Once upon a time, there was a plugin… — WordCamp Europe 2018

Francesco Canovi and I gave this talk at WordCamp Europe 2018 in Belgrade, Serbia.

Francesco Canovi and I took the lightning-talk slot at WordCamp Europe in Belgrade to tell the story of one plugin: Black Studio TinyMCE Widget. At the time it had passed 900,000 active installs and six million downloads.

The interesting part was never the code. It is a small plugin that solves one annoyance: WordPress had no text widget with a visual editor. We wrote a working version in half a day. What followed was the butterfly effect applied to open source — how giving away something small and useful changed the business prospects of the agency behind it.

What we covered

• Where the idea came from, and why nobody else had fixed it properly
• What happens to a two-person agency when a plugin reaches six figures of active installs
• The support load, and what it teaches you about your own users
• Why the returns on open-source work rarely arrive in the form you expect

Slides and recording

• Slides (Google Slides)
• Recording on YouTube
• Session page on the WordCamp Europe 2018 site