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WPBeginner Turns 13 Years Old – Reflections and Updates

Today, WPBeginner turns 13 years old, and it seems we have a teenager on our hand.

It feels pretty unreal to type this.

Like every year, I want to take a few minutes and do a quick recap of all the major things happening in business as well as my personal life.

WPBeginner 13th Birthday - Reflection and Updates

WPBeginner Story

I started using WordPress when I was 16 years old and started WPBeginner at age 19 with a single mission: make WordPress easy for beginners.

Since then WPBeginner has become the largest free WordPress resource site for beginners.

For those of you who’re new, you can read the full WPBeginner story on our about page and use the Start Here page to get the most out of WPBeginner.

Personal Updates

My son, Solomon, is now 5.5 years old, and he will be starting school in August. Time is flying by so fast.

We’re taking advantage of our flexible schedule right now and maximizing our international travel trips. Not to mention, I felt I had a bit of catching up to do considering all the COVID lockdowns.

This year we have taken several trips, but two of my absolute favorites were the Arctic Circle in Finland and the beautiful Serengeti National Park in Tanzania.

Syed Balkhi and Family 2022

If all goes according to plan between work travel and family trips, I will visit 8 countries this year. It’s pretty exciting to be traveling again without restrictions, but at times I have felt overwhelmed depending on what’s going on in the business.

If you didn’t get a chance to read my 2021 recap, I highly recommend checking it out on my personal blog where I share lessons learned from last year.

WPBeginner Updates

Thanks to our awesome community, WPBeginner has continued to grow year over year. Aside from tons of amazing WordPress tutorials on our blog, there have been several notable updates from last year, that I’d like to highlight.

But before I do that, I want to share a huge milestone that I’m super proud of. We got featured on the NASDAQ billboard in Time Square for passing 20 million active installs of our products.

Awesome Motive NASDAQ Billboard - WPBeginner

This was a pretty huge moment for our entire team — going from a blog to being on Time Square in New York City!!!

This was a dream come true moment, and it’s proof that hard work does pay off.

Talking about hard work, here are some big WPBeginner updates that happened in the last 12 months:

1. New WPBeginner Website Design

After 5 long years, we finally did a design refresh for WPBeginner site, and our big focus was content discoverability.

WPBeginner started out as a simple tutorial blog, but over the years it has truly become the Wikipedia for WordPress.

Now when you arrive at the website, you’ll see a big search bar on the homepage.

WPBeginner homepage search

If you visit our WordPress glossary section or best WordPress discounts section, then you will also see a live search feature to quickly find what you’re looking for.

WPBeginner WordPress Glossary Live Search

Aside from that, we also added mega menus, switched from Yoast to AIOSEO, started using the block editor for everything, and a whole lot more.

Not to mention, we made the site super fast and our Google Core Web Vitals score is nearly perfect.

WPBeginner Google Page Speed Test Results

I wrote a full behind the scenes case study with helpful links and tutorials, so you can learn and improve your website.

2. Larger Community + More Content

Our community has continued to grow on all social media networks. Our WPBeginner Engage Facebook group now has over 86,000 members.

And the WPBeginner YouTube channel has passed 274,000 subscribers.

To keep up with growth, we’re doubling down on our video content strategy. This is part of the bigger plan that I can’t wait to share with you in the coming months.

Aside from our video, we have also launched the WPBeginner Podcast. This is an experiment that we’re trying out, so please send us your feedback by leaving comments and sending us your ideas on what topics you want us to cover in future episodes.

You can listen to the WPBeginner podcast on your favorite networks including YouTube, Apple Podcast, Google Play, Spotify, Amazon Audible, etc.

3. Contributing to WordPress and Open Source

As I mentioned last year, we have continued to ramp up our contribution to various free open source projects including WordPress core.

As part of our Five for the Future commitment, we hired John James Jacoby, one of the most well-respected WordPress core contributors, so he can spend 100% of his time on making WordPress and BuddyPress better.

Aside from the contributions that are visible on WordPress.org, we’re offering over 1200 hours of free WordPress support each month through our various support channels including our contact form, Facebook group, etc.

We also invested in creating a free migration tool to help users switch from Shopify to WordPress. This is in addition maintaining several other platform migration tools like Weebly to WordPress and Medium to WordPress.

At WPBeginner, we maintain dozens of free small business tools, and we added few new ones to the mix including:

4. New Acquisitions & Investments

In 2018, I created the WPBeginner Growth Fund to invest in WordPress focused companies that are solving important problems that you, our readers, want me to help out with.

In the past 12 months, we have made several big acquisitions and investments in the ecosystem.

  • We acquired SearchWP to help website owners improve their WordPress search results by giving them more control over the search algorithm. Here’s the full background story.
  • We acquired Easy Digital Downloads which helps you sell digital downloads like eBooks, software, music, etc. This is the exact software that we use to sell all of our WordPress plugins and SaaS. Here’s the full background story.
  • As part of the above deal, we also acquired WP Simple Pay plugin which helps website owners accept credit card payments without a full shopping cart. It lets you add Apple Pay, Google Pay, Buy Now Pay Later, and more powerful payment features.
  • And the deal also included the #1 affiliate management plugin for WordPress called AffiliateWP. This lets you create your own affiliate program for your online store without the middle man fees.
  • Last month, we announced our acquisition of WP Charitable, a top-rated WordPress donation and fundraising plugin. See the full story here.

Aside from the full acquisitions, we also invested in WooFunnels, the leading funnel building software for WooCommerce. Simply put, it helps you make more money from your website visitors. See more details here.

We also took an investment stake in ConvertKit which is one of popular email marketing services for creators.

I’m really proud of how far we’ve come with the Growth Fund, and it’s really amazing to see the impact our companies are making in the WordPress ecosystem and the larger open web.

Want me to invest in your business? Learn more about the WPBeginner growth fund.

Product / Company Updates

One of the questions that I often get asked via our contact form is what is WPBeginner’s income, and how does WPBeginner make money by giving away all WordPress tutorials for free.

Well, we make money indirectly through our suite of premium WordPress plugins that are now running on over 20 million websites. Aside from that, we also have investments in a suite of other WordPress companies through our growth fund that I mentioned above.

Our team at Awesome Motive continued to set new records this year, and all of our products saw tremendous growth.

