Hey Paul. Hey Vern. Welcome everybody just about three minutes away from kicking off officially here with this townhall solid WP captions. We'll be going here for everybody in just a moment. Yeah, plenty. Well, we'll have some things to talk about and then plenty of time for questions and answers toward the end today.
All right, captions should now be working for everyone correctly.
We've got a comment Nathan, your mic is weird. Oh, I don't hear it weird. Yes. Maybe. Maybe it looks. Oh, it's the right mic. Sounds good on my end.
I do have this occasional problem where the wrong might get selected. hazards have too many inputs to bring welcome everybody Glad you're here. We're just about a minute and a half away from officially getting started with the town hall here for solid WP. Matt Cromwell is here with us and they have lots of things to chat about, as well as plenty of time for your questions. So glad everybody's here. It is a rare Monday live stream here on the solid Academy. But we're glad that you have joined us just a couple of minutes but a minute away now from getting started.
So a number of things we'll be talking about just some of the changes that have happened as the branding conversion that has all gone live and new products that products have changed the names and we'll be talking through all of those things as well as a second
I think I gave you the wrong link I think they gave you like the host panelists. You
gave him your private link. So Devin, you want to join us
change your name. I'm gonna go join the audience now but enjoy
I love it. That was awesome. That was unplanned and fantastic.
Let me begin with the correct with the join direct join link. I'll get it there we go.
Yeah, he'll just need to just to register as a normal attendee I'm not sure who was more surprised you are or debit. I
think he was I think definitely.
It was great. Anybody else want to pop on as Matt Cromwell because we'll get that going here as well.
There's only one come on. There's only one.
Absolutely. All right. Well, I think we got that all worked out. Let's go ahead and get started officially it's three minutes after so. Welcome, everybody to this town hall for solid WP. We're glad you decided to join us today for this rare Monday live stream here on solid Academy. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at solid Academy and joined today by Matt Cromwell, the senior director of customer experience at stellar WP Matt, how are things going for you? Things
are great, man. I'm glad to be here again.
Yeah, absolutely. So a lot has changed over the course of the last several months. We've done I think this is the third townhall we've done throughout the process of transitioning I themes to solid WP. It's been our goal from the very beginning to be very transparent about things that are happening and things that we're thinking and changes that are being made. And Matt you you labeled this with the term rebrand and public months ago, where did that come from? Well,
it's a big trend in product marketing and the moment to do branding and our building in public to build in public. And it builds excitement around a new product that's coming out soon and it makes people want to check in and get into the beta that stuff. And I was like honestly the amount of time and work and effort that we're putting into this rebrand it's a it's almost like a new build. And I really wanted to make sure that folks were coming alongside early and learning about all the changes because this audience that's here today with us now and in the other town halls previously. They love these products. They've loved these these brands for years a long time and we want to make sure that everybody knew that we were doing this carefully and with a lot of consideration and we want to make sure that everybody was involved in the process so rebrand in public became a thing. So I love it.
And it really has I think the way this rebrand has progressed has captured that the the overall I've lost the word the overall, just the flavor that I iThemes has had over the years of being very receptive to are the folks that use our products and taking all those things into consideration during honoring of the tradition. That I think that's established over the years.
No, absolutely. I mean, I iThemes was really well known for like one of their taglines that they had that maybe not everybody saw but that a lot of folks saw they said making people's lives awesome. And to do that you have to have a lot of integrity. You have to have a lot of transparency. You have to have a focus on customers and and people know that these are not just dollars in products and digits, but their real lives at stake. And it's, you know, it was important and I really appreciated that coming into the iThemes ecosystem and wanting to really honor that as much as possible. Yeah,
definitely. So folks, we'll be talking today, just a little bit about what has happened, and maybe some of the things that are being planned for over the next several months. And of course, we'll be taking your questions as well. So I'd invite you to ask questions throughout and we'll kind of mix those in and also have a dedicated time of questions and answers toward the end. But the way to ask questions is to mouse over the shared screen where our faces are, click that q&a button and you'll have the q&a box that's either attached to the right side of your screen or floating whichever your choice is not invite you just to keep that open to ask a question as they come up. And if someone else asks the question, you'll see that pop in and you can press the thumbs up icon to upvote those questions and we'll be sure to take the questions based on the number of up votes when we get to our q&a. So Matt, want to just give us a recap of where things have gone over the past several months to get us to where we are today.
