The website maintenance blog at Watchful covers all things WordPress including hosting, software, updates, backups and agency life.
I have been managing digital agencies for two decades. But that wasn’t always the case. I grew up in the 1970s on a remote island in the North Atlantic ocean. The climate was harsh, we struggled to pay the bills, and life always seemed a little harder than it had Read more
The new Gutenberg editor in WordPress is not popular with everyone. But here at Watchful, we love Gutenberg and now use it on all our sites, especially the ability to group blocks and reuse them on any post or page. Perhaps my favorite thing about Gutenberg is the explosion of Read more
A love letter to the global Joomla community. This weekend I attended Joomla’s Forum for the Future (FFTF) in Malaga, Spain. FFTF was a 3-day event that followed an unconference-style format where attendees brainstormed and networked on the future of Joomla. The conference was organized by the Joomla project leadership Read more
Here at Watchful, our goal is to help web agencies save time and money. Most of the time, we do that with our site management platform. But, hopefully we can also save you time and money by showcasing really useful tools. Recently, we moved our support desk from HelpScout (which Read more
Here at Watchful, we love to support high profile users of open source. Every day, we help governments, universities and other large organizations to use Joomla and WordPress. It is inspiring to see the work of Matthew Philogene, one of the Watchful team members. He has just relaunched JoomlaGov.info which Read more
The Joomlashack Conference was a three day online event that took place in early November. This was a free conference featuring the best speakers from around the Joomla world. Plus, somehow, Vic Drover, the CEO of Watchful, was invited too 🙂 As one of the bigger companies in Joomla, Watchful Read more
Here at Watchful we’re big fans of Gutenberg. However, we’ve heard the criticism – and there’s been a lot! We’ve seen the bugs; Gutenberg still has glitches. But overall, it’s a really fun and easy writing experience. Gutenberg is only 1 year and it’s rapidly improving. This week, Gutenberg got Read more
The Joomla Extensions Directory – simply known as the JED – is the cornerstone of the Joomla project. The JED is the most important site in Joomla for both users and developers. For users, it’s the first place they go when they’re building Joomla sites. A few years ago, I Read more
Running a WordPress agency means that you spend a lot of time maintaining sites and updating plugins. Watchful can help reduce your WordPress maintenance costs so your agency can be more profitable. Good maintenance mean happy customers We all have people helping us with maintenance. Wherever you live, people will Read more
When Joomla 4 arrives in 2020, you’ll see many improvements. There’s one improvement that I haven’t seen written about yet, but it will prove very useful to Watchful users. Joomla 4 will have a standard approach to handling license keys for commercial extensions. So whether you’re using extensions from Akeeba, Read more