We’re launching what we here at ManageWP consider our most significant contribution to the WordPress community. We call it ManageWP.org, and we’re hoping that you’ll find it to be your destination to share, vote, and discover incredible content related to all things WordPress.

ManageWP.org. It’s been a true labor of love. We’ve been working hard for nearly six months straight. There’s been no shortage of debating, designing, programming, testing, breaking, and fixing — then we did it again, and again, and again. We’ve put our heart into this, and what we’ve come up with is a beautiful, easy-to-use, fully responsive, and exciting.

ManageWP.org Explained

ManageWP.org is the first dedicated people-powered WordPress community designed to enable you to curate, promote, and vote on the content that matters most to the WordPress community. Within a glance, you’ve got access to all the WordPress content that’s relevant and that matters.

Let’s talk about the three most important aspects about ManageWP.org:

Sharing is up first. We made this very easy.

When you’re on the ManageWP.org site, the Share button is always always available to you. Once accessed, you’ll be prompted to enter the URL of the content you want to share. ManageWP.org then works its magic to prepopulate the title and description — but feel free to edit these manually. Then you’ll select an image, and you’re done.

But if you want an even easier way to share to ManageWP.org, we highly recommend that you add the ManageWP.org Bookmarklet to your browser’s bookmark bar.

Once installed, clicking the “Share to ManageWP.org” button in your browser will take you to the submission screen with all the data pre-filled for you, ready to go, from the page you were on previously.

Exploring the best content that the WordPress community has to offer is another aspect of ManageWP.org that we wanted to make as enjoyable and simple as possible.

With ManageWP.org, we decided to give people within the WordPress community the power to shape what is featured on ManageWP.org.

We also wanted to make it so that you could explore ManageWP.org without having to dig around. You can jump right in, and see everything in a glance. Everything that matters, and every function you would want to use, is right there when you visit the site — no matter if you’re on a computer or a mobile device.

When you first experience ManageWP.org, you’ll notice the site is split into various sections:

• Hottest — this is the best and most recent content available. It’s the quickest way to see what’s hot in the WordPress community.
• Latest — displays all recently submitted content. Jump in and help help surface the best content.
• Greatest — this is the crème de la crème. This is the most popular content on ManageWP.org.

Additionally, we offer several content filters: Articles, Plugins, Themes, Tutorials, and Business. These let you drill down to only the content you want to see on each section of the site.

Voting is the third, and the most important, community aspect of ManageWP.org.

If you see a story you like, hit the Vote Up button associated with any article, and it’ll immediately inject your influence, thus influencing the popularity and visibility of the article.

The content you share that receive votes will contribute to your personal rank. Furthermore, the users who have the most rank also enjoy a coveted spot on the ManageWP.org Leaderboard.

We were able to accomplish all this with cutting edge technology, including a sophisticated author ranking algorithm that is similar to PageRank – we really hope to change the way WordPress news from high quality publishers are distributed.

So be sure to vote, and also post content that others find valuable!

ManageWP.org Button

If you run a website or blog, be sure to have a look at the ManageWP.org Button.

This button, which represents a single line of JavaScript code, can be easily implemented into any WordPress theme, and it gives you, your editorial team, and your users a simple way to submit and vote up your content at ManageWP.org.

Then be sure to ask your writers and your readers to vote on your content. The more people who vote, the more attention your content will receive.

Write A Review, Receive A ManageWP.org Contributor T-Shirt

If you have a blog — and if you feel that ManageWP.org is review worthy — then we would love it if you would write a review of ManageWP.org. If you do, we’ll send you our ManageWP.org Contributor T-Shirt for free.

Our ManageWP.org Contributor T-shirt is our very own design. It contains references to our site’s five primary categories: Business, Plugins, Themes, Articles, and Tutorials. Can you see the associations?

Rules — your review must:

• Be well-thought, well-executed, and informative.
• Be at least 800 words in length
• Include a link to our site
• Include screenshots of our site
• Be published at any point during October 14 – October 21

Once you’ve published your review, send us an email at hi@managewp.org with a link, and if it meets the above criteria, we’ll send you the shirt for free.

