2017 started off well. I remember thinking, “For the first time, I’m going to think about the year ahead, make a plan, try to stick to it”. It was the first week of January. I should’ve just gone back to bed. To be fair to myself, I got most of my annual plan done by… read more
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I used to consider myself a decent designer but I’m very out of practice. Design is definitely one of those muscles you have to use regularly. I built the first version of the Kanban for WordPress homepage over a weekend keeping the design very simple. It has served us fo a year, but we need it updated… read more
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I first heard about using a 100% money back guarantee from Joel Spolksy in his book Joel on Software back in 2004. There were so many good ideas in that book, but that one stuck with me. The no-questions-asked 90-day money back guarantee was one of the best decisions we ever made at Fog Creek. by… read more
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There are two kinds of garage sales – to make money or to get rid of your crap. I’m starting to think of products and pricing the same way. With Kanban for WordPress, for months I got almost an email a day asking for one specific feature. I built the feature as a paid add-on,… read more
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I liked John Turner’s article on wpKube outlining what it costs him to run SeedProd. I think these articles are interesting, and important when considering jumping into a product business. Here’s what Kanban for WordPress has cost me so far, aside from time (which has been hundreds of hours). I’ve listed it roughly in order, as I believe… read more
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I wrote a little rant advocating against people wasting their own time here: https://kanbanwp.com/blog/do-you-really-need-this-plugin/ But from a WordPress plugin developer, this procrastination (or experimentation if you’re less cynical) is what makes the WordPress plugin ecosystem amazing. There’s a general attitude of experimentation and self-sufficiency not found in other technical spaces online. Site owners, who are… read more
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It’s been about 3 months since launching Kanban for WordPress. Here are some of the experiences I’ve had. I lucked onto Kanban as a niche, as there were no boards in the WordPress plugin repo. If you’re looking for a place to start in WordPress plugins, I’d say look at existing SaaS apps, and find… read more
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The following comes from one more discussion with one more “true” PHP developer complaining about WordPress. Instead of trying to defend it, I found myself using Matt’s own words – learn WordPress deeply. I’ve been building some sort of website on WordPress for 5 years now. My knowledge and interaction have increased at a similar… read more
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For our new plugin Kanban, we have a custom WordPress admin menu page. So of course I wanted to add a custom icon to it. I looked a the Yoast SEO WordPress plugin which has a custom plugin, and discovered it wasn’t an image,but a Base 64 encoded svg image. Great! I’d rather do that… read more
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We’re building a plugin for musicians to share their tracks. We want each track page to automatically include an audio player for the track. We want to allow the site owner to be able to add their own content above or below the player, but a player should always show up somwehere. Here’s how we… read more
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