Changing Landscape of the Online WordPress Communites

Vladimir Prelovac

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

WP Tavern

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

ManageWP.org

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

Advanced WP

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 🙂

Vladimir Prelovac Avatar

author

Vladimir Prelovac
Vladimir is the Founder of ManageWP, and is a frequent contributor to the WordPress community – in the form of numerous plug-ins, tools, WordCamp talks and a book by the title WordPress Plugin Development.

9 responses

  1. Melissa Avatar
    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! 😉

    Reply
  2. Tom Avatar
    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).

    Reply
  3. Brin Wilson Avatar
    Brin Wilson

    What no mention of Brian’s Post Status? 🙁

    Reply
  4. Eric Shefferman Avatar
    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

    Reply
  5. Konstantin Yelin Avatar
    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!

    Reply
  6. egitimindir Avatar
    egitimindir

    good theme thanks

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *