Brian Krogsgard, Author at Post Status • Page 144 of 201

The first ever WooCommerce conference is November 3rd & 4th, on the heels of WCSF

The WooThemes team put up a landing page today for their first ever WooCommerce … Read more

Obox has launched Instant: white labeled, seamless hosting for their WordPress themes

Average customers often don’t know the difference between domains, WordPress themes, plugins, and hosting. They have to learn as they go, or hope they land somewhere someone will guide them well.

I once did a WordCamp double-session on WordPress 101. I did two hours of information, that I felt was pretty basic. I finished the presentation by showing the audience some of the power of custom post types. At the end, the first question someone asked was the difference between a domain name and hosting.

Obox Instant

Obox has soft-launched Instant, a new service that offers a white-labeled hosting solution for their themes. The process for new customers is simple: choose a theme, pick the “Instant” pricing option, sign up, and pick your domain for your new website. Then Obox will setup your site “to look exactly like the theme demo.”

The “feature” to make the site look like the demo is no small feature. You’d be shocked how many folks install a theme with little to no idea how to replicate the carefully crafted website that is the average theme demo. It’s a common cause for frustration.

Obox is one of the first well-known theme shops I know of to offer a white-label (and white-glove for that matter) hosting option for their customers.

How Instant works

Instant is similar to most hosted website services. You are an Obox customer, not a customer of their hosting partner.

For Instant, they are partnered with RSAWeb, a large ISP with data centers in South Africa and London, and they are based out of Obox’s home country of South Africa.

Instant customers aren’t as restricted as with some services, especially like other hosted services such as WordPress.com or Evermore, which I recently profiled. Instant customers can install their own plugins and do pretty much anything a normal self-hosted WordPress user can do.

What Obox does is make hosting something their customers don’t have to think about. While it’s a somewhat hefty $49 per month, customers get 2GB of storage and unlimited bandwidth and pageviews, as well as backups, traditional cPanel access, and other items. Obox is also going to be the support liaison for their customers, and have partnered with other WordPress companies, like WooThemes, to offer customers discounts.

Common business plugins at the ready

I thought it’d be fun to try something new here. As you’ve probably noticed, I’ve been doing fewer link posts. That is the result of a good bit of thinking, strategic and otherwise. I’ll dive more into that later.

I’ll still do some long-ish form link posts, but I won’t be able to link all the things I’d like to share, nor can I cover it all with long form content. So, I want to try this concept of a weekend reads / week in review post, that I’ll try and post between Friday – Monday each week. These will largely consist of links to posts from other websites, with the occasional link to special Post Status bits I’d love for you to see.

Without further ado:

Evolving the customizer

Matt Wiebe works on Team Custom at Automattic, and has used the Customizer extensively for the last couple of years. His concerns are in regards to many aspects of the customizer: performance, architecture, UX, mobile considerations, and more.

His wrap-up hurts:

Some folks might be reading this and wondering why I’m not trying to contribute this vision to core. I love to, but I don’t think it’s possible architecturally, and particularly not in a backwards compatible manner. This is certainly a case where the optimal use-case on WP.com (new user signup, pre-picked list of themes) may not line of [sic] with the best user experience for core users. I might be wrong about this, thus this post. I would genuinely love to be wrong, but I’ve worked with the Customizer extensively over the past two years and I’m pretty sure I’m not.

I’m really interested in what others have to say about this. Up until reading this, I was under the impression (from my own experience and others’ notes) that the customizer has a promising future with WordPress. Matt’s post makes me re-think those assumptions.

That said, there’s a lot of activity around the customizer in Trac tickets; one of which approaches some of Matt’s concerns: a ticket that would provide a “window wrapper” to the customizer.

Matt’s post is a good reminder that we should never look at a single feature (especially its first iteration) as a silver bullet. At the same time, I believe the customizer is still a great advancement for WordPress and I’m sure it’ll keep getting better.

We’re ignoring the WordPress philosophy

Tom McFarlin has put together a great series on WordPress philosophies that we are sometimes ignoring. Definitely read through these:

WordCamp Europe tickets are on sale

WordCamp Europe’s second event will be in Sofia, Bulgaria September 27th – 29th. Tickets for the event are on sale now. This is a great opportunity to learn with more than 700 other WordCamp fanatics, and its probably the most notable WordCamp you could attend outside of WCSF, which will be a combo WordCamp / Community Summit event in October.

Web professionals talk a lot about the importance of writing great code. We should talk even more about providing great user experiences for websites and products we build.

