Displaying 1 To 19 Of 19 Comments WordPress Not The Choice For Multinational Search My comment was just a quick one to point out that enterprise level companies have different point of view. Perhaps, I better put some context around my comment. Although I have worked with large commercial companies, over the last 4 years I’ve been working in Government, so that’s the main perspective I bring. My experience in govt has been that the ICT department (which I spent several years with) is similar to most enterprise level ICT departments, although a) they are even more conservative and b) ahem.. perhaps they aren’t as well organised. I’ve seen some things which are just silly. When I was running the web team, we had a case where we could not get small, non-critical CSS tweaks in the template onto the site without having to go through dev > test > prod. This despite the fact we’d tested it on our own local server. At least we didn’t have to go through CAB (Change Advisory Board) for this level of change, but it still took a couple of days for the server team to push the change through to the live server. And when I say live server, it wasn’t a public facing website, it was an internal facing one, with non-critical information, which know one knew about yet. I defy anyone to argue that’s sensible! However, I’m not arguing that testing before upgrading isn’t sensible. I’ve been quite vocal about that in the past, for example in my The Solution To The Lack Of WordPress Beta Testing post from last year, where I: argue against the unthinking update immediately advice Admittedly I could have been far more confrontational in that post, but I don’t think that’s constructive. Our department recently chose a new CMS and WordPress wan’t even on the radar. I’m going to go into the reasons why WordPress doesn’t have more traction in Government (at least in Australia) in my upcoming WordPress and Government talk. One of the reasons is this very testing issue. The recent discussions in the community about moving to a Chrome like ‘auto upgrading in the background’ feature is just not going to cut it with the enterprise. Our websites have quite a bit of content that we are required by legislation to have. We don’t lose millions of dollars if the site goes down, but there’s always the potential for the government to come under criticism from the media and the opposition party. And if the Premier or a Minister is announcing something, the site had better be up! So I am a fan of testing. However, the traditional enterprise level ICT approach (at least that I’ve seen) has been to put risk mitigation and process above delivering benefits to the business and to customers. That needs to be balanced and that’s what I meant when I said:
Thankfully a lot of these companies are realising that they need to change, but that’s the traditional enterprise IT mindset.
I’m not actually saying they shouldn’t bother testing. However, I do believe that they can look at ways of streamlining the process. A major version release may require a lot of testing. Security releases within a major release may require less testing, depending on what was changed (which you can look at in trac). If WordPress is being used for the main mission critical website, test more! If it’s being used for a secondary less important website, maybe you don’t need to test as much. My original comment was obviously too brief to get my position across, so hopefully this has made my position clearer. Oh and by the way, we still use IE6 here. IE7, we dream of IE7! :) (actually people can request to upgrade to IE7 and I get a real browser because I’m in web). » Posted By Stephen Cronin On October 13, 2011 @ 8:59 PM Hi Jeffro, I’m with you – although larger companies often have a culture of extensively testing each update. They have dev, test and production servers and promote changes through these, following through an extensive test plan. Oh and they can’t just do this, they have to take the change to the Change Advisory Board for approval (which may take a couple of weeks), create the test plan, the roll back plan, let all the stakeholders know of the work and the potential outage, co-ordinate the update so there is zero chance of the site going down when something major is happening on the website, etc. And yeah, they need to do all this for a 1 click, 10 second update. So they love a stable product that doesn’t change much. Thankfully a lot of these companies are realising that they need to change, but that’s the traditional enterprise IT mindset. Hmm, that’s all going into my WordPress and Government talk at WordCamp Gold Coast… » Posted By Stephen Cronin On October 13, 2011 @ 10:45 AM Jason Schuller Did It – I Can Do It To Hi Jeffro, I’ll just back up the opinion of those saying don’t rule yourself out as a consultant. As others have said you can always contract out any development work that needs to be done (and you have many connections), but you’d be more than capable of providing advice on setting a site up. Best of luck.. » Posted By Stephen Cronin On May 10, 2010 @ 3:09 AM Review Of The Limit Login Attempts Plugin Hi Jeffro, Sounds like a good solution, especially the nice touch of emailing you about lockouts. Personally, I password protect my wp-admin folder, which means they can’t even get to my login form (without entering a separate password). It means two passwords to enter, but lets me sleep better at night. Still, I’d