Oh, The Drama!

All last week, the WordPress world was “hot to trot” over this whole battle between Matt (the founder of WordPress) and WP Engine (the popular web host).

And, I’m going to talk about it a bit more. But… I also know that this stuff might seem irrelevant and like “inside baseball” to a lot of you reading this. And, it really is.

So, I’m going to address the latest. And, then we’ll move on. And we’ll discuss it again only if there is something new enough and relevant enough to mention.

M’kay? 😇

I mean, it gets to a point where one has to watch all these WordPress people talking all day about this and wonder…. don’t they have work to do?! 😜

LOL.

OK, let’s do this thing…

Featured This Week

How To Control Login and Logout For Your Membership Site

One of the core things when building your WordPress membership site is setting up the login and logout process. How do you style the login? How do you control where members go once they log in? How do you give them login/logout options in the navigation menu?

The WordPress Drama Continues

In last week’s issue of this newsletter, I addressed the big drama going on between Matt Mullenweg (the founder of WordPress) and WPEngine. Ostensively over trademark issues. You can read last week’s issue on the website, so I don’t need to repeat myself. 😇

In the last week, the conflict has only escalated.

• WP Engine responded to Matt’s attacks with a cease and desist letter. (link on X)
• Automattic (basically, Matt) sent a C&D of their own to WPEngine to stop trademark infringments
• Matt published a direct attack on WPEngine on the WordPress.org blog. Then, WPEngine modified the WordPress sites on it’s host to remove the WordPress.org news widget so customers couldn’t see it. That angers Matt.
• Matt responds by blocking the entire WP Engine hosting ecosystem from being able to access plugin updates from the WordPress.org repository.
• The world of WordPress gets angry with Matt, Reactions everywhere. Eventually, Matt issues a short-term reprieve.

There has been so much talking about this that WordPress groups are even beginning to shut down conversations about it. Everything that could be said… has been said. And in the end, most everybody (including me) is talking about things we don’t know about. We’re not in the middle of it, so all we can do is speculate.

Now, the human instinct, for some weird reason, is to pick a side. Same thing happens in politics. So, people feel some odd need to pick their horse and let the world know who their team is. And overall, it seems as if most people have been rather sour on Matt Mullenweg.

But, after a week of this, I really just don’t think this can be oversimplified to something so one-sided.

In my opinion, Matt has generated some of this negativity for himself due to how he handled this, but not necessarily what he is doing. I think Matt was rather naive. A bit immature about how he handled it. But…. not wrong.

Matt is just one guy. And with 100% certainty, he is acting with the best of intentions for the WordPress platform and community. But, he’s one guy. And one guy has the ability to get stressed out, to make wrong moves, and to act on emotion. And I do think that has happened here.

If you want an updated summary of Matt’s view on this, he recently did a great interview with Theo – 13.gg on Youtube. This is actually a great interview. And to be clear, Matt is being pretty transparent about his side of this. And WPEngine is not. WP Engine is being very… corporate.

So, where does this all leave the world of WordPress and us as WordPress users?

• Mostly, life as usual. Frankly, most of this is nerd drama at this point. And it doesn’t really impact our day to day.
• If you are on WP Engine hosting, frankly I’d probably consider switching. Not because of what Matt says about them, but mostly just to get out of the way. Not only that, WP Engine isn’t a host I would recommend anyway. I’d switch over to Rocket as it is much better anyway.
• If anything about this gets in the way of updating plugins for anybody, just update manually. This could affect ACF, too. But, one can just grab ACF versions from the ACF website.

During this whole affair, some things will re-align. And probably in the right way. But, I do have concerns and it will be interesting to see how it plays out. Some of my concerns are:

• There’s a 3-person board for the WordPress Foundation. Matt is one of them. The other 2 are, from the best we can find, total non-entities. One even works for a paint company. So, Matt seems like he has centralized control. Is that good or bad?
• There’s too much of this that is too centered on Matt. He may have great intentions -= and I think he does. But, it also means things are easily poorly handled because it is subject to the whims of one dude.

I do think WP Engine should contribute more. Matt’s overall point isn’t wrong. But, I also would like to see some more transparency and decentralization in the governance of WordPress.

This Week In Concierge

This week in Concierge has been… normal. 🤪 As in, business as usual and I’m sitting here wondering what is interesting enough to tell you about. Sometimes… nothing. 😇

So, I thought I’d take a moment to share a brand new testimonial from one of my long-term Concierge clients. Her name is Deanna and she is the founder of CareDoula Education. She came to me awhile ago because she wanted to start a new project. A membership site which was to be her legacy and compile all of her expertise and material she had created over the years.

