Rebranding Your WordPress Plugin Business

Marcus:
Well, hi everyone. Welcome to another WooBiz Chat. I’m Marcus and I’m here with my co-host, Katie Keith from Barn2 Plugins. How are you doing post Black Friday, Katie?

Katie (00:10):
Great, thanks. Yeah, I’m just recovering. It’s a crazy time, isn’t it? What about you?

Marcus (00:15):
Yeah, pretty good. Pretty good. I had a little bit of time off last week and I used it to just kind of disconnect and recharge and that was super great. But I know that the product world continued on with Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and so I know that you and your team were probably pretty busy. Yeah,

Katie (00:32):
Time off in black Friday week is not a thing, although my designer took the whole of November off, what’s going on? He planned it before he started his job.

Marcus (00:43):
How convenient.

Katie (00:45):
So he didn’t know it was going to be the busiest month, so we had to be really organized and do everything before.

Marcus (00:52):
Absolutely. Well, we have a special guest with us today to talk a little bit about their intro into the WordPress and Woo space and then to tell us a little bit about a rebranding. So let’s go ahead and welcome Robert Abela. How are you doing today?

Robert (01:07):
I’m doing well, thanks. Similar to Katie as well. We developed products, so yeah, it was a very, very busy period. In fact, we’re closing off the campaign, but overall we’re doing very well. Thanks.

Marcus (01:18):
That’s awesome. Good to hear it. Robert. We’ll get into a little bit of Melapress and what you do there and what you have going on, but why don’t you start us off and tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into WordPress and WooCommerce as well.

Robert (01:36):
Sure. I am Robert. I’m Maltese. I come from Malta, but I live in the Netherlands. I discovered WordPress. I’ve always worked for software companies and during my last corporate job we needed a blog. I’m talking about 2012, early 2013, and I started looking, it was a security software company, so we started looking for a blog, found out about WordPress and we started using it. And back then it was still much, it was a much more community. So yeah, I made a few friends through asking questions on web resources or against stuff like that. It was completely new to us and stuff. And yeah, I got interested more than using it as a blog basically. And back then it was the early days, so security, it was a big issue. There weren’t many security products, there wasn’t even so cool and all these, they were in there yet.

(02:34):
And we were a security software company, so we actually developed a product, which was a big flop. But anyway, the million reasons why. But yeah, I got really interested in the security aspect because all of my previous jobs with other companies, I always worked with security software companies basically. So yeah, so I got really interested, made a few friends, went to my first in-person event was at the first WordCamp Europe in Leiden. And yeah, I was since then basically, and then originally started cleaning some websites and stuff like that, writing a few blog posts and I always was kind of surprised. A multi-system, WordPress, multi-user system like WordPress, how come it doesn’t have any sort of activity logging? So yeah, I’m not a developer person, but I can read and write some code. So yeah, I developed the first version of our plugin called WPActivityLog and because I was using it as well when I was working with clients back then, cleaning websites and stuff like that, it became very useful.

(03:43):
If you haven’t installed before, of course you can see, can get an idea exactly of what’s happening and slowly started picking up and I designed it kind of thing as a security tool, but slowly, slowly I found out that many people were using it more activity logs are still security, but more generic user behavior and stuff like that. And we had a lot of requests for WooCommerce as an to start because by default it was kind of keeping a log of what changes people are doing in WordPress person to stock. And we had a lot of people asking us to start supporting WooCommerce at first. To be honest, I was a bit reluctant to support WooCommerce. Nothing. It’s, it’s such a broad product, so it’s a bit overwhelming like, oh, okay, I’m new, I’ve never used this product and all of a sudden we have to support it.

(04:37):
But yeah, slowly we started digging in. The team grew a bit. Yeah, we started digging in, we started developing a sensor for WooCommerce and it’s one of our main drivers lead generation thing for our main plugin basically because when you have any commerce system, you have users, you have your own team, especially for bigger teams, people take care of purchases or there’s stock and stuff like that. So it’s good to keep track who’s doing what changes, etc. Because you can get a better idea of basically you can stay ahead of the game and know exactly what’s happening on your, so yeah, that’s roughly how it all started and how I got involved with WooCommerce.

Katie (05:19):
Interesting. So what is unique about the security requirements of a WooCommerce website as opposed to WordPress generally? Because obviously WooCommerce uses WordPress users. So what additional challenges and needs are there on the e-commerce side of things?