Here’s a list of our plugins that you should check out:

  • OptinMonster – #1 conversion optimization software that helps you convert abandoning website visitors into subscribers and customers. There’s also a free version here.
  • WPForms – the most beginner friendly WordPress form builder used by over 5 million websites. There’s also a free version – WPForms Lite.
  • MonsterInsights – the most popular WordPress Analytics plugin that helps you grow your business with confidence. I use this on all of my websites. Free version available: MonsterInsights Lite.
  • AIOSEO – the original WordPress SEO plugin to help you get more traffic. Used by over 3 million websites. There’s also a free version of AIOSEO.
  • WP Mail SMTP – the #1 plugin that helps improve your WordPress email deliverability. The free version: WP Mail SMTP Lite is sufficient for most website owners.
  • SeedProd – the best drag & drop website builder for WordPress. You can use it to create custom WordPress themes, landing pages, and website layouts without any code. Try the free version of SeedProd.
  • RafflePress – powerful WordPress giveaway and contest plugin to grow your website traffic.
  • Smash Balloon – most popular social media feeds plugin for WordPress. Free version available for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube feeds.
  • PushEngage – leading web push notification software for small businesses – helps send over 9 billion push notifications each month.
  • SearchWP – The most advanced WordPress search plugin. Completely customize your WordPress search form and search results algorithm to improve your content discoverability and increase sales. Trusted by over 30,000+ website owners.
  • Easy Digital Downloads – Top rated WordPress plugin for selling digital products and subscriptions. Easily sell eBooks, software, music, and more, protect digital downloads, accept payments, and more. Trusted by over 50,000+ website owners.
  • AffiliateWP – The most popular affiliate management plugin for WordPress. Easily launch an affiliate program for your store. One-click integration with WooCommerce, WPForms, and 20 other payment plugins. Unlock a new growth channel without the middleman fees.
  • WP Simple Pay – Easily accept payments online without a complex shopping cart setup. Great for simple one-time or recurring payments. Built-in support for credit card payments, ACH bank debit, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and more.
  • Sugar Calendar – An event calendar management plugin for WordPress. Create events, sell tickets, sync with Google Calendar, and more. Great for churches, conferences, paid webinars, and more.
  • TrustPulse – Leverage the power of social proof to instantly increase site conversions by up to 15%. Automatically show real-time purchase notification and other website activity notifications to increase trust, conversions, and sales.
  • WP Charitable – Top-rated donation and fundraising plugin for WordPress. Over 10,000+ non-profit organizations and website owners across the world use Charitable to create fundraising campaigns and raise more money online.

We’re a fully remote team of over 215+ people across 45 countries. Want to join our team and work alongside me in helping small businesses grow and compete with the big guys? We’re hiring.

Thank You Everyone

I want to say thank you to everyone who has supported us in this journey. I really do appreciate all of your retweets, personal emails, content suggestions, and the interactions at the events.

I also want to say special thank you to everyone who’s using our plugins because that enables us to keep bringing more free tutorials on WPBeginner.

You all are AMAZING and without you, there is no WPBeginner.

I look forward to another solid year ahead of us.

Syed Balkhi
Founder of WPBeginner

The post WPBeginner Turns 13 Years Old – Reflections and Updates first appeared on WPBeginner.

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34 at 34 for V5.34: Modern Perl Features for Perl’s Birthday

Friday, December 17, 2021, marked the thirty-fourth birthday of the Perl programming language, and, coincidentally, this year saw the release of version 5.34. There are plenty of Perl developers out there who haven’t kept up with recent (and not-so-recent) improvements to the language and its ecosystem, so I thought I might list a batch. You may have seen some of these before in May’s post “Perl can do that now!”

The feature Pragma

Perl v5.10 was released in December 2007, and with it came feature, a way of enabling new syntax without breaking backward compatibility. You can enable individual features by name (e.g., use feature qw(say fc); for the say and fc keywords), or by using a feature bundle based on the Perl version that introduced them. For example, the following:

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The Fourteenth Fourth

It’s CSS-Tricks birthday! Somehow that keeps coming around every year. It’s that time where I reflect upon that past year. It’s like the annual vibe check.

I’m writing this just days after my current home state of Oregon has lifted most of the COVID restrictions. Certainly a very weird feeling. We’re just hitting the state-wide 70% vaccinated level which is the big milestone covered in the news. I thought our little local organic-heavy progressive grocery store would be the last place to go mask-less, but even in there, the vast majority of people are raw-facin’ it, employees included. So it’s not just America’s birthday this year, but a real sign of changing times. Controversy in tow, as there is plenty of evidence the danger is far from over. Definitely gonna hit up some fireworks though. The kid loves ’em.

Well-Oiled Machine

I’d say that’s ^ the main vibe around here from my perspective. The site is in good shape all around. The tech behind it is stable and mostly satisfying. The editorial flow is flowing. The content idea bucket overfloweth. The newsletter goes out on time. The advertising and sponsorship demand is sound. Ain’t any squeaky wheels on this train.

And did you know we have zero meetings? Just light Slack chatter, that’s it. This is a part-time gig for everyone, and we aren’t doing any life-saving work here, so no need to take up anyone’s time with meetings.

Technologically, we’re leaning more and more into the WordPress block editor all the time and it feels like that is a good thing to do here in WordPress land. Every time we have a chance to get more into any current WordPress tech and take advantage of things WordPress does well, it tends to work out.

This is all great because as far as hours-in-the-day go, most of my time is on and needs to be on CodePen. An incredible amount of work lays ahead there as we evolve it.

Things to Get Done

That’s not to say there isn’t work to be done. I’ve got some WordPress scrubbing to do, for one thing. There are a few too many places functionality code is being stored on the site. I’ve completed an audit, but now I need to do the coding work to get it clean again. Things change over the years, WordPress evolves, needs evolve, performance and accessibility considerations evolve, my own taste evolves. Code from 8 years ago needs to evolve too.

One thing I’d really love to get done is to move all the content on the site that really should have been a Custom Post Type to actually be Custom Post Types. Namely screencasts and almanac entries. Right now they are Pages instead, which was fine at the time as it lends itself to a hierarchical structure nicely. But the only reason they aren’t Custom Post Types is because those didn’t exist when I started them. In today’s WordPress, they really should be, and I think it would open doors to managing them better. I’m not sure I have the chops to pull off a conversion like that so I might have to hire out for it.

I’d also like to evolve our eCommerce a bit. I think it’s been going great as we dipped our toes into selling things like posters and MVP membership, and now it’s time to make all that stuff better and more valuable since it’s a proven win. For example, I’m working on making sure the book is downloadable in proper eBook formats, that’ll be a value-add for members. I’ve started thinking about what more we can do with the newsletter as well since those are so hot these days, and I’m a fan.

Social Media Cards

While social media isn’t a major focus of ours, we do tend to make sure Twitter is in good shape, as we have that sweet handle @css. I’m pretty hot on the idea that sites (content sites especially), should have nice social media images. Fortunately, thanks to Social Image Generator and some custom code, ours are in good shape. I still smile looking at them as they are so damn distinct now. WP Tavern did a nice writeup on the plugin.

