There’s been some interesting threads going around on Jetpack and the future of WordPress, here’s Chris Lema’s take: Is the Future Success of WordPress tied to Jetpack?.
There’s been some interesting threads going around on Jetpack and the future of WordPress, here’s Chris Lema’s take: Is the Future Success of WordPress tied to Jetpack?.
Lema rocks!
I’m definitely bullish on JetPack. It solves a problem – too many plugins and plugin authors to worry about when implementing plugins on client sites.
After spending the last so many years managing a bunch of different plugins for a bunch of different things, it’s simply nice to be able to turn to one plugin that handles a bunch of these things at one time, with the ability to turn each feature of the plugin on or off. There’s a lot to like in JetPack.
What I have come to realize is that JetPack provides a limited set of base features. The Sharing system is great. Has worked perfectly for me for cross posting to clients sites and adding social sharing buttons to pages, posts, and CPTs. However, the limitation is that you cannot roll your own icon pack. I have a restaurant client that is really concerned about image. They looked at both sets of icons for sharing and hoped they could have something that matched the theme we built, but alas, after contacting support at JetPack, I was told that’s not available yet with no plans to implement.
The issue there is in order for someone like me to adopt JetPack consistently, I need a little more flexibility in some of the tools, like the Share bar icons. JetPack can’t force us just to use what is avail. They have to go the extra mile and allow for custom icons.
Matt, based on your post a few months ago about AddThis and services like it putting a tracking cookie in your browser and reporting your comings and goings to 3rd parties, I made the switch to JetPack. But after making the switch, I realized some of the limitations.
The key issue is: can the developers at JetPack keep up with the features people want or need from the plugins they supercede or will replace?
Lastly, it would be great to have image compression along with Photon CDN hosting. It’s not clear to me whether images hosted on Photon are actually compressed too, so maybe I need to go take a look at that, but I’m using smush.it for image compression. Many clients don’t know to reduce the size of their files and even though you train them, someone new comes in and starts uploading 3MB photos. Hopefully, a combination of Photon and image compression will solve this problem.
I know, for me, having a carousel and gallery native in the WordPress media library replaces my old favorite, NextGen Gallery. I never liked having images stored in both NextGen’s separate uploads folder and WordPress uploads folder, because when moving sites, some developers might not think to look for the NextGen uploads folder before deleting the entire site from a server. Sure, you have a backup of the entire wp-content folder structure, but I’m just saying that it’s better now to have all your images avail in one media library, not two.
I’m also happy that BruteProtect is now part of JetPack. Had it already installed and it’s help with spam bots tremendously. Good move.
Bottom line is, as a WordPress agency owner, JetPack is solving some problems. I’m already seeing the benefits and I have to convince those who don’t to move on this, so they are up to speed. In fact, I gave a JetPack presentation at WordCamp Raleigh last year, knowing that JetPack was really the future of WordPress. So, I was already on the ball on that one, for sure!
Hi Tony,
I’m Jeremy, I work for Automattic and help people out with the Jetpack plugin.
You should already be able to customize the look of the Jetpack sharing buttons with some custom CSS. You can remove the existing icons, add new ones, change colours, and do other cosmetic changes by adding custom CSS to your theme stylesheet or to the custom CSS editor available under Appearance > Edit CSS in your dashboard.
If you need help with that, you can post in the Jetpack support forums, I’ll be happy to help!
We try! 🙂 If there is a feature you’d like to see in Jetpack, let us know and we’ll consider it. If it seems like it would benefit a lot of site owners, we’ll add it to the plugin!
Photon already compresses your images, but if you’d like to compress them even more you can add lossy image compression by following the instructions here:
Lossy Image Compression with Photon.
If you have any more questions, post in the forums or send us an email!
Matt, while Lema and I often have issues getting to where we see eye to eye on … much, I have to admit that the Microsoft/Apple vs WordPress/Only-hosted Apps analogy he made is petty smart.
And I was there back in the day, and I concur that WordPress has a great chance of coming out in the Microsoft position, for exactly the reason Chris puts forth.
I( also commented on your words at Pressnomics vis a vis Jetpack, by the way: http://wordpress.answerguy.com/wordpress-jetpack-market-share-big-brother/2015/01/29 ).
As I said there, you made another point there—and Chris seems to agree with it in the piece you pointed at—about the need to start “looking outward”.
Bravo. Jetpack is a big deal for you, but it’s just the tool to accomplish the big goal and that big goal will not come to fruition without a whole lot more folks jumping aboard.
Jeff Yablon
The WordPress Helpers
Lema’s post is a great read.
I see the problem Jetpack solves and it is only getting better with new additions like BruteProtect etc. All this makes Jetpack great for average users like me.
But I think Jetpack’s adoption with the minority tech savvy part of the community depends on whether Jetpack can be jack of all and master of all as well.