So, I built her a membership site. She and her daughter do the content… and I handle all of the “plumbing” and make the site work. Here’s what she said…

“David is awesome, couldn’t ask for anyone better to help me with my projects and business. I trust him 100% I’ve been in his realm for many years using his courses and in 2024 knew he was the one to tackle one of our biggest projects to date in 20 years in business! … and he’s been my rock. He’s easy and so gentle with my total tech-unsaviness. He gives you input, is responsive, knowledgeable, genuine and a family man, what else do you want?!”

I’m blushing. 😊

Deanna knows HER field incredibly well, obviously. But, she’s not a WordPress expert by any means. So, not only have I made the site function the way she wants it to, but I’ve also been happy to help provide some advice and guidance along the way. It has been fun!

And speaking of last week (since that’s what I often do in this section of the newsletter), last week I did go in and professionalize her homepage and sales funnel. To clean it up and make it flow better. And I also gave her some advice on sales conversion.

So, yeah…. Concierge isn’t just about updating plugins. 😇

Thanks, Deanna!These videos are on the new Client Information section of the account dashboard.

WordPress Quick Bits

Periodic Table of Plugins. Well, this is interesting. There is a periodic table of WordPress plugins and it was recently updated. I don’t know why it was presented in flashbacks to chemistry class, but basically it is a list of the most popular plugins in the entire space.

Elementor Introduces Site Mailer. Elementor has launched a new solution for sending transactional emails – called Site Mailer. On the surface, looks like another SMTP plugin, however this one promises that there’s no complexity in connecting to an SMTP service. Which means, it is being powered by Elementor themselves. This is a service. So, could be convenient, but not something I’d stop using FluentSMTP for anytime soon. I’d still prefer to pick my own SMTP service.

FluentCommunity Updates. The beta of FluentCommunity has been updated to 1.6, introducing a lock screen for non-members, an email invite system, and a host of improvements and fixes. This product really looks to be coming along nicely.

Fluent Forms Powers 500K Sites. Shahjahan Jewel shared on X that Fluent Forms has reached the threshold of powering over a half-million websites. Very cool!

Divi 5 Alpha Available. It has been taking them FOREVER to develop the new version of Divi, but it looks like the alpha release of version 5 is now available. I may take a look at it later to see if they’ve fixed some of my big concerns about Divi.

WP Trademark Changes. The WordPress trademark policy was officially updated. The changes are pretty specific to usage of the “WP” and, as you might expect, singles out WP Engine. Changing the rules on the fly there, Matt? 🧐

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Optin Forms on A Membership Site

So, let’s stop talking about WordPress drama. And talk about something practical. 😇

If you run a WordPress site for marketing purposes, you (hopefully) have opt-in forms and are collecting email addresses. It is super important. Now, let’s put this in context of an operational membership site…

If you have people creating user profiles on your site – whether to access free or paid material – then you already have their email address.

A LOT of membership sites I see – including my own at times – are still showing opt-in forms even when a person is logged-in. And the question is…. why?

If a member is logged-in on your membership site, will they still see optin forms? Does that make much sense? 🤓

An alternative would be to hide opt-in forms for people who are logged-in. Or, you could even show something ELSE in place of the opt-in if people are logged-in.

For instance, I recently changed my homepage so that the main opt-in on the homepage is replaced with a link to the account dashboard if you’re logged-in. I also replaced the opt-in in the sidebar so that it simply shows latest content for people who are logged-in.

You could also, if you wanted, show a call to action to logged-in members. Perhaps an offer to schedule a call, upgrade their membership, or whatever makes sense.

If you have segmentation information on your member indicating specific interests, you could even show them something specific to their interest.

The idea is to be contextual to the person who you KNOW is browsing your website. Rather than an opt-in form which treats them as if you don’t know who they are.

Now, HOW do you do this?

Actually, it is pretty easy. The tool you use depends on your specific setup. Since I build sites with Kadence and use the block builder, my go-to tool is the Block Visibility plugin.

This plugin used to have a Pro version, but now it is 100% free with all capabilities. And it is incredibly useful. And it makes it very simple to show/hide entire blocks based on rules.

At the basic, you could use this plugin to show opt-in forms for people who are not logged in… and then show something different to the people who are logged-in.

This plugin can do FAR more than that, if it comes in handy for you. It even works with WP Fusion so you can show/hide things based on individual tags the logged-in user has. Quite powerful.

Hopefully, though, this serves as a small reminder to check out the contextual user experience on your membership site. Log in as different members and see what they see. You can use the User Switching plugin to quickly log in as members and see what they see. And make changes as needed.