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Client’s “Great Thanksgiving Listen” Campaign Featured on Google Homepage

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StoryCorps

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!

From Shawnee, With Love: How A Small Town Inspires Remote Work

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Shawnee article

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.

Sponsoring Sanitize.css

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sanitize

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.

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Markup, CSS, and Project Structure Best Practices

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front end standards

We’re proud to announce the release of Markup, CSS, and Project Structure sections for our Engineering Best Practices.

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.

Consistent with our support for an open web, our Engineering Best Practices are open and available on Github. We encourage any and all contributions!

10up expertise in Net Magazine’s latest cover story

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Corey in NetMagNet 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.

Past contributions by 10up include Eric Mann’s strategy for featuring rich graphical media in a WordPress site without sacrificing page performance, and Eric’s preview of WordPress 4.0 with contributions from Helen Hou-Sandi.

Asynchronous WordPress

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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.

tc performance

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.

Podcast Series: Exploring Commercial WordPress Models

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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.

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WordPress Providence Meetup Kicks Off

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Inspired by a few WordCamps that built themselves up from local WordPress meet ups, I finally got a few locals together at the beginning of April (Ken DeBlois of Brown and Suzanne McDonald, a freelance writer) to help organize a Providence Meetup. A couple of planning meetings, a new website, a Twitter account, and some local marketing later, we had our first meet up on April 26th.

I’ll be blogging over at the WordPress Providence website, so I won’t say too much about it in this forum, but the headline is that I was thrilled by the turn out and energy at our first event. We had about 30 attendees, a lot of buzz during the hour of networking, a nice and short presentation by DandyID (a local firm with a popular plug-in), and a great after-presentation brainstorming / discussion session.

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WordPress.tv Cameo: Intranets

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Back in November, I had the pleasure of attending WordCamp New York City. I spent about 10 minutes presenting my Google Reader plug-in, had a kick off WordCamp Boston planning meeting, had the pleasure of meeting inspiring folks like Raffi Mudge, and even had a great conversation in the hallway with Matt Mullenweg and Jeff Chandler (me in the  middle with the shoulder  bag, Matt sitting to my left, Jeff to my right – photo courtesy John Eckman) for about 40 minutes.

One of the sessions I attended was Ramil Teodosio’s WordPress Powered-Intranets. I’ve done a few Intranet implementations of my own and Ramil’s seminar was a bit more focused on SharePoint-like substitution than I expected. My own experience gave me an opportunity to pipe up a couple of times to offer suggestions and, among other things, plug my free Restricted Site Access plug-in, which was born out of an Intranet project, and I thought might be of interest to the audience. Judging by the post-presentation follow-up with a handful of attendees, at least a few found my comments useful.

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Interviewed on Episode 81 of WordPress Weekly

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Last night I recorded the WordPress Weekly podcast with Jeff Chandler of WordPress Tavern. We chatted for about 90 minutes, and then want on to chat more during an after show chat that continued for over an hour. The podcast was published today, you can listen to it or get instructions for downloading it here. Here’s the iTunes link.

Topics included:

  • General WordPress consulting services
  • WordPress value perception as compared to other major CMS platforms
  • Exciting developer features coming in WordPress 2.9 (RC1 out today!)
  • What the near future holds for WordPress, with the MU merge and growth of BuddyPress, bbPress, et al
  • My latest Smashing Magazine article
  • WordCamp Boston (which I’m helping organize)

I really enjoyed participating in the podcast, and hope to participate again in the near future.