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Miranda Lievers is co-founder & COO of Thinkific, a tech company enabling tens of thousands of entrepreneurs and companies to create, market, and sell their own courses online. She jumped ship from her fast-track corporate job and into full-time entrepreneurship a decade ago, earning her MBA along the way. These days she’s devoted to growing Thinkific while working to help business owners around the globe build their own successful companies online. https://www.thinkific.com/

This week on Episode 266 of the WP-Tonic Podcast Sallie Goetsch, Chris Badgett, Adam Preiser, and John Locke joined host Jonathan Denwood to discuss several recent stories in the WordPress and online community. Featured stories included the latest update of WordPress 4.9.4 released to fix the auto update feature that was broken in 4.9.3, a proposal to stop configuring WordCamps in a track format to allow more interaction of diverse users, Five reasons people redesign their websites, 2017 in review by Delicious Brains, and a public service announcement explaining Google’s latest declaration that all sites need to be using an SSL certificate by summer 2018. More Detailed Notes This week on Episode 266 of the WP-Tonic Podcast Sallie Goetsch, Chris Badgett, Adam Preiser, and John Locke joined host Jonathan Denwood to discuss several recent stories in the WordPress and online community. Article 1 covered the almost immediate release of WordPress 4.9.4 right after 4.9.3 because the recent release of 4.9.3 broke the auto update option. https://wptavern.com/wordpress-4-9-4-fixes-critical-auto-update-bug-in-4-9-3 All software has bugs. Not sure if it was because they were pressed for time. The key is that sometimes as you roll it out something else breaks. It’s a testing issue and testing can always get better. Story 2 was about ditching WordCamp tracks. This author proposes stopping the practice of having multiple tracks at WordCamps in order to make it easier for attendees to get the information you need. https://mrwweb.com/wordcamp-tracks-itineraries/ Story 3 covers the Top 5 Reasons for Website Redesign. This one was written by our own roundtable member John Locke. https://www.lockedownseo.com/5-signs-website-redesign-project/ As a web developer, these are the 5 Top Reason he has seen for people redesigning their site. 1) They want more business. 2) Their website looks outdated. 3) People like their target customers or team aren’t using the site. 4) They have features they have been waiting to add and have been waiting on it. 5) No one has updated the site because it’s too hard to use. They pointed out it is actually a mixture of those, and that increasing revenue is almost always part of it. Story 4 covered a Delicious Brains review of 2017 including their Hiring, Firing and Revenue Details. https://deliciousbrains.com/2017-year-in-review/ Similar to our earlier covering of Pippin Williams 2017 review, the team discussed the overall popularity of providing annual reviews along with the discussion on the company’s specific 2017 experience. Story 5 Google said you have to have an SSL Certificate by the summer. Insecure website shows in Chrome. The team also pointed out that when it’s a WordPress website, you must make sure that you do it properly or you can break your site.

Chris Coyier  joined host Jonathan Denwood and guest co-host John Locke for episode 265 of the WP-Tonic Podcast. Chris is the founder of CSS-Tricks (https://css-tricks.com/) and joint founder of CodePen (https://codepen.io/). This week’s sponsor is Kinsta Hosting (https://kinsta.com/?kaid=QTZIMOYOCEZL). Kinsta hosting is the official web host of the WP-Tonic website. This episode covered information about CodePen, CSS-Tricks and delved into Chris’s ideas about online training and learning. Chris explained the heart of CodePen is a code editor in the browser. You can write CSS, HTML, and Javascript and see it live in the browser. You can then hit save and get a URL of what you just did. It’s very helpful for teaching code. CSS-Tricks is a blog site for developers that consists of many tutorials. Jonathan speaks of CSS-Tricks as part of the online training arena popular right now and asked Chris where he sees online training. Online training isn’t fully baked yet. Chris sees many options coming in the future for online training and sees opportunities arising. He particularly spoke to this in terms of technical training and development. He also sees CSS-Tricks as a tutorial site but not an official online learning site, because there is no learning path.

