THE PENDING DRAFT

OptinMonster – from WP Plugin to SaaS

May 12, 2015

Last week, OptinMonster quietly announced their new stand-alone SaaS tool. In a post on his personal blog, Syed Balkhi shares some more of the reasoning behind that step as well as a little bit about the technical side of things.

Many of you may know OptinMonster as a powerful WordPress lead generation plugin that we created. Well, it’s no longer just a WordPress plugin.

OptinMonster is now a stand-alone (SaaS) lead generation tool that can be used on any website platform. Yup that means WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, and basically any HTML website.

He also promised to share some more technical details very soon.

Converting a WordPress Plugin into a SaaS

A curated collection of tips and tricks for Chrome Developer Tools.

DevTools Tips

Pippin Williamson on Backwards Compatibility

May 8, 2015

Pippin Williamson with a great presentation at LoopConf about Backwards Compatibility and why it’s such an important thing to think about when you develop plugins. He covers many examples of what could happen if you break things and how to avoid those issues.

Backwards compatibility is a cornerstone of WordPress core development philosophy. It is, unfortunately, not something nearly enough plugin or theme developers take seriously. When a plugin or theme project gains 10s or 100s of thousands of users, backwards compatibility can be crucial to the overall health of the project.

Ensuring backwards compatibility is more of a mental mindset than anything. Developers have to mentally make the commitment and say to themselves “I will NOT break installs during upgrades”.

As we are building our own plugin at the moment, Backwards Compatibility is something i think about a lot lately, because as soon as we have it released, some things will be impossible or much harder to change so we better try to get it right the first time.

A Commitment to Backwards Compatibility

Ghost after 2 Years

May 6, 2015

A lot of interesting facts about the first two years (yes, it has really been that long already) of Ghost since they launched on Kickstarter. John O’Nolan goes into great detail about the campaign, the money they raised and how they spent it and the future of Ghost.

April 29th is a very special day for us. It’s the day on which, two years ago, Ghost launched on Kickstarter and went on to raise $300,000. It’s the reason we’re here today!

To celebrate, we’ve got an enormous post in store for you, sharing exactly how we spent the Kickstarter money1, where we’ve gotten to so far, and what’s coming up next for Ghost.

An interesting view behind the scenes of an interesting project.

Ghost 2 Years

Rewriting URLs in WordPress

May 5, 2015

The Rewrite Engine of WordPress is one of the parts of WordPress that can be confusing at first and that i personally never liked to customize at the beginning. Basically just because it normally worked the way it should and i didn’t want to break anything by adding custom rules. But custom rewrite rules can be a very powerful thing, especially if you’re building custom solutions for clients or a web app on top of WordPress. This post covers the basics and various code examples of how to implement your custom rewrite logic in WordPress.

Rewriting URLs in WordPress

Dan Mall on Pricing

May 4, 2015

Dan Mall with some advice on pricing as a freelancer. Especially useful if you’re just starting out. The best advice one could give you is probably “Experiment as much as you can”. I’m working freelance since about four years now, and i’m still experimenting with and adjusting my pricing on pretty much every new job i take on.

For your first paying gig, do what everybody else does: pick an hourly rate. There’s no wrong rate the first time; pick a number out of thin air. (Hint: that’s how everyone does it.)

Your rates will be too low at the beginning, thats pretty much for sure. But eventually you will get better at estimating and more confident at selling.

Dear Design Student – Pricing

Tesla Energy

May 3, 2015

This is the most exciting Keynote i saw in a very long time. If you release something and feel the need to call your product “revolutionary“, “game changing” or any other superlatives (yes, Apple, i’m looking at you!), please go stand in the corner watch this keynote again and think about what you just said.

I just read that a professor at the ETH in Zurich calculated that for the first time in history, solar energy will be cheaper than electricity from the grid, thanks to those Tesla batteries.