The Final Issue (of the year)

We’ve reached the end. This is the final issue of this newsletter.

For the year. 😜

No worries…. I’m not going anywhere. 🙏 I love what I do too much… and I enjoy preparing this issue for you every Monday. I don’t believe I’ve skipped a beat all year, but… I have decided to make this the final issue of 2025.

Frankly, with all of the holidays, parties, and my family and I taking a little RV trip right before New Years… I’ve decided to just enjoy that time and pick up the newsletter again fresh in the first week of 2026.

To cap off the year, this issue presents quite the mix. My first article for you is different than usual, talking about what I call the “Be Do Have Triangle”. You may appreciate that. Then, we dive back into WordPress with a discussion about plugin ecosystems (or plugin silos)…. and the pros and cons to be aware of.

OK, let’s light this candle….

The Be-Do-Have Triangle

For this final issue of the newsletter (for the year), I’d like to talk about the Be-Do-Have model – and why this process can help make 2026 one of your best years ever.

The Be-Do-Have framework has been discussed many, many times… by many, many people. Personal improvement guys, philosophers, you name it. And that’s because it is pretty much a universal truth.

It is actually quite simple…

• You BE the kind of person who can and will achieve what you wish.
• You then DO the kinds of actions that would lead to those things.
• Then you can and will HAVE the things you wish to have.

This is in direct contrast to what many do… who act like you have to HAVE certain things first, so you can DO things, then you can BE awesome. 😜 Doesn’t really work that way, though. People who think that way end up in a sad circle of blame where they think they are a victim of circumstance and other people. A sad state of being, if you ask me.

Now, I think of BE-DO-HAVE as a triangle.

These 3 points are dependent on each other – working together to form the triangle. And that triangle can expand or contract in size, depending on your “level” on each of the 3 points.

So, if you think pretty small and limited (low “BE”), you’ll likely not DO all that much, and you won’t HAVE that much. On the flip side, if you’re a big thinker and capable person (high “BE”) and you lean in on getting things done (“DO”), you’ll likely have more. It is a bigger triangle versus a little bitty one.

There’s also the issue of alignment. The actions you DO need to align with the things you want to have. And your BEINGNESS – literally the way you think and carry yourself day-to-day – needs to be in alignment as well.

When things are not in alignment, you don’t get what you want. Because your actions don’t line up to what you say you want…. and you’re not BEING the person who will achieve them. You’re busy being something else.

I’ll give you a small personal example…

Like a lot of solopreneurs, I want to take my business up a notch. I will say, 2025 has been certainly a growth year for me…. but I want 2026 to be even better. And one of the things I personally think goes in alignment with that is personal HEALTH. I think people who are more in alignment in the different departments of their life are the people who will do well in business.

If a person can’t muster up the energy and discipline to go to the gym and lift some heavy sh*t, how can they be expected to be able to funnel the energy and discipline needed to expand their business or work life?

And the gym isn’t exactly something I’ve adopted as part of my BE. 😇 It is not something that has been part of me.

But, I’m changing that. In fact, for the last 3-4 weeks now, I’ve been working on developing the habit. Going to the gym 3-4 days per week. I do a push day, a pull day, and a leg day. My son taught me that. 😜 And I go in there with the BEINGNESS of a dude at the gym. I don’t look at my phone. I go in there, put in my AirPods, listen to heavy metal music (which isn’t typically what I listen to, frankly)… and I just lift heavy crap for 45 minutes to an hour. Then, I can go back to being a “web guy” when I leave. 😜

Why? Because I realized I need to BE something different – and BE more in alignment – with the things I actually want.

I want to BE in good shape. I want to BE healthy. Because it is all in alignment with what I want. It makes my BE-DO-HAVE triangle bigger.

It might seem unrelated, but I don’t think it is. You have to BE the kind of person who will DO the things that are necessary so you can HAVE what you want. And then the triangle gets bigger, it snowballs, and things get easier as you build inertia.

So, who ARE you?

Are you BEING day-to-day the kind of person who will get what you want? Remember, you can change your BEINGNESS with a simple decision. Many don’t think they can, but they can.

And then, are you DOING what will align with what you want? Are your actions aligned toward what you want? Or are you actually – with your daily habits of BE and DO – producing something completely different you don’t really want to have?

As you look at the new year, a lot of people make vague statements of what they want to do or have in the new year. But, many don’t make it because they never changed their BEINGNESS to align with those things.

And that’s what I wanted to leave you with… as we exit 2025 and look ahead at the new year. 😇

Concierge Client Update

In this week’s update from the proverbial “news desk” for Concierge, I’ll talk about the ongoing site migrations, a new section of the Client Center, and Basecamp.

Heres the video update…

WordPress News & Updates

SEOPress 9.4. SEOPress came out with version 9.4…. and this version has a better integration with the native block editor. Typically, the SEO fields are pushed way down to the bottom of the screen because the block builder takes up the whole thing. In the new version, if you have the universal metabox enabled, you’ll have a convenient button at the top of the interface to easier access to your SEO settings. Click here for the full release notes.

Responsive Editing Native To WordPress. If you’re using something like Kadence with the block editor, you can already do responsive editing (where you have certain visual changes depending on the device type). But, natively, the block editor has been sorely lacking. Some preview images have been posted of the work in progress on this front. Right now, it seems to focus more on hiding elements on tablet/mobile… not necessarily different visual settings. But, I imagine it will eventually get there.

Cloudflare Year In Review. Cloudflare has posted their 2025 Year In Review report, which provides some insight into overall internet traffic patterns. There’s been a 19% growth in global internet traffic. Starlink definitely seems to be helping with accessibility. Interestingly, of the 5000 top domains in the world, WordPress is powering 47% of them.