Robert (05:37):
There are two very different websites. First of all, even just looking at the setup, when you have just a WordPress blog, maybe a few pages and you send a newsletter, a subscription form, and something quite basic when you look at WooCommerce, it depends of course what you needed, what you’re selling. But even just looking at the number of plugins, you need much more plugins, payment gateways, user portals, it depends what type of e-commerce solution you have, where you want. But yeah, you have a much bigger number of plugins. And also typically it depends also on the size of the commerce, but from our experience, big e-commerce websites have a big team. So of course you have much more people. Typically, let’s say a news website is still a big team, but they’re just editing content quite frankly, not much else. Commerce, you have stocks, products, orders, changing the products, the metadata of the products and stuff like that.

(06:35):
And when you have a bigger team, people you have to cater as well. People working from home, people working from here as not because they want to, but not everyone is familiar like, okay, don’t use the hotel wife or stuff like that or public wifi. But these things happen. So there are many more challenges. And even on the website itself, there is much more dynamic content and dynamic and forms and stuff and places of entry or where users have to enter data and stuff like that and customers have to be logged in or so there’s much more going on. So of course you need to really be a step ahead and try to, maybe control is not the right word, but yeah, try to keep an eye out exactly on what’s happening and to keep an eye on the store itself. The stocks and stuff like the SKUs, the product names and stuff like that, we’ve seen some cases someone simple mistake change an SKU or something and they couldn’t trigger back the stocks and stuff like that. Such a small problem can become such a big headache for a business. So yeah, definitely it’s a totally different and much harder challenge keeping an e-commerce solution secure compared to a news website. It’s not that in news website it’s easy, but there’s much less, there are many less moving parts basically.

Marcus (07:53):
Yeah, I actually came across WP Activity Log several years back working at an agency and yeah, it was like you said, I think maybe a little bit less security focused for us as it was making sure that we had a log of what people that we handed the website over to. Were doing an accountability piece to say, okay, they come to us and they say, well, this page is all messed up. I don’t know what happened. And we can go back in the activity log and see who logged in and what pages were edited and I can tell you exactly what happened, here’s how we can fix it, let’s figure out how to move forward. But I do know that you have kind of as a security focused company primarily anyways. You do have a few other pieces like 2FA for WordPress and CAPTCHA for WordPress and WooCommerce stores. So maybe tell us a little bit about a couple of the other pieces, but really what’s kind of your mindset on how you decide what the next plugin product is and what kind of maybe security holes you see in the WordPress space that you feel like, oh, we need to step into here and create a solution for that.

Robert (09:08):
Yeah, WP ActiveTorque started based on a need that we had. The second plugin we had is login security is the smallest plugin we have now, but that’s because it was premium only. Most of the plugins, it’s not like we had an idea, it’s more like it was based on needs. Even 2FA for example, we used 2FA for our own websites of course, which is regardless of our plugin or not, I highly recommend that everyone uses twoFA because of course it saves us of headache. But yeah, it was also, we started developing it based on a need because we’re looking at the free plugins at first because we’re still a smaller company, so we didn’t have a certain budget and now quite some few solutions to be honest out there. But none of them really catered for one specific need was policies as in you didn’t say, okay, I want all editors, I want to enforce all editors to use 2FA.

(10:01):
None of them, they all worked as a solution, but you cannot enforce, they just install it and if someone wants to option, they can configure 2FA. So that wasn’t good enough for us and that’s how it was born. And yeah, of course WP Activity Log helped us a lot. It has a big customer base and yeah, we learn a lot from customers. We see a lot of things because with Logs the advantage I think because you almost touch every aspect of the business. Some people, I don’t know, you see that has problems. I dunno, with a hacked website or login, some people had that problem with user accountability, some problems, some users had problems, I dunno, with an agency, I dunno, they didn’t do it or so yeah, so you get a lot of ideas and stuff like that from customers. But basically all the plugins were born based on needs.

(10:49):
So we have WP Activity Log, the first one, WP 2FA, CAPTCHA. It was also kind of IT effect, that’s one of the reasons why we rebranded, which we can discuss a bit later on. Moving more like we started as a security solely focused on security, but we’re moving more towards more security and administration of a website, management of a website and users. And CAPTCHA is definitely spam users, registrations especially, it’s a big problem. Spam user registrations, fake quarter. This by the way, that’s where WooCommerce comes in as well. First quarter in WooCommerce. It’s a very big problem. Scam orders and stuff like that. So yeah, basically that’s how most plugins were born based, either needs or ideas from customers who are talking to customers and and we came up with the idea.

Katie (11:39):
Interesting. So let’s move on to the rebrand. So I understand you were called WP White Security until fairly recently and then you’ve done a rebrand.

