Once again, we’ll be taking some time away from our desks as we close out the year so that we dive into 2019 refreshed and ready to deliver outstanding service and innovative tools. 10up will be closed from Monday, December 24 through Tuesday, January 1, returning to work on Wednesday, January 2nd.
Here’s how some of our team will be spending the break:
Thorsten Ott on
#team10up is returning to Nashville for WordCamp US 2018, the largest official WordPress conference hosted in the United States! Being part of the open-source community is a big part of our identity, and we’re especially happy to be participating in so many ways this year, from speaking, to co-sponsoring events, to facilitating and attending, we’re here to immerse ourselves and help foster a great event.
Helen Hou-Sandi, our Director of Open Source Initiatives, will be speaking on Saturday, December 8th at 11 a.m. Through her work building editorial experiences in WordPress core and for 10up solutions, Helen has seen the need to innovate beyond familiar UI elements like metaboxes, which are sometimes overly relied upon. In “Metaboxes Considered Harmful” she’ll be reviewing some creative solutions from the past that have broken outside of the bounds of metaboxes and other form-centric interfaces while still maintaining that WordPress “feel.” She will look at practical examples where rethinking the editorial experience and interface led to significantly better outcomes for both builders and content creators alike.
After her talk, she’ll be at the Happiness Bar until lunch to chat and answer any questions.
Sarah James on
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The WordPress Design Team recently had an in-depth conversation in Github about enhancing the publisher flow in Gutenberg. After watching Gutenberg go through several iterations since our last user test, I decided to try testing the current flow to see how well it was received by publishers. I hoped to identify friction or pain points in the Gutenberg authoring experience in the interests of helping refine the publishing flow.
Jay Moore on
We love what we do here at 10up—solving problems and creating digital experiences for our clients. The partnerships we’ve been privileged to form not only make the work more rewarding, they open doors to some really … just cool opportunities.
Our friends at StoryCorps are being featured on the Google Doodle today, and we designed a landing page for the occasion.
It’s our mission to make tools that enable simple and affordable digital story telling. We’ve been pleased to work with StoryCorps, and help them to “preserve and share humanity’s stories in order to build connections between people and create a more just and compassionate world.” Through our collaboration, we’re not just making the internet better, we’re making the world just a little bit better.
What can we build together?
Jake Goldman on
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.
Read More on Distributor publicly released with Gutenberg support and Enterprise service offering
Kanye has nothing on 10up. Just a few days after the rapper debuted his new album near Jackson Hole, Wyoming, 10uppers from all over the world descended on Spring Creek Ranch for our largest All Hands Summit yet. This coming together of our team—and a few clients and partners—spanned two full days of conference-like programming, followed by another two days of team-centric activities and bonding in an inspiring setting among the whistle pigs and prairie grasses.
This annual event provides an opportunity to step away from our home offices, webcams, and daily routines to inhabit a space, share insights with each other, form enduring memories, and build on a common vision for our team and clients.
I recently joined 10,000ft – makers of some popular collaboration software – for a conversation about communication and culture in remote teams. The interview, which is part of their “two beers” series, is now available on their blog.
John Eckman on
We’re proud to be sponsoring and speaking at WPCampus, a conference focused on the application of WordPress in higher education, this week at Washington University. I’ll be presenting, “The grass is always greener: What do other CMSs offer higher education?” You can read more about our affinity for open source in higher education, and our participation in this event, by reading our guest post. Come find me or some of my colleagues at our sponsor table and attending sessions, or watch the live stream starting July 13th.
When a client with several podcasts expressed interest in a simple way to manage their casts from within WordPress, we began with a review of existing solutions and plugins. We quickly identified a gap between bare bones plugins supporting a single feed and complicated plugins designed for advanced workflows, such as sponsor management. To fill that void, we created Simple Podcasting, an intuitive, lightweight, and forward looking plugin that includes beta support for Gutenberg.
Our client’s ideal user story seemed common enough: they offer several podcasts across a network of news sites, with some sites featuring multiple podcasts. They wanted to fully manage and distribute their podcast feeds inside of WordPress, albeit sometimes hosting the media itself externally. Podcasts episodes would be managed as regular posts, and appear alongside their other news, enabling visitors to play an episode right from the website or by subscribing in iTunes or any other “podcatcher.”
My story about contributing to Google’s AMP project was published on Google’s official Open Source Blog. I received a Google Open Source Peer Bonus for my contribution, which added MathML support to AMP.
Helen Hou-Sandi