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.
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:
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.
I posted at the end of last year about a side-project: overhauling the TaxoPress plugin. We continue to make steady progress on this plugin. The most recent new feature is “Auto Terms” which can scan your WordPress content and automatically assign terms. There are lots of ways to get big websites with tons of content. Some sites have forums with 10,000’s of posts. Some sites have large stores with massive amounts of products. Personally, my sites have always leaned towards content. I’ve written a lot of blog posts and documentation articles. At a certain point, all that content becomes hard…
Logtivity is a WordPress activity log that we launched this summer. Not only can you track all the activity on your site, but with Logtivity you can also turn that information into beautiful and useful charts. We use the charts all the time in our other business. You can use these charts to show logins, purchases, subscriptions, cancellations, downloads, or any other key events. Logtivity charts just got a lot better because you can customise the date range for charts. Your charts are updated with advanced date ranges, so you can zoom in to view any time period.
Earlier this year, we took over running Simple Tags, an old WordPress plugin that had 80,000 users, but hadn’t been updated in a long time. We saw a need in WordPress for one plugin that can manage all the taxonomies on your site. A plugin like that would be incredibly useful in organizing large sites. On the surface, these deals always look attractive for developers. We get a large existing userbase at an affordable price. And hopefully those users can become customers and we can build a business. The reality is more rocky.
On Friday, our new Logtivity project was featured on WPTavern. For a start-up, being featured on the Tavern often marks a debut into the WordPress community. Every now and again, some complaints pop up about WPTavern. Mostly they center around the fact that the site is owned by Matt Mullenweg, and there are potential conflicts of interest, but people are rarely able to point to specific examples. WPTavern is well run. Yes, it probably focuses more on boosting and encouraging the WordPress community, than it does on hard-hitting criticism, but that’s not a bad thing at all. For entirely independent…
We launched Logtivity in August: it’s a new activity log service that helps you understand exactly what’s happening on your WordPress site. The first version of Logtivity had support for the WordPress core, so it recorded eventss like these: WordPress Core Updated Post Updated Post Published Attachment Uploaded Theme Deleted User Created Profile Updated Plugin Activated The next big step is integration with Easy Digital Downloads. If you sell WordPress plugins or themes, there is a very good chance that you use the Software Licensing extension. It is a cornerstone of the WordPress economy.
A few months ago, I saw a tweet from Iain Poulson, who has been very active on the business side of WordPress. Iain regularly links to WordPress products for sale, and this time it was a listing on Flippa:
Earlier this year, I posted that we had adopted a WordPress plugin called Simple Tags, and renamed it “TaxoPress”. Since then, we’ve been working hard with frequent releases. Here is the download chart for the plugin on WordPress.org. Each big spike represents a new release. Can you spot when we took over?