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Plugin demos with the WordPress playground

For years, plugin developers have been looking for ways to demo their plugins to users. Users don’t read readme.txt files or plugin pages on WordPress.org. They

Saying goodbye to Marieke at Yoast

Last Friday (June 23rd 2023) we had Marieke‘s goodbye party from Yoast. With that, we’ve both completely stepped out at both Yoast and Newfold Digital, and can

How to deal with plugin security issues

Dealing with security issues for your WordPress plugin can be hard and even a bit scary, certainly when it’s happening to you for the first time. In this post I

Gravity Forms notification routing with a lookup table

I had a need for complex routing of notification messages in Gravity Forms. The email could, depending on a dropdown field, go to some 50-60 different recipient

WordPress’ admin UI needs to be better

The WordPress’ admin UI needs to be drastically improved. It should be improved not just for WordPress core itself, but it should implement a simple and clearly

Social & Schema images: naming considerations

I’ve been playing a lot with Schema and Social images recently and one thing has become clear: we need better naming of these images and we should probably impr

Optimize crawling: let’s turn things around!

I wrote about crawl optimization last week, mostly about getting stuff that you don’t want crawled to not be crawled. There’s more to say about that, and I will

Optimize crawling, for the environment

Search engines rely on spiders / bots to crawl the web and find (new) content. Every time they find a URL, they crawl it and if it’s interesting to them, they’l

WordPress’ market share is shrinking

There’s no more denying it: if you look at W3Techs CMS market share numbers, WordPress’ market share is shrinking, losing 0.4% market share since February. I do

Transitioning to a new role at Yoast

At the end of this month, I will transition to a different role at Yoast. No, I will not leave Yoast. But, I am going to pursue some other dreams outside of Yoa

Elementor: WordPress’ secret growth driver?

Is Elementor the secret behind WordPress’ growth in the last years? We know from my CMS market share analysis that WordPress has been growing fast. Could it be

Yoast joins Newfold

Today we announced that Yoast will join Newfold Digital. Marieke and myself, as well as Omar, Chaya and Thijs have sold our shares. We will, however, all remain