Add A Simple Payment Button To Your WordPress.com Site

May 2016: Hajj Flemings, CEO of Rebrand Cities with renowned photographer, Shawn Lee, in a redesigned school bus en route to working with small business owners in Detroit.

Earlier this year, while working in Detroit with small business owners and the Rebrand Cities team, it became clear that entrepreneurs and publishers are looking for a simpler way to accept credit and debit card payments on their sites.

Our Happiness Engineering team — the guardians of our customers — also weighed in, and we knew that we wanted to make an existing process simpler. So we set a design goal of bringing a 15-minute-long process to under a minute — especially for a customer that has never used PayPal before.

So a small team of engineers and designers came together to solve that problem with the intent of releasing a “Version One” with which we could start to understand how a simpler payment button could be used by our customers. It’s currently limited to our Premium and Business Plan members on WordPress.com and for Jetpack Premium and Professional members on any WordPress site — while we tune and refine how it can work best.

Here’s how it works: Open a new post, select “Insert Content,” then choose “Add Payment Button.” You’ll fill out the details for what you’re selling, add the email address for your PayPal account (where the money will be sent), and that’s it! Now your readers can send you a payment with a credit card, debit card, or PayPal account.

Read more about how to get started with the new Simple Payments feature for Premium and Business Plans on WordPress.com and Jetpack-powered sites.

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It’s easy to think that making simple things is, well, simple. But that’s never the case. Austin, Texas-based engineering leader Bob Ralian led the product team that pulled this live, working prototype together in record time. I had the opportunity to observe the design team in action working with the engineers, and the following is a brief interview with Bob on how all the pieces came together.

JM: So tell me a little about yourself, Bob!

BR: I’ve been building websites and web applications for the better part of 20 years, and I’ve worked at Automattic for four years. I’ve done a mix of engineering, team management, and project management. I live in Austin, Texas, with my wife, three kids, and two dogs.

JM: How does an engineer think versus how a designer thinks?

BR: As an engineer I usually think in terms of what I have and what I know. I can work within a system, take different pieces and turn them into something new. Take duct tape, dental floss, and a rubber band, and turn it into a bicycle. Or I can look at a process and think through how I can make it better. But I’ve found that designers are able to create something totally new out of nothing. They’re not intimidated by a completely blank slate. It’s a superpower that I greatly admire!

JM: They sound very similar!

BR: I think we’re motivated by the same things. We want to make something that people like and appreciate and makes their days a little better. Really, we just want our users to be happy and enjoy what we’re building.

JM: An unusual amount of planning went into this little button — it started in Detroit with a group of designers and then was packaged into a variety of concept sketches and little movies. Does all that up front work really pay off? If so, how?

BR: We spent a lot of time with customers, particularly small business owners, to learn about what they need from their websites. We learned that many of them just want a simple way to take payments. So we used that as our guiding principle, make it as simple as possible for these business owners to add a payment button to their site.

JM: What’s an “MVLP”? I heard the designers use that term with the engineers.

BR: MVLP stands for “minimum viable lovable product.” It means that rather than taking a long time to build a complicated product behind a curtain, we try to build small, simple features and launch them early. It’s ready when it solves a real user need and we can feel proud of it – something we can love. Then we let our customers tell us what they want next and how to make it better. This keeps us focused on building for real user needs.

JM: As an accomplished musical artist yourself, how does “love” play into the engineering of products?

BR: To me it’s all the same; composing a song, writing a blog post, building a new feature, or making something with my hands. I just really love the process of “making things.” Bringing something new into the world is an act of love. It’s an act of vulnerability and generosity. It’s saying to the world “We did our best, and we really hope this makes your life a little better.”

JM: Thanks Bob! Our huge thanks to the engineers who built it; Jason Johnston (who led the project), Artur Piszek, Damián Suárez, Don Park, Jarda Šnajdr, Payton Swick, and Rastislav Lamoš! And special thanks to designers Takashi Irie and Dave Whitley for thoughtfully crafting the experience design for this very first MLVP of the Simple Payment button.

