I’ve been using WordPress since the early days, 2006 to be exact.

I fell in love with the idea of open-source CMSs a few years before that, after experiencing firsthand how cumbersome and expensive closed-source CMSs were. The big open source players at the time were Drupal and Joomla, but then WordPress came along and changed the game.

After seeing how much easier WordPress would be to explain to my clients when compared to Joomla (named Mambo in those days), I made the switch immediately and also started blogging about this exciting piece of software that was going to “democratize publishing”.

I had been blogging for a few years by then, using the limited functionality of Blogger. I switched my site to WordPress and started WP Mayor to share my new knowledge with the rest of the world and also act as a testbed for me to implement things.

I can say that there were 3 main things that attracted me to WordPress in 2006:

• Ease-of-use
• Technically accessible
• Community

First, it was very easy to use WordPress straight out of the box, provided you knew how to set up a domain and basic hosting service, which wasn’t a problem for me given I had been working as a web developer for several years by then.

Secondly, it was also technically accessible. I had started computer science and business at University, but I could not claim to be a hardcore developer. I knew enough PHP and MySQL to build a basic CMS and modify HTML/CSS templates. That’s all I needed to know to customize WordPress websites. I could also build my own WordPress plugins fairly easily. It took me a while to go down that road, but eventually, I built WP RSS Aggregator, which, like WP Mayor, is still around today and doing great.

Thirdly, the community. One of the reasons why it was so easy to get started with WordPress was that there were some great forums, including the official one, where you could easily get help in doing anything WordPress-related, and for free! There was a spirit of generosity and sheer excitement at building an amazing product that would change people’s lives and give a voice to anyone on the planet.

Fast forward a decade and a half, and I am still a WordPress user. This very blog runs on WordPress. However, my feelings towards WordPress have changed over the years. While it remains an excellent product that can certainly deliver the goods (after all, it powers 35% of the world’s websites, according to some estimates), I have a few big gripes that might even jeopardise the product’s future, and that’s what I want to note down in this post.

First – A Little Bit of WP History

Let me take you on a brief history on WordPress from my perspective.

WordPress started life in 2003 as a fork of b2/cafelog by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. Although WordPress is the official successor of b2, another project, b2evolution, is also in active development.

The idea for the fork came to Matt when the main developer of b2, Michel Valdrighi, stopped making updates to the platform. Matt announced the idea on his blog and Mike Little replied saying he was interested in contributing.

In the following months, Matt and Mike made several changes to the codebase (PHP, MySQL, HTML and CSS), however Matt was clearly the one with bigger dreams and ideas for WordPress. He registered WordPress.org.

In 2004 the licensing terms for the competing Movable Type package were changed by Six Apart, resulting in many of its most influential users migrating to WordPress. This was the stroke of luck that changed the course of CMS history forever. If it weren’t for this disastrous move by Movable Type, things would have probably looked a lot different today, as Movable Type was a clear leader in those days.

When WordPress was forked from b2/cafelog, it was squarely meant to be a blogging platform, and it became the undisputed best blogging platform very quickly as users flocked to it from Blogger (a very limited tool) and Movable Type.

By this time, Matt Mullenweg was the clear leader of the project, and he also founded Automattic in 2005 to focus on building WordPress-related commercial software and services. That company now employs more than a thousand people and is currently valued at more than $3 billion today. It has acquired several other companies.

The WordPress core group then decided to take on the CMS space, and compete directly with Joomla and, to a certain extent, Drupal. Concepts were borrowed from these two CMSs and custom post types were introduced, which really changed the game and made WordPress the definite no.1 piece of software to use by web developers building medium complexity sites for clients, and not just blogs. Drupal was still regarded as a better option for high complexity sites, while Magento was the e-Commerce leader.

The next big shift in 2014 came when the leadership announced that the focus would shift to making WordPress an API, where the front and back end admin panels could be built with any other language and interface with the WordPress database, giving ultimate flexibility to web developers. The REST API was the solution, and a lot of energy was spent on Calypso, the desktop app meant to showcase this new WordPress concept. It was a cool piece of software but the REST API was way too limiting to make it a viable alternative to using the traditional wp-admin dashboard for anything beyond writing simple blog posts.

In the meantime, e-Commerce solutions on WordPress were getting more and more sophisticated. WooCommerce (a fork of Jigoshop by themes titan WooThemes in 2011) was emerging as the clear leader, and was acquired by Automattic for over $30mln in 2015, along with the rest of the WooThemes business and team. I think this was a pivotal point that really made it clear to everyone that Automattic was the clear juggernaut of the WordPress space and the company could and would do anything it wanted to profit from the WordPress software and community. Speculation immediately started about whether Automattic wanted to make a hosted version of WooCommerce. This move has not materialized yet but most people take it as a given to happen in the next few years.

