Just a quick note to let you know we have been lucky to have WPEngine select weeblrAMP as their Preferred plugin for AMP implementation.
WPEngine just opened their Solution center, which gathers a list of carefully selected WordPress solutions of various types: mostly plugins, but also services such as CDN, email marketing, etc They are classified in categories: site setup, development, speed, security, marketing, design, e-commerce, site enhancements, and content.
Included solutions were tested and selected by the WEngine team. To quote the initial blog post: " ...we pick solutions that are optimized for site speed, are supported by the company that offers the solution, and offer solutions for WP Engine’s customers in innovative ways."
Very happy to be there alongside famous other members of the WordPress family! We do have more innovative features coming and will do our best to match WPEngine and community expectations in the coming months!
I haven't posted here in a while but that's because we've been busy cooking up big new things for weeblrAMP: just a few days ago, weeblrAMP community was accepted and published on the WordPress plugins directory! Already a big news in itself, but in line with what we discussed with other community members at the last WordCamp Europe, we have also completed support of Easy Digital Downloads and Mailchimp 4 WordPress.
There is still much to do, but I now feel we have made progress on the way to offering automated and high quality AMP pages creation for a wide range of WordPress sites:
For content sites: already well covered, but we can now share a large part of that with the community through the free of charge weeblrAMP Community edition
E-Commerce: WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads allow for AMPlifying both physical and digital goods offering
Marketing: automatic conversion and operation of Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms and Mailchimp 4 WordPress means many visitors intercation can now take place on AMP pages
We just had a customer asking about how to efficiently improve the structured data on their AMP pages. Being such a major SEO optimization one can make, especially for a Recipes site, I thought this would be a good example of using one of many weeblrAMP filters and actions. And so here is the first installment of our #practicalAMP series!
The site in question has both a number of informational pages and then a very large number of recipes. When creating AMP versions of all those pages, weeblrAMP automatically adds AMP-required minimal schema.org structured data, and then some depending on the document type. Which is why it is important to recognize the document type, when possible.
weeblrAMP lets you select the default document type, and then add some shortcode in your content if you need to specify one for some post or page. Not viable for several hundreds existing recipes though, and that's where WordPress filters get into action...
Accelerated Mobile Pages is in the news, and in case you missed it, WP Engine dedicated one of their webinar to AMP, under the title: AMP for WordPress: the inside scoop. This was a joint presentation by David Vogelpohl from WP Engine and Joost de Valk, the well-known founder of Yoast.com.
After just been in touch with them for a few days, they selected weeblrAMP to be one of two methods presented to add AMP to your WordPress site. The other one being the standard AMP plugin by Automattic, completed with Yoast AMP glue plugin.
Maybe even more interesting than the actual tech details of implementing AMP, Joost and David started by discussing the Pros and Cons and Whys of having AMP. This part alone makes it a worthwhile listening, I thought it was a fair review of some of the issues involved in the AMP technology as well as the users and site owners benefits. Especially the "myths debunking part", of which weeblrAMP was part of :)
I was lucky to be invited to speak about Accelerated Mobile Pages at last weekend WordCamp Bordeaux. This was one of my first encounters with such a large WordPress enthusiasts gathering, with a crowd of 350.
A testimony of WordPress community variety and attractivity, we also enjoyed talks such as How to turn WordPress into an E-learning platform, merging online and print activities with a WordPress site, or using WordPress as a central information management solution.
More technical talks as well, with a deep dive into taxonomies or practical code samples around migrating data around WordPress installations. The usual suspects of SEO, Social networking and contribution to WordPress were also on the list.
I also found a very welcome addition Elie Sloïm's presentation of Web Quality and accessibility, based on the Opquast certification program, who reminded us most do's and don'ts are relatively simple to use, while bringing extended benefits not only in terms of accessibility but, for instance, for SEO.
Lastly, I was to happy see a large number of folks showing up for my AMP talk, and enjoyed a lengthy question/answer session, that extended well into the following coffee break. As promised, below are my slides for the talk:
My name is Yannick Gaultier, and I am running WeeblrPress. For nearly 10 years now, I have developed GPL-licensed CMS plugins, as a business venture for more than 7 years. While mostly working on the Joomla! side of things, our products include SEO and content-generation oriented extensions.
Since Google started talking about Accelerated Mobile Pages at the end of 2015, we have been very busy developing and supporting an AMP plugin for Joomla! It opened the same day Google started using AMP in their search results, and has grown since then into some kind of a standard, receiving the Joomla! Innovation of the Year for 2016 last May.
With that work as a strong basis for being able to generate valid AMP pages for many real-life websites, we looked at the WordPress AMP scenery and found that despite a very large offering, important things were missing.
So we set out to build weeblrAMP, an AMP plugin for WordPress with a focus on:
Advanced features, such as automatic forms conversion or live commenting
Strong support for WooCommerce,including AMP-Add To Cart
SEO: OGP, TCards, schema.org markup, and Yoast connector to pick up your custom data
Extensive customization from WordPress admin
Even more extensive customization for developers, through templates overrides and more than 70 fully documented filters and actions
An exhaustive documentation
Professional support
We believe AMP is here to stay, and its usage should and will expand, bringing a lot of benefits to web site users. Though large publishers and e-commerce websites are already taking advantage of AMP, smaller ventures may not have custom development resources still often needed today for a proper implementation.
With weeblrAMP, we hope to help reduce that gap, allowing many WordPress sites owner and developers to fully implement AMP sites in a faster and more efficient way.
