WPTavern Member Spotlight – Conorp And WPKickStart

WPTavern Member Spotlight – Conorp And WPKickStart

By Jeffro on July 7, 2010

You were one of the first people to help populate the WPTavern forum when it launched. Since that day, what has your experience been like?

My experience at the forum has been great. At the time of this interview I have had 490 posts, all of which have been warmly greeted and filled with enlightening answers. I also enjoy other peoples posts, and it is because of this that I use the search function quite frequently. You wouldn’t believe the amount of times I refer back to old threads.

If I understand correctly, you monitored the business section and even tossed around an idea to get feedback on. You now have your own consulting business in WPKickStart. Tell us how that came to be.

WPKickStart was actually born in the ChatBox of the forum. A number of members were throwing ideas at you saying that you should start your own consulting business. I took note of these and thought “I can do that stuff“. So I then went and created a thread to see what everyone else thought. You can see that thread here. (WordPress Services)

What does WPKickStart specialize in? Installations, maintenance, or custom builds?

WPKickStart specializes in installations and maintenance but most of my work these days involves custom builds. I am an ‘Affiliated Woo Worker‘ so I get a lot of work customizing WooThemes.

Are your clients primarily Australian based or all over the world?

A large amount of my clients are based overseas, but I have dealt with a few people based in Australia. That is the great thing about the web, location doesn’t matter.

Any tips you can give to other people thinking about starting a business similar to WPKickStart?

The best tip I can give is to just take a stab at it. Try to find an area that you can specialize in, and become the go to person for these services. Chip Bennett has done this very well with WP Turnkey, His Migration and Maintenance subscriptions are a great example of this.

Why do you enjoy working with WordPress?

I enjoy working with WordPress because of the community. I know that if I need a particular piece of functionality there will be a plugin for it.

Tutorials Offered By WPKickStart

Out of curiosity, what is it about Egyptian objects in Australia that fascinates you considering you maintain a website specifically for that subject? conorp.com

Ancient Egypt is obviously a hobby of mine and having a website on it is the perfect way to combine my two interests, the web and Ancient Egypt. My Egypt site was actually the first website I ever built. It began as a single html page with photos I had taken and has grown significantly since then. I actually started it out of frustration as there was no information on Egyptian objects in Australia out there. Even the museum and gallery websites failed to mention it. I created the site in the hope that other people interested in Ancient Egypt would see it and visit the various museums and galleries with Egyptian objects throughout Australia. I also wanted others from around the world to be able to experience the beauty of the objects located here.

Is there anything else you’d like to say to close out the interview?

Thanks for your contribution to the WordPress community! I love the Tavern, and if it didn’t exist I don’t think I would ever have started WPKickStart.

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Become Proficient With Joomla, Drupal, Or WordPress With OSTraining

Become Proficient With Joomla, Drupal, Or WordPress With OSTraining

By Jeffro on July 7, 2010

Here on WPTavern.com, I’m surprised by how many new companies I discover from the mere fact of them purchasing advertising on the site. One such company is Open Source Training. This is a company that specializes in training corporations with skills relating to Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress. To get more information on what this company is about, I sent some questions there way.

Are classes held all over the country in various spots or is everything performed online?

Hi Jeff. We’ve been able to cover most of the U.S.A. and Canada so far, plus some cities in England. Here’s where we’ve held at least one class:

Anchorage, Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Cambridge, Charlotte, Chicago, Cincinatti, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Jacksonville, Ft. Lauderdale, Las Vegas, London, Los Angeles, Miami, Milwaukee, Nashville, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Phoenix, Raleigh, San Antonio, San Francisco, Seattle, St Louis, Tampa, Toronto, Vancouver, Washington

Now some of those have worked out much better than others. Sometimes it’s easy to tell why: for example it’s much easier to hold a class in a city surrounded by other cities so Dallas does much better than Phoenix. However sometimes it’s a mystery: I’ve not figured out why we can run classes in Tampa and Los Angeles every two months but struggle even to fill occasional classes in Miami and San Francisco.

