In three previous posts, I’ve mentioned that I’ve been slowly refocusing my own business to focus solely on working with WordPress. This particular focus includes:
- Renaming the company
- Doing a long, hard search for a support system that I like
- Trying to find balance with the WordPress Plugins Repository
- And even beginning to offer some online courses
In order to keep this momentum, albeit it very slow momentum, going, I’m looking to begin experimenting with self-hosting WordPress plugins. Specifically, I’m going to be using Auto Hosted.
And much like I did with support systems, I’m going to be evaluating it by actually, you know, using it.
But here’s the thing: I need your help.
Self-Hosted WordPress Plugins
As I’ve mentioned before, one of the things that I really like about the WordPress plugins repository is the tools that it gives you once you submit a plugin.
By that, I mean that you get:
- A simple support forum
- Ratings
- A homepage for the plugin
- Automatic updates
- …and so on
That said, since I’m interested in taking this in another direction – specifically, self-hosted – then I need to be able to provide a lot of that myself. I’ve got the majority of those things in place already, and for those that I don’t have in place, they are done so more or less on a per project basis.
So with that said, I’m looking for a handful of people to help be beta test self-hosted WordPress plugins.
How Will This Work?
I’ll be using the open source plugin Markdown Code For WordPress for testing.
Generally speaking, I need a group of people (read: however many of you are interested) in order to help me beta test the process. This is how I plan on running it:
- You guys contact me and say you’re interested in signing up to help
- Once I get a list of people together, I’ll contact you guys via email
- I’ll shoot you a download link to the email with a small set of instructions
- Over the next week or so, I’ll roll out updates to the plugin and then contact you guys
- You then let me know if you receive the updates or not.
Easy enough, right?
I don’t have much to offer in the way of thanks, but I’m more than happy to have a post go out after the testing is over to thank everyone individually and link to your Twitter account and your homepage, if you’re interested.
Let’s Do This
It’s simple: Shoot me an email using this page, in the subject line, mention something about Self-Hosted WordPress Plugins, and then after 24 hours, I’ll email all of you who have emailed me, then we’ll go from there.
Thanks in advance, guys – shoot me a note!
Hi Tom,
out of curiosity, what made you choose Auto Hosted over another solution like say, Easy Digital Downloads with the licensing addon?
Straight up, it was just out of research that I had done – and I wasn’t aware of the licensing add-on.
This is why I’m just beta testing this particular tool. I’m a big fan of EDD and what’s going on there, so if this doesn’t fit the bill, then EDD will be where I head next.
Hopefully this doesn’t come off as anything against was EDD is doing :). I’ve nothing but major respect for Pippin (and even contributed to EDD in the early days as well as co-authored a plugin with he and Andrew Norcross).
It just happened to be one of the first ones I opted to try.
thanks for the reply.
I’m going to be using EDD and the licensing add-on for some premium plugins myself, so that’s why I asked.
I also love EDD and have contributed a little to it and made 2 addons, so I’m glad I can use it finally myself