Absolutely. So we've talked about this quite a bit. That rebrand in public was the whole rebranding effort was a huge effort and honestly, like Devin and I really thought through it a ton and really had a lot of plans and intentions. But I don't think we really knew the whole extent of everything that had to happen to make it work. We really like worked on everything. Every single product every single website page, the members panel, the what is now solid central the login area there the whole app there. The free products, both I theme sync which is now Central, solid Central, free plugin the client plug in essentially the solid security free plugin, the solid security pro plugin. Everything about solid Academy it was all the moving parts. It really was and what that what that meant was that it was a huge gigantic team effort. And as we're getting closer and closer to the finish line, we really started bringing in more of the stellar WP team honestly in so many ways. This was not just the I iThemes team that was working on this. This was all of stellar web working on this for quite a long time. I was really excited to that we even looped in Nathan and his agency to rebuild the academy website, which I hope you're super proud of. We're super proud of it. I think it's all theory. And we basically anybody who just happened to be standing around, we're like, Hey, you want to work on this website? anywhere along the way. We're just like trying to get more work involved because it was it was a huge endeavor across the board. And with so many moving parts and things like that. I get nervous. I get nervous when there's so many moving parts, because I'm always afraid something's gonna fall through. And I have to say quite honestly, I've worked on a lot of things in my life, and a lot of things in my professional WordPress life. This is definitely the biggest largest project I've ever worked on. And I have to say it went way smoother than it could have. It could have really fallen apart at the seams honestly with so many things going on. But I've just been amazed as things get out there as that folks were given us positive affirmations about what they see and how it came out. And we got feedback all the time. Of course, like we had some bumps here and there of course but we were able to spin it around and fix things up really quickly. So it's it's gone way smoother than I expected. And I'm really really proud of how it all went out proud of the whole team that made it happen. So
yeah, absolutely. So a lot of the folks I think who are on in the townhall today are a lot of recognize a lot of names form from folks that typically attend our live streams. Many of them are people who build and manage sites for clients using solid WP products and in that it's always interesting. We've all done some level of conversion of old some old site to a new site. Just the thoughts of the things that had to happen to move I think.com to solid WP and knowing that for years, I think was really built their marketing around content marketing, and they were a good jillion blog posts. That's an actual number probably to describe this. But how did you how did the team do that? How do you handle all the SEO and the migration and what to leave and what to keep? How did you do that? Yeah,
yeah. thumbnail version. Essentially. We went into it. There's actually really good documentation on the Google website about this type exact type of situation. You have to go looking for it a little bit. But once you find it, they're like, if you are changing a whole entire domain to be a whole nother domain, here's the steps that you do to make that happen. And those steps there. There's not I think there's like seven or eight steps that they list out. But each one of those steps is a lot of stuff. So but the biggest lesson I learned from reading all of that and working with we work for the third party SEO agency called amp Civ as well is in a move like this. When it comes to the URL slugs, you really want to change as little of that as humanly possible. You really want to signal to Google as much as possible that this thing over here is basically a cookie cutter cop copy of this thing over here. And the more things that you change along the way, the more it's like they look like to your to different sites and then what was previously going to I iThemes ends up not going to solid WP so you will notice that there are a lot of things about iteams.com website that still have a little bit of carryover over to solid web, and that's on purpose in the near term. In the long term. We really are going to start to iterate on the website and change things a lot. But besides trying to change as few as poss as few things as possible. The other thing is just cataloging and documenting every single thing and when there are changes that have to happen making that explicit that meant like that literally I don't know if danke analysis here on the call, like Dan went through spreadsheets and spread I created all the spreadsheets, spreadsheets and spreadsheets of the posts, the pages, the tutorials, the ebooks, the customer spotlights, like so many spreadsheets, there is dance here. Sounds amazing. And we had to go one by one and say, All right, is this one going to stay the same? Or is this one going to be deleted? Or is this one going to be redirected? And from that we made the megalith of 301 redirects. It was quite a process. Yeah, the other part that was a little nervous about was actually like having like, we were building out on a staging a live staging site for the most part in terms of like, developers would build locally and then they would ship the updates to the staging site. But then we were like updating content and things like that as we go. And going from staging dot solid wp.com to solid wp.com. That's another migration all by itself. And as anyone in WordPress knows when you you know move stuff in the database like especially with media, it gets really tricky in terms of media. IDs and stuff like that. I was nervous about that launch, as well. But our web dev team, they're just they're just magicians so they were able to make that like we had this we had a whole day launch day where we basically all got on a zoom together. And we're just like alright, here we go, folks, and we had about 10 people on that call. And literally the move from like, all the content of staging Jeff Chandler's here, he was around to is literally a 10 hour zoom call and all the content that was on staging dot Sol wp.com got migrated over to solid wp.com in like the first three minutes of that 10 hour call. It was it was wonderful. I thought it was amazing. They did a great job. And then of course the rest of the 10 hours was just confirming, double checking, updating, confirming that things are working correctly going and checking other things that go in and then having to update other stuff. There's also lots lots of internal API's that we have connected to all the sites for our licensing and other purposes that all had to be triple checked to make sure everything continues to work. And then after that the members panel what folks have known as the members panel was migrated to my dot solid wp.com as well and that was all rebranded as well. Man. It's bringing me back that was only a couple of weeks ago, but that was it was a ton of work and it was amazing watching it all happen. So
amazing. So man, if he had to look at all the things that happen what would you say you're the most proud of? You've talked about the team working together. I'm sure that's a big part of it.
