Torque, a news site dedicated to WordPress professionals, has launched 2016 Plugin Madness: 64 of the most popular WordPress plugins from the official directory will compete for the champion title.
10up’s Simple Page Ordering, built by none other than our Founder, has been recognized as one of the most in-demand plugins, and selected as a top contender. Simple Page Ordering simplifies ordering of pages (and other post types) by adding drag and drop positioning to the backend page list. Torque has randomly assigned its selected plugins to brackets across four regions: Pressers (which includes our plugin), Wordees, Extenders and Installers. In NCAA March Madness bracket style, plugins will be narrowed down through rounds of voting, beginning with 64 entrants. Voting happens every week over at pluginmadness.com.
We now spend more time on mobile gadgets than on desktop devices. The mobile web experience is more important than ever, and overwhelmingly defined by content relevancy, timeliness, and above all, speediness.
Mindful web developers—given adequate budget allowances—strive to build mobile-first sites that provide lean, engaging experiences across different screen sizes and devices. These sites better retain their audience because the experience is enjoyable and, in some cases, because impatient readers will leave (“bounce”) rather than wait for a clunky web page. Because Google recognizes its customers’ preference for performant sites, it factors pagespeed into its search algorithm, boosting speedy sites in search results.
In spite of these incentives to minimize page weight, most websites are heavier than ever. High resolution displays ushered in huge images, and universal support for custom typography has us downloading fonts everywhere. While the renaissance in front end toolkits like jQuery and React.js eases development and alleviates server-side scaling, it has done so at the expense of pushing more assets and processor strain to the browser. Most problematically, today’s website monetization and measurement tools often deliver heavy (and invasive) ads with little incentive to improve.
Much of this “bloat” has been obfuscated by our increasingly powerful devices, improving mobile broadband connections (especially among the “creative” class), and increasingly competitive browser technology. Even so, publishers are clearly testing (or even lazily trampling) acceptable boundaries, creating an opening for ethically gray solutions like iOS 9’s content blockers, and more closed platforms like Apple News.
Enter the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project: an open source initiative based on existing open web standards led by Google, touting noble intentions to improve the mobile web experience by providing standardized, lightweight guidelines and tools for developers. AMP HTML versions of web pages trade complex functionality and capabilities for lightness, simplicity, and a focus on content, resulting in near instant load times.
While there may be more transformative long-term potential for AMP as a framework, in the near-term, Google’s initiative is hyper-focused on improving news and media consumption. In essence, AMP competes with the self-contained, largely closed, and far more restrictive experiences offered by Apple News, Facebook Instant Articles, and the rumored “long-form format” coming to Twitter (among others). Publishers opting to offer AMP’s lean presentation will be rewarded with increased visibility in mobile search results for news, including Google’s News Carousel: the highly coveted positioning at the top of mobile search results.
It’s an exciting time in the WordPress community, with the release of Calypso, a successful inaugural WordCamp US, and WordPress now powering 25% of all websites. Maturation of the WordPress REST API is enabling the decoupling of the content management layer from the display layer, which has the potential to further drive adoption; larger teams can write independent code that communicates via the API, reducing blockers and accelerating feature releases. At the same time, the entire Web is poised to undergo a metamorphosis, as HTTP/2 begins to fundamentally change how content is delivered.
While these developments offer tremendous potential for those of us who work with WordPress for a living, I think there are some important considerations to keep in mind as WordPress and the Web move into a new era of maturity and possibility.
Using a CDN with DDoS protection is increasingly important
We recently started testing a CDN service that offers DDoS protection and mitigation for this site. While we hardly consider ourselves a high-profile target, the number of attacks reported by service is astonishing (more than a dozen every day, sometimes double or triple that). The majority are attempts to exploit known vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins (or other common web applications), such as those listed in the WP Vulnerability Database. Exploit mitigation (or at least, notification) at the CDN layer provider is compelling.
In addition to protection from known vulnerabilities, CDNs are vital to accommodating significant burst traffic, and eliminate the effort involved in hosting sites in multiple datacenter across the world. Instead of scaling your servers to manage exponential traffic as a story goes viral or an online catalog gets slammed on Cyber Monday, the work is offloaded to the CDN and its network of edge servers.
Of course, a CDN might not speed up your site–in fact, it can do just the opposite if you start serving up your site over HTTP/2 and you’re using “best practices” for optimizing your site for HTTP1.1.
