Steve’s Blog

Logtivity Interview with WPTavern

For the second time in a couple of years, I talked with Nathan Wrigley on the WPTavern podcast.

The first time around, we chatted about Gutenberg Phase 3.

This time, we discussed launching a SaaS service. In particular, we discussed how difficult it can be.

I had been talking with other WordPress friends who want to start SaaS. They develop successful plugins and want to branch out to launch a SaaS project. So we focused on the lessons we’ve learned from Logtivity over the last couple of years.

I ended up turning the podcast into a blog post: “Lessons for WordPress Plugin Developers Starting a SaaS“.

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We’re Now Running Logtivity, the WordPress Activity Log

Logtivity is now part of the team that runs PublishPress, MetaSlider, and TaxoPress.

Back in 2021, I told the story of how we became part-owners of Logtivity. And over the last couple of years, I’ve been running Logtivity with my business partner, Ralph Morris. Our aim was to build the best activity log service for WordPress.

During 2023, Ralph’s time has been squeezed between a new job and a growing family. Although 2023 was incredibly productive for Logtivity, we talked at the end of the year and Ralph realized he was over-committed. He needed to recover some of his time. So we agreed to an ownership change. Although we had previously been a minority partner, our team will take over the running of Logtivity.

This process was a little more complicated than we expected because Ralph is in the UK and we’re in the US. The takeover involved closing a UK company and opening a new US company. Stripe doesn’t allow you to move accounts between countries, so we need to migrate all the accounts from one Stripe account to another.

It’s time for our team to get to work and keep working to build the best activity log for WordPress.

Read the full Logtivity announcement.

Read MoreWe’re Now Running Logtivity, the WordPress Activity Log

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.

Continue reading “I’m Trying to Understand a New Group of Publishers”

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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.

Continue reading “We Acquired the Tag Groups Plugin to Join TaxoPress”

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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:

Read MoreInterview With WPTavern on Gutenberg Phase 3

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:

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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.

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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:

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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.

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TaxoPress Gets a Big New Feature: Auto Terms

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 to manage. However, if you’re publishing 10, 100 or even 1,000’s of posts every day, it can be difficult to organize it all.

Continue reading “TaxoPress Gets a Big New Feature: Auto Terms”

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