Post Status Podcasts

Chris Coyier is not a stranger to most of us web workers. He’s a designer at CodePen, a writer at CSS-Tricks, and a podcaster at ShopTalk. He uses WordPress on all three of his primary projects. For years, Chris has been a consistent advocate for the platform. He develops his own websites with WordPress, but his day-to-day interactions are as a user. Chris brings a unique perspective, I believe. He did some client work early in his career, but he’s been more involved in SaaS projects and membership websites; his current membership websites are on WordPress (CSS-Tricks) and Ruby on Rails (CodePen). I asked Chris about his projects, his perspective on various aspects of WordPress, and the community around it. I enjoyed learning from him, and I hope you do too: http://s3.amazonaws.com/PostStatus/DraftPodcast/chris-coyier-post-status-draft.mp3 Direct Download What have you learned from working on membership websites?  It’s just a good dang business idea. Chris was sold on the idea of membership websites from his tenure at Wufoo and SurveyMonkey (where he worked once they acquired Wufoo). He uses Pippin Williamson’s Restrict Content Pro for managing The Lodge on CSS-Tricks. At CodePen, they spend time thinking about pricing, churn, and other membership metrics. They talk about some of these things (and much more) on the CodePen Radio podcast — an awesome podcast for anyone interested in SaaS, not just CodePen. Delivering value Another aspect Chris noted about membership websites is how it makes you want to continually deliver value for customers. He always wants to make people feel like they’re getting excellent features and value for the price of their membership. Another thing he and the CodePen team are learning is prioritizing feature requests. When you are building for members, you want to build features members want; and sometimes that goes against other fixes that are less glamorous. So they are consistently trying to balance time spent on customer-facing features versus behind the scenes development. Build the feature, get the reward Chris talked about how important it is for him to build something, then be rewarded for the work he does, versus selling something and then having to build the feature for it. He experience this with his big Kickstarter project for a CSS-Tricks redesign a couple of years ago, and said that mentality was really difficult for him. What do you appreciate more now about WordPress, after using other software? WordPress comes with a lot of built-in features that many of us (I do at least) may take for granted. Need a user system? Check. Need comments? Check. Need categorization? Check. Building CodePen, Chris is able to appreciate (even more than before) just how powerful WordPress is and how much thought goes into every feature. We dove into something seemingly simple as an example: tags. It turns out that something even that simple takes a lot of thought, consideration, and user experience considerations. What it ends up as, is something you’ll have to iterate on for years to get anywhere close to how good the WordPress one works already. And that’s like the tiniest thing we could think about. Think about the login system, or something else. So his advice was to focus on simplicity and decisions when building features, because required effort grows rapidly as a feature gets more complicated. How would you compare the WordPress community to other web communities? Chris has exposure to a much broader web community than I do. I’m pretty locked into the WordPress bubble. He sees the Ruby on Rails world, the more generic web world, and attends and speaks at a slew of non-WordPress conferences every year. Even though he says he’s mostly in a WordPress bubble himself (he’s not exactly attending Drupal conferences, he notes), he thinks that the WordPress community is pretty top-notch, and hasn’t seen other communities that are “better” than the WordPress community. There’s definitely no other CMS that I’m jealous of that community. What questions about WordPress are you always seeing on the ShopTalk Podcast Chris and his co-host Dave Rupert (seriously, follow Dave and gain laughs and knowledge in life) get a lot of questions about WordPress on the ShopTalk Podcast. Some of these questions are repeated pretty frequently, and they see trends of common issues. Working locally and syncing remotely For WordPress, the most common questions tend to come around syncing the local development environment with the live environment. They’ve been recommending WP Migrate DB Pro for people trying to get around that, though Chris says he doesn’t think it’s perfect for huge websites like CSS-Tricks. I think, to a degree, the common confusion is logical. WordPress development is really centered around three different layers of “stuff”: the content (posts, pages, etc), the files in the directory, and the site management database options. I think there is plenty of room for confusion when it’s not easy to decouple website management with website content, from a database perspective. Learning more about WordPress through the lens of a different audience I used this segment to talk about other confusing aspects of WordPress. We talked about database management, the degree of PHP knowledge required for WordPress theming, using pre-processors in distributed versus custom themes, responsive images, and the asset-itis of many WordPress websites that utilize plugins that each load their own scripts and styles. Regardless of the specific issues people are having, I find tremendous value listening to ShopTalk — which is not as hardcore of a WordPress audience as I have here — where the trends of people’s struggles help reveal real struggles that perhaps we could build better tools for in WordPress. It’s also worth noting that some of the “struggles” we talked about are very modern struggles, and WordPress has been around for over eleven years. WordPress iterates pretty quickly and does a great job of supporting modern web features, but it’s rarely immediate, especially in terms of core support. But plugin support and the shear number of people innovating on top of WordPress is significant and awesome. Just build websites! So many people want to be told what to do and what to learn next. That’s for sure the #1 question on ShopTalk. In the face of lots of new and changing technology, Chris is often asked about what to do first, or what to do next. He and Dave have a core mantra at ShopTalk to encourage people to “just build websites!” The things that you learn will happen as a result of building those websites and things for other people. The degree of paralysis by analysis they see is significant, and Chris and Dave hope that people will let their experiences guide them versus a to-do list of things they must learn today. You’re desirable Another note is that pretty much everyone has something they can do to provide value to others. People surely know something from a tooling perspective that’s worthwhile; even sans-modern tools, basic knowledge of HTML and CSS — the building blocks of the web — could be a great asset to lots of business. Even more important than tooling though, is the ability to solve problems. Chris used an example of a business that sells wrenches. If you can help a business that sells wrenches to sell more wrenches, then you are able to provide that business a lot of value; so focus on helping businesses do what they do better. Learn by sharing I admire Chris’ degree of sharing what he’s learning, through ShopTalk, CodePen Radio, and for years on CSS-Tricks. He doesn’t do anything special to write about what he learns. He keeps his drafts right there in WordPress. He doesn’t take special notes. He just writes, and he often writes about what he’s learning. Over time he’s been able to refine his writing and learn what to expect, as far as feedback goes. But at the core he just writes, and through that writing he’s been able to grow his own audience and get better at everything else he’s doing professionally. Staying consistent and avoiding burnout I was curious what Chris has done to stay so consistent online and avoid burnout. It seems to me that a lot of people get temporarily motivated and quickly disenchanted. I’ve learned in my own experience with the web that any measure of success takes lots and lots of consistent effort. Chris hasn’t done a lot to think about avoiding burnout, but figures there are some things he subconsciously does to stay motivated. That may be taking extended breaks from the web and disconnecting for a trip to the woods, or shorter breaks just in the day like stopping and playing the banjo for a few minutes. Stay in touch with Chris At the end of every episode of ShopTalk, Chris and Dave give guests an opportunity to plug whatever they want. Chris’ plug for our interview was to advise folks to take some time off from building their own product and instead go into their issues list and clean up after themselves and their project — which is what Chris and team are doing at CodePen right now. He also noted that nothing would make him happier than folks going Pro on CodePen. If you teach, interact with others, or want a way to store private pens, you should definitely check it out. And it’s affordable too, at only $75 for the year. While he didn’t take the opportunity to plug much of his own stuff, you should definitely still check out his various projects. I’ve learned a ton from Chris since I started my own journey on the web. If my learning journey on the web were a university, I’ve definitely taken multiple classes from CSS-Tricks and the ShopTalk Show. Chris’ business is built on a three-legged stool right now. Check them out: CodePen – a playground for the front-end side of the web. ShopTalk Show – a podcast about front-end web design (and sound effects). CSS-Tricks – where the whole internet learns CSS. Also check out Chris’ fun about page with his life’s timeline and follow him on Twitter. I’d like to thank Chris for the time he spent with me, and I hope that if you enjoyed this interview and write-up, that you’ll share it!