Gosh, you know truthfully we do all of this for the products because that's what everybody's here for you know I and I mean, there's it's so hard but I think it's because the products are so great and in so many ways. A lot of the content is a product. I iThemes Training solid Academy is is a product in many ways as well. But like the things that we are putting out there for people to be able to use and have their hands on and be able to benefit from for their businesses and for their livelihood and for their websites. That's that's what this is all is for. And this is what this is all about. I was less involved. On the product side of things, but I definitely was informed in on meetings and really seen it all evolve and happen. That stuff is that's what we're here for. We want to make sure that solid security is the best way to secure your WordPress website and that's what we're most proud of. And solid backups has gone through so much iteration and updates in a very short amount of time. Solid central also has just been revamped in such great ways and we have big plans for solid central you guys got to keep your eyes and solid central for sure. So all of those are just amazing. I love all the updates to solid Academy and i i Actually we just published a we have an internal stellar WP podcast called stellar constellations that Nathan was on today. Actually, he was on months ago actually before the launch actually happened, but it was published today. And the solid Academy website was seriously overhauled. And they just really did a really great job with spin up some really great designs and and Nathan and Chris's lead dev really made it happen. So I mean, the product that's what we're here for and that everyone is benefiting from. That's what we're definitely most proud of for sure.
It's awesome. Okay, so speaking of product, what can you tell us about what's coming next? Yeah,
we're digging in deeper on everything security. We got tons of plans for making sure that solid security gets even more rich, feature rich in particular, deeper integrations with patch stack. I hope for some of you folks are enjoying your patch SEC integrations. We really think that that's the best way to make sure you're getting patched against vulnerabilities in the WordPress ecosystem. That's it's coming out really great. We have actually in the free product we're about to launch a new version in the next week or so. That will allow you to write your own custom firewall rules in the plugin itself a little bit of an advanced feature for the devs. But But we think it's a great one to have for for the free product in particular. The Pro product of course is made to be able to create those firewall rules on the fly more based on patch tech stuff, and a little bit more automated and that's a lot of ways that's the way in which we distinguish between free and paid is free is really full featured as a lot of things. But you're gonna have to know what you're doing. You're gonna have to like, do it a little bit more manually. The Pro one is really made to be able to do all those things for you in an automated fashion lot more automatically. So excited about that for sure. Central. We have we're working on a roadmap. And I don't want to speak too much into that one right now because we kind of have like big hopes and dreams. We could go all the way for the fence next calendar year, or we might make some really good steps in the right direction. So we're working on that but But truthfully, I am really excited about what we're going to see with central the first thing for sure, we're going to make sure that there's a lot more tighter integrations between security and backups and Central. You should be able to see your backups and be able to launch those from Central and things like that. You really should be able to get a lot more actionable security reporting directly in central and be able to send security reports to your clients from central things like that as well. So we're excited we have a great development team product team is working on all these things. So this is just the beginning. That's what I love about launches to like if it was like a launch and be like okay, great, have fun folks. that would that would be kind of defeating. The launch was really just the beginning of a lot of really great stuff coming.
That's excellent. So folks, I have plenty of time for questions today. So if you have questions to ask drop those in the q&a. There are a number of questions that are there waiting. So if you haven't taken the time to look at those just scan through and press the thumbs up icon on the questions that you would like to get answers to. Several of the questions here, Matt are related to solid backups, and particularly with deliverability to destinations. Can you talk a little bit about those issues? I know they've been they've been floating around a bit and what's being worked on with those right now.
