Steve’s Blog

June 22, 2023

I’m Trying to Understand a New Group of Publishers

For my day job, I run PublishPress, TaxoPress, and MetaSlider which produce publishing plugins for WordPress.

Over the last couple of years, that work has introduced me to an exciting new movement of publishers and journalists. Because the movement is so new, I’ve struggled to define it and haven’t seen many other people talking about it.

The solution? I’ve been blogging through it. For about 18 months, I’ve been writing at KinshiPress, featuring these new publishers as I find.

May 16, 2023

We Acquired the Tag Groups Plugin to Join TaxoPress

This is slightly old news, but worth recapping. Late in 2022, we acquired the acquired the Tag Groups plugin and added it to TaxoPress.com.

We first launched TaxoPress because there was a gap in the market. There were no good WordPress plugins to help you organize and categorize your content.

The only existing plugin I could find was called “Tag Groups, which had been created by a developer named Christoph Amthor. This was a really useful plugin that allows you to display and filter content based on taxonomy terms.

February 23, 2023

Logtivity Reaches 1,000 Active Installs

This week, Logtivity passed 1,000 active installs, as measured by the WordPress.org plugin repository. Logtivity is a SaaS service we built to track all the activity on your WordPress sites, and then sends you alerts for important events.

1,000 active installs is both a small deal and quite a big deal.

February 17, 2023

WordPress Interview With The Repository

The Repository is probably the best regular WordPress newsletter. The team do a great job of featuring weekly news in context, featuring a wide range of quote from people in the business.

They asked me five questions for a recent edition.

February 1, 2023

This Week in WordPress #240 on WP Builds

I joined Nathan Wrigley and the WP Builds panel for episode 240 of This Week in WordPress, covering the latest news and developments from the WordPress community.

December 8, 2022

Interview With WPTavern on Gutenberg Phase 3

Phase 3 is the most interesting part of the Gutenberg project for me personally.

Phase 3 will allow multiple users to interact with WordPress content at the same time. This is the Google Docs experience inside WordPress. Open up a document, click a button and share that document with others. Those with the correct permissions can interact with you in real time, and you can see the amendments they’re making in real-time.

I chatted about Phase 3 with Nathan Wrigley at WPTavern. We talked about why this a necessary update to WordPress, but also why it’s such a difficult feat of engineering.

Update: as Phase 3 gets close, I’ve been writing more on this topic:

October 27, 2022

Logtivity 2.0 Has Hosted Error Logs for WordPress

At Logtivity we aim solve problems faced by WordPress agencies, or anyone else who is in charge of lots of WordPress sites.

One problem that agencies kept talking about was error logs. It’s often very difficult for them to view error logs for WordPress sites. Some hosting companies require you to contact them, and a few days later, they’ll send you the logs!

With Logtivity 2.0, you’ll always have instant access to view the errors, because we host your error logs. I’ve attached a screenshot below.

September 22, 2022

From 1,000 to 1,000,000 WordPress Installs

Back in February 2019, I wrote a post called “Going From 1,000 to 100,000 WordPress Installs“. At that time, we were just starting our WordPress journey and made the decision to acquire some popular plugins to build the “PublishPress” brand.

Just over three years later, the journey is going strong and we can add an extra zero to the install numbers.

June 17, 2022

We launched RoleUp for Onboarding and Offboarding WordPress Users

Over the years, we’ve built a lot of WordPress plugins. Recently we’ve experimenting with SaaS platforms for WordPress.

First was Watchful which is a site maintenance service.

Next was Logtivity which is a monitoring service for WordPress agencies.

This month, we’ve launched RoleUp. This a platform to onboard and offboard users from a lot of WordPress sites. You can see a preview of the RoleUp dashboard in the image below:

March 11, 2022

Logtivity Has Notifications That Work Across All Your Sites

I’ve been building sites and starting projects for … too many years now. Let’s say 20 years as a conservative estimate. I’ve collected dozens of sites for work, hobbies, side-projects, and for various family members.

It’s always been a pain to keep track of them. At least one site every year gets hacked and falls victim to a bad plugin, or some mistake I’ve made.

So I’ve been making full use of the “Global Alerts” we’ve just built at Logtivity.