WPwatercooler - Weekly WordPress Talk Show

Today's topic is Future proofing your WordPress website. The topic was suggested to us by Julie Kuehl. How do you keep a website up to date? It’s a misconception that once the website is built it’s done. A website is not set it and forget it. It’s a relationship that you have to nurture and take care of it. You need to articulate to your customers that the expectation is they need to invest not only in their content, but consider a refresh in the future be it a month, a year or several years. With WP it isn’t just about content upgrades, but security updates. It’s like a car, you have to get the oil changed or even a new car. The 1st rule of future proofing a site is Don’t Touch Core! Se: It’s not possible to future proof a website. you can upgrade the website, you can add in new coding, you can revise some things, build a whole new theme… but it’s not possible to make a set it and forget it website that will withstand upgrades. If you make a themes, you’re going to have to revisit that code in a year or 2. Jeff: Stay on track and watch the release candidates so you know ahead of time what will come out.  Then you can be ready for your clients and let them know a change is coming because of A B and C. Explain to people you get what you pay for. If you wanted a ferrari but paid for a yugo, you get a yugo. With WordPress, there is no “stable”. Plugins and themes are constantly being upgraded. We need to make clients aware that this is not a one time fee thing. They will have to update their website. Chris: At the core of it, defining what success is and building towards success rather than what’s beautiful is core of how you stay in that middle ground. Clients: If the website is consistently delivering customers, even if the site begins looking dated, you’re in a good spot. Customers may not be as interested in having the latest and greatest upgrades are you are. If their site works well and they are happy with it, sometimes it’s best just to leave it be. Clients often only care about the look of the website. They need to know that even if they don’t want to change the look of the website, they still have to be made aware that they still have to update the backend of the website or the entire foundation is going to crumble. When you decide what plugins to use, having a conversation with your peers is key. Make sure you use plugins that are from reputable people. Ask the community what plugins they work with. Ask around and find out who you should be working with and who won’t burn you down the road. Whenever you pick any platform and build on it, you want to be thinking about what happens in the future when stuff changes. If you can make your content portable and keep your content separate from the look and functionality of the site, you should be ok. You’ll always have your data and can save your data and import it into something else. Tell clients that you can’t make a 100% guarantee that plugins will always work. You don’t control WordPress or plugins. Updates will be made. It happens and it’s not in your control. A maintenance agreement does NOT have to equal monthly payments. It’s an agreement about what is included in maintenance and it’s a description of what you will charge and what rate they will pay to get that maintenance done. The group agrees there is no way to absolutely “future-proof” a website, but you can be prepared. Products we mentioned * BuddyPress * WooCommerce * Genesis * Catalyst * WP All Import *

On this episode of WPwatercooler we will be discussing WordCamp SF 2013, the State of the Word address and after parties. The Hallway Track There are many “Man” or “Woman on the Street” interviews that were conducted by Jason Tucker and Se Reed. Those can be found soon on the WordCamp San Francisco WordPress.TV page. State of the Word State of the Word address by Matt Mullenweg: * OCWP got a big shout out for their 10th anniversary party. * WordPress release cycle – updates and plugins will be updated the most * The release of 3.6 has been postponed * 3.7 and 3.8 release being so close together will create a lot of problems for people that use it in an enterprise setting * Matt said the releases will be small updates with less iterations Video can be found here: State of the Word 2013 Our favorite sessions Mike Schroeder – WP CLI (command line interface) talk was really excellent. His talk isn’t stagnant. He’s constantly fine tuning it so there is always good, new information. Helen Hou-Sandi – Customizing the WP Admin interface Carrie Dills – her talk “Co-opetition” Cooperation, collaboration and competition was great. She highlighted best of competition as well as collaboration. Josh Broton – on Responsive Design. There were 2 huge takeaways: 1) making photoshop images 2.2x bigger and setting quality to 0 then scaling down in the browser saves a huge amount of work. 2) Text in line? justify for grid layouts, if you text in line justify the parent elements and use display inline block on the child elements, you can have completely justified grid system. Natalie MacLees – Her room was packed out. She gave her talk in a really compelling story-telling manner. Mika Epstein – Don’t Use WP Multi-Site. She gave basics of what the watch out for if you want to use WordPress multi-sites. Ian Stewart – Themes – Super passionate and really inspirational. Do not miss it when it’s on WordPress TV Contributor Day * The most people that have ever gone to contributor day. * Steve learned how to commit a patch * There was a large focus was on the support and documentation team. That’s where Se and Suzette spent their time. They worked on the Theme Developer Handbook. There will be no standardization for theme options. Shout out to the Dradcast Activities we did after WordCamp San Francisco 2013 * Pandora Karaoke Bar * Tonga Room * Fang [LISTATTENDEES event_identifier=”ep45-wordcamp-san-francisco-2013-wcsf-recap-wpwatercooler-5-51f589d53223f” show_gravatar=”true”]