There are five different possibilities for social cards now we can use.

  • This is the default. It defaults to the post title, but we can override that.
  • If the post has a featured image, it will be incorporated into the social media image like this.
  • If we add a quote to a meta field, we’ll get this special quote card design.
  • We can turn off the generated social media card and have it just use the featured image as the card.
  • If we turn off the generated social card and don’t have a featured image, it falls back to this generic card.

Sponsors

I’m incredibly blessed that we have the same four major sponsors as we’ve had the last few years:

  • Automattic: WordPress is at the heart of this whole site. I’m so pleased to get to have Automattic as a sponsor, who not only create all kinds of important software for WordPress that we use here, like Jetpack and WooCommerce, but are big contributors to WordPress itself. I like that the site can be a living testament to what you can do with WordPress.
  • Frontend Masters: There is no A to Z learning path here on CSS-Tricks. If you want true curriculum to level up your skills, that’s what Frontend Masters is for. I couldn’t recommend any learning platform more, which is why I’m so happy to have them as our official learning partner and enthusiastically point people there.
  • Netlify: The Jamstack is a good movement for the web and literally nobody does it better than Netlify. They have pioneered so many good ideas it’s incredible. It’s easy to look at the industry and see even huge companies scramble to do what they’ve been doing for years.
  • Flywheel: I’m a believer in happy path web hosting. Use hosts that specialize in what you’re doing. This site is WordPress and I don’t think there is a better hosting option for WordPress than Flywheel. And that’s without consider that they also make Local, of which there is no better local development story for WordPress.

Design

We’re about a year and a half into v18, and it has certainly evolved quite a bit since its launch. While it’s feeling solid now, I’ve started to get the redesign itch and have been saving design inspiration for v19. I imagine it’ll happen over the slower holiday season as it tends to. I have a feeling it’ll be a stripping-down sort of design heading back to less colors and more typography-driven approach that can support themes in a way I never have. But we’ll see!

Analytics

It’s largely the same story as the last 3-4 years. Always hovering just a smidge north of 8m page views a month. A perfectly healthy number for such a niche site. But also a constant reminder how difficult the content game is. You’d think a constant stream of content creation would grow traffic up and up over time, particularly since our technical content usually has a decent shelf-life. But at some point, you have to keep creating content and keep working on a site just to maintain what you have. Meaning older content slowly drives less traffic and new content needs to step up and fill the gap. At least that’s one interpretation of what’s going on—I’m sure the complete story is much more intricate (SEO, competition, saturation, content blockers affecting numbers, etc).

The name?

I ain’t gonna up and change anything, but the name “CSS-Tricks” has been so hokey for so long. Every time I see some other brand pull of a daring name change, I’m a little jealous. Would it be worth it for CSS-Tricks? The potential benfits being: a new name could usher in fresh interest in the site, be a catalyst for other change, and be less of a jarring mismatch between what we actually publish and what people might expect us to publish based on the name. I’d have to do a lot more thinking and research to be able to pull it off. If the domain changes, even with perfect redirects, are there still serious SEO implications? How could I minimize the confusion? Is there a chance in hell a change has more upsides than downsides?

The post The Fourteenth Fourth appeared first on CSS-Tricks. You can support CSS-Tricks by being an MVP Supporter.

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WPBeginner Turns 12 Years Old – Reflections and Updates

Today WPBeginner turns 12 years old — which means we pretty much have a teenager on our hand :)

Like every year, I want to take a few minutes and do a quick recap of all the major things happening in business as well as my personal life.

WPBeginner 12th Birthday

WPBeginner Story

I started using WordPress when I was 16 years old and started WPBeginner at age 19 with a single mission: make WordPress easy for beginners.

Since then WPBeginner has become the largest free WordPress resource site for beginners.

For those of you who’re new, you can read the full WPBeginner story on our about page and use the Start Here page to get the most out of WPBeginner.

Personal Updates

My son, Solomon, is now 4.5 years old. He’s growing up so fast. His storytelling and conversation skills always blow my mind.

Amanda and I got our vaccine doses, and we finally took our first international trip to Punta Mita, Mexico for Fathers Day. After 1.5 years of no commercial air-travel, this definitely felt weird, but overall the trip turned out great.

Balkhi Family 2021

As things are returning back to normal, I’m really looking forward to travel, seeing our team members, and hopefully attending a few networking events.

Earlier this year, we also moved into our new house. We’re still in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, but we’re a lot closer to everything in the city.

If you didn’t get a chance to read my 2020 recap, I highly recommend checking it out on my personal blog where I share lessons learned from last year.

WPBeginner Updates

Thanks to our awesome community, WPBeginner has continued to grow year over year. Aside from tons of amazing WordPress tutorials on our blog, there have been several notable updates from last year, that I’d like to highlight.

1. WPBeginner YouTube Channel passed 246,000 subscribers

Our WPBeginner YouTube channel passed 246,000+ subscribers, and I believe we will likely get pretty close to 300k goal by end of this year.

We have hundreds of free WordPress video tutorials, and we have also been creating a lot of YouTube exclusive content.

If you haven’t subscribed yet, then please go ahead and subscribe to WPBeginner on YouTube (it’s free). My goal is to pass 300,000 subscribers by the time I write this post next year.

2. WPBeginner Engage Facebook Group (Over 77,000 Members)

Our WPBeginner Engage Facebook group has grown to over 77,000 members, and we’re the largest WordPress user group on Facebook.

For those of you who’re not members yet, the goal of this group is to share and learn WordPress tips while getting to know other website owners like yourself.

Aside from peer-to-peer support and knowledge sharing, we also do monthly giveaways, have exclusive video content, and our WPBeginner experts are also there answering questions (for free).

What are you waiting for? Go ahead and join the WPBeginner Facebook Group.

3. Contributing to WordPress and Open Source

We have always been huge supporters of open source. This past year, we really ramped up our commitment to both WordPress and free open source projects.

As part of our Five for the Future commitment, we hired Peter Wilson, one of the well-respected WordPress core contributors, so he can spend 100% of his time on making WordPress better. Recently, he co-led the WordPress 5.7.2 release.

Aside from the contributions that are visible on WordPress.org, we’re now offering over 1200 hours of free WordPress support each month through our various support channels including our contact form, Facebook group, etc.

We’ve also continued to maintain dozens of other free tools like Weebly to WordPress migration tool, Medium to WordPress migration tool, our popular free Insert Headers and Footers plugin, and more.

