Maple Creative

June 2026

June '26: What care looked like in June

Hey Care Plan Clients,

It’s Shayna here to late-deliver our monthly Care Plan Newsletter scheduled for June. While this letter arrives after we meant to send it, enjoy this Pride-themed newsletter from the heatwave of July! The next issue (soon) will touch on Disability Pride Month and updates to our web accessibility work happening at Maple.

Shayna (& the Maple Team)

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Here in Spain, the names and words and letters for the acronyms of “the alphabet mafia” are completely different for what can be called Orgullo. This reminds me of the full diversity in all the different ways people can be in the world, and how that’s beautiful. It is beautiful when there is space for that, as well as openness, fun, freedom, acceptance, celebration, love, peace, curiosity, generosity, and abundance of expression, instead of fear and conformity.

Who you trust with your data is political.

Service / Care Plan update

Freedom means a lot of things to a lot of people, and we at Maple see a need to protect it. One of our core values is to provide the infrastructure and technical / web support for organizations that use their website as a resource for safety, empowerment, education, and belonging. This means organizations that provide education, safety, and support.

“Who you trust with your data is political,” Ryan says.

Part of what the care plan covers is the work of paying attention to where your site lives, which tools touch your data, and what risks come with each choice. We do that vetting on your behalf.

This month Mark Pruce, our developer, completed a new monthly QA (quality assurance) pass across every single site we host. Two things came out of that work.

Jetpack and downtime monitoring

Jetpack and downtime monitoring is now baseline on every care plan site. Before this pass, roughly 30 to 40 percent of sites did not have Jetpack, specifically, enabled. If your site goes down, this will tell us.

ongoing monthly qa pass

The monthly QA pass across the portfolio is now a regular part of what your care plan covers. This is a real expansion in what the care plan delivers. Mark is drafting a monthly report template so that what's happening on your site is something we can share with you directly.

Client Resource Hub walkthrough

The best view in the house

Last newsletter I promised I would show you my favorite view within the Maple Client Resource Hub. Here it is. This is the view I recommend for seeing what’s new in the Hub’s tutorials (and when you want to drop down many a rabbit hole).

Step 1. Open community.buildwithmaple.com.

Step 2. Scroll to the Maple Tutorial Library. Click.

Step 3. Right-click to "Open source database” to Tutorials + Guidebooks.

Step 4. You land on the “Recently Created” view. Now you’ve arrived at my favorite view! The trailhead of the Tutorials + Guidebooks database!

If you have not browsed the Hub recently, this view is a friendly place to begin. You can see what was added recently at a glance, instead of guessing which section to open.

Save yourself some time:

→ Start at the trailhead here​

Featured Resource: Staying Safe Online

Protecting the people you serve.

This month's featured resource sits alongside last month's Anatomy of a Website guide. It's called Staying Safe Online: a practical orientation for thinking about online safety, grounded in real examples.

This resource is tailored for site owners and mission-driven organizations navigating the pull between being visible and staying safe online. For groups doing public-facing, community-focused, or politically adjacent work, being visible carries both opportunity and risk.

Freedom—to be, to be fully ourselves—needs protecting. Maple's care plan is part of that protection. The infrastructure under your site is how the people you serve stay safe.

You want to trust others with your data when you navigate the web, and you also want to be trusted when others navigate to you.

Here are four moves to start with. Each one is unpacked further in the full guide.

• Skip Google Analytics. Google's "free" tools come at a real cost: your visitors pay in data that gets folded into Google's advertising profiles. On every Maple care plan site, we default to Fathom Analytics, unless requested otherwise. In the words of our own privacy policy, Fathom is "a non-corporate, non-invasive analytics tool we're proud to partner with… that helps us improve our website without giving profiling information to corporations who then use your personal data to profit."
• Protect reader privacy. Be intentional about what you track, what you store, and for how long. If you don't need it, don't ask for it. Set retention windows.
• Secure forms and contact data. Anything a visitor sends you is a small act of trust. Treat it that way. Use a form that encrypts in transit, don't email yourself submissions in plain text, and store responses somewhere you can audit and clear out. Our recommendation is to retire WordPress contact form plugins in favor of an embedded external form like Tally. We use this for many of our own forms, and the company handles spam and uptime on their end.
• Mindful tool choices. Every plugin and embed brings someone else's policies into your site. Choose with care. See our trusted toolkit for a primer.

The full guide goes deeper into the why behind these moves: the tension between being seen and being safe, why “security comes through community,” and what organizational safety practices can look like.

If any of this raises a question about your specific site, we’re here to have that conversation. That’s what your care plan is for.

Maintenance Report

Here's what we caught and fixed in June.

Mark's portfolio-wide monthly QA pass turned up real work. Here is what came out of it:

• Jetpack security flags on 13+ sites, all resolved.
• Three plugin vulnerabilities proactively deactivated: Monster Insights Pro, Block Slider, and Floating Social Bar. Affected clients were contacted directly.
• A serious vulnerability on halttheharms.net, addressed.
• Critical errors caught on a handful of sites, with fixes in progress.

This is the kind of work that does not show up on your site. It is also the work that keeps your site stable, your visitors safe, and your data where it belongs.

Pride, together

We see you.

Ryan was in Boise for Craft + Commerce, listening to creators and small business owners and leading hikes in nature.

A small invitation. Reply to this email with one queer-led or queer-serving organization you support, formal or informal, local or far away. We'll compile what comes in and share back to the community in a future issue, so we can all learn from one another and amplify the work.

I'll be honest: There was a part of me that had thought to name LGBTQIA+ Maple clients this month, to share stories, and to mention organizations that support queer and trans people. But in the spirit that capitalism can’t contain a legacy within the neat little confines of June, we’d love to more intentionally celebrate your work and feature your stories year-round. Do the things that directly build community and honor you.

We see you, we appreciate you, we are inspired by you, we are rooting and fighting for you. This is a small gesture of gratitude for the awesome and necessary work that you do, in this low-key newsletter ;)

Take Care (with a capital “C”),

Shayna (& the Maple team)

Shayna Grajo Care Plan Manager, Maple Creative​

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