shop in 2009, Lift has delivered web projects for clients like Frito-Lay, The Next Web, eBay, GoDaddy, and Disney. Lift earned acclaim when a “second screen” experience built for AMC’s Walking Dead was nominated for an Emmy Award in the interactive program category in 2012. Their work earn a second nomination in 2015 for Mad Men: The Fan Cut. Among their innovations, Lift built and sold a WordPress themes shop (UpThemes), and started a career center for distributed companies, RemoteJobs.com. They recently launched CampusInsiders.com, a project spotlighted by Automattic’s WordPress.com VIP program; the project earned Lift an invitation to become an official VIP agency partner.
As 10up’s President & Founder, I am elated to welcome this outstanding team, award recognized portfolio, and client roster to the 10up family. This acquisition accelerates our growth in Experience Design, adding executive-tier design leadership and enriching our growing portfolio of design stories. It represents a special opportunity for all parties to go further and faster as we partner with clients to make a better web.
Jake Goldman
