One of the key players in the WordPress publishing ecosystem is Newspack. They have a hosted service, but it’s also possible to download and use Newspack independently. The key Newspack plugins are all available on Github.
Over at PublishPress, we’ve been seeing some customers use Newspack on their own hosting. This led me to write a guide to using Newspack for self-hosted projects.
Continue reading “Newspack Can Do For Publishers What WooCommerce Did For eCommerce”There’s a fascinating story around the work of Flatwater Free Press (FFP), a WordPress publisher in Nebraska.
Yanqi Xu is a reporter for FFP. She won a national award for “Our Dirty Water”, a series about Nebraska’s high nitrate levels and their connection clusters amongst local residents. Farmers in Nebraska are using fertilizers full of nitrate. That nitrate making people sick across the state and forcing local governments to spend millions of dollars to clean up their drinking water.
Continue reading “Nebraska’s FlatWater Free Press Gets in Good Trouble”WordPress is a platform that focuses on publishers. The project’s mission is to “Democratize Publishing“.
However, WordPress does lack some key features that most publishers need. One of these missing features is custom statuses. The current choice for WordPress users is between “Draft” and “Pending Review”.
Here’s a typical request from one of our PublishPress customers: “We need a way to mark our posts as Draft, Filed, First Read, Second Read, Hold, Killed, etc.”
Continue reading “Custom Statuses for WordPress Publishers”Last month, I wrote about the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress sites. ActivityPub could form the basis for a new social network with your WordPress site as your profile.
The time is right to explore alternatives because social media is abandoning publishers.
As you’ve probably heard, the Twitter is now called X, and it’s not very good any more. It used to be an excellent place to follow the news.
But the truth is that Twitter/X never sent many visitors to publishers. Even when it was more successful, it drove less than 2% of visitors.
What has changed in 2023 is Facebook.
Continue reading “Social Media is Abandoning WordPress Publishers. What’s Next?”Over 10 years ago, I wrote a post with this title: “There is an Open Source Rival to Facebook: WordPress“.
In that post I pointed out that WordPress had almost all the features needed to build a social platform and asked, “What might happen if all those WordPress sites were linked together into a network?”
Continue reading “How to Use the WordPress ActivityPub Plugin”