Calypso never really picked up steam, and suddenly the focus changed on redoing the way people created content with WordPress. This consisted of replacing the TinyMCE editor used on the wp-admin interface and instead use a newly built tool called Gutenberg. Undoubtedly, this was due to platforms such as Wix and Squarespace providing a much simpler interface for new users, making it clear that something had to change for WordPress to keep up.

Although Gutenberg has been the main focus of the WordPress core theme for over three years, it has still not won over the hearts of users, and the Gutenberg plugin in fact is one of the worst-rated plugins in the repository. The hope is that long-term the kinks will be ironed out and old school users will learn how to use Gutenberg while newer ones will immediately find themselves at ease with the more modern interface it provides.

I’m not sure how this will end, all I can say is that I’ve tried Gutenberg and I wasn’t convinced. Probably because I’m set in my ways and I had no real incentive to change the way I create content, so Gutenberg was a big annoyance more than anything. I do agree, however, that for younger users there needs to be a better way of content editing that is more akin to the interfaces they are used to. Whether it will be Gutenberg or something else remains to be seen. Certainly, third party tools like Elementor seem to receive much more love from users.

And that’s where we are at in 2020 as far as I’m concerned. Now on to a few concerns and gripes that have risen over the past few years.

1. Changing WordPress Narrative

As I’ve described, WordPress has morphed from a blogging system, to a CMS, then to an app platform at the database level using APIs. Currently, I’m not even sure what WordPress is trying to be anymore. Is Gutenberg a step towards becoming the top blogging/CMS tool once again?

What is the role of WooCommerce in all this? We know it’s a huge profit center for Automattic and has a big slice of the overall e-commerce market, but it also has serious rivals like Shopify to contend with. As with Wix and Squarespace, these hosted tools have focused on one thing right from the start, while WordPress has been changing and trying to accommodate everything that is thrown at it over the past decade and a half.

2. A Different Web

The web itself has changed a lot since WordPress came to be, and Javascript frameworks are now all the rage. The WordPress codebase now has a much bigger percentage of JS than PHP, and this has been tough on many WP developers who have had to learn a new language in order to keep up.

Apart from the technical considerations that have changed, the online expectations of users have changed as well.

Ten years ago, there was a strong focus on owning your content and open-source platforms were very popular. Nowadays, it’s all about convenience and most users don’t give a hoot about owning their content. You know things have changed a lot when people are writing their blog posts as Instagram posts rather than having a website. It’s insane to me, but realistically that is where the trend is going.

Our lives have gotten busier and users are accustomed to hosted platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Wix, Shopify etc. and value the convenience they provide. They don’t care about giving up ownership of their content or about having central organisations that can deactivate their accounts if they feel like and censor them with ease.

3. A Powerful Few Companies Rule

The early days of WordPress were characterised by people who were genuinely motivated about democratising publishing, making good software available to everyone at free or low cost. As WordPress grew and companies like Automattic became extremely profitable, things changed, and I think nowadays it’s all about making money.

It is impossible for a clan of powerful companies not to form in such situations. At present, I see Automattic and a few other big WordPress players who really determine the future of WordPress, as well as have tremendous power commercially. In the plugin space, for example, you have companies that focus purely on acquiring other successful plugins, then cross-promoting their plugins, leaving little chance for other players to compete, let alone new entrants.

I won’t even get into the confusion created between WordPress.com and WordPress.org, with WordPress.com being fully owned by Automattic and a big revenue driver for them, while WordPress.org is where you can actually download WordPress the software. Most new users will naturally gravitate towards the .com domain and then have to figure it out on their own.

4. Hard to Attract Talent

WordPress is no longer the cool kid on the block, and it’s hard to attract talented developers to dedicate their time to WordPress-related development. There are way cooler programming languages and projects that attract them these days. Add to that the fact that many of the existing long-time WP developers don’t really have strong JS skills and it’s really hard to find people.

I can’t blame talented coders who shy away from WordPress due to its antiquated code or core development teams that frequently resist change.

5. Uncontrolled Growth

WordPress has grown immensely from any data point you look at. Take WordCamp Europe, for example. It’s becoming a challenge to even find a venue that can accommodate the thousands of people who want to attend every year. This particular case might not be a big problem, but it is in other cases.

Take the plugin repository as another example. There are many thousands of plugins, and those which were around in the early days have a huge advantage over new entries, discouraging competition and innovation. As a user, it is a nightmare to find the most suitable plugin for your needs. Are we really expecting users to download and test 10 seemingly identical SEO/caching/contact form/social media plugins to decide which one they like best?