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Today's topic is “The responsibilities you have as a contractor” and it was suggested to us by Steve Zehngut We’re asking where their responsibilities end in a project and do you define it up front? Some clients are looking for a firm that will be a “one stop shop” meaning they want someone that will provide logo, social media, website, content. So as a contractor, what do you do? There is a benefit to being a one stop shop. Some clients don’t want to hire a lot of people to handle all of those aspects. If you are skilled enough to do it and willing, you will likely be hired and therefore have a job. This is a good way to start, but after a while, you might find your niche and start dropping some of the items you don’t enjoy. As a contractor, it us your responsibility to be completely up front about what is AND isn’t included in the project. Be very clear about your expectations. Communicate, communicate and communicate. Often potential clients will assume you will be handling an aspect that you have no intention in taking care of, such as content. Several panelists include a sheet with services included. This page tends to spark the most conversation between the client and contractor. If they are asking for a service you don’t provide, let them know you would be happy to refer or subcontract out the portion of the job you don’t do to someone that does that type of work. Contractors are consultants and guides, not order takers. There should be a conversation throughout the project with the client. Utilizing a Scope of Work. Wes’ process: He uses Freshbooks. If anything changes from the original Scope of Work, even if it’s a small change or addition to the original contract, he sends them an estimate that they have to accept before he does the work. When they click “accept” it makes them more mindful that they are asking for changes. Using a Scope of Work for ALL jobs large or small helps you come across professionally. If you do a lot of “little” jobs, but you don’t keep records, when the client comes back to you for the “big” job, you won’t have the proof that you’ve done a lot of “little” jobs for them already and now you need to charge more. Record keeping and invoicing often will help show the progression of the smaller projects leading up to the larger one. When does maintenance start? Suzette: Once project is finished and delivered and they have made their final payment – anything extra from that point on (updates to code or data entry, etc…) that will be extra. If it’s a “bug” that was your own fault, you should take care of that without charging extra. Chris: When he’s finished and deploys to his public facing server that they can access, and the work he was hired to do only the development effort (and it’s not in the contract that he will deploy to their servers) then he’s “done done.” Maintenance starts the day he deploys to his server. Steve: Like Chris, he does not tie maintenance to launch but to delivery. Once the project has been delivered and given the ok, that is when a separate maintenance agreement would begin. [LISTATTENDEES event_identifier=”ep44-the-responsibilities-you-have-as-a-contractor-wpwatercooler-5-51eb8cdb” show_gravatar=”true”]

