Category: WordPress
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A Brief History of the WordPress Product Business
In January of 1848, James W. Marshall discovered a shiny piece of metal in his Sacramento lumber mill. He showed the metal to his boss John Sutter, and the two discovered that it was gold. Sutter tried to keep the discovery a secret in order to avoid endangering his agriculture business. He failed. In the…
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Announcing Holler Box: A Better Way to Communicate With Your Audience
I built a new thing, it’s called Holler Box. It’s a WordPress plugin I built for myself, because I wanted a better way to communicate with my site visitors. For example, I did a webinar a couple weeks ago, and I was trying to figure out how to announce it to people on my website…
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Net Revenue Stats in Easy Digital Downloads
One of the most important metrics for my business is net revenue, but it’s a harder number to find than you’d think. I use Easy Digital Downloads, and their reporting tool and app shows you a revenue total. For example, let’s say you see this in the EDD reports: Total earnings this month: $10,000 You…
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EDD Metrics Plugin Released
I’ve been working on a new plugin for Easy Digital Downloads called EDD Metrics, it’s now released on the WordPress plugin repository. This plugin gives you valuable metrics on your business with comparisons to previous periods. If you are familiar with Baremetrics, this is basically a copy of that. I love Baremetrics, but it just doesn’t…
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Javascript, APIs, and the Future of WordPress
Automattic just announced Calypso, which is a radical new interface for WordPress.com. It replaces the old WordPress.com admin experience with a faster, more modern approach. It uses a Javascript framework called React, which was developed by Facebook. The main advantage of React is that it’s supposed to allow development of web and mobile apps using…
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Working with Custom Post Types in WP-API v2
If you worked with the first version of the WP-API, you know that getting custom post types was really easy. To get all posts, I could send a GET request to http://scottbolinger.com/wp-json/posts. To get a specific type, I could send my request to http://scottbolinger.com/wp-json/posts?type=event. There have been some pretty big changes in version 2, which…
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Basic Authentication with the WP-API (v2) and AngularJS
Check out an updated post on WordPress login using Typescript and Angular 2 with a free plugin here. Working on the WP-App Project, we need to use authentication to do certain things in the app. Deleting/approving comments, or listing users for example. Basic Authentication is handy for testing code, but it should only be used…
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The WordPress Theme Business, Then and Now
I’ve been selling products for 5 years now, starting with premium WordPress themes. I now have a plugin business and a SaaS product. I’ve learned a lot, this post is basically everything that worked and didn’t work for my theme business, and where I see the theme market today. A brief history of premium themes…
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2015 WordPress Business Revenue Statistics
A lot of people in the WordPress community have published transparency reports in the last year, and I wanted to gather them all in one place. It’s mostly for statistical data for presentations, and to analyze what business models people are using. I also have some knowledge that isn’t public information (from my own businesses,…
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Should we be selling support instead of products?
When you sell products, you do a lot of customer support. It takes up a lot of time, and some would say product companies are really selling support, not the product. Is support for sale, or is it the product? If support is really what we are selling, should we tell the customer that? There…