It’s also harder to control the quality of the plugins found in the repository, presenting a security nightmare because who knows if the next plugin you install is secure or not?

6. The Sense of Community Has Changed

I’ve perhaps already made references to the fact that the community is not the same as it was in the early years. Nowadays the focus at official events is on marketing and making money, while the official forums are not quite as helpful and tolerant as they once were. In my opinion, some forum moderators who have been there for many years should have moved on to something else a long time ago.

The reason I say that is that they have grown increasingly cynical, dismissive and outright arrogant over the years. The way they speak at times feels like they know that they are backed by the most powerful corporation in the space and are basically untouchables.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, take a look at this post or even the screenshot below from a that I randomly came across earlier this week.

Nothing too dramatic on the face of it, but I don’t think it’s ok to use such a tone when replying to a user who had politely submitted a perfectly formatted and good question and repeatedly thanked the moderators in previous interactions.

At the same time as this brashness and arrogance is on display, we have the powers that be in WordPress becoming more and more espoused to a certain political view of the world. The best term I’ve found to describe how I feel WordPress leadership operates is the Chinese word Baizuo. Here’s an extract from Wikipedia:

the word “Baizuo” refers to those who “only care about topics such as immigration, minorities, LGBT rights and the environment”, but lack a concept of “real problems in the real world”. It is also used to describe those “hypocritical humanitarians who advocate political correctness just to satisfy their own sense of moral superiority”.

I don’t know about you, but this really hits home for me when I think of the WordPress community’s overall feel.

7. Hard to Recommend WordPress

Due mainly to the shift in expectations from the user side, I am finding it harder and harder to recommend WordPress to people these days. This is hard to accept for me as I spent many years being a WordPress evangelist through my writing on WP Mayor. It’s changing narrative is another issue.

Let’s consider a few examples. If a friend calls and says that they:

• want to start a blog – I’m probably going to suggest taking a look at Ghost.
• need to sell products online – Shopify is where I’m going to direct them.
• want to know what frameworks they should learn – Laravel, React, Node are what I’m suggesting.

Perhaps the one use case where I would still recommend WordPress is if they want to build a company website or want to do something else that doesn’t fit tidily into what the hosted services offer. For example, an automated content aggregator about COVID-19 just to cite a recent example. Then yes, WordPress coupled with plugins such as WP RSS Aggregator would definitely be the number one tool for the job in my view.

I do miss the days when I would encourage everyone to have a voice online and promise them that the easiest way to do so was to spend a couple of hours getting their own site set up with self-hosted WordPress.

Final Thoughts

So there we go, this is just me reflecting on my time in WordPress and my current feelings. I’d welcome your views, even if you think I’ve gotten it all wrong. Ultimately, being a WordPress user, I’d really love WordPress to continue flourishing in the next 10 or 20 years and consolidate its position as a leader.

However, my feeling is that WordPress has lost its spark over the years due to the factors I mentioned and others. To make some comparisons, I feel the crypto space nowadays is very similar to the early days of WordPress. I see the same ethos of changing the world for the better, with open source having a strong presence, as well as incredible communities around Bitcoin and other crypto projects.

The uncertainty and frustration at certain decisions and ways of doing things are feelings that are shared by many people, and some have so far as to actually fork WordPress, creating ClassicPress, a project that is described as “Forked from #WordPress, without #Gutenberg. ClassicPress is a business-focused CMS. Powerful. Versatile. Predictable.”

It remains to be seen whether a fork like this can have any real impact. In my view, it all hinges on whether they can provide any real benefit to new users versus what WordPress offers. If they manage to achieve that, then it would make sense for plugin developers to adapt their plugins to work with ClassicPress (many do by default since it’s a fork of WordPress) and then they can focus on building a superior plugin repository. Only then can they give WordPress a good challenge.

I’m not sure I’ve managed to accurately convey my thoughts and feelings across in this post, so I might revisit it with more ideas in the near future, but for now, it’s done its job in helping me sort out the things in my head.

I take a lot of screenshots on a daily basis for various uses, so I make sure I use the best tools for this purpose.

Here are the various options out there.

Mac Inbuilt Screenshot Facility

Your Mac comes with an inbuilt screenshot facility that is accessed via keyboard shortcuts. If you use Dropbox, you will also get prompted to automatically save screenshots to the Screenshots folder on Dropbox, and a link to the latest saved screenshot will be copied to your clipboard, so you can instantly share that image with others if you need to.