Better Blogging Through Podcasts: Announcing RadioPublic Embeds

We love podcasts: they’re like the blogging version of radio, a medium anyone can jump into and use to share their story. They introduce us to new voices and give us glimpses into new perspectives… and they pair perfectly with blogs and websites, where they can add more texture and interest to what you’re already publishing.

Thanks to a new partnership with RadioPublic, you can choose from a quarter of a million podcasts to embed into your posts and pages on WordPress.com and Jetpack-powered websites. Whether you produce a podcast yourself, write about them, or just like to listen, you can share podcasts with your visitors, no matter where the podcasts are hosted.

What Can a Podcast Add to My Site?

Use a RadioPublic embed to share and promote your own podcast !  But even if you’ve never even listened to a podcast before, there are ways you can use them:

• Round up your favorites: everybody loves a good top-ten list, especially when includes a few surprises. Recommend some sports shows that break the mold (like 30 for 30 and The Rematch), podcasts about art (try A Piece of Work or The Lonely Palette), or amazing audio fiction. By embedding the shows right into your post, you make it easy for readers to sample, listen, and add the shows to their own listening list.
• Add a relevant episode to a post to give readers more to chew on. Writing about architecture? There’s probably a 99% Invisible episode that you could tie in. Pop culture? Check out Still Processing.
• Not everything has to be heavy: maybe your readers could just use a few minutes of cats purring — there’s a podcast for that, too!

With over 250,000 podcasts out there, there’s probably a show on whatever you’ve writing about.

Howdy, RadioPublic!

We’ve partnered with RadioPublic,  one of the leading podcast technology providers. They share our commitment to an open web, using open protocols to deliver free audio on demand, across all platforms — their founders have been innovating for years when it comes to the delivery of rich, immersive podcasts. Their technology makes sharing podcasts easier on all WordPress.com sites, opening up a world of opportunities for discovery, curation, and new voices.

The How-To

As with other kinds of media, you can embed a podcast with a few clicks:

1. Head to search.radiopublic.com to find a show.

2. Click on the name of a show. If you’d like to embed a specific episode, click the title of the episode.

3. Ta-da! The URL of that page is your embed link. Select it, copy the full link, and paste it right into your post editor, on its own line.

So for example, this URL:

https://play.radiopublic.com/song-exploder-yWw069

…will display this embed player:

(For more detail, head to our RadioPublic embed support doc.)

Did we mention that if you embed a show (rather than a specific episode), the player will automatically display and play the most recent episode? It’ll keep your site fresh without you having to lift a finger.

Start embedding right now by visiting search.radiopublic.com. Enjoy!

Four Tips From Seasoned Bloggers

Some of the best blogging advice we hear is from you. On Discover, we publish interviews and profiles of bloggers around the world, who also impart their own tips on how they’ve gotten the most out of WordPress.com. If you’ve missed these interviews, not to worry — we’ve compiled some of the best bits of blogging wisdom here.

Join communities that sustain your interests.

When you start to click around, follow blogs, and fill your Reader with posts to read, you’ll discover that WordPress.com is full of many smaller communities. For example, some participate in black and white photo challenges led by blogger Cee, while others join our multimedia Discover Challenges, hosted every Tuesday.

Novelist Claire Fuller credits two communities on WordPress.com for supporting and influencing her: Friday Fictioneers, a group of bloggers that writes a weekly 100-word story inspired by a photograph (hosted on the blog of Rochelle Wisoff-Fields), and The Prime Writers, a community of writers who published their first book after age 40.

But it’s the community that I love the most — so inspiring and supportive. They’ll give constructive criticism when I need it and encouragement when something hasn’t gone right. And these are people from all around the world, most of whom I have never met.

— Claire Fuller on Friday Fictioneers

Get started: Looking for a community like these, but not sure where to start? Learn about supportive blogging groups, or browse the events and challenges on The Daily Post, which are hosted by fellow bloggers and listed by topics — like books, gardening, and music. Or tap into communities through tags, like #weekendcoffeeshare, in your Reader. (You can search for any tag in the Reader — results will appear if someone, somewhere, has added that exact tag to one of their posts.)