Robert (11:49):
Correct. The official rebrand, we officially announced it at WorldCamp Europe this year in Greece. It was in Greece this year before we were WP White Security. There are a few reasons why we rebranded it. First of all, it’s a very long name. Melapress is much shorter than WP White Security. It’s also easier to pronounce. Also, we are moving kind of thing from just purely security into more security and admin kind of thing of websites. And there are things like when people see security in most, not always, but when PC security in most case, they always assume, yeah, you’re some sort of firewall malware company. First time at WorldCamp, people come up to us and say, okay, how do to compare yourself to Sucuri or all the other ones? We don’t actually complement these products, we don’t compete with them. So we had to go through that whole process of explaining what we do and why.

(12:54):
And those are the main reasons why we have rebranded. We’re moving towards more security and admin and also this business is kind of thing, I wouldn’t say by coincidence, but it started as a hobby, then it became a part-time and became full-time. So there was never a plan or something. So we started as WP White Security we started writing blog posts, securing websites, then WP Activity Log kind of was created, started growing, became its own product. So we opened the website and then we had opened the website and yeah, it was even from the marketing point of view, it was becoming too many brands to disperse. And one thing which we noticed where it came not this year last year, people knew WP2FA, people knew the capture plugin, people knew WP Activity Log, but no one knew what is WP White Security. Cause it was like there was no umbrella company.

(13:58):
It was like just people, no individual plugins. So we wanted to rebrand to, even from the admin point of view, it makes things much easier now, but also from the branding, we’d like to present ourselves as we have a suite of plugins, not just this plugin or this plugin. So it’s much easier even for users. In fact, the most common customers of who purchase our new plugins to have the other plugins is the oldest one, and the other ones are only two, three years old. Their users which use WP Activity Log. So it’s good to see customers that need some of our suite of plugins like using them together and stuff like that. So those are the main reasons why we

Katie (14:43):
Rebranded. When we started as a web design company targeting local small businesses and since we were in a national park, it seemed relevant that we were based in a converted barn. We had no idea we were going to become a multinational software plugin company. So now we’ve got this weird name that doesn’t really mean anything. So I’m really fascinated to hear what you are saying about, in a way you’ve moved to a more generic name so that you can present it as the Umbrella brand. We’ve always thought, should we rebrand and then worried about losing the brand awareness we’ve already developed and things. So it’s interesting to hear your story.

Robert (15:32):
Yeah, very good question. In fact, the rebranding part has been on my mind. So I started in roughly 2013 officially. Yeah. And rebranded this year we made the official decision where it can last year in June. But yeah, it was on my mind for a few years because similar to you, should we rebrand? Why people asking question? Is it better? I don’t think, to be honest, there’s the right time to rebrand or not is just like, let’s do it. But I think what’s very important is planning. The planning stage took a whole year basically. That’s why the official decision was made. I was with the team in June last year in Portugal last year. Yeah, we decided, okay, I shared this idea of rebranding. Cause I’ve always thought about it the last few years, quite frankly, let’s start doing it. So it was a whole process.

(16:34):
It was a whole year of planning and stuff like that. I don’t think there’s a perfect time. I think there will always be some impact to the brand. So I mean it depends how you plant this up, but there’ll always be a bit of an impact. Always. It’s just a matter every day that the way I see, it’s like we made the decision because okay, we’re not sure what an impact will have, but every day that passes, that’s the day we’ve lost towards renaming kind of thing. A day that has passed. So it’ll always, it’ll never feel comfortable doing it always. Oh, now it’s so late. Now we grew, now we have another customer. Now we have another customer. So we just put the foot down and say we’re going to do it. It’s hard. There’s a lot of planning involved, a lot of unknowns as you said, easily remembered.

(17:25):
The new name will they keep on searching for the old name. Some things are out of your control. I think what’s really important is especially in the preparation, the planning stage, try to worry and plan as much as you can about the things you can control. The rest is you cannot control much. What’s important is that of course the planning stage, making sure that we have this Excel which was still kept. It’s so long of all the things we need to do and we to do them and literally went course we’re still dealing with it. Of course there are still some things. For example, at the moment we’re still chasing some websites, which they had articles about our plugins for example, and they linked to us and working them to change the URL. Yes, we’ve set up the redirect, but of course if you change to a direct link is better.

(18:11):
Yeah, but even the checklist, we had the split in three. There’s the pre rebranding during the extra brand that week where there’s not happening and then there’s post rebranding and yeah, we’re still going through the post rebranding. But yeah, the planning is very important, but I don’t think there will ever be the right day when to rebrand actually. So we just were been thinking about it for a few years. I got kind of a confirmation from him, it’s a good idea, let’s do it. So at least it wasn’t just me along with one crazy idea. We’re a team. So yeah. Then of course it happened.