If that covers all your needs, I don’t see any reason for using any apps, just learn the few shortcuts that you need and you’re good to go.

[Read more…]

As you might have noticed, I include the latest photos from my Instagram feed in the footer of my blog. I’m no Instagram celebrity, but including the Instagram shots help my readers get a glimpse of another side of me, namely my experiences as a padel player competing in Spain and my journey in this sport.

Spotlight for WordPress offers a simple and effective way to add your Instagram feeds to your WordPress site.

Instagram has become one of the most used social media platforms. It is now becoming as important as ever to harness its power and use it to your advantage. By integrating your Instagram feed on your site, you can increase social engagement and brand awareness while also building social proof.

As one of the main social media platforms in 2020, Instagram is a place where you can connect with your audience in a very different way than you would on Twitter or Facebook. While Twitter is mostly used to express your views and Facebook to connect with friends and family, Instagram is unique in that it is a space where you can tell your story. Used in the right way, Instagram can be a very powerful tool for bloggers, businesses, and brands alike.

Instagram for me is a place where I can share my passion for sports – in particular my padel and tennis journey. It is a way to showcase a different side to my personality that adds a personal touch to my blog. In this post, I will be taking you through the process of installing Spotlight on your website, just like I’ve done in my footer. Let’s get to it.

Whether you have a blog, product or service page, run events, or a business, Spotlight can help you take your Instagram game to the next level.

Instagram itself, surprisingly, does not make it very simple to embed such a feed and customize it on your site. Instead, we have to use WordPress plugins that facilitate this task. My favorite plugin for this is Spotlight, so in this post, I’ll review Spotlight for WordPress and cover some of its best features.

[Read more…]

Starting a blog is a fun and rewarding experience. However, on the other hand, it can also be portrayed as being as daunting as it is interesting. Often, people are very interested in starting their own blog but struggle to get to grips with how to go about starting one from scratch.

The purpose of this post is to provide you with insight and guidelines into how you can start your own blog using one of the most powerful platforms for this purpose – WordPress.

STEP 1 – WordPress as the chosen blogging platform

WordPress is a self-hosted platform and is one of the most popular Content Management Systems (CMS) available. Millions of posts are created using this platform and it can be used for building many types of websites, ranging from a personal blog to business-level sites. The main advantage of WordPress is its user-friendliness, easy to understand interface, as well as being completely customizable.

The WordPress software can be downloaded from wordpress.org.

STEP 2 – Choosing a Web Host

Once you have decided to use WordPress as your blogging platform, you will need to choose a web hosting company to host your site. Web hosting can be a very complicated and technical topic, and it’s what trips most new bloggers up in their initial steps.

My suggestion is to keep things simple and don’t get too obsessed about finding the best possible host and configuration.

You will see that thousands if not millions of bloggers out there start off with a platform like Bluehost. The reason is that this company has been in the industry for over twenty years and provides one of the most simple ways to starting a WordPress blog and keeping it running without any issues.

If you choose Bluehost, you don’t even need to download WordPress yourself, instead you can use their interface to get it installed, with the big advantage being that you can get started in 5 minutes without worrying about MySQL databases and editing any PHP files.

Get a Bluehost hosting account

Here’s a quote from my cousin, who was able to get his own blog up and running after a short chat with me that consisted of me telling him the guidelines that I’m sharing with you in this blog post:

I have personally just started WordPress an Bluehost for blogging and was able to understand how to use it and its functions fairly quickly! The main reason for this is that the back end is intuitive, straightforward and relatively easy to navigate around. Moreover, there are many fora, tutorials or blogs which can help one acclimatise to this CMS.

One helpful site for tutorials is www.lynda.com, offering basic and more advanced tutorials WordPress guides. Check it out!

STEP 3 – Selecting a topic for your blog

OK, so you have decided to create your own blog. Now you must determine what your blog will be about.  What topic best suits the need for creating this blog? There are many topics one can select. It is important to keep in mind that you don’t need to necessarily pick a topic that is seemingly the most popular, but you may also opt to select a topic that is interesting to you, enjoyable and one in which you are interested in learning further.  However, do remember that if you manage to strike a balance between the two aforementioned approaches, you will increase the likelihood of increased traffic to your blog!

Keep in mind also that you need not be the expert in that field when you first start out!  You need only have a keen interest and passion for the topic and ultimately learn as you go along.

One other important factor to keep in mind is that the blog topic chosen should not determine that your entire blog will be tied to that topic.  Feel free to switch around a few topics or spread your topic into other areas of interest.  Feel free to experiment and mix it up a bit. Ultimately, you will definitely find the topic, or topic, which will definitely be to your liking and best matches your interests or passion.