There was a long, you know, with the rebranding public with the way we've been doing this, we've been all about full transparency, trying to talk really openly and honestly about everything. There was a long history with AI themes with Backup Buddy, where it really wasn't getting development attention. For for quite a while. And that was that was a shame. That was that was a bummer. And the the feature that fell apart the most was being able to deliver backups remotely to other locations. That's one that we have been slowly chipping away at and making sure that what we have there is not broken. Truthfully, honestly, I'd really love to see that stash continues to be the number one way that people use backup. Backup Buddy. Use solid backups. I do think that the pairing of solid backups with solid Central is where all the all the meat in the power is at. But we understand people are going to make different choices to we're going to ensure that the any of the remote options continue to be really available. It's always a kind of a moving target when you're dealing with third party API's, essentially, that can change on the fly really quickly without a lot of notice. So we have to stay on top of those things more. But ideally right now the way it is is that local backups or our work local restore works, being able to work with stash works really well. The remote aspect is still a little bit shaky, but we're working on and we're getting there for sure. So it's on the radar and we're working on it. Yeah,
very good. Great question from Ben here. Ben is wondering about the white labeling option for solid central email reports. Is that going to be re activated and also our solid central email reports going to be improved with the ability to customize a bit better?
Hmm, that's an interesting one. I'm going to just I'm going to plead a little bit of ignorance. I don't know the status of that feedback. Honestly. That's a good one. I have to you know, I'm going to take some notes because maybe we can send out an email with some follow ups for anything that I might not be. Again, folks, all the moving parts. I wish I knew every single detail of all the things hold on real quick. Let's see backups. It's no no central central white labeling the labeling
the client reports.
Got it. I'll look into that for sure. That's a good one. I mean, we know that the primary purpose and focus of Central is for agencies like Nathan's to be able to better serve their clients and that is definitely the focus that we are going to have for it going forward as well. So things like that are really good. feedback that we want to act on right away. Yeah,
good. Thank you for that, Ben. Let's see que que question back to solid backups. que que is hosting on Nexus and having an issue with the import tool not working on Xs on Nexus and Nexus says it's solid backup solid backup says it's Nexus that's a pretty granular issue. I'm not sure you've had your your head into but any thoughts? Honestly,
the combination of Nexus and support is something that I do have my head into a lot everyday like like you all know, I'm a senior director of customer experience. And I've been working with the Nexus team on the daily lately with things like that. So K, it was k k you see, okay, if you can even just like put in your ticket number from Nexus in the chat right here. I will follow up there personally myself and see what's going on. Import what used to be called Import buddy. It definitely should especially work in a Nexus environment. And the Nexus support team really should know exactly where to find us so that we can work together instead of like a tag back and forth kind of situation so that that kind of friction is something that is top of my list to remove as much as possible. I do want to make sure that anybody who is using Nexus and solid products at all or any stellar products at all has a totally completely frictionless experience with their support, folks, for sure.
Yeah, and that's something let's circle back in on that just a bit, Matt, because this is a position that hasn't existed before. And you know, as far as someone really watching all the products to make sure that they're that they're playing nicely together and that customers who are customers of any of the products underneath the stellar umbrella are having a great experience using them, period. So you talked a little bit about that role. What how is that ultimately going to impact folks that are users of stellar products?
I mean, that's what I'm really excited about. Maybe not everybody knows my, my background, but like, I'm one of the cofounders of gift MVP, and my longtime partner and co founder Devin Walker is here in the wings. And one of the ways that I really built myself up in WordPress is on customer support. And it's what I'm still extremely passionate about. And around this time last year, I pitched to stellar leadership that I'd love to see some really strong leadership in the area of customer experience, which is which, for us, that is tails, three different departments. It's actually technical support, Account Services and customer success. And I won't go deeply into it but Account Services is kind of like the reactive kind of work like oh, I have a problem with my account. Customer Success is a lot more of the proactive kind of work reaching out and saying, How can we help you or we're reaching out to make sure that your renewal happens on time, things like that. And on the technical support side, I've been really excited to take the things that I have learned and grown into on gift WP and translate that over to all of the stellar WP brands. And of course I themes solid WP is one of the first ones I'm really digging deep into with another longtime friend and colleague of mine, Ben Meredith, he's director of support for solid WP, we've been digging in deep and really doing a big focus on free support in particular, of course, also the paid support as well. And I'm really excited about all the ways in which we are increasing the value and the benefit of all of our technical support technicians across all of stellar WP a side benefit of that, that I didn't intentionally seek out, but now have ended up founding to be really valuable is the way in which I themes has traditionally had a lot of interaction with Nexus in particular, of all the brands I think that a lot more interaction with Nexus and so I have now been really interacting with that team a lot more as well. And trying to grease those wheels as much as possible. If you are a Nexus user, I will do want you to know right now that you do get solid security Pro for free. There's a an area in the plug in in your WordPress admin where you have a whole bunch of options to just kind of enable stuff. And one of them is solid security Pro. Right now it's actually still the I themes, security Pro, and we're just about to get solid security pro out the door for all of y'all. And when you activate it it is going to have patched up there as well. So if you're a Nexus user, you get to have solid security pro with patch stack for free. And that's because Nexus is actually paying for that patch stack integration for you. So I've Ckk right there. There we go. I'm copying that right there. Okay. So yeah, all of those relationships, all of that. Support and friction issues. Those are things that are now my bread and butter and my top priorities that I'm I'm personally really excited about and, and really working hard to make sure that we iron out all those kinks and make every interaction that you have with anybody on our team, the best it could possibly be. That's awesome. All right.