Marcus (18:50):
I think in contrast to what you’ve built, Katie with Barn2, Barn2 has a bit of name recognition where I think what Robert was saying is most of the recognition was on the products themselves, on WP activity Log on WP 2FA and the Product suite and not as much on WP White Security, which I think probably you have maybe had some confirmation on that. Like you said at Porto when you were talking to people about what WP White Security is and like, oh, I know what activity log is and the name recognition for WP White Security maybe wasn’t there as much as it was for the products, and so making that decision to change to Melapress maybe wasn’t as difficult or as tall of an order. I am curious though, Robert, one where the Melapress name comes from. Just curious to hear you talk a little bit about that and two, maybe if you have a couple of considerations for people that might be looking to rebrand some of the things that they may not be thinking of before going into it. Something that you’ve run across in the last six months to a year in the planning, in the doing in the pre and current rebrand. Just a couple of considerations that people may not think of if they’re trying to do rebrand something, some advice you can give them.

Robert (20:15):
Sure, definitely. First of all, yeah, I agree with you. I think the fact that WP White Security didn’t have a strong brand by itself, that made the decision a bit easier kind of thing. Like okay, it’s not very strong in regards to the team. We’re a remote company. Everyone works from home. We have no office. I am based in the Netherlands, there’s someone in Malta, there’s someone in Bulgaria, Romania. We have people in base. We have two other people here in the Netherlands. So we are distributed team. We’re multinational. Two people are from different countries. Maea is a Maltese world. It depends on the tone, but can mean a yes or an no maybe. So it depends on the tone on how you use it. So we struggled a lot, by the way, with the name to come up with the name Melapress of course is for WordPress, but we struggled a lot.

Marcus (21:06):
I like it. For what it’s worth, I like the name. I was just curious where it came from.

Robert (21:10):
Thanks. Yeah, it had a lot of meetings, a lot of brainstorming sessions, and I was speaking to a Maltese colleague of mine said he used the word. I was like, okay, that sounds nice. So it worked out really well. Even at WordCamp you read this year we had very good feedback. Very good. Yeah, people like the name, so we’re glad about that. In regards to things to consider, so you can plan as much as you can when rebranding. One thing that I think people tend to overlook, not on purpose, whether you like it or not, you can do, of course you won’t set up direct. There’s a lot going on and stuff, but one way or another it’ll definitely affect, at least for a period of time, your SEO traffic, your traffic websites, which also means your revenue. So you need to make sure, of course if you’re running literally your company from paycheck to paycheck, there might be problems.

(22:06):
I think that’s one of the biggest things that people don’t think about because it’s definitely important and the rest as such, there isn’t much out of this world, as in if you start reading online, there are quite a lot of articles. You find quite a lot of Excel sheets, checklists that you need to go to when rebranding. I think that was the biggest thing, as in I knew about it because we have rebranded Ws before it was WP security audit log, so we had a bit of an idea what happens. We had changed the website then. So yeah, that’s definitely something like, okay, even when I spoke to people, even when I was at WordCamp, people ask, okay, does this affect your revenue and stuff like people, it seems they overlooked it. It does. It does affect your SEO traffic. We’ve recovered of course, but yeah, you can see even if you go to analytics or you can see that dip basically.

(22:58):
So it’s normal. There is this business as usual set up the redirects. I think something else that some people might overlook, the post rebranding, there’s a lot going on. We’re still going on until now. As I said, yes, you can set up redirects, but it’s always better to keep on chasing those websites which link to our old website to update the links. Keep on checking the logs for four and stuff are very important, especially when you run a blog for 10 years. You have a lot of blog posts, you have a lot of products and stuff. So yeah, you can have checklists, you can use crawlers, but there will always be some article which you had written in the past or it is redirect and now it ended up redirecting somewhere some. So yeah, keeping an eye. The rebranding the way I see, it’s like the day when I was rebranding is not the end of the project. It’s actually the start of the second phase of the project because there’s much more going on after this stage, checking things, making sure everything is still redirecting properly. Some of the websites actually, we had to send at least I think eight emails until they got back to us. The rebranding is just the beginning, so there’s much more going on after their rebranding than the rebranding.

Katie (24:15):
So did you do the implementation all in one go? The reason I ask is that a major rebrand that’s happened recently in the WordPress space is I themes to solid WP and they seem to have drawn that out in a very intentional way over months because of the complexity of the project. So did you do that or did you do it in one go and then phase two it’s more checking and up updating links and things.