Upcoming WP Classes For 2010

When I look at the prices for tickets, I cringe. However, considering the types of clients working with OSTraining, have you had much success selling out these training sessions?

Yes, we’ve just today (June 25) held our 150th class since January 2010. That’s a class every 3.5 days or so and we’ve had just over 2000 attendees in that time.

Between Joomla, WordPress and Drupal, which has been the most popular in terms of training?

A couple of caveats before I answer fully:
1) That answer is Joomla simply because it’s where we started in 2008 and what we’ve been doing the longest. We added Drupal in 2009 and now WordPress in 2010.
2) I’ve a golden rule that I never try to compare Drupal, Joomla and WordPress. I cringe whenever I see a comparison between them simply because most of them are lazily done and from the viewpoint of people who really only understand one of the three systems. It’s a bad idea for Open Source projects to get territorial or competitive when there’s so much closed-source market share for us all to take.

However, there are some differences between the market for Drupal, Joomla and WordPress training services, and I’d be out of business pretty fast if I ignored them:

1) Drupal attendees tend to be large government agencies and universities. The market is still much smaller than WordPress or Joomla, but they tend to think $299 is dirt-cheap. They’re accustomed to paying much more.
2) Joomla attendees tend to be web design firms, small-to-medium size business and non-profits and large tech companies. They tend to think the $299 cost of the class is about right.
3) WordPress attendees tend to be web design firms, entrepreneurs and business people who want their own site. They tend to think $299 is a real stretch.

Other areas of the CMS market may see different patterns, but those are the people walking through our doors. It’s likely then that our offerings will soon start to differentiate for each platform – for example, we may focus on online training for WordPress, live training for Joomla and corporate training for Drupal.

Become Competant In Joomla, Drupal, Or WordPress

Near the bottom of the site, you have a couple of logos from some large companies that are purported to have used or using OS Training. Can you describe how some of those companies are using your service?

We’ve three levels of classes and large companies use them in different ways:

Online classes. They consist of video versions of our live classes backed by a support forum. Big companies tend to be a little sceptical perhaps because it’s not easy to go to Accounts Payable and ask to be signed up for training on some random website. Formal in-person training is much easier to get approved.

Live classes. They’re held every 2 to 3 months in the just about every major U.S. city. It’s common for large companies to send employees on either side of signing a development contract: before a project to scope out the software or after a project to top-up on their skills. Unfortunately, we’re also getting a lot of laid-off workers from companies like IBM who are retraining on their ex-employers tab.

Corporate training. That’s held whenever a larger business wants a private, custom class at their location. Last month Apple had us on-site to help them build a custom intranet. It seems currently that it’s easier for major companies to adopt Open Source for in-house rather than public-facing projects.

Out of curiosity, why did you decide to use Joomla to power OSTraining.com rather than WordPress or Drupal?

To be honest, either WordPress or Drupal would have been fine for this site. We’re running a fairly basic setup with a subscription system protecting content and a support forum.

Both WordPress and Joomla had several good options for subscriptions systems and forums. At the time Drupal didn’t really get a look-in because there weren’t any good off-the-shelf subscription options. We’d have needed to create one from scratch

We went with Joomla simply because that’s what we were training in at the time. When we launched I’d no idea the business would grow so big.

OSTraining also offers coding training. What is covered in this course and if I complete it, do you think I’d be able to write a WordPress plugin with PHP?

Unfortunately not yet. We’ve done an HTML class with a focus on creating posts (WordPress), nodes (Drupal) and articles (Joomla). A CSS class is underway with a focus on themes and templates, but PHP is third on the list won’t be until later in 2010.

I’ll be honest, however, and say coding isn’t highest on our priority list. Giving away a final corporate secret here (!), beginner training is far and away the most popular, followed by intermediate and higher-level general training. Theme design is popular enough but substantially further behind, and sadly, coding trails in last place.

