Community | Torque

The WP Summit: An online conference for WordPressers

Author

Marie Dodson

Filed Under

Community, Events, Featured

Published

March 12, 2015

2 Comments

The WP Summit , a virtual conference aimed at educating WordPress users on how to build impactful sites, kicks off on Monday, March 16! The 10-day conference, hosted by online entrepreneur and WordPress developer Jan Koch, features interviews with 28 WordPress experts and online entrepreneurs on a range of different topics from WordPress fundamentals, to inbound marketing: Day 1: WordPress Fundamentals Day 2: Design and WordPress Themes Day 3: Online Business with WordPress Day 4: List Building Day 5: Content Marketing Day 6: Social Marketing / SEO Day 7: Podcasting / Summits Day 8: Copywriting / Conversion Optimization Day 9: Backups and Security […]

Defining the WordPress 80/20 problem

Author

Josh Pollock

Filed Under

Community, Featured

Published

March 11, 2015

13 Comments

The 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto Principle, states that “for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.” The 80/20 rule is named after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, and was popularized as a business tool in the book Living the 80/20 Way, by Richard Koch. This is one of the most useful principles for finding the most important things to focus on in business marketing and development. Identifying the 20% of your efforts that have the biggest impacts is a fundamental step in maximizing your efficiency in any pursuit. Most people with a freelance web […]

14 iOS and Android mobile apps for WordPress users

Author

Shaun Quarton

Filed Under

Community, Featured

Published

February 18, 2015

6 Comments

As our mobile devices become more sophisticated, so too does our dependency on them. That might seem worrying to some readers, but I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing. Think about all the wonderful apps that have been developed that make our lives easier, and consider the potential apps that might exist in a few years’ time — exciting, right? Now, running a website is seriously hard work, even when using a user-friendly CMS like WordPress. If we’re not careful, it can feel like we spend entire days staring at a computer screen. With this in mind, we could […]

Lessons we can learn from Jetpack, and how it’s helped WordPress succeed

Author

Josh Pollock

Filed Under

Community, Featured

Published

February 11, 2015

24 Comments

Of the many gifts that Automattic has given this community, Jetpack is definitely one of the greatest. Jetpack is an all-in-one suite of tools, including services that run on WordPress.com’s servers, for free, that couldn’t be handled by the kind of $5 per month shared hosting packages many users start with. If it wasn’t for this plugin helping to ease the onboarding of new users, WordPress would not be where it is today. Automattic has gained a lot from this: they are a company, with a simple objective to make money, pay salaries, and provide a quality return on investment […]

Interview with SIDEKICK co-founder, Ben Fox, on sidekick.pro, future initiatives, and more

Author

Marie Dodson

Filed Under

Community

Published

February 10, 2015

No Comments

In January, SIDEKICK launched its new website sidekick.pro, as well as its new Composer tool — a tool that allows users to create WordPress walkthroughs, for free. The announcement came much later than originally anticipated — but has nonetheless been greeted with open arms. Torque reached out to Ben Fox, co-founder of SIDEKICK, to learn about the reasons for the delay of sidekick.pro, how the company plans to reach new users, its partnership with Go Daddy, and future initiatives. Why the delay Torque: What caused the delay for sidekick.pro? Ben Fox: SIDEKICK is a bootstrapped company, we have no outside investment (yet). This […]

11 ways to contribute to WordPress

Author

Brandon Yanofsky

Filed Under

Community, Featured

Published

February 6, 2015

6 Comments

WordPress is an open source project — meaning there is not one individual, entity, or company that maintains it. Instead, a community of people around the world contribute to WordPress and make it better every day. The WordPress community invites you to contribute as well. It doesn’t matter whether you are a developer, designer, writer, teacher, or just a user: You can be an absolute beginner or a seasoned veteran. If you want to get involved, there are many ways you can contribute. You can visit the wordpress.org website, which outlines all the ways you can help out. Just click here. […]

Why the best web dev teams are a little like the Guardians of the Galaxy

Author

Brenda Barron

Filed Under

Community, Featured

Published

February 5, 2015

No Comments

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve likely seen (or at least heard of) the Marvel film, Guardians of the Galaxy. A solid installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), Guardians tells the tale of Peter Quill, a half-human, half-alien who was abducted from earth as a kid and grew up cavorting around in space, picking up alien lady friends along the way. Everything is business as usual until he finds himself locked up with a group of criminals who band together to save the galaxy. What’s interesting is that each member of the crew brings something unique to […]

Deadline approaching for Community Hub poll

Author

Marie Dodson

Filed Under

Community, News

Published

January 27, 2015

No Comments

There’s only one day left to vote for the features you’d like to see included in the WordPress Community Hub. The poll will close at 00:00 UTC January 29, 2015. In early December, Jenny Wong gave the green light for the Community Hub project — a project that will make it easier to find WordPress user groups all over the world. The announcement also pointed to this as an opportunity to make the hub into so much more: “. . .The community hub can be the WordCamp.org of local user groups/ meet ups. This would mean that user groups who want a localized […]

Don’t throttle my ingenuity: Why the little guy needs net neutrality

Author

Doug Vreeland

Filed Under

Community

Published

January 22, 2015

1 Comment

Much of the debate surrounding net neutrality has framed the issue as both ideological (with those favoring more regulation pitted against free-market advocates) and political (with all sorts of strange bedfellows staking out positions on behalf of various constituencies). Net neutrality is certainly both of these things, but from my perspective as in-house counsel for an Internet start-up, the real story of net neutrality resonates most clearly in the familiar story of David and Goliath. David was the scrappy kid who stood up for his beliefs and had the courage to confront an opposing giant. David’s skill and the strength […]

12 Google Chrome browser extensions for WordPress users

Author

Shaun Quarton

Filed Under

Community

Published

January 20, 2015

8 Comments

Running a WordPress website can be exhausting, so many of us have picked up plenty of tips and tricks over time to help us work more efficiently. Now, most of us depend on WordPress plugins, and perhaps one or two productivity tools, to save time and make our lives easier. However, there’s one thing that many of us ignore when trying to improve our efficiency: browser extensions. That’s right. You can install additional functionality to your web browser, which can help you perform certain tasks that WordPress webmasters need to do on a daily basis. As WordPress Chrome is the […]

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