Want to join our team and make an impact on the larger open source ecosystem? We’re hiring.

4. New Acquisitions & Investments (PushEngage, Uncanny Automator, and more)

As you may know that in 2018, I created the WPBeginner Growth Fund to invest in WordPress focused companies.

We finished the 2020 strong with the acquisition of PushEngage, the leading web push notification software. See the background story.

I also invested in Uncanny Owl and Uncanny Automator plugin. I’m really excited about what we’re building at Automator. Our goal is to help website owners connect WordPress with other business tools without paying the high costs of Zapier. Read the full background story.

Earlier this year, we also acquired Plugin Rank. It’s a very useful tool for WordPress Plugin authors to keep track of their plugin ranking and grow their business.

I’m really proud of how far we’ve come with the Growth Fund in just three years. It’s really amazing to see the impact our companies are making in the WordPress ecosystem and the larger open web.

For example, one of our portfolio companies MemberPress announced earlier this year that they passed over $1 billion dollars in creator earnings on their platform. We project that MemberPress site owners and course creators will earn over $600 million in 2021 alone!

Our other portfolio companies continue to crush it as well.

Want me to invest in your business? Learn more about the WPBeginner growth fund.

Product / Company Updates

One of the questions that I often get asked via our contact form is what is WPBeginner’s income, and how does WPBeginner make money by giving away all WordPress tutorials for free.

Well, we make money indirectly through our suite of premium WordPress plugins that are now running on over 17 million websites. Aside from that, we also have investments in a suite of other WordPress companies through our growth fund that I mentioned above.

Our team at Awesome Motive continued to set new records this year, and all of our products saw tremendous growth.

Here’s a list of our plugins that you should check out:

  • OptinMonster – #1 conversion optimization software that helps you convert abandoning website visitors into subscribers and customers. There’s also a free version here.
  • WPForms – the most beginner friendly WordPress form builder used by over 4 million websites. There’s also a free version – WPForms Lite.
  • MonsterInsights – the most popular WordPress Analytics plugin that helps you grow your business with confidence. I use this on all of my websites. Free version available: MonsterInsights Lite.
  • AIOSEO – the original WordPress SEO plugin to help you get more traffic. Used by over 2 million websites. There’s also a free version of AIOSEO.
  • WP Mail SMTP – the #1 plugin that helps improve your WordPress email deliverability. The free version: WP Mail SMTP Lite is sufficient for most website owners.
  • SeedProd – the best drag & drop landing page builder for WordPress. Try the free version of SeedProd.
  • RafflePress – powerful WordPress giveaway and contest plugin to grow your website traffic.
  • Smash Balloon – most popular social media feeds plugin for WordPress. Free version available for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube feeds.
  • PushEngage – leading web push notification software for small businesses – helps send over 9 billion push notifications each month.

We’re a fully remote team of over 170+ people across 31 countries. Want to join our team and work alongside me in helping small businesses grow and compete with the big guys? We’re hiring.

Giving Back / Philanthropy

As you know that WPBeginner is a 100% free resource, and I don’t really ask for much in return. Your kindness and generosity in supporting our premium WordPress plugins make this business sustainable for us.

A big priority for Amanda and I is to help others, and we do a ton through our Balkhi Foundation. We also recently built another school in Cambodia through the Cambodian Village Fund.

Cambodian Village Fund School

Since Balkhi Foundation is our family foundation, we don’t ask for donations there. However if you’ve ever found WPBeginner to be helpful and want to give back, then I would appreciate you supporting some of my favorite charities below:

Thank You Everyone

I want to say thank you to everyone who has supported us in this journey. I really do appreciate all of your retweets, personal emails, content suggestions, and the interactions at the events.

I also want to say special thank you to everyone who’s using our plugins because that enables us to keep bringing more free tutorials on WPBeginner.

You all are AMAZING and without you, there is no WPBeginner.

I look forward to another solid year ahead of us.

Syed Balkhi
Founder of WPBeginner

The post WPBeginner Turns 12 Years Old – Reflections and Updates appeared first on WPBeginner.

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The Thirteenth Fourth

Well boy howdy. The 13th birthday of CSS-Tricks has rolled around. A proper teenager now, howabouthat? I always take the opportunity to do a bit of a state of the union address at this time, so let’s get to it!

Design

Technically, we’re still on v17 of the site design. This was the first design that I hired first-class help to do, and I’m still loving it, so I haven’t had much of an itch to do massive changes to it. Although it is quite different¹ today than it was on launch day.

For example…

Maybe next year we’ll do something different again. My list is starting to grow for some behind-the-scenes tech stuff I wanna re-jigger, and sometimes that goes hand in hand with redesign work.

Closed Forums

The forums on this site have been a mental weight on me for literally years. Earlier this year I finally turned them off. They are still there, and probably always will be (so the URLs are maintained), but nobody can post new threads or replies.

It was a painful move. Even as I did it, there was still some regular daily activity there and I’m sure it didn’t feel good to those people to have a place they have invested time in shut down. Here’s why I did it:

  • Nobody here, including me, checked in on the forums with any regularity. Unmoderated public forums on the internet are not acceptable to me.
  • The spam volume was going up. There were periods where most posts, even after the automatic spam blocking I get from Akismet, where spam that required manual removal. Even if we had a dedicated forums employee, that’s no fun, and since we didn’t, it was just a random job for me and I don’t need a time sink like that.
  • The forums represent a certain level of technical debt. They need to be updated. Their design needs to be functional in the context of this site. At one point I ripped out all custom styles and left it be the default theme, which was a good step toward reducing technical debt, but in the end it wasn’t enough.

I can handle some work and some technical debt, of course. But when you combine those things with the fact that the forums don’t contribute much to what I consider to be the success of the site. They don’t exactly drive page views or advertising demand. There isn’t really money to hire help specifically for the forums. But that’s a small part of it. I want this site to help people. I think we can do that best if we focus on publishing with as little divided attention as possible. I think there are places on the internet that are better for forum-like discourse.

Now that they’ve been off a number of months, I can report that the lifting of the mental weight feels very good to me and there is been little if any major negatives.

Social

Here’s another mental weight I lifted: I stopped hand-managing the Twitter account (@css). I still think it’s good that we have a Twitter account (and that we have that cool handle), but I just don’t spend any time on it directly like I used to.

In the past, I’d queue up special articles with commentary and graphics and stuff and make sure the days were full with a spread of what I thought would be interesting tweets about web design and development. That’s fine and all, but it began to feel like a job without a paycheck.

We don’t get (or seem to drive) a lot of traffic from Twitter. Google Analytics shows social media accounts for less than 1% of our traffic. Investing time in “growing” Twitter just doesn’t have enough of an upside for me. Not to mention the obvious: Twitter can be terribly toxic and mentally draining.