Robert (24:41):
We’ve done it with one goal. We thought about it, we thought about splitting the process. I think we would have had less pressure as a team, but after doing some dry runs, just talking with the teams and stuff, it seems like we were going to, it’s more of a kind of, we didn’t want to end up dragging our feet with the project. So I said, listen, okay, if we’re going to do this then next month, and we were already delaying the first task, I was like, okay, then all the other tasks will be delayed. And then what happens here, and as you said, especially if you’re a team, someone’s going to take some time off. So by sticking to a date from four months before, so that month at least listen, we’re going to make sure everything is ready before everyone needs to be there and stuff like that.

(25:33):
I think most probably if you stage it, it has much less impact on the traffic, on the revenue and all this stuff. And maybe there’s a bit less pressure because we’re doing it stages, but for us, maybe because we’re a small team, it’s made it easier. At least let’s do that date and let’s stick to it and publish everything. Otherwise, as I said, some people rightly so someone with some time off, then this happened, then this happened, then this missing, it becomes a bit more complicated and it’s the whole process, even if you plan it, it’s stressful by itself. So listen, let’s do it and get rid of it. And then of course there’s the post rebranding process which is going on, but at least the biggest step is done.

Marcus (26:20):
I almost wonder, I don’t know what the experience is from the SolidWP team, but I almost wonder if you drag it out over time, if you end up with a little bit of a split personality for a period where you’re sort of iThemes and you’re sort of SolidWP and you’re kind of having to jump back and forth and oh, you’re from iThemes. Well yeah, but that’s going to be solid WP. And then when it happens, you’re like, yeah, it was formerly and you’re doing a lot of explaining for a while why you kind of have two names floating out there. So I almost wonder if that’s good too, depending on what’s possible. Again, maybe the team size and the amount of pressure that they needed to alleviate made sense for them to spread it out over time, where for your team’s size it made sense to just go ahead and switch it. But I almost wonder if just going ahead and switching it all at once makes sense to kind of not have two brands floating out there that mean the same thing for a while.

Robert (27:20):
I don’t think there’s an ideal setup. I think it really depends on the company and stuff. However, one thing maybe, which is also something that I should have mentioned before, but you said you need to keep on reminding people. For example, I noticed that as most of the world knows, Twitter has been renamed to X. Now that was a very rebranding, everyone knows, not everyone, at least people who are Canadian, whether people like him or the company or not. It was a very public thing, but still when I receive emails from them, they’re still like X.com in brackets, formerly Twitter. So you have to keep on reminding people, this is how we are, this is how we are.

Marcus (27:59):
Well, Twitter is having a different issue where people are refusing to call it X, and so to some degree they’re going to have to do that for a little while, where in your case, Malapras is a great name. It’s not a single letter that’s going to be very confusing. Exactly,

Robert (28:16):
Yeah.

Katie (28:20):
Twitter, they’ve just done it tiny bit at a time.

Robert (28:23):
Yeah, yeah, just happened.

Katie (28:24):
They’re still on Twitter.com and I think the main motivation was because he owned X.com and has wanted to use it for something. So they’ve done it, I’d say much worse than SolidWP, which is maybe in two stages. They’ve just done it incrementally, so people got confused. So that’s the opposite.

Marcus (28:43):
I think they missed the pre-planning piece entirely.

Katie (28:48):
And they have the budget to do it. I would assume

Marcus (28:51):
With the change away from WP, White Security to Melapress, I know that it’s not just a change of name, it’s not just a change of design. It’s a little bit of maybe a shift of focus. Maybe the focus was there and now you’re just trying to maybe play catch up a little bit with your focus shifting. So security is still obviously a big focus, but you said sort of administrative tasks within WordPress are also a primary focus for the company. What sort of administrative pieces within WordPress are you looking to tackle? What needs to be fixed within WordPress? On the administrative side,

Robert (29:28):
We do, to be honest, we do have a lot of ideas. We do have a lot of plugin ideas and stuff. However, this year and next year, especially with the rebrand, we want to focus on the dust settle grow with what we have. Because the last three years we grew really fast. Up until four years ago it was just me and the part-time, actually someone via Upwork, basically subcontracted. So yeah, so we’d like to wait a bit, let the dust settle a bit and then we’ll look. But in general, I would say even from the other plugins that I see, one thing that I see really kind of lacking user roles as in there are user roles, the default weapons user roles are quite limited. As in terms of there are those five I, 5, 4, 6, I’m not sure. Anyway, I know there are some plugins which cater for creating your own custom roles and stuff, but I only know towards your plugins and it seems like roles maybe are not given enough importance, how powerful they can be, depends on how you use them, but they can be very powerful. In fact, some plugins including WooCommerce, they create their own custom roles, customers, shop manager and stuff. So yeah, roles are very powerful. I think that’s one thing if I had time, but in the future maybe we can definitely focus on user roles are definitely need a bit more of TLC because they are very powerful and I think they are underestimated.