Finally, finally someone has done it. They’ve combined the power of self-hosted WordPress with the ease of hosted WordPress.com. Evermore is WordPress for everyone. It comes with “the most important functionality built in.” There aren’t loads of tiny upsells like other hosted services (I’m looking at you, WordPress.com), and there are only two plans. It is not free. You can pay $50 per month, or $75 per month, and each plan comes with a 10x setup fee. But the result is exactly what you’d hope for: a very powerful, functional, easy-to-use website. http://s3.amazonaws.com/PostStatus/DraftPodcast/evermore-cliff-seal-draft-podcast-poststatus.mp3 Direct Download If I had to give Evermore a competitor, I’d say it’s much closer to Squarespace than WordPress.com. But it’s built on WordPress, meaning you can leave Evermore any time and take your install with you. In fact, they sell the ability to leave Evermore as a feature. Because they should. Evermore offers you true portability and freedom: as your needs outgrow it, we’ll help you move to another service by giving you all the files and instructions you need. We’ll even suggest new hosts that will take care of you and your site. I just love that. It reminds me of Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street sending people to another store instead of trying to side-sell them what they don’t want. Little will help establish my loyalty to a service like the ease one offers me to leave it. I have no desire to take WordPress and try to hijack the open source process and make people feel like they’re closed into another product system. Who is behind Evermore? Evermore is a project by Cliff Seal and Kyle Bowman. Cliff is a respected WordPress developer and works full-time at Pardot, a division of SalesForce. Kyle is an accountant and avid WordPress fan who has invested heavily in the concerns of WordPress users. In our interview, Cliff accounts many Evermore decisions to Kyle’s attunement to the end user. Together they make Evermore, a service that represents exactly three clients — or a 50% increase since I interviewed Cliff. Yes, Evermore is a new service. But I haven’t been this excited about a relatively generic WordPress product in a long time. For one, I think Cliff is a great developer. He’s the type of guy that will work through the difficult technical challenges a hosted service will inevitably face. For instance, he helped work on the ability to symlink plugins in WordPress 3.9 before launching Evermore so he could more easily share directories between sites. Second, I love that Kyle has recently faced some of the same concerns as many of their future customers face. This allows him to be empathetic to their needs and better serve them. His business savvy as a self-described “recovering CPA” probably won’t hurt either. Why a hosted solution? More than Cliff and Kyle’s qualifications to operate a service like Evermore, I just like their motivations. Cliff and Kyle felt that there was a gap in the market for web design, development, and maintenance services. They would run into users and site owners with common frustrations: frustrations with getting their initial site setup, managing their hosting and updates, finding the right plugins to use for particular functionality, and more. They decided they had an opportunity, and they wanted to see if they could fill the gap. The process Evermore is a multi-stage process. First, there’s a setup fee. With this fee ($500 for the base plan, $750 for the secondary plan), they’ll walk you through getting a new domain or using your own, choosing a theme and setting up your site with demo content, including sample menus and widgets. The setup period is currently 24 hours, since they haven’t automated every aspect of it. They are going to force themselves to scale in this arena, versus automating things that don’t need it yet. They also want to have that time to do the kind of individual site testing they want to do with early customers. Once you get setup, they have some generic guides for helping clients manage their site. But for the most part, they don’t have an interest in massively changing the admin. They want people to feel like they are in WordPress. The features Evermore is baked with a number of features. Some highlights: Forms eCommerce Google Analytics An events calendar A slider Podcasting functionality They are also willing to add functionality over time to enable customers to do more with Evermore. However, you will never be able to add your own plugins on Evermore. It is restricted in that sense just like other hosted website solutions. This is for support and maintainability reasons. You have to have this critical mass of knowledge to operate — even the best CMS out there. So, instead what we’ve chosen to do is say, curate themes and plugins for you. Especially with plugins, we’ve gone through and combined some of the best plugins specific to features. The plugins they use are a blend of commercial plugins they pay for and free plugins from WordPress.org; but importantly they curate the plugins and are able to manage them at a network level to benefit their users. For commercial plugins Evermore uses their own licensing, so site owners don’t need to own their own versions or manage license keys or anything else. Evermore currently has 35 themes to choose from. Some are the WordPress default themes, many are from Genesis and StudioPress, and others are free or commercial options from a variety of locations. Pricing The $50 per month (and $500 setup fee) for Evermore gets users a website setup with a commercial theme, and up to 50,000 monthly visits. The deal is for one website and includes a free domain registration. The $75 option (and $750 setup fee) includes mostly the same features, but includes support for up to 100,000 monthly visits and the option to enable eCommerce. Regarding the pricing, Cliff calls their choices, “a best guess” based on a year of research he and Kyle have done, to fit in the market that includes a variety of different styles of managed WordPress hosting and support solutions. As far as the setup fee goes as well, that’s an attempt to kind of cover for us as well; because there is nothing stopping you from signing up for a day, getting your website back and asking for the dump and then leaving. … And so much of that setup is the difficult part. So much of that expertise, and automation, manual labor and things like that come at the beginning. Nearly impossible to fail Another aspect I really enjoyed about our talk was that no matter how Evermore turns out, Cliff wouldn’t see it as a failure. They aren’t trying to scale a free product. They definitely have some up-front investments in Evermore, but more importantly, it equips them to better serve their own service clients both now and in the future. Additionally, honestly I’m really tired of seeing people launch, sort of, products and SaaS products and things like that and not be able to support anything long term. They have to shut down in six months because they didn’t have enough money to keep it going. If other people don’t think it’s a great idea, then they will be happy with it as a service even for just a few people. They can live with that. There isn’t a “runway” to consider, as so often motivates the startup culture. Worst case scenario, Evermore stops taking new customers and just maintains existing customers as long as they are happy. And as Cliff notes, customers have little risk. No matter what, there’s no way to get