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The WP Minute brings you news about WordPress in under 5 minutes -- every week! Follow The WP Minute for the WordPress headlines before you get lost in the headlines. Hosted by Matt Medeiros, host of The Matt Report podcast.
Eric Karkovack (00:00)
Hi everyone, and welcome to the WP Minute. I'm Eric Karkovack. Today's episode features a segment from Matt's interview with the WP Weekly's Davinder Singh Kainth. Davinder provides an inside look at the WP Awards and how the annual event has evolved. Now, you can catch the entire interview over on our WP Minute Plus podcast. Visit thewpminute.com for all the details.
Matt Medeiros (00:26)
Let's turn our attention to the WP awards 2025. They were recently announced last week, right? Last week or earlier this week. I forget. We are this is well, here's the question. How many years running now for the for the WP awards?
Davinder Singh Kainth (00:35)
Yep.
This is the fifth year, so it started in 2020.
Matt Medeiros (00:47)
And what's your biggest takeaway running at five years? Like what's the lesson you've learned as the curator of the awards? And then let's talk about like the pattern that you've seen in folks ⁓ picking certain categories. First, your lesson as the curator of the awards.
Davinder Singh Kainth (01:07)
Firstly, it's a lot of work and it's difficult to make an...
Matt Medeiros (01:09)
you
Davinder Singh Kainth (01:11)
Difficult
to make everyone happy like you know when I started it like the first edition even I was you know exploring how it should be done and My innate nature is like let's do things in a more simple way not you know complicate things So when I started I was like okay, how do I select nominations right because everyone wants to be nominated right? So I followed the same pattern as WordPress is it's open for everyone you can nominate yourself
your user can nominate you any product gets there but when it comes to voting and you know the biggest lesson was how do I control the voting pattern because when I started in the first year the response was okay because this was new right second year it blew up really big but then I had to figure out like how do I control the
spam entries and you know how because a lot of people would say I have 100 employees I'll just ask my 100 employees to vote for 100 votes right I don't mind that as long as it's a unique person or a unique email ID that's doing it so over the years I've added this year I've been really strict like last last last year I added the you know unique IP address validation like if you are trying to vote from the same IP address you will not able to work it like the form will not submit
So this year not just I did that but I also took out all the email addresses that was there ran it through the spam filter so it was like 1500 spam entries that got you know culled at the beginning so yeah so step by step I am also because again security spam you know there's no 100 % you know foolproofing anywhere it's just a learning step one by one so yeah it's but this year I think this has been the best ever you know response like this year
2025 so yeah I'm happy about it.
Matt Medeiros (03:00)
Yeah.
What are the logistics just so for folks who don't know about the awards, when do the nominations start and are you changing that for 2026? So how long do you give yourself to get nominations?
Davinder Singh Kainth (03:13)
I've been following the same pattern. the nomination period runs from 40 to 50 days. Again, after that ends, there's a break of 10 days. And then again, voting period runs from 40 to 50 days. And once that is done, I take a break of one week to calculate votes and all that. yeah, and then I, because now I'm a little more prepared. So I make the final result page minus the voting count in advance.
and you know the first year I was so dumb I shouldn't be calling that you know when I was trying to calculate votes and I said I'm gonna calculate manually and I spent so many hours calculating manually I mean this is not how you should do it right so now it's easy like I just download the whole excel sheet of the voting I dump it into the Google Drive and then I have a function that I run so it will basically automatically calculate who got how many votes in per category so yeah it's like 10 minutes job now
Matt Medeiros (03:50)
Yeah.
Let's talk about the categories. Let me just scroll down. Oh, you probably already know off top of your head, but I have the page up. We have 29 categories, and the 29th category is niche plugins. So that's when you're like, screw it. I just have this one category. just going to throw everybody into this. How do you come up with categories? And I'm sure, and we'll tell a story how I reached out to you representing Gravity Forms in a little bit, but I'm sure you have folks knocking on the door going,
Davinder Singh Kainth (04:15)
Another pain point.
Matt Medeiros (04:38)
Don't put me in this category, put me in that category, or why don't we have this category explain those logistics and pain points.
Davinder Singh Kainth (04:46)
⁓ You've just hit the nail on the head I get asked these questions every year and when I you know When the voting opens and someone come and email or DM me hey my product should not be in this category It should be in that category. So, okay. I don't argue with anyone. I just okay I'll put it there even though you know if you go to the niche plug-in, you know category there are a few entries or nominees that could have been in the their own category above
But again, people say, ⁓ I don't want my product in this category and that category. But then categories have evolved over time. Like the Bricks add-on category, like I used to get a lot of Bricks ⁓ product submissions, right? And adding Bricks add-ons in a page builder category would be defeating the purpose. So over the years, Elementor add-ons became a category. Bricks add-ons became a category. Then there was a WooCommerce issue as well. Now there's a single
WooCommerce add-on plus there are people who make you know, they have a shop with multiple WooCommerce add-ons So I split it into two so you can nominate your WooCommerce add-ons shop with multiple add-ons or if you are running like a single add-on that goes into a separate category and Next year I'm planning to you know, split even further maybe do 30 35 categories I don't know but yes, there could be you know, this is a I guess step-by-step improvement process because there's no
perfect answer to it because there will be someone in some corner unhappy about it. You know, I'm not perfect.