Sallie Goetsch, Chris Badgett, and John Locke joined host Jonathan Denwood for Episode 264 of WP-Tonic. This episode is brought to you by IntelligenceWP, a WordPress plugin that integrates with Google Analytics to give you more insight into your site’s traffic and user engagement. https://intelligencewp.com/ This week’s roundtable covered several hot stories for the WordPress community. Chris Badgett announced a new update for LifterLMS. They just released an advanced quiz option that includes features like fill in the blank, short and long answer, having students upload assignments, and reordering items in a list. https://lifterlms.com/product/advanced-quizzes/ The first story news was a big one. iThemes has joined the Liquid Web family. https://ithemes.com/2018/01/31/ithemes-joining-the-liquid-web-family/ The group wasn’t surprised. It was pointed out that the iThemes sync was already part of the Liquid Web platform, and that hosting companies are often purchasing products that enhance their offerings. Along the lines of companies purchasing products that fit their ecosystem, the second story covered UpdraftPlus purchasing Easy Updates Manager a plugin to help manage hosting. The team agreed that this makes sense in their backup ecosystem. https://wptavern.com/updraftplus-acquires-easy-updates-manager-plugin Story 3 wishes a Happy Birthday to WordPress - as WordPress turns 15. , along with congratulations, Jonathan floated out the possibility that a major fork may take place. Sallie said while there may be gossip, forking WP would be a huge undertaking. Talk is easy, but doing it is a very large undertaking. You would really need a specific vision. Forking WordPress to keep it the same isn’t a good enough vision. She is seeing more encouraging information about Gutenberg. Chris said the surest way to see the future is to create it. He points to leadership and doesn’t hear a clear leadership voice in the ecosystem. Certainly not a voice that shows we have a clear vision to make splitting the path something viable. John Locke discussed that while people talk about forking, he agrees with Sallie and Chris. It is a major undertaking. Story 4 - WooCommerce 3.3 pulled from WP Repository because it broke themes https://wptavern.com/woocommerce-3-3-removed-from-plugin-directory-due-to-theme-conflicts John Locke who has several WooCommerce customers had a few issues on updates but was surprised that it was pulled from the repository. He did mention how hard it is to create software with so many moving parts. Sallie pointed out the irony that this is the WooCommerce version that was to work with all themes, yet it was theme issues that caused the removal. She did note that the issues she had in themes were not catastrophic but were noticeable. Her biggest challenge has been that purchasing from WooCommerce.com has become confusing to her clients. You have to sign in with your WordPress.com account - but clients don’t know what it is. Never make it hard for people to give you money. Chris spoke of using WooCommerce on their LifterLMS site. They sell LifterLMS software with WooCommerce. They love open source because they optimize the way it does license keys, etc. In the spirit of our earlier conversation about and leadership and vision, Chris asked, What is the vision for WooCommerce? We need a map of where it’s going especially if you aren’t a power user. If setting up your first store, it may make you look to a Shopify or something else. Sallie brought a story forth about Ebay switching payment processors. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-31/ebay-to-ditch-paypal-for-dutch-processor-adyen-lowering-costs?ref=webdesignernews.com The news pundits mentioned PayPal stock falling, but the team doesn’t think this means it means a whole lot to PayPal or to eBay’s customers. The discussed options for payment processing on WordPress sites including Stripe. This final discussion reminds us that there are things outside of WordPress, like payment processors, that affect WordPress users.

We Interview Lee Jackson founder of Agency Trail Blazer Community podcast and membership website is on a mission to help design & web agencies fall in love with their business again. This show is dedicated to exploring ways we can improve agency life, grow our businesses, achieve our goals and get back time with our loved ones. https://agencytrailblazer.com/

Ben Arellano is the joint founder of Fly Plugins: We at Fly Plugins offer 3 premium plugin products. WP Courseware which is a learning management system, S3 Media Maestro which is a media protection plugin with Amazon S3 integration, and Churnly our latest product that helps to reduce churn. Our flagship product is WP Courseware and is by far our most popular plugin. https://www.wp-tonic.com/podcast/260-wp-tonic-friday-round-table-show-19th-jan-2018/

This week on Episode 262 of the WP-Tonic Podcast, the roundtable discussed Virtual Reality in WordPress and WordPress use in higher education. Sallie Goetsch, Morten Rand-Hendriksen, Chris Badgett, John Locke, and Adam Preiser joined co-host Kim Shivler in a lively discussion of the future of virtual reality with one member believing it has no future. We launched with WPTavern’s covering of Tuesday’s Higher Ed Conference. https://wptavern.com/free-conference-dedicated-to-wordpress-in-higher-ed-takes-place-january-30th-at-9am-cst On Tuesday, January 30, WPCampus will be holding a free, all-day conference about WordPress in higher education. The conference begins at 9AM CST and you can register at https://online.wpcampus.org/. Much of this discussion included reminiscing on our own computer experiences at the university level with some of us attending before there was a World Wide Web. The team discussed how universities are embracing WordPress though adoption is sometimes siloed by department and there isn’t always a campus-wide governance or strategy. This is something we touched on in our WP-Tonic interview with WPCampus Founder Rachel Cherry. https://www.wp-tonic.com/podcast/259-wp-tonic-show-special-guest-rachel-cherry-wpcampus/ Watch on YouTube - https://youtu.be/7FX2BD_Cwjo Our second story was, Virtual Reality in WordPress: Are You Ready to Give This a Shot? https://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/virtual-reality-in-wordpress-are-you-ready-to-give-this-a-shot/ This one brought debate about the future of virtual reality with Morten laying out a world of virtual and augmented reality that completely removes computers as we know them today and includes overlay information provided in contact lenses, and Adam debunking virtual reality as anything other than a gaming platform. The roundtable did point out that much of what was called virtual reality in the article, like Google Maps Streetview or a 360 view of a real estate listing isn’t a true VR experience.