locked into a bad business decision [as a customer], because you can always leave, and you always have that information, and it’s always yours to begin with. Going generic versus a niche They basically didn’t see anyone looking for the market in same way they are. We’re trying to explore whether we’re in the right place or not. … Instead of trying to pick a niche and go for it directly — we want to see if we can create some awareness in this space. Can we begin solving a problem? Even if it ends up that other people come and take the exact idea and target them and “run them out of town”, they’ll still be happy because they’ll have helped drive the market forward. While they think multiple people can work in the market together, and that they can do well even with competition, they would love to see the hosted WordPress space evolve. The evolution of the hosted WordPress space While I think Evermore is going to need to rely on slow growth — since organic search will be competitive and hard to come by without a niche — I think they can still strike a chord and make some noise in the hosted space by referral and leveraging the power of WordPress as their platform. I agree with Cliff. I think there is room for dozens of Evermores. Maybe hundreds of them. It wouldn’t surprise me if many theme shops start creating a seamless theme purchase to hosted website transition for quick setups. Whether that works through white-labeling services with hosts, fully automated hosted solutions, or some kind of hybrid, I think it’s coming. I also think that the framing of Evermore as a springboard to the greater WordPress experience shouldn’t be understated. As a WordPress consultant that often struggles with whether to recommend my friends to WordPress.com or self-hosted WordPress, something like Evermore sounds like exactly the type of service I’d love to refer people to. Do I think Evermore is perfect? No, of course not. It’s a brand new service and product, and I’m sure they’ll learn a ton as they onboard new users. But I’m incredibly excited to see that something like Evermore even exists, and that people like Cliff and Kyle are thinking of these kinds of problems to solve. I really look forward to following up with them in a year to see what they’ve learned and how Evermore has evolved. If you enjoyed this post and interview, I’d really appreciate it if you share it. These type of posts take more effort than any other, with hours of research, interviews, processing, and writing. I love doing them, and also love seeing them shared on all your favorite social networks! Also check out Chris Lema’s post on Evermore, which compliments this one well. You can follow Cliff and Kyle on Twitter if you want to stay in touch with them, and of course be sure to check out the Evermore website.

WP eCommerce is one of the oldest WordPress plugins you’ll find. That it’s an eCommerce plugin — built on WordPress, well before such a thing seemed sensible — is even more of a testament to just how impressive this plugin is. It’s been under development for eight years, and is nearing 3 million downloads on WordPress.org. Today, WP eCommerce is working to shed layers of duplicate functionality that can now be replaced by WordPress core. It’s a wicked thing for a product to be ahead of its time. An eCommerce plugin built on WordPress is clearly — we know today — a viable thing. But for years, as WP eCommerce chugged along, many were skeptical that eCommerce and WordPress could — or even should — be harmonious. That WP eCommerce is so old is its blessing and its curse. The blessing is that it was the only major player for a long time, allowing it to achieve great success, relative to other commercial plugins of the time. Its curse is that it gained a reputation for bugginess and as a product that was trying to be a round peg in a square hole. It’s safe to say that WP eCommerce has passed the time where anyone should doubt it’s a viable product. But the question remains: can something old be new again? Dan Milward and Justin Sainton believe so. And they are now 50 / 50 partners to ensure it. For years, Dan ran WP eCommerce under the umbrella of Instinct Entertainment. While WP eCommerce wasn’t Instinct’s only project, it was its largest for a long time. Dan hired support staff and developers to help maintain the product and manage customers of their premium support tokens. Justin Sainton has been contributing to WP eCommerce since 2010. He’s written nearly 70,000 lines of code and deleted nearly 30,000 lines of code from the codebase, just since they started tracking activity on Github in 2011. He’s got more commits to the project than any of the other 39 contributors. At times, Justin has been the lifeblood of WP eCommerce development. Now that the two are partnered, they are ready to move ahead with full steam. Or catch the audio: http://s3.amazonaws.com/PostStatus/DraftPodcast/wp-e-commerce-audio.mp3 Direct download Born out of need Dan was building websites with b2, pre-WordPress. He remembers when the repository was on a third party website, with only twenty or so plugins. He had a customer looking to sell plumbing related supplies online. Dan looked at osCommerce and Zen Cart to see if they could do the job. The hosted solutions we know today, and even Magento, didn’t exist yet. Dan had the wild idea to build it in WordPress, and the client let them release it to the public. The world’s first eCommerce plugin for WordPress was born out of a need to cater to plumbers. That was in 2006. Instant growth The plugin took off very quickly. Dan remembers launching “Gold Cart”, their premium version of WP eCommerce, on a Friday, and was blown away by the transaction history he saw the very next day. The success was unexpected. They never thought it’d be the kind of plugin “that would end up being used by millions of people around the world.” And if he could go back, he says he probably would’ve done it differently. Today, WP eCommerce powers sites large and small. They know of sites with upwards of 100,00 products and / or seven figures in revenue. Impressive numbers. Retro-fitted One of the hardest parts of development of WP eCommerce has been growing with WordPress and retro-fitting the plugin to utilize functionality and APIs that WordPress offers in core. The best example of this is for custom post types. Custom post types were not introduced until WordPress 3.0, meaning that it took a significant effort and change of the WP eCommerce codebase to utilize custom post types, and all the benefits that go along with using them. The Jetpack of WP eCommerce Gold Cart is what Dan calls the Jetpack of WP eCommerce. In an attempt at longevity, WP eCommerce was an early player in the commercial plugin market. They quickly offered a premium version of WP eCommerce. They now monetize in two ways. They have support tokens, as well as commercial add-ons. Support for WP eCommerce is managed via Help Scout. Justin’s entrance to WP eCommerce Justin also got into eCommerce with WordPress due to client work. He’s been working with WordPress since 2007, but he’s been doing eCommerce since 2005. So he quickly searched for WordPress eCommerce integrations, and therefore found WP eCommerce. By 2008 and 2009 he was using WP eCommerce for client work, and he reach out to Dan to figure out how he could start contributing. Justin got heavily involved with WP eCommerce when they were making the switch to using custom post types. He helped guide the plugin from using around 40 custom tables