Code quality is really important. We should have standards, and utilize them habitually. We should code with proper debug tools so we catch problems as they happen. We should document our work, embrace new technologies, and strive for excellent quality all the time.

But creating great websites doesn’t stop there. Not even a little bit.

How useful is code that doesn’t throw notices or warnings if what’s painted on the screen isn’t accessible across a broad array of devices, browsers, and user abilities?

Not very.

What is a user experience anyway?

Wikipedia provides the International Organization for Standard’s definition of user experience:

A person’s perceptions and responses that result from the use or anticipated use of a product, system or service.

So user experience can be a positive, or a negative thing.

It made me a bit sad to see Google’s use of user experience:

if a website degrades the user experience too much, people will simply stay away

The expectation, based on this usage, is that the website will degrade the user experience away from the web’s intent no matter what; it’s just a matter of how much. What a sad perception.

User experiences should be delightful

That’s easy to say. No web designer or developer would tell you they intend to create a poor user experience in the things they build.

But just because we don’t want something to be bad doesn’t mean it won’t be bad anyway.

User experience is design, and a process

We are creating a user experience from the time we begin a project. If we’re not thinking about the user experience from the beginning, then we’re still creating a user experience; it’s just more likely to be a poor one.

Building the user experience is a process.

No, it’s more than that.

It’s a process, and a mindset.

We must continually design and build with the sole intent to delight those who utilize what we build, and then implement procedures to test our efforts.

Websites are complicated these days. Even when we work locally, we typically still need … Read more

The Pressware shop is open, and ready to cater to WordPress publishers

Tom McFarlin is a veteran of the WordPress product space. Today he’s announced that his company, Pressware, has opened a shop for selling WordPress products.

Pressware’s first product has been out for a while now; the Mayer theme has been available exclusively through WordPress.com since February. Now Mayer is available for self-hosted bloggers as well.

The price for Mayer is $99, and Tom is advocating simple, straightforward pricing for this and future products.

Mayer is available for $99 for a yearly subscription, and there’s only a single license – no confusing choices from which to select what’s best for you. The theme has been optimized for self-hosted installations, can be used on unlimited sites, and has full support and upgrades over the next year.

There is also a demo available for Mayer if you want to see it in action.

I like the Mayer theme; I think it’s a focused, practical blogging theme that will be great for a lot of people. But I’m more excited about what Tom is doing with Pressware, and what we have to look forward to from his business.

The entire goal of the products that I’m going to be releasing – that is both themes and plugins – are meant for people want to use WordPress for blogging. At this time, I’m not interested in going after other verticals in the market. I just want to provide the best themes and plugins possible in order to make a person’s digital publishing experience as nice as it can possibly be.

His goals and focus is so straightforward that it excites me to think what he’ll create for the publisher.

Publishing is an interesting thing. You’ve probably often heard the phrase, “just a blog”, but that phrase bothers me. Blogging is hard, and unless you blog a lot you might also not know how best to serve bloggers with your products. Well, Tom blogs a lot — daily in fact.

Additionally, he’s an editor for WordPress articles at Envato, and he has a unique take on the needs and wants for publishers. There is power in using your own product, so that you can make it better for your customers, and Tom uses his own product with a unique perspective all the time.

As part of wanting to help solve common problems for bloggers, Tom has setup some strategic partnerships with SearchWP (20% off), WP Demo (10% off), and WP Migrate DB Pro (20% off). The discounts will be given to any current or future Mayer buyer:

In my experience, the needs of bloggers vary across the spectrum – some want a simple blogging theme, some want to enhance search, some use their blog to promote products, and others become so popular, they end up outgrowing their current infrastructure.

What a great problem, right?

So I wanted to make sure the companies and people with whom I’m partnering are also people who help empower bloggers in the work they do.

I asked Tom how he hopes Mayer (and his future products) will stand out amongst the competition. I really enjoyed his answer, so I’m just going to give it to you in full:

Scott Kingsley Clark notified me this morning that a security update has been released … Read more

Evermore, hosted WordPress with power and ease of use

Finally, finally someone has done it. They’ve combined the power of self-hosted WordPress with the ease of hosted WordPress.com.

Evermore is WordPress for everyone. It comes with “the most important functionality built in.”

There aren’t loads of tiny upsells like other hosted services (I’m looking at you, WordPress.com), and there are only two plans. It is not free. You can pay $50 per month, or $75 per month, and each plan comes with a 10x setup fee.

But the result is exactly what you’d hope for: a very powerful, functional, easy-to-use website.