Automatically share your posts with the world.

Many of you share your posts far and wide, like Depression Comix artist Clay Jonathan, who casts a wide social net. With Publicize, let us do the sharing for you and push your new posts to Facebook, Twitter, and other services.

“If you build it, they won’t necessarily come,” says parenting blogger Emily Austin, who writes about motherhood and life at The Waiting. In her Discover interview, she gives solid tips on growing your blog and making meaningful connections, from guest posting to cross-posting to getting the word out on social media.

While WordPress.com has a thriving community of bloggers who are engaged and encouraging, I wanted to write the one blog that people who don’t read blogs would read. And to do that, I had to put myself out there via social media. It took me a ridiculously long time to get my act together and set up a Facebook page for The Waiting, but once I did, I realized I was doing myself a disservice not to connect with my community outside the walls of the blog. I now focus on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. When it came time to interview for my job, I was able to show my organization that I know how to drive engagement and connect with both established and potential readers and customers.

Get started: To set up Publicize, go to My Site → Sharing. You’ll see a list of services we currently support: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Path, and Eventbrite. (If you like videos, follow along on this tutorial for connecting specifically to Facebook.) Click Connect next to a service and follow the steps to enable Publicize.

Organize your feeds with Reader lists.

In your Reader, you can keep up with the blogs you’ve followed in Followed Sites, our editors’ picks and features in Discover, and any tags you’ve followed under Tags.

You can also create Lists to organize your feed by topic or group, or create a blogroll of multiple lists, which is handy for people who read a lot, have varied interests, and love to share their recommendations. Ra, the writer and reader at Rarasaur, has built a following of loyal, engaged readers, as well as forged dear friendships offline, compiled in her Reader list, Blokin (short for “blog kin”).

In a recent interview, Ra describes what moves her when browsing and reading new posts.

I am a reader of many things — fictional novels, nonfiction documentations, graphic novels, magazines, poetry, everything — but blogs have the ability to offer perspectives not found anywhere else. I seek that sparkle. . . .

I’ll read something I don’t understand, or something I don’t agree with, or something I would never want in my own life — but I will move on, quickly, if it’s something I can’t feel.

As Ra suggests, there’s so much to read out there, so take control of your Reader to ensure you see the stuff that matters to you. For example, you can follow popular tags like photography (or follow tags on specialized photography topics), but why not curate your own list of favorite photographers? Or, if you’re really into photography, build a blogroll of photography lists across topics and groups, from film and analog enthusiasts to portrait and landscape photographers around the world.

Get started: In your Reader, scroll down to the Lists section. Click on the down-arrow next to Lists and then click on Add, which will prompt you to name your list and take you to the edit page where you can can build your list.

Find a theme that allows your work to shine.

Your site is your online home: a place where you welcome visitors, old and new. Visually, your site should represent you and present your work in the best possible way.

For photographers, this is especially important. At food blog Infinite Belly, husband-and-wife team André and Adélaïde Zollinger use the free and minimal Libre theme, which keeps the focus on their images of culinary creations and picturesque French landscapes.

Strong visual storytellers, André and Adélaïde offer photoblogging advice:

See what formats work best for your blog depending on your design and theme. We used to take a lot of pictures in landscape format but discovered that single portrait formats work really well for us to display large photographs and show details.

Get started: Explore hundreds of themes to find a design that’s right for you. Go to My Site → Themes to browse the Theme Showcase, and filter by “free” or “premium” or click More to narrow your search with filters (type of site, feature, layout, etc.). As André and Adélaïde advise, experimentation is key: consider everything from the orientation of your featured images to the number of columns (one, two, multiple) in a theme.

At Discover, we profile writers, artists, and photographers doing great things on WordPress.com. Read the latest interviews and stories in our Features section.

New Themes: Affinity and Shoreditch

I’m happy to introduce two new themes in our collection: Affinity and Shoreditch.

