marcusfrontender

“Something I miss in WordPress is audit logs” – Jonas Lejon

Posted on 2017-11-20 by marcusfrontender

We talked briefly with Jonas Lejon about WPScans and WordCamp Stockholm 2017.

What does your organization do?

WPScans.com is an online security scanner for WordPress vulnerabilities. We keep track of all your WordPress installations and tell you as soon as they are outdated.

How do you help support WordPress enthusiasts and professionals?

Yes, both types of WordPress users can can use our WordPress Security service.

What kind of client would be a good fit for you, and who wouldn’t?

I would say that everyone with an WordPress installation should try WPScans.

How do your organization add value to the WordPress community?

We do WordPress Security Research and keep track on vulnerability statistics.

Is there anything in WordPress that you would change, and why?

Something I miss in WordPress is audit logs. So you can do more tracing in who logged in when and similar security events.

Where will WordPress be in 2 years from now?

WordPress will be even more secure. I think with the Bug Bounty program more and more people are watching and trying to hack WordPress and therefore making it more secure.

Is there anything else that you would like the WordCamp attendees know?

Nope, just try our service. It’s free and if you like the service you can try our premium subscription for 19€/month.

“Sharing is important to us” – Thomas Audunhus

Posted on 2017-11-20 by marcusfrontender

We talked to Thomas Audunhus, Country Manager at Servebolt about all things WordPress and the key to scalability and performance in WordPress.

What does your organization do?

At Servebolt we are believe in a faster internet. We contribute to a faster internet by delivering amazingly fast hosting.

How do you help support WordPress enthusiasts and Professionals?

Sharing is important to us. We have WordPress professionals in our team that share their knowledge with the WordPress community. We are continuously researching how to speed up WordPress, WooCommerce and websites in general. A lot of what we do is shared and distributed as open source projects, or as publicly available articles.

What kind of client would be a good fit for you, and who wouldn’t?

We do hosting without cutting corners, by delivering extreme peak performance – without basing performance on full page caching. Our hosting is fast because of kick ass hardware, a self-maintained software stack designed for performance and security, and a world class R&D team that develops and optimises the stack to the bleeding edge in regards of performance. Not everyone needs that. But if you need high performance, scalability and a reliable environment that is amazingly fast, we’re the right fit.

How do your organization add value to the WordPress community?

For us the WordPress community with Meetups and WordCamps are essential to meeting the right people, and to plant our ideas, spread our vision and make our contributions available to the community.

The community is the corner stone of WordPress, and is essential for making better sites with WordPress, especially since many WordPress professionals work alone or in small teams. This is why we support the community as best we can with sponsorships of Meetups and WordCamps, and share our performance knowledge with the community.

Is there anything in WordPress that you would change, and why?

Thank you for asking!

We have passion for the low level stuff. Databases, table types and indexes, .htaccess files, compression, aggregation and optimisation. The key to scalability and performance relies on this, and there are a variety of things we work on.

When it comes to Core, for instance the wp_options table is lacking an index on the autoload column. For any sites with a big options table, adding the index will give a nice performance improvement.

ALTER TABLE `wp_options` ADD INDEX(`autoload`);

Also, why are transients stored and maintained in the options table? After all, the options table is the heart of WordPress, and constantly inserting and updating data there is an issue – especially at scale.

When it comes to performance, we also think it is important to move away from the idea that WordPress should do everything. For example providing a security framework or a complete cache system using PHP, largely based on .htaccess rules. PHP is slow, and the .htaccess system is an incredibly slow part of the web application stack, and should be completely avoided – if possible.

We are seeing a lot of very commonly used WordPress plugins that not use databases and indexes correctly. Databases are an advanced topic, so maybe the WordPress Community should organise a team that did reviews of how the most commonly used plugins use databases? We’d love to contribute to this.