Katie (31:00):
That feels like a good fit for you as well because often people have misuse of user roles, which causes security problems. An admin. Exactly. So if there was an easy way to adjust the user roles and give everybody what they wanted, which may not fit neatly into author and editor or then that would make their site more secure, wouldn’t it?

Robert (31:22):
Yeah, I don’t blame people. You have just five user roles. You can install third-party plugin user roles is there for example, and create your own roles. But how many people, actually you’re a small agency getting started, you are two people. How many people have the time? Okay, so what are we doing exactly on the website? And you create that role, you go to every permission tick. This one? Yes, this one, no, this one denies. So I don’t blame people. So it’s more a question of awareness, having something that’s really easy to use and install and stuff like this. Yeah, so yeah, that’s the biggest issue. I think ease of use and yes, it is indeed. User roles are big problem and most people have an admin role or it’s there that’s the lowest people go usually. But yeah, definitely there’s a need there for something a bit better, a bit more flexible and may be a bit users, somehow a product that shows user more the potential of roles and how they can better use I am.

Marcus (32:31):
Before WordPress, I was a Drupal user at the agency that I worked at, and I’m going to be sacrilegious here for a moment, switching from Drupal to WordPress. I do feel like the one thing that I miss is Drupal’s roles and permissions system to be able to set up a role that was able to modify a custom post type and certain fields. And that seems to be far more difficult to do in WordPress than it was in Drupal. Now this is a few Drupal versions ago, so I don’t know what Drupal permissions and roles looks like these days, but when we made the switch from Drupal to WordPress, that was the one piece that I feel like didn’t quite work as well as it did in Drupal. So if you can fix that for us, I would be eternally grateful.

Robert (33:19):
Thanks. It’s a long, long road, but yeah, maybe we’ll get there. We’ll see.

Marcus (33:24):
Sure, sure.

Robert (33:26):
Yeah. I think one of the biggest problems, especially when planning new products, especially with WordPress, it’s such a popular product that people use. WordPress in any way, shape or form mean. Just look at the WooCommerce sector, people who use WooCommerce, you think honestly every day or whenever we get a support case, you think commerce will after all these years and you go in like this or how are you using it? They start telling you use this, we installed this plugin, like whoa. Or we have this discuss code. So yeah, you think you know it all. So yeah, and with user roles, of course it’s difficult to really envisage how WordPress users are using them. I think it’s more a question of, cause at the core of it, the design of WordPress and the permissions and how they are is quite good. I think more is the representation of how they are.

(34:19):
The most popular plugin when it comes to user roles is user road Editor. It’s, it’s really basic. So basically you see all the list of permissions in WordPress? Yes. No, I think it’s just a question of somehow making that process a bit easier because the system is there, the system works, it is already quite good enough, there’s no need for modification. I’m sure with time of course it’ll be modified and improved, but it’s more, yeah, do way these things can be configured rather than because the system is there, it works just there. Are the tools good enough to help users use the roles at therefore potential? Basically?

Katie (34:59):
Yeah, it’s quite overwhelming choosing from so many dozens of capabilities. Even when you click the human readable box, it’s not clear what a lot of that means, edit options, whatever. But I found that there’s also gaps in functionality. For example, I quite often get feature requests saying, how can I control which of my team members can edit which posts? So you might have a blog or a custom post type and they want to control specific posts or something that people can edit in the back end. Well that is nothing to do with user roles at the moment because that’s all about types, isn’t it? Can they edit posts in general, which is all post types and so on. So I think just giving you product ideas here, I think that is a gap as well that I haven’t seen any product do. front-end content control plugins, of course, that what the user can access. There’s lots of them membership and whatever, but in the backend, I’ve never seen anything.

