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:

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.

Markdown Code For WordPress

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:

  1. You guys contact me and say you’re interested in signing up to help
  2. Once I get a list of people together, I’ll contact you guys via email
  3. I’ll shoot you a download link to the email with a small set of instructions
  4. Over the next week or so, I’ll roll out updates to the plugin and then contact you guys
  5. 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!