This week, Adam Fout, John Locke, and Adam Preiser joined host Jonathan Denwood for Episode 260. This week, the roundtable covered three news stories relevant to the WordPress and online community. Story 1 WordPress 4.9.2 was released and patches an XSS Vulnerability https://wptavern.com/wordpress-4-9-2-patches-xss-vulnerability This was an important update and brought up the overall importance of keeping your sites updated to keep them as secure as possible. The topic also moved into recent security news about people buying plugins and themes and using them to spread malware. Those managing the WordPress repository remove plugins that aren’t updated. Adam Preiser addressed Tide, a tool to run automated tests against plugins in the WordPress directory. This was announced at the recent State of the Word address. He wondered if this will also be expanded to provide some security scans possibly using machine learning. https://xwp.co/tide-a-path-to-better-code-across-the-wordpress-ecosystem/ https://make.wordpress.org/tide/ The second story covered was The Best Tech Newsletters compiled by codeinwp.com. https://www.codeinwp.com/blog/best-tech-newsletters/ This discussion mainly covered are newsletters still important and relevant? Jonathan asked the team what newsletters they receive that they still read. Adam Fout reads: Search Engine Journal - https://www.searchenginejournal.com/ Copyhackers - https://copyhackers.com/ He thinks email marketing and newsletters is still important and doesn’t think you can get enough information from what you see in click rates. People may only read the subject line all year and then click on a special and buy. It still keeps you in front of your customers. John Locke reads several including: Whitespark Roundup - https://whitespark.ca/ Phil Rozek’s Local Visibility System - http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/ He says key is making sure you have great content that your target audience will be interested in. Is there a preference to have one main story or a spread of little stories? He tends to prefer a deeper dive. He likes focus and quality content. Adam Preiser He finds he has the news before a newsletter arrives because he still uses an RSS Reader. He doesn’t actually read any newsletters. He pointed out that it depends on your audience. He doesn’t send regular newsletters to his lists, but does send updates sometimes and particularly includes personal information about himself. His point is to build a relationship with his followers, not just consider them a number. The sponsor for this episode is IntelligenceWP (https://intelligencewp.com/) - a plugin that helps you make sense of your Google Analytics data. For the third story, the group covered - Black Friday and Cyber Monday generate huge revenue for WordPress products by freemius.com https://freemius.com/blog/black-friday-cyber-monday-wordpress/ People know this is a time of year to spend money. The plugin and theme space is no different. People expect sales at this time of year and buy during this time of year. Adam Preiser is the roundtable member who is most involved in affiliate marketing. During the Black Friday period of time he put a live chat on his website. People go there and ask him to decide between plugins, themes and what to buy. He had at least 300 live chats and when he saw how much people purchased, he was surprised. The challenge is will people just wait until the discount days? Are you training people to wait for the sale?

On Episode 259 of WP-Tonic, host Jonathan Denwood and co-host Kim Shivler interview Rachel Cherry of WP-Campus (https://wpcampus.org/). Rachel is a Senior Software Engineer at the Walt Disney Company in California. In the WordPress community, she is more well known as the founder and director of WP-Campus, a community for people in higher education interested in WordPress. This episode is brought to you by Kinsta Hosting (https://kinsta.com). This Premium WordPress Hosting Platform is the power behind WP-Tonic. Check them out today for your hosting needs.

This week, Chris Badgett, Sallie Goetsch, John Locke, and Adam Preiser joined host Jonathan Denwood to discuss two news stories concerning the WordPress ecosystem. This episode is brought to you by IntelligenceWP (https://intelligencewp.com/) a plugin that provides detailed information into your site’s traffic and content value based on Google Analytics. Grab the free version and start gathering more information about your website, today. Story 1 - Introducing Elementor v1.9: Never Lose Momentum With Autosave https://elementor.com/autosave Elementor is one of the newest Page Builder Plugins for WordPress, and it seems to be growing in popularity. Chris says that some of the reasons people like Elementor is the company’s commitment to speed, and the template library is massive. He explained that people are working on making it compatible with LifterLMS. It was pointed out that roundtable member Adam Preiser loves it.