Robert (36:01):
No, I agree, I agree. But I think it’s still possible to use hooks and filters and somehow use what WordPress has built a bit on top of it and then for example, say, yes, I want these users to only edit, did these posts and then one, these users only did this type of posts. So yeah, I agree. It’s not perfect, but it’s definitely possible to build on it. It’s just a question of presentation. Personally, I’m not even of front-end plugins. Whenever I, with front-end, it’s, it’s much more difficult as in, because the WordPress dashboard is the WordPress dashboard, and of course there are some plugins which might make some changes. But overall user interface, quite simply, when you go to front-end, we’re talking about plugins, scripts, everything, the team itself, and you want to be placed here, the other government is here, so it gets way more complicated. That’s one thing. Again, never say never, but one thing at this stage, I can guarantee we’re not going to anything near the front-end for now because that’s another

Katie (37:08):
Very sensible, we’ve learned it in theory, but we still make the mistake. So some of our most profitable plugins are the ones that just touch the back-end. Like we’ve got a WooCommerce protected categories plugin, which adds password protection to the categories, and it’s all back-end and it’s just so easy to support. Whereas say our WooCommerce product filters plugin in the front-end is a total nightmare because of all the theme issues and compatibility with other plugins, and it’s far more profitable if you find a good gap in the market in the back-end to do with, I don’t even shipping or anything really, but if it’s a back-end plugin, then as a business it’s a lot easier.

Robert (37:53):
Yes, yes. The front-end is a bit of even the back-end, but the front-end is much worse. I think it’s the beauty of open source. As an open source, the code is available and so yeah, it, it’s kind of like it’s much easier for people to develop something, which is great. However, there’s also that problem with some people, for example, I don’t know, to log out, for example, there’s a certain hook to log out to log off a user, for example. But some people you might see some teams, they just kill decision, for example, that’s it. And then of course you’re trying to keep a log off that, but you cannot because they’re not using the right hook. And with the front-end, it’s even much worse with these things as you’re saying. For example, I’m imagining filtering products and someone’s using some team, but they use Subhook. I don’t know what, it can become really, really complex. So yeah, that’s one of the reasons why I try to avoid different, as much as I can. It’s much more difficult to be honest.

Marcus (38:47):
I’m going to ask you both, since you’re both products owners, I know that WordPress is undergoing some admin area changes in the next year to 18 months or so. How closely do you all follow those things knowing that what you’re working on has to interface with any changes that happen in the WordPress admin?

Robert (39:09):
I do follow the news. I am on a number of select channels. However, I try to filter, I turn not to read. I’m kind of selective on what to read and what to follow because yeah, I mean there’s a lot of news and 18 months is especially in it, it’s a very long time as in so many things can change. I mean we’ve seen it, even with Gutenberg started as something that everything is changing them. There’s a lot going on. So also one thing I’ve learned, it’s nice to support latest technology because it helps in a way support WordPress as well, but it takes people take time to update. I’m saying this right now with WooCommerce WooCommerce and version eight. A lot of things change in core and now there’s version 8.3, there’s a lot of changes.

(39:59):
Gave us a bit of a hard time playing around and trying to fix some issues we had with our plug-in. So we spent a lot of time, but then we realized, listen, this is just 3, 4, 5 months old. In fact, we even, we supported most of it and we didn’t get any support query about it. And then I realized I think very, very, very few people started actually using these things. It would take a few more months until people who start using, we’ve seen it as well with Gutenberg. Gutenberg was a big thing. It was popular. Nowadays, of course there are more websites using Gutenberg, but it took a few months until, so I try to follow the news just to get an idea of the direction, but until I see something actually happening, being implemented and say, okay, let’s try it now. Because even in Gutenberg, since it’s been launched, it’s changed so much. In terms of Covid, I try to keep myself informed. Of course, we’re in this industry, but yeah, wait, still I’m never the first one to do, oh, we’re like it to kind of let people lose their bits, see what’s happening and that kind of thing. Start if it’s something that affects us, see what’s happening and stuff and then start developing or adjusting the product for that.

Marcus (41:16):
Was that how you think about things too, Katie? Kind follow the news but then follow the activity and see what people are actually doing?

Katie (41:23):
I don’t think this is a good area to be an early adopter because things change so rapidly as Robert says. So like Gutenberg has changed so much, and when we’ve tried to integrate with blocks, for example, our filter plugin is an excellent example. We came across blocks that were marked as experimental in the code saying this may have unpredictable results if you try to integrate with it. So we’ve had to launch products and document, it does not work with this block. We are waiting for them to stabilize and finish this block, and we do what we can when something is added to WordPress itself. But it’s often very slow process. And one current change is the new WooCommerce product editor, which is in beta. It’s taken a surprisingly long time for blocks to be available for the single product page, and it’s actually looking very good.

(42:23):
It’s super buggy, the beta at the moment, but the concept looks good and it doesn’t look like Gutenberg, although it does use blocks for creating the long description and so on, that is going to have serious consequences for several of our plugins. For example, we have plugins that you edit variations on the single product page and add extra fields like product sample buttons and lead times, and this is all going to change, but in my opinion, there’s no point in us supporting this current beta version because it’s just going to change. So as a business, I feel it wouldn’t be efficient to support it yet, even though it is available in WooCommerce core. If you tick a box, it’s kind of for trial purposes really. So I’m waiting as well.

