Category Archives: Discussion

WooCommerce 2.1 Outdated Templates

I got an email today from a local developer who was asking me some questions about the recent WooCommerce 2.1 update. When she updated she got an error related to her shipping methods. With a quick search she was able to discover our recently created WooCommerce 2.1 Issues page which mentions a fix for that error:

…You can delete that specific file from your theme until this issue has been patched by your theme developer for a temporary fix.

The problem is that in this case she's the developer. She created a custom theme for her client and she has to figure out exactly which template has changed and how to change it back. The question is how? What is a more permanent fix?

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Basecamp

Basecamp

One of my favorite heroes in this industry is 37signals. They're the guys who make Basecamp, Highrise, Campfire, and Know Your Company; they write incredible books like REWORK, and REMOTE; and the CEO even has a TED Talk. I've talked about them before a few times here because they're so awesome and so inspring. They take away all of the bureaucracy & red tape and only do things that actually help people work.

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Skip the After Party Bars

Alcoholic Drinks

There's been a lot of discussion recently about women in WordPress and how we should change the status quo. If you haven't been following along I would start with Sarah Gooding's post about Creating a Culture of Respect. There were some excellent follow ups by Chris Lema & Sarah Pressler.

There's a lot of information to digest and a lot to process. I want to write my opinion in response to these excellent posts but I'm honestly not ready. I work best by breaking things into smaller chunks and digesting those pieces and then moving on. That's why I'm starting with something tangential – why do we host after parties at bars?

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Do Less

One of the things I enjoy most about vacation is taking some time to read. It's nice to think about new ideas and just let your brain roam free latching on to whatever you want. One of the books I read was REWORK by 37 Signals. They're the guys who run BaseCamp & Highrise CRM. They put out some revolutionary ideas on their blog and one of the founders made a phenomenal TED Talk about time wasted at work.

They talk a lot about bad business practices and how they do everything backwards and how it works out really well for them.

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WordCamp Phoenix 2014 Highlights

WordCamp Phoenix 2014

There's snow swirling outside as I sit in my comfy chair at my local coffee shop back in Green Bay. I got back into Green Bay late last night after an amazing WordCamp Phoenix last weekend. If you haven't ever been to a WordCamp you have to go. They're a very affordable conference where you get to meet other people in your industry & hear all sorts of presentations related to WordPress.

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Let Open Source Encourage Diversity

One of the things that constantly amazes me at my job is the number of ways that people use WooCommerce. There's over 200 extensions available for WooCommerce on the WooThemes.com site and there's demand for thousands more. So what does WooThemes do? Do we go on a massive hiring spree and build thousands of plugins?

I'm sure we could do that but why? No matter how many extensions we create there's just no way to cover every single use case one of our users come up with. There's also no way we can be experts in every single market. There's thousands of substandard services out there that we don't want to integrate, and there will be problems finding the right extension if we offer thousands. The trick here is to encourage other experts to work with you so that you can create an exceptional product for 90% of your audience and other developers can cover the last 10%. Let your open source project encourage diversity.

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