We love when our clients are successful, and StoryCorps and their amazing Thanksgiving Listen campaign being featured on Google’s homepage certainly qualifies. The project, powered by the WordPress JSON REST API, is hosted on a custom Amazon Web Services stack created by our systems team to accommodate its highly unusual scaling requirements. Check out our earlier post about StoryCorps and consider using your own Thanksgiving to record your family stories!
Our distributed workforce model empowers 10uppers to work where they love, providing us with the freedom to create from inspiring places and spaces around the world.
Take Whitney Yadrich, a Senior Project Manager & Team Lead over in Shawnee, Kansas where you’ll also find her husband, their two dogs (Lita and Sarge), and the town she fell in love with. Whitney was recently featured in the Fall/Winter issue of Shawnee’s local magazine, where she and two other young professionals dish on their love for their hometown. Supported by our remote work culture, she credits the city for offering inspiring work spaces where she can change-up her scenery, recharge, and stay focused. Whitney also offers tips for the work-from-home professional, namely: prioritizing a normal work schedule, taking the time to get dressed every morning despite the lack of a mandatory commute, and switching up locations regularly to keep things fresh.
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.
When it comes to CSS and Markup, our industry offers a vast landscape of choices and philosophies, illustrated by the number of frameworks and preprocessors available. While our Front End Engineering team always pushes the boundaries of these platforms, our Best Practices set a standard bar for the techniques, functionality, tools, and libraries we use.
As we focus on practical business application of technology, our philosophies are guided by a mandate to ensure consistent, reliable, and predictable experiences for website visitors. Many CSS attributes and HTML5 features are amazing, but are also dependent on unreliable polyfills for compatibility with some popular web browsers. In addition to avoiding known technical pitfalls, standardizing our tools, style, and structure improves efficiency, collaboration, and overall quality of work.
Net Magazine’s latest cover story details 8 “dos and don’ts” for architecting WordPress themes with best practices and an eye towards maintainability. In this article, I cover the WordPress template hierarchy and the loop, foundational concepts necessary to build and understand WordPress themes. A few 10up clients, like H.M.Clause, also get shout outs.
Net Magazine is a 20-year-old publication for professional and amateur web designers and developers; having published insights and stories from 10uppers in the past, they’ve come to recognize 10up as an expert resource.
When John Bloch and I (Eric Mann) started working with TechCrunch last year on their site redesign, one of the main goals was to improve site performance. Among the various tools we built to help meet that metric was a library called WP Async Task: an abstract library meant to give structure to asynchronous background tasks.
Thanks to WP Async Task, we can offload time-consuming requests (like Twitter interactions) from the main WordPress thread. Editors can publish posts as usual while expensive tasks run in the background rather than holding up the publication process.
In June, the TechCrunch team presented on “Non-Blocking WordPress,” explaining some of the approaches we took. Attendees were interested in learning more about WP Async Task and particularly interested in whether the code was available anywhere.
Being big believers in the power of open-source and giving back to the community, we’re thrilled to say that TechCrunch has decided to open-source the library and make it available on GitHub. Check out the library and look at the documentation on how to use the library in your own code.
Throughout the month of April, I had the pleasure of co-hosting the WordPress Weekly podcast with regular host Jeff Chandler. The April episodes comprised a mini-series focused on commercial WordPress business models, not including consulting. Our primary goal was to provide insight and wisdom to those considering a commercial software or SaaS model built on an open source project (WordPress, specifically) from those who had been there and done that.
The origin of the series actually dated back to January’s WordCamp Boston, where Jeff moderated a panel I organized called “Monetization in a Free World”, intended to help the audience understand the commercial WordPress themes, plug-ins, and SaaS businesses. Jeff ended up being in an impossible position, with 40 minutes to cover all 3 models and incorporate Automattic’s perspective, visa vi Jane Wells. Jeff and I decided it was worth doing justice to the idea; and so the April series of podcast episodes came to life.
Jaimee Ratliff
Jake Goldman
Vasken Hauri
While these developments offer tremendous potential for those of us who work with WordPress for a living, I think there are some important considerations to keep in mind as WordPress and the Web move into a new era of maturity and possibility.
David Peralty
Taylor Lovett
Corey Ellis
Net Magazine’s latest cover story
Eric Mann
Throughout the month of April, I had the pleasure of co-hosting the