With the end of the year approaching, I wanted to take a step back and look at some of the things we achieved this year and give you a sneak peek into what we are working on at the moment.
WordCamp Europe 2024
In June, we attended WordCamp Europe 2024 in Torino, where we met with many other plugin developers and got a lot of insights and ideas to improve picu further. You can find our recap post here. Shortly after the conference we also launched our Development Blog with the goal of giving you a look behind the scenes and share more openly what we are working on, while we are working on it. Next year, the WordCamp will be held in Basel, Switzerland and I am part of the organizing team for the event and look forward to welcome the international WordPress community in my home country.
New Website
In September, we finally launched a small update to our branding and our new website, with the goal to highlight the features of picu as well as picu Pro much better. But also to improve our documentation pages dramatically. There’s still lots of things to improve, but we’re quite happy with the result so far. Check it out and click around, if you haven’t yet, and please feel free to send us your feedback if you miss anything.
Social Media
Since Elon Musk took over twitter X a while back, the platform has become less and less aligned with our values and we find it hard to justify our presence on it. While we still kept our account alive so far, we finally found new homes on bluesky and on mastodon where we intend to be most active going forward! If you haven’t signed up for an account, now is the time to do so.
Features
Apart from all that, we also launched a few new features for picu & picu Pro this year, namely we:
- Introduced Star Ratings for clients
- Introduced a new post status “Open” and “Closed” to make the whole proofing workflow much more flexible in the future
- Added the ability to add new clients to a collection after it has been sent out
- Made it possible to close collections manually
Selling Images / e-commerce
We wanted to make it possible to sell images through picu for a very long time and this year we made a decision that it’s finally time to tackle this once and for all – and started working on it again. And while our initial goal of releasing a first beta version this year unfortunately won’t be met, we did make a lot of progress and are optimistic that we get it out to a few selected testers in January!
If you are interested in beta testing and giving feedback yourself, please contact us to apply.
Development Insights
We posted many things to our dev-log over the course of this year, ranging from product related stuff or marketing insights to more technical stuff going on behind the scenes. Here’s a selection of some of the highlights that I feel could be most interesting:
- Florian shared our progress on the e-commerce side of things
- Soon, there will be a Custom Block to list collections (replacing our old shortcode)
- You can now close a collection right from the approval email
- About Star Rating and Filtering and another Star Rating Update
- We were notified that we unintentionally violated the WP.org guidelines, but fixed it only a few hours after getting note of it
- We finally fixed a long-standing bug to exclude picu collections from Yoast SEO settings
- Individual comments in the frontend now show a date
- Selection Goals are now communicated to your clients much clearer
- Wrote about how our settings pages are built under the hood
- Improved “Add Client” functionality in the backend for sent collections
- We did a survey about and later posted our first outline of “Phase 1” to bring e-commerce to picu
As you can see, there has been a lot going on in 2024 and we start the new year full of ideas. Our goal has always been to make your life as a photographer easier with our tools and our motivation to do so has never been stronger!
We’re excited for 2025 and can’t wait to share some more of the things we’re building! But now, first and foremost, we want to say Thank you to all of you. We wish you a peaceful Christmas time & end of the year and hope you can take some time off to relax and recharge.