In today’s hyper-competitive and saturated digital environment, the story you tell sets you apart.
At WP Engine, we’re in the business of helping our customers tell better stories through incredible digital experiences. But it’s also important to pause, reflect, and examine our own story and the core values that underpin it, to ensure we do everything we can to help our clients grow.
All Hands does just that, as its biannual company-wide event focuses on internalizing where you’ve been in the past six months and what goals you’re setting for the future. provide the opportunity to do so.
Last week, All Hands Winter 2022, a fully virtual event for employees around the world, highlighted WP Engine’s continued growth as the integrated self-service platform of choice for WordPress builders, designers, brands, and agencies. became. of all sizes.
During this year’s All Hands keynote, WP Engine CEO Heather Brunner delivered a message of innovation and continued growth to over 1,100 employees around the world.
To tell our story, looking back helped us lay the groundwork for where we are today. In short, a multi-product WordPress company that optimizes your WordPress experience from start to finish.
Our growing set of developer tools includes Local, the #1 local WordPress development tool. Themes and frameworks such as Genesis and Frost.and beloved plugins like Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), WP migration, WP Offroad Media, WP Offroad SESand Better search replace.
We are able to invest in the future of these tools for the benefit of the WordPress community at large, while making it easier for our customers to use them to create high performing WordPress sites.
“Together we live our core values and deliver great products, great innovation and great service to our customers every day,” said Brunner.
“Today, WP Engine has an incredible array of products to help our customers design, build, manage and grow with us.”
By investing in developer assets that WordPress users already love and continuing to add and optimize them, you can ensure that the WordPress community continues to thrive.
WP Engine is a longtime partner of Webby Awards. We support their efforts through our annual awards show sponsorship, Created in code (a project that shares a behind-the-scenes look at the process of building a Webby-nominated site), and Webby Talk On this tour, the Webby team visits advertising, media and technology companies to share insights on emerging trends online.
This year’s Webby Talk, titled Never Niche Enough, delves into how Gen Z is reshaping how we connect online. Ciel VanderVeen, Managing Director of the Webby Awards, joined online to share the results of his survey of more than 3,000 Gen Z consumers about their online habits and interests. Did.
After collecting data over three months, Webby’s experts found that Gen Z is disrupting the internet monoculture in favor of smaller, more unique and authentic experiences. Whereas millennials are viewed as “my generation” online and use social media to showcase their personal experiences and achievements, Gen Z has opted for a “our generation” mentality and seeks common ground. We create connections and inclusive communities through interests and hobbies.
“We started to see these very interesting new communities emerge, and Gen Z seemed to be leading some of them,” said VanderVeen. “We’ve noticed they’re flocking to these online communities, but it’s becoming more of a niche than just a community. There are these online spaces that hit the sweet spot between [members of Gen Z] Yes and what they love. ”
VanderVeen concluded by reiterating how brands and businesses can tap into this new niche future of the web by taking the time to learn about the audience they want to target before marketing. A deeper understanding of our audience and their motivations is essential to gaining buy-in from younger generations, and appealing to both their radical individualism and emphasis on inclusivity will ensure long-term relevance. It’s the only way to keep
How the team at 11Onze, Europe’s largest fintech company, collaborated with WP Engine Agency Partner WONDR to create a real Webby Award Winner Digital experience—La Plaza. Built on the pillars of community, education, and trust, Personal Social Networks (PSNs) and learning portals provide financial tools and knowledge to younger generations, including Generation Z.
In this year’s All Hands breakout session, Kellen Mace, Developer Relations Manager at WP Engine, talked about the evolution of Atlas, WP Engine’s headless WordPress platform. What started as a complete headless WordPress platform has evolved into a comprehensive collection of headless WordPress tools. Many of them are open source and available to anyone wanting to build a headless site with WordPress.
The Atlas ecosystem reduces friction for headless builders and provides fine-grained control over the development experience when navigating in and out of headless architectures. Atlas’ complete list of tools and frameworks includes multiple pieces, Mace said, making headless WordPress development readily available to builders experimenting with the technology.
Faust.js is a front-end JavaScript framework made for headless WordPress. It includes authentication, post preview, template hierarchy, easy WordPress data fetching, and works right out of the box.
WPGraphQL can run any WordPress site GraphQL serverand the recently released WPGraphQL Smart Cache Plugin Create a new way to cache frequently run queries to ensure your users get a lightning-fast experience.
It can be used with traditional or headless WordPress sites, ACF is the most popular custom fields plugin for WordPress, making it easy for builders to implement the custom fields they need on their headless sites. moreover, localheadless addon ( Add-on library) simplifies local development of headless sites.
Finally, the Atlas Search plugin provides advanced search functionality on all headless sites built with Atlas.
Together, these tools make headless WordPress development faster, easier, and more powerful. In fact, Mace was able to launch a demo site in his last 10 minutes of the presentation.
WordPress continues to evolve thanks to a vibrant community of dedicated contributors. During the All Hands closing session, WP Engine Developer Advocate Nick Diego made this fact abundantly clear.
“WordPress will decline or stagnate without active community contributors,” he said. “WordPress is built and maintained by community members, and if you have a say in those discussions, you can help dictate how WordPress is built.”
Diego started the session with an overview of how much WordPress core has been modernized in the last year alone. 2022 he started with the release of version 5.9 in January. With this release, site editor It has fundamentally changed the way builders and designers create and edit sites.
Version 6.0, released in May, greatly improved user editing, including the ability to manage page and post template types. Most importantly, new content His locking feature allows site administrators to keep certain aspects locked and under lock, preventing other site editors from unintentionally breaking important site functionality. You can prevent it from slipping.
In November, version 6.1 was released thanks to the contributions of WP Engine employees. In fact, two of the ten style variations available in the default theme in version 6.1 (twenty three) Designed by WP Engine employees!
To fulfill WordPress’ mission and truly democratize publishing, WordPress Core goes full steam ahead with block editing, making it easier than ever to build beautiful, powerful sites with WordPress. To that end, WP Engine is committed to providing even more contributor hours in 2023, devoting direct time and effort to improving WordPress core across the community.
Going forward, WordPress will continue to emphasize the importance of design. After all, design matters. WP Engine is committed to giving back to the WordPress community that has helped drive our success.
Winter All Hands 2022 told the story of a company becoming the unified WordPress platform of choice for builders around the world. It looks bright for WP Engine.
Find out more about WP Engine and our story here.Or search for open positions and be part of our story here!