Let's see moving to the next question here from Vern. Common in a question just about the branding of solid security and its name, solid security basic versus solid security Pro. Vern says he sees a lot of variation in the naming may be inconsistent to the free product compared compared to the pro product. Is that is Basic and Pro the naming that's going to be that we've landed on Yep,
solid security basic is what you find on wordpress.org funny little like WordPress history. If you go to look for it, Nathan you know this the slug of the plugin is still the very original slide from this is actually the second time that this product has been rebranded and another deeper fun story that not a lot of people know that that that original plugin was called Better WP Security. And that was back in 2010 2011, I think comes about and I was personally the very first paid support technician for depth better WP Security. I don't know if I ever get to see that Nathan I don't know.
That is
why yeah, like I cut my teeth in support doing working for another company. And the very first thing I did was was working on better WP Security with Chris Wakeman way back in the day. And then Chris had acquired by themes and it became I theme security of course. If you go to wordpress.org It's still the same slog better WP Security, but you'll see the banner and everything says solid security basic and basic always has this little pill right next to it. Solid security Basic and Pro has solid security Pro and Pro is what you purchase on the website itself. So
yeah, good. And yeah, Vern to see there your note there in the chat. The two word names solid security. So before it was I think security, I think security Pro. So now it'll be solid security basic and solid security pro so it's all three word name, right? Yep.
Yep. And actually Jeff Jeff Chandler's here in the wings as well and he was helpful in trying to like flush that out. We first were trying to consider not doing three words. We were like we want everybody to just have solid security. And that would be the paid version. And then we would say Ah, this is like the other one is like solid SECURITY light or something like that. We didn't like that idea at the end of the day. And Jeff helped us parse that out a little bit with some good WordPress ecosystem research.
So yeah, very good. So yeah, looks like there might be some text updates for solid security needs to be referred to and or maybe solid security is the thing in general. And then there's Basic and Pro when we're speaking specifically about the product.
On the website, you probably will see sometimes that it just says solid security and maybe it's not very specific and yeah, actually KK says solid security Pro is not listed as an installable plugin in Nexus today that's correct KK right now it should say I theme security pro in and and like I was saying I'm about to get it all lined up so that it will be solid security instead of I theme security. It's not quite ready yet, but it's almost there. Yeah,
very good. Let's see a follow up from Paul here and the question regarding the destinations and Backup Buddy. His group spent a lot of time over the weekend manually moving some backups that had failed. He says each support case starts out with the same try this try that. Is there. Is there anything you can say to the when that development is going to deal with those issues?
I really need a lot more specifics. One thing that I know that is very common with backups at the moment is essentially PHP timeout issues. Often a host has very limited timing for how long PHP can run before it just basically gives up. And so that's a really, really common one. But most often, your solid backups logs will give you some really actionable information. So in all of those cases, I would always go to the logs first and make sure that when you submit a support ticket to us that you provide the those logs as much as you possibly can like the most recent 10 logs or something like that. In order to help the support technicians know exactly what's going on in the environment. We are working on those things all the time. Most often. Backups situations are really related to the hosting environment a lot. And sometimes host environments have some some very random security checks that prevent things from running for too long or size issues that they want to clamp down on or the way in which they will lock down databases. So it's very often related to the host. So you might even want to reach out to your host first and say Do you see anything in the logs on your side that might show what's happening? That's preventing solid backups from functioning correctly and your host might be able to help you ideally hopefully. And then if they do provide something also provide that to your support technicians here at solid and we'll get jump on as quickly as we can.