Affinity

Affinity, designed by yours truly, is a classic one-page theme designed with weddings and family announcements in mind.

Collect everything you need for your big day on one easy-to-customize site — add an R.S.V.P. form, link to your favorite registries, or add stunning photos from the event itself. Keep your loved ones in the loop with a blog, and collect their messages and wishes for you in your guestbook.

However you use it, Affinity is an elegant solution for your wedding or family announcement.

Give Affinity a spin in the Theme Showcase!

Shoreditch

Shoreditch, designed and developed by Thomas Guillot, is a responsive, and multi-purpose theme. Packed with a Panel Page Template and a Full-Width Page Temple, Shoreditch is a perfect solution for a company’s online presence. Although its main purpose is business, Shoreditch looks great as a personal blog theme too, thanks to its flexibility and clean design.

Read more about Shoreditch in the Theme Showcase.

¿Habla Español? Love Helping Others? Apply to Work with Us!

Karen Arnold, Deborah Beckett, Erica Varlese, and Pam Kocke work on the Happiness Hiring team at Automattic. They hire new Happiness Engineers who support users on WordPress.com and Automattic products. In May and June, they’ll visit WordPress and WooCommerce events in Argentina, Spain, and Austria to meet local WordPress enthusiasts and encourage people to apply to work with us. Don’t be shy! Thinking about applying? We think you should.

Karen, Deborah, Erica, and Pam will be in Argentina, Spain, and Austria in May and June to encourage Spanish-speaking people to apply to work with us at Automattic.

Where will you be and when?

We’ll be doing several events in Argentina, Spain, and Austria in May and June 2016. We’re particularly excited about visiting local WordPress communities and meetup groups and speaking at WordCamp Europe at the end of June.

If you’re in Argentina or Spain, come find us to chat at one of the events below:

Argentina (Buenos Aires, La Plata, Córdoba)
Monday, May 9th at 6:30pm

• Buenos Aires WordPress meetup group
• DaVinci (Buenos Aires)

Tuesday, May 10th at 6pm

• WordPress Happy Hour and Networking
• Sugar (Buenos Aires)

Wednesday, May 11th at 7pm

• La Plata WordPress meetup group Globant (La Plata)

Thursday, May 12th at 6:30pm

• Córdoba WordPress meetup group
• TechPub (Córdoba)

Europe (Barcelona, Madrid, and Vienna)
Friday, June 17th

• WooCommerce Barcelona meetup group Location and time TBD (Barcelona)

Saturday, June 18th at 11:30am

• Barcelona WordPress meetup group Location TBD (Barcelona)

Tuesday, June 21st at 6:30pm

• Madrid WordPress meetup group
• Campus Madrid

Friday June 24th to Sunday, June 26th

• WordCamp Europe
• MuseumsQuartier (Vienna)

What’s the purpose of the trip?

Part of our mission to democratize publishing means making our tools and services accessible to people all over the world. While the entire Automattic family works remotely — which means we’re located all over the world — we still primarily provide support via English.

We want to help users in their first language. While there are many wonderful tools online to help with translation, nothing beats the feeling of opening a chat box for help and being greeted with someone who can help you in the language you speak every day. We’ve been able to provide localized support for our Brazilian Portuguese-speaking users, and we’d like to expand that to our Spanish-speaking users as well.

To localize support, we need Happiness Engineers that speak Spanish. Our goal with this trip is to meet and connect with the amazing, Spanish-speaking WordPress communities across the globe and, hopefully, entice a few folks to join the Automattic family.

What are you looking for in applicants?

Happiness Engineers are passionate about good support. It helps to have a working knowledge of WordPress, WooCommerce, Jetpack, and the family of Automattic products, but you can also increase your skills on the job.

We spend our days helping Automattic/WordPress.com customers who have a wide range of experience. In a single day, you can chat with someone who’s just starting their first blog to someone who’s been developing websites for a decade. Regardless of who you’re talking with, a successful Happiness Engineer is patient, has a good sense of humor, and is ready to take technical language and make it easy to understand.