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Today's topic is about Documentation. Documentation for a website, plugin or theme is an important component of a project. It allows the uninitiated to work with your code on either the web side of things or adding to your existing code. Documentation enables your customers to understand how to use what you have built for them. Commenting your code isn't enough, not everyone reads and interprets PHP and Javascript so taking the extra effort to explain how to use what you built will save people time, frustration and racking up support tickets for you to deal with. On this weeks topic of WPwatercooler we will be discussing documentation of all aspects. How does the customer expect the documentation to be and how a web developer can save money in spending the extra time writing, updating and cultivating good documentation for their customers. Why are some companies so bad at providing documentation? If you’re a developer and you’ve spent many hours writing code working with or creating API’s, and you want to bring on a 3rd party and have to explain the code, it can take as long to explain the code as it was to write the code. It can ultimately defeat the purpose. On the flip side? If you employ someone to do the documentation they come with a different perspective to you. As a developer you’ve been immersed in the code for a long time but they will look at it with a fresh set of eyes. Often the developer will struggle to explain it to the non-developers, user documentation writers and novice users. An outside writer is like having a translator for you. The turn “geek” into “normal language.” Developers really don’t like writing documentation. It’s a lot of work and a time suck. As things change, your documentation is immediately out of date. How to get better at creating documentation: There needs to be a differentiation between developer documentation and user documentation. The developer can pass off their own documentation to the write who then creates user focused documentation. Jason Coleman talks briefly about the process used by Paid Memberships Pro: Once they’ve finished development and put out a heavy release, they shut down development and move into a documentation period. If you’re finding that you get more user questions from your documentation, your documentation might be the problem. Test it out on a novice developer. Documentation is no substitute for a good user experience. If you’re back end is a total mess, documentation doesn’t matter a lot. It doesn’t fix bad code. What about video documentation? Downside: screencasts take a long time to produce something professional Upside: If you don’t care about it being professional, you can create something quickly that should answer basic questions. It’s good for many end users, however no everyone wants to spend the time watching a video. Sometimes they just want to get into the doc, find their answer and get out. Different types of documentation: Inline documentation with your code Inline documentation and help info around elements in the GUI Free documentation as a download Forums  Mentions: * WP101 * Paid Memberships Pro * Gravity Forms * Twilio * Stripe * WPHelp [LISTATTENDEES event_identifier=”ep43-wordpress-web-development-documentation-july-15-2013-5-51e1f3023b206″ show_gravatar=”true”]

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So what makes a good shared web host? Is it the support? Security? Caching? Clustering? Long execution times? On this episode we will uncover what our developer panelists look for in a shared host all without a trek to asking Deep Thought so don't panic, don't forget your towel and join us for this interesting topic. What is it and why do you want to start with it? * A shared webhost is where more than one website is stored on the same “webserver” owned by the webhost. The more sites hosted on a server the more resources are being used to do this. * It’s inexpensive * Most provide good basic support * Ability to ask to move servers if your site is having issues and they usually will do it About Support from the Hosting company Especially software support… where do we stop saying we’ll support and help? Installation? Plug-in set ups? The support departments aren’t filled with developers. Remember that. Once you get into code, a line has been crossed. Hosting companies are not there to look at your code. About DreamHost They have unlimited (within reason) domains and users. Set them up however you want. You can map them to the users however you want. They offer SSH and you can do what you want with SSH. They will often go above and beyond with helping you, however don’t expect it. They have a user friendly control panel (although Lucy disagrees with this) About MediaTemple They have a custom control panel. They allow up to 100 domains. They allow SSH and SFTP on shared hosting sites. About Go Daddy What’s the problem with GoDaddy? Our panelists say that it’s slow and you can’t use sftp so you don’t have the ability to change things on the server (actually it looks like you can now). Good until you need to make changes. You don’t connect to the same server your files are hosted on. insecure – gets hacked a lot? Lucy thinks so. You can call them and get a person but when they mention WP, they are less than helpful. The default problem is “It’s a wordpress problem” and they aren’t interested in digging deeper to see if it’s their problem or a wordpress problem. One Click WP install takes a very long time. Databases installations take a few hours Shared Webhosts the panel recommends Se – HostGator Jason – DreamHost Lucy – SiteGround Steve – Servint for VPS not shared hosting Mentions on this episode * DreamHost * Media Temple * GoDaddy * HostGator * BlueHost * SiteGround [LISTATTENDEES event_identifier=”ep42-what-makes-a-good-shared-web-host-july-8-2013-5-51da4740b6a4f” show_gravatar=”true”]