Yeah, great. Let's see. Oh, good question down here from Stacey. So for a long time, I think members legacy members that have an old iThemes toolkit from whichever flavor that they bought into years ago. At one point through this rebrand in public we talked about the potential of purchasing patch stack integration for those legacy security plans. Has that been thought out more and when might that be available?
That's available now. And that is the case for sure that if you have solid secure I theme security pro already that in order for patch stack to work you're going to need to go through the checkout process. We worked a lot on this one actually. So at launch, there was basically really just like this one link that takes you to the checkout, you log in and it's like, here's your patch deck. Just check out here. Now, it's actually going to show you it's gonna give you like a commensurate number of sites like if you have a theme security pro 10 site license, it's going to show you the option to get 10 patch stack licenses. Not everybody wants to use all of those licenses and there that is a multiple that makes it from 49 a year up all the way up to 490 a year. So let's say you want to do five instead, you have the ability now when you go through that checkout experience instead of 10. You could say oh no, I want five instead or I want two or I want one. You can choose how whatever amount you want right now. So in the WordPress area in the solid security area, you'll see that banner that says enable patch SEC today. Click on that button. It'll take you to my dot Sol wp.com You log in with your same user account and then and then it will show you the patch stock options. So I think actually I'm gonna grab I also have a link in case like maybe somebody disabled that banner in their plugin. I do have a link here that I'll try to get real quick
Yeah, so that will allow everyone no matter. You know how many sites you want to add patch stack to and your security. Maybe maybe some of your clients want that and some of them don't. You'll be able to upgrade to exactly how many of those licenses you want. That's, that's great news. Yep. And there's a good question there in the chat. I'll address while Matt's looking for that information. This will be available as a replay if you're just now be able to connect or if you want to share this with someone else. The replay link is about to drop that in the chat now. We'll have that up in about an hour after we wrap up today.
I think I can't paste to everyone. So Nathan, you'll have to pass that on for me. All right, here is what?
I could get the right link. That'd be great. There we go. All right. So there's the link to enable patch stack there in the chat if you would like to take a look at that Stacy and anyone else. All right, let's see. We got a number of questions coming up about solid backup some particular error here about a cron event. I think that one I've seen being discussed. And so I think the good recommendation for anyone who's having issues with backups is to put that support ticket in so you can be informed when those issues are resolved.
Yeah. I love q&a. I love answering as many questions as I can but I know with certainty I can't answer your all of your support questions with backups right now today. My team absolutely can. And the best way to do that is get as many logs as you can talk to your host if you can submit that support ticket we're jumping on everything. As quickly as possibly can. Yeah,
absolutely. Let's see several questions here from Jeff. I like all of these. So getting nearly a million users informed about the rebrand is obviously complicated. How did the team handle communicating to the public and existing users to try to get everybody on the same page about this transition from I iThemes to solid
you know, the, in my past experiences with give and other products like you always have your certain channels where you always communicate stuff out, and you get it out there and you're like, man I really liked I went and I probably informed like 10s of 1000s of people or hundreds of 1000s of people like surely everybody knows. But come that day you still get folks are like what in the world is solid WP? I've been so surprised. Generally speaking, I feel like we actually did a pretty good job of of getting folks informed the town halls that Nathan helped host were a big part of that for sure. Because I do think that the I iThemes community long standing iThemes community over the years is a tight knit group of folks who know each other and reach out and they tell each other about stuff. Very good word of mouth area. We definitely have a very large email list. We've been email lien about this for a long time, all of the blogging and public was on purpose. All of the YouTube channels was on purpose. Reaching out to all of our affiliates for them to update their YouTube videos to be solid instead of I iThemes. We did all of that in advance as well. I mean, there's there's been a lot across the board, both in terms of the solid WP website itself was kind of like a simple blog site, while ipmn SATCOM was still going and people were following it things there. And then of course, we went out and reached out to as many different communities as we could the post status community of course, it's always strong. Lots of different Facebook groups. Let us post things about the rebrand effort. I mean, I've been around the horn for quite a while and I tried to hit every single corner that I possibly knew about so talked about it a lot at WordCamps I had these really fun. I wonder if I could find them really quick. Nathan I showed you them my little they're called they have a name Vin ticular stickers or something like that. I'm gonna say it wrong Oh yes. You know they mean the like Transformers stickers as well this one that was like I themes and solid WP and I was handing those out at word camps. I mean, we talked everywhere we could Jeff we went everywhere we did everything we could like. It was just everything on the top of our mind for for months and months. So
yeah. It's been an interesting process to watch for sure. And a great follow up from Jeff there in the questions is with everything that the team did everything you were involved in personally, looking back hindsight 2020 Was there anything you would have done differently in this rebranding process? Hmm,