BuddyBoss Shady Billing Practices. An interesting thread on Reddit where a user reports being unexpectedly billed an annual renewal for BuddyBoss for $465, without any advanced notification. Then, when he asked for a refund, he was denied. This seems pretty shady. From a business perspective, there is simply no reason to refuse a refund on a renewal charge aside from just being stubborn. I am seeing FAR more complaints about BuddyBoss these days than anything good. That is one company that needs a course correction, if you ask me.

Ollie Pro Class Manager. Ollie Pro is doing some great work with the native block editor – and now they’ve released a new class manager. This is more for the developers among us, but it makes it easier to create and manage your own custom CSS classes and apply them to blocks through your site.

Enterprise Isn’t Running From WordPress. When the whole WPEngine/Automattic fiasco heated up, I remember hearing that enterprise and big business was avoiding WordPress due to the uncertainty. Well, apparently that wasn’t true. The 2025 State of Enterprise WordPress report was released. Reportedly, 95% of organizations running WordPress plan to continue doing so…. up from 75% the prior year. 28% of these organizations reported seeing over 10 million visitor monthly. Interestingly, too, most of the organizations have adopted the block editor for their site editing…. versus proprietary page builders like Elementor. In a reaction post, WebDevStudios has pointed out that the block editor is now the Enterprise Standard…. and that relying on “legacy” page builders is a short-term gain for a long-term pain. If you continue to rely on a page builder, you are planning for obsolescence.

The Pros And Cons of Plugin Ecosystems

One of the things I’ve been noticing for awhile in the land of WordPress is the creation of plugin ecosystems. These are plugin SILOS – where the plugins are all developed by the same company – that are often marketed together.

And 3 of these ecosystems come to mind off the top of my head:

• Awesome Motive (with WPCode, WPForms, MemberPress, etc.)
• The “Sure” line of products (Surecart, SureForms, SureRank, SureDash, etc.)
• The “Fluent” line of products (FluentCart, FluentCRM, Fluent Forms, etc.)

Each of these companies are expanding their product line into a full end-to-end ecosystem. Awesome Motive is a little looser about it just because that company ends up acquiring so many plugins, but the Sure ecosystem just keeps coming out with new stuff. And, so does the “Fluent” ecosystem.

And very often, I find that people tend to go “all in” with one or the other. If I go into a site which has WPForms, I will often see WPCode, WP Mail SMTP, All in One SEO, etc. If I go into a site that uses SureCart, I very often find them also using SureForms, OttoKit, Astra, Spectra, etc. And us “Fluent” guys often end up using many of them…. FluentCRM, Fluent Forms, FluentCart, FluentCommunity.

Often, it comes down to integrations. These ecosystems are designed to work together pretty seamlessly. Usually, when these teams work on integrations, they will work on integrating their own plugins before they think about others. Not only that, sometimes those integrations are even better with their own stuff. So, they’re providing every incentive for you to stay within their orbit.

There’s also the matter of cross-promotion. Awesome Motive is notorious for aggressive upsells into their own plugins from inside their other plugins. If you’re not careful, you’ll even end up auto-installing some of the other stuff!

I’m starting to think of the “Sure” team as “Awesome Motive Lite”… because frankly, I think they’re getting annoying with the cross-promotions within their plugins. They’re not auto-installing (yet), but I’m not a fan of getting ADVERTISING within my WordPress admin panel and the “Sure” guys are getting kinda bad in that department.

The “Fluent” people are way more subtle about it.

In the end, these teams are getting into the ecosystem game because it is good for business. When I first saw the release of SureForms… or SureRank… my reaction is WHY? Why even bother? The market does not need another forms plugin or another SEO plugin. But, it is an ecosystem play. And it works because literally just last week I had a new client come onboard Concierge and he was running quite the suite of “Sure” products. 😇

So, are these plugin ecosystems a good thing? Are there risks?

For the most part, I think it is convenient and could lead to a little less “trouble” down the road, potentially. After all, these ecosystem plugins tend to integrate with each other quite well. That makes life easier.

The risk of any of these ecosystems comes down to the development team and the company behind them – and whether they continue to do things right. The COMPANY can make or break you.

Will they change strategy and become more overly aggressive in their panel spam? Will they get acquired? Will they start trying to lock you in? If you’re running a full suite of plugins from the same company, then it makes you way more exposed to the decisions of that one company.

I avoid Awesome Motive because I don’t like their practices. Several of their plugins will even lock down and prevent you from using it if you don’t pay their expensive subscription fees. I’ve talked to MANY people who felt “stuck” because of this. And THAT is the real danger in going “all in” on any one ecosystem.

The “Sure” products do a lot of cloud SaaS stuff in their plugins, so it isn’t really digitally sovereign. That’s something that’s important to me, so I tend not to use their stuff much. I also don’t like the increasing nature of the cross promotions and sales coming into their products. To be honest, I have a little bit of a TRUST issue with this team. I also think their development pace on each product is too slow.

And then there’s the “Fluent” guys. I happen to love these guys. I really like their products, their development philosophy, pace of development, and accessibility. But…

Could they get acquired one day? Of course. Could they have a company cultural change some day that leads them to build in more aggressive sales and cross-promo into their plugins, or begin to do lock-outs if you don’t pay? They could. They don’t now – and I see no signs of it coming – but it is certainly possible.

And that’s the pros and cons lineup of these ecosystems.

Now, let’s just see if if they release “FluentSEO“. 😜 That would honestly be funny.