RUSSΞLL AARØN | #WPSupport

Not a word from @chrislema , @learnwithmattc or @innerwebs. You say something nice, from the heart and how you really feel and they have nothing to say. But they had something to say when they misunderstood what was said. Oh boy did they sure drop a comment one after another.

@BacLeodiv Not nearly as shameless as copying and pasting the same thing 5,900 other "influencers" have word for word.

If AI wrote most of your code, do you feel shameless calling yourself a founder?

@BridgetMWillard @ZacheryMimbsB According to Matt, it's destroyed. His words, not mine.

@ZacheryMimbsB Good q

EDIT. The Website GiveWP.com died. The plugin is alive.

@chrislema @innerwebs @learnwithmattc @innerwebs and @learnwithmattc you too. If you have ever questioned me - look at how I've ever treated you. With high respect. If you have any doubt that I am accusing you of anything other than doing what you felt was right, I'd love to fucking hear it.

@chrislema @innerwebs @learnwithmattc Chris. You literally gave them a legit blueprint & the right people to succeed in this space. IMO, a money printing machine w/ brand trust & zero micromanaging attached. I also disagreed with Stellar. Left right after you. If you wonder who's fucking team I'm on: 👀👇

The WordPress plugins that are slowly disappearing from the web (ala their own sites are replaced with a single generic landing page), is getting felt. Truly felt in a deeper way than most. Why is that? I'll give you my take (even though my take doesn't matter at all). I was hired by Liquid Web back when it was thinking about seriously getting into the WordPress game. We built a managed WordPress and a managed WooCommerce offering. And in that process I made the recommendation to purchase iThemes. Not because we were trying to own plugins. Because they had features that were faster to integrate than to build ourselves. Backups / Security - useful utilities. My recommendation, which our leadership and our board accepted, was a) keep the iThemes leaders in place, b) keep the iThemes brand in place, c) keep the products in the market. A couple of years later, we started thinking about hosting for WordPress applications. These would be customers whose web site was the application (not website was about the application or company). It's what @jason_coleman is doing today with membership hosting. But this was early. So the plan, and the investment hypothesis, was to purchase brands that had strong brand equity (again leaving them to run independently, leaving their brands in market, leaving their leadership in place) and build targeted hosting solutions for membership sites, fundraising sites, courseware sites. That's why we purchased Pippin's membership plugin, why we chased GiveWP, and why we went after LearnDash. It was to turn them into vertical saas solutions powered by WordPress (and these key application-based plugins). Later, I understood the idea of Stellar and its approach but disagreed with it, and it led to me moving on. But I think when you see GiveWP, LearnDash, and Kadence, for example, all disappearing, I think the reason is because they're not just normal plugins. They aren't utilities. They don't just do a task. If one of the plugins I use to route people to the latest post on my blog goes away, I look for another. But these were full "solution" products that people embraced and let into their hearts, as well as their businesses. When your entire business is sitting on a key product, and it no longer feels stable, it makes your own business feel unstable. That's what I think is happening. Just my .02

@benUNC @AlexStandiford this. clients asking me what they do now and how to avoid this in the future.

The biggest legitimate issue I see is that LOTS of people lost access to their licenses, and therefore could not even download products they've already paid for. On top of the site that hosted those products going away with no advanced notice, it was one of the strangest things I've ever seen a company do. If I had woken up with the expectation to add the Kadence blocks pro plugin to my site today, being a lifetime license owner, not only would I not be able to download it, the entire website it used to live on is redirecting to a single (remarkably bland) landing page at LW, which I don't know how to log into. With no warning.

Can people help me understand what specifically about the StellarWP retirement is causing such an outrage? On the surface, it just looks to me like a company is tightening up their brand and positioning. I'm not really looking for input from couch marketers with their hot take on why it's a bad move from a marketing perspective, I'm a lot more interested in hearing from users and customers to understand what signal they're seeing from this, and why it's concerning to you. I have no dog in this, just genuinely trying to understand the context.

Destroyed. This hits hard. Words from the brain that helped create a plugin, a community and contributed to the open source community's journey forward.

@KatieKeithBarn2 EDD was my favorite brand and I really loved learning from Pippin. That guy taught me so much about WPEngine hosting. I guess we're just hopeful romantics about products in the WordPress space when others are more of a Netflix and Chill type.