anything I would have done differently. Hmm. I think I would have done even more rebranding and public activity. I think that it was useful and helpful. And I think folks appreciated it. And there was a lot that we were working on that I feel like we didn't talk about in advance that could have got folks even more excited about things. And, and it was just because we were working so hard, we're just working all the time and all this stuff. And it was hard to take a breath and and come up and and do public stuff as well. One kind of middle ground we did like one of our devs on on solid central John hooks. He actually made some really great progress on one day, he just did a little internal video for us to say hey, this is what I got going on, on Central and we were like, Oh wow, this is like fancy. And so he said, John, would you just kind of do that again, but record it like you know, like other people are gonna watch it, not just us. And we ended up publishing that as a rebranding public option as well. And that was a really fun little middle ground that we did but that's the one thing I would do is just even more publications, even more blogs, even more insights because when you're in the middle of it that's when that's when you're like really like knowing the dirt and not really knowing like oh, this was hard or all this was like a thing I almost let slip through the cracks and I don't want to forget in the future. So yeah,
yeah. Interesting. Okay, great question here from Clinton as well. In talking about how large this rebrand project was, were there any particular tools that were helpful to the team to QA everything or even just to keep everything on track?
Hmm, that's a good one. Um, you know, honestly, it ended up being a whole lot of spreadsheets honestly. There was a stage at which we move stuff into JIRA tickets instead. And that was helpful for sure. I mean, any kind of project management system is going to be your, your backbone for this kind of thing. I think, by and large, it really was just a lot of people having a whole lot of people. Oh, yeah, exactly. Jeff's in the, in the, in the comments here saying that was a lot of manual labor. It was like, there's no shortcuts with stuff like this. That's the thing like there. We'd love to be like, here's the magic tool that lets you like magically migrate everything in a certain dramatic way like there's no shortcuts for these kinds of things. Not that I'm aware of. And the truth is, with so many moving parts, like you have to pay attention to all the little things so it was really just a whole lot of like, make your intentions known. do all the work. Double check all the work. Go fix all the things that you missed, like it's just really just very manual labor process of being really careful and not like revealing things until you really have done all the double checking as much as possible. Now when the day of reveal like we didn't go and pronounce it everywhere, like it was live for quite a while. And I ithemes.com was live also at the exact same time, and they were not redirecting and that's because we were like let's just keep working. Let's keep pushing. Keep dialing and all the little eyes and cues and everything. And then finally, once the redirect really happened, that's when like, okay, it's really real now. But we we waited until we felt really confident in how everything was flowing. Until we triggered those redirects. And I think that was really an important step in the process for for our sanity, basically.
Yeah. And especially you know, you were talking about you brought in an external SEO group am sieve. What was their role in this process? And how did how did they help in this in this whole transition? Yeah,
I mean, there's all these things that we control and that's like physically the content because that's why we all love WordPress, we we own this stuff. We can control that. We can't control what Google thinks about all these things. But we can try our best to understand and it's not real, it's not just Google. It's like making sure that analytics is configured correctly on both sides is making sure that search console is set up correctly. All of our AdWords stuff is set up correctly, that there's a conversion process and also for I themes, and for solid WP all the checkout happens on a subdomain. So you got to make sure everything is happening there as well. There's the academy subdomain that actually influences the root domain. All of these things have intense SEO implications. And like I said, it's like this is the like before launch. I ithemes.com was performing a certain amount of organic search results every single week, every single day, every week every month. And we want to see those commiserate results happen post launch as much as possible. I will say honestly, like one thing that if anybody else is going to I'm not recommending that you all try to do a project like this. Honestly, it's a lot of work. It's hard. But if you do find yourself in a position of having to do something like this, that migration process can be a really good way to to clean out a lot of the keywords that you actually don't want to be found by and that's a little bit of what we were doing as well is that like, a lot of ways in which I themes.com was found online was buy a lot of old content that wasn't relevant to our current today products anymore. And so the fact that we actually aren't found necessarily by some of those old keywords anymore is actually a good thing. So there's portions of traffic that we aren't recovering, but that's actually a little bit on purpose. But when it comes to anything WordPress security oriented or even just general WordPress oriented, we wanted to make sure that we were maintaining that traffic as much as possible. And so it's a big system AMS live was really involved in auditing exactly why we were being found for the terms that we were being found for and monitoring exactly how the traffic was working before the the migration, advising us on any changes that we were making. In the migration itself. Like I said, we tried to change as few slugs as humanly possible, but there definitely were slugs that we changed. Like for example, we did not want to be offering ebooks anymore. We want to offer solid guides. That's a slug change. Just that one little thing is a slug change and so now there's a 301 redirect for every single ebook over into a guide now. And whether or not that actually worked, that was up to AMS gives advice and our implementation and now they've been monitoring those results afterwards. So it's the before picture, the advice for how the actual migration happened itself, and then the monitoring and any fixes afterwards as well is what they were hired for, essentially.