We love to see applicants who already spend their time in the WordPress community or online support forums. While technical knowledge is important for success in this role, it’s the added touch of seeking out a way to provide cheerful, honest, personalized support that makes all the difference.

What’s the best way for applicants to get in touch with you?

For questions, feel free to comment on this post and we’d be glad to reply. Otherwise, you can apply for the position via the Work With Us page, following the steps listed at the bottom of the job description. See you soon!

Three WordPressers Making a Splash

We love celebrating the achievements of those who use WordPress to share their talents with the world, so here are three recent success stories we thought you’d enjoy. If you’re thirsty for more in-depth profiles of WordPressers and their accomplishments, be sure to browse through our Discover features.

Modern love, modern families

Jerry Mahoney has been documenting the ups and downs of gay parenthood for years at his blog, Mommy Man (which also inspired a book by the same name). Last month he added another accolade to an already impressive list when his essay “Mom/Not Mom/Aunt” was featured on the New York Times’ Modern Love podcast, narrated by none other than Modern Family’s Jesse Tyler Ferguson:

I loved reading for the #ModernLovePodcast! nyti.ms/1WLJ2RT Thank you, @WhyJerryWhy, for the touching story. https://t.co/e9V0bvogX9

—
Jesse Tyler Ferguson (@jessetyler) March 24, 2016

While you’re at it, be sure to read Jerry’s recent — powerful — post, “Why I Put My Family on Display.”

Pushing a hallowed artform into the present

Harmony France is a Chicago-based theater actor who’s had enough of the body-shaming and narrow-minded casting decisions she’s been subjected to in her decade in the industry. So she took to her blog to express her frustration — and her hope for a better future for performers:

Theaters wonder how to stay relevant; how not to die off once their main audience literally dies off. This is how. We need to start casting in a way that looks like the world that we live in. Casting predominantly white and male is antiquated. It doesn’t fly anymore. If we don’t change with the times, we will become irrelevant. And worse, it’s UNCREATIVE in a CREATIVE art form. We have so many more types of stories to tell with so many more different types of people. Let’s do better.

A book you’ll want to judge by its cover

If you’re like us, you may have wondered what Matthew Ramsay — the chef and food stylist behind PornBurger — has been up to. And why it’s been so long since he shared any new, extravagant, gravity-defying burger creations with the salivating masses.

Well, the answer is here:

Ramsay’s been hard at work on a new “cook-and-look” book, PornBurger: Hot Buns and Juicy Beefcakes, which is now available for pre-ordering (the official release date is May 17). That’s quite a bun-to-blog-to-book success story.

What achievements have you and your blog been celebrating lately? Leave a comment to let us know.

Field Notes: CMS Africa Summit 2016

Automatticians, the people who build WordPress.com, participate in events and projects around the world every day. Periodically, they report back on the exciting things they do when not in front of a computer.

Today I share my experiences meeting and getting to know some of the most active members of the open source community in East Africa during the CMS Africa Summit, held in Kampala, Uganda, earlier this month. I was joined by my colleagues Job Thomas, Konstantin Obenland, Matty Cohen, Deborah Beckett, and Gareth Allison. 

CMS Africa Summit, where Automattic was a title sponsor, celebrates not only WordPress but open source software in general. The two-day event featured a jam-packed agenda of workshops, breakout sessions, keynotes, and even a hackathon, all targeting the fast-growing community of developers, business owners, startup founders, and bloggers in East Africa. Speakers from around the continent (and beyond) shared their expertise on building a business based on open source software and contributing to the community, to name just two topics.

My colleagues and I offered workshops on launching an eCommerce site and using Jetpack to expand WordPress’ functionality. Job, Konstantin, and Gareth gave a joint keynote presentation on contributing to the WordPress project, while I offered tips on marketing a business both offline and online, based on my personal experiences running a successful startup for several years.

