Category: WordPress

Was reading about the botched Kadence/Liquid Web rebrand/relaunch today, and some of the aftermath. I’ve made my feelings on the Liquid Web decline known for almost 8 years now, so I won’;’t retread that.

But, one user complaint got me thinking about “white label”. This user complicated that overnight(and unannounced), a new top-level admin menu item for “Liquid Web” appeared on client sites.

Now, I can understand the basic frustration here, but this quote got me to think:

For designers managing client sites, having a third-party hosting company’s branding appear prominently inside a client’s WordPress dashboard is a big deal.

Immediately hearing that, I have zero sympathy for these folks. If you have no transparency with your clients about the underlying tech you’re using, you are failing.

If you feel too threatened to be honest with your clients that you are a hosting reseller or using tools you didn’t build and don’t maintain, you are setting yourself up for failure. Inevitably, when something fails, you now have to either lie about what happened with your “white label” tech or finally fess up about the fact you didn’t build everything from scratch.

Many times, I’ve been brought in to projects to solve something bigger than the normal page-building “developer” can handle, and there was suspicion from the client that the “developer’ wasn’t honest about their offerings.

One was a few years ago with a larger client that had been working with a “developer” whose garbage code I’d actually seen on another freelance project(small world). But, my relationship with this client vastly predated the other relationship. So, I spoke up with a word of warning. I warned that the hosting they claimed to be providing bespoke was just resold from Pressable, and deep server config changes would not be possible.

Client thanked me. Then, a few months later I predictably receive an email from the client.

Just writing to thank you again. You were right about [garbage “developer”].

Moral of the story, if you are white labelling to boost you or your companies ego, you suck. Get better at your job so you can lose the insecurity that causes you to hide behind other developers’ code.

UPDATE: RTC was pulled from 7.0, although not for the right reason. Following, it just seemed like the A8c folks were fighting the big boss about using a custom DB table, which I do not understand their reluctance here. It’s clearly the better option.

Now, in 7.1, we’ll go through the same exact process. Wait until a week or two before Beta 1, scramble to finish where they left off in 7.0, and it’ll be only marginally more complete than it is now.

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Plainly, it’s not ready for 7.0, but even worse, it shouldn’t be in Core at all.

It’s not going to be used by 80% of all users. It’s a feature for workflow-driven publishing, but 90% of all WordPress sites don’t have a need for a workflow! It’s one author. Or, it’s WooCommerce(growing in overall share of WP sites).

It’s a super cool feature, but it should 100% be a Canonical Plugin. I don’t see a more perfect candidate for that.

However, since it’s been promised as a headlining feature of 7.0, there’s induced momentum in A8c that just cannot be overcome at this point. The feature is dictating the schedule and architecture, versus it being built from a first principles perspective. So many questions are just not being asked because “we have to get it in”.

WP Core Philosophies are mostly now meaningless.