Meet The ManageWP.org Team

Vladimir Prelovac — Product Manager

Vladimir Nerandzic — Project Manager

James Mowery — Quality Assurance

Zoran Krnetic — User Experience

Sanja Vukasinovic — User Interface

Filip Milivojevic — Development

Ivan Bjelajac — Deployment

Creating ManageWP.org

Vladimir Prelovac: What was the drive behind creating ManageWP?

This project was very personal. We worked incredibly hard for six months to make this ship sail. It all begun from my genuine interest in WordPress news, due to the nature of business. I followed a dozen or so RSS feeds, and I also used external news aggregators like Zite and Flipboard to keep on top of WordPress news. That was simply too much work! So it occurred to me that a community as big as ours needs a dedicated and moderated hub for high quality content. That was how the idea was born.

It started as a side project, but then it quickly evolved into this huge undertaking from technological standpoint. For example, we ended up using an advanced iterative algorithm for author and article ranking, similar to what Google uses with PageRank. And I also had the goal of featuring a fully responsive design — ManageWP.org will work perfectly on mobile; it was a priority from day one.

Filip Milivojevic & Vladimir Nerandzic: What technology stack did you use when creating ManageWP.org?

In the development of ManageWP.org, for the backend we are using the Symfony2 framework, one of the leading open source PHP frameworks that integrates Doctrine, one of the best rated ORM’s available. This enabled us to adapt to the changes and requirements as the project development progressed in a timely manner, and without having to rewrite large portions of code from scratch.

We are using the latest HTML, CSS and JS technologies to deliver an optimal experience to a broad range of clients using PCs and mobile devices. There were challenges early on to make the site adapt to different devices that have very different usage scenarios. jQuery abstracted the client differences for us and enabled us to focus on core functionality, and the newest HTML5 technologies allowed us to make every use case easier for the users of newer browsers while maintaining compatibility with a broad range of devices.

Twitter and Facebook integration enables our users to get started instantly. We also focused on respecting the user’s privacy, so we intentionally request minimal information from the user’s social media profiles.

Sanja Vukasinovic: What has been your experiences with designing ManageWP.org?

As a designer, it has been such a great experience from my point of view. My greatest challenge was to make a shell which could hold living content at all times, and also be both readable and intuitive on every device and resolution imaginable.

My goal was to make it clear that ManageWP.org is not just for informing readers, but it should invite them to engage with this large community: to exchange their thoughts, to encourage new ideas and, of course, to evoke discussions on relevant subjects.

There were also many things to incorporate here through visual design, and I feel I was able to successfully accomplish this in a beautiful, magazine-like interface that I hope users will enjoy.

Zoran Krnetic: What has been your experiences with building the user experience for ManageWP.org?

I’m really happy that we were able to create a layout that is simple and easy to read, but also not be stale and boring. I personally went through multiple iteration of our design, and we tested it with users until we reached a look and feel that we thought was meeting the needs of our users. This is the design we have now.

The biggest challenge was the nature of source articles; specifically, handling images. Some content may not have images, and others could have images, but they are poor quality. So we had to develop a solution that worked for this. And, on top of all of that, it still needs to look great with mobile and desktop screen sizes.

The key takeaway of this project, however, is that in the end, more often than not, the simplest layout is the best. Additionally, focusing on a mobile-first design really makes sense since it forces you to focus on the essence and future of web site or app.

Ivan Bjelajac: What’s the technology behind the ManageWP.org server stack and setup?

We’re expecting a lot of people to access ManageWP.org simultaneously, so we went with the setup we considered that will be the fastest and most stable for our users.

ManageWP.org runs on a LAMP stack with PHP-FPM, MySQL Percona, and Nginx, along with a custom created set of rules for caching and image manipulations.

We chose Nginx because it accelerates content and application delivery, improves security, and facilitates availability and scalability for the busiest web sites on the Internet. Nginx doesn’t rely on threads to handle requests — instead it uses a much more scalable event-driven (asynchronous) architecture and in combination with PHP-FPM (hands down the fastest way of running PHP scripts.) and Percona (one of the leaders of high performance MySQL servers). This is, in my opinion, the fastest way to go when it comes to high availability application hosting.

Get Started

Thanks for coming this far. There’s really only one thing left to do:

Experience ManageWP.org

A special thanks goes out to all of our customers, subscribers, and the WordPress community as a whole. Without you, none of this is possible.