This year will be marked as the year of the rise of online WordPress communities. For a couple of years prior to this, Twitter seemed to have captured and held the dominance over the most of the WordPress community buzz.
Recently there seems to have been an obvious rise in the popularity of online communities organized around specific sites or groups.
WordPress News Sites
WPTavern seems to be the site of the hour when editorial WordPress news coverage is concerned. It features top quality writing, probably the liveliest community and the highest comments per post ratio. Sarah and Jeff are really the top WordPress journalist of the moment doing an amazing job of keeping us all informed about important events in the WordPress scene.
The worthy mention goes to Torquemag which features wide coverage but somewhat smaller engagement from the readers.
WordPress Community Sites
Our own ManageWP.org community started out as a ‘reddit for WordPress’. It established itself as a site that captures the pulse of the WordPress ecosystem, and the main driving force of the community is the high standard of quality, no spam, strict content curation and strong membership. ManageWP.org helped discover over 1,500 new blogs and authors and with the launch of the Plugin Discovery Tool hopes to help discover best new plugins and plugin authors. Our future plans include creating a real-time WordPress events calendar.
WPChat is a growing community for online WordPress discussions with high quality content and strong membership. The simple and easy to use interface help it with gaining momentum within the community thus quickly expanding its userbase and reach.
WPClipboard is the newcomer to the scene, trying to organize all the timeless WordPress content in one place. Its success will probably be dependent on the standard of quality of the content shown on the site.
Third-party Hosted Communities
The Advanced WordPress Facebook group is similar to WPChat but is much larger and restricted only to Facebook users. It is also probably the biggest community of its type, with over 11,000 members. Since I deleted Facebook at the beginning of this year I was unable to follow the activity here, but it should have retained its high standard.
WordPress and ProWordPress sub-reddits are not as active but sometimes good discussions can be found.
Prismatic is an automated content aggregator (like Flipboard or Zite) and it features a WordPress category with all kind of posts scooped from the Web.
Occasionally an interesting article will pop up on Inbound.org, popular inbound marketing and SEO community.
I really like how the online communities scene is growing and reviving after several WordPress-centric sites have been shut down in the past few years.
But there is one thing that I am currently missing. Going beyond online and into print. A printed WordPress publication! If anyone would like to start one, please get in touch 🙂
egitimindir
good theme thanks
Konstantin Yelin
Re printed WordPress publication: there is SpinPress Magazine, and something like that can adapted for print.
The eBook format is probably the way to go, though. Plenty of reasonably priced services for that: Lulu, Amazon, Pubit, etc. Plus I am sure there are services that allow on-demand print publications as well. I.e. an eBook is only printed when it is specifically ordered as a print edition (by enough customers). That would help eliminate most costs involved.
By the way, thanks for including WP Clipboard on this list!
Eric Shefferman
Losing money starting a print magazine is a good business for people who don’t have enough money to start an airline.
When I started Modern Ferret, it cost 32 cents to mail a letter. Now I have no idea what it costs to mail a letter because I haven’t used postal mail in years.
You’d need some ridiculous things like advertisers who are excited that the readers AREN’T connected to the internet and can’t just click a link and go to their website. It might be possible to argue that a lot of people who are pet owners or landscapers or something aren’t web connected — it’s not possible to argue that WordPress developers aren’t all web connected.
For Modern Ferret — a very low circulation magazine about pet ferrets — it cost us around $20,000 for printing and postage for each issue and that was with us doing all the pre-press work ourselves (desktop scanner, digital photography, desktop publishing, etc.) and all the other work (customer service, warehousing, data entry, writing, photography, etc).
Note: Just the amount of work customer-service-wise to deal with subscribers not receiving their magazines is absurd. Email has a relatively high delivery rate and if the email bounces back it’s no big deal wheras at best the Post Office will both destroy non-delivered magazines AND charge you extra for the process.
If you’ve got a few hundred thousand dollars or more to throw away then it might be fun for a while — and it’s always cool to tell people you publish a magazine whether it makes money or not.
It could probably be done with less money than that and really bootstrapped (Modern Ferret was started with more like $10 to 15K back in 1994) but that is asking for a lot of work and misery. And you’d need people so excited that they’re going to write for the magazine for free and promote it for free and so on.
If you’d like to pick my brain on this more, feel free to contact me.
about Modern Ferret:
http://www.modernferret.com/about/awards.html
Modern Ferret did last longer than George:
“Hachette Filipacchi CEO Jack W. Kliger, whose company bought the Kennedy family’s controlling interest in George last year, told The New York Times that even though the magazine’s circulation had grown in the past year (under a new editor, Frank Lalli), there was no longer enough advertising support to continue the endeavor. The Associated Press quotes Kliger as saying that his company sunk $10 million in George last year. ”
http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,618803,00.html
Vladimir Prelovac
Wow, really insightful comments Eric.
I’ve been told that print is bust, but I still do see my self reading the most important news from my business industry from a piece of paper. Not everything is about the convenience of the online. For example I just subscribed to New Yorker as I like everything about how it looks in the hands, how it smells and how it makes me feel when I really dig into an article. I can never get this from a tablet or even worse from a phone.
My point is, not everything is about consuming the information, there is still something about HOW you consume it.
Brin Wilson
What no mention of Brian’s Post Status? 🙁
Vladimir Prelovac
I love Brian’s work but at the time of writing this article Brian did not have a post in almost two months so he was not my pick for news sites for that reason. I see he recently activated again so thats good news.
Brian Krogsgard
Definitely had a break, but I like to consider it the calm before the storm 🙂 Lot of energy going into Post Status at the moment and for the foreseeable future!
Tom
I am a big fan of Inbound.org, however it is mostly about SEO, content marketing and paid advertising. Mangewp.org is the #1 for discovering WordPress news. (at least for me).
Melissa
I like seeing all the new WordPress news publications cropping up and I think there’s definitely room for even more diversity in the WP community news world.
That said, print is expensive. Unless you’re suggesting we commandeer the Xerox at work and go at it zinester style! 😉