like to know when someone tried, which I can’t currently… » Posted By Stephen Cronin On May 6, 2010 @ 12:34 AM I’m not complaining about lack of donations by the way, that’s never bothered me, but being told I can’t add a link does smart a little. By the way, I agree with Justin Tadlock in most respects, but would argue that it’s still my right to add the link if I allow it to be turned off. I know WordPress itself used to have blurb saying please link to them in the footer because it was their only form of promotion. I don’t know if they still say that anywhere, but they used to. They’re big enough they don’t need it now, but my little plugins might benefit from the exposure (not from SEO, there’s very little SEO benefits left for such links these days. As a end user, I appreciate seeing the links when I go to someone’s site, so I can find that plugin and use it myself. » Posted By Stephen Cronin On February 22, 2010 @ 12:00 AM @Jeffro Additionally, it’s just occurred to me that one of my plugins (not yet in the repository but hopefully one day when I clean it up), requires an external link to Yahoo! because it uses their currency rates api. Anyway, I still think I’m entitled to add a link if I want to. In over 10,000 downloads, I’ve only ever recieved one $15 donation. I’m not paid for my efforts, but I’m not allowed to ask for a link in return for providing free software? Man, that’s harsh… Note, I always provide a way to turn the link off (except in the Yahoo! case as it’s required) and I don’t add a link if it doesn’t make sense. » Posted By Stephen Cronin On February 21, 2010 @ 11:45 PM Paid Membership Being Applied To The Forum @Jeffro – I agree that’s great news. I hope you find another way to make some money from your efforts. I’ve been thinking about this. The people who a) have the money and b) are willing to spend it are those using WordPress to run websites that make them money. When they have a problem, or need some custom work done, they’re often willing to pay. Now, I know you’ll say that you don’t have the technical skills to help these people, BUT you do have a very solid community that does have these skills. Maybe you can hook the two up and take a cut of the profits? Just throwing some ideas out there, but what about a Support forum where people could pay $50 to post what their problem is, then the WPT community jumps in and solves it for them. The person who provides the solution gets 50%, you get 50%. Okay, maybe you may want to give the person solving the problem a higher percentage, but you get the drift. The WordPress Support Forum is full of topics where people didn’t get an answer – some of these would be willing to pay for the answer. Or what about a ‘job-board’ co-ordinating freelance work? Okay, there are other places out there for that, but you have the community that could provide those services and enough reputation to get some traction… Anyway, over to you. I hope you do find a model to make some money from all the effort you’re putting in. » Posted By Stephen Cronin On October 6, 2009 @ 10:33 AM Good Luck Jeffro, I respect your decision, although I probably don’t have the time free to use the forums to a level that would justify paying. They were a very useful free resource, but you contribute so much to the WP community that it’s fair enough that you charge for some of it. Just don’t start charging for the PodCast! :) » Posted By Stephen Cronin On October 6, 2009 @ 2:48 AM Ideas To Improve The WordPress Release Strategy Hi Jeffro, Great post and I entirely agree. Regarding the email notification, there is a plugin that does this: Upgrade Notification by Email I do agree that it should be an option in the core, but the plugin may be a help right now when it’s not in the core. » Posted By Stephen Cronin On September 15, 2009 @ 10:38 PM WPWeekly Episode 68 – Hey, I Didn’t Change My Password! Hi Jeffro, Great show as always! I can confirm that John’s name is definitely John Godley. Going back a couple of years, if I’d been asked who my favourite WordPress plugin authors were, I would have said Lester Chan, Alex King and John Godley. Now, I’d still keep those three, but add Vladimir Prelovac and Joost DeValk – so that podcast was one of my top 5 interviewing another of my top 5. Magic… For what it’s worth, although I use All in One SEO Pack, most of the top SEO guys (including Joost) seem to use John’s HeadSpace. » Posted By Stephen Cronin On August 19, 2009 @ 11:13 PM WordPress Dev Chat For 7-30-09 @Jeffro – Well WPT should be in the official feed! It’s high time they reveiwed the included feeds. I’d suggest that they should do this on a 6 monthly basis (or at least yearly) so they can add new high value sites and remove any that stop posting or take a dive in quality. Because being included in the feed is valuable in terms of extra traffic etc, I think they need to select the sites very carefully. A public survey is a good way to do it IF they can make sure it’s not gamed.. » Posted By Stephen Cronin On August 4, 2009 @ 1:15 AM Jeffro, I’d be really happy to have the chance to vote on feeds to be included in the WordPress Planet feed. WPT should definitely be included (it is already right, at least some posts are?). There’s one blog in there which should be taken out – it just posts very generalised information. In a couple of cases, to do with SEO and Adsense, the advice being given wasn’t particularly accurate. It