Marco Chiesi

Once upon a time, there was a plugin… — WordCamp Europe 2018

The story of Black Studio TinyMCE Widget — 900,000+ active installs — and what a free plugin did for the two people who wrote it. A lightning talk with Francesco Canovi at WordCamp Europe in Belgrade.

Francesco Canovi and Marco Chiesi on stage at WordCamp Europe 2018 in Belgrade

Francesco Canovi and I gave this talk at WordCamp Europe 2018 in Belgrade, Serbia.

Francesco Canovi and I took the lightning-talk slot at WordCamp Europe in Belgrade to tell the story of one plugin: Black Studio TinyMCE Widget. At the time it had passed 900,000 active installs and six million downloads.

The interesting part was never the code. It is a small plugin that solves one annoyance: WordPress had no text widget with a visual editor. We wrote a working version in half a day. What followed was the butterfly effect applied to open source — how giving away something small and useful changed the business prospects of the agency behind it.

What we covered

  • Where the idea came from, and why nobody else had fixed it properly
  • What happens to a two-person agency when a plugin reaches six figures of active installs
  • The support load, and what it teaches you about your own users
  • Why the returns on open-source work rarely arrive in the form you expect

Slides and recording