I just released the Gatsby theme I use for this site, called Gatsby Theme Publisher. This site uses WordPress as a back-end, and Gatsby as a static front-end. I built this theme because I couldn’t find other themes that had all the features I wanted. You can clone it and use it on your own …

I’ve had a few conversations lately with friends who build WordPress websites for clients, and I was surprised to hear all of them say things have slowed down. I thought at first it might just be a certain segment, or maybe just the smaller shops. I asked around and it seems this slowdown is affecting …

I wrote an article for Post Status about a month ago, it was just published to their blog. In it, I discuss how the WordPress product market is a lot different than it used to be. People started making real money building for the platform around 2008, when there was high growth and low competition. …

I had the pleasure of interviewing Joel Bronkowski, who worked at WooCommerce for many years, and now works for Shopify. My recent post about a Shopify-centered conference got a lot of attention, so I wanted to dive deeper into this topic. I was excited to hear from someone with experience in both WordPress and Shopify, …

I just got back from an eCommerce conference called Content and Commmerce Summit. It was very different from the WordPress conferences I usually go to, and it gave me a lot of perspective. I go to the same events every year, and talk to the same type of people. I love WordPress, and so do …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …