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WooThemes joins Automattic
- erlend_sh 11y agoThat's pretty clever. They're buying WooCommerce, one of the leading eCommerce platforms.
- blumkvist 11y agoLeading in the (very) small business segment.
- blumkvist 11y agoWhat are you down voting, chumps? That's the truth.
- dubcanada 11y agoWhere are you getting your stats from? I'm interested in the source for said speculation.
- nedwin 11y agoeCommerce overall http://trends.builtwith.com/shop http://trends.builtwith.com/shop Trending up and to the right http://trends.builtwith.com/shop/WooCommerce http://trends.builtwith.com/shop/WooCommerce
- mcintyre1994 11y agoFrom the article : > here we find ourselves powering over 24% of online stores with our flagship product, WooCommerce That seems pretty impressive and means they're definitely a top player.
- arkitaip 11y agoAnd just like that - by acquiring the people behind e-commerce plugin WooCommerce - Automattic has become one of the major e-commerce platform providers. Great move by Automattic.
- ereckers 11y agoWooCommerce has already got a big chunk: http://trends.builtwith.com/shop http://trends.builtwith.com/shop And they're trending up: http://trends.builtwith.com/shop/WooCommerce http://trends.builtwith.com/shop/WooCommerce
- themodelplumber 11y agoWordPress' API and its limitations are so annoying that I just can't imagine developing for this platform unless you desperately need money. Ideally they develop some new product that is more competitive than the current combination of WP & WC.
- wonderyak 11y agoThe thousands of developers making a living mostly off of WordPress development would probably disagree with you. It's low hanging fruit, not a lot of effort for decent return.
- themodelplumber 11y agoIt's a technical debt trap. You dive in with a one-click install and follow up with a bunch of plugins that seem to fit the bill. Then you spend 2-3x more time creating a custom theme for someone than you would in a sensibly-architected CMS, and only then do you begin to realize that maintenance costs down the road are going to be absolutely crazy. Especially when plugins X and Y start requiring a different theming architecture in production builds, and an immediate update to the latest version is now critical due to a security flaw. Then the plugin you were relying on for sub-task Z is sold to a third party, and while they keep promising to address security and usability issues, somehow you start to receive spam for telecommunications equipment through their support channels. This actually happened to me. Low-hanging fruit is often a mirage when it comes to the CMS world.
- infinii 11y agoYou're not the first person to make such a comment. You're also not the first to make such comments without suggesting an alternative CMS that addresses all of your concerns.
- ereckers 11y agoThis is definitely unexpected. I'm guessing Auttomatic + WooThemes + Jetpack + More? is WordPress's answer to fending off the Weebly, Shopify, Wix, etc..
- wonderyak 11y agoWith the coming REST API and possibly some new ways of obviating the dashboard and the TinyMCE editor WordPress is headed in a great direction.
- ereckers 11y agoYeah. REST API + JS front-end frameworks like ReactJS look to be the future.
- ryan-allen 11y agoYou forgot ThemeForest, the other big player in selling Wordpress Themes.
- wonderyak 11y agoI wonder if this will somehow improve the quality of WooThemes' themes?
- torbit 11y agoI'm wondering if the prices will change, if any plugins will be discontinued, how high will yearly markups be, how often will they update the plugins.
- MichaelTieso 11y agoHey all. I'm Michael, a Developer Advocate at WooThemes and now Automattic. I'm happy to answer any questions. As you can imagine, we're all really excited about this.
- ryannevius 11y agoSort of unrelated, but still a question: what is the role of a "developer advocate"? Also, it sounds like job roles transferred over one-to-one?
- pionar 11y ago> Also, it sounds like job roles transferred over one-to-one? Usually when a company merges like this, there's a period just after acquisition where both companies still operate independently while the higher-ups try to figure out the integration plan. That doesn't mean titles/roles won't change, but the same day as the announcement? It'd be business as usual at both companies.
- DannySantoro 11y agoMichael works with other companies to encourage better integration, like payment gateways and shipping tools. It's a new position, but a sure exciting time to be there :)
- ereckers 11y agoCongratulations and thanks for going with Automattic and not a VC firm. From Magnus Jepson's blog: http://jepson.no/we-are-joining-automattic/ http://jepson.no/we-are-joining-automattic/ > We had talks with potential partners, including VC firms and competing companies. This led us to Automattic, who had previously shown great interest in the popularity of WooCommerce. CEO Matt Mullenweg, who is also the co-founder of WordPress, had built his company in the same distributed manner as WooThemes with a team of over 300. This was our dream partner! Here's a question: do you have any idea of what the first initial changes might be for developer/firms and how we work with WooCommerce/WooThemes/WooMatic?
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- MBCook 11y agoGoing in not knowing who Automattic is (although I know of WooThemes)... I still don't know who Automattic is. That seems like basic information I'd expect to see.
- lbotos 11y agoInteresting. Automattic are the makers of WordPress.
- photomatt 11y agoWordPress.com, to be exact. :) We contribute and volunteer a lot for core WordPress.
