Blog

Bringing Out 9to5Mac’s Dark Side

Ricky Lee Whittemore on January 14, 2020

9to5mac Dark Mode Example

Brightly colored screens in low-light environments can keep people up at night, contribute to eyestrain, and even burn up battery life on newer devices with OLED displays. In recent years, all major operating systems — macOS, iOS, Windows, and Android — have added a dark-mode option. With this setting, the OS and any application that supports dark mode can switch from a light color scheme to darker tone, which offers UI personalization and reduces eye fatigue.

With all major web browsers now supporting the dark-mode setting, web developers can also serve either a light or dark theme, based on the user’s device setting.

Apple news site 9to5mac, a long-term client, added dark-mode support to its site just before the official release of iOS 13 last Fall — the first version of the iPhone operating system to offer dark mode.

Leveraging Elasticsearch With ElasticPress To Create A Porsche-Quality Search Experience

Vasken Hauri on January 9, 2020

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.”

— Alexander Altendorfer

FanSided 250 Launches, Ranking The Top 250 Fandoms For 2019

Jason Clarke on December 16, 2019

FanSided 250

Last week FanSided published its annual FanSided 250, the ultimate ranking of the 250 best fandoms in the world, from celebrities and movie franchises to sports figures and more. While my New England Patriots didn’t rank as high as I think they should have (anything less than #1 for us is a disappointment), I am ecstatic to be part of the 10up team that collaborated with FanSided to bring the bold new FanSided 250 website to life.

“We’re thrilled with the look and feel of the FanSided 250. Working with 10up has been an extremely rewarding venture. Every aspect of the experience has been upgraded from previous years, and the FanSided 250 has never looked and operated better.”

—Michael Dunlap, VP of Corporate Communications & Business Development

Jake Goldman on December 4, 2019

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.

ElasticPress 3.1 introduces a friendly interface to manage search weighting and ordering

Vasken Hauri on November 20, 2019

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.

10up Releases WordPress GitHub Actions To Streamline Plugin Deployment

Helen Hou-Sandi on November 18, 2019 • 5 Comments

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 GitHub Actions Mention on the GitHub Blog

Jake Goldman on November 13, 2019

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.

Best Practices for Managing Open-Source Software

Jeff Paul on October 29, 2019

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.

Our latest contribution is the release of our official Open Source Best Practices as a public project on GitHub.

10up Open Source Best Practices GitHub Repo Home Page

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.

10up Is WordCamp US Bound

Jake Goldman on October 22, 2019

WordCamp US

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.

Integrating More Than 20 Million Public Data Records With WordPress

Brian Bourn on October 15, 2019

Brian Bourn Speaking at BigWP SF

As a WordPress.com VIP gold agency partner, 10up was recently invited to speak at BigWP SF, the enterprise WordPress meetup series that brings together developers, business leaders, and product managers who work with high-scale WordPress applications every day.

My presentation, Managing Millions of Public Data Records With WordPress, highlighted the challenges we encountered when integrating millions of public data records with the WordPress-powered website for ElectricityPlans, a broker in the deregulated Texas electricity market, and how we used solutions like ElasticPress to overcome those challenges.