Category: News

Drama in the WordPress Community – What Does it Mean for You?

Posted on by Nick Bonnet

Up until now, you might have been blissfully unaware of the drama brewing in the WordPress Community. At a very high level, there have been disagreements between Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, the company behind products like wordpress.com and Jetpack, among many others, and WP Engine, a hosting provider that also owns popular plugins like ACF, which is used on millions of WordPress sites.

We don’t want to get involved and take sides, but thought you should know of a few events that might impact you:

  • On September 25th WP Engine was blocked from being able to access the WordPress.org repository, as outlined in Matt’s post here. This means WP Engine customers won’t be able to update plugins and themes through WP admin.
  • On October 3rd the ACF team, owned by WP Engine, announced that future updates will come directly from their site.
  • On October 12th  Matt appropriated the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin and .org listing, creating “Secure Custom Fields.”
  • October 13th WP Engine, the owner of Advanced Custom fields, sent out an email to WordPress customers informing them of this action. WP Engine is making consumers aware of how to get “real” ACF, directly through them. 


If you’re on one of our maintenance plans, there’s no need to worry. For the foreseeable future our team will have to manually download plugin updates, and then upload them to your site directly. This will take longer, but we hesitate to make any hasty moves, like switching hosting providers or plugin solutions, until we see how the dust settles in the coming weeks. Anyone who is hosted on WP Engine isn’t impacted by the ACF change mentioned above, and website maintenance customers who aren’t will continue to have ACF updated manually by our team. Rest assured we are monitoring the situation closely and will keep in touch on the best steps moving forward.

 

Nick Bonnet
Director of Operations

Adam Kiefer, Ryan MacPherson of UNC STAR Heel Labs Featured in New England Journal of Medicine

Posted on by Nick Bonnet

Adam Kiefer and Ryan MacPherson are the co-directors of the UNC STAR Heel Performance Laboratory at UNC Chapel Hill, and co-founders of Elipsys, an performance tracking and improvement company whose clients include professional sports franchises in the NBA, Major League Baseball, and more. 

We’ve been fortunate enough to work with Elipsys and STAR Heel Labs over the past year, helping them with brand development, UX, and creating marketing collateral to help them better tell their story to professional sports franchises looking for a competitive edge through Elipsys’ eye-tracking technology. 

In December, the New England Journal of Medicine published Kiefer’s study “Trial of Training to Reduce Driver Inattention in Teens with ADHD”, where Keifer and his co-authors leveraged Elipsys’s eye-tracking technology to study the impact of ADHD on the driving habits of teens, and demonstrated the effectiveness of a computerized skills-training program on reducing accidents. You can also read more about the team and their study in this article from UNC Research. 

Congrats to Adam, Ryan and their team at STAR Heel Labs – we can’t wait to see what’s next for this exciting team and their ground-breaking tech!

Ainsley opens North Carolina office at WeWork Raleigh

Posted on by Nick Bonnet

Ainsley, a Baltimore-based advertising and marketing agency, today announced that they have expanded into North Carolina with a new satellite office in Raleigh. The new office is part of the WeWork location at One Glenwood that officially opened June 3.

“North Carolina, in particular Raleigh and the surrounding area, has just seen some tremendous growth in the past few years,” said Tom Ainsley, CEO of Ainsley. “Expanding our presence with an office there is a great opportunity for us to pursue our vision of having small teams in multiple markets really positioned for growth.”

Ainsley has leased private office space at WeWork, with the ability to expand as the company begins to hire in North Carolina towards the end of 2019 and into 2020. WeWork is the largest tenant at One Glenwood, with over 80,000 square feet spanning multiple floors within the new building.

“When we first started to explore our priorities and options for a new location back in 2018, we took a decidedly different approach than we had in the past,” Ainsley said. “Rather than be locked in to a 5 or 10-year lease at a single location, we believed that having multiple locations in spaces like the ETC and WeWork was the best of both worlds. We have private office space within both of these locations, but still have access to the events, perks, programming and community that make a co-working space great. And, we have the flexibility to take on more space in both locations as we grow.”

Ainsley’s team in Baltimore is headquartered at the Emerging Technology Center at 101 N. Haven Street, which currently houses over 40 other technology-focused companies.

Ainsley is a full service marketing and advertising agency with offices in Baltimore, Md., and Raleigh, NC that focuses on providing a full range of marketing services, from initial strategy to campaign execution. Our capabilities include brand development, marketing strategy, web design, digital marketing, video production, public relations and web development. We operate with a single mission — to help organizations tell the story of their brand to prospects, customers and employees in ways that help them continue to grow and stay relevant in a rapidly changing marketplace.