- camworld 11y agoThis is a really smart acquisition. WordPress continues to dominate the CMS market. With the upcoming REST API, it's only going to get better. I'm watching niche CMS industry after niche CMS industry crumble under the continual migration to WordPress. The latest victims are the small CMS vendors who have been selling proprietary CMS solutions to public school districts for the past 15 years, charging far too much money (your U.S. taxpayer dollars!) for barely functional CMS's. The FCC voted recently to prohibit spending federal money on these solutions, a practice that basically created the market, so now every school district in the U.S. (14,000+) are looking around for cheaper and better solutions. A large percentage of them are migrating to WordPress.
- callmeed 11y agoDo you have any links about this FCC ruling and school districts? I'm intrigued.
- jcurbo 11y agoI was interested too (as a former school IT admin), a little googling turned up this: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/08/01/37erate.h33.html http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/08/01/37erate.h33.htm... E-Rate is a major funding source for school Internet connections and is ran by the FCC. The sidebar on that article says: "Phases out support for some non-broadband services, such as voice services; and eliminates support for others, such as email, Web-hosting, paging, and components of telephone service such as text-messaging and directory assistance." I'm guessing it relates to that "web-hosting" bit.
- camworld 11y agoYes, that is exactly right. Public school districts can no longer use E-Rate (federal money) funds to pay for web site hosting or web site management systems. The FCC decided to re-allocate $5 billion in E-Rate funds for a 5-year wifi roll-out plan for all public school districts. You can read more about the FCC's E-Rate Modernization Order :https://www.fcc.gov/page/summary-second-e-rate-modernization-order https://www.fcc.gov/page/summary-second-e-rate-modernization...
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- HNhappyface 11y agoWonder if they'll keep hosting the site at WP Engine...?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- aikah 11y agoI'm fascinated by Wordpress success. It's an horrible peace of software, with horrible PHP code 4.x style, a db schema only a beginner could have come up with and an ecosystem with a lot of trash(not even talking about the admin which is hideous ). Yet it's a blazing success in the CMS space, because of 3 things that are insanely overlooked by other CMS developers : - Ease of installation - It runs on a minimal PHP/Apache/Mysql setup (cheap hosting) - It has a great backward compatibly, unlike other solutions that break everything with each major version. If one compares with Drupal for instance, I mean with Drupal, a designer can go really really far without writing a single line of PHP code, aside from a few tags for templates(but it's really light). You have views, CCK and a lot of handy stuff. On the other hand, one cannot customize Wordpress without writing more than a few php tags or downloading a plugin that will mess up with the original db schema. And good luck customizing the admin(easily done with Drupal). I get that Wordpress is more of a "platform" businesses can build products upon, but who would really want to build on that shitty core,with that db schema? one can say i'm negative and unfair in my criticism, but I think my arguments are valid. It's true however that while Wordpress gets a lot of heat from PHP devs, there is no effort from the PHP community to build something like Wordpress with a better codebase, and a better db schema. So Wordpress still has a reason to exist. Reminds me of Javascript : dismissed as an horrible toy by smart people, fits an niche, becomes popular and ubiquitous , smart people now have to work on these deployed codebases....
- usaphp 11y agoI think number one reason of its success are themes and plugins.
- aikah 11y agoOf course, but it is in my opinion a consequence of the stable plugin/theme api wordpress has (point 3)
- pknight 11y agoThe number one reason is because it is FOSS, easy to install, easy to use and easy to extend. The thriving themes and plugins ecosystem is the result of the platform becoming popular because of the aforementioned. If it wasn't FOSS WordPress wouldn't be where it is today.
- gesman 11y agoWise business decision for wordpress. Free ecommerce framework + lots of paid sub-plugins for years to come. This will pay for itself.
- luisrock 11y agoAny plans for Sensei plugin? My business depends on it and I am a little scared…
- pknight 11y agoUsually an acquisition spells trouble for the product's users, but this is a different kind of situation. I think WooCommerce and Sensei will only get better as a result. The only folk who have to worry is the people building competing products.
- MichaelTieso 11y agoSorry if it was not clear. Sensei, along with all of other other plugins will remain and continue being develop as normal. No need to worry at all. We have a lot of exciting things coming up for Sensei ;)
- ShirsenduK 11y agoI'm a fan of Wordpress but not the templates which are available. They never take performance into consideration. Most wordpress sites are slow primarily Becuase of the frontend performance. 5 css and 10 JavaScript files seems to be the average. As for woothemes it's 2015 and the page where they have announced this acquisition still isn't responsive and they want to take over 51% of the web. Hope they switch gears and innovate.
- thirdsun 11y agoYes, same complaint from me, but I think their problem is the target audience, which probably opts for flashy sliders and kitch-sink approaches to design instead of keeping it simple and fast. However, coincidentally WooThemes offers a theme that advertises itself with something along the lines of "no sliders, no fonts, no bloat" - forgot the name, but it's a good move.
- skrebbel 11y agoAutomattic is definitely a company I wouldn't mind being acquired by. They seem to genuinely put "make cool stuff" before "ecosystem! lock in! billionaires!". Congrats!