Progress for WordPress

What do WordPress plugins and crime stats have in common? Skewed distributions. Marieke links crime data to plugin installs, showing how a few dominate. She argues for helping smaller plugins gain visibility in the repositories.

WordCamp Europe is an incredible event, but its professional standards set an unrealistic example for local WordCamps. How can we lower expectations for local events? Should flagship WordCamps, like WCEU, have a different name? Taco shares his thoughts in this blog post.

As WordCamp Europe nears, this blog post reflects on our return as a sponsor. It highlights the role of independent voices at WCEU and shares how Progress Planner will contribute this year through live website reviews and community engagement.

At WordCamps, last-minute prep is the norm, but it shouldn’t be. This blog post shows how preparation and rehearsal can elevate your talk, draws lessons from TED Talks, and calls for higher speaker standards across the WordPress community.

WordPress is divided into two sides: the passionate open-source community and a growing commercial sector. This split risks the values that made WordPress special and calls for renewed collaboration between business and community.

People think WordPress is insecure. That view isn’t new, but it’s becoming more harmful. Joost de Valk explains why this belief exists, how the community reinforces it, and why changing the narrative around WordPress is essential to its future.

PressConf reminded me that business isn’t about strategy or scale. It’s about people. The real moments happened off-stage, by the pool.

Marieke challenges the obsession with performance metrics and reminds us that the most meaningful parts of marketing, like trust, resonance and brand, often can’t be tracked. Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts.

More content isn’t always better. Joost shares why we’re shifting our focus at Progress Planner: away from content quantity and toward real value. Learn how thoughtful pruning and smarter publishing can help your site perform better in today’s crowded web.

Joost de Valk argues that WordPress doesn’t need more AI hype. Discover how shared infrastructure could unlock truly helpful AI features for millions of users.

Over the past few months, you may have picked up on a few things —Joost de Valk was removed from the speaker lineup at WordCamp Asia. Progress Planner wasn’t allowed to sponsor. And in this tweet, Matt Mullenweg referred to Joost as “persona non grata” within the WordPress community. We haven’t publicly discussed this until…

In my previous post in this Progress for WordPress series, I shared my experiences as a teacher at the Fontys University of Applied Sciences. Since January, I’ve been teaching marketing to first-year students—an international group of 18-year-olds. These are the marketers of tomorrow. They’re the ones who will build, optimize, and market websites. They’re the…