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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 for my interview with Marcus Burnette. Marcus is the founder of the WP World, a media partner of the WP Minute. He stopped by to talk about his latest project, Well Played WP, a plugin membership service. He shared the story behind the project, the pricing challenges he faced, and his passion for the WordPress community.
Now you can catch the entire interview over on our WP Minute Plus channel. Visit thewpminute.com for all the details.
Eric Karkovack (00:36)
So, I mean, you found this time somewhere in your schedule for ⁓ Well Played WP. Explain a little bit about what it is and how did you decide to start this?
Marcus Burnette (00:47)
Yeah, yeah, lot of nights and weekends when it comes to finding time for a schedule. ⁓ Because, you know, there's a family and stuff I need to spend time with them too, but people do go to bed sometimes, so I've been told. And then when they go to bed is when I have some time to work on things like well-played WP. ⁓ Yeah, over the course of the last...
Eric Karkovack (00:58)
Yes.
Marcus Burnette (01:10)
maybe six months to a year started to accumulate a little bit of a library of WordPress plugins that were
more than a code snippet, ⁓ more than just a handful of lines of code that you would paste into a code snippet plugin or into ⁓ your theme functions file, but not quite something as big as like an e-commerce platform or learning management system. ⁓ Mostly things that solved issues that I had or that my teams at Bluehost had. And I thought, let's see if I can put something together, collaborate with Codex mostly to see ⁓
what I can come up with there and started to collect a bit of a library that was just sitting on my computer. And I thought, you know, why am I holding onto this when there are other people that may be interested in the functionality that some of these mini plugins provide, ⁓ I would call them. And so decided to kind of bundle them together. Again, neither of them is enormous, but they're also not, ⁓ you know, just a handful of lines of code. So I thought,
you know why not why not put them together in the library and see if
somebody out there might have use for a handful of them and kind of sell them as a bundle. And so they're not a bundle in the sense that I would never recommend that anybody install all of them on their website. ⁓ They're not really related to each other. They're all kind of different use cases other than there are some that are WooCommerce specific. There are some that are Elementor specific at the moment. Those are kind of the the category is outside of just general WordPress usage that
Eric Karkovack (02:35)
Yeah.
Sure.
Marcus Burnette (02:53)
exist. ⁓ But again, still wouldn't recommend that somebody just, you know, fully enable, you know, activates all of them all at once. But my hope is that you look at the library, and they're just over 20 at the moment, I'm going to continue to grow that, of course. But
find, I don't know, three, four, five, six of them that serve a purpose in either your own site or a client's sites and decide to go ahead and buy a license. One license covers download, activate, and update for all of the plugins. So kind of the way it works, I have a core, well-played WP library plugin.
you install that into as many sites as you want, ⁓ depending on your plan that you've chosen. ⁓ And then you can one click install any of the plugins from the library right in that site through the main plugin. So you're not going back to WellPlayedWP and downloading plugins and then going back to the website to install them. You kind of have that hub from installing the WellPlayedWP library plugin.
Eric Karkovack (03:53)
Okay.
Marcus Burnette (04:04)
and kind of one click install through there. I, the idea kind of came because I didn't want to just create just another plugin shop where you can come and kind of piecemeal a la carte, you know, I want this plugin and that plugin and now I've got, you know, six different licenses for different plugins that I'm juggling to keep these updated. ⁓ So try to keep it simple, try to figure out what can I do a little bit differently.
Eric Karkovack (04:27)
Yeah.
Marcus Burnette (04:32)
And one of my favorite Mac apps actually is called SetApp. ⁓ And it's basically a library of other kind of mini apps, if you will, ⁓ for Mac OS. And I use a handful of those on my Mac. And so I decided let's maybe borrow that business model. And while SetApp, I think, is a collection of apps that are created by a number of different ⁓ companies, all of the well-played WP plugins are plugins that I've
built
so in that way it's different but in the sense that you have kind of that main that main app the main plugin that allows you to install the other ones into a website it was kind of the the model I was going for so yeah that's kind of how it came to be it's kind of how I thought through the model and why I wanted to go the direction that I did
And I think that it's a nice little collection of plugins and I continue to grow it as ⁓ inevitably that I find other things that our customers at Bluehost or I myself need in a mini plugin and I'll add them to the library over time.