to 13 custom tables today. He’s been the biggest contributor to WP eCommerce ever since. With the release of WP eCommerce 3.9, their new partnership becomes official. The new structure of Instinct Instinct is now focused on WP eCommerce, and Dan’s other projects (like Gamefroot, an impressive HTML5-centric gaming entity) have shifted over to a different organization. Justin and Dan are now managing the day to day of WP eCommerce through Instinct. The team of support providers and paid developers will be managed under the new Instinct. Long term opportunities WP eCommerce 3.9 will be a huge release for them. The features in this release include nearly five years of work between Justin, Ryan McCue, Gary Cao, and others. All of these have been developed as the “features as plugins” concept over the last five years. So that was something that we were a little bit early to market with as a concept. A few of the new features: 1) A new theme engine. It’s not as easy as it should be to create themes, so they are fixing that with 3.9. They have a number of commercial theme developers they are working with to help create themes with the new theme engine this year. 2) New payment gateway API WP eCommerce will have a much simpler and more flexible API for managing payment gateway integrations with 3.9. It will replace an API that’s been in existence since 2009. 3) Marketplace functionality The most impressive functionality to Justin (and to me too) is the marketplace functionality they’re building into WP eCommerce 3.9. This means that people who install WP eCommerce will be able to view and shop extensions for WP eCommerce through the admin, and purchase straight through that system. They hope to open up third party development considerably with this feature. A product to be proud of One of the most impressive parts of the interview was when Dan talked about the rise and slow fall of WP eCommerce as other platforms “leapfrogged” them. At one point, they figured that around 250,000 users had migrated to using WordPress with WP eCommerce. But over time, as development stagnated some, he knew that it wasn’t the same type of product as it once was — a product that he was super proud of and ready to go to WordCamps and promote. However, as they are now entering the final stages of 3.9 and even gear toward 4.0, they are ready to go head-on again marketing and promoting what they think can still be a go-to solution for WordPress eCommerce. Evolve or die “Evolve or die.” This is the Darwinian quote Dan used to describe the necessary change that an open market creates for products. WP eCommerce has certainly had to evolve. Yes, they were early to market, but they were probably (in my opinion) too early to market. Now, they’re evolving, and working hard to once again be the big player in the market. And they’ve got longevity on their side, which is a benefit that is often undervalued. The WordPress space is a big space, right? … eCommerce can mean so much. … There’s plenty of opportunity to do new things. They are excited and confident about what the future holds WordPress and WP eCommerce. They believe there are untouched niches and market segments that have a lot of potential. We don’t want to just compete. We want to be doing new and innovative things — which is what we’ve always done. I asked where some of that potential is, and Dan said at least a couple areas where he sees potential are in-app purchasing experiences and the user-interface. Prioritizing goals Justin has a lot of plans for future development. While he has a list of long term goals, he’s also outlined shorter term plans. The Product He wants to zero in on the WP eCommerce product itself. He’s not necessarily interested in WP eCommerce in terms of how it competes feature-for-feature with other WordPress eCommerce options as much as how strongly it stands on its own. The community Justin wants to empower the developer community surrounding WP eCommerce to feel welcome and encouraged to contribute. When I enter a community that I’m new to, and I feel immediately that I don’t have a voice, that’s going to turn me off pretty quick to staying active in that community. Partnership development Justin and Dan both see a ton of potential with connecting and integrating with some of the thousands of other platforms, services, and softwares that are part of the overall eCommerce process. Longevity as a feature Justin has run his consulting company, Zao, for ten years now. Both Justin and Dan have been involved in the WordPress community for a long time. They intend to be involved in the WordPress ecosystem for a long time to come. In my mind, their collective experience and expertise are a considerable asset to the future of WP eCommerce. When someone is choosing what eCommerce platform to use, longevity of those providing the software is a huge feature. Nobody wants to invest in building a site on software that will become unsupported during the lifetime of the project. WP eCommerce has been around longer than any other eCommerce platform, and I think they can combine this history with their more modern features to really strongly market their position in the WordPress eCommerce space and the eCommerce space in general. Spreading the word WP eCommerce does still face a number of challenges. One of these is spreading the word. Not only do they need to spread the word that WP eCommerce exists, but also that it’s good again. Justin used the example of a WordCamp he went to, where he asked the crowd who had heard of WP eCommerce, and about 70% of the room raised their hand. When he asked those that loved it to keep their hand raised, only about 20% of the room kept their hand up. Jokingly, he said, “Okay, I’ve got some work to do. Let’s talk.” This is the kind of attitude that I think can make WP eCommerce successful, in a big way. In addition to WordCamps and evangelizing to developers, they are also sponsoring and organizing sponsoring smaller events. Just last week, Justin headed up the organization of BeachPress, a micro event of about 30 developers in a beach house on Oregon’s coast. Events like this and the personal relationships that come from them are what will help them find willing contributors and product advocates. A new stage for a new plugin While the WP eCommerce plugin approaches a new stage of life, you wouldn’t really know it by looking at GetShopped.org, the landing page for the plugin. This, along with other internal infrastructure issues, are additional goals for improvement for Justin and Dan. They are planning to re-analyze business models, restructure documentation, rebuild the website, and much more. Dan notes that getting past the technical challenges of the upcoming versions of the plugin is like ridding themselves of shackles. Depending on how well the changes are received, Dan and Justin are also prepared to put more and more of their focus on WP eCommerce versus their other projects. WP eCommerce is their priority, and they plan to see it through. WP eCommerce really does remind me of the saying that, “what’s old is new again.” I look forward to seeing how the rollout of WP eCommerce 3.9 goes, and how the community responds. I have a feeling that we’re going to see a second life for WP eCommerce, not as a replacement to other options, but to a place back in the front-runner category for viable WordPress eCommerce options. If you want to keep track of WP eCommerce, you can do so on their main website, and follow Dan Milward and Justin Sainton on Twitter.

