As part of our Special Projects team here at Automattic, we help interesting people and organizations have a great experience with WordPress. Sometimes that involves collaborating to build out new solutions to meet our partners needs, other times we help them migrate existing custom systems over to WordPress. I’ve recently had the opportunity to work on a custom migration from Contentful, which I learned will often need to be handled custom, due to the individualized nature of how customers design their structures in Contentful’s spaces and the format of their export. To aid in future efforts ..read more

Daniel Brown at his home-based workstation. Photos by Harper Brown. What’s it like to work at a fully distributed company with a worldwide team and culture guided by a Creed? Welcome to “Life @ Automattic,” a series of Q&As with the people behind the products. Today we speak with Daniel Brown, a Technical Account Manager for Newspack. Who are you, and what do you do? I have two simple qualities that define me: leave things better than when I found them, and empower others to do the same. This has grown out of being a father of two great kids, and having a strong positive outlook. Automatti ..read more

In this write-up, we talk about recent performance improvements that we did on WordPress 6.3, sharing both our findings and journey. While this post will mostly be around performance improvements at the code level, we want to emphasize that when we write code, we first want it to be readable, correct, secure, and only after that, performant. In any case, digging into both PHP and WordPress core internals can provide insightful knowledge, providing awareness of how things work – whether at the architecture level, the function level, etc. Code performance 101 Code performance optimizat ..read more

At Automattic, no career path is cast in stone. There are no hindrances or rules against moving to different departments and even roles. What matters are demonstrated abilities. There are also a lot of conducive elements that encourage personal development. At Automattic, the first sentence of our creed is “I will never stop learning.” SourceHappiness Engineer by Day, Hacker by Night “Happiness Engineers” (HE) are the folks at Automattic who take customer service to the next level. I joined WordPress.com as a HE in 2018 and quickly found ways to tinker with code. For example, a few months into ..read more

One benefit to WordPress.com’s managed WordPress hosting is that you never have to worry about configuring the server. No Nginx tweaks, restarting PHP processes, or optimizing the MySQL configuration — we take care of that for you. It doesn’t need to be a total black box, though! For WordPress.com Business and Commerce sites with hosting features enabled, our new Site Monitoring page gives you visibility into the power running under the hood. Explore the Site Monitoring page Our Site Monitoring page strives to make it easy to understand how your site is performing, without overwhelming you wit ..read more

What’s it like to work at a fully distributed company with a worldwide team and culture guided by a Creed? Welcome to “Life @ Automattic,” our series of Q&As with the people behind the products. Today we spoke with Rudy Faile, a senior systems engineer. Under “Job Title” on our company intranet, you wrote, “Literally web master.” I love that! But what exactly did you mean by it? Meet Rudy Faile, senior systems engineer at Automattic. It’s actually “Literal Web Master”   – it’s a play on “webmaster,” which was a more commonly used term in the early days of the internet, particularly in ..read more

Great news! WordPress 6.3 is coming soon. It’s packed with a bunch of new features and is scheduled to be released on Tuesday, August 8th, 2023. All WordPress.com sites will automatically upgrade to WordPress 6.3 when it’s released. If you’d like to test your site with WordPress 6.3 beforehand, you can now do so on your WordPress.com staging site. Staging sites are available to WordPress.com Business and Commerce sites with hosting features enabled. Use the Latest WordPress Beta with Your Staging Site To test your site with WordPress 6.3 before release, you’ll need to first create a staging si ..read more

What’s it like to work at a fully distributed company with a worldwide team and culture guided by a Creed? Welcome to “Life @ Automattic,” an occasional series of Q&As with the people behind the products. Today we spoke with Doyle Irvin, a senior product marketing manager for WordPress VIP. Who are you, what’s your job title, and where do you live? Hi! My name is Doyle Irvin. I’m a senior product marketing manager for WordPress VIP, and I live in San Francisco—I’m in Noe Valley, the neighborhood with all the strollers.  What is WordPress VIP? WordPress VIP is the content platform us ..read more

What’s it like to work at a fully distributed company with a worldwide team and culture guided by a Creed? Welcome to “Life @ Automattic,” an occasional series of Q&As with the people behind the products. Today we spoke with Talent Operations Wrangler Elizabeth Urello. Who are you, what’s your job title, and where do you live? I’m Elizabeth Urello, my title is Talent Operations Wrangler, and I live in Kyle, TX which is a small town about 45 minutes south of Austin.  What is a “Talent Operations Wrangler,” anyway? I work on our Happiness Experience team. My are ..read more

As a developer, it’s frustrating to constantly deal with configurations, install various libraries, and commercial licenses. We enjoy writing code, building things, and shipping products that help people. Code is poetry. wp-now is a new, zero-config development environment we recently contributed to the WordPress Playground. Currently in its alpha stage, wp-now is already the fastest and easiest way to spin up a local WordPress site. We want to help developers focus on what matters most, which is transforming caffeine into lines of code and shipping products quickly. At WordPress.com, contribu ..read more