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Progress Report On A/B Testing Plugin

Progress Report On A/B Testing Plugin

By Jeffro on July 6, 2010

Mitcho who is the author of the Yet Another Related Posts Plugin is currently working on a new project called ShrimpTest, sponsored by Automattic. ShrimpTest is a simple, A/B testing plugin that enables users to create various experiments on their site. For example, with ShrimpTest, you can create an experiment to track conversions based on the text used. In the video demo, Mitcho runs an experiment between a large version of a PayPal donation button versus a smaller one to see which provides a better conversion rate. Out of about 3,000 people, the results were almost split with a slightly higher percentage converting through the larger image. I encourage you to watch the following video to get a better idea as to what ShrimpTest is all about.

You can read all of Mitcho’s status updates regarding the plugin via the development blog. Also, if you’re interested in testing out ShrimpTest, Mitcho has recently packaged up version 0.1 that is available for download here. Please reports bugs or other issues within the ShrimpTest trac area.

This plugin is really cool and I suspect that it will be heavily used for UI testing within WordPress. I can also see marketers drooling at the mouth for something like this.

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Wondering If The Wrong Logo Is Auto Corrected :)

Automatically Correcting The WordPress Mistake

By Jeffro on July 6, 2010

Wondering If The Wrong Logo Is Auto Corrected :)

Who would have guessed that automatically correcting the use of WordPress within the post title and content areas would cause such a flurry of activity. I’ll try to summarize the points of discussion up to this point.

In WordPress 3.0, folks can no longer incorrectly misspell WordPress with a lower case p (WordPress). This use is detected by the following patch (14996) that Matt Mullenweg wrote and was then committed by Andrew Nacin. The code simply adds a filter that looks for WordPress used with a lower case p within the content, the post title, and comment text. If detected, the word is replace by the correct spelling. It’s a very simple patch but its simplicity has met strong resistance from those in the developer circle.

One of the arguments against this patch deals with performance which is discussed earlier on in the comments within ticket 13971.

Then there is the principle of the matter. Should WordPress force the use of a word without consent or recourse? Quite a few people don’t think so. By the way, I’ve seen some people comparing this behaviour to how the iPhone spell checker works. This is an incorrect comparison because the iPhone spellchecker provides an option to use the correct spelling or not. WordPress does not. It automatically uses the correct spelling whether you like it or not, at least when you’re using a lower case p. This is a distinct difference between the two.

Although a minor inconvenience, some of us will be made to look foolish thanks to the auto correction. Those who are well versed in the WordPress community understand the proper spelling. Occasionally, we would write posts to try and inform the masses on how to properly spell the word. In fact, there are a few plugins in existence that performed the same function as this patch, such as the one created by Ozh in 2007. As you can read in his post, the lower case p versions of the word are corrected which is not only confusing since we don’t know what is being corrected, but it generally makes the entire post look like an April Fools joke.

There are also instances in which the patch breaks things as per ticket 13971 where an image file name with a lower case p was automatically changed to a capital P thus breaking the image.

It’s also worth mentioning that Matt did not bypass everyone and put the patch into WordPress. In fact, the idea was run past the other lead developers for WordPress as per Mark Jaquith:

This was run past the other leads. I brought up the argument that this might break a great many links. Matt said that they’d been running it on WordPress.com for several years with, I believe, only one recorded instance of it breaking anything. That satisfied me that this reported bug would occur infrequently.

I understand WordPress.com is a huge testbed for WordPress.org code, but you can not use WordPress.com in nearly as many ways as the WordPress.org software. WordPress.com users can’t use plugins so how would you ever know if plugins, especially image gallery ones would work with this change?

Removing The Functionality:

If the change has broken your site or you don’t like WordPress being changed automatically to the correct spelling, you can use the following plugin that will remove the filter. I’ve installed this plugin on WPTavern.com as a means of supporting its removal.