Mike McAlister has been an active member of the commercial WordPress theme space since 2009. He started by selling themes on ThemeForest. He transitioned to the Okay Themes brand in December of 2011. And at the end of March of this year, Mike transitioned yet again to Array. While these transitions may seem like arbitrary branding, to me they represent broader shifts both in Mike’s style and the direction of the commercial WordPress space in general. He’s never really attempted to fit anyone else’s mold, but I believe he’s done quite well at predicting the market and staying ahead of the pack; and that’s why I love following his work. Mike consistently challenges himself to succeed in a saturated space by attacking the market in a different way than the rest of the crowd. http://s3.amazonaws.com/PostStatus/DraftPodcast/mike-mcalister-post-status-draft.mp3 Direct Download Selling WordPress themes on ThemeForest In 2009, Mike discovered WordPress and saw the opportunities of the commercial WordPress space. He quickly got his first ThemeForest theme put together, which he admits was probably sub-par code; but it got him started on his journey to consistently sell themes at a fairly early stage of the market. ThemeForest has always been a controversial space. From a consumer side, with nice designs and a huge selection, it’s an easy way to discover themes — hence the popularity and explosive growth of the marketplace. From the non-ThemeForest developer side (developers dealing with ThemeForest themes), it’s often a frustrating marketplace because good code is very difficult to quantify on ThemeForest themes, making it difficult to steer people away from bad themes. But there’s also the seller’s viewpoint. Exclusive sellers on ThemeForest start by making 50% of the revenue on a sale. Once they hit elite status ($75,000 in cumulative sales), they max out at 70%. But for non-exclusive partnerships, sellers only make 33.33% of the sale, which strongly encourages exclusive authorship for ThemeForest community members. More than four out of five ThemeForest authors are exclusive authors. Moving the market forward Selling on ThemeForest means that you accept the terms of the marketplace, both as a buyer and a seller. Over the years, this has resulted in a variety of public debates. Mike started one such debate on pricing, when he advocated for a change in the pricing model. The debate Mike helped start is what led Envato to establish the elite program, which at the time gave elite authors more flexibility for pricing, and higher rewards for various achievements. Throughout his tenure on ThemeForest, Mike was part of a core group of authors that helped move the marketplace forward. I saw Mike participate in community conversations regarding price, bucking design trends, methods for offering theme support, licensing themes, and more. Authors like Mike helped make Envato a better place. Establishing Okay One of the things Mike discovered as he became a more experienced theme developer was that support was easier with simpler themes. Also, simpler themes allowed him to make design decisions versus offering design options. In December 2011, Mike made the transition to simpler themes official with the launch of Okay Themes. I don’t want that to be the bulk of my business. I don’t want to be answering questions about settings. You know, that seems adverse to everything I’m trying to do. So, yeah, I started ripping things out slowly over the years, taking out various settings and going with the mantra of ‘decisions not options’ – that kind of thing – and really just spending the time to make these decisions, you know, add the details where I thought they needed to be and just whitling it down to a very, very simple theme that just works. Such a decision doesn’t come lightly. When the proven model is options-centered, taking the other route takes guts. Mike’s themes evolved into much simpler products. He tried to make a specific theme for a specific purpose versus creating a generic theme for any purpose that could be reused for dozens of sites. Okay Themes had successes and failures on ThemeForest, but Mike was able to establish a reputation and a brand around well designed, simple themes that are reliably free of the bloat ThemeForest is infamous for. It’s what made his themes a go-to recommendation for many WordPress developers, myself included. Over time, Mike realized he wanted to fully separate from Envato. Despite all of the positive change over the years from Envato leadership, it doesn’t make the consumer’s decision making skills any better. And Mike’s style of theme didn’t really fit perfectly any more with the style of customer ThemeForest tends to have. Selling themes on WordPress.com One way Mike has reached out to more user-centric customers, versus “flippers”, is through the WordPress.com marketplace. Mike was invited to the WordPress.com marketplace and launched Publisher in August of 2013. The experience was enlightening for him. Envato has theme reviews, but it has never reached anything close to the level of code critique that WordPress.com offers. Themes distributed to WordPress.com require complete review and assurances that they will be able to scale incredibly well. Therefore, all new authors are mentored under an Automattician “Theme Wrangler” that guides them as they prepare their theme for the marketplace. This experience led Mike to re-evaluate and improve (with the help of his team) nearly all of his themes. The result was that he became even more committed to simple themes that do a job and do it well. Okay is now Array The experience with WordPress.com and his desire to create a different kind of theme led Mike to further consider his relationship as a seller on Envato’s ThemeForest. It’s hard to be a part of that, when ultimately my philosophy is quite drastically different these days, and I’m trying to target a different crowd. So, yeah, it culminated, and here we are in April, and Okay is now Array. Mike completely rebranded Okay Themes to Array. The project included logo and identity work from Heavy Heavy, an entirely new website, and of course the new name. In the launch post, he assures that the change doesn’t mark a new “way of doing business,” but a transition: Okay Themes will now be known simply as _ Array _. We (still) specialize in beautifully crafted, high quality WordPress goods. New name, new website, new logo, same way of doing business. Pricing themes Array themes cost $69 each right now, or you can buy access to all of them for $199 per year. Currently Array does not auto-renew packages. We spent some time talking about how renewals work across the industry, as well as some ideas for creating licenses for longer update periods, and perhaps separating those from support pricing (okay, this was mostly me spouting off). Tools behind a theme shop We spent also spent some time going over the variety of tools Mike uses to power the Array website. Like many theme shops nowadays, Array is running eCommerce with Easy Digital Downloads, which manages both digital downloads as well as software licensing and updates. They also switched from Tender to bbPress for support, which I thought was interesting, since I feel like there’s been a trend of moving away from forums. The whole post about tools Array uses is really interesting and worth checking out. Advice to other theme authors As one of a number of theme authors that have taken the route from a theme marketplace to his own marketplace, I was curious what Mike’s advice would be to others aiming to start their own theme shop. In general, he would still encourage new authors to utilize a marketplace like ThemeForest to get started and get their name out there. We both largely agreed with Chris Lema’s post that a marketplace can be a great incubator for a WordPress product maker. However, if someone does start on a marketplace, they do need to be aware that when and if they make the switch to their own shop, they basically have to start over from an SEO and marketing perspective. SEO may seem like an odd thing to an outsider to the theme industry, but when the market is as saturated as it is, it takes a lot of work to get your themes out in front of a largely theme-uneducated audience. Mike’s primary advice was to “make it manageable” from the very beginning. Make it as manageable as possible. Write clean code, not just because it looks nice, but because it’s manageable, and then you won’t spend a bunch of time rewriting it later. And just spread that throughout your whole business. Make it simple to begin with. Make it manageable. Use the right tools. Use quality tools that get the job done, and treat your customers with respect. It goes a long way when people actually get a nice quality response and conversation out of something. Just talking themes I’ve tried to summarize much of Mike’s story in this post, as I’ve done with other interviews. However, we spent around 50 minutes talking about the ins and outs of WordPress themes, business, and other things. It was one of the most fun and laid back interviews I’ve ever had the privilege of conducting. I hope that you listen to the entire thing, and I hope that you enjoy it. I love doing these, and I hope to keep bringing them to you. That said, I’d also really appreciate any feedback readers and listeners have as to how I can make these posts better. Thanks to Mike for joining me for this interview, and everyone be sure to check out his excellent new adventure, Array.