It was the most fun conference I’ve ever attended. How many tech events have you ever been to that included a giant “cash box,” a tattoo competition, or, inexplicably, an enormous, glowing white orb dotted with the iconic W logo? My favorite part of the entire event was running into a young attendee in the women’s bathroom — she was applying what appeared to be a couple dozen of the temporary WordPress tattoos we’d brought along as swag giveaways. None of us were surprised when we learned that she ultimately won the competition. Clearly, the love for WordPress (and WordPress swag) runs deep here.

What we took away from the event, however, were the astounding energy, drive, talent, and intelligence that we witnessed during those remarkable two days, and the thirst we observed for open source software and what it can do to transform communities. Africa’s technology sector is booming, and we’re excited to have met many of its most passionate and inspiring pioneers.

New Themes: Rowling and Scratchpad

It’s Theme Thursday time, which means we have some more awesome themes to share.

Rowling

Originally designed by Anders Norén, Rowling is a clean, simple, and elegant magazine theme that’s versatile enough for you to use on just about any kind of site or blog.

The theme offers responsive design and great typography, as well as many opportunities for customization. Some of the highlights include two Custom Menu locations, a Social Menu for sharing buttons, custom accent colors, a custom site logo, and a special Gallery Post Format.

Want to explore Rowling? Head over to the theme’s Showcase page!

Scratchpad

Scratchpad is great way to add a touch of whimsy to your writing, photos, and drawings. Its bright colors and illustrative details help your posts pop, and the theme pays special attention to different post formats for visual variety. This fun theme is a perfect fit for sharing projects, recipes, stories, and more with family and friends.

Check out Scratchpad today on the Theme Showcase!

New on WordPress.com: Sharing Buttons for WhatsApp, Telegram, and Skype

Our users — and your sites’ visitors — share millions of WordPress.com posts every day across social networks, and today we’re excited to announce sharing buttons for three more services: WhatsApp, Telegram, and Skype.

Here’s how to set up the new buttons:

1. Go to My Sites → Sharing.
2. Select the Sharing Buttons tab, and then Edit Sharing Buttons.
3. Select any of the three new options (in addition to our many other sharing possibilities).

Learn more here, or watch this handy video:

Now, in addition to sharing on social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, you can share on some of the world’s most popular messaging apps.

We’re excited to offer these new buttons — and, as always, you can contact us in support if you have more questions.

HTTPS Everywhere: Encryption for All WordPress.com Sites

Today we are excited to announce free HTTPS for all custom domains hosted on WordPress.com. This brings the security and performance of modern encryption to every blog and website we host.

Best of all, the changes are automatic — you won’t need to do a thing.

As the EFF points out as part of their Encrypt the Web initiative, strong encryption protects our users in various ways, including defending against surveillance of content and communications, cookie theft, account hijacking, and other web security flaws.

WordPress.com has supported encryption for sites using WordPress.com subdomains (like https://barry.wordpress.com/) since 2014. Our latest efforts now expand encryption to the million-plus custom domains (like automattic.com) hosted on WordPress.com.

The Let’s Encrypt project gave us an efficient and automated way to provide SSL certificates for a large number of domains. We launched the first batch of certificates in January 2016 and immediately started working with Let’s Encrypt to make the process smoother for our massive and growing list of domains.

For you, the users, that means you’ll see secure encryption automatically deployed on every new site within minutes. We are closing the door to un-encrypted web traffic (HTTP) at every opportunity.

Web encryption provides more than security

Protocol enhancements like SPDY and HTTP/2 have narrowed the performance gap between encrypted and un-encrypted web traffic, with encrypted HTTP/2 outperforming un-encrypted HTTP/1.1 in some cases.

Google also announced HTTPS is used as a ranking signal in search results, with HTTPS-enabled sites ranked above their plaintext counterparts.

As a WordPress.com site owner, keep an eye out for this feature on your custom domains. Once your site is HTTPS-enabled, you should see a green lock icon in your browser’s address bar. All plaintext HTTP requests will be automatically redirected to their encrypted counterpart (your URL will begin with https:// instead of http://). We will transparently handle all the complexities of SSL certificate management for you.

We take security seriously, and we’re proud to offer this to WordPress.com users. For more information about encryption, please see our support documentation.