When Elferspot, the largest marketplace for classic and pre-owned Porsche sports cars, wanted to create a premium search experience on their WordPress site, they turned to 10up’s managed search solution for WordPress, ElasticPress.io.
“I’ve never had such an amazing support experience with any company. I had a problem with how I wanted to use ElasticPress and the support team worked with us to solve the problem together.”
From New York City, to rural South Africa, to a dozen countries across Europe, our distributed workforce model empowers us to bring in the best strategists, designers, and engineers, wherever they may live—because the best talent isn’t found in a single zip code.
Recently, I had the opportunity to discuss our forward-looking remote work culture with Toggl.
My interview is featured in their new ebook How Remote-Friendly Organizations Can Embrace a Client Roster That’s Not Limited by Office Location, along with insights from other remote work cultures, including Buffer, Gitlab, and Doist. The ebook provides a blueprint for building a successful business while working remotely, including establishing customer expectations, choosing the right tools, and navigating cultural differences.
At 10up, we think digital innovation often happens at the intersection of expertise in design and engineering. The latest release of ElasticPress represents 10up innovation at its best, bringing together expertise in user interface design, web engineering, and systems architecture. In ElasticPress 3.1, we’ve introduced a simple and friendly user interface right inside of WordPress for managing search result weighting and customized results; a challenge that required Elasticsearch appliance expertise, and advanced WordPress UI and back end development.
From information discovery and filtering to data visualization and mapping, search is the foundation of many digital experiences across the websites and apps we use every day.
Thousands of websites rely on ElasticPress to extend the native WordPress search functionality through an integration with Elasticsearch, a fast, scalable way to manage searchable content in near-real-time. The release of ElasticPress 3.1, that includes weighted search and custom search ordering, moves several popular code-based features into an intuitive dashboard that provides a comfortable experience for anyone familiar with WordPress.
According to GitHub, developers have contributed more than 1,200 Actions to GitHub Marketplace since GitHub Actions was released in beta last year. Our mission to craft tools for content creators — including developers — and our passion for open-source contribution led us to make a solution that uses GitHub Actions to radically streamline and simplify WordPress plugin release management.
Automating Your Workflow With GitHub Actions
GitHub Actions enables you to create custom software development life cycle (SDLC) workflows directly in your GitHub repository. You can write individual tasks, called actions, and combine them to create a custom workflow. Workflows are custom automated processes that you can set up in your repository to build, test, package, release, or deploy any code project on GitHub.
As a WordPress core lead developer and Director of Open Source Initiatives at 10up, I immediately saw the opportunity to use GitHub Actions to make specific tasks easier for WordPress plugin developers, like deploying a plugin and its assets/readme updates to the official WordPress.org plugin repository.
We previously introduced early versions of these Actions, and now they’re ready for primetime following the announcement of general availability of GitHub Actions — an announcement that took the time to spotlight our “WordPress publishing” solution:
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.
Contribution to the open web is one of 10up’s guiding values. The sharing of expertise, like our engineering best practices, and the creation of our open source tools like Distributor, ClassifAI, and ElasticPress, along with our hundreds of commits to open projects like WordPress, reflect 10up’s position as a leading contributor to open source platforms.
Following 10up’s mission to make a better web with finely crafted websites and tools for content creators, our Open Source Practice brings forth deep experience in the long-term stewardship of open-source projects. Beyond pushing code to a public repository, effective open-source management requires thoughtful consideration of licensing, defining maintenance procedures, and proactive communication with participants. By releasing our best practices, we hope to provide a guide for the establishment and ownership of open-source projects.
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.
10up aims to make a better web through finely crafted websites, innovative tools for content creators, and open-source contributions that drive growth. As a leading contributor to WordPress and the greater open-source community, the creation and sharing of open platforms and tools is a large part of our identity.
The establishment of an official Open Source Practice within 10up demonstrates our commitment to advance open-source technology, lead by example, and grow the community of which we are proud to be a part and upon whose shoulders we stand.
We have long utilized employee downtime between client projects for open-source contribution. Earlier this year, I joined the team as Open Source Practice Manager. I work most closely with Helen Hou-Sandí, our Director of Open Source Initiatives, and Adam Silverstein, a Lead Open Source Initiatives Engineer, both of whom primarily focus on open source and contribution. That core team is augmented by additional 10uppers, some of whom have dedicated recurring time carved out for open source initiatives, and some of whom join our efforts for discrete projects. Collectively, 10up invests more than 350 hours every month into our open source initiatives.
Last week, we released Insert Special Characters, a plugin that brings a special characters menu to the new WordPress block editor.
The new WordPress editor (aka Gutenberg) introduced a modern, block-based paradigm for visually authoring content. For all of its advancements, a button to insert special characters was not carried over from the classic editing experience—a feature critical to writers and publishers frequently using mathematical notation or other symbols. Feedback concerning its absence and some client questions inspired our Open Source Practice to take action.
Vasken Hauri on
Helen Hou-Sandi
Jeff Paul
Jake Goldman
Thorsten Ott
Taylor Lovett