I was privileged to be joined by six core contributors to WordPress 3.9 for a Google Hangout where we talked about the new release, contributing to WordPress, and more. To learn more about WordPress 3.9, check out our summary. You can watch the full video right here: I was joined by an all-star cast. Of course, keep in mind, these six people are amazing, but a whopping 267 people made WordPress 3.9 happen. That said, here was our panel: Andrew Nacin Lead Developer, 3.9 Lead ( Twitter |  WP Profile) Favorite feature of WordPress 3.9: No more “Paste from Word” in TinyMCE Least favorite feature of WordPress: Settings screens and Mulitsite Mike Schroder 3.9 Co-lead ( Twitter |  WP Profile) Photo Credit Favorite feature of WordPress 3.9: WP Views / Customizer enhancements Least favorite feature of WordPress: The plugin editor Gregory Cornelius Contributing Developer ( Twitter |  WP Profile) Photo credit Favorite feature of WordPress 3.9: Widget Customizer Least favorite feature of WordPress: Managing page hierarchy Helen Hou-Sandí Core Committer ( Twitter |  WP Profile) Photo credit Favorite feature of WordPress 3.9: Widget Customizer Least favorite feature of WordPress: Admin Menus Scott Taylor Core Committer ( Twitter |  WP Profile) Photo Credit Favorite feature of WordPress 3.9: Customizer improvements Least favorite feature of WordPress: List Tables Weston Ruter Core Contributor ( Twitter |  WP Profile) Photo credit Favorite feature of WordPress 3.9: Media improvements Least favorite feature of WordPress: Magic quotes Brian Krogsgard Post Status editor, Panel Host Favorite feature of WordPress 3.9: Image editing Least favorite feature of WordPress: Default comment handling

Pantheon is a website development, deployment, and hosting platform. But they aren’t just any host. They like to think of their product as a hosting killer, because in their mind, they do much more than just hosting. I heard about Pantheon for the first time last year, when it was a Drupal-only platform. When Pantheon announced last week that their platform would now support WordPress, I knew I had to check it out. I spoke with Josh Koenig, one of the co-founders of Pantheon, and the Head of Developer Experience for the company. You can listen to our entire half hour conversation here: http://s3.amazonaws.com/PostStatus/DraftPodcast/pantheon-josh-koenig-post-status-draft.mp3 Direct Download How Pantheon works Pantheon markets itself differently than most hosts. For one, they target developers. They think about developers all the way down to the way to pay for services; they have a feature for developers to invite a client to pay for a service they’re managing, versus a client needing to share access with their developer. The way Josh describes Pantheon, it’s more like Heroku than a traditional host in terms of how it runs. A Pantheon customer, like a Heroku customer, is on the exact same platform as every other customer. For scaling, Pantheon simply adjusts the number of containers that are running, similar to Heroku’s Dynos. The containerization is much more nimble and much more efficient than virtual machines are. … If you have a bunch of virtual machines that are all running websites, they’re probably all running the same server software, using the same libraries, but they’re doing many copies of that for every virtual machine, whereas we have one host endpoint and that can share all the common binaries, all the common libraries, for all the containers that are located there. Containers can spin up in ten or fifteen seconds, much faster than scaling your website from one type of hosting (like a shared environment) to another (like a VPS) with a traditional host. How Pantheon compares their platform to traditional hosts  Using Pantheon Every new user gets two development environments with Pantheon for free. To begin, it asks you to start a new project or import a site. I was able to easily download my files and database into one zip file from WP Remote, and I purposefully did nothing special to make it easier on Pantheon. When I uploaded my backup, I was amazed that in around one minute, it had perfectly imported my site, extracted and connected the database, edited my config file for the Pantheon setup, and my development website was ready to go. There were some UX things with the dashboard that were a little weird to me. It took me a few minutes of digging around and figuring how where and how to do things. But once I got the hang of it, I could see how I could easily get used to a system like this. As far as developing with Pantheon, you can work locally very easily, as their dev sites come setup as a Git repository and the Git clone URL is ready and waiting from the start. Or a developer can quickly grab SFTP connection details from the dashboard and edit their site straight in the development environment. Once you are happy with your website, Pantheon makes pushing to testing and live servers easy, right from the dashboard. Pantheon also has a paid feature called MultiDev, which allows for Git branching through the dashboard to quickly create entirely new installs for testing, training, feature building, etc. From a branch, users can then merge the code back to the main site through the dashboard. Is Pantheon different from other Managed WordPress hosts? I was curious how Pantheon is really different from a WordPress managed host like WP Engine, Pressable, or Pagely. They certainly aren’t marketing themselves as a managed host. They are trying to expand their marketability beyond that. The way Josh describes it, what makes Pantheon different is the smoothness of the development workflow, with automatic and simple management of development, testing, and live environments. Another item Josh highlights is that Pantheon allows for more than just WordPress websites. This is something I’d never really considered, because I’ve never had a need beyond a WordPress website, but I can totally understand why a development shop that does both Drupal and WordPress work would really enjoy this. Finally, Josh says that the smoothness of their scaling experience with their containers sets them apart. Pantheon is one platform. Our biggest sites and our free sites all run on one coherent platform. So we really can say, ‘If you can make it work on your free dev site and you like the performance you got there, we can scale that to millions of users and you won’t have to, like, go through a migration.’ Josh said that they are pushing billions of pageviews per month on the platform right now, most of which are currently Drupal sites since the WordPress setup is so new. While his statement about a single platform makes sense, I do think it’s more complicated than that. For one, it assumes the code quality is good. This is exactly why WordPress.com VIP reviews code before deploying to their system, even though it can also easily scale for large websites — any large website needs quality code running. So I hope that Pantheon has a way to determine that, or plans to police plugins and code a bit, as other managed hosts have done. Whether Pantheon is truly different from managed hosts like Pressable, WP Engine, and Pagely, I don’t know. I think that they are after a more developer-centered audience means their tools may evolve further beyond what other options offer. However, they are an opinionated platform, just like other managed hosts. You won’t have cPanel and the things that come with it. Multisite could be a pain (or maybe not available, I’m not sure). You’ll need a different solution for email. These things are fine, and they are what we’ve come to understand as part of working with a managed host. Pricing for Pantheon Pantheon isn’t cheap, but it’s comparable to other managed hosts. They bill mostly on pageviews, though Josh notes it’s not a hard barrier (also consistent with how I know others work). The personal plan is $25 per month. Professional plans are $100 per month, with a $30 add-on for SSL. Their business plans scale to 1 million pageviews per month and dedicated phone support, for $400 per month. In our conversation, we used my own site as an example. I have one site I really care about and am willing to pay a decent amount for hosting — this one. Other than that, I manage a few small websites for friends and family. In a situation like mine, Pantheon would probably not be my only host. With other managed hosts, I can easily tack on domains for lower priority sites, mixed in with my main website account. Though Josh did throw out some interesting ideas about how they might actually want to offer “hobby” site hosting in the future, perhaps even for free — further evidence for their developer target. Additionally, as I noted earlier in the post, it’s easy to invite a client to pay for a new site, without having to use different credentials. Pressable has a similar setup for this, which I really enjoy. Is Pantheon a game-changer in WordPress website management? I think Pantheon is going to raise the bar for WordPress hosting. I don’t think they’ll suddenly convert the tens of thousands of customers currently using various WordPress managed hosts, but I do think others will integrate some of the features (and marketing tactics) from Pantheon. Also, Pantheon isn’t new to this. They have a team of 30, appear well funded, and have a couple of years of experience doing this with Drupal already under their belt. I know it’s a bit lame to do so, but I think Andrew Nacin, a lead developer for WordPress, really nicely highlighted how Pantheon has targeted features that could help them gain serious traction in the WordPress development community. . @getpantheon has all the stuff I’d be looking for in a host: awareness of the application stack, focus on scaling, CLI access, rsync, etc. — Andrew Nacin (@nacin) March 20, 2014 This is for professional web developers doing professional web projects. Josh said this toward the end of our interview. I think if they stick to this tactic and this marketing, Pantheon could really do great.