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On this weeks episode we will be discussing our community of collaboration and how it isn't a competition. You're benefiting the community by collaborating and not being cutthroat. Instead you're able to share secrets and better the whole industry as a result. By collaborating with the community, you sharpen the industry as a whole. Carrie will be talking on collaboration at WCSF after having been burned by someone in the community that wasn't even technically her competition. This has lead to some very educational blog posts on her website. Check them out carriedils.com So why is the WordPress community so open to collaboration as opposed to the tech community in general? * It could be due to WordPress's open source nature. * It's a lot more common in open source communities to share things rather than hold on to it and not give it away. * WP is so popular there are loads of meet ups and so everyone is always out there helping each other. * Without the Foundation maintaining the hard line to ensure it remains open source, it would probably become competitive and capitalistic. * The focus isn't just on the open source software but on the openness of the community. There isn't much kept secret. Anyone can jump right in and get involved and find the support they need. Competition is motivation. On the other hand, competition doesn't have to be the bad guy. It drives innovation. It's only when you're looking at what someone else is doing that you can say I think we can do this better. The key is to figure out how to collaborate and compete. The WP community “iterates.” They see something someone has done and want to make it better. “Co-Opetition” – WP isn't really one or the other. It's a merging of both mindsets. It's good to be first, but it's better to be best. You only get out of the community what you put into the community. If you share what you know, you will get other people's knowledge in return. If a meetup is run with competition in mind, it will likely fail. When your motivation is to share, chances are good that it will be a success. Without building a community, you have no one to collaborate with. If you build the community in your local area, it will absolutely pay off. WordCamps plant the seed for local meetups to be started. In the WP community, if you aren't someone that's willing to share and collaborate, eventually people will eventually begin to shun you. People won't respect that in a community built on open source. This episode is sponsored by WP101 http://www.wp101.com Mentions: http://wpdaily.co http://2013.sf.wordcamp.org/ [LISTATTENDEES event_identifier=”ep41-community-of-collaboration-not-competition-july-1-2013-5-51d10c3278385″ show_gravatar=”true”]

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This weeks topic is “How to work effectively with designers”. We will be speaking with WordPress Developers and Designers to share some tips with working effectively with designers. We think that Designers and Developers will surely get something out of this discussion. Show starts Monday June 24 at 11:00am PST. Working with a designer can be a challenge for clients and engineers. You want an experience where customers are engaged on your site. How do non designers work with designers? Designer viewpoint:  * Having the developer ask questions. Communication is key for wireframing and design. How should they hand over files to the developers?  Do they want CSS callouts? Do they want the whole structure? * Plan that out ahead of time.  Developer Viewpoint:  * Plan and communicate. Wireframes are key but communication is more important. Explain WHO the market is for the site. Make sure you’re meeting the needs of the target audience. * Establish how you want your photoshop files delivered. Decide what you want open and what you want flattened. What other pieces you need such as fonts. Tips for starting with a new designer: * Ask what their process is. * Ask questions of the developer. Especially if the dev isn’t giving feedback. * Designers, if you have a question? Ask your developers what they see the end result to be. * Utilize phone calls or a google hangout. It works better than email. * How do designers handle clients that say, “That’s not right but I’ll know it when I see it.” * If after a round or 2 they still don’t “see it,” ask them to provide you with examples they do like around the web. It’s ok to eventually say “maybe we’re not a good fit” and end the relationship. Tips for clients looking at designers: * Tell them what your ultimate goal is for your website * What are you hoping to accomplish with your site? New leads? New customers? Do you have a logo? Do you have branding ready? Are you ok with the designer establishing that for you? * Have your content ready. If it’s not, be up front about that. * Offer the designer info about what you don’t like. Hate a color? Hate a design? Let them know. Links: * CSS3 * WordCamp Chicago * WordCamp SF * WP101 * DradCast [LISTATTENDEES event_identifier=”ep40-how-to-work-effectively-with-designers-5-51c4e964e5adf” show_gravatar=”true”]

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Today's topic is Picking the right WordPress theme for non programmers. Scared of JQuery, PHP, CSS, LMNOP (I made that last one up) we have your back. We'll help you pick the right theme to start from for a non developer on this episode of WPwatercooler. Show starts at 11:00am PST on Mondays. [LISTATTENDEES event_identifier=”ep39-picking-the-right-wordpress-theme-for-non-programmers-wpwatercooler-ju” show_gravatar=”true”]

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This weeks topic is Extending WordPress with mobile apps and custom web interfaces. [LISTATTENDEES event_identifier=”ep38-extending-wordpress-wpwatercooler-june-10-2013-5-51b4f8c601e02″ show_gravatar=”true”]

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On this weeks episode we will be discussing the recent WordCamp Orange County #WCOC. There were many great talks and events that happened during this awesome camp.

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