Giving Thanks and Giving Back

We’ve got a lot to be thankful for here at Modern Tribe, so we wanted to take a moment to publicly share appreciation for our team, our users, and the WordPress community at large. It’s been a hell of a journey, and we’ve worked hard to pay things forward along the way.

Giving Thanks

2015 was a big year for us.

We surpassed 2 million downloads of The Events Calendar and continue to serve over 300,000 active users.  Our incredible support team has helped answer over 8,000 questions through our premium support forums, plus assisted with resolving another 2,000+ tickets in the WordPress.org forums.

We’re incredibly thankful to our team members. They are Tribe. Their multitude of talents and dedication to quality is the backbone of our reputation.

We’re also thankful for our community. You guys support us, challenge us, and push us to continuously innovate and improve. Without you, we wouldn’t be where we are today, and for that, we are deeply appreciative.

Giving Back

For us, a big part of participating in the WordPress community is giving back. Not just during special holidays, but continuously throughout the year.

Helping out organizations that help others has been one of our focuses this year. We’re proud to share that to date, we’ve donated over $200,000 in plugin licenses through our Non-Profit Partnership Program.

Like most top WordPress agencies, we encourage and support our team’s efforts to contribute to the community on a personal level. Throughout 2015, they have spent countless hours volunteering, contributing to core, releasing free plugins, speaking at WordCamps or meetups, and getting involved in other ways.

Recognition is important to us, so we want to take a moment to call out some of their individual contributions to the community:

-Zach & Matt released HeadlineEnvy, an A/B headline testing plugin that integrates with Optimizely.

-Nico volunteered for WordCamp Buenos Aires, the first official WordPress event to be held in that location in the past 5 years.

-Gustavo helped organize WordCamp Rio de Janeiro and spoke there. He was also a speaker at WordCamp Belo Horizonte. His core contributions to WordPress this year include tickets 28529, 34594, & 34607, as well as meta contribution ticket 1386.

-Jonathan gave a few WordCamp talks this year, including “Build Your Dev Environment With Docker” at WordCamp Miami, “Smaller, Faster PHP: An Introduction to Backend Performance Optimization” at WordCamp Tampa, and “Defense Against the Dark Arts: Writing Secure WordPress Plugins and Themes” at WordCamp Orlando.

-Peter & Rob both spoke at the inaugural WordCamp Sacramento. Peter’s talk centered on Coding With A Team, while Rob’s presentation later in the day covered The Art of Replying to Reviews on WordPress.org.

-Reid gave his take on Reimaging Content Creation at WordCamp Vancouver.

There were many other contributions made by our team members to WordPress that we haven’t listed, but are no less important or deserving of recognition (they just didn’t necessarily want to be called out in a blog post, which we totally respect).

Like we said at the beginning, we have a lot to be thankful for. We’re thankful for our success. And we’re thankful for the ability to give back to the WordPress community that supports us, both as a company and as individual members of Tribe.