The ecosystem of businesses that have been built around WordPress is huge, but shallow. Few companies are both large (relatively speaking) and central to a broad WordPress community. With 60+ employees, some of which are very well-known WordPress developers, 10up has quickly become a central figure in the WordPress world. Big WordPress companies with significant community influence Until recently, Automattic has always been the primary example cited as a mature company in the WordPress space. But it’s hardly the only company using WordPress as a primary tool. Envato is similarly sized (just over 200 employees, and 50+ more this year), but Envato’s business spans well beyond WordPress themes and plugins on ThemeForest and CodeCanyon. A 60+ person team doing web consulting is not particularly unique either. There are loads of more traditional design agencies, ad agencies, and regional web firms that do a good bit of their business using WordPress. But there aren’t very many companies in general, much less the size of 10up, that are so engrossed within the WordPress community. Yet, as WordPress gains more and more traction as the CMS of choice for the web services and consulting industry, there are now WordPress focused service agencies that are growing quite rapidly. 10up leads this pack, despite being quite a young company; they just celebrated their 3 year anniversary. Meet John Eckman, 10up CEO 10up Founder Jake Goldman has just announced that they’ve hired a CEO, John Eckman. The hire is representative of a new era for 10up, a company often analyzed by other agencies and professionals in the WordPress ecosystem. I was fortunate to be able to interview Jake and John together to talk about the announcement, a number of other topics around running 10up, and the WordPress ecosystem in general. John Eckman is from the Boston area, and is an organizer of WordCamp Boston. Prior to his new role at 10up, he was the managing director of ISITE Design‘s Boston office. John has experience working for and managing teams in a number of service companies over the years. He’s generally an open source advocate, with specific interests in Drupal and WordPress. Jake and John met in 2009 during planning for WordCamp Boston. Jake has been thinking about bringing on a CEO for about a year and a half. Jake interviewed a number of candidates for the position, but specifically wanted someone with ties to the WordPress community, understanding of engineering disciplines, and experience managing teams within large web-based organizations. This is the first interview Jake and John have done together. We talked about a number of things, largely around decision making and running a business. Mini 10ups within 10up One of the things I was interested in was the growing pains. If you are like me, you’ve watched, flabbergasted, as 10up grew at an amazing rate. And Jake admitted that a significant challenge has been realizing when architecture needs to change. The company was mostly flat until they scaled beyond a dozen people. At that time, they established a leadership team, most of whom have now evolved into Vice President or Director roles. However, he also notes the early lesson they learned that great engineers don’t always make great team managers and mentorship doesn’t have to be exclusive to managers. When they got to around 30 employees, they switched to a pod system, with pod leaders. Each pod has dedicated production employees, a pod leader that acts as a manager and lead strategist, and they are now introducing a “producer” role to help the pod leader manage day to day managerial duties. From what I could glean from the conversation, a pod within 10up basically functions like its own little agency, with each pod handling a variety of projects. The design pod, however, is independent from the others. 10up is better known for programming and implementation than design — something they are working to change — and currently the design pod acts more like an outsourced element from each pod on a per-project basis as needed. Turnaround projects and managing cashflow I was curious about cashflow and managing clients when you have a lot of teams. If 10up was only doing new projects and not maintaining relationships longer term, it seems like it would be difficult to constantly manage everyone’s time. While they didn’t downplay these challenges, both Jake and John highlighted how recurring revenue from large customers and also engaging customers beyond “positioning yourself as a coder” and simply doing what is asked. He notes that those who do so set themselves up for short term clients, and instead 10up offers advice for engaging a client long term. In those early phases, bring value, bring strategy, bring ideas that help them build their business; to show that you’re a partner that has business solutions, right, that you create those kind of relationships. It’s why we call everybody at 10up engineers, instead of developers. Because the definition of an engineer is not a coder or a programmer; it’s somebody that builds a solution for a problem. For those looking to get into these types of relationships, John advises to begin in the proposal phase, by introducing ideas and showcasing the experience the client would be buying, versus simply showing deliverables of your proposal. You’re essentially selling a point a view. You’re bringing a consultative guidance to them on how things ought to operate. And as long as they’re hearing that value, they’ll be excited for it. Jake estimates that between 60 and 70 percent of their business is reliably repeat business and another portion of their business is repeat business that was less planned. They are able to categorize these projections as expected repeat customers and not have to worry as much about constantly finding new work to make payroll every month. As far as the size of projects, they like to take on large projects, which helps reduce churn, but they also like to stay open to smaller projects that excite them. Jake didn’t exactly highlight what their “floor” is, but he did use $5,000 as an example of the type of budget that sometimes comes in and is usually unrealistic for them. He also noted that they have some accounts that have spent over $1 million with them in a year, and “definitely” some that have spent that amount over the life of the project. These long term, higher value clients rarely spend the money they do because of WordPress specifically, but rather consider 10up a partner to their web presence. And  these longer term and higher dollar projects are what enable them to more effectively manage their team. How big will 10up grow to be? When I asked the inevitable question of just how big 10up would grow to be, Jake responded the way he says he always does. “My reply to that is always, ‘as big as it can be while we do great work.’ To me the number of people is actually irrelevant.” Adding to that, John notes, “growing does enable us to have more impact in places we want to have more impact.” The impact he’s referencing is to push into markets like “government, higher ed, the enterprise,” but also cites that it’s important for them to do so “without sacrificing culture or quality.” Bringing in CEOs in tech companies There is some precedent for a founder of a tech company to bring in a CEO. Outside of WordPress, the examples are many; even within the WordPress world, there are a few worth noting: Matt Mullenweg brought in Toni Schneider to be the CEO of Automattic in 2006; and at the beginning of this year they actually switched jobs. In October 2013, WP Engine CEO Jason Cohen stepped down into a CTO role, and hired Heather Brunner to be CEO. Not exactly the same, but in November of 2013, VeloMedia acquired Crowd Favorite, and Crowd Favorite founder Alex King became the CTO — a role he felt more comfortable in. It’s very impressive to me when a founder relinquishes a level of control and brings in a CEO to help steer a ship they’ve made such great efforts to build. I think in the instances I cite above the changes have been hugely successful for each company, and we’ve seen them all continue to grow and do a lot of impressive things since. What will things look like three years from now? I do hope you watch the full interview with Jake and John. I think it’s very valuable for anyone interested in the business of WordPress, or want to know what life is like inside a company like 10up. I haven’t gone into some of the topics we discussed at all, such as their stepping into the product business. It amazes me just how fast our space is evolving. The “old” companies in the WordPress world aren’t even ten years old; WordPress itself hardly is. A slew of companies are doubling (at least) in size every year. Traditional web agencies around the world are abandoning proprietary software and advertising their WordPress chops — because their customers demand it. Businesses that have historically just done services are getting into products. It seems almost everyone is hiring. The culture of work is being disrupted. With all of these incredible shifts, it’s almost not surprising that a company like 10up could go from 1 to 60+ in three years, gaining a stellar reputation along the way. But it doesn’t stop it from being impressive. I can’t wait to see what the landscape looks like three years from now, to see how existing companies continue to evolve. And most of all I’m excited to see how many other entrepreneurs enter the fray between now and then and how they change the conversation again.

I had the pleasure to interview Drew Strojny, founder of The Theme Foundry, about their work at The Theme Foundry, their philosophies about themes, and their latest theme release, Oxford. http://s3.amazonaws.com/PostStatus/DraftPodcast/Post-Status-Draft-3-Drew-Strojny-ThemeFoundry.mp3 Direct Download Drew is a former Duke football player that spent a few years in the NFL before he started a small business doing general marketing. Over time, his clients started asking for websites, so he discovered WordPress. His work with web projects led him to start designing WordPress themes, and he ended up being an early player in the commercial theme market in 2008. Competition with themes over time In 2008, there weren’t many people selling themes. Chris Pearson was selling Thesis, Brian Gardner was selling Revolution, pre-Genesis. WooThemes was just underway. But the demand was enormous. Well, I thought we’d just throw our hat into the ring and try a design and see how it goes, and we got a really huge response. It was really great timing on our part. It was one of the best times to get into the theme market. The WordPress theme space really exploded for a few years. Drew notes that they haven’t seen the explosive growth in the past couple years compared to the first two The market is maturing and there are a lot more companies in the space, and a lot more options. Setting themselves apart I asked Drew how The Theme Foundry sets themselves apart from the competition, considering just how many theme providers there are now. They like to tout their “world class design and clean code” when they market their themes. They do most of their design in house, but they also commission some designs to get outside the bubble of the “WordPress theme” concept, and those commissioned themes help them expand their work. John Hicks designed Shelf. Ryan Essmaker designed the Anthem theme, Dave Ruiz designed the Avid theme, and most recently Veerle Pieters designed the Collections theme. The Theme Foundry notably doesn’t use any form of framework and attempts to limit theme options as much as possible. When they sell a theme to a customer, they want it to “just work” and be reliable over time. The impact of selling themes on WordPress.com The Theme Foundry was one of the first providers invited to sell commercial themes on WordPress.com. They released the Shelf theme in early 2011, and today nearly their entire collection is available. However, WordPress.com wants as many great themes in the marketplace as possible, so over time the overall impact WordPress.com plays on The Theme Foundry’s business has been reduced, but it’s still an important part of what they do. Making big splashes with themes The Theme Foundry has made a number of big splashes in the theme market. Shelf, at the time, was an innovative theme, making use of post formats and responsive design when hardly anyone was doing it. Collections has a single page app (SPA) feel, using Backbone for loading pages, and Basis has a drag and drop builder that made a lot of waves. Drew says that they don’t like to just put out themes, but prefer to create themes that target a specific concept, and then build the theme to fit well into that concept, without bloating the theme with unnecessary functionality. Oxford theme and Typekit integration Their latest theme is another that’s ready to make a splash. To date, no theme company has automated Typekit integration; as in, if a theme customer currently wants to use Typekit fonts, they need a separate account for it. With Oxford ( demo), The Theme Foundry is including Typekit support, without a Typekit account, as part of the yearly licensing deal. What this means, is that Oxford offers the theme plus the Typekit font integration, for $79. And the yearly renewal fee is reduced to $39 for support, updates, and a continued Typekit font license. The Typekit integration is the first of its kind in the WordPress theme landscape. To date, it’s a world limited by Google web fonts for hosted custom font integrations. There’s nothing wrong with Google web fonts, but Typekit is certainly a level up, and I’m excited to see this happen. All of The Theme Foundry’s themes will be integrated with Typekit over the coming weeks. You can read more on their announcement post. The Theme Foundry, Post Status, and what’s next Drew and I had a fifty minute convesation discussing the topics above and much more. We also spent some time talking about advertising, content marketing, and The Theme Foundry’s partnership with Post Status. If you’re interested in our relationship and Drew’s motivation for supporting what I do, I hope you’ll give this interview a listen. It was a pleasure to talk to Drew, and I look forward to seeing what The Theme Foundry has coming next. You can follow Drew on Twitter, The Theme Foundry on Twitter, and check out their website.