smacks of being written by someone who’s just read a little bit and is trying to pass themselves off as an authority. Maybe I’m being a bit harsh, but it got under my skin when I saw inaccurate information being served up to people. » Posted By Stephen Cronin On August 3, 2009 @ 9:53 PM WordPress Dev Chat For 7-15-09 I think the plugin / theme developer mailing list is a great idea. Finding out what might affect my plugins is currently a little bit of hit and miss, and this list would solve that. Not sure about the plugin adoption idea. It’s a great idea if the plugin author actually chooses to put the plugin up for adoption, but I’m a little uncomfortable with the idea of doing it without their explicit approval (ie if you can’t get in contact with them). It’s all open source, so anyone can take the code and create a new plugin based on it, but actually transferring the original plugin to someone else without permission seems wrong. » Posted By Stephen Cronin On July 22, 2009 @ 1:36 AM First WordPress Weekly Listening Party Hi Jeffro, Interesting. I have a draft post half written, taking the angle that while WordPress is great as a CMS for small to medium businesses, it’s a long way from having the functionality required for an enterprise level CMS. Obviously, people talking about using WordPress as a CMS aren’t thinking about it from an enterprise level perspective, but I thought I’d point out there’s an area where it’s not up to the job. Sometimes the WordPress as a CMS craze gets me down a little – although I totally understand the benefits it provides and know that the people writing and reading these articles aren’t involved at the enterprise level (I am). The number one weakness is Workflow. WordPress lacks a flexible workflow system which is able to define different workflows (different approval steps and different users) for different content types, different categories, etc. It’s limited to one workflow, which only has a couple of levels, which just isn’t enough. For example, in a large organisation, you may have 100s of authors in different geographical areas, using a workflow such as: There’s no way to do this is in WordPress at present, but I’d be interested in hearing what Randy and Scott have to say about a) the workflow issue in general and b) what other limitations they may have come across where WordPress falls short of the enterprise level. Of course, I know that most listeners and WordPress solution developers aren’t working with / interested in large organisations, so this is really a fringe issue… » Posted By Stephen Cronin On July 8, 2009 @ 9:29 PM Hey Jeffro, I just wanted to say thanks for doing these posts – I can’t get to the IRC meetings, but I’m interested in what’s said, so your summaries are great reading for me. » Posted By Stephen Cronin On July 1, 2009 @ 8:43 PM I should add that the field has been in my DB since at least March 2008 (that’s the latest backup I had on hand tyo check), so it’s not a new field » Posted By Stephen Cronin On July 2, 2009 @ 3:26 AM Hi Jeffro, I’m pretty sure this field has nothing to do with the plugin. I have it in my DB and I’ve never installed the plugin. The field is used in the core code: on line 894 (in 2.8) of wp-includes/comment.php which is called when comments are inserted into the database and also on line 1115 when comments are updated. If the field isn’t in the DB, then WordPress will fall over when a new comment is made or an old one is edited. I would guess this is a field they added sometime back with the idea of one day creating a feature which used this (much like the comment_parent field was added many many versions before WordPress added threaded comment support to the core). » Posted By Stephen Cronin On July 2, 2009 @ 3:20 AM State Of The Word From WordCamp Dallas Hi Jeffro, Interesting to see Matt’s views on ads – can’t see it taking hold though. Personally, I only show adsense to search engine visitors (not to regular visitors), but the 125 units appear on every page. This is the lifeblood of many blogs and I can’t see people giving up income derived from their blog. » Posted By Stephen Cronin On June 28, 2009 @ 8:56 PM Hi Jeffro, Can’t wait for 2.8, thanks for the date. Also the news about MySQL is very interesting. It’s good to promote the newer versions of MySQL and PHP, but I hope it doesn’t affect too many people in a negative way. It’s all well and good to say that people should move to a decent host, but I’m sure some people will be caught out and be unhappy about not being able to upgrade. Still I guess they really need DO need to change if the hosts are that outdated… Stephen Cronin’s last blog post.. New Greasemonkey Script To Number Bing Search Results » Posted By Stephen Cronin On June 3, 2009 @ 7:49 PMComments Posted By Stephen Cronin
state that there are not enough end users involved in beta testing
propose a staged rollout (such as Google uses for Google Analytics)
Wow – Mark’s answer is in reponse to my comment, but I never noticed it. I’ve just left a response, which includes:
The plugin is free, it’s GPL, but it makes a call to a Yahoo! api and they require the link. Are you saying that plugin can’t be added to official repository?
Content author -> Manager -> Communications -> Web Editor -> Tech QA -> Publish.
.-= Stephen´s last blog ..New Greasemonkey Script To Number Bing Search Results =-.
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