Back in 2015, Matthias found the company behind his first product WordPress Real Media Library: MatthiasWeb. In the meantime, a lot has changed and it is time to reinvent the company behind the Real product series. We would like to give you a brief outlook on what you can expect from us in the future.
What has MatthiasWeb achieved so far?
Maybe you are a happy user of the WordPress Real Media Library. Today we can proudly say that this is a high quality WordPress plugin. But this was not always the case. When Matthias started developing this plugin, it was his first attempt to create an end-to-end product and this first WordPress plugin. Not surprisingly, the quality of the plugin… to be honest, was crap. In the last five years he has gained a lot of experience in this field and has completely rewritten the Real Media Library three times.
Based on this experience, he has developed even more high quality WordPress plugins. Real Physical Media is one of them. The WordPress plugin restructures the file system of your WordPress in the same way as you do it in Real Media Library. Real Category Management, on the other hand, extends the idea of the Real Media Library in another direction. In large WordPress sites, for example, you have thousands of articles in a single table. Which is messy and time-consuming to maintain. Our plugins provide folders for all so-called taxonomies (e.g. articles, pages) and you can easily manage large amounts of content. But you should also be efficient when using a new WordPress theme. Therefore, Matthias has developed the Real Thumbnail Generator for WordPress to give you the possibility to regenerate all preview images of media uploads in your WordPress in the perfect size.
Matthias has reached over 15.000 customers with his plugins. This may sound like a lot to you, but it is not. According to W3Techs, in 2019, 32.7% of all websites worldwide were using WordPress, which is more than 500,000,000 websites. Here are a lot of people how you could build better websites with the Real plugin series!
Why we renamed from MatthiasWeb to devowl.io?
You remember, Matthias started in 2015. At that time we already asked Jan – both met in their childhood in an online game – if he would like to help him. But Jan already had other projects in mind.
In the following years Matthias and Jan sometimes worked together, but both made their own projects and products. During these years, the two of them have gained a lot of different experiences in software development and in business. This should change in 2019, when they discovered a new business idea together – which did not work out. But at the same time this was the starting point to work more closely together, learn from each other and share resources. They realized that their private and professional goals were similar, which led to a decision:
Let’s try together to make the development of WordPress plugins a pleasure! And to develop even more high quality products that can replace old, broken and sometimes unsupported solutions in the WordPress environment.
They decided to focus on full-time from 2020 on to archive this goal, and had to find a legal structure for this, leading to the idea of creating a better brand: devowl.io. We are dev(eloper)s. We are night owls (and early birds). And we try look in all directions – like real owls.
Matthias Günter, co-founder of devowl.io
Jan Karres, co-founder of devowl.io
What will devowl.io change?
We want to change a lot! Not only behind the scenes, where we are working on a completely new infrastructure to quickly develop high quality software, provide faster support and sell products directly to our customers. To achieve even more, we are trying to face the issues in three phases:
- Phase 1: Rebrand everything. MatthiasWeb has become devowl.io. Our products Real Media Library, Real Physical Media, Real Category Management and Real Thumbnail Generator had (or have) no logos or any kind of graphic style before. We think it is important to change this so that more people can discover our great solutions and make their daily business with WordPress easier.
- Phase 2: Release WP React Starter. Right from the start Matthias created a boilerplate for the development of WordPress plugins and made it available as a hobby product. Already in 2019 we spent a lot of time restructuring the whole system and developing it in a reliable, scalable and faster way. Now it’s time to stop keeping this a secret and share the knowledge as a complete solution with other WordPress developers to encourage them to write high quality WordPress plugins.
- Phase 3: New WordPress plugins. Our pipelines are already full, the calendars are planned and the concepts written. In the future we want to publish even more high quality plugins for your WordPress websites. For free or as paid plugins, depending on how much time we have to spend developing great solutions!
Follow our path
If you are still here, you might be very interested to know what the future of devowl.io looks like. We want to invite you to subscribe to our (monthly) newsletter to be informed about the next releases and the great solution we discover in the WordPress area. Stay tuned!