One day in 2018, my husband Andy called me over to his desk. He was on the IconicWP website and said "Look at this site. They sell WooCommerce plugins like us, but their branding is better than Barn2's. It's run by one British guy - James Kemp - who obviously knows what he's doing." After that, I became friends with @jamesckemp and we worked positively together in a way that I've never achieved with any other competitor. (We heavily cross-promoted each other's non-competing products while quietly not mentioning the ones where there was overlap.) This continued after he sold to Stellar/Liquid Web although from the outside, I could quickly see evidence that Iconic was never going to be their priority. After he left, I continued doing some cross-promotion with Iconic, although his replacements never really understood the fact that we were only competitors in specific areas, so the relationship between Barn2 and Iconic dwindled. Despite this, Iconic has always been one of my favourite brands in the WordPress space. I was sad to see the end of it yesterday, with the deletion of the website that brought me to Iconic in the first place, and most of its plugins being merged into Kadence Shop Kit. I'm particularly sad that their blog no longer exists because it contained many excellent posts promoting my plugins 😬 Task for today: Scrub Iconic from 34 posts on the Barn2 blog and find other plugins to replace them with (not Kadence Shop Kit...)

@KatieKeithBarn2 Look at what Matt tried to do with ACF. We can all do the same thing with these products we all use and love. GiveWP becomes DonateWP and people will make the switch just by word of mouth and a couple posts. They really need a prestige here.

I’ve been reflecting on why I (and so many other people) care so much about what’s happening to the ex-Stellar brands. Over dinner, my husband correctly pointed out that companies get acquired all the time and are often sidelined or even closed down. But for me, this is different because: - I’ve known and used many of these products for 10+ years. - I have so many friends who either founded these companies or used to work at Stellar. - I’ve heard so much about the problems and frustrations over the years, which makes me feel closer to the situation even though I’m not involved. - It could have been Barn2, except that I chose not to sell when everyone else was getting acquired (and I felt like the odd one out for wanting to remain independent!).

@jeffr0 Because that's what everyone wants. More lock-in. Screw that noise. Someone's going to fork the events calendar, RCP, GuveWP and create something new on the repo, just like Matt did with ACF. Then all will be right in the world once again.

The rollout might have been shit, but the unification of products under the brand and leveraging the hardware of Nexcess is actually something that should have happened a long time ago. From a business perspective, I think this is a good long play move.

@JustinFerriman 100% aware. I think it's stupid on their part. How can you call yourself a managed WordPress host and then you're killing some of the biggest names that built the community community

@enqueue_russ I get it. Though the product is still there and it's still the same name. My post is more regarding the brand identity as I knew it (its own website, a prominent logo, and the like).

RIP to the LearnDash brand 🪦 - the site now redirects to a lander on LiquidWeb. Not many people know this, but I randomly registered that domain in 2011, about a year before I launched (the project was originally "WPLMS"). I bought it for $10 when I combined the words "Learning" and "Dashboard" together. When I asked people what they thought "LearnDash" meant, NO ONE thought it meant "learning dashboard", not even my parents. 😆 ... Most thought I copied "DoorDash"... which isn't true; that came out after. In any event, these kinds of changes happen in business I guess. I loved that brand and gave it every ounce of my energy and passion. End of an era.🥀 #WordPress

@KatieKeithBarn2 @learnwithmattc @innerwebs No argument there.

@enqueue_russ @learnwithmattc @innerwebs At least the people are still around. They just work elsewhere now.

It's the end of a #WordPress era. I was lucky enough to know the brains behind some of my favorite plugins, check out where they were developed & take home some awesome stuff. I'm gonna have to have a beer in honor and pour out a 40oz later tonight for my homies.

GiveMoreWP. ThanksGivingWP. GivverWP. GiveWP Reloaded. Yet another donation plugin. @learnwithmattc and @innerwebs Just saying. Same great plugin. New Management. Everyone loves a sequal.

@enqueue_russ @innerwebs Thanks Russell. I hope to ship more product for you soon! We can pour a few more with new brands and products

@KatieKeithBarn2 Yes I am. I use @williamsba tutorial and his Abilities Plugin on Github. He makes it easy to understand. Everything you need is in this video with Links. youtu.be/bifrczzAM-8?si… Once you have MCP setup to your site (local staging or prod) it's easy to do.