So now, all our posts to Twitter are automated through the Jetpack social media connection (we really use Jetpack for tons of stuff). We hit publish on the site and the article is auto-tweeted. So if you use Twitter like an RSS feed of sorts (just show me the news!), you got it.

The result? Our follower count goes up at the same rate it always did. Engagement there is the same, or higher, than it ever was. What a relief. Do ten times less work for the same benefit.

When I have the urge to share a link with commentary I use the same system we’ve always had here: I write it up as a link blog post instead. Now we’re getting even more benefit: long-term content building, which is good for the thing that we actually have on our side: SEO.

Someday we could improve things by hand-writing the auto-tweet text with a bit more joie de vivre, crediting the author more clearly, and, #stretchgoal, a custom or fancy-generated social media graphic.

Opened Up Design Possibilities

One aspect of this site that I’ve been happy with is the opportunity to do custom design on content. Here are some examples of that infrastructure.

On any given blog post, we can pick a template. Some of those templates are very specific. For example, my essay The Great Divide is a template all to itself.

In the code base, I have a PHP template and a CSS file that are entirely dedicated to that post. I think that’s a fine way to handle a post you want to give extra attention to, although the existence of those two files is a bit of technical debt.

I learned something in the creation of that particular essay: what I really need to open up the art direction/design possibility on a post is a simple, stripped-down template to start from. So that’s what we call a “Fancy Post” now, another template choice for any particular post. Fancy Posts have a hero image and a centered column for the content of the post. From there, we can use custom CSS to style things right within WordPress itself.

For example, my recent post on DX is styled as a Fancy Post with Custom CSS applied right within the block editor.

The Block Editor itself is a huge deal for us. That was one of my goals for the year, and we’ve really exceeded how far we’d get with it. I think writing and editing posts in the block editor is a million miles ahead of the old editor.

The hardest challenge was (and still is really) getting the block transforms set up for legacy content. But once you have the power to build and customize blocks, that alone opens up a ton of design possibility within posts that is too big of a pain in the butt and too heavy on technical debt otherwise.

Another door we opened for design possibilities is a classic one: using categories. A sort of freebie you get in WordPress is the ability to create templates for all sorts of things that just sort of automatically work if they are named correctly. So for example I have a filed called category-2019-end-of-year-thoughts.php and that fully gives me control over making landing pages for groups of posts, like our end-of-year thoughts homepage. Not to mention our “Guide Collection” pages which are another way to programmatically build collections of pages.

That’s a lot of tools to do custom work with, and I’m really happy with that. It feels like we’ve given ourselves lots of potential with these tools, and only started taking advantage of it.

Speaking of which, another aspect of custom design we have available is the new book format…

eCommerce

We’re using WooCommerce here on the site now again. I just got done singing the praises of the Block Editor and how useful that is been… WooCommerce is in the same boat. I feel like I’m getting all this powerful functionality with very little effort, at a low cost, and with little technical debt. It makes me very happy to have this site on WordPress and using so much of suite of functionality that offers.

So for one thing, I can sell products with it, and we have products now! Lynn Fisher designed a poster for our CSS Flexbox guide and designed a poster for our CSS Grid guide, which you can now buy and ship anywhere in the world for $25 each. Look, with the Block Editor I can put a block for a poster right here in this post:

CSS Flexbox Poster

Find yourself constantly looking up the properties and values for CSS flexbox? Why not pin this beautiful poster up to the wall of your office so you can just glance over at it?

$25.00
Shop now

Another thing we’re using WooCommerce for is to sell our new book, The Greatest CSS Tricks Vol. I. If we actually made it into a proper eBook format, WooCommerce could absolutely deliver those files digitally to you, but we haven’t done that yet. We’ve take another path, which is publishing the book as chapters here on the site behind a membership paywall we’re calling MVP supporters. The book is just one of the benefits of that.

WooCommerce helps:

  • Build a membership system and sell memberships. Membership can lock certain pages to members-only as has programmatic hooks I can use for things like removing ads.
  • Sell subscriptions to those memberships, with recurring billing.
  • Sell one-off products

And I’m just scratching the surface of course. WooCommerce can do anything eCommerce wise.

Analytics

They are fine. Ha! That’s how much I worry about our general site analytics. I like to check in on them from time to time to make sure we’re not tanking or anything scary, but we never are (knock on wood). We’re in the vicinity of 8m page views a month, and year-over-year traffic is a bit of a dance.

Sponsors

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU

That’s what I have to say to all our sponsors. We’re so damn lucky to work with a lineup of sponsors that I wholeheartedly endorse as well as literally use their products. We have different sponsors all the time, but these are the biggest and those who have been with us the longest.

  • Automattic: Thanks for building great software for the WordPress ecosystem. This site is made possible by a heaping helping of that software.
  • Netlify: Thanks for bringing the Jamstack world to life. I’m also a big fan of this way of building websites, and think that Jamstack should be the foundation for most websites. Beyond that, you’ve redefined modern developer experience.
  • Flywheel: Thank you for hosting this website, being a high-quality host I can trust and who has been helpful to me countless times. This is what high-quality WordPress hosting looks like.
  • Frontend Masters: Thank you for being an education partner that does things right and helps me have the best possible answer for people when they are searching a more structured formal education about doing web work: go try Frontend Masters.

If you’re trying to reach front-end developers with your products, that’s literally how I make a living and can help.

My Other Projects

CodePen is no spring chicken either, being over 8 years old itself. I repeat myself a lot with this particular aspect of talking about CodePen: we’ve got a ton of ideas, a ton of work to do, and we can’t wait to show you the CodePen of tomorrow. 2020 for CodePen has been a lot different than the last 2-3 years of CodePen. Some technical choices we’ve made have been starting to pay off. The team is vibing very well and absolutely tearing through work faster than I would have thought possible a few years ago, and we haven’t even unlocked some of the biggest doors yet. I know that’s vague, but we talk in more detail about stuff on CodePen Radio.

ShopTalk, as ever, is going strong. That’s 420 episodes this week, friends. Dave has me convinced that our format as it is, is good. We aren’t an instruction manual. You don’t listen to any particular episode because we’re going to teach you some specific subject that we’ve explicitly listed out. It’s more like water cooler talk between real world developers who develop totally different things in totally different situations, but agree on more than we disagree. We might evolve what ShopTalk show is over time, but this format will live on because there is value in discussion in this format.

Life

My wife Miranda and I are still in Bend, Oregon and our Daughter Ruby is two and a half. She’s taking a nap and I’m looking at the monitor as I type.

