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WordPress powers 1-in-7 Webby Nominees

WordPress is strongly represented among the 2016 Annual Webby Awards, powering 1 of every 7 nominees in the Website categories. Nominees span 32 of the 48 categories, recognizing websites marketing major financial institutions and web apps, superstar artists and musicians, government projects, and major media and news outlets.

With its intuitive interface, flexible code base, and focus on democratizing content creation, we’re not surprised to see our go-to CMS solution owning such a respectable percentage of the pack. 10up believes in open technology and we’re glad to see platforms such as WordPress in such high use.

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WordPress 4.5 was released yesterday, featuring improvements to content editing, responsive previews, and a handful of under the hood performance and developer improvements. More than a dozen 10uppers made this release possible, most notably Adam Silverstein, who served as Release Deputy.

Thank you for helping make WordPress: David Brumbaugh, Drew Jaynes (emeritus), Dreb Bits, Faishal Saiyed, Helen Hou-Sandí, Josh Levinson, Lukas Pawlik, Pete Nelson, Ricky Lee Whittemore, Ryan Welcher, Scott Kingsley Clark, Steve Grunwell, and Sudar Muthu!

Clean up and secure WordPress data with WP Hammer

When making copies of a website for development and testing, populating a thorough content and data set is vital for Quality Assurance (QA). The most efficient path typically involves mirroring the entire production site’s database. But this can be problematic: a large site can have tens of thousands of posts (each with many revisions and healthy doses of metadata) and many user accounts.

Those user accounts (and sometimes the site’s content) can contain sensitive data that, if mishandled, can put clients at risk. On top of that, testing, development, and initial imports—often executed on lightweight virtual machines—can be painfully slow when working with very large datasets. Cleaning up imported production data is a must, but has been a tedious, inefficient task.

Enter 10up’s WP Hammer: an open source developer tool that quickly and efficiently reduces—or completely removes—production data and sensitive client information like email addresses and hashed account passwords from a WordPress installation.
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In 2014, we instituted Rocketrip, so that 10uppers could earn points for shared savings on business travel. These points could be redeemed for rewards like gift card and donations. Earlier this year, after we decided to sunset the program, our team had a few weeks to redeem their points.

Something wonderful happened. A few of us decided to pool our points for a group charitable gift, spurring dozens of other 10uppers to donate their points to the pool. This week, we donated to Girls Who Code – whose mission is to close the gender gap in technology and engineering. We’re proud to support an organization consistent with our values, practices, and culture.

Simple Page Ordering competes in Torque Mag’s #PluginMadness

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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.

Supercharge WooCommerce performance and search with ElasticPress WooCommerce

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WooCommerce is the world’s most popular e-commerce software, available as a free WordPress plugin. Its expansive extensions library houses a number of premium extensions addressing recurring payments, different payment gateways, shipment tracking tools, and more.

Scaling open source e-commerce solutions like WooCommerce, that can be installed on infrastructures of all shapes and sizes, is challenging. Online stores typically require intensive database transactions: complex queries on both the front and back-end that filter and sort products based on several categories, stock, and properties like pricing and reviews.

Further, most shoppers depend on site search to find products. Complex filters combined with keyword search across fields heavily tax relational databases like MySQL, the underlying database used by WordPress. And of course, increased store traffic increases the number of database queries to process, making every transaction even slower. Not surprisingly, many WooCommerce sites run quite slowly.

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5 Down: 10up’s Fifth Year

Our origin story is modest: just five years ago, 10up began with a single individual working in the smallest U.S. state and a portfolio containing fewer clients than there were Star Wars movies at the time.

Since then, 10up has matured at a much faster pace than your average agency. We’ve continued to grow our team by ~30%, welcoming dozens of new 10uppers across Project Management, Web Strategy, Engineering, Design, Revenue, and User Experience. Financials also continue to thrive; in the first month of 2016, we saw more revenue than our first two years combined (and more than half of what we did in our third year).

But here at 10up, we value more than revenue and growth statistics—it’s about nurturing the culture within, providing our team the resources to achieve peak performance—a sense of community, a pride of ownership, and material benefits for a team that is building a future together, not merely cashing in a paycheck.

In 2015, we hosted our biggest All Hands Summit, practically taking over a hotel in Boulder for a 10up-only conference with sessions exploring our business goals, emerging and important technologies, and the latest tactics for effective project management, with a healthy dose of team building. We even hosted an awards ceremony: The First Annual Uppies – a tradition is born.

As we continue to strive for the very best consulting experience in the publishing and content management space, here are just a few accomplishments since our last birthday:

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