Direct Download

If I had to give Evermore a competitor, I’d say it’s much closer to Squarespace than WordPress.com. But it’s built on WordPress, meaning you can leave Evermore any time and take your install with you.

In fact, they sell the ability to leave Evermore as a feature. Because they should.

Evermore offers you true portability and freedom: as your needs outgrow it, we’ll help you move to another service by giving you all the files and instructions you need. We’ll even suggest new hosts that will take care of you and your site.

I just love that. It reminds me of Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street sending people to another store instead of trying to side-sell them what they don’t want. Little will help establish my loyalty to a service like the ease one offers me to leave it.

I have no desire to take WordPress and try to hijack the open source process and make people feel like they’re closed into another product system.

Who is behind Evermore?

Evermore is a project by Cliff Seal and Kyle Bowman. Cliff is a respected WordPress developer and works full-time at Pardot, a division of SalesForce.

Kyle is an accountant and avid WordPress fan who has invested heavily in the concerns of WordPress users. In our interview, Cliff accounts many Evermore decisions to Kyle’s attunement to the end user.

Together they make Evermore, a service that represents exactly three clients — or a 50% increase since I interviewed Cliff. 😉

Yes, Evermore is a new service. But I haven’t been this excited about a relatively generic WordPress product in a long time.

For one, I think Cliff is a great developer. He’s the type of guy that will work through the difficult technical challenges a hosted service will inevitably face. For instance, he helped work on the ability to symlink plugins in WordPress 3.9 before launching Evermore so he could more easily share directories between sites.

Second, I love that Kyle has recently faced some of the same concerns as many of their future customers face. This allows him to be empathetic to their needs and better serve them. His business savvy as a self-described “recovering CPA” probably won’t hurt either.

Why a hosted solution?

More than Cliff and Kyle’s qualifications to operate a service like Evermore, I just like their motivations.

Cliff and Kyle felt that there was a gap in the market for web design, development, and maintenance services. They would run into users and site owners with common frustrations: frustrations with getting their initial site setup, managing their hosting and updates, finding the right plugins to use for particular functionality, and more.

They decided they had an opportunity, and they wanted to see if they could fill the gap.

The process

Evermore is a multi-stage process. First, there’s a setup fee. With this fee ($500 for the base plan, $750 for the secondary plan), they’ll walk you through getting a new domain or using your own, choosing a theme and setting up your site with demo content, including sample menus and widgets.

The setup period is currently 24 hours, since they haven’t automated every aspect of it. They are going to force themselves to scale in this arena, versus automating things that don’t need it yet. They also want to have that time to do the kind of individual site testing they want to do with early customers.

Once you get setup, they have some generic guides for helping clients manage their site. But for the most part, they don’t have an interest in massively changing the admin. They want people to feel like they are in WordPress.

The features

Evermore is baked with a number of features. Some highlights:

The WordPress community summit was an exciting event in 2012. For the first time … Read more

Who is buying commercial WordPress themes?

To say the theme marketplace is undergoing a transition is probably an understatement. We’ve … Read more

PressNomics 3, the economics of WordPress conference, is January 22nd – January 24th

Dates have just been announced for the next PressNomics. PressNomics’ third edition will be … Read more

Crowd Favorite to acquire Forty, a UX and design agency

Forty is a design and UX agency based in Arizona. James Archer, Forty’s CEO, … Read more

WP eCommerce: What’s old is new again.

WP eCommerce is one of the oldest WordPress plugins you’ll find. That it’s an eCommerce plugin — built on WordPress, well before such a thing seemed sensible — is even more of a testament to just how impressive this plugin is. It’s been under development for eight years, and is nearing 3 million downloads on WordPress.org.

Today, WP eCommerce is working to shed layers of duplicate functionality that can now be replaced by WordPress core. It’s a wicked thing for a product to be ahead of its time. An eCommerce plugin built on WordPress is clearly — we know today — a viable thing. But for years, as WP eCommerce chugged along, many were skeptical that eCommerce and WordPress could — or even should — be harmonious.

That WP eCommerce is so old is its blessing and its curse. The blessing is that it was the only major player for a long time, allowing it to achieve great success, relative to other commercial plugins of the time. Its curse is that it gained a reputation for bugginess and as a product that was trying to be a round peg in a square hole.

It’s safe to say that WP eCommerce has passed the time where anyone should doubt it’s a viable product. But the question remains: can something old be new again?

Dan Milward and Justin Sainton believe so. And they are now 50 / 50 partners to ensure it.