We have the virus here like everywhere else. It’s sad to think that we’re this far into it and our local hospital is pleading with people to be careful this holiday weekend because they are very near capacity and can’t take much more. Here’s hoping we can get past this painful period. Stay safe and stay cool, friends, thanks for reading.

  1. I always feel bad when I make design changes away from an actual professional designer’s work. Is the site design better today than Kylie’s original? Uhm probably not (sorry for wrecking it Kylie!), but sometimes I just have an itch to fiddle with things and give things a fresh look. But the biggest driver of change is the evolving needs of the site and my desire to manage things with as little technical debt as possible, and sometimes simplifying design things helps me get there.

The post The Thirteenth Fourth appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

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WPBeginner Turns 11 Years Old – Reflections and Updates (+ Giveaway)

Today is July 4th which means WPBeginner is officially 11 years old. We’ve come a long way :)

Like every year, I want to take a few minutes and do a quick recap of all the major things happening in business as well as my personal life.

Bonus: I’m also doing a Website Toolkit giveaway which includes a Macbook Air, Free domain + Hosting, and my favorite premium WordPress plugins.

WPBeginner 11th Birthday

Since this is a long article, you can easily skip to the section you’re most interested in:

WPBeginner Story

I started using WordPress when I was 16 years old and started WPBeginner at age 19 with a single mission: make WordPress easy for beginners.

Since then WPBeginner has become the largest free WordPress resource site for beginners.

For those of you who’re new, you can read the full WPBeginner story on our about page and use the Start Here page to get the most out of WPBeginner.

Personal Updates

My son, Solomon, is now 3.5 years old. He’s growing up fast, and he now even suggests keywords that I should mention in my email newsletters to WPBeginner audience.

Since the last WPBeginner anniversary post, we travelled to Turkey, Germany, Austria, Bahamas, Pakistan, Mexico, and several places in US.

Balkhi Family Photo Collage

Of course all of our travels came to a stop in February due to COVID-19. We’ve been staying home and spending a lot of family time.

I’ve also been working a lot during this lockdown – focusing on creating more content as well as revamping various product features.

If you didn’t get a chance to read my 2019 recap, I highly recommend checking it out on my personal blog where I share lessons learned from last year.

WPBeginner Updates

Thanks to our awesome community, WPBeginner has continued to grow in double-digit (year over year). Aside from tons of amazing WordPress tutorials on our blog, there have been several notable updates from last year, that I’d like to highlight.

1. We launched Three New Free Business Tools

Since last year, we have launched 3 new free business tools to help you do more with WordPress.

The first is a smart business name generator to help you find brandable company name ideas with available domains, so you can start your online business idea.

The second is a WordPress theme detector that helps you find out what WordPress theme your competitor’s website is using. Simply put, if you have ever wondered what WordPress theme a website is using, this tool can help you find that.

Last but not least, we launched a free WordPress Call Button plugin to help you easily add a click to call button on your website.

2. WPBeginner Engage Facebook Group is now Over 48,000 Members

WPBeginner Engage - Facebook Group

To celebrate our 10th anniversary, we launched the WPBeginner Engage Facebook group to offer WordPress help for non-techy users.

This was something that a lot of you had been asking for, and I’m extremely pleased with the progress thus far. We now have over 48,000+ members in our Facebook group, and I believe it’s now the largest WordPress user group on Facebook.

For those of you who’re not members yet, the goal of this group is to share and learn WordPress tips while getting to know other motivated website owners like yourself.

Aside from peer-to-peer support and knowledge sharing, we also do monthly giveaways, have exclusive video content from myself, and our WPBeginner experts are also there answering questions (for free).

What are you waiting for? Go ahead and join the WPBeginner Facebook Group. I look forward to connecting with you :)

3. WPBeginner YouTube Channel Now Has 191,000+ subscribers

Our WPBeginner YouTube channel passed 191,000+ subscribers, and I believe we will pass 200k goal by end of this year.

We have hundreds of free WordPress video tutorials, and we have also been creating a lot of YouTube exclusive content.

For example, you can watch our playlists to learn how to Make Money Online, learn WordPress SEO, and more.

WPBeginner Playlists on YouTube

We are also doing monthly State of WPBeginner videos where we share what’s happening in the WordPress ecosystem, summary of Awesome Motive products, and more.

Also I’m personally making more appearances on the channel in the interview style videos.

If you’ve not subscribed to our YouTube channel yet, it’d mean the world to me if you can subscribe and hit the bell button, so we can pass the 200,000 goal.

4. We switched our WordPress hosting to SiteGround (Google Cloud)

Last year, I was extremely excited about our private cloud hosting platform that we built, but it led to many complexities.

That’s why earlier this year, we switched WPBeginner hosting to SiteGround Enterprise (which is powered by Google Cloud).

I wrote about 6 reasons why we switched to SiteGround.

If you’re looking to switch hosts, I highly recommend SiteGround – their customer service and new tech platform is really robust.

5. New Acquisitions & Investments (All in One SEO, Smash Balloon, & more)

As you know, two years ago I created the WPBeginner growth fund to invest in WordPress focused companies.

This past year, I’m proud to welcome the following companies to our family of products:

All in One SEO Pack is the original WordPress SEO plugin used by over 2 million websites. In January, we acquired AIOSEO to bring it under the Awesome Motive umbrella, and I’m working with the team to build tons of amazing SEO features to help you rank higher.

If you’re looking for a SEO plugin, try AIOSEO – there’s a free version available here as well.

Smash Balloon offers the most popular social media feeds plugin for WordPress. Over 1.3 million websites use Smash Balloon plugins to display their social media content.

If you’re looking to create and display custom Instagram photo feeds, Facebook feeds, Twitter feeds, and YouTube feeds, then there’s no better plugin that Smash Balloon. There’s a free version for all four plugins that you can try.

I also invested in Rymera Web, the parent company behind Wholesale Suite and Advanced Coupons for WooCommerce. These are extremely useful plugins for WooCommerce store owners.

Product Updates

One of the questions that I often get asked via our contact form is what is WPBeginner’s income, and how does WPBeginner make money by giving away all WordPress tutorials for free.

Well, we make money indirectly through our suite of premium WordPress plugins that are now running on over 15 million websites.

WPForms

WPForms is our drag & drop WordPress form builder plugin that’s now being used by over 3 million websites.

Since last July, WPForms has launched numerous exciting features including integrations for Authorize.net (payment forms), ActiveCampaign (CRM), WPML (translations), smart access controls (security), and improved Entry management.

Aside from that, they also added many powerful form fields like multiple file uploads, number slider, text limits, improved reCAPTCHA, etc.