Lastly i have to mention that more and more developers prioritize convenience over performance in the way they set up and develop WordPress, and the hosting environment. I believe that’s an issue that’s just going to keep growing, resulting in slower sites and less reliable sites. This is something we try to attack in any way we can, but I hope more developers and other hosting providers will embrace this issue and do something about it too.

Where will WordPress be in 2 years from now?

Servebolt believes that WordPress will be powering even larger E-commerce stores, especially as WooCommerce continues to professionalise and evolve. We also believe that WordPress will be increasingly used as a backend and CMS, and less just for the front-end application.

Is there anything else that you would like the WordCamp attendees know?

Our partner network is open for submissions. And we’ll love to chat with every WordPress professional, and agencies large and small about partnership. We want to make you build better websites!

“We have users and customers spanning from individuals to larger multinational companies” – Niclas Alvebratt from beebyte

Posted on 2017-11-13 2017-11-12 by marcusfrontender

We sat down with Niclas Alvebratt from hosting and cloud service provider Beebyte to find out more about them and chat WordPress.

What does your organization do

Beebyte is a leading hosting and cloud service provider with focus on the Swedish market. Among our users you find small independent consultants as well as larger e-commerce factories.

How do you help support WordPress enthusiasts and professionals?

We do this by developing new features and tools for our users that adds value to their end business, for example by integrating staging tools and web site monitoring systems out of the box. Business, no matter if it is WordPress based or not, does not mean winner+looser=value, it actually means winner+winner=great value.

What kind of client would be a good fit for you, and who wouldn’t

We have users and customers spanning from individuals to larger multinational companies. A very wide user base that we have built by intention. By having such a wide range of users we can listen in to different user experience and let those inspire us to develop new features that can enhance our end users businesses. We also take an active stand against pornography and websites promoting violence, those kind of websites aren’t welcome. We strongly believe that a clean conscience goes hand in hand with good business.

How does your organization add value to the WordPress community

Being deeply committed to the open source culture, our owners annually gives money to support the Free Software Foundation – a foundation that aims to spread the word of the benefits of open source and GPL licensing.

Where will WordPress be in 2 years from now?

I’ll guess that we will continue to see a steady growth of WordPress instances and especially new Woocommerce setups.

Is there anything else that you would like the WordCamp attendees know?

Yes please stop by our booth and take part of a very interesting and geeky challenge!

“We are very focused on helping the community with relatable and actionable content” – Maik Gruppen

Posted on 2017-11-07 2017-11-06 by marcusfrontender

We sat down with Maik Gruppen from managed WordPress hosting company Savvii to talk about WordPress and WordCamp Stockholm 2017.

What does your organization do?

Managed WordPress Hosting for European agencies and entrepreneurs that is fast, secure and stable. From the community for the community.

How do you help support WordPress enthusiasts and professionals?

First of all, all not-for-profit WordPress related sites host for free at Savvii. Secondly, we believe that sharing = caring. We are very focused on helping the community with relatable and actionable content. Not only hosting related. For example: How agencies can grow with recurring revenue models, how WooCommerce shops can prepare for the holiday season or which themes are a smart choice to implement. We also host events that are not WordPress specific, like PHP and tech meetups.

What kind of client would be a good fit for you, and who wouldn’t?

Especially three types of clients are very happy with us: Agencies, developers, and entrepreneurs, like publishers or bloggers with a large audience. We only do WordPress hosting and nothing else, period. That focus is real important to us. Companies looking for generic hosting solutions, like domains and other-than-WordPress CMS’, are not our target audience.

How does your organization add value to the WordPress community?

We do a few things that are implemented in the core of Savvii. We’re community-driven. That means we organize Meet-ups (WordPress Meetup Nijmegen, our home town) and help organizing others. Also, we’re contributing much to WordCamps. Not only by sponsoring, but also by volunteering, coming to Contributor Days with a large team and by giving talks. Next to that, we develop for and with open source software. For example, our plugin, Warpdrive, is open source. We also contribute development time improving open source software.