For years, Dan ran WP eCommerce under the umbrella of Instinct Entertainment. While WP eCommerce wasn’t Instinct’s only project, it was its largest for a long time. Dan hired support staff and developers to help maintain the product and manage customers of their premium support tokens.

Justin Sainton has been contributing to WP eCommerce since 2010. He’s written nearly 70,000 lines of code and deleted nearly 30,000 lines of code from the codebase, just since they started tracking activity on Github in 2011. He’s got more commits to the project than any of the other 39 contributors. At times, Justin has been the lifeblood of WP eCommerce development.

Now that the two are partnered, they are ready to move ahead with full steam.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yH-611HyNRg

Or catch the audio:

Direct download

Born out of need

I encountered an article today that made my blood boil. Phillip Thomson wrote about the cost of three websites for the Australian Minister of Foreign Affairs for the Sydney Morning Herald.

The article blasts Julie Bishop and her department for spending $113,000 on upgrades and maintenance for three websites. I have no opinion on Australian politics, this politician, or the value of these three websites. I am an American.

However, I do have an opinion about the complete failure to do due-diligence by this author, the ridiculous fear-mongering attitude displayed toward open source technology, as well as the moronic quotes by the “security expert” in the article.

Three websites for Foreign Minister Julie Bishop’s foreign affairs portfolio have cost taxpayers $113,130, according to answers to questions on notice at Senate budget estimates.

Let’s use bits of the article to understand more about the $113,00 expenditure.

The costs include more than $68,000 for “website testing”, $19,000 for training, $15,000 for “website release management” and $10,000 for “website deployment”.

“I assume [website deployment] means pushing the button to put it up,” said Labor Senator Joseph Ludwig, who was asking top bureaucrats about the costs in the hearing on Wednesday morning.

I’m sure Senator Joseph Ludwig is an expert about website deployment.

As an aside, I’d like to point out to Mr. Ludwig and Mr. Thomson that $113,000 is not an extreme amount of money for maintenance and upgrades for three government websites. If you research a variety of governments’ expenditures, you’ll find that it’s probably fairly normal.

Now, onto the stupid.

Keen-eyed readers have since pointed out that Ms Bishop’s electorate website juliebishop.com.au is built on WordPress, a free online platform. Although heavily customised, it uses the 2012 theme template and many of the tools readily available to novice website designers.

Aha! Now Mr. Thomson has really nailed her. WordPress is free! What a waste of tax-payer funds!

Hilariously, Ms. Bishop’s office corrected the author, stating that her personal website was not part of the expenses. Think about that for a second. It means that the rest of these false statements are also, in fact, completely pointless.

Mr. Thomson, allow me to teach you a few things.

Around 22% of the internet (yes, the whole internet) runs on WordPress.
It’s the CMS (that means content management system) of choice for well over half of all websites that use one.
WordPress is used for far more complex applications than as tools for simply “novice website designers”. Although, it is quite usable for all — even ill-informed journalists.
Six and seven figure projects are not uncommon for website development and maintenance. In government especially, navigating requirements, project management costs, bureaucracy, and many other non-technological factors can quickly cause a project’s cost to go up.
Governments around the world consider WordPress a fine tool for web applications. NASA, the United States military, Sweden, the European Commission, and many others use it. This doesn’t even include the countless cities, county, and state governments that use WordPress (typically self-hosted!). Here’s a spotlight from WordPress.com VIP about WordPress in government.

Now, let’s break your number down. If you divide $113,000 by $150 per hour (a common rate, and probably too low for most government consulting work), you get 753 hours. That’s about 15 hours per week of work on three websites throughout the year — a very typical amount of time for even normal maintenance, much less upgrades. Even if these dollars are quarterly costs, that’s only one person’s time to manage these three websites.

Not that it matters. The websites in question are not even WordPress. Yet you continue to put FUD in your article about WordPress and open source technology.

Security expert Phil Kernick of CQR Security pointed to the potted security history of WordPress and questioned the use of the popular platform for a government official’s site.

“I’d never build it on Worpress or Joomla or any of those other tools if I wanted a secure website. When you are a public figure, you have to manage your identity carefully. I can’t imagine why anyone would do that,” Mr Kernick said.

Let me put this as simply as I can, Mr. Thomson. Your security source is an idiot regarding open source technology.

Made with WP: conversations with people who make things with WordPress

Chase Livingston and Chase Clemons host a number of podcasts on The Dispatch. Chase … Read more

Software development tips you probably still need to learn

New Relic has some advice for programming concepts to learn for newly graduated software … Read more

The first ever WooCommerce conference is November 3rd & 4th, on the heels of WCSF