Community building in times of Twitter and Co

Since May 2010, Twitter has been one of the services that have connected me to the world. Friendly, interesting and inspiring people could be found here as well as news from all over the world. In fact, they still are today, Twitter is just working hard to become unusable for users like me

Contact with the “family”

Calling the WordPress community my family of choice may sound pathetic, but it’s pretty much what I feel. And as chance would have it, Twitter is a popular communication medium in the German as well as in the global community. This is one of the main reasons for me, not to turn my back on Twitter at the moment. But with any luck, there could be a real alternative for all of us.

Continue reading “From tweets to toots.” →

Anyone who asked me for a good SEO plugin for WordPress in 2015 got a definite answer within a split second: wpSEO, the paid plugin by Sergej Müller. After Sergej’s departure however, the slow death of the plugin began. The solution for an effective further development of the plugin is very simple.

Retrospect

In the time after Sergej’s departure from the community, there was a lot of movement. The free plugins from his portfolio were added to the Pluginkollektiv. The group still takes care of the plugins today – albeit in a slightly different composition. The WP Letter (German), Sergej’s free WordPress newsletter, found a new home with me and is (almost always) published regularly today.

wpSEO was in an uncertain state for a long time. It was established as a paid plugin on the German market and available as a lifetime license for a low double-digit amount. Sergejs engagement in updates and most of all in support was more than worth the money. When it was finally clear that a quite well known SEO person from Germany would take over the further maintenance of wpSEO, I – and many others with me – was first cautiously optimistic.

Continue reading “We saved wpSEO, we just don’t know it yet.” →

It took, believe it or not, 10 years working with (and on) WordPress before I was able to overcome this step. My own plugin in the WordPress.org directory. So it’s about time we talked about “Impressum”.

On a cold day at the end of October 2017 my good friend Matze and I sat together in Stuttgart and had the crazy idea. Let’s “simply” develop a little WordPress plugin. In theory, it sounded relatively easy: a plugin that gets an imprint generator directly into the WordPress backend. But already after a short time it turned out: something like this can either be programmed quickly or correctly, we decided for the latter and in the past half year we have spent a day or two working and several glasses of Mate, Red Bull and Gin on the plugin.

Show and Tell

But before I get into the history of origins for too long, we’d better get straight to the point. The plugin bears the simple name Impressum and can be downloaded from the WordPress.org directory or imported directly via Plugins > Install in the WordPress backend.

Continue reading “Of plants and little plants” →

The new European General Data Protection Regulation is on everyone’s lips these days. Hardly any customer conversation can do without the ominous letter combination. Was it GDRP, GRPD or GDPR? Not important at all, from May 25th you should be serious about data protection, and that’s a good thing.

Those who now expect concrete instructions from me will be disappointed by the following contribution. I am sufficiently informed on the topic to bring my WordPress installations, those of friends, acquaintances and customers to terms until May 25th, but my interest is not sufficient to punish myself by reading law texts and to chew the whole thing up here again. Others can do better. I want to write about a single WordPress plugin that currently appears in many articles: Antispam Bee.

Antispam Bee is one of the plugins that are maintained and developed by a group called “Pluginkollektiv”. The Pluginkollektiv consists of WordPress developers who have set themselves the goal of maintaining the excellent plugins by Sergej Müller and keeping them in the best possible condition for the many hundreds of thousands of users. Small disclaimer: I myself belong to the Pluginkollektiv, so in the following I am not only an uninvolved third party.

The trick in Antispam Bee – like in all plugins of the collective: it is designed from the beginning with German and European data protection in mind and today therefore offers the perfect solutions for all, whom want to make their websites somewhat more compliant with GDPR.

Continue reading “Your data protection sucks – spam protection in times of the GDPR” →

With the founding of the WP Meetup Frankfurt at the end of 2012, a new chapter in my life has begun. From the first small group meetings to the most recent meetings with dozens of visitors, I haven’t missed a single one of the 62 Meetups. But now it’s time for some changes.

About Meetups

WordPress Meetups are local meetings of users, developers and anyone who is somehow interested in the open source content management system WordPress. For the past five years, as an active member of the local community in Frankfurt, I have organised such a meeting every month.

Continue reading “Le Meetup c’est moi” →