Monthly Roundup – March 2020

Hello there, fellow person in physical isolation, and thank you for doing your bit to #FlattenTheCurve. 

Last month, we published a bunch of advice for business owners and agencies who are forced to go remote for the first time. Most of the things we covered were reflections from our own experience doing the same, albeit, over 5 years – Lessons from our fully-office to fully-remote transition.

Moving to a fully distributed setup has a lot of well-documented benefits – more flexible work hours, more time at home and the opportunity for a healthy work-life balance. Juhi’s story on HeroPress is proof of all that and more. 😌

"Three years back, I got married and had to relocate to Delhi, from Pune. Thanks to WordPress and @rtCamp’s remote work culture, I didn’t have to worry about looking for a new career." — Juhi Saxena @juhi_se https://t.co/mLzgYNuuGJ #WordPress pic.twitter.com/YWoyDTWxy5

— HeroPress (@heropress) April 1, 2020

March-ing on with greater passion

rtCamp turned 11 last month. The celebrations were subdued and bittersweet, as Rahul wrote:

On one hand, there was none of the usual singing, dancing, food and good-natured banter that goes with our celebrations. On the other, it’s almost a milestone in itself that we have grown past our traditional “office” roots to this place where we can all jump on a company-wide video conference at a moment’s notice, and lose none of the joy, positivity or celebration.

He also outlined the direction that we want to keep heading in:

We want to drop a digit from “11” and pursue our goals with the passion of a 1-year-old well-funded startup, with no baggage of past glories.

Thank you for your love and support over the years. Here’s to 11 more! 🍻

Webinars FTW! 

Aren’t webinars great? In March, various rtCampers were part of 4 different webinars: 

• Mervin and Imran told the story of how we built the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) a newsletter creation tool that lives right within WordPress. With it, the MBA is able to focus on building great newsletters that inform their large audience while reducing reliance on their tech & design teams. Win-win!
• The solution was actually built using Gutenberg, WordPress’ new editing interface. Imran & Ajit hosted a virtual WordPress community meetup on this very topic if you’d like to learn – Digging into Gutenberg meetup on WordPress.tv.
• And Imran was at it again with his presentation on Progressive Web Apps in WordPress at WordSesh APAC (slides)
• Muhammad spoke about GatsbyJS, the “blazing fast modern site generator for React”. His recording and slides are available.
  (On a related note, the GatsbyJS + WordPress combination has been getting a lot of attention because it combines the speed of a static site with the power of a CMS 💁‍♀️ )

Other Updates

Edit Flow is one of the most popular plugins, with over 10,000 installs according to WordPress.org. Last month, we released an extension to the plugin that sends comment notifications to Slack, alongside the default email. From our post:
“bringing the comments into Slack allows us to use threaded conversations to hammer our finer details right within our team channels. We find this so much cleaner than email threads, especially for longer conversations. 🤓” 

We also released updates to two rtMedia add ons – rtMedia Photo Tagging and rtMedia Sorting. Full changelog here.

Stay home, stay safe! Until next month 👋