Is there anything in WordPress that you would change, and why?

We would love WordPress to be friendlier to the modern developer, for example with a MVC set-up, and to stop supporting ancient PHP versions. We also would like WordPress to become even more friendly for enterprise customers with a better roles & user rights system.

Where will WordPress be in 2 years from now?

Aah, the good old crystal ball, like Automattic, we are a strong supporter of net neutrality. That is going to be the next battle of the Internet, and we’re going to fight it together. As for the software itself, because more and more (bigger) companies adopt WordPress, a shift to more enterprise features will be necessary. Think of high availability options, better multisite and multi-language options built-in and more granular user management. At the moment though, it looks like development is heading the other way, with Gutenberg focusing on a broader audience.

Is there anything else that you would like the WordCamp attendees know?

I am giving a workshop about recurring revenue for agencies on the Contributor Day and I am combining it with some Roman history. So if you want to know how to grow your company with a subscription model and learn some cool facts, please join us! And if you’re interested in talking with us: We’re the guys in the blue Wapuu shirts!

WP Engine contributes over $1.5 million per year in time and contributions in support of the WordPress community

Posted on 2017-10-30 2017-10-30 by marcusfrontender

We spoke with Edmund Turbin from WP Engine who was with us at WordCamp Stockholm 2016. We are very glad that they have decided to sponsor our WordCamp Stockholm once again and excited to hear more about them.

What does your organization do? Give us an elevator pitch!

WP Engine is a WordPress digital experience platform, providing brands and agencies the agility, performance, intelligence, and integrations needed to drive their business forward faster.

How do you help support WordPress enthusiasts and professionals?

At WP Engine, we are proud to support the WordPress community. We do so through financial donations to open source projects, event sponsorships, WordPress core contributions, community support, thought leadership initiatives like Torque, the leading WordPress publication and through over 5,000 hours a year in volunteering time. All in, WP Engine contributes over $1.5 million per year in time and contributions in support of the WordPress community.

What kind of client would be a good fit for you, and who wouldn’t?

Today, organizations of all sizes from SMBs to Enterprises to agencies choose WP Engine to power their digital experiences. The common thread between all of our clients is that their sites are mission critical for their business, which means they turn to WP Engine to innovate and go-to-market faster, improve the performance of their brand’s online presence, deliver actionable insights to improve the ROI of their sites and applications, and enable integrations with the best-in-category technologies.

How does your organization add value to the WordPress community?

One of our values is “Aspiring to Lead, Committed to Give Back”, so we strive every day to support the community. We have team members who contribute to WordPress core as well as offer plugins like our PHP compatibility checker that is available for anyone to use. We also publish Torque Magazine, an award-winning resource for WordPress news that equips new and advanced WordPress users with expert insights and information, in addition to ongoing support through WordCamps and Meetups.

Is there anything in WordPress that you would change, and why?

I’m excited to see how the Customizer will continue to evolve. The Customizer allows for changes to be made in WordPress while providing a live preview. It adds an element of instant visual feedback that is really helpful for content creation and I look forward to how this will work with the Gutenberg editor.

Where will WordPress be in 2 years from now?

While WordPress is already the dominant CMS, powering 28% percent of the internet, I expect that it will continue to grow its market dominance significantly. It wouldn’t surprise me to see WordPress power up to 50% of the Internet in the not too distant future.

Is there anything else that you would like the WordCamp attendees know?

WordCamp events are a great way to learn more about WordPress, chat with the people who use it for content creation, build sites on WordPress and meet people who are doing similar things and learn from the thought leaders and influencers in the community. WordCamp is also a place to become involved with WordPress and give back as a contributor. One of the great things about WordCamps is that there’s something for everyone – from the expert to the beginner. I’d encourage anyone remotely interested in starting something online to participate at a WordCamp event near them – because we’ll give them all the support they need and there’s very little prior knowledge of development and coding required!