So we have so far determined that we want to start a blog, identified WordPress as our blogging platform and chosen our web host. We also identified our chosen topic of interest. Let’s move on to the next steps…

STEP 4 – Setting up your WordPress blog

In order to start your blog, you need a host and a domain name.

The domain name is the main URL, or the address, for your website.  Choose wisely as this is what will identify and distinguish your blog from others!  The following are a number of tips when selecting your domain name:

• Keep the name simple and relevant to your blog
• Keep it as short as possible
• Make it easy to type and pronounce
• Avoid using number and symbols, like hyphens, as this can make it confusing and hard to find for your visitors
• Try to use words that can be easily picked up by search engines to improve your visibility on the web

We touched briefly on hosting earlier, and I hope you took the chance to get that set up right away. If you did, then great, you can skip to the next step.

If you’re still unsure, let’s talk a bit more about web hosting.

Every website needs web hosting in order to function.  Without having a web host you would not be able to take your blog live on the web.  The web host’s function is to store your files and data on their servers so that people visiting your website can access the content of your website using their web browsers.

There are a number of different web hosting options available.  Below is a shortlist of hosts I’ve tried over the years and can recommend for beginner bloggers:

• Bluehost
• Kinsta
• WP Engine

So if you want to compare and contrast, by all means, visit those hosts and take your pick. You can’t go wrong with any of them. 

STEP 5 – Customizing your blog

So you have now taken your website live on the web! The next step is to start customizing your blog’s design to make it visually appealing, easy to navigate, and attractive to your visitors.

Themes

WordPress gives you the ability to select amongst thousands of themes for your website.  There are free themes and the premium themes which often provide more advanced features and functions for your website.  Navigate through the library to select the theme which best suits the content of your blog.  Keep in mind that when selecting a theme try to opt for a theme that is simple to use and offers a clear and clear design for your visitors to view and navigate through.

The following are a couple of good WordPress themes and page builders suitable for blogs. My favorite combinations are:

• Studiopress
• Elementor

Plugins

Plugins are a function in WordPress that have the ability to improve the design and functionality of your blog.  They are essentially add ons that you can install on your site that focus primarily on adding new features to your site.  The type of plugin required depends on the type of blog you are writing and the type of extended function that you are after.  Much like themes, there are a plethora of plugins available to the community. For blogs, in particular, you can check out plugins like Spotlight (Instagram and Social Media) as well as WP RSS Aggregator (importing news items from other sites via RSS).

STEP 6 – Writing your first blog post

Congratulations! You have set up and customised your WordPress blog.  Your next step it to start writing your first blog post!

To write your first blog post, click on the Posts menu in the left hand menu of your dashboard, then select Add New.

To begin with, start with choosing a title for your blog post.  Posts are structured into various ‘blocks’  Each block you add can contain different types of content.  For example, text, images, videos, headers, lists, etc.  Proceed by writing your blog and inserting the different types of content as necessary for your blog.

You may notice that on the right hand side of your dashboard when writing a blog there is an option to assign ‘Categories and Tags’ to your blog posts.

Whilst writing your blog post you may choose to save the blog as a draft or to preview it as it will look on your website.  Furthermore, when you have finished writing your blog you can click on the Publish button to make your post live on your website, either immediately or set it to go live on a certain date and time.

Once you have written and published your first post, set yourself a timeline as to when you would like to start publishing your next posts to your blog.

Happy blogging!

Let me know in the comments section if you have any questions about starting a new blog and I’ll be happy to help out. It can certainly take a lifetime of learning to run a successful blog, but now it’s easier than ever to get started thanks to hosts like Bluehost and the WordPress software.

Over time I’ve built and run several blogs and so far I’ve always relied mostly on organic SEO for my traffic. I’ve managed to ramp up traffic through good content over the years that has been picked up by Google, but lately I’ve been wondering whether it makes sense to use social sharing plugins or services.

I’m aware of Buffer, Hootsuite, Missinglettr, MeetEdgar and some other WordPress-specific plugins such as Nelio and Social Web Suite.

So far I’ve only auto-published across FB and Twitter using a plugin which basically posts to those two platforms as soon as the post is published on my blog. I’ve briefly tried tools like Buffer and Missinglettr in the past but abandoned them soon after due to getting little results for my efforts.

I suspect that these tools are great for sites with higher traffic or a different kind of audience, as I don’t see my sites getting more traffic if I just retweet posts or repost with different titles and content (a la Missinglettr).

Judging by the popularity of these tools, however, I had a suspicion that I might be wrong.

[Read more…]