Robert (43:15):
Yeah, in fact, even we noticed, for example, just this week, sorry, last week, we’re working on the Captcha plugin to support the latest edition of the WooCommerce checkout. And there are no, in fact, there’s no hook for this. It still needs to be developed. So it’s not just everyone. So yeah, you have to wait and there’s no point in trying to work around that, especially if you know that they’re going to develop it. Just have to wait, follow the tickets. Especially as developers, I tend to follow the news. Developers tend to follow more the projects on GitHub and stuff, which is better. There’s a balance between us. Sometimes I tell things to developers. Sometimes they tell me because they’re more in the GitHub area with other developers and

Katie (43:54):
Customers are an excellent guide as well, because when customers start asking for something, that’s when you know there’s demand. Of course, you need to move quite quickly at that point, and you shouldn’t be reactive. You need to be aware it’s on the horizon, but that is one way to know how to prioritize.

Robert (44:11):
Exactly. Yeah, I agree a hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah, customers are a very good indicator.

Katie (44:15):
So what are some of the future plans for Melapress then? What’s next on the horizon?

Robert (44:23):
Yeah, this year is almost finished next year. It’s more about refining the products kind of thing, making them more mature. I mean, they all start all of them. They start as a project, as a hobby and stuff, and they develop WP Activity Log is already set in standard, and we want all the other plugins to be at the standard in terms of code and stuff like that. In fact, we’re also slowly, slowly adding, implementing the WordPress coding standards and stuff like that. Of course, it’s better, especially when it comes to integrations with the plugins. We’re also focusing to get a bit more organized because we are experiencing growth. As I said, the last few years, we grew very fast, but there’s still a lot of unknowns and okay, you do this now and someone else does this, and there’s a lot of, I wouldn’t say it’s not that things are not structured, but it’s not even this organized.

(45:18):
But yeah, we can be definitely a bit better organized. So before we actually recruit more people and start moving faster, we need to organize ourselves much better right now, use the right tools and stuff like that. And once we are good, now, then we can start getting more people. Because if we’re not kind of think functioning properly now, as soon as you start adding more people, of course you have even more problems. So let’s get ourselves structured, let’s get ourselves organize, okay, this is how we’re trying. I’m sure most startups go through this documentation, it’s a nightmare. But yeah, let’s document the processes. Let’s document everything. Who does what? And whenever we publish an article, it has to go through this, to this phase, this phase. It goes here, it goes here it goes here. A plugin, getting a new developer. Not everyone starts writing like the wild, wild west, okay, we follow these standards, these are repositories, this is what we do, this is how we’re going to build, et cetera. So next year is definitely a lot of focus on that one, and hopefully we succeed. We’re a bit more organized, the products are in a better place, more stable and stuff as they grow. And yeah, then we’ll be ready hopefully to get more team members on board and yeah, who knows, maybe new plugins.

Marcus (46:35):
Yeah, we’ve got you going in your head on that. Roles and permissions plugin already. I can tell. Yeah,

Robert (46:42):
I have a card in my Trello board.

Marcus (46:46):
You’re ready to get started on that one? Yeah. I saw on your website, I think that y’all have a newsletter and stuff. As we start to wrap up here, where can people find out more about you, more about Melapress and your products and keep up to date with all the things that you have going on?

Robert (47:02):
Sure. I’m Robert. You can find me on LinkedIn, you can find me also on Twitter and stuff like this. The prime minister of Malta also called Robert Abela, so most probably some people get confused, in fact. But yeah, you can find all the information. There are links to our socials and everything. As you said, we have the newsletter, we have the blog. Even the blog we’re kind of like, now we’re focusing much more. We always tried our best, of course, try good content, but now we’re focusing much more on longer format, more complete, longer format articles, more informative. Our motto was always, of course, every business is there to sell, but we were never fans of articles like, oh, this is the best. We prefer to write an article that readers find useful. And hopefully, of course they will learn about our plugin through the process, learn who we are and what to do. But yeah, the main scope now was always, but now it’s even more, let’s write something education that the readers can find useful, that’s useful to users. And then of course, hopefully they’ll discover and learn about us as well.

Katie (48:13):
Definitely. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming on. It’s been great to talk to you and we’ve covered loads of interesting ground from the rebrand to running a business in general on WooCommerce or to, we call it Woo now. I think it’s WooCommerce still in that context. So thank you very much.

Robert (48:30):
Thank you very much. Thank you for having me here. And yeah, to the next one, hopefully.