Are you successfully using AI to directly update the content of your WordPress site? I haven't figured this out yet as the official MCP is so technical and the others look bloated, so I'd love to know what you're using.

@jessuppi @KatieKeithBarn2 You're all out of tokens. What would you like to do? > wait until your time resets > buy more tokens

@enqueue_russ @KatieKeithBarn2 Is it the guy who made their PATH TO A MILLION DOLLARS landing page?

It's the end of an era - StellarWP is no more. Some of the most important brands in the WordPress ecosystem - LearnDash, The Events Calendar, Kadence, Iconic, GiveWP and others - have had their websites taken offline and redirected to basic landing pages on the website of their parent company, Liquid Web 😢 For 5 years, I watched the development of StellarWP with interest as it was a first-of-its kind in WordPress. I never shared my opinions publicly because I had many friends there. However, those people have either quit or been laid-off, and now feels like the time due to genuine concern for these great brands and their future, and what this means for the wider WordPress community. Back in 2020/2021, the WordPress product ecosystem was growing rapidly. Many products were seeing huge growth, which sparked a wave of acquisitions. Some were by hosting companies like Liquid Web, who saw potential in expanding into products. They acquired an impressive range of products and created the StellarWP umbrella brand to house them. In my opinion, this was the first mistake. I never understood the purpose of a public-facing Stellar brand because it diluted the visibility of well-known brands that the public was already familiar with. For example, each individual product no longer had a prominent presence at WordCamps because they were represented at the shared Stellar booth instead, which felt strange for brands as big as LearnDash. I'm sure the existence of Stellar brought some benefits internally - e.g. shared resources and centralized marketing - but publicly, I think it harmed the products rather than helping them. Another mistake was acquiring companies of vastly different sizes. It's sensible to apply the 80/20 rule to business by prioritizing the highest revenue products - I do this myself with Barn2's plugins. However, I noticed that some of Stellar's smaller brands - once highly respected independent businesses - were neglected. I struggle to see the logic in acquiring a brand and then giving it less focus. I suspect that some of the companies that acquired WordPress products during the 2020/2021 boom expected the high level of growth to continue post-Covid, which was never realistic. If revenue projections weren't met then naturally, this would have led to the patterns we've seeing at Stellar, such as multiple rounds of cuts, layoffs and restructures - and ultimately deprioritizing their entire product range, as we are seeing with the death of their individual websites. However, the true reason I'm writing this is not to analyze the reasons - it's because I'm concerned about what happens next. I can foresee two possible futures for Stellar's products: FUTURE 1 - SLOW DECLINE The decision to relegate huge brands to minor landing pages on the Liquid Web site suggests that we'll see a slow decline of these products over time. We'll see further cuts and layoffs, and some of WordPress' best brands will fade. That would be a loss for everyone because strong, visible products strengthen the WordPress ecosystem as a whole. FUTURE 2 - ACQUISITION I'd love to see the Stellar brands get acquired by a company (or multiple companies) that understand their value and can give each product what it needs to grow and thrive. Companies with a strong record of building successful WordPress products. I don’t know what will happen next, but I hope these products end up with people who truly understand and care about the WordPress product ecosystem and have the ability to take them forward. More than anything, I hope the outcome gives the remaining people working on these products the stability and leadership they deserve.

@AlexStandiford Yeah, I'm the same way. I want to meet all the people I HAVEN'T met before and learn how they use WP. I'm not there for the popularity contest anymore.

I'm often told that when I'm at WordCamps I'm "a blur". I'm told that I am "everywhere". It's not completely wrong, but it suggests that what I'm doing is more-random then the actual strategy that's behind the approach. I'm not just frantically talking to everyone with a WordCamp tag, I'm coming into WordCamp with a plan to talk to the three types of people that I can expect to run into there. I've found that there's 3 types of people that you can talk to at a conference. Customers, collaborators, and competitors, and yet many people treat everyone like "customers" because it's the only offer they've prepared when they go to conferences. The real shame is that "collaborators" are where the real money tends to be, since those people can become one-to-many relationships, especially in B2B. Before you go into any kind of watering hole, make sure you understand what you have to offer to both customers AND collaborators. You (hopefully!) know what your offer to your customer is, but have you spent the time to think about what your offer to potential collaborators looks like? If not, spend some time preparing that before your next excursion. You may be missing out on some of the most amazing opportunities simply because you haven't thought to ask for it.