Yeah, that sounds like it definitely required a special group to execute. Yeah, yeah.
Yep. And they really, they were in our Slack team, and they were like, part of our team the whole time and all of our meetings and it was great.
Yeah, definitely. Okay, here's a good technical question. Ben is wondering. Customers used to be able to email support at i think.com. He said support at solid wp.com doesn't currently work. How's the best way to get support requests and now login
to my dot solid web.com And there's a support intake form there and that will get you right into our help desk, where we can get you validated and answered ticket as quickly as possible. That's the best way to get us and all of your tickets are are in there as well. So you could see your past tickets and all that kind of thing. So that's the best way to do it.
Right. So email support, just emailing directly to a support address is no longer supported. It's
not really advised. We really want to make sure that folks who end up into our priority inbox are the ones who are our customers. We want to any of you all who are customers. We want to make sure that we're helping you with our best priority and having a public email like that. The aim betekent email into just adds a lot of noise into our inbox that makes us less efficient for our customers. So that is something that I am particularly opinionated about. So yeah,
it makes perfect sense. I mean, if someone didn't like you, how many spam lists would they subscribe supported? I ithemes.com, too. Right? Yep. Yeah, for sure. All right. Well as we get ready to start wrapping up this Townhall. A great question to finish this up here with Jeff is why why solid WP we've talked about this earlier town halls. But why solid?
Devin and I really have always enjoyed Branding. Branding is just a really fun exercise. And, and Devin really landed on solid Web. In the end it was a conversation between he and I going back and forth about something foundational we were like it needs to be something foundational we really want to say that like if you're building a WordPress website, you need to build it on. And now it sounds so obvious, a solid foundation. And so we kept thinking about different ways to talk about foundations we talked about hubs we talked about Central's we talked about all kinds of talked about trying to think of another term that we used I had one I think I really liked essential WP like it needed to be like an essential part of your website and things like that. Jeff, the same pillars yet pillar is a good one. Pillar stand on top of foundations so like foundation is even lower. So at the end it we really came down to solid, like it's got to be solid and it's really fun and funny. I have a long growing joke I always tell people that you gotta intend your pawns people intend your pawns. So Solid has become a pawn that we use around the stellar WP offers quite a lot like is it really solid? I don't know. And we always say it with a wink but it's it's on purpose because it really communicates a lot. So and we did really want to keep the WP in solid WP we need to make it clear that like we are built on WordPress. We are a WordPress software company. We have a SASS outside of WordPress but at that Sass is made for maintaining WordPress websites. So I'm really glad that we have the WP in there as well. So and yeah, that's that's what it is a solid foundation. You'll see that through all of our marketing, a solid foundation for your WordPress website. That's what it's all about.
Absolutely. That's great. place to end today. Thanks, Matt, for your time today. Any final thoughts as we're wrapping up,
just keep watching folks and keep bringing that feedback. We really need it. And also if you are enjoying our content if you're enjoying our products in any way and you haven't yet given us a kind review, if you're using security in any way we would love your your reviews on wordpress.org We could really use them. We're really out there working hard to make sure that they're the best that they could possibly be for you. And we want everybody to hear from you. How much you appreciate them. So reviews mean a lot to us. Thanks so much everybody.
Very good. Well thanks again man for being with us today and it's exciting to me to hear that what you've just seen in the change from I iThemes to solid WP is just the solid foundation of more that's going to be built for for you all specifically for those that are building and managing WordPress sites for clients to have a good solid foundation for all your WordPress site. So very exciting. I dropped in the chat a moment ago. The replay link will have this up in about an hour maybe less. If you want to share this or go back and rewatch anything. Also tomorrow is our plugin round. up regular time first Tuesday of the month right here. 1pm Central. You can register for that there with the link in the chat. That's going to wrap it up for us today. Thanks again for hanging out with Matt and I for the last hour. And we'll hopefully see you back tomorrow for plugging round up here on the solid Academy where we go further together.