Where I Stand:

I’ve had nothing break, that I know of due to the forced spelling change. In fact, I’ve found it very convenient but after giving the principles of the matter more thought and looking at the bigger picture, I don’t think WordPress should be forcing anything upon its users, especially when it comes to content. If people want to misspell something, let them do that. Don’t hold their hand and change their content for them without recourse. I would have used this opportunity to promote the After The Deadline plugin/service as it correctly labels the misspelling of WordPress. I also would have used PollDaddy to generate a poll to get a feel for what others thought about the idea and possible repercussions on the proposed implementation.

While a handful of developers have chimed in with their support of reverting the patch from the core of WordPress, Matt’s responses within the WP-Hackers mailing list thread regarding the issue give a sense of the change not going anywhere and sticking to his guns although he admits that if people voted with their feet or via a plugin to disable/remove the filter, he would reconsider:

As I said before, you are in /complete control/ of your site. It’s a single line to remove a filter. If you don’t like the filter, vote with your feet or with a plugin. If the function cause a non-trivial number of people to avoid 3.0, leave WP, or install a plugin to deactivate I would seriously reconsider it. In the absence of that, there are a 1,001 better places to focus my attention with regards to WordPress.

The patch has good intentions but this addition to WordPress is one more example of something that needed a wider scope of feedback before being implemented into the core. I’d like to see the auto correcting behaviour removed until it’s decided that according to the community, they have no problem with it. In fact, I bet if a poll was conducted via the WordPress Dev blog or even Matt’s blog explaining the patch, its intentions, and possible pitfalls, the response would have been more positive than negative and if it were voted to be included or most people didn’t care, then a bunch of energy wouldn’t have been spent fighting against it.

Speaking of communication, it may also be worth noting that Matt’s patch did not have a ticket attached to it to provide discussion from other developers before it was committed. It was a straight patch. If I’m wrong on this point, please provide a link in the comments to the ticket before the patch was committed.

P.S. For a good laugh, check out WPCamelcase.com.

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Ask Mark!

Ask Mark!

By Jeffro on July 2, 2010

WordPress core developer Mark Jaquith has started a new practice on his website where visitors will be able to use a question submission form to ask Mark anything having to do with WordPress. It could be a question regarding WordPress, usage, security, or development issues. From time to time, Mark will be publishing the chosen question or questions and answering them on his site. Considering Marks extensive knowledge in development security, it will be interesting to see how many of those questions are submitted/chosen.

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Restricting Your Content To Adults Only

Restricting Your Content To Adults Only

By Jeffro on July 1, 2010

Ever wanted an easy way to make sure adults were the only ones that saw your content? It’s become a lot easier to do now thanks to the release of the Restricted To Adults plugin by Saguaro Digital. What this plugin does is add a unique string of “meta data” which can be inserted into the computer code of any website. Parental filtering software recognizes the tag and prevents children from viewing adult content. Diligence needs to be made on the parent to make sure the computer in use by the child has parent filtering software installed or else the RTA tag is useless.

The plugin was developed free of charge for ASACP which stands for the Association Of Sites Advocating Child Protection.

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VideoPress Undergoes Major Update

VideoPress Undergoes Major Update

By Jeffro on July 1, 2010

VideoPress LogoVideoPress.com has announced a major update to it’s video player. The player has been completely rewritten using the Open Source Media Framework which is MPL-Licensed by Adobe. VideoPress now offers custom skins and partner integrations including WordPress.com stats, Quantcast, and CDN providers. These partner integrations are made simple through the use of OSMF plugins that will enable advertising and analytics built by each potential partner.

The player itself has a few changes as well such as the embed menu being replaced with a Share menu. The videos shortcode and HTML embed snippet are hidden behind a copy to clipboard button. The direct download links have been exposed for videos so you can download them in MP4 (H.264/AAC) and Ogg (Theora/Vorbis) formats. Last but not least, the new flash player supports different languages and if you’re interested in translating the player into even more languages, you can use the VideoPress translation page.