You can download the free version of WPForms or get WPForms Pro to unlock even more powerful features.

MonsterInsights

MonsterInsights is the most popular WordPress analytics plugin. Over 2 million website owners use MonsterInsights to see the stats that matter right inside the WordPress dashboard.

Since last July, MonsterInsights has added smart analytics features such as Email Summaries, PDF export for reports, smart date range, multi-site network wizard, improved Pretty Links integration, and more.

You can download the free version of MonsterInsights or get MonsterInsights Pro to unlock more powerful features.

WP Mail SMTP

WP Mail SMTP is the most popular SMTP plugin for WordPress. Now over 1 million website owners use this plugin to fix the WordPress not sending email issue.

It’s a must have plugin on all our websites. Simply put, this plugin fixes WordPress email deliverability issues by letting you send emails using Amazon SES, MailGun, G Suite, and other more reliable email platforms.

We launched the premium version last year to add smart features like Email Logs, Email Control, Pro integrations, and a White Glove Setup for business owners.

You can download the free version of WP Mail SMTP or get WP Mail SMTP Pro to unlock more powerful features.

OptinMonster

OptinMonster is the best WordPress plugin to convert website visitors into subscribers and customers.

Simply put, it helps you get more email subscribers.

This year we added several exciting features into OptinMonster including: new personalization workflow, A/B testing for campaign types, mobile exit-intent, new integrations for email providers, and more.

OptinMonster truly is the #1 most powerful conversion optimization toolkit in the world. It will help you instantly boost leads and grow revenue by converting and monetizing your existing website traffic.

This is my not-so secret website tool that I use on all our websites because it just works!

RafflePress

RafflePress is the best WordPress giveaway and contest plugin. It’s a new product that we launched last year to unlock viral growth on our sites.

We’ve been using it on WPBeginner and our products to grow our email list, increase engagement, and generate more sales.

RafflePress helps you turn your visitors into brand ambassadors. As a result, you get more website traffic, email
subscribers, and social media engagement FASTER without buying any paid ads!

You can download the free version of RafflePress or get RafflePress Pro to unlock more powerful features.

WPBeginner Birthday Giveaway

To celebrate the 11th birthday of WPBeginner, we are offering an Ultimate Website Toolkit to one lucky reader.

The prize includes a Macbook Air, free domain + 1 year GoGeek hosting from SiteGround, 1 hour Zoom call with Syed (me), and pro licenses to all our premium WordPress plugins: WPForms, OptinMonster, MonsterInsights, WP Mail SMTP, SeedProd, RafflePress, TrustPulse, All in One SEO, Smash Balloon, MemberPress, Affiliate Royale, Thirsty Affiliates, Pretty Links, Formidable Forms, Wholesale Suite, and Advanced Coupons for WooCommerce.

Winners will be chosen randomly using a random generator script.

All you have to do is enter the giveaway using the widget below:

* No purchase is required to enter this giveaway.

Giving Back (Opportunity)

As you know that WPBeginner is a 100% free resource, and I don’t really ask for much in return. Your kindness and generosity in supporting our premium WordPress plugins make this business sustainable for us.

A big priority for Amanda and I is to help others, and we do a ton through our Balkhi Foundation.

Since it’s our family foundation, we don’t ask for donations there. However if you’ve ever found WPBeginner to be helpful and want to give back, then I would appreciate you supporting some of my favorite charities below:

Thank You Everyone

I want to say thank you to everyone who has supported us in this journey. I really do appreciate all of your retweets, personal emails, content suggestions, and the in-person hugs / interactions at the events.

You all are AMAZING and without you, there is no WPBeginner.

I look forward to another solid year ahead of us.

Syed Balkhi
Founder of WPBeginner

P.S. We’re hiring for several roles as our company grows. If you or someone you know would be interested in being part of our fast-growing team, then please apply here.

The post WPBeginner Turns 11 Years Old – Reflections and Updates (+ Giveaway) appeared first on WPBeginner.

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Happy 17th, WordPress

Chocolate cupcakes with blue frosting and lit candles stuck into them.

Seventeen. It is almost a lost year between sweet 16 and the adulthood that comes along with 18. For many, 17 is a rebellious age when they feel like they have already reached grown-up status but still have some hard lessons to learn, some growing to do. The past year of WordPress’s life has felt much the same. Our community has worked and is still working through some rough patches. We are still learning. We are still growing. For better or worse, we are still coming together to build a better web.

By its next birthday, we should expect to see a much different WordPress. It will have grown from a simple blogging platform to nearly a full site builder. The community will likely stumble a few times as users and developers acquaint themselves with an evolving platform. With luck, we can work through most of the kinks before that day arrives. For now, we will need to suffer a bit through this messy teenage rebellion.

Teens often see the world differently than those of us well into adulthood do. We must be there to temper the worst ideas but encourage the hopes and dreams that accompany the vision of youth. It is this vision that will change the world. I expect no less from WordPress in the coming years.

Currently, WordPress powers 36.7% of the top 10 million websites. It has come a long way since its humble beginnings as the basic fork of B2/cafelog that Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little kick-started in 2003. It has brought online publishing to millions and provided careers for 1,000s — I have been blessed with a 12-year career thanks to WordPress.

The first official release of WordPress landed on May 27, 2003. The platform included texturize (so good it’ll make your quotes curl), a link manager for building blogrolls, improved automatic line breaks, manual excerpts, XHTML 1.1, new default templates, and a fresh admin interface. Needless to say, the software has changed since its first release — can we make blogrolls cool again?

Perhaps the saddest part of WordPress’s 17th birthday is that most of us cannot celebrate it together in person. No slices of birthday cake will be passed to WordCamp attendees. We cannot share a hug or a handshake. We cannot clink our glasses together in a toast. However, we can still celebrate in spirit.

In Celebrate Seventeen, Mullenweg urges the community to enjoy this day:

If you’d like to celebrate with me, put on some jazz, eat some BBQ, light a candle for the contributors who have passed on, help a friend or stranger less technical than you build a home online, and remember that technology is at its best when it brings people together.

My addition to his list would be to hop over to your WordPress website and write a blog post. It can be anything. Write in celebration of WordPress turning 17. Write about your children, cats, or dogs. Share your feelings surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. Whatever it is, just write. The best celebration of WordPress is to use the platform to do the one thing it was meant to do 17 years ago — publish something on the web.

Then, take a moment to appreciate the ability that we have to share our thoughts with the world. WordPress represents the most important, inalienable right that all humans share — freedom of expression. It has provided an avenue for people all over the world to share their thoughts for 17 years. That is not something to be taken lightly. So, let today be a celebration, despite the rough patch the world is going through. Let today be a celebration, regardless of our weekly arguments about the project’s future. Let today be a celebration of the people from all walks of life who have come together to build this amazing piece of software.

