After a brief stint away for the holidays, 2019 is off with a bang (or, a shake, for the VIP Business Development team attending a meetup in Mexico City last week). The first 1/12th of the year has seen several exciting launches, including GitHub, Prensa Libre, and Crowley. Our client USA Today came back with its Ad Meter rankings of the most popular ad at the Superb Owl, but our favorite might be this shoutout to the free press from the Washington Post.
Take a look ahead at this month’s updates from across enterprise WordPress, including a spotlight straight from VIP’s own newsroom, and the running list of events we’ve got our eyes on this spring.
The VIP Launch Squad met in Boulder, Colorado last week. Photo not actual size. (Photo credit @kgagne)
News and Releases
Updates from around VIP, our clients, and our agency and technical partners.
- You can now watch and share the videos from November’s BigWP NYC event. Our thanks to Remy Stern of the New York Post, Setka CEO Katya Bazilevskaya, and Libby Parker and KAdam White of Human Made for dropping knowledge on managing push notifications, AMP compatibility, and customizing pre-existing Gutenberg blocks.
- GitHub has a new home on VIPGo, with a .blog TLD. Check out github.blog or their 2019 policy predictions for a look around the new digs.
- Prensa Libre is one of the biggest newspapers in Guatemala and one of the highest-trafficked websites in Central America. We partnered with Alley to migrate them over to WordPress and the VIP Go platform. New capabilities include a refreshed landing page module system, and the option to export wire stories straight to print.
- Congrats to Crowley on their long-haul launch of a new site on VIP, and many thanks to the small army of collaborators from across several teams who made this one possible.
- Alley published a robust 2018 year in review, highlighting their work with news organizations, museums, nonprofits, and more.
- Hello Design worked with MDC to build the Coral One robot, which Business Insider called the best robot at CES2019.
- Clutch named Human Made both a “Top 1000 Global” B2B company and “Top WordPress Development Company.”
- Reaktiv Studios launched Tala on VIP Go as a multilingual site.
- Rtcamp is heading to WordCamp Bangkok, where CEO Rahul Bansal will speak on the art of pricing. Read how choosing ‘focus’ as a guiding theme for 2018 impacted their year.
- XWP wrote a piece on what you need to know before you AMP. They also released v1.0.0 of their WordPress development library.
- Setka’s CEO Katya Bazilevskaya was quoted in the Native Advertising Institute’s 2019 predictions e-book (gated download).
Platform Notes
- We’re building a testing panel to give us feedback as we develop our client-facing tools. If you’re interested in helping us, please drop us a note via support.
- We’ve released WordPress 5.0 (Lobby post for clients) up to 5.0.3 (Lobby post) and Jetpack 6.9 (Lobby post)
- VIP CLI has been updated to 1.3.0. You’ll notice a few updates: we now preview the date and time of the backup used for sync, show the mapped domain when listing apps, and better messaging around environments–as well as some minor bugfixes and general bolt tightening. Please update your local install with
npm install -g @automattic/vip - MU Plugins:
- Query Monitor is updated to 3.1.1
- Fieldmanager is updated to 1.2.4 (Lobby post)
- Edit Flow is updated to 0.9 (lobby post for clients (Lobby post)
- Safe Redirect manager is 1.9.2 (Lobby post)
- Responsive Images are rolled out to all sites (Lobby post)
- Getty Images 4.0 (Lobby post)
- We’re upgrading our VIP Go Hosting to PHP 7.3, to take advantage of the performance benefits, stability, and security advantages there. Non-production environments were updated on Monday 4 February, and production sites are planned to be upgraded on Monday 25 February (Lobby post)
What We Read (And Listened To)
- Publishers are getting serious about podcast revenue (Digiday)
- Alert! Alert! The information demands on the modern digital journalist are overwhelming and leading to burnout (NiemanLab)
- How a Vermont social network became a model for online communities (The Verge)
- The future of media is niche (Axios)
- Design in technology (Aichaku podcast from Automattician John Maeda)
Spotlight
VIP is deeply committed to the sustainability of news organizations, large and small, around the world. We’re excited to share we’ve doubled down on that commitment by investing in the News Project. According to founder Merrill Brown, the News Project’s goal is to “stabilize existing news sites and encourage new startups by simplifying publishing and the path to sustainability.” Take a product tour to learn more about their tools, or sign up for their newsletter to stay up to date.
Upcoming Events
- Tickets are on sale for WordCamp London, April 5-7. This event joins a slate of WordCamps going down all across the globe this spring, including Jakarta and Pune on February 16, Helsinki March 7-8, and Miami March 15-17.
- ‘Intelligent Connectivity’ is the focus of #MWC19, coming to Barcelona February 25-28. Attendees can explore 8 themes, including Immersive Content and Digital Trust.
- This year’s (free) AMP Conference will be in Tokyo April 17-18. Already an AMP expert? Act fast: the call for speakers is open through February 14.