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Six Revisions On Missing Features In WordPress

Six Revisions On Missing Features In WordPress

By Jeffro on July 1, 2010

Jacob Gube of SixRevisions.com has published his take on ten features that are missing from the core of WordPress. According to Jacob, these features should be adopted into the core of WordPress for the benefit of all. I agree with some of his reasoning on moving features into core but it’s a mindset that I’ve been trying to stay away from. First of all, I as an individual user don’t really know what the WordPress userbase deems useful or worthy of being in the core of WordPress. Secondly, apart from the search in WordPress sucking, just about everything else on his list relates to a specific use case of WordPress and since everyone seems to use WordPress in a different way, these features could end up as useless bloat for many people. However, WordPress already has a number of features that I rarely ever use but I don’t want to see any more of them added to the core software.

This is one of the reasons why I now support the idea of core plugins. Keep the core of WordPress light, add hooks, functions, better APIs and let the third parties do the rest. Keep WordPress flexible and modular instead of weighed down. Unfortunately, there are thousands of plugins, multiple ones that perform the same subset of features, some that are outdated, etc. Having those features in core eliminates that worry but at the cost of modularity. As someone brought up in the comments, the idea of WordPress Installation Profiles seems like the answer to this problem as certain branches of the software could either ship with a predefine list of plugins for that use case or have those plugins built in. Those WordPress branches would need to mirror the development of WordPress though which means the core team most likely will not maintain them. The installation profile idea has been brought up on the WP-Hackers mailing list a few times before with the outcome being that WordPress.org will not create and maintain these new branches but nothing stopped anyone else from doing so. Dougal has a few tips and a link that explains how to use the install.php file to create automated WordPress customizations.

The bottom line is, if you think a particular plugin should be added to the core of WordPress for the benefit of all, you’re probably wrong. Think about the big picture before you come to any conclusions.

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FeedBurner Relevancy And RSS Subscriber Numbers

FeedBurner Relevancy And RSS Subscriber Numbers

By Jeffro on June 30, 2010

Jean-Baptiste Jung has a good blog post over at The Blog Herald that questions whether FeedBurner is still relevant. In the post, Jean examines how in the past month, his numbers if varied widely. As a long time user of FeedBurner, I too have seen numbers vary wildly with no explanation. By the way, it’s awesome that WPTavern.com has bumped up past the 2,000 FeedReader average.

Line Graph Swinging Up And Down

I’ve enjoyed being able to know roughly how many people are subscribed to the Tavern RSS feed but in reality, I don’t know how accurate those numbers are. While Jean lists out some other services that could replace FeedBurner such as FeedBlitz, I think we have to take a step back and ask ourselves, does the number of RSS subscribers matter anymore? Are they still used as part of the popularity of a particular website? Will you lose out on advertising sales because of little or no numbers? Without using a service like FeedBurner, you’ll have no way of knowing the reach your sites RSS feed has.

Personally, I prefer to know how many people are subscribed to the RSS feed even if it’s just a rough number. It’s one more metric I have at my disposal on monitoring the growth and reach of the site. How do you feel about the notion of RSS Subscriber numbers?

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VaultPress Issues First Set Of Invites

VaultPress Issues First Set Of Invites

By Jeffro on June 30, 2010

We haven’t heard much about VaultPress since its launch on March 31st but today, the site has started to roll out the first round of beta invites. Considering the nature of the service where backups are a continous event, they are controlling the growth of the service through the invite system. What’s interesting and what may spark a lot more interest is the fact that early customers are getting a lifetime discount applied to their subscription while the price will go up to the premium level once VaultPress goes public.

To generate buzz and perhaps allow people to move ahead in line, Matt encourages you to blog about why you want to use VaultPress and then link to the blog post. Alternatively, you can use the hashtag #vaultpress on twitter. So far, I’ve yet to receive my invite but I’ll be keeping an eye on my inbox. If you were lucky enough to snag an invite, let us know about your experience in the comments.

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