Most of all, take time to appreciate that we have an even brighter future to look forward to. WordPress may be a bit of a dinosaur in this fast-paced world of technological advancement, but it is not done yet. It may be going through a huge transitional phase at the moment, but we are not to the halfway point. We are just getting to the good stuff.

Buckle up. Look for the next 17 years to be an even wilder ride. I welcome the adventure.

Posted on

The Twelfth Fourth

CSS-Tricks is 12 years old! Firmly into that Early Adolescence stage, I'd say ;) As we do each year, let's reflect upon the past year. I'd better have something to say, right? Otherwise, John Prine would get mad at me.

How the hell can a person go to work in the morning
And come home in the evening and have nothing to say.
- Angel From Montgomery

See the Pen
Fireworks! by Tim Severien (@timseverien)
on CodePen.

Easily the biggest change this year was design v17

We redesign most years, so it's not terribly shocking I suppose that we did this year, but I think it's fairly apparent that this was a big one. The biggest since v10.

Here's a writeup on v17.

I still get happy emails about it.

The aesthetics of it still feel fresh to me, 6 months later. There are no plans at all yet for what the next version will be. I imagine this one will last a good couple of years with tweaks along the way. I'm always working on it. Just in the last few days, I have several commits cleaning things up, adding little features, and optimizing. That work is never done. v18 might just be a more thorough scrubbing of what is here. Might be a good release to focus on the back-end tech. I've always wanted to try some sort of MVC setup.

In a way, things feel easier.

There is a lot going right around here. We've got a great staff. Our editorial workflow, led by Geoff, has been smooth. There are ebbs and flows of how many great guest posts are in the pipeline, but it never seems to run dry and these days we stay more ahead than we ever have.

We stay quite organized with Notion. In fact, I still use it heavily across all the teams I'm on. It's just as fundamental as Slack and email.

We're still working with BuySellAds as a partner to help us sell advertising and sponsorship partnerships. We've worked with them for ages and they really do a good job with clean ad tech, smooth integration workflows, and finding good companies that want to run campaigns.

On the 10th anniversary I wrote:

If you do all the work, the hope is that you just keep to keep on keeping on. Everyone gets paid for their effort. This is not a hockey-stick growth kind of site. It's a modest publication.

Yep.

Check out a year over year chart from Google Analytics:

I can look at that and celebrate the moments with growth. Long periods of 20% year over year growth, which is cool. Then if you look at just this last month, we're more even or a little bit under 2018 (looking at only pageviews). Good to know, kinda, but I never put much stock in this kind of generic analytics. I'm glad we record them. I would want to know if we started tanking or growing hugely. But we never do. We have long slow steady growth and that is a comfortable place for me.

Thinking on ads

The world of advertising is tightly integrated around here, of course. I'm sure many of you look at this site and go JEEZ, LITTLE HEAVY ON THE ADS, EH? I hope it's not too big a turnoff, as I really try to be tasteful with them. But another thing you should know is that the ad tech is clean. No tracking stuff. No retargetting. No mysterious third-party JavaScript. There might be an impression-tracking pixel here and there, but that's about it. No slew of 100's of requests doing god-knows-what.

That's not by accident. It's clear to me now how to go down that other road, and that road has money on it. Twice as much. But I look at it as what would be short term gains. Nobody is going to be more mad at me than you if I slap 80 tracking scripts on this site, my credibility amongst devs goes out the window along with any hopes of sustaining or growing this site. It's no surprise to me that on sites without developers as an audience, the tendency is to go down the golden road of tracking scripts.

Even the tech is easier.

Just starting in July I've gotten all my sites on Flywheel hosting, and I've written about that here just today. Flywheel is a new sponsor here to the site, and I'm equally excited about that as I am in actually using it. Between using Local for local WordPress development, GitHub for repos, Buddy for deployment, Cloudflare for DNS/CDN... everything just feels smooth and easy right now.

The way I feel about tech at the moment is that nearly anything is doable. Even stuff that feels insurmountable. It's just work. Do a bunch of work, get the thing done.

Fancy posts

One thing that we snuck in this year is the idea of posts that have special design applied to them. The term "Art-directed articles" seems to be the term that has stuck for that, for better or worse, and we've added to that.

There are posts like The Great Divide that I intentionally wanted to make stand out.

And now we've taken that and turned it into a template. The point of an art-directed article is to do something unique, so a template is a little antithetical to that, but I think this strikes a nice middle ground. The template assumes a big full-width header with background image under big title and then is otherwise just a centered column of type on white. The point is to use the template, then apply custom styles on top of it as needed to do something special for the post. I have a good feeling we'll keep using it and have fun with it, and that it won't be too burdensome for future designs.

Elsewhere

Last year at this time I was just settling into living in Bend, Oregon. It still feels that way. I'm in a new house now, that we've bought, and it feels like this is a very permanent living situation. But we're less than a year into the new house so there is plenty of dust to settle. I'm still honeymooning on Bend as I just love it here so much. My daughter is just over a year and a half now so stability is very much what we're after.

Professionally, most of my time is on CodePen, of course. There is a lot of overlap, like the fact that we work with BuySellAds on both sites and often sell across both. Plus working on CSS-Tricks always has me in CodePen anyway ;). Miraculously, Dave Rupert and I almost never miss a week on ShopTalk Show. Going strong after all these years. Never a shortage of stuff to talk about when it comes to websites.

Thank you

A bit hearty thanks from me! Y'all reading this site is what makes it possible.

The post The Twelfth Fourth appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

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WPWeekly Episode 354 – Pantheon Acquires StagingPilot

In this episode, John James Jacoby and I discuss Panethon’s acquisition of StagingPilot and why regression visual testing will likely become a standard feature across managed WordPress hosts if it’s not already. I rant about the size of text on so many sites being too large and having to shrink the site down to 80-90% in order for it to be manageable. We celebrate WordPress’ 16th birthday, discuss what happens to unloved patches, and GitHub’s Sponsors tool.

Stories Discussed:

Robots, Autopilot, and The Holy Grail of WebOps

WordPress Turns 16

Unloved Patches

New GitHub Sponsors Tool Draws Concerns from Open Source Community

Automattic Acquires Prospress, the company behind WooCommerce Subscriptions

Transcript:

EPISODE 354 – Pantheon Acquires StagingPilot Transcript

WPWeekly Meta:

Next Episode: Wednesday, June 5th 3:00 P.M. Eastern

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Listen To Episode #354: