The new year has barely started and there’s already a bunch of new stuff going on here in the WP Ultimo HQ! And we are happy to announce a couple of them today!
Meet Juliana and Marcelo!
Some of you might have noticed some new faces on the chat bubble on our main site. That would be me, Juliana, and Marcelo. Two months ago we arrived at NextPress, and since then we’re getting to know everything around here. The goal is to provide even better support and deliver new features and fixes faster and better (1).
(1) and to ease the burden on my back a bit, haha
— Arindo
Marcelo Assis is an experienced WordPress professional who joined our team as a full-time developer, helping with maintaining the add-ons and pushing WP Ultimo core forward as well. Are you aware that the last Admin Page Creator release (1.3.0) added Brizy and Elementor support in addition to Beaver Builder? Well, that’s Marcelo’s work right there!
Need something? Glad to help you! I’m Juliana Dias, WP Ultimo’s new Community Manager. I’m here to aid community members and to help with questions you may have before and after starting your own network. Also, you can talk to me in English, Spanish, and Portuguese =)
A new year, a new way to work:
This year will be awesome, with a lot of changes to come! And all of these changes will be guided by you guys: the WP Ultimo Community.
Speak your mind on the Roadmap!
From now on, WP Ultimo will be developed on 6-week-long cycles (we’ve copied this idea from the folks at Basecamp). Once the features that make up a cycle are decided (and we’ll decide them together), we don’t add anything else until that cycle is finished. If we think the features are too large to fit in the 6 weeks after we started to work on them, we will cut some details out until we reach a version that ships in 6 weeks.
The goal here is to have some sort of “contract” with the community and provide better estimates of when things will ship. Arindo does not have a great track record when it comes to giving estimates and he’s aware of it (I know how frustrating this can be, sorry guys – Arindo). This aims to make this less of a problem.
Cycle 1 has already begun and things are right on schedule. Features that will be developed during this first cycle are divided over 6 weeks, and you can follow everything on our recently updated Roadmap.
After each cycle, we’ll have a cool-down period of 1-2 weeks. Here we won’t focus as much on new features, but on making sure the things we added on the previous cycle are working as smoothly as possible, writing documentation, and, most importantly, talking with you to decide what should make it into the next cycle.
Developers, developers, developers!
Steve Ballmer has said it all!
In this first quarter of the year, we are also focused on writing better documentation for developers and producing video tutorials so we can see more and more add-ons developed by third-party shops, which we are already starting to see (check out WaaS PRO and Keypress).
We also aim to improve the Getting Started documentation with video tutorials covering the basic functionality for people that are just starting out with their Website as a Service platforms.
Group Chats
As Arindo promised last time, we are planning to hold Community Conversations, starting next month. This will be a group chat where we’ll discuss WP Ultimo, people will be able to share what they are doing with the plugin and we will eventually demo features that are under construction. This will be fun! Be sure to subscribe to our mailing list to receive the invitation (don’t worry, if you are a license holder, you are already subscribed =]).
We hope to have you join us in the incredible ride 2019 is going to be!
— Juliana Dias
PS.: If you were having issues with a slow admin panel, we released an update (1.9.6) a few hours ago that addresses it. To learn how to enable updates for WP Ultimo, read this.
